Bell Harry Read online

The writers were there as well, forming a little group of their own. Geoffrey Chaucer, Christopher Marlowe, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens all wanted to pay their respects as the Warrior passed through on his way to Westminster Abbey.

  George Stephenson wanted to as well. It was his railway lines that were taking the Warrior to London. He was standing with poor Lady Hamilton, mother of Lord Nelson’s only child, who had prayed so hard in the cathedral for the admiral’s safe return.

  The preacher John Wesley was there too, Warwick the Kingmaker from the Wars of the Roses, General Monck and the helmeted Roundheads from the Civil War, and a great many other people besides. Whatever their differences in life, they were all English in death, all united in respect for their country’s Unknown Warrior as the train bearing his body pulled into the station.

  The ghosts drew themselves up to attention as it arrived. They bowed their heads in homage. They didn’t move until the train had gone again and the Warrior had passed out of their sight for ever. Then they raised their heads and dispersed as quietly and invisibly as they had come, fading away unobtrusively into the night. The Unknown Warrior didn’t need their homage anymore. He was one of them now.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Yank’s Tale Continued

  The day after he had recorded the tape about his time in Canterbury during the war, Ezra Tyler went in to Fort Collins to find someone to send it to. He was looking for an expert on Canterbury, someone who could make sense of all the things he had said on the tape after he was dead. He had no idea who.

  The best place to find out was the university, he had decided. There was bound to be someone at Colorado State who could help him. College professors were the people who knew.

  Tyler found the admissions office and went in. They directed him to the history faculty. The secretaries there didn’t know what to do with him, but Tyler refused to go away. He said he wasn’t leaving until he saw someone.

  At length, an assistant professor on his lunch break was persuaded to give Tyler five minutes. The man listened in a corridor as Tyler explained that he had been in England during World War Two and wanted someone there to see his tape. He mentioned Canterbury cathedral, but didn’t say what was on the tape.

  ‘I just want an address,’ he said. ‘Someone in England I can send it to who knows about Canterbury.’

  ‘Okay.’ The assistant professor saw that the quickest way to get rid of Tyler was to do what he asked. He took Tyler to his office and sat down at his computer. Five minutes online produced the department address of a historian at London University.

  ‘There you go.’ The professor wrote it out for Tyler. ‘Send it to this guy. He knows all about Canterbury.’

  ‘Good,’ said Tyler. ‘Thank you, professor. That’s just what I wanted.’

  The tape was bagged up and ready to go. Inside was a note from Tyler saying that everything on the tape was true, but he didn’t want his family to know anything about it. Tyler wrote the historian’s address on the outside of the bag and put it in the US Mail. Then he went home and shot himself.

  He was going to die anyway. The cancer had spread. Tyler was just saving himself a few weeks of pain by shooting himself in the head with a hunting rifle and making it look like an accident. After a long life, he wasn’t particularly sorry to go.

  He was buried in his hometown, just north of Fort Collins, within sight of the Rocky Mountains. His wife was dead, so his son Billy was the chief mourner. Billy’s three kids were there as well, and a couple of Billy’s grandchildren, and some Tyler cousins who had come up from Denver. They all joined Tyler’s friends at the graveside for the funeral.

  The coffin was draped in the American flag for the service. Tyler was given the veteran’s burial due to a former United States serviceman. A two-man honour guard stood to attention while a uniformed bugler played Taps. Afterwards, the flag was ceremonially folded up and presented to Billy Tyler, Ezra’s son and heir.

  The wake was held at the dead man’s house. His family and friends crammed in for beer and sandwiches after the service. They were all agreed that Tyler hadn’t been a happy man before his death. Something had been bothering him as his life ebbed away.

  ‘It was the war,’ Billy Tyler said. ‘He never got over the war. It bugged him to the end of his life.’

  ‘He ever talk about it?’

  ‘Never.’ Billy shook his head. ‘Never said a word. He never wanted to talk about the war.’

  ‘He was in Normandy?’

