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 EIGHT
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 green-shirted 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.’
‘The lateness is not all mine; our eldest servant has just died.’
She looks concerned. ‘What, old Arthur? How?’
‘The shell passed through his room. He was uninjured but I believe his heart gave out.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, taking her boots off the table, her frown still there but troubled, even sympathetic. ‘I take it he’d been here a long time.’
‘All of my life,’ I tell her.
She makes a strange little noise with her mouth. ‘I thought we’d got away unscathed, there. Damn.’ She shakes her head.
I begin to feel a fractious annoyance at her sympathy and seeming sorrow. If anyone ought to feel aggrieved it is I; he was my servant and she has no right to assume my role in this, even if I have chosen not to play it to its limits; it is my right to underplay it, but not hers to understudy me.
‘Well, no; we were scathed,’ I say curtly. ‘I’m sure he’ll be much missed,’ I add. (Who will bring me my breakfasts in future?)
She nods thoughtfully. ‘Is there anyone we should try to inform?’
I had not even thought. I wave one hand quickly. ‘I think he had some relations, but they lived at the other end of the country.’ The lieutenant nods, understanding. The other end of the country; in the present circumstances one might as well say on the moon. ‘Certainly there was nobody nearby,’ I tell her.
‘I’ll see he’s buried, if you like,’ she offers.
I can think of a host of replies to this, but restrict myself to a nod and, ‘Thank you.’
‘Now.’ She breathes deeply, stands, strides to the windows and pulls the curtains open to the sky. ‘These maps,’ she says, settling into the chair again.
We discuss her miniature campaign; she wishes to strike this afternoon, before we lose the light. The day seems fair, and without such luxuries as weather forecasts, soldiers as much as anybody else are reduced to the sort of weather lore that has apocryphally guided shepherds through the ages; best to attack when one can, lest rains set in and make the whole proceeding sodden as well as lethal.
I am what help I can be. I pencil in amendments to the charts, ploughing a new track here, erecting a bridge with a couple of pencil strokes and by
a single solid line and a few wags of the wrist constructing a dam and filling in the waters behind. The lieutenant is appreciative, hmm-ing and nodding and biting on one fingernail as we talk the matter through. A curious and novel feeling of what I believe must be usefulness creeps over me, along with the surprisingly agreeable appreciation of what it is to be in a team such as that the lieutenant has around her to command, each man depending on this sort of planning, each life hanging on how well or ill she thinks through what she might ask them together to accomplish. How collective, how even convivial, if also potentially humbling as well as deadly; such exemplary esprit de corps makes the contrived camaraderie of the hunt look a pale and paltry thing indeed.
Later her deputy, Mr Cuts, joins us, and he too sits and studies the maps, listening to what she proposes. Mr Cuts looks to be of late middle-age; not quite old enough to be the lieutenant’s father. He is tall and spindly with silvery-dark hair and wears small thin-rimmed glasses sitting high on a great narrow hook of nose.
He is, now I think of it, the only one of the lieutenant’s men who is free of facial hair (even if, in the case of some of them, such hair is scarcely more than downy, youthful tufts). I was myself briefly bearded when we lost mains power a year or more ago. For this last year I’ve used an antique cut-throat razor old Arthur discovered for me - complete with brush, mug, mirror, whetstone and leather strop - in a storeroom. I find myself wondering if Mr Cuts has a supply of razor-blades, and whether his nickname is linked somehow to his clean-shaven nature.
The fellow sits hunched, concentrating on the maps. He contributes his own grunts and a few suggestions, mostly regarding his pessimistic projections of the distances their vehicles can cover without running out of fuel.
In time I am dismissed, albeit with the lieutenant’s apparently sincere thanks. I feel excluded, perhaps denied the witnessing of their more detailed plans by an instinctive or suspicious urge in them to keep their preparations secret, perhaps by the lieutenant mistakenly thinking I might be bored by such martial business. I stop at the library door, decided.
‘You’re short of fuel?’ I ask.
The lieutenant looks up, glancing at Mr Cuts. ‘Well, yes,’ she says, as though amused. ‘Sort of the way everybody is, these days.’
‘I know where there is some,’ I tell her.
‘Where?’
‘Beneath our carriage, in the stables. There are a few drums of petrol and diesel and one of oil, strapped underneath.’
She looks at me, one eyebrow hoisted.
‘I thought to use it as currency,’ I explain, refusing to be bashful. ‘Something to bargain with, while on the road.’ I give a small frown and gesture with one hand. ‘But please; feel free.’ I smile as graciously as I can.
The lieutenant breathes slowly in and out. ‘Well, that’s very generous of you, Abel,’ she says. Her eyes narrow above a tight twist of smile. ‘Is there anything else you’ve been keeping back which we might be interested in?’
‘There is nothing else which is hidden,’ I tell her, only a little disappointed with her reaction. ‘Everything in the castle and the grounds is open and obvious enough. We have no weapons or medical supplies you don’t know about, and you let Morgan keep her jewellery.’
She nods. ‘So I did,’ she says. Her smile loosens. ‘Well, thank you for your contribution,’ she says. ‘Would you mind asking one of the men to bring the fuel round to the trucks?’
‘Not at all,’ I say, with a small bow, then leave and swing closed the library door, a strange feeling of both relief and exhilaration coursing through me.
