The Snowfly Read online

  I briefly outlined the legend as I knew it and Charlie listened attentively. “Bleedin’ hell,” he said. “Thought I’d heard everything. Got any Adamses?”

  “Pretty good supply.”

  “May I?” he asked. “Yanks tie them so much better.”

  “We’re going to use an Adams?”

  “And Callibaetis, but I’m flush in those and my dressings are top of the line, what?”

  Charlie and I were awake early the next morning and settled for coffee and dry toast before climbing into our waders.

  “I thought Brits fished from the banks.”

  “Only the rigid fools. I like to mix with the fish, but mind you, we’ve got to be bleedin’ cautious, stay to the sides and remain low. These fish don’t grow large, but they’re born smart.”

  The river was called the Drake.

  “After the insect?” I asked.

  Charlie laughed out loud. “Right, Sir Francis, he was certainly a right bleedin’ pest to the Spaniards, eh?”

  We were on the river a few moments before sunrise. Charlie said, “I release most of my fish.” I told him I did too. There was a hazy overcast and a forecast of showers later in the day. I tied on a small Adams and hit a fish immediately. It was a brown, a healthy ten inches, bright silver with dark markings and not a lot of yellow.

  “Give us a look,” Anjali Toddywalla said from the bank behind me, startling me. She had two cameras around her neck and was carrying a small tripod.

  I showed her the fish, careful to not take it out of the water.

  “Lovely,” she said, “but the light’s not quite right. Mind if I follow along?”

  “Of course not.”

  The river flowed down a slope, forming a series of terraced drops. We were in a narrow gorge with growling water and some pools under the shadows of large gray boulders. There were undercut banks in places and man-made stone walls on some bends. There wasn’t an abundance of aquatic vegetation, but enough to provide cover for fish and insects. Ancient oaks towered above us. The water wasn’t deep, but it had a firm and steady flow. The rocks were a combination of sandstone and granite, the latter covered with multicolored lichens. It was a lovely setting for trout fishing.

  The fish weren’t as spooky as Charlie had made them out to be. They were mostly small, but fought valiantly and stubbornly.

  At midmorning I came around a bend and, out of the corner of my eye, caught a silver flash to my right. It was a trailer, what the Brits called a caravan, set back from the bank, built up on a wooden platform. A porch with a railing of barkless wood had been built along the side facing the river.

  Anjali, who had followed me in silence, announced it was time for tea; I got out of the river and followed her into the place. The furnishings were spartan: a table and chairs, stove, small refrigerator, and stone fireplace built into one side, where the metal had been cut away. There were three small shadow boxes on one wall, filled with displays of flies, mostly naturals. Several spare drawings of trout looked almost alive.

  Charlie came in as Anjali began to brew tea.

  “My dears are skittish wee things, aren’t they?”

  I said, “Not bad.”

  “Howjado?”

  “A few,” I said. In fact, I had not been counting. I had been concentrating too hard on figuring out where they were.

  “Twenty-six,” Anjali announced from the stove.

  Charlie’s mouth hung open. “Kiss my glorious goolies,” he said.

  “Truly,” Anjali said. “I counted them all. And you, Charles?”

  “Four,” he said, “and I can tell you I was bleedin’ well pleased with that. Thought I’d have to console Bowie. You’re a cheeky bastard, Rhodes! Catchin’ my brownies so easily.”

  “He casts beautifully,” Anjali said. “Pinpoint radar in his arm. He might give you a lesson or two, Charles.”

  “Might he?” Charlie said, laughing.

  I wished Anjali would stop needling him. “Lucky morning,” I said.

  “Yes,” our water boiler said, “the sort of luck you have with birds, Charles.”

  Charlie reddened and grinned with embarrassment. “Rather have the bleedin’ browns,” he muttered.

  The three of us drank tea and ate fresh honey-oat muffins, which Anjali pulled from her rucksack.

  “I didn’t see another fisherman all morning,” I told Charlie.

  “And shan’t,” Charlie said. “This is mine.”

