The Schirmer Inheritance

The Account concluded with a sanctimonious homily on the subjects of prayer-saying and the obtaining of forgiveness for sins. George skipped it and turned to Mr. Moreton’s diary.

Mr. Moreton and an interpreter whom he had engaged in Paris had arrived in Germany towards the end of March 1939.

His plan had been simple; simple in intention, at all events. First he would retrace Hans Schneider’s steps. Then, when he had found out where the Schneider family had lived, he would set about discovering what had happened to all Hans’s brothers and sisters.

The first part of the plan had proved simple of execution. Hans had come from somewhere in Westphalia; and in 1849 a man of military age had had to have a permit to leave it. In Munster, the old state capital, Mr. Moreton had been able to find the record of Hans’s departure. Hans had come from Muhlhausen and gone to Bremen.

In Bremen, a search in the port authority files of old ships’ manifests had revealed that Hans Schneider of Muhlhausen had sailed in the Abigail, an English ship of six hundred tons, on May 10, 1849. This had checked with a reference, in one of Hans’s letters to Mary Smith, to his voyage from Germany. Mr. Moreton had now concluded that he was tracing the right Hans Schneider. He had gone next to Muhlhausen.

Here, however, a baffling situation had awaited him. He had found that, although the church registers recorded marriages, baptisms, and burials as far back as the Thirty Years’ War, none of them covering the years 1807 and 1808 contained any reference to the name of Schneider.

Mr. Moreton had brooded on this disappointment for twenty-four hours; then he had had an idea. He had gone back to the registers.

This time he had turned to those for 1850, the year of Franz Schneider’s death. The facts of his death and burial had been recorded, and the location of the grave. Mr. Moreton had gone to inspect it. Now he had had a most disturbing surprise. A decaying memorial stone had supplied the confusing information that this was the resting place of Franz Schneider and his much beloved wife, Ruth. According to Hans’s Account, his mother’s name had been Maria.

Mr. Moreton had returned to the registers again. It had taken him a long time to work back from 1850 to 1815, but by the time he had done so, he had had the names of no less than ten of Franz Schneider’s children and the date of his marriage to Ruth Vogel. He had also learned to his dismay that none of the children’s names had been either Hans or Karl.

The idea that there must have been a previous marriage in some other city had soon occurred to him. But where could this earlier marriage have taken place? With what other towns had Franz Schneider been associated? From what town, for instance, had he been recruited into the Prussian army?

There had been only one place where that sort of question might be answered. Mr. Moreton and his interpreter had gone to Berlin.

It had taken Mr. Moreton until the end of March to cut through the swathes of Nazi red tape and dig far enough into the archives at Potsdam to get at the Napoleonic war diaries of the Ansbach Dragoons. It had taken him less than two hours to find out that between 1800 and 1850 the name of Schneider had figured only once in the nominal rolls of the regiment. A Wilhelm Schneider had been killed by a fall from his horse in 1803.

It had been a bitter blow. Mr. Moreton’s entry in his diary for that day ended with the despondent words: “So I guess it’s a wild-goose chase after all. Nevertheless I will make a check search tomorrow. If no result, will abandon inquiry as I consider inability to link Hans Schneider positively with Mulhausen family in records makes further efforts pointless.”

George turned the page and then stared blankly. The next entry in the diary consisted entirely of figures. They filled the page, line after line of them. The next page was the same, and the page after that. He flicked the pages over rapidly. With the exception of the date hadings, every entry in the diary from then on-and it continued for over three months-was in figures. Moreover, the figures were in groups of five. Not only had Mr. Moreton decided after all against abandoning his inquiries in Germany, but he had thought it necessary to record the results of them in cipher.

George abandoned the diary and glanced through the file of photographed documents. He did not read German with great confidence even when it was printed in roman type. German handwriting of the traditional kind defeated him completely. These were all handwritten. Careful scrutiny of two or three of them revealed the fact that they referred to the births and death of people named Schneider, but this was scarcely surprising. He put them aside and opened the sealed envelope.