The Moon Rock | Page 5

with convulsive starts. Austin Turold fixed his glance on the
ceiling, where a solitary fly was cleaning its wings with its legs. From
the window Charles Turold presented an immobile profile. Only Dr.
Ravenshaw seemed to listen with an interest which never flagged.
Yet it was a story well worth hearing, that record of indomitable
pertinacity which had refused to be baulked by years or rebuffs. Men
have acquired titles more easily. That was apparent as Robert Turold
related the history of his long and patient investigation; of scents which
had led nowhere; of threads which had broken in his hand; of fruitless
burrowings into the graves of past generations. These disappointments

had lengthened the search, but they had never, baffled the searcher nor
broken his faith.
The story began in the fourteenth century, when the second Edward had
summoned his trusty retainer Robert Turrald from his quiet home in
leafy Buckinghamshire to sit in Parliament as a baron, and by that act
of kingly grace ennobled him and his heirs forever. Successive holders
of the title were summoned to Parliament in their turn until the reign of
the seventh Henry, when one succeeded whose wife brought him three
daughters, but no sons. At his death the title went into abeyance among
this plurality of girls. In peerage law they were his coheirs, and the
inheritance could not descend because not one of them had an exclusive
right to it. The daughters entered a convent and followed their parents
to the grave within a few years, the Crown resumed the estate, and the
title had remained in abeyance ever since.
But the last Lord Turrald had a brother Simon, a roystering blade and
lawless adventurer, who disappeared some years before his elder
brother's death. Little was known of him except that he was supposed
to have closed a brawling career on the field of Bosworth, when
Richard the Crookback was killed and the short-lived dynasty of York
ended.
The Turolds' family deed-box told a different story. There was a
manuscript in monkish hand, setting forth, "in the name of God,
Amen," the secret history of Simon, as divulged by him on his deathbed
for the information of his two sons. In this confession he claimed
kinship with the last Lord Turrald of Great Missenden. But he had not
dared to claim the title and rich estates on his brother's death, because
he was a proscribed man. He had been a Yorkist, and had fought for
Richard. That might have been forgiven him if he had not unhorsed his
future king at Bosworth and almost succeeded in slaughtering him with
his own reckless hands. So he had fled, and had remained in obscurity
and a safe hiding-place after his brother's death, preferring his head
without a title to a title without a head.
On this document, unsigned and undated, with nothing to indicate the
place of its origin, the Turold family based its claim of descent from the

baronial Turralds of Great Missenden. But the Turold history was a
chequered one. Their branch was nomadic, without territorial ties or
wealth, without continuance of chronology. They could not trace their
own genealogy back for two hundred years. There was a great gap of
missing generations which had never been filled in. It was not even
known how the document had come into their possession. Simon's two
sons and their descendants had vanished into unknown graves, leaving
no trace. But the family clung fast to their belief that they were the
lineal descendants of the Turralds of Buckinghamshire.
It had remained for Robert Turold to prove it. His father and
grandfather had bragged of it, had fabricated family trees over their
cups, and glowed with pride over their noble blood, but had let it go at
that. Robert was a man of different mould. In his hands, the slender
supposition had been turned into certainty. By immense labour and
research he built a bridge from the first Turold of whom any record
existed, backwards across the dark gap of the past. He traced the
wanderings of his ancestors through different generations and different
counties to Robert Turold, who established himself in Suffolk forty
years after the last Lord Turrald was laid to rest in his family vault in
the village church of Great Missenden.
The construction of this portion of his family tree occupied Robert
Turold for ten years. There were scattered records to be collected,
forgotten wills to be sought in county offices, parochial registers to be
searched for births and deaths. A nomadic family has no traditions;
Robert Turold had to trace his back to the darkness of the Middle Ages.
It was a notable feat to trace the wanderings of an obscure family back
so far as he did, but even then