Epigraphs in The Hallmarked Man – Prose
The prose epigraphs in The Hallmarked Man come from two sources, the masonic works of Albert Pike, and the novel, A Maid of the Silver Sea by John Oxenham. You can read about the epigraphs drawn from the works of poets, Robert Browing, A. E. Housman and Matthew Arnold here.
‘Did you know they found silver on Sark in the nineteenth century?’
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
‘Really?’
‘Yeah… Cost a fortune, because they were digging out under the sea and they needed pumps to keep the water out. Then a shaft caved in, drowning ten miners, and that was the end of Sark silver.’
Twenty-five of the epigraphs come from A Maid of the Silver Sea, including the epigraph to each part of the book. The novel was published in 1910, and follows the fortunes of Stephen Gard, a Cornishman like Strike, who comes to Sark to oversee a silver mine, and ends up accused of murdering a hostile local, Tom Hamon. The mine fails, but Stephen’s innocence is proved by Tom’s sister Nance, who turns out to be the real treasure to be found on the island.
The mystery of the body in the vault of Ramsay Silver takes Strike and Robin to Sark at a crucial period of the investigation, and the story of the mine — dangerous work for uncertain rewards — provides ample parallels with the investigation.
John Oxenham is, like Robert Galbraith, a pen name. In this case it’s the pen name of journalist, poet and novelist William Arthur Dunkerley. He produced an enormous amount of work during his career, including ‘A Mystery on the Underground,’ a serial killer novel set on the London Underground in 1897, another novel ‘Carette of Sark’, set on the island, as well as poetry. A Maid of the Silver Sea is dedicated to his friend Edward Baker, on whose supremely comfortable veranda of La Chaumiere, Sark, the story was partly written.
‘Wouldn’t go that far,’ said Hardacre. ‘Never forget what Albert Pike said.’
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
‘You’ll have to remind me.’
‘“Masonry does not change human nature, and cannot make honest men out of born knaves.”’
Albert Pike was an American lawyer, freemason and literary man, who fought for Native land rights in the American west during the nineteenth century. Although he wrote extensively about brotherhood, he was an avowed racist. He fought for the confederate army in the civil war and protested at the presence of free Black Americans in his adopted state of Arkansas. Some maintain he did see the error of his ways after the war, and became a close friend of Thornton A. Jackson, who established a brother masonic order for Black Americans in Washington. The epigraphs in The Hallmarked Man, come from works of esoteric ritual and philosophy he compiled after the war. The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry was created to update and popularise the rituals of his rite of freemasonry and in Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Pike gathered material from many different works, the scholarly edition cites over a hundred authors, to create instructive essays about comparative religion and philosophy. These essays worked as companions to the different degrees of membership of the rite. Pike died in 1891.
Chapter 10
… a Brotherly affection and kindness should govern us in all our intercourse and relations with our brethren…
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Albert Pike
Strike did his best to look appreciative while ‘Happy Birthday’ was being sung.
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
Strike’s birthday comes around as the partners are considering whether to take the case of Decima Mullins, who is convinced a body discovered in the vault of Ramsay Silver that summer is that of her missing boyfriend Rupert Fleetwood. Strike is hoping that the day will be ignored, and that Robin won’t be reminded he is now forty-two. Unfortunately, the subcontractors want to celebrate, and Pat’s chocolate sponge cake, brought from home in a tin covered in pictures of Princess Diana, comes with tell-tale candles. Pat and the subcontractors get Strike a bulk order of his favourite vape-juice which he appreciates as a practical gift, rather than something pointless he’d have to keep in his flat out of politeness. Robin gives him a bottle of his favourite whisky. Strike’s strained efforts to look appreciative while they sing him happy birthday, make Robin start laughing, and amused by her amusement, Strike is genuinely grinning by the time Pat instructs him to blow out his candles. It’s a moment of brotherly kindness for the team, though Robin doesn’t feel much affection for their newest hire Kim Cochran.
