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The Ways of the World Copyright © Robert and Vaunda Goddard 2013
The Corners of the Globe Copyright © Robert and Vaunda Goddard 2014
The Ends of the Earth Copyright © Robert and Vaunda Goddard 2015

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THE CORNERS OF THE GLOBE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

None of the recorded history of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 has been altered in this novel. Real people, places and events have been depicted as accurately as possible. I am indebted to the authors of numerous books on the subject for the insights they gave me, most notably Margaret Macmillan (Paris 1919) and the late Harold Nicolson (Peacemaking, 1919). In truth, the conjuring up of the past, whether for fictional or non-fictional purposes, can never be precise. But I am grateful to the staff of the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris for helping me make it as precise as it could be in this case. I am also grateful to my good friend Toru Sasaki for providing the Japanese translation of the surname Farngold.

THEY COULD IGNORE the telephone. That was one of the unwritten clauses of the Armistice. No telephone would have rung unanswered for long at the squadron base in France where their paths had first crossed in the summer of 1915. But they were not in France. And the war was over. So there they stood, side by side, aware of the importunate ringing in the unattended office in the corner of the hangar, but unmoved by it, lulled by the scent of oil and varnish and the fluttering of a pigeon in the rafters and the vernal brightness of the light flooding in around them.

It was a silvery late-morning light that gleamed on the fuselages of an array of aircraft that had never strained through dives or loops in combat, or been strafed by enemy fire, because they had been constructed just as the war was ending and were now as redundant, for all their elegance and cunning of design, as the pair of youthful Royal Flying Corps veterans who were admiring them.

Even at a glance the two men would have struck an observer as dissimilar, so dissimilar that probably only the war could account for their ease in each other’s company. The taller and slimmer of them was James Maxted, former lieutenant, known to all but his family as Max. He had a good-looking face that held a promise of rugged handsomeness in middle age, boyishly flopping fair hair, pale-blue eyes and an ironic tilt to his mouth that hinted at cynicism. His companion, a shorter, bulkier figure, was Sam Twentyman, former sergeant. Max had served in the RFC as a pilot and known Sam as the most reliable and resourceful of the engineers who kept his plane in the air. Sam was five years older than Max, but looked younger, despite some greying of his curly brown hair, thanks to his round, rosy-cheeked face and general air of terrier-like eagerness.

‘You’re sure Bristols are the ones to go for?’ Max asked, arching a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Some of the lads who flew them said they preferred the Sopwiths.’

‘They did at first, sir,’ Sam replied. He still addressed Max as an NCO would an officer and showed no sign of breaking the habit. ‘But after all the modifications we made the Bristol was the best two-seater by a long chalk. You were out of circulation by then, of course.’

By ‘out of circulation’ Sam meant held for the duration in a prisoner of war camp in Silesia. Max smiled at the euphemism and stepped close enough to the nearest plane to run an appreciative hand over the burnished wood of its propeller vanes.

Now it was Sam’s turn to smile. They were spending Max’s money, not his. He had no illusions about who would be calling the tune in their future enterprise. ‘Will the budget stretch to a couple of SE5s, then? Beautiful machines, they are. Ten quid the pair. A real bargain.’

‘Is that what Miller said?’ Max nodded towards a scurrying, overalled figure who had just entered the hangar by a side-door and was heading towards the still-ringing telephone in the office. He wore an irritated frown on his thin, oil-smudged face. ‘The airworthiness certificates will treble that price, remember.’

Sam grinned. ‘You’re a natural, sir. You gave quite a few of the Hun a flying lesson, as I remember.’

The telephone had stopped ringing. Miller had finally answered it. In the welcome silence Max recalled the intoxicating pleasure of his first flight, a joy-ride from this very aerodrome eight years before, in the summer of 1911. Was it only eight years? It seemed longer, so very much longer, in so very many ways. Cambridge. Farnborough Flying School. The Western Front: those crazy days of scouting above the trenches, nerves stretched as taut as the rigging of his plane, ending in a crash behind enemy lines he had been lucky to survive – doubly so, given the rapidly declining life expectancy of pilots as the war advanced. Then eighteen months of tedium and privation in the POW camp. And now, here he was, back at Hendon, birthplace of his passion for flying, about to acquire a training squadron of his own at a knock-down price.

‘Miller would let you take one of the SE5s for a spin,’ Sam continued, ‘if that’s what you need to make your mind up.’

‘I’m sure he would. And I’m sure you reckon it would make my mind up.’

‘And we deserve some honey, don’t we, Sam, you and I?’ Max clapped his friend on the shoulder and was suddenly overtaken by a surge of optimism about their joint venture. He planned to call the flying school Surrey Wings. He had the perfect partner in Sam. He had the site, courtesy of his father. And soon, after a little horse-trading with Miller, he would have the planes. Flying was the future. For the first time in years, the sky was wide and blue and full of promise.

