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Page 49
"Of course!" replied Mitchington, with a confident laugh.
"And--I shall! Keep it to yourself, doctor."
When Bryce had let the inspector out and returned to his
sitting-room, Ransford and Mary had come from behind the
curtains. He looked at them and shook his head.
"You heard--a good deal, you see," he observed.
"Look here!" said Ransford peremptorily. "You put that man
off about the call at my surgery. You didn't tell him the
truth."
"Quite right," assented Bryce. "I didn't. Why should I?"
"What did Braden ask you?" demanded Ransford. "Come, now?"
"Merely if Dr. Ransford was in," answered Bryce, "remarking
that he had once known a Dr. Ransford. That was--literally
--all. I replied that you were not in."
Ransford stood silently thinking for a moment or two. Then he
moved towards the door.
"I don't see that any good will come of more talk about this,"
he said. "We three, at any rate, know this--I never saw
Braden when he came to my house."
Then he motioned Mary to follow him, and they went away, and
Bryce, having watched them out of sight, smiled at himself in
his mirror--with full satisfaction.
CHAPTER XII
MURDER OF THE MASON'S LABOURER
It was towards noon of the very neat day that Bryce made a
forward step in the matter of solving the problem of Richard
Jenkins and his tomb in Paradise. Ever since his return from
Barthorpe he had been making attempts to get at the true
meaning of this mystery. He had paid so many visits to the
Cathedral Library that Ambrose Campany had asked him jestingly
if he was going in for archaeology; Bryce had replied that
having nothing to do just then he saw no reason why he
shouldn't improve his knowledge of the antiquities of
Wrychester. But he was scrupulously careful not to let the
librarian know the real object of his prying and peeping into
the old books and documents. Campany, as Bryce was very well
aware, was a walking encyclopaedia of information about
Wrychester Cathedral: he was, in fact, at that time, engaged
in completing a history of it. And it was through that
history that Bryce accidentally got his precious information.
For on the day following the interview with Mary Bewery and
Ransford, Bryce being in the library was treated by Campany to
an inspection of certain drawings which the librarian had made
for illustrating his work-drawings, most of them, of old
brasses, coats of arms, and the like,--And at the foot of one
of these, a drawing of a shield on which was sculptured three
crows, Bryce saw the name Richard Jenkins, armiger. It was
all, he could do to repress a start and to check his tongue.
But Campany, knowing nothing, quickly gave him the information
he wanted.
"All these drawings," he said, "are of old things in and about
the Cathedral. Some of them, like that, for instance, that
Jenkins shield, are of ornamentations on tombs which are so
old that the inscriptions have completely disappeared--tombs
in the Cloisters, and in Paradise. Some of those tombs can
only be identified by these sculptures and ornaments."
"How do you know, for instance, that any particular tomb or
monument is, we'll say, Jerkins's?" asked Bryce, feeling that
he was on safe ground. "Must be a matter of doubt if there's
no inscription left, isn't it?"
"No!" replied Campany. "No doubt at all. In that particular
case, there's no doubt that a certain tomb out there in the
corner of Paradise, near the east wall of the south porch, is
that of one Richard Jenkins, because it bears his coat-of-arms,
which, as you see, bore these birds--intended either as crows
or ravens. The inscription's clean gone from that tomb--which
is why it isn't particularized in that chart of burials in
Paradise--the man who prepared that chart didn't know how to
trace things as we do nowadays. Richard Jenkins was, as you
may guess, a Welshman, who settled here in Wrychester in the
seventeenth century: he left some money to St. Hedwige's Church,
outside the walls, but he was buried here. There are more
instances--look at this, now--this coat-of-arms--that's the only
means there is of identifying another tomb in Paradise--that of
Gervase Tyrrwhit. You see his armorial bearings in this drawing?
Now those--"
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