Regent Supreme, sir,’ Specky replied respectfully. ‘It’s true, I’m afraid. When I had made a provisional count of the contents of the first receptacle and then discovered that there was another two also containing money I abandoned the count and summoned an Extraordinary General Meeting in virtue of the powers vested in me as High Claviger. Chief Claviger Savage proposed immediate equal division of the money but I vetoed that in accordance with the constitution as laid down by the Regent Supreme, that is yourself, sir.’
‘You couldn’t divide it,’ Frank complained direct to Percy, appealing to him with his hands clasped in prayer. ‘And even if you could you couldn’t spend it. We’d be found out, bound to be! We’d all be in trouble. Please, Percy, tell the cops! Please!’
‘I myself told Chief Claviger Savage equal division was out of the question,’ Specky said with condescending calm to belittle Frank’s hysteria, ‘but he wouldn’t agree. He even proposed to expel Probationer Garson for treason but I opposed that too and said it was a matter for the Regent.’
Percy bowed in regal acknowledgement. He was trying to think, and the chattering in front of him only confused him. There seemed to be something ominously true in what Frank and Specky were telling him, and in that case he must take charge and be cool, calm and collected. He mustn’t get excited, and yet he felt his leg tremble under the weight of his elbow as he resumed his thinker’s pose. The chattering became a clamour.
‘Silence!’ he shouted, in a temper with them.
‘Permission to speak, please!’ Skinny called out, his right hand high.
Percy grunted permission. He must keep patient and listen and try to think at the same time. It was difficult for him. Why was it, he wondered, that some folk were born with a quick brain, shrewd customers, fly men; and better folk needed time and privacy to work things out? Where was the justice or equality in that? But he knew enough to know that silence can be mistaken for wisdom and that nothing is so infectious as panic. So he held his tongue and put on an air of indifference.
‘The majority decision of the Clavigers was to refer the matter to you,’ Skinny started, taking Specky’s place behind the desk, ‘because your father had charge of the cellar and you’re your father’s heir, so if the money in those chests belonged to your father then legally it’s yours, and there was nobody else looked after the cellar, so it must have belonged to your father.’
‘Ach, don’t be daft, Skinny!’ Frank shouted. ‘You’ve seen what’s there. Percy’s father never had that kind of money, never, never, never!’
Skinny turned from addressing the chair to argue with his subordinate.
‘How do you know? That’s for Percy to say. Percy knows what his father had, you don’t. Percy’s the boss, it’s no’ you!’
‘Well, I like that!’ Frank screamed. ‘It’s me that’s been arguing Percy’s the boss, and now you try and tell me!’
Percy felt the first throbbings of a headache. It was the frequency of his headaches, beginning just after he left school, that made him suspect he was an intellectual. They were probably due to the abnormal activity of his brain.
‘You’ve always said you should have had money if you had your rights,’ Skinny turned back to the chair, ‘so maybe this money is your inheritance, maybe that’s why you could never find the money you knew your father ought to have left you if you were to be a great man because that’s where he had hidden it.’
‘Yes, could be,’ said Percy, too overwhelmed to dispute the point. ‘Let me see what yous are all talking about.’
He came clumsily down from Miss Elginbrod’s chair and the Clavigers dragged the three lower tea-chests out of the darkness into the candlelight.
‘That’s how they were, with the three other chests on top of them,’ said Frank ‘and there was all those costumes on top of the money but we put everything back just as it was to keep it hidden.’
Specky, Skinny and Savage pulled out concert costumes, Christmas party decorations and brown paper from the first chest, and Percy stooped over it when they gestured him to look inside. He fumbled out a bundle of notes with an elastic band round them and flipped it through with dumb awe.
‘Those are all fivers,’ said Frank helpfully. ‘But there’s singles as well there, and the bags with the half-crowns and the florins is in the middle one.’
Percy slouched round the other chests and examined them perfunctorily. The money was real. There was no doubt in his mind. And when the three chests were emptied of all the rubbish crammed in them to reveal the money underneath he saw that the bottom of each was covered with notes an inch deep. He felt slightly sick, much as he had felt when an old man in Packing and Dispatch had taken him into a pub and made him drink a pint of beer one night after they had been working late, and there was a quivering and a fluttering in his stomach.
‘Cover it up again,’ he said, stricken with responsibility. ‘Hide it just as it was! And let me think! Let me think!’
‘Oh no, Percy, no!’ Frank whispered in dismay. He had seen the glint of greed, and he was afraid.
Percy ignored him, and the Clavigers hastily and willingly obeyed the order.
‘Now put the chests well back, away back at that wall where the rats are,’ Percy commanded firmly. ‘We’ll need time to think. I want to think about this.’
‘But the rats might eat the money,’ Skinny objected. ‘It’s only paper after all.’
‘Some paper!’ chuckled Savage.
‘They’d have to eat their way through all those dresses and things first,’ Specky commented, shrugging.
‘And we’ll be back before then!’ Savage cried. He showed off his good young teeth like an animal showing its fangs as he leered in triumph at Frank Garson. ‘Lovely lolly! All the lolly in the world there! And we’ll be back!’
‘Yes, we’ll be back,’ Percy admitted.
He felt a vague but none the less substantial right to the money. Even though he hadn’t found it himself it had been found in his father’s territory and he was his father’s heir. Indeed, it had been his territory too. Many a Sunday he had been sent down to the cellar to look after the boilers in the days when the school was still heated by steam pipes. Many a Saturday he had spent sweeping it out and making it tidy before it became a neglected dump. It was merely accidental that someone else had found what was in those tea-chests. But the right didn’t lie solely in the finding, it lay just as much in claim to the place. This cellar was his. He wondered where the money came from, but passed on at once. He had met somewhere in his grasshopper reading the remark that science consists in asking the right questions. That meant there were questions it was stupid to ask. For example, where this money came from. There was no answer. Why ask a question that couldn’t be answered? The right question was what to do with it. But first he must frighten the Brotherhood into obedience.
‘Gather round!’ he yelled in his Regent’s voice, and sat again in Miss Elginbrod’s broken-backed chair.
‘This is a very serious matter,’ he declared. ‘There’ll have to be a solemn vow of secrecy. Yous have all got to swear not to say a word about it to anybody and take a blood oath.’
‘That’s the idea! Great!’