  “His aunt’s,” Anjali said, interrupting. “To be accurate.”

  Charlie ignored her. “Auntie bought this back in the nineteen-forties, right after the war. Nobody fished the river back then. Too small, not enough flow, fish too small. But she bought it and had some chaps down from Wales and they did this and did that. Never planted a fish; the natives prospered.”

  “Your aunt fishes?”

  “Whole bloody family,” he said. “What’s left of us.”

  “She’s quite famous,” Anjali said.

  “Infamous would be more to the point,” Charlie said.

  “Women’s rights,” Anjali said.

  “You name it,” Charlie added. “My mother’s sister. My father and mother were killed in 1948, in India, soon after independence.”

  I wondered if this was his connection to Anjali.

  “Auntie took me in,” Charlie continued. “Of course, she was gone knockabout most of the time, shedding her knickers for peers and pals. When I showed promise at football at public school she had them remove me from the team. Wouldn’t tolerate her nephew playin’ a ‘gutter’ sport. Naturally, I told her to piss off, left school, joined Arsenal, and you know the rest.”

  “They didn’t speak for years,” Anjali said in a scolding tone. “Charles refused to apologize and she insisted she had been right. It was a frightful contest of misdirected wills.”

  “She was wrong!” Charlie said, his face flashing anger. “Why would I apologize?”

  “For being a cheeky, self-absorbed wowser,” she said.

  He lowered his eyebrows. “Besides that?”

  They both laughed. It was obviously an old joke.

  “They’ve only recently reconciled,” Anjali said to me.

  “Who finally surrendered?” I asked.

  Charlie rolled his eyes. “I did. The old girl wasn’t gettin’ any younger and maybe I’d grown up a bit.”

  “Not all that much,” Anjali Toddywalla said dryly.

  “Ever hear of Sir Thomas Oxley?” I asked.

  Charlie rolled his eyes. “Heard of him? I should think so. The man was a giant. Not that the other Lordships appreciated his single-minded dedication to spreadin’ trout. They felt he ought to concentrate on bleedin’ old England and bugger the rest of the world. His offspring did not inherit his love for fish, which is somewhat of a tragedy.”

  “Trust went under,” Anjali announced.

  Charlie gaped at her in disbelief. “You must be joking.”

  “It’s true,” I added. “A very recent event.”

  “How do you know that?” Anjali asked. “It’s not been publicized.”

  “I had business with St. John Wonbrow, the Trust’s former managing director.”

  “Dreadful man,” Anjali said.

  “You know him?”

  “His reputation,” Anji said.

  “My dear Bowie,” Charlie said, “in certain social circles in England everyone knows everybody. It can get quite tiresome. I simply can’t believe the Oxley Trust has gone under.”

  “It was Ozzie’s fault,” Anji said.

  She seemed quite well informed and I decided to listen rather than talk.

  “Ozzie!” Charlie said. “Complete bleedin’ idiot.” He looked over at me. “Oswald Oxley, the great man’s great-great-grandson or some such thing. Couldn’t manage a h
alf quid. The Oxley fortune has been pissed away for generations. The truth is that it’s a miracle the patriarch himself ever accumulated anything. The old boy reputedly had a terrible head for business.”

  Anjali interrupted. “The National Trust tried like the dickens to get hold of the Oxley properties, but the trustees felt they could make more on the open market.”

  “Nothing remains?” I asked.

  “Dribs and drabs,” Charlie said. “What’s the name of that awful place in Hampshire?” he asked Anjali.

  “Greavy House,” she said.

  Greavy! The word startled me. In his article on cryptography M. J. Key had talked about Irish monks at a place called Greavy. And now I was finding that Oxley had a place called Greavy House? A connection between Key and Oxley? This was not only a weird coincidence, it was scary. I couldn’t speak.

  “Right you are. That’s the place. Ozzie’s now,” Charlie said, “if he’s alive. Last I heard he was into the psychedelic scene and taking constant trips to Morocco, hash-with-trash and all that.” Charlie suddenly stopped talking and stared at me. “What business would you have with the Oxley Trust?”

