Of course. War.
“None of us can prevent it,” Harry said. “Nothing we have done has caused it.” He gave a slight shrug. “Greed. Ambition. Brutality. It is all part of life.”
Stella rose from the table and lifted the coffee pot from the hot-plate on the buffet table. She walked around the breakfast table, refilling cups as people wanted.
“Jack,” she said, “tell us where you have been. What have you been doing for so long? Founding empires? Destroying hopes and ambitions? Breaking hearts?”
“Learning to live with myself, mostly,” Jack said quietly. “Learning about myself.” He pushed his plate away, the food only half-eaten. “For the past two hundred years I’ve been living in America. Mostly alone, inhabiting the vast forests, roaming the mountains.”
Stella sat down. “As Ringwalker?” Jack had only barely come into his responsibilities as Ringwalker, the ancient Stag God of the forests, when he had left England in the seventeenth century.
“For a greater portion of the time, yes. It was part of the journey into myself I needed to make. Other times I walked as a man—I took the identity Jack Skelton during the Civil War—and lived within a more human society.”
“Aha,” said Silvius, “and did you break hearts then?”
Jack gave a rueful smile, and slid a glance Noah’s way. “A few, no doubt. It is, after all, what I’ve been good at.”
“And the uniform, Jack?” Stella said. She’d lit a cigarette, and was leaning back in her chair, studying him.
“I use it much as Harry uses his ‘boffin’ status. It is useful, and it gets me entry to places and people I otherwise would not. It is a useful glamour—no one questions it. My papers are all in order.” Jack paused, his fingers toying with a fork. “Besides, I’ve always been more comfortable in uniform than out of it.”
“Jack the Conqueror,” Harry said with a smile, referring to Jack’s previous life as William of Normandy.
“Speaking of whom,” said Jack, “where is Matilda? And Ecub and Erith?”
“They live in London,” said Noah.
“Highbury?” Jack said. “I had a vision that they lived there.”
Noah shook her head. “Hampstead. They’re all waiting to meet you—Matilda especially.” When Jack had been William, Matilda had been his much-loved and -respected wife. “But they thought it might be a bit too much having everyone gathered here last night.”
“What else can we do for you, Jack?” said Harry. “What else do you need?”
Jack felt a little resentful at the prompt, knowing Harry referred to their conversation on the terrace the previous night. “A long talk with you, Harry. Perhaps you can walk about London with me this afternoon?”
“A pleasure. What else?”
Jack decided he might as well give Harry what he’d been waiting for. “Something Walter can do for me.” He swivelled in his chair so he could look Walter in the face.
Jack did not speak more, but as soon as Walter lifted his eyes to Jack’s, power rippled out of Jack making the others about the table gasp or sit up a little straighter.
“There is one last task you need to perform for me and for this land,” Jack said, “and when you have done this task, then perhaps both I and the land will let you go to your Christ and we will never make any demands upon you again. A bargain, Walter Herne?”
“And this task?” Walter said. He was noticeably shaken, but his voice was strong.
“Do you truly not know what it might be?” Jack said. The power was now almost visibly dancing out of him, and there was not a person in that room who was not fixated by it.
“You need to be marked,” said Walter. “You need your crown.”
“Aye. Do you dare the crowning, Walter?”
“Do you?” Walter whispered, and Jack smiled, and the power abated.
“Will you do it, Walter?”
He nodded. “If you will let me go.”
Jack looked at Harry. “Well, my Lord of the Faerie? Is that possible? Can Walter be given his freedom from all demands of this land, freedom to go to Christ, if he does this for me?”
Harry had been looking at Jack, a little awed by the power he’d just displayed and thinking he had used his time running the forests of the New World very effectively indeed, but now he switched his gaze to Walter.
“Yes,” he said, and his appearance shifted subtly, so that for a moment it was not Harry Cole who sat at the head of the breakfast table, but the Lord of the Faerie wearing his crown of twigs and red berries. “Yes, I agree. If that is what you want, Walter, then do this one last thing for both Jack and the land, and you have your freedom to walk away. If you can.”
Walter breathed out, patently relieved. “Thank you. Jack, when?”
Jack gave a grin and it was almost feral in its nature. “Not just yet. But soon. At a time and place of my choosing.”
At the far end of the table Grace looked between Jack and Harry, then dropped her eyes before any noted the look.
EIGHT
Faerie Hill Manor and London
Sunday, 3rd September 1939
Walter left after breakfast, using one of Harry’s cars to return to London. Late in the morning,
the others gathered in the drawing room around a small side table, on which sat a large wireless. Harry sat closest to it, fiddling with the knobs to finetune the signal coming through.
Then, just as everyone’s nerves could barely stand the scratchy static one more moment, the voice of a broadcaster filled the room with last-minute news before the Prime Minister’s announcement: a lorry had turned over in Highgate, spilling “food too good to be wasted” over half the road; the American Ambassador had been seen leaving the residence of the Prime Minister at No. 10 Downing Street late the previous night. A woman had been murdered, quite vilely (although the broadcaster gave no details), and her corpse left sprawled under the porch of St Magnus the Martyr.
The broadcaster paused, then announced the PM, and the voice of Neville Chamberlain sounded.
I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.
I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, this country is now at war with Germany.
There was little reaction at the words. No one had expected anything else.
You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more, or anything different that I could have done that would have been more successful.
“There never is, really, is there?” Silvius said softly.
Chamberlain continued speaking about Britain’s obligations to the Polish people, and how he expected the British would bear the burden of war with their usual fortitude.
Now may God bless you all and may He defend the right. For it is evil things we shall be fighting against—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution—and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
Harry and Jack exchanged a long, meaningful glance. In previous lives both of them had led the armies of a nation into war, and neither envied Chamberlain his forthcoming experience.
“Evil things we shall be fighting against,” Noah said. “He has no idea how evil.”
They ate a light lunch—most eating as little at lunch as they had at breakfast—and then Weyland brought his car round to the front to take his family, Harry and Jack down to London.
Jack whistled in admiration as soon as he saw the huge silver and red-enamelled Daimler.
“Nice,” he said, then gave a small grin. “Bet it’s going to make a spectacular target in moonlight.”
“Weyland has been asked to paint it something more subdued,” Noah said as Weyland put their small bags into the boot. “He’s been resisting until now.”
“This morning’s announcement has put paid to the silver,” Weyland said, shutting the boot. “I’ll get one of the mechanics at the Savoy’s garage to dull it down somewhat.”
He walked to the driver’s door. “Come on then,” he said. “Load up.”
Noah moved to the front passenger side, leaving Harry, Jack and Grace to accommodate themselves on the back bench seat. Jack found this a little awkward. Grace hadn’t said a word all day, and frankly, he didn’t know what to say to her. It was obvious she wasn’t one for light chitchat, and in fact actively avoided conversation at all by refusing to look anyone in the face.
She looked extraordinarily tired with pallid skin and dark rings under her eyes, and Jack wondered if there was any residual soreness in her wrists after Catling’s attack last night. He couldn’t see her wrists as the sleeves of her blouse, and now the cardigancoat she’d put on against the autumn chill, effectively hid any sight of them and he had no idea how to broach the subject.