‘What?’ Max emerged from his fleeting reverie to find Miller looking towards him from the doorway of the office. ‘What is it?’

‘Well, evidently your mother knows. And she wants to speak to you. She says it’s urgent.’

‘My mother? Confound it all.’ Max glanced at Sam and shrugged helplessly, then hurried towards the office.

In the twenty seconds or so it took him to reach the telephone, Max concluded that the only way his mother could have tracked him to Hendon Aerodrome was first to have telephoned the flat. Saturday was one of Mrs Harrison’s cleaning mornings. He had mentioned his destination to her on his way out. She must still have been there when Lady Maxted rang. But as explanations went it did not go far. Lady Maxted was of a generation that scarcely made habitual use of the telephone. Off-hand he could not recall her ever calling him before.

‘James?’ No telephone line could drain from her voice the querulousness that always seemed to attach itself to her pronunciation of his name.

‘I think you should come home at once.’ By home she meant Gresscombe Place, the house in Surrey where Max had spent a sizeable portion of his childhood and youth without ever quite thinking of it as home. ‘There’s been … an accident.’

‘What sort of accident?’ Max felt the mildest tug of anxiety, but nothing more. Surviving the aerial war in France had inured him to most of the calamities of everyday existence. Whatever his mother might be about to say, it surely did not represent a turning point in his life.

But such moments come when fate decrees. And this was such a moment. ‘It’s your father, James,’ said Lady Maxted. ‘He’s been killed, I’m afraid.’

MAX USED TO tell any friends who asked about his father that they could know him as well as he did simply by studying his entry in the Foreign Office List. He was only half-joking.

MAXTED, Sir Henry, 2nd Baronet, born 1853. Educated Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. Clerkship in the Foreign Office, 1875. Assistant Private Secretary to Lord Granville, 1880–82. 3rd Secretary, Vienna, 1882–86. Vice-Consul, Budapest, 1886–89. 2nd Secretary, Tokyo, 1889–91. Home attachment, London, 1891–92. 2nd Secretary, Constantinople, 1892–96. 1st Secretary, later Chargé d’Affaires, Rio de Janeiro, 1896–1910. (Succeeded as 2nd Baronet, 1897.) Consular Counsellor, St Petersburg (later Petrograd) 1910–18.

That was as much as the latest edition revealed. There was no mention of Sir Henry’s father, Sir Charles Maxted, a diplomat in his own right as well as a noted Assyriologist, who had earned the baronetcy his son inherited through his negotiation of the route of the Odessa–Tehran telegraph in the 1860s. Nor was his marriage to Winifred Clissold, the future Lady Maxted, alluded to. Their eldest son, Ashley, was born in 1882, Max’s senior by nine years. Max was born in Tokyo, during the last posting on which his mother accompanied his father. She professed a dread of Turkish sanitation and sent her husband off to Constantinople alone. The threat of yellow fever precluded her joining him in Rio de Janeiro and by then the pattern was set. Lady Maxted led a contented life in Surrey with little thought (as far as Max could tell) for Sir Henry’s activities a continent or half a world away.

So it was that Max knew his father merely as an occasional visitor during periods of leave, which often coincided with his school or university terms, thereby limiting their contact to a stilted conversation in an Eton or Cambridge tea-room. Sir Henry struck the young Max as a gruff, stiff, emotionally restrained man, the archetypal diplomat in that sense, who conversed with his son about as freely as he might with an official of a foreign government. But perhaps he was too gruff and stiff for his own good. Rio de Janeiro was far from the diplomatic high road and St Petersburg was no place for him to spend the concluding years of his career. Lady Maxted sometimes referred to him ‘losing his way’, though precisely how he had done so she never specified.

Retirement was bound to reunite Sir Henry and Lady Maxted in due and problematical course. It came while the Great War was in its final months and Max was still a prisoner of the Germans. But by the time he was repatriated, in January 1919, Sir Henry was abroad on government business again. The British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference required the services of expert advisers in numerous fields. Sir Henry was asked to be one of them. He departed with what Lady Maxted later described as ‘alacrity’.

Who, in the circumstances, could blame him? Paris, even in the aftermath of the war to end all wars, was still Paris. He was hardly to know that death lay in wait for him there.

After a hurried explanation, Max left Sam to stall Miller as best he could and set off for Surrey.

He and his mother had never enjoyed the warmest of relationships. There were reasons for that they had never spoken of and probably never would. He was not her idea of what a son should be. Nor was she his idea of a good mother. Still, Sir Henry’s sudden death was an event which even Max acknowledged as a family emergency. His place, now if hardly ever, was at home. So, home he went.