  “Sir Thomas collected fishing books. I was at his Trout House on the River of Trout on the Vietnam border with Cambodia.”

  “Bugger off!” Charlie said incredulously. “His what?”

  “The name of his place in Vietnam. Seriously, there were trout in Vietnam, planted by Oxley. And some of his books. I saw a manuscript called The Legend of the Snowfly but never got to read it.”

  Charlie was grinning in disbelief. “And why’s that, old chum?”

  “It got blown up and burned.”

  Anjali said, “My God.”

  “While you held it?” Charlie asked, still not believing me.

  “No, a few seconds after I put it down.” I told the two of them about the North Vietnamese attack and Tet and Gillian and the books and what had happened and how the place had been destroyed and they listened politely until I was done.

  When I finished, they were silent and exchanged glances until Anjali said, “How absolutely dreadful.”

  Charlie poured us more tea and stared out the caravan at the river. “Who was the author of the manuscript?”

  “M. J. Key.”

  Charlie looked at me. “The snowfly bloke you mentioned last night?”

  “The same.”

  “You said he wrote other books?”

  I provided dates and brief descriptions.

  Charlie nodded. “Long interval, eh?”

  “Fifty-one years,” I said.

  Charlie asked, “Manuscript dated?”

  I shook my head. “Estimated late nineteen-thirties to mid-nineteen-­forties, but I’m only guessing.”

  “Only the one copy?”

  “Again, I don’t really know.”

  “Snowfly, eh?” He looked at Anjali Toddywalla. “Something, eh?”

  “Worth a look,” she said with an even voice. “We could drop in on Ozzie sometime.”

  “I should say! Smashing idea for an expedition, Anj. Be rather like visitin’ a zoo run by the mentally infirm,” Charlie said, slapping his hands on the table. “But now it’s troutin’ time and we’ll deal with Mister Key later.” He lowered his chin and glared. “This time we’ll see who the Angler of the Beat is.” He flashed a mock-fierce face. “I shall thump your colonial arse this afternoon, Rhodes.”

  But the outcome was the same and at dinner Charlie was as pleased as if he had done all the catching. “Bleedin’ spectacular!” he proclaimed over port and Cuban cigars.

  •••

  The next day we got into Anjali’s Land Rover and drove up to the huge house on the hill. Palace was more like it, a castle that had been tamed with sculpted gardens in front and back. The flowers were multihued and fragrant, their scent wafting down into the gorge. I had smelled them on the river.

  We were met at the front door by a butler who looked surprised to see Charlie.

  “Auntie in?” Charlie asked.

  “Mister Charles?”

  Charlie glared comically at the servant, “No, I’m his bleedin’ doppelgänger. Where is she, Lewis?”

  The unsmiling servant pointed down the hall.

  We walked into a hall that was close to fifty yards long. The walls were festooned with oil portraits. Hair and clothing styles suggested that the paintings stretched back hundreds of years. A lot of the subjects wore military uniforms or armor.

  An old woman in a wheelcair sat by a large window, which had been cracked open. She had binoculars in hand and a novel open in her lap. Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, newly released and already a bestseller. A gray sweater was wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. A small multicolored dog was squeezed into the chair beside her. It looked like a small cocker spaniel.

  “Auntie?” Charlie said, stepping between her chair and her window. He knelt down on one knee in front of her. “You are looking ravishing today, darling.”

  “Indeed,” she said after an extended silence. The dog’s ears perked up, but the old lady’s hand stroked the dog’s head and it relaxed. “You are looking quite fetching yourself, nephew.” She gazed fondly at Charlie and asked, “How are Arsenal these days?”

  “Barely competent,” Charlie said.

  “You should be managing the side.”

  Charlie laughed. “I thought you didn’t want me in that gutter sport.”

  “I’d purchase the side, of course. It would be perfectly acceptable for a peer to be the executive in such an undertaking.”

