The Boy in White Linen
Jon Jacks
Other New Adult and Children’s books by Jon Jacks
The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly
The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale
A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things – The Last Train
The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator
Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus
P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers
Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)
Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien
Text copyright© 2013 Jon Jacks
All rights reserved
Thank you for your support.
A planet of blue, white, green,
Serenely circling, seemingly endlessly, irrevocably,
But yet a small ship, tossed on a sea of unknowing;
Are we lost?
Are we all alone,
after all?
Lillianne Violet Pine, Jerusalem 1920
*
Chapter 1
The road to Jerusalem, April Fools’ Day, 1920
‘A…ttishoo!’
‘God bless you, Miss Pine.’
Through bleary eyes, Lillianne gratefully reached for the pristinely ironed handkerchief Captain Hilary had deftly produced from his top pocket.
‘It’s the dust I’m afraid; it gets everywhere.’
Lillianne was beginning to wonder if she would have been better taking the train rather than insisting on travelling overland ‘along a route Jesus would have recognised’. It was a far more boring trip than she had expected, the land they were passing through hardly seeming to change. Worse still, even her uncle’s Rolls Royce seemed incapable of protecting her from either the worst of the bumps and jolts of the potted road or the fine red dust that seemed to coat everything.
‘Captain?’ The soldier chauffeuring them spoke over his shoulder as he kept his eyes on the road. ‘I think I just heard gunfire south of here.’
‘Drive on, Broadley; Miss Pine’s safety is our main concern today.’
‘Sir; it’s probably a settlement under attack!’
Captain Hilary glanced back through the car’s rear window, through the clouds of dust, at the truck following on behind them.
Lillianne turned to look with him, even though she knew what she would see; a truck that looked like it had served in the recent Great War, badly dented but now repainted as a police vehicle. Even through the plumes of dust their own car was throwing up behind them, Lillianne could see that the truck and its occupants were suffering even more bone-jarring jolts than they were.
She couldn’t make out the driver, or the man or men crammed into the seat next to him. The men in the back of the truck were completely out of view, of course. But she had seen them all earlier when Captain Hilary had arrived to tell her he’d been appointed by her uncle to make sure she arrived safely in Jerusalem. They weren’t what she’d been given to expect by her uncle’s telegram promising a ‘military escort’. They were policemen, obviously recruited from the local population. Yes, they were armed, but their dress and attitude were what could only be called slovenly.
Not that the sole British solider accompanying the captain was any more inspiring. He was better and more smartly dressed, yes, yet now and again he seemed to treat his commanding officer with a strange mix of apparently calculated ignorance and casual rudeness.
She had been surprised by the captain’s lax attitude to the indifference of his men to his authority, as if he were resigned to it. She felt sorry for him, in a way; perhaps he had tried earlier to instil a sense of hierarchy, only to find his threats carried little or no weight. This was some form of protectorate, after all (Was that the right word? She felt sure it was), rather than a part of the Empire that the British had real control over; ‘You must realise we’re effectively only there to advise and help,’ her mother had explained, trying to dissuade her from going ahead with her trip even as she planned it.
The captain turned around in his seat. He glared at the back of the head of the driver.
‘And you seriously think that getting these men involved wold help the settlement, do you?’ he said. ‘We both know full well that they’re far more likely to end up joining in the attack.’
The driver jerked forward, slamming down hard and abruptly on the brakes. The car juddered and bumped as it slewed to a halt, throwing up even more clouds of dust.
‘Sidney!’ the captain yelled furiously.
Behind them, there was a loud squeal, a cacophonic protesting of tortured metal, as the truck tried to stop. It spun aside, partially turned off the road, and swung around almost side on to the back of the car.
‘Get back in the car, Sidney!’
Ignoring the captain’s command, the driver stepped out onto the dusty road.
‘We can’t help them!’ Flinging open his own door, the captain leapt out of the car. ‘There are hundreds of settlements scattered across Palestine! We can’t protect them all!’
The driver was striding towards the idling truck, his only response to the captain being a dismissive cry over his shoulder.
‘I’m not asking you to protect them all, Harry! Just this one!’
Harry?
Lillianne was amazed by everything she was witnessing.
Is this how private soldiers now addressed their commanding officers in the British army?
‘Sid! I’ve protected you enough from all this madness, this insubordination!’
Quickly stepping out of the other side of the car, Lillianne watched in bemusement as the driver continued to ignore his captain. Instead, he shouted up to the men in the back of the truck, something in Arabic that she couldn’t understand. Grinning wryly, as every bit as bemused by everything as she was, the men swapped questioning glances before one of them threw down a rifle to the waiting Sidney. A box of ammunition immediately followed, which Sidney deftly caught in one hand.
‘The settlers don’t trust us anymore, Harry!’ Turning off the road, he strode out across the rocky ground towards the settlement, from where the sharp crack of gunfire could now be clearly heard. ‘We’re not stopping the Fedayeen from attacking them, and we’re not letting them arm themselves either!’
‘They’ve already got guns, Sid, you know that! The war’s just ended and there are thousands out there unaccounted for!’