The journey took longer than he would have wished, involving a forced march to Hendon station, a train to St Pancras, a hectic crossing of London by Tube and another train from Waterloo to Epsom. The Tube he particularly loathed. The horror of confinement he carried with him from the camp meant his nerves were tested whenever he descended into the Underground’s malodorous depths. The services were busy that day, reminding him how uncomfortable he now was amidst any mass of humanity.

He was, of course, unduly familiar with death in numerous forms and disguises, thanks to the swathe it had cut through his squadron in France. But there were many men of his age carrying gruesome memories with them into the genteel peacetime world. He would have claimed no distinction on that account. He had fully expected to die himself. The expectation had aged him, he suspected. He was young, in the veritable prime of his life. But he did not always feel so.

Yet the depression that had claimed some had never touched him. ‘You’re a tough ’un and no mistake,’ Sam had once said to him, in the wake of a particularly heavy day of losses, when Max had been keener to discuss minor adjustments to the gun-mounting on his plane than mourn the comrades he had seen shot down in flames. But toughness was not quite it. Max knew that to allow himself to care would be fatal. ‘This is all just a joke we can’t quite see the funny side of, Twentyman,’ he had replied. And he had believed it. That was why he had laughed the afternoon his luck had run out behind German lines and, with a failed engine and a jammed gun, he had gone down like a falling leaf spiralling through the Flanders sky.

But his luck had not quite run out, not to the last morsel. The shots that had stopped his engine had missed his fuel tank by a matter of inches. And the ground was flat and soft enough to make some kind of a landing. He had emerged, to his own astonishment, in one piece.

And that astonishment stayed with him to this day, as an unsmiling light-heartedness, a blithe disregard for how others expected him to lead his life. It meant the news of his father’s death, though surprising, had not shocked him. He was not indifferent to such things, but he was well accustomed to them.

His mother had supplied little in the way of concrete information. Sir Henry had died in a fall from a roof, apparently. It was, Lady Maxted had emphasized, an accident. ‘A tragic and dreadful accident.’ How she could be sure of that she did not say and Max had known better than to ask. He would attempt to elicit more details when he reached Gresscombe. His brother would be there. He might be in possession of the facts. When it came to facts, Ashley could generally be relied upon. Sir Ashley, as he was now, of course. Max was going to find it hard to think of him as such, but he supposed he would grow used to it. Ashley himself would relish the status of the baronetcy, though perhaps not as much as his wife. Lydia had the prize for which Max suspected she had married his brother – and many years earlier than she could have expected. She would be mourning her father-in-law, but with secret satisfaction.

All in all, Sir Henry Maxted’s passing was unlikely to prompt an outpouring of grief among his relatives. For the last twenty years and more he had been largely absent from their lives. He attributed this, in one of his typically lofty phrases, to ‘the exigencies of the service’, and Lady Maxted never suggested it was otherwise. To Max, however, it seemed an arrangement that suited both parties to the marriage. How Sir Henry filled the waking hours not given over to the tireless and patriotic pursuit of British interests in foreign parts Max could only imagine. As for his mother, good works, Surrey society and occasional forays to London appeared to content her, though Max had cause to believe that had not always been the case, if indeed it was now.

Sir Henry’s death raised a delicate issue, however, one which Max turned over uneasily in his mind as the train steamed slowly through the countryside south of Wimbledon. He had not yet told Ashley of the agreement he had reached with their father and he doubted if Sir Henry had either, since there would surely have been some reaction to the news from his brother. The question now – the devilishly tricky question – was whether Ashley would honour the agreement, as the new owner of the Gresscombe estate. If not, Max’s plans for the future, along with Sam’s, would go badly awry. He had not mentioned this disturbing possibility to Sam. It had not actually occurred to him until after he had left Hendon. Without the land his father had promised him, there could be no flying school. And the land was now in his brother’s gift.

‘Damn it all to hell, Pa,’ Max murmured under his breath as he gazed out through the window of the train. ‘Why’d you have to go and die on me?’

SIR CHARLES MAXTED, Max’s grandfather, bought the Gresscombe estate following an early retirement from the diplomatic service funded by his prudent investments in mining and railway stock. The estate had suffered from decades of neglect. But Sir Charles had a keen eye for a bargain. He re-tenanted Gresscombe Farm and demolished the tumbledown Georgian manor house to make way for an Arts and Craft mansion of his own commissioning. Gresscombe Place was a red-brick house of multiple gables and parapeted bays, with high windows to admit as much light as possible in a vain attempt to recreate the dazzling brilliance of Mesopotamia, where he had served as consul for fifteen years. An abundance of Middle Eastern rugs and beaten copper were nods in the same direction, overwhelmed since his death by the more cluttered and heavier-curtained tastes of his daughter-in-law.

