There was a pause. ‘Did I, er, go into all that detail?’ said Blouse.
‘Oh, no, sir. You shouldn’t have to, sir. Sergeants and corporals deal with the fine detail. Officers are there to see the big picture.’
‘Oh, absolutely. And, er . . . how big was this particular picture?’ said Blouse, blinking.
‘Oh, very big, sir. A very big picture indeed, sir.’
‘Ah,’ said Blouse, and straightened up and assumed what he considered to be the expression of one with panoramic vision.
‘Some of the ladies here used to work in the upper keep, sir, when it was ours,’ Polly went on quickly. ‘Anticipating your order, sir, I had the squad engage them in light conversation about the layout of the place, sir. Being aware of the general thrust of your strategy, sir, I think I have found a route to the dungeons.’
She paused. It had been good flannelling, she knew. It was almost worthy of Jackrum. She’d larded it with as many ‘sirs’ as she dared. And she was very proud of ‘anticipating your order’.
She hadn’t heard Jackrum use it, but with a certain amount of care it was an excuse to do almost anything. ‘General thrust’ was pretty good, too.
‘Dungeons,’ said Blouse thoughtfully, momentarily losing sight of the big picture. ‘In fact I thought I said—’
‘Yessir. Because, sir, if we can get a lot of the lads out of the dungeons, sir, you’ll be in command inside the enemy’s citadel, sir!’
Blouse grew another inch, and then sagged again. ‘Of course, there are some very senior officers here. All of them senior to me—’
‘Yessir!’ said Polly, well on the way to graduating from the Sergeant Jackrum School of Outright Rupert Management. ‘Perhaps we’d better try to let the enlisted men out first, sir? We don’t want to expose the officers to enemy fire.’
It was shameless and stupid, but now the light of battle was in Blouse’s eyes. Polly decided to fan it, just in case. ‘Your leadership has really been a great example to us, sir,’ she said.
‘Has it?’
‘Oh, yes, sir.’
‘No officer could have led a finer bunch of men, Perks,’ said Blouse.
‘Probably they have, sir,’ said Polly.
‘And what man could dare hope for such an opportunity, eh?’ said Blouse. ‘Our names will go down in the history books! Well, mine will, obviously, and I shall jolly well see to it that you chaps get a mention too. And who knows? Perhaps I may win the highest accolade that a gallant officer may obtain!’
‘What’s that, sir?’ said Polly dutifully.
‘Having either a foodstuff or an item of clothing named after one,’ said Blouse, his face radiant. ‘General Froc got both, of course. The frock coat and Beef Froc. Of course, I could never aspire that high.’ He looked down bashfully. ‘But I have to say, Perks, that I have devised several recipes, just in case!’
‘So we’ll be eating a Blouse one day, sir?’ said Polly. She was watching the baskets being stacked.
‘Possibly, possibly, if I may dare hope,’ said Blouse. ‘Er . . . my favourite is a sort of pastry ring, d’you see, filled with cream and soaked in rum—’
‘That’s a Rum Baba, sir,’ said Polly absently. Tonker and the others were watching the stacked baskets, too.
‘It’s been done?’
‘ ‘fraid so, sir.’
‘How about . . . er . . . a dish of liver and onions?’
‘It’s called liver-and-onions, sir. Sorry,’ said Polly, trying not to lose concentration.
‘Er, er, well, it has struck me that some dishes are named after people when really they just made a little change to a basic recipe—’
‘We must go now, sir! Now or never, sir!’
‘What? Oh. Right. Yes. We must go!’
It was a military manoeuvre hitherto unrecorded. The squad, coming from different directions on Polly’s signal, arrived at the baskets just ahead of the women who’d proposed to take them up, grabbed the handles and advanced. Only then did she realize that probably no one else wanted the job, and the women were only too happy to let idiot newcomers take the strain. The baskets were big and the wet washing was heavy. Wazzer and Igorina could barely lift one basket between them.
A couple of soldiers were waiting by the door. They looked bored, and paid little attention. It was a long walk to the ‘elevator’.
