‘And after that?’
‘They found a quarry in the hills, a dynamite store, but it was empty.’
‘Then what?’
‘They talked to people on the road; refugees. They threatened them but did not harm them, were told something they wanted to know. We went up into the hills, on a track. I think we passed the Anders’ house. Some of them went ahead, taking horses from a farm there, and the rest went on foot. I was left with two of them at the jeeps. They all came back later without having found anything. It had been night for some time by then. Too dark.’
‘And after that?’
‘We made our way back. Oh, we crossed a bridge over the river, and there were boats with dead people in them; one of their scouts had seen them yesterday. They dragged the boats ashore and hid them, in case they ever had to use them later. The dead people they let float down the river. That was on the way back here.’
‘An eventful day.’
You nod. The fire throws wavering shadows across the ornately corniced ceiling and the dark, wood-panelled walls.
‘An eventful day,’ you whisper, agreeing.
I say nothing for a while. ‘Were you all right?’ I ask eventually. ‘Did the lieutenant treat you properly?’
You are silent for a long time. The fire shadows dance. Eventually, you say: ‘With all the deference and esteem that I have come to expect.’
I am not sure what to say. So I say nothing. I attend, instead, to our situation. Still you lie and I look, and - watching, lying - steady we remain, as though in that moment timeless.
But we are never so; my thoughts contradict their own genesis. Time itself is not timeless, much less us. We are willing victims of our own quickness, and, while the more elegant action might have been to turn my back, ignoring you, I did not. Instead I reached out, I made an effort, and for a chosen moment decided to decide no more, and, guided by a coarser, simpler layer of mind to act as well, reached over, gripped the bedclothes’ edge, and covered you.
I dreamt of summer in my reinstated sleep, of a time, many years ago, when our liaison was new and fresh and still a secret, or so we thought, and you and I went on a picnic, riding horses to a distant meadow in the wooded hills.
Such energetic canterings always excited you, and we rode again, you facing me, straddling and impaled, your skirts covering our union, while that brave horse, uncomplaining, rode round and round within the hidden, sunlit arena of that flower-carpeted, insect-loud clearing, the animal’s springing, muscled vigour bringing us, finally, eventually, by our relative stillness (hypnotised, oblivious, lost within that lengthened moment of dappling light and buzzing air) surrendering all control to its long pulsing motions, to a sweet mutuality of bliss.
While always preferring poetic injustice to prosaic probity, it would, I think, have been a shame if that which wakened us in the morning had put us instantly back to sleep again, so that, in some state, we lay in.
You were always the darker sleeper; I have seen your slow unslumbering take more than one cock’s crow to achieve. Our reveille is accomplished, however, by something capable of flight which happily does not find its voice.
Sudden and intrusive chaos takes the castle’s roof, its floors, walls and our room and shakes it all; flaps the castle’s stones like a scaly flag and sets free the dust and us, tumultuous and milling and emplaced within its cloud, losing us within that swirling, particulate confusion.
A shell; a first too-lucky round that found the castle out and hit it square, running it through, producing a violent trail of stone dust, splintered wood and panic in its wake. But to no climax; it stops between the ground and lower floors, unexploded.
I reassure you as you sob, reduced to patting and uttering trite inanities by this unexpected intrusion. I look around at the dry mist of choking dust the shell’s passage has bestowed upon us, while an arid shower of debris patters from the hole in the ceiling on to the floor, then I go calm and smiling from you, a kerchief held over my nose, waving white clouds aside, to inspect the demolished corner of my room. There is a hole above, and daylight visible through curling dust. The upper part of the wall has been removed in a great semicircle, as though bitten by a giant, affording a view into a dark space next door. It should be an old storeroom, piled high with furniture, if I recall correctly. Beyond would be the principal guests’ suite, which the lieutenant has commandeered for her own use.
I climb upon the side of an elegant armoire - it escaped injury by a hand’s breadth as the shell passed it by - and lean into the shadows on the far side of the stone and rubble wall. Stretching forward and reaching through, past age-dark, torn wood, I detect an odd chemical smell; an odour from my childhood which I associate with clothes, parties and with hiding. I see something metallic glint and reach for it. Mothballs; the scent is of mothballs, I think suddenly.
My hand closes round a coat-hanger. I pull it from its rail, in the punctured wardrobe standing in the dim room beyond, then throw it back and climb back down. Below my feet, another hole leads through the mosaic of wooden flooring, boards, lathe and plaster into the dusty dining-room. Shouts issue from the gap, and the sound of running feet.
I go to the windows and open them to the day, leaving the curtains drawn behind me. A curious peace reigns beyond; another ordinary day, with mist and a low, watery sun. Birds sing in the woods. ‘What are you doing?’ you wail from the bed. ‘I’m cold!’