Max barely remembered his grandfather. He was only six when the old man died. Sir Charles’s greatest claim to fame was to have assisted Henry Rawlinson, his predecessor as consul in Baghdad, in his pioneering translation of cuneiform script. Max’s father was named in honour of Rawlinson and Sir Charles pursued his interest in Sumero-Babylonian languages to the end of his days.

Haskins, the chauffeur, had been sent to meet Max at Epsom station. He was a taciturn fellow at the best of times and Max knew better than to seek his views on what he described, uncontroversially, as ‘a bad business’. He would doubtless have said the same, in the same neutral tone, if Max had been killed in the war. He was more sentimental about the internal combustion engine than the crazed doings of humankind.

Accordingly, there was nothing in the way of idle conversation to distract Max as they passed the flat quartet of fields west of the town where he planned to open his flying school. Sir Henry had agreed to their use for the purpose with disarming readiness. ‘Gladly, my boy,’ had been his exact words. But gladness was likely to be in short supply now at Gresscombe Place.

And so it proved. The family had gathered to discuss the sad news from France. None of the early-spring sunshine penetrated to the drawing-room where they were assembled: Lady Maxted, the Dowager Lady Maxted as she now was, with Ashley and Lydia, as well as Uncle George, Lady Maxted’s brother. There was a notable dearth of tears, though Max would not have expected his mother to be prostrated by grief, even if she felt it. She was rigidly self-controlled at all times. She considered any display of emotion to be an admission of weakness. And she was not weak. Nor was her daughter-in-law. Lydia was a woman of hard features and firm opinions, who spoke to her husband, her children and indeed her brother-in-law in the same tone she used to instruct her several dogs and horses.

Ashley was predictably subdued in the presence of the two women who dominated his life. He was shorter and bulkier than Max, with darker hair, a puffier face and a ruddier complexion. A knee mangled in a hunting accident ten years before had left him with a slight limp that had spared him frontline service in the war. Somehow he had acquired a captaincy by sitting behind a desk in Aldershot for the duration. He never referred to the contrast with Max’s aerial derring-do and nor did Max, but that did not mean either of them was heedless of it.

George Clissold had arrived hotfoot from an undemanding half-day in the City, where he was something (probably superfluous) in marine insurance. He was, as usual, not entirely sober, but sobriety had never suited him. Lady Maxted claimed to rely on him for advice in financial matters. For his part, Max would have relied on him for nothing beyond the recommendation of a good malt whisky. But he was a genial and unobjectionable presence. And he did at least raise a smile at his nephew’s arrival.

‘Bit of a facer, what, James my lad?’ he said in his rumbling voice as he clasped Max’s hand.

‘A terrible shock, Uncle, yes.’ He turned to Lady Maxted. ‘How are you, Mother?’

Tea was served. Lydia plied Max with an unsought account of how bravely little Hetty had taken the news of her grandfather’s death and the arrangement she had made for Giles’s housemaster to inform him of the sad event. Max knew convention demanded that he display some interest in the welfare of his brother’s children, but he felt even less able than usual to express any. Besides, Lydia was clearly only filling in until the maid left them to it.

‘I shall tell you what Mr Fradgley from the embassy in Paris told me, James,’ said Lady Maxted as soon as privacy was restored. ‘Heaven knows, it leaves much unexplained, but I do implore you all to guard against unwarranted speculation.’ She paused to let her request, which was more in the way of an instruction, sink in. There was already an implication that they should be guarding her good name as well as her late husband’s. ‘Some time last night, Henry fell from the roof of an apartment building in Montparnasse. Precisely when this occurred is unclear. No one seems to have seen him fall – that is, no one has yet come forward to say they did. He was found … in the early hours of the morning … by a group of people leaving a … well, some place of amusement. According to Mr Fradgley, there can be no doubt the fall killed him instantly, which is a blessing, I suppose. Mr Fradgley had already spoken to the police. They were satisfied the fall had been … accidental.’

Max assumed he was not alone in wondering how the police could be so swiftly satisfied on such a point. In the circumstances, suicide was surely a possibility, although not a likely one in his opinion. Sir Henry was hardly the self-destructive type and had been in notably good spirits when Max had visited him in Paris two weeks before. There was, of course, a third possibility. But he was not about to mention it. Still, there was one obvious question he reckoned he could risk asking. ‘How can the police know Pa fell from the roof rather than a window on one of the upper floors, Mother?’

‘I’m sure the poor man didn’t want to burden your mother with the particulars,’ said Lydia.

‘Are you familiar with the area?’ Lydia asked sharply, as if unfamiliarity with Montparnasse would somehow disqualify Max from querying the point.

‘No, I’m not. But … his hotel was off the Champs-Elysées. That’s a long way from Montparnasse.’

