Book 1, Chapter 2 – The Birth of a Gryphon
The main emblem in the coat-of-arms of Charles Griffin, the 12th Earl of Ardun, was a Gryphon – that fabulous hybrid creature with the head, wings and talons of an eagle and the body of a lion. Two Gryphons carved in stone were perched like totems on the gateposts of the main drive at Ardun, his ancestral country estate in Oxfordshire. A more flamboyant version, with a very long tail, was the dominant figure in the stained glass fanlight above the door of his London town house in Chester Square, Belgravia. And a minimalist abstract was embossed on his personalised stationery at Brown’s, the private bank in the City of London where he became Chairman in 1980.
Although he had lived in London all his adult life, he always thought of Ardun as home. He had maintained a set of rooms in the south wing of the house since he was a boy and helped his father manage the three thousand acres of the estate in preparation for the day when he would inherit the Earldom. He respected his father even though he judged him to be a lesser man than his grandfather who was known affectionately in the family and among his close friends as Hunter John. The nickname was first given him by Buffalo Bill, the former colonel of the United States Cavalry whose real name was William Cody. Hunter John was in his early twenties at the time, on his first tour of the family’s business investments in Canada. He had taken a side-trip to the American West to take part in his first bison hunt and he had hired Buffalo Bill as a guide.
Charles regarded Hunter John – not his father – as his link with the family’s long tradition of buccaneering capitalism. He was a world traveller who lived an adventurous life and took pride in having bagged big game under the Union Jack flag on five continents. It was Hunter John who introduced him to fox hunting in the Cotswold Hills when he was seven years of age, and initiated him into deer hunting in the Western Highlands of Scotland when he was ten, smearing his face with the blood of his first kill.
The Trophy Room at Ardun became a virtual memorial to Hunter John’s exploits as it filled up with the mounted animal heads, stuffed birds and stretched skins he brought back – many of them from Canada.
The “Red Indian” collection in the Long Gallery was also a trophy, of sorts. Hunter John liked to tell of how he survived when the prairie Indian tribes rebelled against the British Empire in 1885.
Extract 2
As the threat of insolvency loomed, Charles became convinced that marriage was no longer merely a question of strengthening the family’s assets, but of saving them. He could not afford another failure. But the fact that he had already married and divorced twice spoilt his reputation. Stories about his indiscreet promiscuity, the infertility of his two failed marriages, his gambling, and rumours about his failing finances meant he was less eligible in Britain than ever before. With a growing sense of dread he knew that he might have to look abroad again.
***
His search led him to Spain by way of the Caribbean. One of Brown’s American clients from South Carolina had asked the bank to assist in financing the purchases of a sugar plantation in Trinidad and Tobago. As part of his due diligence enquiries, the Earl met with the vendor’s agent at the old plantation house on Tobago.
Under the influence of the Earl’s charm, the agent, who was a former commercial attaché at the Spanish Embassy in Venezuela, revealed that his client was a Spanish noblewoman from Andalucía – a Countess.
The two men were sipping rum on the veranda overlooking gardens that were shielded by flowering Jacaranda trees. Green and scarlet humming birds probed the thicket of orchids in the garden. As the rum soaked his veins and the cool breeze softly soothed the prickly heat, the agent abandoned professional discretion and told the Earl all he knew about his client. Her name was Condesa María Concepción Giménez de Córdoba. She was intelligent, vivacious and classically beautiful, the agent said – his rolling eyes and expressive gestures conveying more even than his generous words. Strangely, she had never married or been romantically linked to anyone. This was thought to be due to her religious convictions. Although she had good relations with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, having a cousin a Cardinal in the Curia at the Vatican, no less, it was rumoured that she dabbled in strange and esoteric spiritual practices.
He had been given to understand from her financial advisors in Madrid that the sale of her Caribbean plantations was part of a grand plan to liquidate most of her family’s businesses and land-holdings in the Americas and throughout the world and convert their value to cash.
There had been some whispered debate in business and diplomatic circles in Spain about the reason for her plan. Some thought it was a shrewd strategic business decision to get out of the colonies before they achieved political independence. Newly independent states would nationalise segments of the private sector, especially those businesses, like hers, which were mainly based on land holdings and which had politically incorrect origins in the colonialism that followed on the Spanish Conquest of the New World. Others thought she had a bad conscience about the origins of her family’s great wealth. Yet others thought she acted on an altruistic impulse to raise cash for her charitable and religious activities.
