by Francis - TO THE HILT

My uncle thoughtfully restored the Cup to its box and closed the lid. The whole room looked a little darker at its eclipse.

'The accounts of King Alfred burning the cakes and suffering from haemorrhoids were all tosh,' Dr Lang said in her lecturing voice. 'King Alfred suffered from spin-doctors. But the fact remains, he is the only king in Britain ever to be called great. Alfred the Great. Born in Wantage, Berkshure. He was the fifth son, you know. Primogeniture wasn't supreme. They chose the fittest. Alfred was a scholar. He could read and write, both in Latin and his native tongue, Anglo-Saxon. He freed southern England - Wessex - from the rule of the invading Danes, first by appeasement and sly negotiation, then by battle. He was clever .' Her old face shone. 'People now try to make him a twentieth-century thinking social worker who founded schools and wrote new good laws, and the probabilities are that he did both, but only in the context of his own times. He died in 899, and no other well-authenticated king of that whole first millennium is so revered or honoured, or even remembered. It's a great pity this remarkable gold chalice here isn't a genuine ninth-century treasure, but of course it would have been either stolen or lost when Henry VIII devastated the churches. So many old treasures were buried in the fifteen-thirties to keep them safe, and the buriers died or were killed without telling where the treasures were hidden, and all over England farmers still to this day find gold deep in their fields, but not this Cup. Alas, it wasn't around in the days of Henry VHI. I think, actually, that the proper place for it now is in a museum. All such treasures should be cared for and displayed in museums.'

She stopped. Himself, who disagreed with her, thanked her warmly for her trouble and offered her wine or tea.

'What I would like,' she said, 'is to see the Kinloch hilt.'

Himself blinked. 'We have only the replica on show.'

'The real one,' she said. 'Show me the real one.'

After less than three seconds he said, smiling, 'We have to keep it safe from Henry VIII.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean we have had to bury it to keep it.' He was making a joke of it and, unwillingly, she smiled tightly and settled for a sight of the copy.

We walked down the long passage where once relays of footmen had hurried with steaming dishes from kitchen to Great Hall, and Himself unlocked the weighty door that let us into the castle proper.

The Great Hall's walls, thanks to the theft of all the tapestries, were now for the most part grimly bare. The display cases, since the disappearance of the priceless dinner service, were unlit and empty. The long centre table, where once fifty guests had dined in splendour, bore a thin film of dust. Without comment my uncle walked down the long room under its high vaulted ceiling until he came to the imposing grilled glass display unit at the far end that had once held the true Honour of the Kinlochs.

Himself flicked a switch. Lights inside the glass case came to brilliant life and beamed onto the gold-looking object inside.

The replica hilt lay on black velvet and, even though one knew it was not the real thing, it looked impressive.

'It is gold plated,' its owner said. 'The red stones are spinel, not ruby. The blue stones are lapis lazuli, the green ones are peridots. I commissioned it and paid for it, and no one disputes that this is mine.'

Dr Zoл Lang studied it carefully and in silence.

The hilt itself, though larger than a large man's fist, looked remarkably like the King Alfred Gold Cup, except that there were no crenellations and no engraving. There was instead the pommel, the grip that fitted into the palm of the hand: and instead of the circular foot, only the neck into which the snapped-off blade had been fastened.

The ceremonial sword that Prince Charles Edward had hoped to use at his coronation as rightful King of England and Scotland had been made for him in France (and, amazingly, paid for by him personally) in 1740. It had been his own to give, and on impulse, in gratitude and despair, he had given it.

Dr Lang, with fervour and unexpected fanaticism, said intensely, 'This imitation may be your own, but I agree with the castle's custodians that the real Honour of the Kinlochs belongs to Scotland.'

'Do you think so?' Himself asked politely, good manners and jocularity in his voice. 'I would argue with you, of course, and I would defend my right of ownership…' He paused provocatively.

'Yes?' she prompted.

He smiled sweetly. To the hilt.'

'Al,' Himself asked thoughtfully, as we walked back from seeing Zoл Lang out to her taxi, 'how far would you actually go in defending the Honour of the Kinlochs?'

'Up to and including the hilt?'

'I'm not joking, Al.'

I glanced at his heavy troubled face.

"The answer,' I said, 'is that I don't know.'

After a pause he asked, 'Would you have given up the hilt to the four men who attacked you if they'd told you what they wanted and had used more than their fists?'

'I don't know.'

'But how much urge did you have anyway to tell them where to look?'

'None,' I said. 'I didn't like them.'

'Al, be serious.'

"They made me angry. They made me feel futile. I would have denied them anything I could.'

'I don't ask for you to suffer to keep that thing safe.

If they attack you again, don't let them hurt you. Tell them what they want to know.'

I said with humour, 'You wouldn't have said that two hundred years ago.'

'Times change.'

We went peacefully into his house and into his dining-room, where the black cube containing the King Alfred Gold Cup still lay on the table. We checked briefly to make sure that the gold prize was still inside, and I ran a finger over the faint indentations of Bede's Death Song: consider the evil one does on earth, because a reckoning awaits.

Was it good or evil, in changing times, to pay for physical relief on earth with one's eternal honour?

Where did common sense begin?

At what point did one duck the scream?

I had no need to ask such questions aloud. Himself - my august uncle, my hereditary clan chief - was the product of the same ancient ethos and conditioning that I had received from his brother, and I had willy nilly inherited the mainstream Kinloch mind, stubbornness and all.

Himself and I re-enclosed the black cube in its drawstring bag and replaced it in the cardboard box with the copies of Dickens on top. I restuck it all as best I could with the wide brown fastening tape, though the result couldn't be called secure, and we put the box back in the sideboard for the want of anywhere better.

'We can't leave it there for ever,' my uncle said.

'No.'

'Do you trust Dr Lang?'

I was surprised by the question, but said, 'I would trust her to be true to her beliefs.'

'Think of somewhere better for the Cup, Al.'

'I'll try.'

At his own request I hadn't told him to the inch where to find the hilt, though he knew it was somewhere at the bothy. After much consideration we had, as a precaution against us both inconveniently dying with our secret untold, like Henry VIII's evaders, entrusted Jed with the basic information.

'If you have to,' Himself had said to him, 'dig around and pull the bothy apart stone by stone. Otherwise, forget what we've told you.'

Jed couldn't, of course, forget it although he had never alluded to it since except to say once that he felt overwhelmed by our faith in his loyalty. If Jed had been going to betray us to the castle's administrators he could have done it at any time in the past few years, but instead had taken the game of hide and seek into his own private world in enjoyment, and it was certainly the basis of the solid friendship between the two of us.