The Unburied by Charles Palliser

subject is far removed from my own area of interest, the Library subscribes to the
Proceedings of the English Historical Society
and so I happen to have read both your paper and Scuttard’s response to it.’
    ‘I’m very pleased to hear that. But I hope you were not convinced by Scuttard’s argument?’
    ‘I wouldn’t dream of venturing an opinion in an area of such complexity outside my own province. But he was very persuasive. He is a scholar of remarkable abilities and achievement – though still barely forty – from whom even greater things are expected. His book on the eighth century has blown away much of the mist of unsupported assumptions which has until now obscured the subject.’
    I was rather taken aback by this response. ‘However that may be – and I think he dismisses too readily some very brilliant insights by earlier scholars – he is wrong in this regard.’
    Dr Locard looked at me dispassionately: ‘If you find what you hope to, you will completely destroy his argument. What I don’t understand from your letter, however, is why you are so optimistic.’
    ‘I don’t know if you are familiar with the name of the antiquarian and scholar, Ralph Pepperdine?’
    Dr Locard nodded. ‘The author of
De Antiquitatibus Britanniae
?’
    ‘Just so. Well, he died in 1689 and left his papers to his old College – my own, as it happens. Shamefully, they have never been properly examined. Just two weeks ago I looked at them because I was coming here and remembered that Pepperdine had once visited this town. I found a letter written by him while he was visiting this Library in 1663.’
    ‘Really? I imagine it might offer an interesting perspective on the Foundation at that difficult time.’
    ‘Indeed so and there is something in it which will, I think, be of particular interest to yourself.’ I removed from my portfolio the handwritten copy I had made. ‘Pepperdine gives a description by an eyewitness of the death of Dean Freeth.’
    ‘Really? Does it differ significantly from the accepted version?’
    ‘That his death arose from a misunderstanding of the orders given and was completely unintended?’
    ‘Yes, though that version was proffered by the officer in charge who had every reason to account for it in that way.’
    ‘Pepperdine gives a completely different explanation.’
    Dr Locard smiled. ‘Then it makes all existing discussion of the incident entirely inadequate. When a competent historian of the Foundation appears he will be in your debt.’
    ‘Is there not already such a history?’
    ‘Nothing since a ponderous work published in the middle of the last century. And there is nothing of any quality in prospect, though there are some amateurish efforts being undertaken whose use of the sources is most unscholarly. What does Pepperdine say?’
    ‘The opening of his letter need not detain us. He describes the journey and the state of the roads and says he arrived two weeks earlier and is lodged in the Palace with his old friend, the Bishop. This is the interesting part:
    At supper yesternight with Mr Dean I heard an account of the death of the late Dean which gives the lie to the story given out. As you most likely know, when the Parliamentary forces captured the town, they shamefully made the Dean a prisoner in his own dwelling because he was mightily affected to the kings party and it was feared that he might incite the people to resistance. My intelligence is from one Champniss who has been a Canon Residentiary here for upwards of four decades and greatly loved the unfortunate Freeth. On the morning of his death, Champniss saw six troopers enter the Close who appeared to be drunk and who forced their way into the corner where the Library is. Then they started to sack the building – smashing the windows and looting and stealing. The old man told me that the Dean must have seen this from one of the windows of his Deanery and that, mightily perturbed by this act of desecration, he