Chapter 18
They had none of them cared much for this man. He was not a man to make close friends. But death had given him a new dignity among them…
A Maid of the Silver Sea, John Oxenham
I seen ’im out there,’ said Mandy, who seemed to want to reclaim the detectives’ attention, and she pointed towards the hall. ‘Seen ’im the day ’e arrived.’
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
Strike and Robin take the case and head to St George’s Avenue to discover where ‘William Wright’ was living while working at Ramsay’s Silver, and before he was found dead in the locked vault of the shop and discovered to be working under a false name. At his former home they meet Mandy, who recognises Strike’s name from the newspapers, and is more than happy to talk to them, as is her partner Daz once he’s got some clothes on. They share what they know with enthusiasm, enjoying the interest of the famous detectives. While Mandy feeds her son Clint chocolate biscuits, she and Dan shed some useful light on the man who was briefly their upstairs neighbour, including his interest in the Masons, and some mysterious visitors. Given the smell of dope in the room, Strike and Robin suspect they were not so chatty with the police.
In Maid of the Silver Sea, the body of young Tom Hamon is retrieved and treated with respect by the people of Sark. Then his widow accuses Cornishman Stephen Gard of his murder, and the people of the island believe her.
Chapter 24
You were informed in the Royal Arch degree, that King Solomon builded a secret vault, the approach to which was through eight other vaults or apartments in succession, all under ground, and to which a long and narrow passage led…
The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Albert Pike
The Silver Vaults’ entrance was a discreet wooden door with a small glass awning. Robin… was instructed to descend three flights of stairs, and take no photographs outside the individual shops.
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
King Solomon, builder of the First Temple in Jerusalem, home of the Ark of the Covenant, is regarded as one of the original master masons and stories that the temple contained secret chambers to protect its treasures are part of its legend. The architecture of the temple is also an important metaphor for the self-development and collaboration encouraged by freemasonry.
The Silver Vaults that Robin visits are very real. They are situated on Southampton Buildings, which despite its name is in fact a road, off Chancery Lane. The underground arcade of individual shops specialising in antique silver, began as the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit company in 1882. It was a place where jewellers and wealthy Londoners would store their treasures securely, without involving a bank, but by the second world war it had become a unique shopping destination. Robin visits the vaults to try and interview Pamela Bullen-Driscoll, sister-in-law to the owner of Ramsay’s silver, and great-granddaughter of the founder of Bullen & Co. Pamela does not want to talk, but she’s suffering after laser eye surgery, and Robin’s kindness and offer to make a coffee leads Pamela to unburden herself. She tells Robin about her foolish brother-in-law who hired ‘William Wright’, the day the Murdoch silver was delivered to his shop, Pamela’s efforts to help, and the to and fro around the discovery that the silver was missing and ‘William’s Wright’ had been murdered.
Robin’s kindness produces such impressive results. When Strike hears them, he roars over the sound of the surrounding traffic that she’s a marvel.
Part Four
And all putting in and getting nothing out results in stressful times, in business ventures as in the case of individuals. The great shafts sank deeper and deeper, the galleries branched out far under the sea, and there was a constant call for more and more money, lest that already sunk should be lost.
A Maid of the Silver Sea, John Oxenham
He doubted this information would crack the case, and he needed some kind of breakthrough, because the expense of the expanding investigation was growing steadily higher.
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
In A Maid of the Silver Sea, Old Tom’s wife is horrified that he is considering selling the farm to pour more money into mining. He accuses her of not being able to see further than the end of her nose.
As the new year begins, the case of the body in the vault is also branching out in different directions though their client, Decima, remains convinced the body in the vault is Rupert Fleetwood. Strike manages to speak to Rupert’s former flatmate who is working at an eco-lodge in Kenya after fleeing London. Meanwhile, Robin is pursuing a lead arising from their visit to Mandy and Daz, and meets a young woman called Gretchen at the Montagu Pyke. The pub on Charing Cross Road was once a famous music venue and Robin notices a huge poster of the Deadbeats, the band fronted by Strike’s father, Jonny Rokeby, while waiting to get a coffee.
