William Le Queux - The Hunchback of Westminster

“Enough for the day is the worry thereof,” I told myself as I mixed a glass of steaming grog. “I’ve got the money from this Spaniard, and I’ve got the commission to go to that auction, and when I am able to answer any or all the puzzling questions that this mysterious visit of Don José Casteno has suggested to me I’ll ask them quickly enough – but not before. As for Mr Naylor, well, he’s got his troubles. So have I. ‘One dog, one bone,’ as my old groom used to say when any of the other servants tried to interfere with his prerogatives. I’ll stick to my own lines, and that, at present, is nothing more formidable, in spite of his dark hints and tall talk, than the acquisition of these old manuscripts for Don José.” And gulping down the hot jorum I had prepared I resolutely threw the bedclothes over my head, and soon was fast asleep.

Next day, however, I turned up punctually at the mart in Covent Garden just before the hour the advertisement specified.

To say I was not anxious about the result of my action would be foolish. I was – for always behind my business, you must remember, lurked those soft, shy, tender eyes of Doris Napier, which I wanted to shine on me alone. All the same, I had no idea of the strange and bewildering acts of trickery in which, contrary to my best efforts, I was destined to become a central figure. Had I known, of course, the sequel to them might have been very different, and maybe, too, this story would never have been written. As it was – but there! let the affair speak for itself. It happened like this:

Directly I arrived in King’s Street I found the huge wooden apartment, with its familiar roof of green opaque glass and its big staring advertisements in colour on the walls, known to curio lovers all over the world as the “Brom,” crowded from end to end and door to door with foreigners. Now this was extremely unusual. In an ordinary way the same dealers and amateurs turn up at these functions time after time – these people fall into methods of their own of quick and agreeable acquaintance – and the bidding is conducted with certain airs of old-world politeness and decorum, which men who love the work find very delightful and refreshing in themselves, and yet conducive to the best business results.

To-day, however, the whole atmosphere and method of the place were changed as if by magic. A crowd of Jews, Spaniards, and Italians had practically taken entire possession of this huge and rambling mart, and their eager, polyglot conversation recalled nothing less than the Tower of Babel as they chattered, twisted, turned, elbowed, and gesticulated with as much animation as though they had met to devour the effects of a Rothschild instead of the books and goods of a poor, unnamed, dead refugee priest.

Indeed, it was just as much as I could do to elbow my way into the place at all. The crowd didn’t actively impede my progress, but they showed no desire to move out of my path; but finally I did, with a free use of my shoulders and knees, squeeze myself into a good position on a packing case, which lifted me high above the crowd, and yet which also gave me a splendid view of the rostrum upon which, as it happened, the auctioneer had just taken his seat.

Even he seemed rather stupefied by this vast, unexpected, and quite unusual assemblage, for no sooner had he called silence with a touch of his mallet on the table than he cleared his throat and said:

“I hope, gentlemen, that you have not been drawn here this afternoon under any misapprehension. This is not really one of the days of our big sales; all we have to dispose of are some two hundred books, a few vestments, and some quaint, old manuscripts belonging to a priest – a father – ”

He turned despairingly to his clerk, who consulted his ledger, and supplied the name needed.

“I mean a Father Alphonse Calasanctius, who, I am told, arrived quite mysteriously in Southampton late last week by the royal mail steamer Tartar , and was, unfortunately, found dead in the room he took in a private hotel in the Adelphi only the night afterwards.

“My idea, to-day, is to get things over as quickly as possible, and so I will put up the manuscripts first. I confess I don’t know myself whether certain of them are of any value, or whether they are some mere monkish jests of some centuries ago when men had more leisure to penetrate long legal-looking hoaxes. I ought to tell you, though, that I took several of them myself to an expert at the British Museum yesterday afternoon, and he was inclined to think they might be exceedingly precious, for he found that they related to some extraordinary secret which certain Jesuit monks in Mexico had taken that means of putting on record. All the same, he said quite frankly, he could not pledge himself on the point, for, as it happened, he could make nothing out of the greater part of the writing on them, which seemed to him, read in the ordinary fashion, mere gibberish, which might take years of patient study and research to unravel, and then be worth nothing in the end.”

The sale commenced, and the prices realised by some of the codices that comprised the first lots were ridiculously low. Whoever bought them made magnificent investments. For instance, a fourteenth-century English manuscript of Sower’s “Confessio Amantes” on vellum, with eighty-five miniatures – a perfect gem, worth at least the fifteen hundred pounds which the Fountaine copy realised – went for eighteen pounds ten. A French manuscript of the Bible of the same period with a number of ornamental initials and miniatures fetched only sixteen pounds, although, as a collector, I knew it to be worth three hundred at least; while a thirteenth-century manuscript, “De Regimen Principium” of Egidius, written on vellum in double columns, with a beautifully illuminated border on the front page, and bearing the stencil mark of the well-known collector, Sir Thomas Phillips, fetched only twenty-one pounds ten; while a twelfth-century “Decretales Gregorii,” an eleventh-century Latin Bible, and a “Biblia Versificata” of the twelfth century, once the property of the Jesuits’ College at Heidelberg, fetched equally low prices.

Presently the three manuscripts comprising lot eighty-two were held up for inspection. Each was about a foot square, and was intolerably dirty and stained by damp and time.

“Now, gentlemen, what offers?” cried the auctioneer, and again he brought his hammer down on the table with a sharp knock.

“I’ll give ten pounds for them,” instantly shouted a voice in the crowd, and all at once I caught sight of the face of the owner thereof, which, to my intense astonishment, proved to be no other than my friend Peter Zouche, that odd-shaped, deformed person who is familiarly known to the rich and learned everywhere as “The Hunchback of Westminster.”

Now, how had Peter Zouche, who was reputed to spend his life between Sotheby’s, Quaritch’s, Dobell’s, and Maggs’s, and that mysterious den in which he lived, under the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, got wind of these treasures.

Instinctively I felt there was something more in these documents than even Don José had hinted, and so with a quick turn I caught the eye of the auctioneer and nodded briskly again.

“Twenty pounds offered,” he said, and he pointed his hammer straight at me, whereat all the crowd appeared to turn and stare suddenly and openly at me with fierce and malevolent looks.

Then, almost in a flash as it were, the real excitement of the gathering broke out.

Before I quite knew what had happened bids had poured in from a hundred eager voices, and the figures had miraculously climbed up, up, up with the rapidity of lightning, so that before I had interposed five times I believe they were actually all trembling on the brink of a thousand pounds!