  ‘Yeah. He saw it all. I guess he killed people, although he wouldn’t say. Whatever happened over there, my dad didn’t want to discuss it. Not ever.’

  The others nodded. It was the same with a lot of veterans. The ones who had seen action didn’t like to discuss it. Nobody wanted to press them.

  The wake lasted a couple of hours before the guests departed, one by one. The Tyler family stayed to the end. They hugged one another when it was their turn to leave, promising to see more of each other in the future. Billy’s three children all had children of their own and were leading busy lives. It was only weddings and funerals that brought the whole family together these days.

  ‘Thanksgiving,’ one of them said. ‘We’ll see you then. Let’s do it all together this year.’

  ‘Yeah. Why not? It’d be fun.’

  Billy Tyler locked up the house when everyone else had gone. Then he and his wife drove back to their own house not far away, taking the American flag with them. They hung it on the wall when they arrived, next to Ezra Tyler’s army medals and a framed photograph of him in military uniform. He had done his country proud service during World War Two. His family was proud of him in return.

  *

  A few weeks later, a group of British academics gathered in a seminar room at London University for a screening of Tyler’s tape. There were half a dozen of them, all experts in their field, specialists in various aspects of Canterbury cathedral and its history. The academics didn’t know what they were about to see, but they trusted Professor Alan Brent when he told them they would find it astonishing.

  ‘The tape was sent to me out of the blue,’ he explained. ‘An American from Colorado. He was in Canterbury during the war. He wanted to leave a record of what happened while he was there.’

  Brent ran the tape. The audience watched as Tyler appeared on screen. He was an old man with a reedy voice, filming himself outside in a garden chair. The mountains in the background looked to be the Rockies.

  ‘Hi,’ he told the camera. ‘I’m dying. I only have a few weeks to live, so it’s now or never if I’m going to say what I want to say.’

  The audience was increasingly spellbound as Tyler’s story unfolded. Bombs, buried treasure, three soldiers fighting over the loot. Best of all, the King of France’s famous ruby that had disappeared without trace soon after the destruction of Thomas Becket’s tomb. Brent had been right to say that the story was astonishing.

  ‘So that’s what I’m doing here, putting it on record for somebody else to figure out. I’m not going to show this tape to my family. I don’t want my grandkids to know what I did in Europe. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it instead. I guess probably I’ll send it to some experts somewhere, England maybe, people who know what the treasure was all about. Must be someone, somewhere, who knows what it was about.

  ‘Not me, though. I’m done now. Time for my medication. I’ll turn the tape off now and then I’m going to the bathroom.’

  The tape came to an end. There was a long silence as Brent switched it off and faced his colleagues. They were as dumbfounded as he had been when he first saw it.

  Kate Weston was the first to speak. She had just completed a doctorate on the letter-books of Canterbury cathedral. She had been entranced by Tyler’s story.

  ‘It’s pure Chaucer,’ she said. ‘Every word of it, from beginning to end.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, really. It’s The Pardoner’s Tale, come to life.�
��

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘The Pardoner’s Tale. Three young men in Flanders meet an old man who tells them they’ll find death at the foot of an oak tree. They go there and find buried treasure instead. One of them goes to get food. The other two murder him on his return, so as to get a bigger share of the treasure for themselves. Then they eat the food he has poisoned and die too.’

  ‘Who’s the old man who warns them about death?’

  ‘The greengrocer. The air raid warden with no eyes, whatever his name was.’

  It was true enough. The blind man Bert Marden had warned the Americans about the Roundhead skeletons hidden under the cathedral. Dutch Branigan had shot Billy Williams in the back before being beaten to death by Ezra Tyler. Tyler had taken his own life later. All three had come to a violent end. Not one had profited from the treasure they had stolen from Canterbury cathedral.

  ‘Well, that’s as may be.’ One of the other academics was more interested in the story he had just seen. ‘The real question is whether Tyler was telling the truth or not. I wonder if he made the whole thing up?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Brent. ‘He wasn’t an educated man. He wouldn’t have known how.’

