The Mortlake conference is a covert meeting at Beatrice Nest’s home where Maud Bailey, James Blackadder, Euan MacIntyre, and their associates plan how to stop Mortimer Cropper from secretly acquiring the contents of Randolph Henry Ash’s grave. Its decisive importance lies in the shift from academic argument to coordinated intervention: the group considers inheritance and copyright, investigates Cropper’s whereabouts, and proposes watching him so that the grave and whatever it contains can be protected.

Setting and Participants

The conference takes place in Beatrice’s house, chosen because Mortlake was believed to lie beyond Cropper’s attention. Beatrice hosts the gathering and serves onion and cream tart, green salad, and chocolate mousse, recalling the meals she once made for her graduate students. The domestic hospitality gives the meeting an atmosphere of gaiety and conspiracy, but Beatrice is focused on the threat Cropper poses and senses the tensions among her guests, including their unspoken feelings and omissions.

Maud arrives first, severe and preoccupied, wearing a green silk scarf pinned with her mermaid brooch. She studies a silver-framed photograph of Ash on Beatrice’s secretaire, noticing that it shows the poet when young rather than the familiar older figure. Val and Euan MacIntyre arrive next. Euan explains that he is present as Maud’s informal legal adviser; Beatrice, meanwhile, observes Val’s newly defiant radiance without attempting to account for it. Blackadder brings Leonora Stern into the group as someone who may be materially helpful. In the upstairs drawing-room, Leonora and Maud embrace at length, while Beatrice recognizes the silence around Blackadder’s greeting to Roland Michell but does not understand the history and tensions behind these gestures.

Ownership and the Manuscripts

Euan distinguishes ownership of physical letters from copyright. In his account, recipients own letters as material objects, while copyright remains with the sender. He argues that Maud is the heir to LaMotte’s letters and probably to the manuscripts of Ash’s letters, although not to their copyright, which belongs to Ash’s heirs. He bases the claim on LaMotte’s will, signed and witnessed, which left her manuscripts to Maia Thomasine Bailey, Maud’s great-great-great-grandmother.

Euan further explains that Maud’s father, the nearer heir, had already given Maud the manuscripts that came to their ancestress. Maud had deposited them at the Women’s Resource Centre in Lincoln. Her father had not yet been told about the new discovery, and Maud doubted that he would sell the documents to the Stant Foundation, given her wish that they remain in the country. This account makes the dispute more than a contest for scholarly prestige: the meeting must reckon with inheritance, the difference between a document and its copyright, and the choices of the people who have custody of the papers.

Cropper’s Plan and the Threat to the Grave

The immediate danger emerges when Beatrice recounts what she overheard Cropper say to Hildebrand Ash. Cropper had proposed keeping the matter secret until Hildebrand inherited, then arranging for Hildebrand to appear to find the object and sell it to Cropper. Hildebrand insisted that it was morally his property; Cropper described himself as a discreet custodian and acknowledged that the vicar and the rules governing disturbance of burials could obstruct them. The plan would have made a covert removal appear legitimate while avoiding the required church authorization.

Blackadder considers possible responses: reporting Cropper to the police, complaining to Robert Dale Owen University, confronting him, or having him deported. He judges these options ineffective or impractical, noting that the group cannot keep guards at the grave for months. Euan has already telephoned Cropper’s hotel and Hildebrand’s country house, pretending to be their lawyer, and learned that both men are at the Rowan Tree pub on the North Downs, near Hodershall. Blackadder suggests alerting Percy Drax, the vicar, though he expects little cooperation from someone hostile to Ash scholars and poetic visitors.

The Watch Plan and Its Significance

Euan argues that the group should catch Cropper in the act and take whatever he removes before he can desecrate the grave. The proposal draws an eager response, but Euan distinguishes the apparent simplicity of catching Cropper from the uncertainty of what might need to be safeguarded. Blackadder wonders what is or was in the box, underscoring that the meeting is acting before the contents are known.

The practical plan is to place two people Cropper does not know in the same pub, watch him, and alert the others if he moves toward the churchyard. If necessary, they could confront him, follow him, or try to stop his car with a legal-looking document. Val and Euan volunteer to go; Euan notes that he has some holiday time. Blackadder can contribute an order preventing the export of Ash’s papers until the Heritage Advisory Board has decided what should happen. The conference ends not with certainty about the box, but with a shared resolve to monitor Cropper and intervene before he can disturb the burial. Its conspiratorial hospitality thus becomes the setting for a defense of both the grave’s sanctity and the contested archive it may contain.