This duty discharged, I climb towards you again, my dear, and stand for a moment at one of the casements in my room. The hole in the floor has been filled in and covered with both a rug and a large ceramic urn, while an old tapestry has been nailed across the ceiling and wall where the hole is. Continued thumping from above bears witness to the servants’ efforts to repair the roof as best they can.
I throw open the windows to gaze through mists and scattered showers upon the far, unpopulated lands, our tent-despoiled lawns and catch - on that still veering wind, brought over the hills and across the plains - the reasserted rumble of distant artillery fire, and the smell of death’s decay upon the freshening breeze.
CHAPTER NINE
You are stirring, the wind is stirring a swift unmaking in the clearing air and rustling trees around us as I prepare to leave. I determine that my shoes are not sufficiently sturdy and change to a pair of stout boots, requiring a change in socks and trousers too, then of jacket, shirt and waistcoat if I am not to look ridiculous. I am careful to transfer everything from my pockets and even hang the clothes up myself.
Making my way through to your room, I find you with heavy eyes and clumsy mouth taking in a cold breakfast. I sit on your bed, watching you eat slowly. You are still breathing with some difficulty.
‘Roly said’, you say, wheezing, ‘that Arthur is dead.’
‘You shouldn’t call him Roly,’ I say automatically.
‘Is he really?’ you ask.
‘Yes,’ I say. You nod, continue eating.
I wonder at what I feel now and decide it is nervousness. I am used only to anticipation, not to this perhaps similar but entirely unpleasant emotion and I imagine it affects me all the more acutely because I am so unused to it. There have been scares and crises aplenty over the last few years as circumstances spiralled down - unbelievably at the time, though there is a cast of inexorability to what transpired, looking back - to the present excess of adversity, but somehow in the past I escaped this sense of dread.
Perhaps I always felt in control in the past, secure in the stewardship of our home and its distributed resources; even taking to the roads, abandoning the castle for its own sake, seemed at the time like a brave and resourceful act, finally taking our fate into our own hands when that previous resolve began to look more foolhardy than courageous. And at the end of that attempted flight, when the lieutenant brought us back, I felt concern, anger and a sort of indignant, physical fear, but all was held in check at the back of my mind by the immediacy of response our situation called for, our immersion in the demanding instant.
But this trepidation, this febrile anxiety, this apprehension of the future is something quite different. I cannot recall feeling so since I was a young child and sent to my room, to await punishment from Father.
I look around your room. Downstairs, I hear the lieutenant commanding her men, shouting out orders. The hammering continues above. The castle, surrounded, assaulted, invaded, used and pierced, holds us all; you and I, our servants, the lieutenant’s men. Its old stones, still arguably inviolate, still seem now lessened; without their slighting, without the theft of any significant treasure but just by the addition of the lieutenant and her men it is brought down, reduced to something expressible in only time and matter. What for all our heritage now? Where lies the spirit of the place, and what does it matter?
For all its warlike aspect, the castle is a civilised thing, its value appreciable only in times of peace; for it thoroughly to resume its old significance and its power, all about us would have to sink even lower, to the point where no engines worked and no guns fired and people like the lieutenant and her men were reduced to arrows, bows and spears (and even then siege engines could still level it). The map the lieutenant soiled with her unwashed hair and mud-caked boots will bear less legend now, and that fine paper, representing, must support us all.
Am I doing, and have I done, the right thing? Perhaps I should have misled them over the map and somehow sent intelligence of their attack to the opposing side, then - contriving not to go with them - stayed behind and overcome whatever troops they will be leaving here in the hope that their main force is annihilated by their enemies. Perhaps I should not have told them about the fuel we hid underneath the carriage.
But still I feel I am in the right; they fight our fight for now and I pursue our own ends in helping them attempt to capture the g
un. That weapon has the measure of us, and only luck prevented it from destroying half the castle - and you and I - with that first round this morning. Who knows what will happen this afternoon? My own place in any attack will perforce be at the rear, unarmed. If they fail, I should be able to run, retreat with them, or even escape their company altogether. In either event, the reason that those who fired upon the castle did so will have been removed from it and they may leave us alone. If the lieutenant’s band succeeds, still surely reduced, the most immediate threat to the castle is still cancelled, brought into the lieutenant’s control or simply destroyed.
And if nothing else I rid this place of them for a while. I’ll lead them out of it to their own battle, and for this inconsequential episode, if no more, I will be involved; allowed to feel alive in a way I have not felt before.
Perhaps none of us will come back, my dear; perhaps only you, our few servants and the meek, damaged ones of the lieutenant’s troupe will inherit the castle. I look at you, yawning, brushing a heavy fall of dark hair back from your face and spreading some butter on a ragged slice of bread, and wonder if you’ll remember me fondly, or - after a while - at all.
Oh dear. I do believe this is self-pity. I am imagining myself dramatically dead, tragically taken from you and even more lamentably forgotten. What dreadful clichés war and social strife reduce us to, and how powerful the effect must be, if even I am so infected. I think I must pull myself together.
You finish your breakfast and rub your fingers, looking around for a napkin. I am reaching for my handkerchief when you shrug and use the edge of a sheet, then suck on each finger in turn. You see me looking at you and smile.
I wonder how much time we have. I ought perhaps to make the most of what may be the last occasion we see each other; pull the bedclothes from you, part my fly and quickly plant myself between your legs, urgent with the impending threat of an un-little death.