Bushell looked at that darker patch for a couple of minutes, his face utterly empty of expression. Then he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his keys once more. They jingled; he had a lot of them. He went through them one by one until he found a short, stubby shiny one, which he inserted into the lock above the top right drawer of his desk.
He pulled the drawer open. It was not packed with papers like the rest of the desk drawers. One of the things it held was a gilt-framed picture, about the size of the darker rectangle on the wallpaper. The picture was face-down. Bushell did not turn it over. On top of the picture lay a flat pint bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey. He picked it up, pulled out the stopper, and took a swig, then another. The smoky taste of the whiskey filled his mouth. Its warmth filled his belly and mounted to his head. He took one more pull and then, with slow deliberation, corked the bottle and put it back in the drawer, which he locked. He went back to staring at the wallpaper. Eventually, the darker patch would fade to the color of the rest and disappear. If only memories faded so conveniently. Someone knocked on the door. Bushell started. The someone tried the knob, which gave Bushell a good notion of who it was. “Half a moment, Sam,” he called, loud enough for his voice to pierce the thick wood. He was relieved to find he sounded sober as a judge (and wasn’t that a laugh, with half of them bloody lushes!).
He used the half a moment to light a hasty cigar. Its aroma would cover that of the Jameson in the room and, more to the point, on his breath.
He went to the door and opened it. Sure enough, there stood Captain Samuel Stanley, his adjutant.
“Welcome back, Chief,” he said, and stuck out his hand.
Bushell shook it, then stood aside. “Come in out of the rain.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Stanley walked into the office. He was a round-faced, medium-dark Negro, four or five years older than Bushell and several inches taller. His hair was as closely cropped as it had been in the long-ago days when he was staff sergeant in Bushell’s platoon, but the pepper hadn’t been dusted with salt then.
“One thing I have to give you, Sam,” Bushell said with a chuckle: “you don’t dress like most colored men I see.”
Samuel Stanley looked down at himself with considerable dignity. “And why the devil should I?” he asked. “I’m not a petty official trying to pretend I’m better than I am, and I’m not an undertaker, either. I’m an officer of the RAMs in a warm town, and damn proud of it.”
He glared at his longtime comrade, daring him to make something of it. And indeed, his double-breasted light blue blazer and white worsted trousers with thin black stripes were not only acceptable but handsome. As Bushell had said, though, most men of his race would never have appeared in anything save black or navy, nor worn a gold silk cravat dotted with crimson.
“Good. You damn well ought to be,” Bushell said. “Clothes won’t matter tonight, anyway: time to hope the moths haven’t eaten our dress uniforms.”
“As soon as I heard you were back, that’s what I came here to remind you about,” Stanley said. “After all the fuss and feathers in Victoria, there was always the chance you’d lost track of the date.”
“Not bloody likely.” Bushell pointed to the print of The Two Georges. “After looking at that every day I’m here, after seeing it every time I pull out my wallet, after growing up in a house with an enormous lithograph of it hung over the sofa in the parlor, do you think I’d miss the chance to see the original at last?”
“Now that you mention it, no.” Samuel Stanley chuckled. “About as easy to get away from The Two Georges as to flap your arms and fly to the moon, isn’t it? What’s that word the damn Russians use for a religious painting?”
“An icon,” Bushell answered. “That’s about right, too.” He walked over to the small closet behind his desk, pulled the door open, peered inside. “Well, the moths seem to have left something here. You have your dress reds?” The question was purely rhetorical; Samuel Stanley, as best as he could tell, never forgot anything.
The black man nodded. “I brought them in this morning. I’m just a lowly captain, don’t you know” - his voice took on the languid accents of an English milord of Oxonian overeducation - ”so I don’t have a la-de-da closet in my office.”
Bushell snorted. “Go change, then, and meet me back here in fifteen minutes.” He pulled out his pocket watch. “We’re in good time. The reception doesn’t start until half past eight, and the governor’s mansion is only about half an hour from here. That should give us plenty of time to mingle beforehand” - he rolled his eyes to show how much he looked forward to that - ”and to make sure security is as tight in the mansion as it looks on paper.”
“Nothing is ever as good as it looks on paper,” Stanley said with the certainty of a veteran noncommissioned officer, “but you’re right; one more round of checks won’t hurt. I’ll see you as soon as I’m in uniform.” He nodded to Bushell and left the office.
Bushell got out of his civilian clothes, hung them up, and put on the red-striped black trousers and the red tunic he took out of the closet. The tunic had two rows of seven gilt buttons down the breast, and a high stand collar that was damnably uncomfortable. The shoulderboards showed Bushell’s rank with the crown of the British Empire (differenced from that of the military by the letters RAMP beneath) and two pips each.
He belted on his ceremonial sword, pulled his service cap from the shelf above the coat rail, and set it on his desk. The visor had a row of scrambled eggs along the edge, but not by the crown. That and the band of red around the cap also signified his colonelcy.
Samuel Stanley knocked on the door well before the fifteen minutes had passed. That surprised Bushell not at all; he was just glad to be ready himself. Stanley grinned when he saw Bushell. “Don’t we make a fine pair!” he exclaimed.
His tunic bore a single row of buttons. On his shoulder boards were three pips apiece, and the letters RAMP. His cap was plain black, without red band or scrambled eggs. The basket hilt of his sword was plain steel, while Bushell’s had been gilded.
“We’ll break up the monotony of frock coats, white shirtfronts, and toppers, that’s certain,” Bushell said. “Nothing like a uniform to make the pretty girls notice you, eh, Sam?”
Stanley sent him a wary look. He and his wife, Phyllis, had been married for more than twenty-five years. As for Bushell. . . Stanley’s eyes slid to the dark rectangle below the print of The Two Georges. Instead of rising to the bait, he said, “Let’s get going, shall we?”
“I’ll drive,” Bushell said. “I enjoy it, and the steam’s up in my car.”
“Are you all right?” Stanley asked.
“Right as rain,” Bushell answered. “I slept better in the airship the last two nights than I do in my own flat.” That was true. If it wasn’t precisely what his friend had enquired about, he chose not to notice. He and Stanley went downstairs together. As soon as they left the RAM headquarters, they set their caps on their heads, almost in unison, and smiled at each other. Bushell held the passenger door open for his friend, then went around to the right side of the steamer and slid behind the wheel. He backed the car out of its parking space, shifted to the lowest of his three forward gears, and all but silently rolled away. He turned up the burner to give him more pressure in reserve when he got out onto the street. The RAM office building was in what had been downtown ever since New Liverpool belonged to the Franco-Spanish Holy Alliance. The provincial governor’s mansion lay some miles to the west; as at the airship port, Pacific breezes helped moderate the climate there.