A small room, eaved; bright wallpaper, half hidden by settling dust. Some cheap looking furniture. I don’t think I have been in this room ever before; it has always been the old servant’s. It must have been quite dull. There is a skylight, but most of the illumination comes from the ragged hole in the sloped ceiling, not far from the door, where the artillery round passed; the hole leading to my chamber is almost at my feet.
Arthur lies on his side in his narrow bed at the far end of the room, seemingly uninjured. He is turned towards us, propped up a little by one arm and the pillows behind him, and yet at the same time slumped. He is wearing pyjamas. A jar containing his false teeth sits on a small bedside table, beside a book on which rest his glasses. His face looks grey, and wears an expression of annoyed concentration, as though he is looking down at the floor by the bed trying to remember where he put a book, or what he’s done with his glasses. Lucius and I stand in the doorway. In the end it is I who go forward, stepping over the hole in the carpeted floor.
Old Arthur’s wrist is cold and without a pulse. There is a layer of what feels like talcum powder on his skin. I blow on his face, removing a patina of white dust. The skin beneath is still grey. I look apologetically at Lucius and slide my hand in under the covers towards the old fellow’s belly, grimacing. It is cool under here, too.
Around his neck is a thin gold chain. Rather than a religious emblem or other lucky, charm, it supports only a small, ordinary key. I slip the chain over his head and let its cool weight pool in my palm. I put it in my jacket pocket.
Arthur’s eyes are still partially open; I place my fingers on the lids and close them, then press his body by one shoulder so that he flops slowly on to his back in an attitude generally regarded as more befitting the recently deceased.
I rise, shaking my head. ‘A heart attack, I imagine,’ I tell Lucius, looking at the hole in the roof. ‘I dare say it must have been a rude awakening.’ Feeling the gesture is required somehow, I pull the bed’s top sheet over Arthur’s grey, still face. ‘Sleep on,’ I find myself murmuring.
Lucius makes an odd noise, and when I look at him he is sobbing.
I return to you, my dear, en route to my rendezvous with the lieutenant, half expecting to find you wheezing blue faced on the floor and clutching at your throat, but like and unlike our quick visitor, and our old servant you too now sleep.
Chapter 8
When I go down to meet our lieutenant, the soldiers are in the hall, watching the shell, now disinterred, going out, carried on a stretcher. Its pallid bearers handle the solid deadness of it with a facsimile of respect even more faithful than that they reserve for their leader. Baby small and tenderly, precisely as though those who bear it are transporting someone they do not wish to wake, the shell leaves slowly, to be dumped somewhere in the woods. I make a mental note to inquire precisely where, on the off chance we might survive to see peace again, then go on my way, to the library and the lieutenant.
I enter the library’s wall thick dimness by its already open door and step into the silence with due deference. The lieutenant sits in an ancient chair, her head lying on her greenshirted arms, folded on the table in front of her. The opera cloak has been discarded, draped like a fold of night across the back of the seat behind her. A map of our lands lies crumpled beneath her head, her curled, bedraggled hair hovering like a dark cloud above us all. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open slightly; she looks like any woman sleeping, and less remarkable than most. The ring on her small finger glints faintly.
How many devotees of Morpheus we have this morning. I feel a small moment of power over the sleeping lieutenant, thinking that I could reach between that old opera cloak and her shirt and slip her automatic pistol from its holster, threaten her, kill her, take her hostage so that her men are forced to leave the castle, or perhaps by the boldness of my action compel them to recognise me as the stronger leader and agree to follow me.
But I think not. We each have our position, our place, as much in these martial matters as in anything else and perhaps more so.
It would, anyway, be underhand, even ungallant.
And besides, I might make a mess of it.
An atlas, old and heavy, lies by the lieutenant’s head, opened at this place. I lift one dusty side and let it fall. The thud, flat and resonant, awakens her. She rubs her eyes and stretches, sitting back in the creaking chair and casually, unthinkingly, placing her boots on the table by the map. These are not army boots, nor are they the ones she wore when we first met her; they are long riding boots, of soft brown shining leather, a little worn but still good. They look like an old pair of mine, the last ones I ever outgrew; another pair of refugees abducted from our past, no doubt exhumed from some cupboard, store or long sealed room. I watch small flakes of mud fall from their soles to caress the map. ‘Ah, Abel,’ the lieutenant says as I find another chair and sit across from her. Inelegant in waking as in sleep, she grinds a finger in one ear, inspects the waxened end, then her watch, and frowns. ‘Better late than never.’
‘The lateness is not all mine; our eldest servant has just died.’
She looks concerned. ‘What, old Arthur? How?’
‘The shell passed through his room. He was uninjured but I believe his heart gave out.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, taking her boots off the table, her frown still there but troubled, even sympathetic. ‘I take it he’d been here a long time.’
‘All of my life,’ I tell her.
She makes a strange little noise with her mouth. ‘I thought we’d got away unscathed, there. Damn.’ She shakes her head.
I begin to feel a fractious annoyance at her sympathy and seeming sorrow. If anyone ought to feel aggrieved it is I; he was my servant and she has no right to assume my role in this, even if I have chosen not to play it to its limits; it is my right to underplay it, but not hers to understudy me.
‘Well, no; we were scathed,’ I say curtly. ‘I’m sure he’ll be much missed,’ I add. (Who will bring me my breakfasts in future?)
She nods thoughtfully. ‘Is there anyone we should try to inform?’
I had not even thought. I wave one hand quickly. ‘I think he had some relations, but they lived at the other end of the country.’ The lieutenant nods, understanding. The other end of the country; in the present circumstances one might as well say on the moon. ‘Certainly there was nobody nearby,’ I tell her.
‘I’ll see he’s buried, if you like,’ she offers. I can think of a host of replies to this, but restrict myself to a nod and, ‘Thank you.’
‘Now.’ She breathes deeply, stands, strides to the windows and pulls the curtains open to the sky. ‘These maps,’ she says, settling into the chair again.
We discuss her miniature campaign; she wishes to strike this afternoon, before we lose the light. The day seems fair, and without such luxuries as weather forecasts, soldiers as much as anybody else are reduced to the sort of weather lore that has apocryphally guided shepherds through the ages; best to attack when one can, lest rains set in and make the whole proceeding sodden as well as lethal.
I am what help I can be. I pencil in amendments to the charts, ploughing a new track here, erecting a bridge with a couple of pencil strokes and by a single solid line and a few wags of the wrist constructing a dam and filling in the waters behind. The lieutenant is appreciative, hmm ing and nodding and biting on one fingernail as we talk the matter through. A curious and novel feeling of what I believe must be usefulness creeps over me, along with the surprisingly agreeable appreciation of what it is to be in a team such as that the lieutenant has around her to command, each man depending on this sort of planning, each life hanging on how well or ill she thinks through what she might ask them together to accomplish. How collective, how even convivial, if also potentially humbling as well as deadly; such exemplary esprit de corps makes the contrived camaraderie of the hunt look a pale and paltry thing indeed.