‘That’ll be what got him up there. Someone offered him the use of their roof to admire the night sky. It was the equinox, wasn’t it?’

Into Max’s mind came a memory of his father instructing him in the distribution of the constellations one clear summer night around the turn of the century, when his home leave had briefly intersected with Max’s school holiday. Sir Henry had given him a cardboard-mounted chart of the heavens – a planisphere – as a late birthday present and shown him how to identify Perseus and Orion and the Great Bear. On the reverse was a chart of the southern sky, the one Sir Henry saw from his residence in Rio. Max had looked long and often at it after Sir Henry’s departure, imagining what it was like to be so far away that even the stars were different.

‘Please, George,’ said his mother, her words cutting through the memory. ‘This is exactly the sort of futile supposition I wish to avoid.’ She allowed herself a sigh of exasperation. ‘And it is why I want you and Ashley to go to Paris as soon as possible, James, to clarify the circumstances of your father’s death and to arrange for his body to be brought home for a funeral here in Surrey at the earliest opportunity.’

‘I can’t see why we both need to go,’ said Ashley in his first contribution to the discussion. ‘I can perfectly well deal with … whatever needs dealing with.’

‘You must both go,’ said Lady Maxted, in a tone Max recognized as brooking no contradiction. ‘It is only fitting that his two sons should accompany him … on his final return to these shores.’

‘You will do this for your father, won’t you, James?’ His mother stared expectantly at him.

‘Of course, Mother.’ He glanced at Ashley, who was frowning dubiously. The arrangement evidently did not suit him, nor in all likelihood Lydia, which was something to commend it from Max’s point of view. ‘Of course I’ll go.’

AFTER TEA, ASHLEY suggested Max accompany him to his study, so that they might consult Bradshaw and plan their journey. Max suspected he also wanted a word alone with him, out of their mother’s – and his wife’s – earshot.

Certainly planning the journey did not occupy them for long. ‘We can have Haskins run us up to town first thing in the morning and catch the eleven o’clock train from Victoria. Where did you stay when you went over?’

‘The Mazarin. Pa booked it for me. He said it was one of the few places not overrun by delegates to the peace conference.’

‘We’ll cable them, then. We shan’t need to stay for more than a couple of days.’

‘You heard Mother. Sort out the paperwork and ship Pa home p.d.q. That’s what she wants. So, that’s what she must have.’

Ashley hurrumphed at that and subsided into the chair behind his desk. Above him hung, as it always had, a large framed map of Mesopotamia circa 1850. The study had originally been their grandfather’s and was furnished much as he had left it. The clay jar on the desk that served as a pencil-pot could easily have been thousands of years old, chanced upon in one of the places marked on the map. Max had been angling for a transfer to the Mesopotamian Front in the months before he was shot down. He had dreamt of flying over the sun-baked remains of the ancient civilization whose language his grandfather had helped to translate. But a dream was all it had been.

Ashley flicked open the silver cigarette-box that stood beside the pencil-pot, took out a cigarette, tamped it on the blotter and lit up. Max sat down and lit one for himself. A short interlude of fraternal understanding elapsed as smoke curled into the air between them. Then Ashley said, ‘Unless you credit Uncle George’s hare-brained idea about star-gazing, it’s hard to imagine anything reputable lying behind this … accident.’

‘You saw Pa more recently than I did. How would you describe his … state of mind?’

‘Retirement didn’t suit him, you know. He prowled round here like a caged lion. He greeted the summons to join our delegation in Paris as a gift from the gods. “I’m back in the saddle,” he said to me.’

‘He said the government wanted someone with knowledge of Brazilian politics to advise them on how to respond to Brazil’s claims at the peace conference. Something to do with confiscated German ships and impounded cargoes of coffee.’

‘Coffee? Small beer, more like. I can’t believe his expertise has been in high demand. And given that, he’s probably not been kept very busy …’

‘An accident pure and simple’s highly unlikely, James. You know that as well as I do. And suicide’s out of the question, I think we can agree. Montparnasse is a long way from the Champs-Elysées, as you yourself pointed out. I believe it has a somewhat … dissolute reputation.’

‘There you are, then. Models au naturel. Drugs. Drink. Debauchery of all kinds.’

‘The point is, Pa probably started mixing in circles he shouldn’t have and ended up dead. How exactly, we may never know. And perhaps we needn’t know. If the French police are happy to write it off as an accident, there’s no sense our raising a stink, is there?’

‘She certainly wouldn’t.’ Ashley regarded Max studiously through a slowly exhaled plume of smoke. ‘We’re of one mind on this, are we?’

‘I won’t do anything that risks … embarrassing our family, if that’s what you mean.’

Max was damned if he would pretend this was anything but a strange question, even though it was not quite as strange as he meant to imply. ‘I hadn’t seen him in nearly five years, Ashley. Even by our standards, that’s a long gap.’