Standing on the side of the road, watching his driver walk away from him, Captain Hilary fumed impotently, a hand quivering over his holstered revolver as if he were struggling with the side of him that said he should draw it, threaten to fire, call his man back ‘or else!’
‘The Palestinians have lived here over a thousand years!’ he cried out instead. He was having to shout out louder now that Sidney was refusing to turn back. ‘The way they see it, the settlers should never have been allowed in! We can’t be seen to be taking sides, Sid!’
‘Hah! Tell that to the young Miss’s uncle and all the rest of the top brass, Harry! Pro-Arab most of ’em – and you know that!’
Giving Lillianne a swift, apologetic look, Captain Hilary noticed at last that the men in the back of the truck, having stood up to get a better view of Sidney’s leaving, were all grinning hugely at his humiliation. With a brusque waving of an arm, an even brusquer yell in Arabic, he ordered the truck’s driver to begin backing up onto the road.
‘Sorry, Miss Pine,’ he said, indicating that she should get back into the car as he m
oved towards the driver’s door. ‘I did warn you that this was a far from ideal time for you to visit–’
‘…and that if I hadn’t just turned up more or less unannounced, I would have been refused permission to visit? Yes, I do remember, Captain.’
She ducked her head, crouching slightly as she stepped back inside the Rolls Royce’s spacious interior. The captain slipped into the driver’s seat, slamming his door shut.
‘Shouldn’t we help them?’ Lillianne asked, taking her own seat. ‘The people being attacked, I mean. And your soldier friend?’
‘Help him?’ Captain Hilary started the car rolling slowly forwards. ‘God help him, Miss Pine! And yes, God help us too; we’ve got a clash of festivals – Passover, Easter, the Moslem Nebi Musa – and thousands of armed men out there who were all fighting in the Great War for differing, conflicting goals that were never going to be realised.’
Seated in the back and just off to Captain Hilary’s side, Lillianne at last had an opportunity to more closely study him. From her first sight of him, she had thought him smart and attractive, still boyish in the softness of his face, yet somehow more angularly hard and handsome when he was stern or authoritative. In his light green officer’s jacket, his khaki shorts and his jauntily positioned hat, he cut a rather dashing figure who would definitely impress her friends back in the school dorms when she sent back any photographs of them strolling through Jerusalem together.
‘Surely my uncle’s men are perfectly capable of controlling it all, Captain?’ she replied proudly.
‘Your uncle’s men,’ the captain chuckled wryly, giving a backward nod of his head to draw her attention to the truck following on behind, ‘are all half trained like those men back there, Miss Pine. And we’ve got less than two hundred of them to police Jerusalem.’
‘And you don’t think that will be enough, Captain?’
‘Well the Turks, Miss Pine, they’ve run and known what this country’s like for more or less a millennium; and even for a normal Nebi Musa procession, they’d flood the streets with thousands of soldiers.’
Glancing over his shoulder, he attempted a grin, but it appeared to Lillianne to be strained, even pained.
‘As I said, Miss; God help us all.’
*
Chapter 2
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
Song of Songs 8; 7
Surprisingly modern, and enclosed within its own small yet well-appointed garden, the house could have been lifted from a French town’s suburb then deliberately set down where it had wonderful views of the pink-walled old city.
The wheels of the Rolls Royce crunched satisfactorily on the gravelled drive as Harry expertly curled it around the large (but dry) fountain situated directly in front of the house’s grandly decorated porch.
(Lillianne couldn’t remember at what point on the long journey she had taken to calling him Harry but, as he hadn’t objected, as he had in fact seemed to become more at ease with her, she had insisted – Miss Pine being too formal, Lillianne far too tiresome – that he should either call her Lilly or, better still, like all her closest friends, Lil.)
The noise of the arriving car having alerted the staff, a nervously hand-wringing maid almost instantly appeared at the door and, by the time Harry had helped Lil demurely step out of the car, a clutch of others had joined her. In their midst stood an imperiously straight-backed, relatively fashionably dressed woman who observed Harry and Lil’s familiarity with a frown of disapproval.
‘Miss Pine! Captain! I would remind you that decorum is expected even in front of staff!’ With the very slightest of stoops, she peered into the back of the car. ‘Your chaperone, Miss Pine? I was led to believe you would be arriving here with a Miss Anne Corr as your companion; doesn’t she understand that her role is to remain in constant attendance?’
‘Or, er, I’m afraid that I’ve had to leave Anne behind as she was so unwell, Miss, er…please accept my apologies, ma’am, but I wasn’t informed of your name.’
As she apologised, Lil bent a knee in a slight curtsy, a simple act that appeared to appease the woman at least a little, for she no longer sounded quite so irate when she next spoke. With nothing more than the flick of a hand and a lowering of her eyes, she also indicated to the staff that the car should be unloaded.
‘Miss Debussy is my name; and I have been left in charge of the household – and of your wellbeing too, Miss Pine – until your uncle’s return. He will not be pleased to hear you have arrived here without the chaperone we were promised would be accompanying you.’