  I wasn’t processing all this. Was she suggesting that she buy Arsenal for Charlie? What peer? I kept my mouth shut.

  “Got that out of my system,” Charlie said.

  “Trout,” she said. “And sporting in the kip.”

  He laughed happily. “You’d know.”

  “Don’t be impertinent.”

  “It’s accurate.”

  She granted a little smile. “Perhaps. What brings you to your knees in front of me?”

  Charlie grabbed my elbow and pushed me in front of his aunt. “This is Bowie Rhodes. American journalist, former Vietnam war correspondent.”

  “Godawful little war,” she said. “A legacy of the French.”

  “He’s a top-shelf trout man. Caught yesterday . . . how many, Anji?”

  “Twenty-six in the morning, twenty-one in the afternoon.”

  The old lady looked astonished. “In our river?”

  “Impressive, what?”

  “Unthinkable,” the old woman said. “Forty-seven? Are you sure?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I figured it was my turn to talk.

  “On what?”

  “Size twenty Adams.”

  “American dressing?”

  “Yes.”

  She seemed relieved. “Well, that explains it. They are not used to it. You simply surprised the poor dears, I should think. Ambushed them.”

  Her tone of voice suggested something less than approval.

  “Sir Thomas Oxley,” Charlie said.

  “Fine man,” Auntie said. “His grandson Harold asked me to hold his glove and promptly shoved his ungloved hand up my dress at Ascot one year.”

  “Shocking,” Charlie said, grinning affably.

  “Yes, and when he had finished I told him to remove it and never put it there again. My horse won.”

  Charlie laughed so hard he nearly cried. Anjali looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Two of a kind,” she said, forming the words but not saying them out loud. “Both pots.”

  “What about Oxley?” Auntie asked her nephew. She seemed physically feeble, but her mind was keen, her tone and manner indicating that she was accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed without question.

  “I believe he had books.” />
  She nodded. “He did indeed, but I should think they’ve all been sold off by the idiots running the Trust. Incompetent sods, the lot of them. I should think all the intelligence in that family settled in one and never moved on.”

  “Enthusiastic collector, was he?”

  “Quite. Saw the books once. At the Hampshire place.”

  “Greavy House. Belongs to Ozzie now.”

  She looked surprised. “That one’s not dead yet? Will be soon, I expect. Worthless as Chamberlain.”

  “Did you know M. J. Key, Auntie?” Charlie asked. “Another beau of yours, perhaps?”

  “Charles Jowett,” Anjali said in a low, scolding tone.

  “Bugger off, Anji. She doesn’t mind, do you, Auntie?”

  “Miss Toddywalla is a lady, Charles dear, and you are a scalawag, but no, I don’t mind. Yes, I knew Mister Key. He was a man who followed his own path. Excellent mind, you see, but premature on some matters. Appalling style as a writer, but his ideas carried the day. Content over style, which in my experience is unusual in this world. Key was not at all prolific with the pen. The man traveled to angle and nobody can say they really knew him. I most certainly did not.” There was a sudden misting in her eyes and her voice dropped. “Not that I would have objected, mind you. Handsome fellow, strapping and rugged.”

  Charlie’s hand went to her shoulder and rubbed affectionately. “He leave family?”

  “Not likely,” Auntie said. “Had the bachelor disease with no time for women or men, just fish and his sciences.”

  “Biology,” I said, butting in. And maybe cryptography, I thought, but left this unsaid.

  The old woman looked askance at me. “Mathematics,” she said emphatically.

  “He taught in America,” I said, trying to recover.

  “Balderdash,” she said. “Never! Ghastly thought. Why should you think such a thing, Mister Rhodes?”

  I was really confused. If there was an M. J. Key of England, who was the M. J. Key who taught in East Lansing?

  “I must be mistaken,” I mumbled.

  “I should think so,” Auntie said, but it was said sympathetically. “He died in 1939. I attended the funeral.” Her eyes went to Charlie to see if he was supporting me.