‘He was five years older. Like me. I dare say I’m not as twinkle-eyed and clear-browed as I was in 1914. Actually, I thought he was … surprisingly invigorated.’

So, now they had come to it. Sir Henry had promised he would write to Ashley, telling him of his agreement to let Max open his flying school on part of the estate. Max had expected to hear from Ashley once he had received the letter. He had heard nothing. Until now. ‘Did he write to you?’

‘Yes.’ Ashley opened the desk drawer and pulled out a letter, still in its envelope. The stamp was French and Max recognized the handwriting as his father’s. ‘A flying school, eh? Well, well. That’s your plan for the future, is it, James?’

Barratt was the tenant at Gresscombe Farm. According to Sir Henry, he had no legal right to object and Max had confidently assumed that was true. ‘He doesn’t seem to be making much use of the fields.’

‘Appearances can be deceptive in farming, as you’d know if you’d ever taken an interest in the estate. I’ve had to manage the place in Pa’s absence. You may be surprised to learn it doesn’t run itself.’

‘Are you going to let me open the flying school, Ashley?’ The moment had come to pose the question directly.

‘These are straitened times. Who’s going to have money to throw away on flying lessons?’

‘People who see the commercial potential in becoming a pilot and consequently won’t be throwing their money away.’

‘And what is the commercial potential? No, no.’ Ashley held up his hand. ‘We can save this for the trip. Make a good enough case, James, and, who knows, I might let you go ahead.’

‘I’d like to, obviously.’ Ashley smiled, but his smile in fact made nothing obvious. ‘I have to consider the financial security of the estate as a whole. I wasn’t going to mention it, but Lydia’s expecting another child. And there’ll be no easy money for anyone while the nation pays off its war debts. Pa may not have thought this through properly.’ His smile broadened. ‘I owe it to the family to be sure that I do.’

WINIFRED, THE DOWAGER Lady Maxted, had announced that she would rest before dinner. She had retired to her room, where she lay on her bed and contemplated the slow advance of twilight through the half-curtained windows.

Sir Henry’s retirement from the diplomatic service had hung over her head for a decade or more as an unwelcome but unavoidable end to a long separation both had found increasingly congenial. Strictly speaking, she could not be sure Sir Henry had found it congenial, but he had never given her cause to doubt it. She assumed and rather hoped he had found some discreet companionship along the way. She bore him no ill will. And certainly she would not have wished him dead in this sudden, strange and possibly scandalous manner. A fall from a roof in Paris, indeed. She shook her head at the tragic inappropriateness of it all. This was not how Sir Henry Maxted should have ended his days – though, to be sure, precisely how he had ended them she did not know.

She thought for a moment of how close they had been at the loving outset of their marriage, of the lengths she had been prepared to go to to ensure his happiness and to protect his good name. Tears came into her eyes for the first time since she had heard of his death. ‘My poor dear Henry,’ she murmured. ‘Who would have predicted this?’

There came a knock at the door. She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief and was instantly composed. ‘Come in,’ she called. She did not sit up, for she knew who her visitor was. And he would take her as he found her. He always had.

‘You wanted a word, Win,’ said George Clissold, stepping quietly into the room. There was something in his tone and bearing that was fractionally different from the buffoonish uncle he had presented himself as in the drawing-room. ‘Is this a good time? If you really do need to rest …’

George conveyed an armchair to the foot of the bed and eased himself into it. The evening light fell obliquely on his silvery hair and handsome man-of-the-world features and Winifred smiled affectionately at him.

‘But I always played fair by letting them glimpse the depraved core of my being before I popped the question. That generally settled it.’

‘Yes. I’m known for it. And nonsense is what I may have been talking when I said I thought I’d seen Henry last week. I was probably mistaken. Chance resemblances are common enough. He was out of sight before I could get a proper look at him.’

‘A few days ago you were sceptical, to say the least. What’s changed your mind?’

‘Some years ago – many years ago, in fact – Henry’s father presented to the museum a small collection of what the curator tells me are Sumerian cylinder-seals. I’ve never actually seen them. I’m not even sure they’ve been on display recently. He didn’t say.’

‘No. Nor had Henry ever interested himself in the seals, as far as I know. Until last week. They were only on loan, it seems, albeit indefinitely extended. But last week, on the very day you thought you saw him in Lombard Street, he went to the museum and reclaimed them.’

‘Yes. The curator wasn’t there. He wrote to me asking for an address where he could contact Henry, in order to ascertain whether their removal was permanent. He mentioned that the seals are probably … quite valuable.’

‘It’s clear to me Henry told no one he was in England because he didn’t want to have to explain the purpose of his visit. What could have taken him to Lombard Street, George?’