In spite of their progress, Strike is not convinced by Decima’s theory and concerned the investigation is proving expensive. The detectives still have other branches of the investigation to pursue which will mean visits to Ironbridge and Scotland and rumour says Decima’s restaurant, The Happy Carrot, is in trouble.
Chapter 61
The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation; but very different are the aspects which it bears to them. To the one, it is all beauty and gladness… The other idly or mournfully gazes at the same scene, and everything wears a dull, dim, and sickly aspect.
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Albert Pike
He supposed many would find Moffat picturesque, but Strike saw everything with the jaundiced eye of the hungover and miserable.
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
Strike is already depressed when he takes the train to Crieff in Scotland to visit Jade Semple, wife of a missing former soldier, Niall, who is a possible candidate for the body in the vault. He had hoped he’d be on this trip with Robin. The visit is useful, Jade texts him a picture of the strange note her husband left and tells him about Niall’s sudden obsession with the masons, but a walk in the rain with her though has left his knee swollen and sore. The statue of a ram, visible through the café window in Moffat, where he has broken his journey south to eat darkens his mood still further. Sheep tend to remind him of Robin’s father, the professor of sheep medicine, and of the evening he and Robin spent at the Ritz together, when she first gave Strike this information.
While in the café, Strike comes across a thread on ‘The Truth about Freemasons’ which quotes a mysterious phrase from Pike: ‘combat of two religions, meeting head to head, like two goats of darkness on the bridge of the Infinite’
The more common phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, which encapsulates the feeling Strike acknowledges while looking at Moffat, and which Albert Pike outlines the epigraph, was coined by a romantic novelist, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, in her 1878 book Molly Bawn.
Chapter 66
… it was only the mistaken justice of a simple people that wanted blood for blood, and was not over-heedful as to whose blood so long as its own sense of justice was satisfied.
A Maid of the Silver Sea, John Oxenham
‘Because I’m the only person who’s on Ty’s side, other than his gran… There was a car crash, see… and people blamed Ty for it.’
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
Strike meets Robin in Ironbridge on his way back from Scotland after spending the night in Penrith. They are there to meet the adoptive grandmother of another candidate for the body in the vault, Tyler Powell, a powerfully built young man who went missing around the same time ‘William Wright’ started working in the shop. Ty was being accused of causing a crash which killed two local young people and seems to have left the town as a result of the lies and rumours being spread about the accident. As well at Ty’s grandmother, Strike and Robin also meet his friend and neighbour, Griff, who after a rocky start, proves a mine of information. In A Maid of the Silver Sea, Stephen Gard also must flee local vengeance and builds himself a shelter on Sark to escape the people who believe him a murderer.
Chapter 70
Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battle-fields, which have their heroes,—heroes obscure, but sometimes greater than those who become illustrious.
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Rite of Scottish Freemasonry, Albert Pike
‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘My mum’s just died.’
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
‘Shit,’ said Strike, who’d had no idea of this.
‘I’m sorry.’ ‘Yeah. Last month. She was never right, after my brother,’ said Wardle. ‘Broke her heart.
Strike can’t remember ever having a personal conversation with Eric Wardle, his police contact, though they’ve long liked and respected each other. They met in fact during the first investigation Strike and Robin worked together, the apparent suicide of supermodel Lula Landry (The Cuckoo’s Calling). The loss of Wardle’s brother in a hit-and-run had ramifications for the detectives, as it meant the incompetent DI Roy Carver was put in charge of the Shacklewell Ripper case. By the time Robin and Strike are looking into the Universal Humanitarian Church (The Running Grave), Wardle has lost his boyish good looks and his wife, April, has left him and taken their baby son with her. In a phone conversation they have while Strike is examining Moffat with a jaundiced eye, Wardle mentions he’s been signed off work with depression, and Strike tells him there’s a job for him at the agency any time.
