“Ah. I see.”
“We need that gun; destroyed, or for our own use. We have to take the thing, or leave here.” She turns to me with that thin smile. “And I don't want to leave.” She looks away again. “We have a rough idea where they might be; I'm sending some of the guys out to recce.” She leans on her elbows, arms straight out on front of her, hands together. She inspects the gold and ruby ring on her smallest finger, then fixes her gaze on me again. “I might want you to look at some maps with me later on,” she says, eyes narrowing. I make no reaction. “Found a few in the library,” she continues, “but some of the tracks didn't seem to match up when we went looking out to the west, yesterday.”
“They're rather old maps,” I concede. “If it's the Anders” estate, they changed quite a lot of the routes through the forest over the years. They put in new bridges, dammed one of the rivers; various things.”
“Would you know much about all that, Abel?” she asks, trying to sound casual but scratching her head.
“Sufficient to be your guide, you mean?”
“Mm hmm.” She pulls on the cigarette again, then flicks it towards the moat. There are still some finches floating there against the banks. I'm not sure whether she's noticed or not.
“I imagine so,” I say.
You'll do it? Be our guide?”
Why not?” I say, shrugging.
“It'll be dangerous.”
“As might staying here be.”
“Yes; good point.” She looks me up and down. “I'll let you get dressed now. Meet me in the library in ten minutes.”
Ten minutes, to attend to one's toilet and dress? My face, I think, must betray me.
“Okay,” she says, sighing. “Twenty minutes.”
It takes a little longer than that, though I think I dress more quickly than I ever have, save when there's been some pressing incentive, such as the sounds indicating the unexpected return of a notoriously jealous husband.
It is your fault, initially, my dear. When I return to our apartments you are in your own room, gasping for breath, hunting through drawers for an inhaler. You cough and wheeze, struggling with each intake of air. An old condition; asthma troubled you from childhood. Dust or shock might each have brought it on again. I do my best to comfort you, but then there is further commotion, and a frenzied hammering at the door.
“Sir, oh sir!” Lucius, another servant, stumbles in when I give him permission. “Sir, sir; Arthur!”
I follow Lucius” heels up the spiral steps to the attic floor. I suppose I should have thought; old Arthur's room is somewhere above ours, directly in line with the course. the shell took. I have a few moments to imagine what we might find.
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.”