Polly hadn’t been able to picture it when it had been described. You had to see it. It really was just a big open box of heavy timbers, attached to a thick rope, which ran up and down in a sort of chimney in the rock. When they were aboard, one of the soldiers hauled on a much thinner rope that disappeared up into the darkness. The other one lit a couple of candles, whose only apparent role was to make the darkness more gloomy.
‘No fainting now, girls!’ he said. His mate chuckled.
Two of them and seven of us, Polly thought. The copper stick banged against her leg as she moved, and she knew for a fact that Tonker was limping because she had strapped a washing dolly under her dress. That was for serious washerwomen; it was a long stick with what looked like a three-legged milking stool on the end of it, the better for agitating clothes in a big cauldron of boiling water. You could probably smash a skull with it.
The stone walls dropped past as the platform rose.
‘How thrilling!’ trilled ‘Daphne’. ‘And this goes all the way up through your big castle, does it?’
‘Oh, no, miss. Gotta go up through the rock first, miss. Lots of old workings and everything before we get that high.’
‘Oh, I thought we were in the castle already.’ Blouse gave Polly a worried look.
‘No, miss. There’s just the washhouse down there, ‘cos of the water. Hah, it’s a climb and a half even to the lower cellars. Lucky for you there’s this elevator, eh?’
‘Wonderful, sergeant,’ said Blouse, and allowed Daphne back. ‘How does it work?’
‘It’s corporal, miss,’ said the string-puller, touching his forelock. ‘It’s pulled up and down by pris’ners in a treadmill, miss.’
‘Oh, how horrid!’
‘Oh no, miss, it’s quite humane. Er . . . if you’re free after work, er, I could take you up and show you the mechanism . . .’
‘That would be lovely, sergeant!’
Polly put her hand over her eyes. Daphne was a disgrace to womanhood.
The elevator rumbled upwards, quite slowly. Mostly they passed raw rock but sometimes there were ancient gratings or areas of masonry, suggestive of tunnels long ago blocked—
There was a jerk, and the platform stopped moving. One of the soldiers swore under his breath, but the corporal said, ‘Don’t be afraid, ladies. This often happens.’
‘Why should we be afraid?’ said Polly.
‘Well, because we’re hanging by a rope a hundred feet up the shaft and the lifting machinery’s thrown a cog.’
‘Again,’ said the other soldier. ‘Nothing works properly here.’
‘Sounds like a good reason to me,’ said Igorina.
‘How long will it take to repair?’ said Tonker.
‘Hah! Last time it happened we were stuck for an hour!’
Too long, Polly thought. Too many things could happen. She looked up through the beams in the roof. The square of daylight was a long way up.
‘We can’t wait,’ she said.
‘Oh dear, who will save us?’ Daphne quavered.
‘We’ll have to find a way to pass the time, eh?’ said one of the guards. Polly sighed. That was one of those phrases, like ‘Well, lookee what we have here’, that meant things were only going to get a lot worse.
‘We know how it is, ladies,’ the guard went on. ‘Your menfolk away, and all. It’s as bad for us, too. I can’t remember when I last kissed my wife.’
‘And I can’t remember when I last kissed his wife, either,’ said the corporal.
Tonker jumped up, caught a beam, and chinned herself to the top of the box. The elevator shook and, somewhere, a piece of rock dislodged and crashed down the shaft.
‘Hey, you can’t do that!’ said the corporal.
‘Where does it say?’ said Tonker. ‘Polly, there’s one of those filled-in tunnels here, only most of the stones have been knocked out. We could get in easily.’
‘You can’t get out! We’ll get into trouble!’ said the corporal.
Polly pulled his sword out of his scabbard. The space was too crowded to do much with it except threaten, but she had it, not him. It made a huge difference.
‘You’re already in trouble,’ she said. ‘Please don’t force me to make it worse. Let’s get out of here. Is that okay, Daphne?’
‘Dm . . . yes, of course,’ said Blouse.
The other guard laid a hand on his own sword. ‘Okay, girls, this has gone—’ he began, and then slumped. Shufti lowered her copper stick.