When Wardle calls to postpone the curry he’s planning to have with Strike because he’s looking after his son, Strike decides to go and see Wardle at home, the memory of two suicides he’d investigated while in the military hovering in the back of his mind. Strike knows something about battle fields, physical and mental. They discuss the fallout from the mystery of the man in the silver vault, and Wardle tells Strike that Robin’s boyfriend Ryan Murphy is at trouble at work. The curry also gives Wardle the chance to talk a bit more openly about his struggles.
Chapter 85
You don’t know our Sark men… They do things first and are sorry after…’
A Maid of the Silver Sea, John Oxenham
From his suddenly prone position in the wet grass, Strike saw the panicked young man drop his weapon and begin to run towards the house,
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
When one of the branches of the investigation takes Strike and Robin to Sark, Strike tells Robin about the ill-fated attempts to mine silver on the island, the attempts which form the backdrop to A Maid of the Silver Sea. The locals are, by and large, friendly and the barman at the local pub is happy to tell them where the man they are looking for is. Their quarry’s reaction to seeing Strike approach though is impulsive, and violent, more in tune with the impulsive behaviour heroine and amateur detective Nance warns Stephen Gard about in Oxenham’s novel. In A Maid of the Silver Sea, the locals are doing the pursuing, but in the current investigation it is Robin and Strike moving in on a target, Strike aided by a walking stick Robin has just bought him. She gets it in army green so no one will think he’s a big girl’s blouse.
Chapter 99
… perfect honesty, which ought to be the common qualification of all, is more rare than diamonds.
Morals and Dogma of The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Albert Pike
‘We were sorry to hear the house fell through,’ she told Robin.
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘It was a shame.’
The case is beginning to offer up its secrets after Strike and Robin’s diligent and dangerous investigations, but truth in their own relationships remains elusive. Strike is keeping his dangerous connection to former girlfriend Bijou Watkins hidden from his partner, and Robin, despite eventually telling Strike about her hospital visit, has not told him about her ongoing difficulties with her boyfriend, Ryan Murphy. She is also struggling with her doubts about buying a house with Ryan and pretends to be disappointed when she hears that they’ve been outbid on a two-bed end of terrace house in Walthamstow, when she is actually shocked by the relief which washes over her.
In this chapter she pretends to be disappointed again when Ryan suddenly introduces her to his parents, and his mother, a friendly attractive woman in her early sixties, commiserates on the loss of the house. She also realises Ryan is not being honest with his parents about his own work and personal problems.
Even though both Robin and Ryan are hiding their problems, the afternoon still ends with a fight. Ryan accuses Robin of looking bored during the afternoon, while Robin is sure her real crime was working while Ryan and his father watched the football rather than knitting as his mother did. What she finds, searching Ryan’s flat after the fight, only makes her feel worse.
Part Ten
Here, of a surety, he said to himself, was the silver heart from which the scattered veins had been projected.
A Maid of the Silver Sea, John Oxenham
Well, if you and Midge are successful at Ramsay Silver tomorrow morning, we’ll have solid evidence at least part of our theory’s right.
The Hallmarked Man, Robert Galbraith
In A Maid of the Silver Sea the discovery of the chamber which seems to hold the riches Old Tom has bet his fortunes and future on is a moment of awe and vindication, but one which immediately costs him his life as the mine collapses and floods. In the final part of The Hallmarked Man as the case reaches its climax, Strike and Robin embark on parallel quests to find proof of the shocking crimes which led to, and have been revealed by, the body in the vault. Penetrating to the centre of the mystery and finding proof is a life, and career threatening, challenge up to and including the last moments of revelation when conspiracies collapse and horrific discoveries flood in from all of the branches Strike and Robin have been pursuing.