‘I am sorry Miss Debussy, but there was nothing much that could be done of it, as she was sorely ill.’
‘Sorely ill? Not the flu, I trust?’
‘I fear it may well be the flu; poor Anne wasn’t well at all, the last I saw of her.’
‘Then it may well be for the best that she did not come–’
‘My point exactly, ma’am; we thought it best for everyone that she remained where she was–’
– ‘as would have indeed been the best course for you to take as well, Miss Pine!’
Miss Debussy was obviously angered by Lil’s unfortunate interruption, the burgeoning signs of her better nature gained by the young girl’s curtsy instantaneously withering.
‘These are not good times to be visiting Jerusalem, Miss Pine, and had we had more notice of your intention to visit rather than a seriously delayed letter and an ambiguously worded telegram–’
Miss Debussy’s eyes widened in fury as she was interrupted again, this time by the poorly suppressed giggling of the maids. The young servant who had unloaded and picked up the heaviest of the cases from the back of the car was heading back towards the door, the paper fish pinned to his back now plain for all to see.
Sensing Miss Debussy’s growing anger, the youngest of the maids diffidently curtsied (much lower than Lil could have managed, or believed appropriate) then rushed over towards the unfortunate man, swiftly removing the fish with an apologetic, ‘Poisson’d Avril, Jacques!’
‘When are you expecting my uncle to arrive home, Miss Debussy?’ Lil asked, taking advantage of the interruption to deflect Miss Debussy from her line of questioning.
‘Your uncle has been called away on urgent business in Damascus.’
Miss Debussy’s eyes flicked worriedly towards Harry as she spoke, an anxiety that was instantly reflected in his apprehensive frown.
Why should they both display such concern over her uncle’s departure to Damascus? Lil wondered.
She looked towards Harry questioningly, relying on the friendship that she believed had developed between them on the journey to prompt an answer from him.
Perhaps, she hoped, it was more than friendship? After all, in the village that lay just outside her school, as well as the village where her parents lived, she was considered ‘a blossoming beauty’ (as she had overheard herself being described – in a variety of similar terms – a number of times by nearby adults). The way she was treated, too, particularly by men, particularly by young men, had changed remarkably over the last few years as she had grown from pretty, vivacious girl into well-mannered, self-conscious young woman.
‘Don’t you mind, young Miss,’ a shop boy would whisper with a conspiratorial wink, secretively handing her the full weight of chocolates or complete length of lace that she had admitted she didn’t have enough money to buy.
She had always caught, too, out of the corner of her eye – even though she tried so hard to pretend that she hadn’t noticed, that she didn’t care – the admiring, sometimes even longing looks cast her way as she went about the village streets and greens. She knew it meant she had a certain power over her admirers, that her attractiveness could be used to make them help her in extra special ways that would be denied to others who asked for such favours. Indeed, she had grown to expect a special kind of treatment, from young men especially – but strangely, too, from people from all walks of life, including o
ther women – to the extent that her friends would marvel and giggle at her audacity as she would seemingly innocently ask for aid or items that anyone else wouldn’t even think of requesting.
She felt sure that even the handsome, elegant Captain Hilary wasn’t totally immune to her allure when it came to appeals for answers or help.
‘There’s been a coup in Syria, Miss Pine; with Faisal installed as king–’
‘Captain, I’m sure Miss Pine has no interest whatsoever in the politics of this region! However, having said that, it’s just one more thing that makes the timing of your arrival even more unfortunate, Miss Pine.’
Lil groaned inwardly, realising that her ploy had backfired, for now Miss Debussy was once again raising questions about her arrival.
‘We’ve already had violent riots here over Passover,’ Miss Debussy continued. ‘And it’s not even as if we Christians are safe; from what I’ve heard about this Moslem festival that’s coming up, it just seems to give them an excuse to make all kinds of mischief for any Christian groups they come across on their walk to Jericho.’
Lil once again looked to Harry for an explanation.
‘The Nebi Musa procession I mentioned?’ Harry said helpfully. ‘It runs from Jerusalem to Jericho, where they believe Moses is buried. Christian communities on the way have usually faced trouble.’
‘Then can I hold you responsible for Miss Pine’s safety, Captain?’ Miss Debussy demanded sourly. ‘Seeing that you were more than aware of the problems we face, yet brought her out here regardless?’
‘Miss Pine can be very insistent, ma’am.’
‘A slip of a girl, Captain?’ She looked Lil up and down in a distasteful manner that implied she fully understood why the captain had been incapable of refusing her requests. ‘If you can’t control a young girl, what possible hope have we for Jerusalem?’
‘Oh, in Har – Captain Hilary’s defence, Miss Debussy, I should point out that he took great care in explaining the many dangers I face here.’
Lil glanced Harry’s way, a mischievous glint in her eyes that left him in no doubt that he owed her for saving him from Miss Debussy’s wrath with her little white lie. Yes, he had mentioned the problems Jerusalem faced when they had first met, but he hadn’t gone into any details, nor had he forcibly insisted that she stayed on the coast.