I lean out, looking up to the skies - at this point still thinking that we might have been bombed rather than shelled - then out towards the hills and the plain. ‘I think the windows are safer open, if we are to be bombarded,’ I tell you. ‘If you like, being underneath the bed might be advisable.’ I look for my clothes, but they were left on a seat that stood where our little visitor has passed; on the floor by the hole I find a few kindling-sized bits of the seat itself and a couple of buttons from my jacket. I wind myself in a white sheet, pour dust out of my shoes and slip them on, then catch sight of myself in a mirror and kick the shoes off again. I descend to meet the others, thinking to follow the artillery round’s route down through the castle.
In the Long Room on the floor below the lieutenant’s men run shouting, clutching weapons or their pants. A dulling whoop from outside the walls makes us all duck or dive. There follows an equivocal sort of thud, something that neither ears nor feet want to take full responsibility for sensing, a conclusion that the brain may have provided by itself. We rise, and I walk on.
In the dining-room, its generous depths extended by the dust which fills it, two soldiers wave their arms over a hole in the floor which must lead down to the kitchens or cellars. Above, the punctured roof rains powdery motes. From a tear in the ceiling close by, a thin pipe hangs free, wagging; steaming water geysers from it, splashing down upon the table and the central rug, steam contending with the corkscrewing weight of dust. Curtains, caught by a piece of fallen frieze work, lie sprawled on the floor, admitting light which catches the dust and steam. I stop for a moment, forced to admire this fabulous disarray.
As I approach the hole and the two soldiers, a huge tearing noise, braided with a dying, inhuman scream, rips across the sky outside; the two irregulars throw themselves to the floor, thudding to raise more dust. I stand, looking at them. This time there is an explosion; sound bursts in the distance, quaking the boards beneath my feet and rattling the windows like a storm’s gust. I run to the windows as the lieutenant’s men scramble to their feet. Peering out, I can see nothing, just the same calm skies.
I take a look down the hole the soldiers are now kneeling by, then head for the corridor outside, tiptoeing across a shallow pool of warm water.
‘A ghost already?’ says the lieutenant’s voice. I turn and she is there, long boots thudding down the stairs two at a time, pulling on a jacket, tousle-headed, stuffing a thick green shirt into her fatigues, a holstered pistol at her hip. She looks tired, as though just woken from the very depths of sleep, and yet more consummate too, as if all
chaos merely served to boil excess water from her spirit and leave a stronger concentration behind.
‘Mr Cuts!’ she yells, over me, to her deputy just appeared at the far end of the Long Room. ‘Onetrack on guard? Send Deathwish and Poppy up there too; see if they can spot where this stuff’s coming from. Tell them to keep their heads down and watch the grounds too in case it’s cover. And get Ghost on the radio; find out if he can see anything from the gatehouse.’ She sticks her head round the door to the dining-room. ‘Dopple!’ she calls out. ‘Fix that leak; get one of the servants to show you where the stopcocks are.’ She waves dust from in front of her face, then sneezes, and for the smallest moment is girlish, a soft but hard figure in this haphazard mist shaken from the castle’s strength.
‘Oh, sir!’ Rolans, one of our younger staff, a pasty-faced young man of an awkward, chubby build, comes running up to me, struggling into a jacket. ‘Sir, what--?’
‘You’ll do,’ the lieutenant says, grabbing the fellow by his wrist. She urges him towards the soldier emerging from the dining-room. ‘Here you are, Dopple; go and do some plumbing.’
The one she called Dopple grunts. Rolans looks at me; I nod. The two set off along the corridor, whitened faces like badges in the morning gloom. The desiccated smoke that is the stone and plaster dust rolls about them, contaminating all of us - as we move and breathe within that everywhere surface - with an infection of the castle’s assaulted shock, leaving us all half ghosts and I, in my blank uniform, archly archetypal.
The lieutenant turns to a man limping past wearing a steel helmet and carrying a rifle, puts out one arm across his chest and brings him smoothly to a stop. He looks frightened; sweat coats his face save where a long jagged scar runs. It is the elder of the two men I spoke to yesterday. ‘Victim,’ she says, gently (and I have to think, well, he was at least well named). ‘Easy, now. Get the wounded down to the cellars on the east side of the castle, would you?’
He swallows, nods, and limps quickly off.
I look after him. ‘I’m not sure that’s the safest place,’ I tell her. ‘I think that first shell ended up in one of the cellars.’
‘Let’s take a look, shall we?’
‘Is that safe?’ I ask as the lieutenant ignites her lighter in the darkness.
She looks at me in its flickering yellow flame. Her mouth takes on a small twist. ‘Yes,’ she says shortly. We are in the cellars squatting on top of an empty concrete coal bunker, gazing at a pile of rubble fallen from the ceiling and landed on top of a log-pile; my toga-garb makes the position awkward and my feet must be filthy.
The lieutenant takes her silver cigarette case from her jacket, selects and lights a cigarette. I feel I am being treated to a show of courage. She draws upon it languidly, breathes out.