‘And I think we can assume he didn’t want the Sumerian cylinder-seals to decorate his hotel room in Paris.’

‘I don’t care about ancient Mesopotamian knick-knackery. But I do care about this house and the estate. Ashley has his children to consider. Lydia’s expecting again, you know.’

‘My concern is that if Henry was so desperate for cash that he resorted to pillaging the county museum, might he have mortgaged the estate?’

‘We’ll know soon enough if he did. Once the boys return from Paris with a death certificate, we can make the necessary enquiries.’

‘Mortgages aren’t agreed and paid overnight, old girl. Even if he was in London to negotiate one, it’s highly unlikely the capital will have been released yet.’

‘Let’s hope not.’ Winifred sighed. ‘What can he have got himself mixed up in, George?’

‘Papa was so pleased when I told him Henry would be asking for my hand in marriage. “You can’t go wrong with a Foreign Office wallah, Winifred,” he said. And I believed him. I believed him absolutely.’

Winifred propped herself up and frowned at her brother. ‘Half the Foreign Office is in Paris. What are you implying?’

‘There’s no reason why he should. He may write to me, of course, offering his condolences. I’m sure many people will write to me. Henry was well liked wherever he went.’

‘Are you sure Ashley and James is a good idea? They always tend to rub each other up the wrong way.’

‘It’s time they learnt to cooperate. I don’t want their … temperamental differences … to fester into some kind of feud.’

‘Hah!’ Winfred laid her head back on the pillow. ‘Only someone with no children could suppose that having them means you understand them. You never do, George, believe me, you never do. Ashley and James are grown men, and Henry was their father. They must do their best for him. And I must let them.’

MAX TOOK A sip of whisky and replaced the glass on the chair beside his towel, then lay back in the bath and let the heat of the water ease some of the stresses and anxieties of the day. He had returned from Germany ten weeks before – ten weeks that sometimes felt much longer than that and sometimes much less – determined to live his life henceforth on his own terms. Being alive at all was so outrageous a piece of good fortune that he had no intention of squandering his existence on dull pursuits and workaday routine.

So much for intentions. They did not trump circumstances. The flying school was such a good idea. He did not want to abandon it. He knew Sam was pinning his hopes of liberation from the family bakery business on it. He was pinning a good many hopes on it himself. And the last thing he wanted to do was to let Sam down. But could he trust himself to dance obediently to Ashley’s tune in order to pursue it?

Everything had seemed so much simpler a fortnight ago. He had travelled to Paris, wondering how his father would react to his request. His memories of their meeting were confused by a growing suspicion that he had overlooked abundant evidence that all was not well in his father’s world, so preoccupied was he with the question of the flying school. To be sure, Sir Henry had been cheery and welcoming. But in retrospect his exuberance had been unnatural. He too had been preoccupied, happy to let Max do whatever he wanted with a portion of the Gresscombe estate, perhaps because he was caught up in matters which made the fate of four fields west of Epsom seem as distant as it was insignificant.

But what might those matters have been? And did they have any bearing on Sir Henry’s death? Max took another sip of whisky, rested his neck against the rim of the bath and tried to force his brain to reconstruct the details of their final encounter in search of the answers.

The journey from London to Paris was supposed to take seven hours, but there were delays all along the line in France and Max’s train eventually pulled into the Gare du Nord three hours late. He went straight to the hotel Sir Henry had booked for him, the Mazarin, in Rue Coligny. There was a note waiting for him there on Hotel Majestic writing paper.

5.iii.19

Dear boy,

Welcome to Paris. I am so sorry about this, but I have to cancel our luncheon engagement for tomorrow. I am not my own master during this damned conference. But dine with me instead. The Ritz at eight. It will be a grand evening.

Affectionately,

Your father

There they were again, Max, supposed: those famous exigencies of the service. The peace conference was important. No one who had fought in the war could doubt that. It was a re-ordering of the world map – the creation of new countries and boundaries intended to heal the old divisions. It was the shaping of a future that would be safe for all to live in.

Still, his father’s postponement of their reunion seemed odd, not to say unfeeling. As he unpacked, Max decided he would not simply wait for their dinner date at the Ritz. The Majestic was only a shortish walk away. Armed with directions from the concierge, he set off into the Paris evening. His hopes for a touch of spring were misplaced.

A fellow looking remarkably unlike a Parisian hotel doorman was guarding the entrance to the Majestic. He was, in fact, as he swiftly revealed, a Scotland Yard detective. No chances were being taken with security at the headquarters of the British delegation. Without a pass, or someone to vouch for him, Max was not going to gain admittance.