  ‘It seems hard to believe, though. Treasure in the cathedral.’

  ‘Tyler didn’t make it up. He wrote me a note saying his family must never know what happened.’

  ‘Is there any proof that he was ever in Canterbury?’

  ‘There is.’ Brent had looked into it. ‘His army regiment was stationed there before D-Day, just like he said. Tyler and the other two were all there at the barracks. Williams was killed in action near St Lo. Branigan was found beaten to death in Maryland after the war, just as Tyler said. The murder is still unsolved.’

  The audience was divided. They were all longing to believe Tyler’s story, but it was their job to be sceptical. They went over it again in their minds, looking for holes. It seemed too good to be true that King Louis’ famous ruby had turned up again, after being missing for so many centuries.

  ‘What do they say at the cathedral?’ asked Kate.

  ‘They say it’s pure fiction, nonsense from beginning to end. Just a story made up by a fantasist.’

  ‘No hidden tunnel under the cathedral?’

  ‘Not according to the cathedral authorities. Nothing there whatsoever.’

  ‘And never has been?’

  ‘So they say.’

  Which they would, of course, Kate thought. The cathedral authorities were always fighting off conspiracy theories about the whereabouts of Thomas Becket’s bones. They wouldn’t want to know about a wild story of hidden treasure under the crypt.

  ‘I thought it was all carried away at the Dissolution,’ she said. ‘Great cartloads of gold and silver wheeling off through the gate to the Tower of London?’

  Brent nodded. ‘The jewels alone occupied two wagonloads. It took eight men to carry each load out from the cathedral, if the contemporary accounts are to be believed. But a lot of it never reached the Tower.’

  ‘Stolen on the way?’

  Brent nodded again. ‘Everyone helped themselves to a few pieces discreetly. Small bits and pieces that the King wouldn’t miss.’

  ‘Not the ruby, though. Henry VIII would have missed that.’

  ‘That’s the extraordinary thing. Ezra Tyler was quite certain that the prize jewel in the collection was an enormous ruby. How would he have known about that, if he hadn’t seen it for himself?’

  It was certainly a puzzle. Tyler’s story rang true in every particular, but it was still very hard to believe.

  ‘There’s this, too.’ Brent produced a photocopied newspaper clipping from 1961. ‘It was in the Kentish Gazette. The greengrocer’s obituary.’

  He handed it round. The obituary ran to three paragraphs, saying that Albert Marden of Canterbury had died, aged 64. He had served with the Royal West Kent Regiment during the First World War, rising to the rank of sergeant. He had been an air raid warden in the Second, until he was blinded. Marden had been known among his friends for his colourful stories of Roundhead skeletons under the cathedral.

  ‘So the skeletons are true?’ Kate asked.

  ‘It looks like it. Marden certainly told the story.’

  ‘Something about them rings a bell.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t know what.’ Kate racked her brains. ‘I know something about the Roundheads at the cathedral, but I can’t remember what, offhand.’

  ‘Oh well. Let us know if it comes to you.’ Brent turned to the others. ‘Anyway, that’s the story. Three Americans found a pile of medieval treasure in the cathedral and made off with it. The question is, what are we going to do about it?’

  What, indeed? The obvious answer was to follow the money, but that particular trail led to a dead end.

  ‘Tyler says the treasure was buried again?’ someone asked. ‘Dug up from the army training ground and reburied somewhere else?’

  Brent nodded. ‘It makes sense. American troops looted stuff from all over Europe. They were very carefully searched by customs when they got home. Dutch Branigan probably buried it nearby and planned to come back later, when the heat was off. That’s what it says on the tape.’

  ‘So it’s still nearby, somewhere?’

  ‘Almost certainly. Branigan knew Canterbury well and he needed to bury it quickly. He wouldn’t have hidden it far away.’

  ‘Still there to be found?’

  ‘If we only knew where to look. That’s the hard part. Knowing where to look.’