‘I meant,’ I find myself saying, ‘that we are in a fuel store.’ It sounds lame. I hope the lighter flame is too weak to show my blush.
The lieutenant looks sceptical, glancing about the dark cellar. ‘Anything explosive in here?’
‘Only that, I suppose.’ I indicate the pile of rubble where we are assuming the shell has come to rest.
‘Unlikely,’ she says, drawing upon the cigarette. ‘Here; hold this,’ I am told. I am given the lighter. The light is poor. How odd the things one misses. I am trying to remember the last time I saw a torch battery. The lieutenant leans forward, cigarette jammed in the corner of her mouth, and scrapes some of the debris carefully away, sending small soft falls of pale dust spilling softly to the floor of the coal-black room. Some shards of rock follow, then she tugs and hauls, grunting, at a more reluctant piece. There is an alarming crunch and a small raft of dusty stone and broken wood collapses off the wineracks, taking some logs with it.
‘Hold the light closer,’ she tells me. I do so. ‘Ha,’ she says, supporting herself on the underside of the ceiling as she leans forward to jostle something out of the way above. ‘There it is.’ I look, and see the swollen side of a gleaming metal casing. She smooths dust from its flank, hand gentle as any mother’s on her child’s head. ‘Two-ten,’ she breathes. A tremor shakes the cellar around us, and the sound of a distant explosion comes through the hole to the dining-room above. The lieutenant sits back, slapping her hands, seemingly unheeding. ‘Better get at it from above.’
The lieutenant watches as two men pick at the shell’s brief tomb, kneeling on the dining-room’s splintered floor and reaching down to scoop out lumps of stone and wood. The flow from the water pipe hanging over the dining table has been reduced to a drip; water has pooled towards the room’s outer wall, forming a long, gently steaming pool. Above, one of the servants is attempting to repair the void in my bedroom floor, gagging its throat with wood and an old mattress; his efforts dislodge more clouds of falling, rolling dust. Every now and again pieces of plaster fall from the hole, hitting the floor near us like small powdery bombs.
A noise behind us is the red-haired soldier, treading with a comic wariness over the film of dust on the floor and holding something long and black. He approaches the lieutenant, makes a sort of half bow to her and mutters something, handing her the garment. It is a long black opera cloak, red to the inside. I think it was Father’s. She smiles as the soldier backs off, and thanks him. She glances at me with a look of amused tolerance, then puts it on, opening it and swinging it out so that it settles over her shoulders like a shadow.
Another plaster-bomb plummets from the ceiling, crashing on to the floor beside the two men clearing the rubble away from the shell and making them jump. They glance round, then continue. The lieutenant glares up, hand waving in front of her face.
‘So much dust,’ she says.
I gaze upwards too. ‘Indeed. But then the place has had four centuries to dry out.’
She merely grunts, then claps her hands, releasing dust, and in a small storm of it swirls out in her dramatic cloak, her footprints upon our punctured, coated floor like an animal’s in snow.
Still clad in my sheet, I stand, trying not to shiver, on the battlements with the lieutenant and a group of her men. She puts down the field-glasses. ‘No sign,’ she says. Her stubby fingers tap on the stonework, her eyes narrow as she takes in the distant scene.
The artillery fire has stopped and left the morning hung out as though to dry, its dew hanging from the smooth ridges and the needled trees like a coy veil the land’s assumed following the distant gun’s intolerant assault. There have been no more shells for ten minutes or so. The last was the closest - excluding that first which pierced the castle - landing in the woods up-hill one hundred metres off. A faint wisp of smoke rises from where it hit, though there is no other obvious damage to the forest. The men the lieutenant sent to the roof were not able to observe where the shells were coming from. They confer, trying to agree how many rounds were fired. They settle on six, with at least two of them duds. There is some talk concerning who fired upon us and from where. The lieutenant sends two of the men below and stands leaning on the parapet, gazing towards the hills.
‘You know who might be firing at us?’ I ask. My feet are numb but I want to find out what I can.
She nods, not looking at me. ‘Yes. Old friends of ours.’ She takes another cigarette from her case, lights it. ‘We tried to take the gun that fired it a week or two ago, but they have it in the hills now.’ She pulls on the cigarette.
‘And in that range, appear to have ours,’ I offer with a smile.
She looks at me, unimpressed. ‘I think we almost found them again yesterday,’ she says, and shrugs. ‘Thought they’d headed off. Looks like they didn’t. Must know where we are. Trying to get us to quit this place.’
I let the silence run on for another two lungfuls of smoke, then ask her, ‘What will you do?’
Another draw on the cigarette. She taps some ash down towards the moat and inspects the cigarette’s burning end carefully. Something about the way she does this chills me, as though our lieutenant is used to checking that such a glowing tip is just right for apply
ing to an interrogatee’s flesh. ‘I think’, she says contemplatively, ‘we might have to take it from them.’
‘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.