The Earl asked Brown’s to make discrete enquiries about the Countess through its correspondent bank in Madrid. The results excited him. Whatever her motivation, she was already well advanced in her plan. Brokers at the houses which handled her purchase of bonds estimated that her sale of real assets had already raised cash in excess of three quarters of a billion pounds sterling and there was much more to come.
A press clipping service on Fleet Street provided the Earl with a bundle of articles from Spanish newspapers and magazines. There was a photograph of her draped in black lace at the Vatican in audience with Pope John XXIII, and another of her wrapped in a white silk sari in Dharamsala, India with the Dalai Lama. Others showed her with the Chief Rabbi in Jerusalem and with Senior Mullah in Morocco, with a Shinto priest in Tokyo and with various other religious or spiritual persons including shamans and witchdoctors. The phrases, “ways of knowing” and “paths to knowledge” and “enlightened consciousness” appeared often enough in reference to the conferences and events she was attending to suggest what her preoccupations were.
There were also pictures of her in New York meeting with Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary-General of the United Nations and at a reception in Stockholm for Lester Pearson when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. That photograph was of special interest to the Earl because he was acquainted with Lester Pearson, who was the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, the current leader of the Liberal Party in Canada and, as such, probably the next Prime Minister.
Digging deeper in the Latin American press with the help of the Bank’s Spanish speakers, he read reports of her charitable projects in Mexico and Central American countries and in Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay and Chile. She had funded orphanages, children’s hospitals, family clinics, leprosaria, schools, colleges and cultural centres.
From the press coverage, at least, it seemed that most of the projects were related to the children and families of the indigenous Indian populations of Mexico and Central and South America. In many of the projects she appeared to be supporting the initiatives of the local people; in others she seemed to be associated with the Catholic Church and, in particular, with the Society of Jesus – the Jesuits.
When he made further discreet enquiries through the Spanish Embassy in London, he was referred to the Centro Para la Restitución, a foundation in Seville. The Countess was its patron and main benefactor. Its stated mission was to promote “restitution to the indigenous peoples of the New World”. In his search, the only words he could find that were directly attributed to Doña María Concepción was the keynote speech she had delivered to a World Bank symposium in Washington DC. It was entitled Restitution is an Obligation not a Choice.
She was certainly an enigma. Her interests encompassed the environment, ecumenism between the major religions, the promotion of unorthodox systems of belief and knowledge – including tribal shamanism and witchcraft – and she seemed to have a preoccupation with the native peoples and cultures of the Americas. Given her enormous wealth and reputed beauty it was certainly odd that no man had got close to her. She was about thirty-seven years of age, two years younger than Charles. Surely, at her age she should be growing anxious about her biological clock. No rich woman would want to become a childless spinster.
It was possible, of course, that she was just another eccentric, wealthy dilettante trying to buy herself significance. That would be all the more reason for him to approach her as if her interests were serious, coherent and compatible with his own.
Extract 3
“It’s remorseless, this bloody process” he concluded, “unless I stop it.”
An hour later he stepped outside and passed through the ornate Italian gardens that nestled up close to the west side of the house and up several ornate steps to a promontory. The western view revealed how high Ardun sat among the Cotswold Hills. There was no sight of roads or buildings or fences or any man-made thing. The parkland pastures fell away in undulating slopes to the thick woodlands on either side and below. The sky was big and solemn.
He listened to the last of the birdsong as the sun descended towards the horizon. He heard a raucous cry and saw the shadowy outline of a large bird. For a brief moment he fancied it was an eagle, but it was a rook returning late from the fields. The air was still and heavy with the scent of the lavender and thyme and other sweet-smelling herbs as well as the night-blooming jasmine shrubs in the borders of the garden. He felt closer to Ardun than ever before.
It was time to make a decision. If the cost of saving Ardun was a restrictive marriage contract with a quirky woman from an alien culture, so be it. Duty before pleasure! Besides, he thought, if he did not act soon she would have no difficulty finding someone else to satisfy her urgent desire for an heir. “It’s time for you to keep your own council, Old Boy,” he said aloud as he scanned the dusk sky for the first stars. “Mortimer would never approve, but grandpa would.”