  It was an enticing prospect, nevertheless. The choicest jewels from Becket’s tomb, still buried somewhere within sight of Bell Harry. The academics in the seminar room all wanted to be there if ever the cache was discovered.

  ‘Keep it to yourselves for the moment,’ Brent advised them. ‘We don’t want this to get out. There’d be metal detectors all over Canterbury if word got out.’

  The others nodded. They needed to do some research before going any further. There might be something in the archives that would shed light on Tyler’s extraordinary tale. They would find it if there was.

  ‘We’ll meet again in a few weeks’ time.’ Brent named a date just after the end of the summer term. ‘Let’s pool our resources before then and see what we can turn up.’

  The meeting dispersed. They were all excited as they left the room. Stories of fabulous treasure didn’t happen often in the academic world.

  Nobody was more intrigued that Kate Weston. Her mind was racing as she returned to her own department. She was thinking about the Roundheads at Canterbury cathedral, wondering what it was about them that she couldn’t quite remember. The troops had done something in the cathedral that made perfect sense in retrospect, in the light of Ezra Tyler’s astonishing story. For the life of her, though, Kate couldn’t remember what.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Search for the King’s Ruby

  Kate was busy for the rest of that day. It wasn’t until next morning that she had time to sit down and think about Ezra Tyler’s story and the French king’s ruby, the Régale de France, that lay at the heart of it.

  According to Tyler, he and two accomplices had stolen the jewel from a tunnel under the cathedral. Dutch Branigan had then reburied it somewhere unknown before Tyler killed him. The secret of the ruby’s present whereabouts had died with Branigan.

  But there were other accounts that contradicted Tyler’s story. The ruby had apparently been seen on Henry VIII’s thumb after Becket’s shrine had been looted. The King was said to have worn it as a ring before having it reset in a necklace. The necklace featured in an inventory of royal jewellery taken soon after his death.

  Kate looked up the details. According to the inventory, the necklace had been kept under lock and key in ‘The Kinges Secrete Juelhous in the old gallery towards the leades of the privey garden at Westminster’. A clerk had listed it as Item no 2746 in Coffer No 1:

  A Coller of
golde set with xvj faire Dyamountes whereof the Regall of Fraunce is one and xiiij knottes of perles in euery knott iiij perles.

  That was the first puzzle, the clerk calling the Régale a diamond when it was supposed to be a ruby. The second puzzle was what had happened to it after the listing in the inventory.

  Queen Mary was rumoured to have worn the ruby as a brooch, but the evidence for that was sketchy. Charles I was said to have sold something that might have been the jewel to Cardinal Mazarin of France, but there was no real evidence for that either. The ruby had effectively vanished off the face of the earth after its dubious listing as a diamond during the reign of Edward VI.

  There were the Roundheads too, the Parliamentary soldiers who had run riot in Canterbury cathedral at the beginning of the Civil War. Kate knew something about them, something relevant to Ezra Tyler’s story, but she still couldn’t remember what. It bothered her for days that she couldn’t recall what she knew. And then one morning she woke up and remembered exactly what.

  Britain’s national archives are kept at the Public Records Office in Kew, on the outskirts of London. Every old manuscript from the Domesday Book onwards is stored there for safekeeping. Kate had spent a lot of time in the archives while researching her dissertation on the letter-books of Canterbury monastery. It was where she had come across the story of the Roundheads in the cathedral.

  Kate caught the train to Kew Gardens and walked up the road to the records office. She put in a request slip for the Reynard papers, a collection of letters written by Sir Anthony Reynard during the Civil War. Sir Anthony was a Kentish landowner who had fought reluctantly for Parliament during the conflict.

  The letters took half an hour to arrive. They were kept in a strong cardboard box. Kate carried it to a spare desk and sat down to read through Sir Anthony’s correspondence until she found what she was looking for.

  Sir Anthony had owned a country estate near Cobham. He had joined the Parliamentary troops heading for Canterbury, bringing with him a few volunteers from his own estate. They had been part of the group that had rampaged through the cathedral, ripping up and destroying everything that they couldn’t carry away.