Dan Abnett - Border Princes

‘Absolutely.’

Cosley Hall lay some fifteen minutes west of the city in parkland beyond Wenvoe. They had arrived just after nine thirty, and driven in through the imposing gates and up the long, planned drive to a house hiding beyond a screen of trees. Prior to her purchase of the guidebook, Toshiko had supplied an improvised guide commentary. The gates, she announced had been ‘specially imported from the Carpathians’ and the outbuildings to the west of the main house had been ‘a stabling block for the Cosley family’s pedigree pack of killer dachshunds’. The house and grounds were now in the care of Cadw, having been left to the Nation by the last of the Cosley line, who had died in 1957 of a ‘surfeit of toff’.

‘Don’t make me laugh, I’m not in a laughing mood,’ said Gwen, laughing as she got out of the car.

Much funnier was the fact that, once it had been purchased, the guidebook as good as corroborated Toshiko’s invention. The gates might not have actually been Carpathian, and the dachsunds might actually have been beagles, but other than that she’d been close to the truth. The last of the Cosley line, William Peignton Cosley, had left the hall in a bequest to the Crown, following his death from a stroke in 1964.

Entry to the house and grounds was free, though a donation was appreciated. They’d asked the Cadw guide on the till — a young, blonde, studenty girl with a stud in her nose — if there were any papers or written records from the Colonel’s era. The girl said she didn’t know of any on display or available for inspection. There were quite a few books in the library, but most of them dated from the 1920s and 1930s, when the last Cosley, William, had built up a collection of geological works.

Gwen and Toshiko wandered around the hall for an hour or two. Whenever they were out of sight of other visitors, or the guides and the tour parties, Gwen surreptitiously took a portable scanner out of her coat pocket and swept it around, to zero effect.

They stopped eventually in the dining room, and gazed at a dinner table set with crystal and silver for forty guests who would never actually arrive. The voice of a guide drifted in from down the corridor behind them. A door closed somewhere.

‘I feel a bit of a plank, actually,’ said Gwen. ‘Jack said this would be a bust and he was right. Of course. I don’t know what I thought we could do here. Imagine the skill with which he’ll have gone over the place already.’

‘It was worth a try,’ said Toshiko. ‘Your logic was spotless.’

They traced their way back out of the baronial Victorian dwelling, pausing one last time in front of Colonel Joseph Peignton Cosley.

Gwen fixed the portrait right in the eyes. ‘What did you know? What were you told? Where did it come from? Who gave it to you? What the bugger did you think it was?’

‘Why are you talking to a painting?’ Toshiko smiled.

‘God knows. Made me feel better. Come on.’

They were walking back through the reception area, past the postcards, and the books on kings and queens, and the novelty pencil sharpeners, when the studenty blonde girl with the nose stud called out to them from the till.

‘Oh, there you are,’ she said, ‘I thought you’d already gone. I asked Mr Beavan about you, about the questions you were asking, I mean. Hang on a jot.’

The girl picked up a walkie-talkie. ‘Mr Beavan? Yeah, no, they’re still here. In reception. OK, lovely.’

She put the walkie-talkie down again. ‘He’ll just be along,’ she said.

Mr Beavan appeared about five minutes later. He was a small, neat, grey-haired man with pinched cheeks and large bags under his eyes that gave him a sort of treeshrew-like appearance. He was wearing a Cadw guide pullover.

He was, he said, head of staff at Cosley Hall, and had been since 1987. He knew a thing or two about the place.

‘Ellie tells me you were asking about the family records. Papers, diaries, that sort of thing, was it?’

‘Especially concerning the Colonel,’ Toshiko replied.

‘Interested in old Joe are you? He was quite a fellow. India, the Far East, South Africa. He was under Baden-Powell for the Relief of Mafeking.’

‘We’d heard rumours,’ said Gwen.

‘What can you tell us about him?’ Toshiko put in swiftly.

‘Very much a principled man,’ Mr Beavan said, seriously. ‘Upright and convinced of his role as a defender of the realm and a protector of the people. He was astonishingly generous to the local community and the people who worked on his estate lands. I think he rather fancied himself as a local lord, ruling his demesne. Charmingly old-fashioned notion of the good old feudal system. Rose-tinted specs, I think, as was often the case in the late-Victorian age. Romantic dreams of a classical Britain that had never actually existed. He was very fond of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, funnily enough. Arthurian subjects.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Gwen lied.

‘Old Joe wasn’t the first in his family to feel that way,’ said Mr Beavan, warming to his theme. ‘His father and his grandfather both thought of themselves as border princes. As in the old days, along the Welsh Marches. Noble soldiers guarding the threshold between adjoining lands. The Colonel was very much taken with that notion.’

‘A bloke like him, then, usually leaves journals and diaries, doesn’t he?’ asked Gwen.

‘Well, we know a huge amount about his life and career. British Army records are fairly thorough. And his family business interests are well documented. Chamber of Commerce, the municipal archives.’

‘But personal stuff?’

‘Well, that’s why I pricked up my ears when I heard you’d been asking. There always had been suggestions that Colonel Joe kept quite extensive diaries, throughout his life, but we’d never found them. Then, quite by chance, about six years ago, one of the team turned up a bill of service in an old ledger of accounts, dated 1904. The bill related to a haulier, who had been employed to transport, um, ‘sundry personal items’ I think it said, all the way over to Long Marsh, just outside Manchester. It was very exciting.’

Gwen and Toshiko glanced at one another. ‘I can imagine,’ said Gwen delicately.

Mr Beavan smiled. ‘Ah, well, you see, the Colonel died in 1904. Cosley Hall was taken on by his son Ernest, and his widow, Francie, upped sticks and moved away. She went to live out her last remaining years with her own family, the Cassons, who owned Long Marsh. A little research suggests that she took many of her late husband’s most personal and private effects with her. Journals, for example.’

‘So,’ said Gwen, ‘Colonel Cosley’s stuff is at this Long Marsh place, then?’

‘Sadly, no,’ said Mr Beavan with another smile. ‘I wish it was that simple. If it was, I’d have popped over there myself long since to take a look. No, Long Marsh was shut up in about 1930. The Cassons lost a fortune, in the shipbuilding trade, I think it was. The family was ruined, anyway. Long Marsh swiftly fell into decay, got pulled down, and I believe there’s a cinema there now. Most of their possessions were sold against debt, but the contents of the library, and all the family papers, were gifted to Manchester Museum, where they remain to this day.’

‘On display?’ asked Toshiko.

‘No, no. Not at all. Uncatalogued in museum storage. I’ve known students and a couple of would-be biographers get a licence to trawl the catacombs. Thankless task. But the last one who did was Brian Brady, who’s working on a full biography. He pops in quite often, though he lives up in Manchester somewhere himself. He told me he’d found quite a lot of fascinating material. If you’d like his number…’

‘Oh well,’ said Toshiko, as they crunched back across the gravel to the SUV. ‘it was worth a try.’