***
The Countess prevailed upon the Archbishop of Seville to allow a Church marriage even though the Earl was twice divorced and not a Catholic. But the Archbishop would not allow it to take place in the Cathedral in Seville. To avoid the unfavourable public comment a marriage at a less prestigious location might attract, the Countess turned to her cousin, the Cardinal, to arrange and preside at a quiet wedding within the walls of the Vatican. There were few guests and both parties made simultaneous announcements of the marriage in England and Spain.
While the failure of his first two marriages had clouded his prospects at Brown’s, the Earl’s marriage to the Countess transformed them. His relief was enormous. The financial arrangements satisfied the cash-flow needs of the family estates and his personal need for greater disposable income. Furthermore, the Countess entrusted Brown’s with the banking arrangements for a substantial portion of her investments.
Following his marriage, Brown’s created a new Americas Division under his direction and made him deputy chairman of the bank. The mission of the Americas Division was to revive and develop the bank’s former merchant banking business in Canada as a platform for a similar revival in the United States and the Caribbean. Any new business he could generate in Latin America through the Countess’s connections would be a welcome bonus.
To carry out this plan, he began a twelve-month tour of duty in the summer of 1962. He chose Montréal as his base because that is what the Countess wanted. But in justifying his choice to Brown’s on business terms he argued that Montréal was still Canada’s principal financial centre and the location of the head offices of many of its largest corporations and financial institutions, although Toronto was gaining fast. He could access Toronto and Ottawa – and New York, for that matter – by frequent trains from downtown Montréal and flights from Dorval airport.
For his own personal interest he also wanted to visit some of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s old fortified factories and stores in the far north and view the polar bears that trekked hundreds of miles to maraud the rubbish tips in the northern township of Churchill.
In Montréal he lived in Hunter John’s former residence. It was on Pine Avenue close to McGill University and the Royal Victoria Hospital, low enough on the southern slopes of Mount Royal for him to be able look up at the large illuminated Cross near the summit, and high enough to look across the rooftops of the downtown. The house was a mock baronial manor built by a Scottish entrepreneurial engineer who helped build the railways in Québec and Ontario. It reminded the Earl of his family’s hunting lodge south and east of Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, and it would not have looked out of place in Aberdeen, with its grey granite blocks, green copper roof, ornamental turrets and irregular shaped windows – some with stained, leaded glass.
Montréal still had some of the infrastructure developed in the old colonial era to help British expatriates feel at home. The St. James club in the business district cultivated the ambience of a London gentleman’s club, and the Ritz on Rue Sherbrooke was a modest reminder of its Parisian namesake. The ballroom at the Windsor Hotel was a good place for galas on the feast days of St. George, St. Andrew, St. David and St Patrick. The officer’s mess at the Canadian regiments of the Grenadier Guards and the Black Watch were always hospitable. As an English Lord, Charles Griffin could live a comfortable, privileged life in downtown Montréal without ever having to speak a word of French.
***
The Countess followed the Earl to Montréal in the fall when the humidity of summer had dissipated and the air had become dry again. She was enchanted by the red, russet and gold of the foliage still clinging tremulously to the trees or, having fallen, lying scattered like a rustling duvet.
In London she had become accustomed to riding twice a week on Rotten Row in Hyde Park accompanied by the Earl or, in his absence, by Household Cavalry officers exercising their horses from the Knightsbridge barracks. When she joined the Earl in Montréal, he arranged for a stable to deliver horses twice a week to Beaver Lake at the top of Mount Royal from where she and her escort for the day would explore the mountain’s roads, pathways and woods, searching for vantage points from where to look down on the city and across the island to the Saint Lawrence River.
Montréal characteristic blue skies reminded her of Andalucía. And winter arrived gently enough. When the first snows fell they muted the noise of the city and purified it of its blemishes, unifying mountain, trees, streets and buildings in a seamless, shining, white shroud. However, other snowfalls followed remorselessly. Intermittent thaws turned each new crisp layer of white crystals to icy slush mixed with salted gravel, inches deep in street gutters. And when the bitter winds of winter funnelled along Rue Sherbrooke and Boulevard de Maisonneuve, cutting through layers of furs and wool to chill her flesh, the Countess pined for Seville.
She was unaccustomed to northern winters and felt no wifely obligation to accompany the Earl on his tour of duty. However, she thought Montréal would be an auspicious place for her child to be born. It was only ten miles from the Mohawk village of Khanawake where the slender bones of Kateri Tekakwitha, “the Lily of the Mohawks”, could be viewed in the silk-lined casket in which the Jesuit priests had placed them.