He was escorted as far as the reception desk, however. But Sir Henry Maxted was out. ‘He generally leaves very early and returns very late,’ the clerk informed him, discouragingly. The clerk, like the policeman, was English. ‘I’ve been imported from the Grand in Birmingham, sir,’ he explained, noting Max’s puzzlement. ‘The gentlemen from the Foreign Office wouldn’t be happy with French staff. They want people they can rely on. So, here we all are.’

‘Certainly, but I wouldn’t like to say when that might be, if you know what I mean.’

Max was far from sure he did know what the man meant, but he left it at that. He felt a sudden desire for life, colour and entertainment. He hopped into a cab and named the Folies Bergères as his destination.

Max rose late the following morning and treated himself to a gentle day. He walked down to the Seine and crossed to the Quai d’Orsay, briefly joining the small band of onlookers outside the French Foreign Ministry, hoping for a glimpse of someone notable – Lloyd George, perhaps, or President Wilson – coming or going. But those who came and went were anonymous functionaries to a man. He returned to the Right Bank and wandered east, noting the captured German cannons in the Place de la Concorde and the enormous bomb crater in the Tuileries rose garden. There were refugees everywhere from the war zones and disabled ex-servicemen begging at street corners. He rewarded them with cigarettes, which he suspected were more valuable than the sous and centimes in his pockets. The war was over. But in Paris it could not be said to have ended. It was settling around him: the dust of a vast upheaval falling slowly to earth.

The Ritz was as glittering an oasis of opulence as Max had hoped. There were no doorkeepers from Scotland Yard to be braved. It was open house for those with money and fine clothes, many of whom were laughing and flirting over cocktails in the bar. It was there that Max waited for his father, after leaving word for him with the maître d’ of the restaurant. To Max’s no very great surprise, Sir Henry was late.

‘Dear boy,’ were Sir Henry’s first words to his son, before astonishing him with a hug. Stiff handshakes had been their usual greeting, but Sir Henry was in an expansive, expressive mood. He looked older than when they had last met because he was. His dress and appearance were those of a senior civil servant of a bygone era: bow-tied, starch-collared, frock-coated and Edwardianly bewhiskered. But that, Max instantly sensed, was not the whole story. There was a sparkle in his pale-blue eyes, a warmth to his smile and something Max could only have described as a bounce in his bearing. He was not as stout as he had been either. He looked like a man with plenty on his mind, but uplifted because of it.

Champagne was ordered and Max soon found himself infected with some of his father’s unwonted good cheer. They moved into the restaurant and were plied with fine food and wine by waiters gliding to and fro beneath glistening chandeliers. Max was persuaded to describe a few of his more hair-raising exploits with the RFC and to recount some of his experiences as a prisoner of war. Sir Henry could hardly be said to have had a quiet war himself. From his post at the British Embassy in St Petersburg, he had had a ringside seat during the upheavals of the Russian revolution. ‘They were dangerous days, my boy. I could easily have got in the way of a Bolshevik bullet if my luck had been out. Fortunately, the Ambassador took pity on the older members of staff and took us with him when he was evacuated. The people we left behind had a very rough time of it, I can tell you.’

And what of his activities in Paris, which were evidently keeping him so busy? Officially, he explained, he was there to give advice to the leaders of the British delegation, as and when required, about the demands and expectations of the Brazilian delegation in respect of German merchant ships held in Brazilian ports and cargoes of Brazilian coffee the Germans had never paid for. ‘It shouldn’t matter a damn to LG.’ (Sir Henry referred to the Prime Minister so casually Max assumed they were on familiar terms.) ‘But our American cousins want to be seen to be doing their continental neighbours a few favours, so we have to be on our guard. And fourteen years in Rio de Janeiro made me the closest to an expert the FO could find. Most of the time, though, I just make myself useful. And when that fails I try to enjoy myself. I always wanted a posting to the Paris embassy, but I never got it. This is the next best thing.’

It was over Tokay and crêpes Suzette that Max finally unveiled his plans for a post-war career as a flying instructor. By then he was optimistic that his father would give him the use of the land he needed at Gresscombe. And his optimism was not misplaced. ‘You shall have it, James, you shall indeed. I’ll write to Ashley and have him tell Barratt to grub up whatever miserable crop he’s planted and make way for you. It’s the least I can do – the least he can do – after what you flyers endured in the service of your country.’

The discussion could hardly have gone better. And in the circumstances it seemed fitting to return to the bar after their meal to toast Max’s airborne future with the Ritz’s finest cognac. It was there that the evening took a faintly puzzling turn, when a man detached himself from a party in the farthest corner of the room and came across to greet Sir Henry as a close, if not necessarily cordial, acquaintance.

Also by Robert Goddard

THE WIDE WORLD TRILOGY

Robert Goddard

Keep reading for the next instalment in The Wide World Trilogy

THE CORNERS OF THE GLOBE

AUTHOR’S NOTE