'You're no fool, are you?' he exclaimed.
'No dearie, I certainly am not.'
'This way.' He suddenly pulled her arm and turned inland behind the houses. 'The surf makes so much noise you can't hear yourself speak; and the shingle's hellish hard to sit on.'
'So we're about to sit are we?'
'Yes, unless you prefer to go back to the pub; I should not dream of protesting against your decision.'
'And you're no fool either, are you?'
'Yes; if I'd had any sense I'd have shot another half dozen of those bloody mutineers, then we'd be running south from the Azores by now.'
'Don't kick yourself unnecessarily. You put up a pretty marvellous one man show.'
'Not too bad, but I ought to have done better. How's this?' Gregory pointed to a gently sloping grassy bank.
'I've seen worse in my career of crime.' Veronica stooped to sit down.
'Half a minute, it may be damp,' he warned her as he slipped off his tunic and spread it out for her to sit on.
'Thank you, Sir Walter; but what about you?'
'I shan't die that way,' he laughed, and pulled her down beside him.
'You're a queer bird, aren't you?' she said after a moment.'
'Yes, I suppose I am, but so are you for that matter.'
'Touché and birds of a feather!'
"That's about it, but honestly I should go mad if you weren't in this party.'
'Liar!'
'No, I mean that.'
Tra la la! so you say.'
'It's a fact, but I wonder why it is that women always see the main issue of a thing so much clearer than the average man. Kenyon can't chuck off his stupid public schoolboy morality, Silas is so damned soft hearted he thinks I'm a devil from hell; Thompson and the troops still believe me to be a Brigadier so “theirs not to reason why”; Andrews is only interested in the welfare of his people, and good old Rudd follows me blindly, never pausing to think at all. Not one of them really appreciates that although I could clear out on my own tomorrow I'm staying here to fight their battle as well as my own. You're the only one in the whole party who may protest at times but, given a reason, understands and approves my actions.'
'Perhaps that's because woman always consider the man so much more important than the principle.'
'That's about it; and in this instance I'm the man, aren't I?'
'Your grammar, my sweet, is appalling.'
'Does that matter?'
'Not a nickel in hell!'
'Good for you; are you comfy?'
'Yes.'
'I'm glad of that because I now propose to kiss you.'
'Well,' she turned her face up to his in the moonlight. 'I'm glad of that because it will intrigue me to see if you are as great a lover as you are a leader of men.'
19
Death in the Cards
The first ten days at Shingle Street had seen the transformation of that quiet hamlet into a pulsing centre of strange and seemingly unconnected activities: the second saw them take form and cohesion. Regular convoys were proceeding between the village and the Labour Colony. The small fishing fleet was organised on Naval lines the men electing, at Gregory's suggestion, the most experienced among themselves as Commander and Lieutenant. They ordered sailings in accordance with weather and tide, while Petty Officer Sims augmented the flotilla by supervising repairs to boats that had long been out of service. The majority of farm carts, now no longer needed, were knocked to pieces, and from the material a jagged but stout palisade erected behind the village under the lee of the houses. Into the compartments of this great corral the live stock were herded, safe from the rigours of the coming winter or the depredations of desperate men who might slip past the sentries under the cover of night.
The fortifications were now almost completed and a long line of breastworks linked the Martello Tower on the south with Silas's redoubt to the north, screening the whole village and the stockaded enclosure upon the landward side. Gregory well knew the weakness of his defence to be his limited armaments. Only thirteen men with rifles had survived the debacle of the Shark, and his pistol and those of Silas, Kenyon, Sims and Rudd would be of little use except at close range. He still had his three Lewis guns, however, and leaving those in charge of picked troops, passed on the rifles to some of the ex service men in his Labour Colony levy. He had also acquired eight shotguns and several hundred cartridges on his forays into the interior, and formed a special squad to bring these into action if an attack was pressed to within the limits of their range, so he hoped to be able to put up a performance which would lead an enemy to think that the garrison was far stronger than it was in fact.
However, he placed his confidence far more in rendering the place almost impossible of approach, and for that purpose raked the village from end to end for suitable material. Wireless aerials, now silent and therefore useless, flagstaffs, wood fencing, iron palings, obsolete fishing nets. Every box, barrel, and wicker basket in the place to be filled with shingle and inserted in the breastworks. Old potato sacks and tarpaulins were filled with earth, and he even demolished several sheds to utilise their corrugated iron roofing for revertments.
Entrenchments were dug and emplacements thrown up, fields of fire cleared for the Lewis guns and these rendered doubly difficult of approach by a hundred ingenious devices. Tangles of wire and netting, pieces of board with long nails driven through them and scattered broadcast in the long grass to stab the feet of running men, and lines of pits with pointed stakes set upright in them, but cunningly concealed by rushes and dried turf.
Veronica meanwhile, slim and boyish in her borrowed overalls, worked at her mending in the August sunshine, or, when she could, sneaked off to sun bathe in a sheltered dip of the beach that she had found, continuing in the evenings her dual flirtation…
She felt that she liked the big American the better of the two; he never pestered her, but placid, smiling, efficient, always seemed to be at her side when wanted, and she grew to know him better she came to appreciate more and more the immense and kindly tolerance of his simple straightforward nature. He was widely travelled, deeply read, a distinguished amateur of music and at some time or other he seemed to have met nearly all the really important people who had influenced events, a month no, it seemed to her a year ten years ago, in that other, now so distant and orderly, existence. Yet he seldom spoke of the influence he had wielded and only little by little did she become aware of his vast interests.
Gregory on the other hand treated her in a fashion she would have resented from any other man. He forced her to fulfil her daily quota of the mending that she so detested, as ruthlessly as he made his soldiers dig; stalked off to bed immediately after dinner when he felt that way inclined, hardly troubling to throw her a casual 'good night', yet such was his magnetism that when he uttered an abrupt 'Come on let's walk,' her resistance seemed to crumple and with a half guilty, half defiant glance at Silas she would gaily respond 'Why not?' and accompany him to the grassy bank behind the stockade. He was as great a lover as he was a leader of men, when he chose to devote himself to her. His crisp intellect was a continual delight and he confided in her alone, often days in advance, every new plan as he devised it for their better security and comfort. He knew too, instinctively it seemed, just when to caress her and when to refrain; so that his passion never irked her, and she began to crave the deft touches of his masterful hands. She wondered sometimes what would have happened if they had met in normal times and felt, that if he had insisted on it, she might well have abandoned Grosvenor Square for Gloucester Road.
Some nights he would neither go to bed nor make love to her, but set off alone on long tramps, penetrating far inland and often not returning until dawn. No one else was allowed outside the fortifications on any pretext, so their news of the outer world was confined to such rumours as he chose to pass on to them after these solitary expeditions. However, he spoke little of them, except to state that conditions in the interior were growing more and more terrible and the roving population desperate to a primitive degree, until at the end of the third week of their stay he told them that he had good reason to believe that a Communist Government had been established in London.