***
Doña María Concepción’s empathy with los Indios began early in her life – so early that she could not remember when or why. It may have been no more complicated than her childish fascination with the large 16th century oil painting that covered a wall in the dining room in the family hacienda in Andalucía. It showed Christopher Columbus returning from one of his voyages to the New World, parading a line of Indians through the streets of Seville on the way to the royal court.
When she was older she learned that they were probably the Taino from Cuba or from the island of Hispaniola, which later came to be known as the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Columbus had brought the Taino forcibly to Spain to be sold as slaves to fund his expeditions, and as curiosities for the entertainment of the royal court.
The painter had taken artistic licence to depict the Taino carrying parrots and toucans on their forearms and shoulders, and turtles and iguanas in wooden cages, and bundles of plants such as tobacco and cotton, and potatoes and exotic fruits. Their brown bodies were naked and painted. Where modesty required, the artist had contrived to give them a skimpy apron of small seeds threaded with cotton. A broad, woven headband held plumes of parrot feathers upright around the circumference of their heads in the shape of a crown, and other gaudy feathers drooped in clusters from bands around their arms, knees and ankles.
When, as a young woman, María Concepción became more informed about the history of the Spanish Conquest of the New World, she also became more critical of the artist for not showing the bewilderment the Taino must have felt, their fear, homesickness and exhaustion, or their grieving for so many of their family and friends who died on the journey to Spain in the crowded holds of Columbus’ small ships only to have their bodies thrown unceremoniously to the sharks. Perhaps the painter believed the Indians had no thoughts or emotions for he had given them identical impassive faces – like dolls.
As a very small girl, she would often go alone to the dining room, climb gingerly on a chair close to the painting, and gaze into the eyes of los Indios as a Russian girl might contemplate a religious icon of Christ or the Virgin. She saw in their faces the same beatific calm she had seen in the paintings and statues of Christian martyrs on their way to their deaths and the intense recollection in the eyes of the suffering Christ as he carried his cross through the streets of Jerusalem.
Extract 4
The Earl followed two weeks later, taking a commercial flight and arriving in Seville on the Saturday of Easter Week. The next day, María Concepción’s cousin, the Cardinal, baptised the child over the very same font where she, her brothers, her father and generations of her family had been baptised.
Charles Griffin felt uneasy in the alien atmosphere of a Catholic Cathedral still stuffy with the incense that lingered from the Easter Sunday masses. He was relieved when the christening was over. Afterwards, there was a reception in his wife’s home in Seville. Nobody from his family was there.
He did not appreciate the rasping, broken English of the Countess’s effusive relatives and friends. After greeting the guests in a perfunctory manner, he secluded himself in the library of the house and drank two double shots of single malt as he perused maps of the 16th and 17th century voyages to the New World funded by Doña María Concepción’s ancestors. As the solitude and the whisky did its work he began to feel better. Before long he was congratulating himself on having delivered his side of a very good bargain. In one stroke, so to speak, he had produced an heir and secured his and Ardun’s financial future.
His good humour restored, he left the library to mingle with the guests and to accept their compliments with his customary charm and grace. When the time came to leave to catch the early evening flight to London he was feeling expansive and went to the nursery for a last look at his son. A few minutes later, the Cardinal followed, gliding silently into the room to stand opposite him at the crib. For a minute or two, the Earl seemed oblivious to his presence, lost in his thoughts as he looked down at the small, crunched face of the sleeping child.
“And the Christian names you and the Condesa chose for him,” the Cardinal said softly with only a slight Spanish accent, “Rupert and Carlos! They reflect so well his noble English and Spanish heritage.” He looked at the Earl, inviting a reply. “It’s perfectly proper that the father’s choice of name should have precedence.” When the Earl still did not respond, he continued. “But I confess that I would have preferred his Spanish name to be first.”
He slipped his hand beneath his soutane and drew out a small, silk pouch from which he poured a string of rosary beads made from clear Mexican crystal, and he hooked them to the canopy of the crib so that the silver crucifix dangled above the infant’s head. Straightening himself he said, “I understand that you will raise him in both cultures?”
The Earl looked up with a start as he became aware of the Cardinal’s presence. “Both cultures?” He swayed slightly as he struggled to understand the question. When he did he turned his glazed eyes back to his son in the crib, taking time to adjust his focus.
“Ah yes,” he said, “both cultures!” He nodded his head with exaggerated gravity. “Rupert is a true Gryphon – part lion, part eagle.”
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