He lived with questions – why had he joined up with Ranklin and the Bureau? why had he joined the Army before that? – which were too big to have anything but small answers, like a smile and a shrug. He had been there, he was here now, tomorrow he would be – in Hell, it seemed possible. He smiled and shrugged.
Ranklin came in with a long rifle in one hand, a scabbarded bayonet in the other and a dazed look on his face. He kicked the door shut, threw the rifle and bayonet onto a bed and said: “That wasn’t dinner we had, it was the Mad Hatter’s tea party.”
O’Gilroy got up and reached for the rifle. “What is it? Is it loaded?”
Ranklin shook his head and refilled his brandy glass. “No. No bullets. Just the bayonet.”
“Bayonet fighting?”
Ranklin tried to nod and swallow brandy at the same time. When he had mopped up, he said: “Yes. And we’re not waiting till dawn. That, according to the General, is just a popular myth. Christ, I …” he shook his head. “I’ll tell you what happened.”
O’Gilroy was finding out how the bayonet fitted under the muzzle of the rifle. “I’m listening.”
“First, Gunther hasn’t offered any apology; I don’t understand that. Second, I made a fuss about having a doctor there – I know that’s standard practice – so the General sent to the village for the local quack. He must be in the old boy’s pocket, not expected to report this to the gendar – the police.”
“Who might also be in the General’s pocket, mind.”
“Ye-es. After a few hundred years in one place, the family in the Big House can grow big pockets.”
“Yer not telling me anything new.” And come to that, hadn’t Ranklin’s family – until very recently – held just such a near-medieval position in their patch of Worcestershire?
“So – then we got on to weapons. I said a country gentleman and a cigar merchant wouldn’t be swordsmen or know much about duelling pistols, so why not sporting rifles, four hundred metres apart? In daylight, of course. That’s when I got the bit about not waiting for dawn. And the General came up with this: the commoner’s weapon. The bayonet.
“That,” he added, “is the French Lebel, their standard rifle until fairly recently. He had a couple hanging on his walls as mementos of his campaigns.”
The Lebel, O’Gilroy reckoned, was over six inches longer and a pound heavier than the shortened British Lee-Enfield, as well as being generally more old-fashioned. With the bayonet fixed, it came to his own height, something like a cavalry pig-sticker. He held it in his left hand, testing for the point of balance.
Ranklin continued: “Then I said you hadn’t served in the Army but Gunther had told me he had, and the General said that was only in the Dutch Schutterij – a sort of conscript garrison force – and anybody could learn bayonet fighting in twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes, is it? He’s remembering how long he learnt to be a General.”
“Silence in the ranks. Get on with learning.”
Bayonet fighting is unrealistic. If you’re reduced to using the bayonet on the battlefield, you might get in one thrust before some third party stabs you from behind. But armies practise it because it makes soldiers confident in handling their rifles and is a cheap way of keeping them busy. So it gets formalised into a sort of fencing, only with two-handed swords that, if Lebels, weigh ten pounds and are six feet long.
O’Gilroy moved out from between the beds to a clear space in front of the fireplace, holding the rifle firmly in both hands. He brought it slowly down to the “on guard” position, then leant gently forward in a “point” keeping himself and the unfamiliar weapon carefully balanced. At the “withdrawal” Ranklin noticed the trained-now-instinctive twist of the hands to free the bayonet from the grip of dying flesh. O’Gilroy did it again, a little faster.
Still watching, Ranklin said: “Now we don’t have a truce until dawn, we have to think a little faster. I was hoping that when it was dark, everybody asleep …”
“There’s a back door to each wing,” O’Gilroy said, swinging the rifle through low and high parries, left and right. “Past the bathrooms and down the back stairs. The servants’ rooms in this wing are empty.”
“You reconnoitred this?” Ranklin goggled at him.
“Coming back from me bathe. Captain – ” he stopped and looked at Ranklin; “ – in our trade, don’t get yeself inside a building without ye know another way out.”
“Yes.” Ranklin nodded slowly. “Yes. Well … If you take the codes, I can pretend to everybody you’re still here. I mean, nobody expects to see you until …”
“Only it’s not yet dark and the house wide awake, and how far d’ye reckon to the railway?”
“Five miles. About that.”
“And more to a station. With them in cars after me and me not knowing a word of the language. Haven’t I heard officers talking about not dividing yer forces?”
“But if you stay here, you’ll have to go through with the duel, damn it!” But the glint of the bayonet went on weaving fierce, graceful patterns in the gloom.
“Oh bugger it,” Ranklin said. “Well – don’t believe that about Gunther and the Dutch Schutterij. I’d say German Army, maybe even Prussian. And I’m sure he thinks you were in the Army, probably still are. Only,” he added thoughtfully, “as an officer. Not with a rifle and bayonet.”
O’Gilroy turned, the last cold daylight from the window lodging on his thin, hungry smile. He lunged smoothly and checked, the bayonet barely quivering, a couple of inches from Ranklin’s waistcoat.
“So mebbe I’ll just kill him.”
“In an hour. In the courtyard. By lamplight.”
But I still don’t believe all this is happening, Ranklin thought, even if the duel was my idea. I’d just wandered into the General’s dream, feverish from the germs of a glory that infects this house where “blood” is just a fine word like “duty” and “honour”, and the dying don’t scream for their mothers. When there is real blood on the cobbles down there, God let me be the first and fastest to wake up.
Somewhere behind the Chateau a generator chugged into life, but only the ground floor seemed to have been wired up for lighting. Soon after, the manservant brought in a duplex oil lamp, vase-shaped and ornate but cheaply electroplated. He took the coffee cups and pots and left without saying a word.
O’Gilroy made another brief attempt to smoke a French cigarette and went back to the rifle – shadow-fencing with it, now.
Time ticked by. The General’s car came up the drive and Ranklin went out to the window at the head of the stairs to watch the village doctor – not an old quack, as he’d assumed, but a young man with a wispy professional beard – get out with his black bag. The courtyard was already being prepared by the manservant and another – the cook? – carrying a small ladder round to light lanterns fixed to the walls on the wing sides. There was some other light source at the main door, but that was out of sight below him.
It should be flaring torches to give the proper Olde-Tyme atmosphere, he thought sourly, and went back to the bedroom.
There, he tipped a little more brandy into their glasses. “Five minutes.”
“Any time. We’ll get nowhere by running now.”
“No, but the first chance we get to nobble any pursuit … Good luck.”
“Mud in yer eye, Captain. Is it the right thing now to break the glasses in the fireplace?”
Ranklin brightened. “That’s an idea. The more of the old loony’s property gets smashed, the better I feel.” He emptied his glass and threw it with feeling.
15
The whole household seemed to have turned out to watch – well, who wouldn’t? Apart from the staff they knew, and the probable cook, there were just two middle-aged women, presumably wives of two of the servants. But still barely half the number a house that size needed, and no outside staff like gardeners and stablemen.