Lord John And The Hand Of Devils

Page 19

The horse stamped, hard, and the vibration of it ran through the long bones of Grey’s legs.
“Hast thou given the horse strength?” he quoted softly, hand stroking the braided mane that ran smooth and serpentlike down the great ridge of the stallion’s neck. “Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?… He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword.”
He leaned close and pressed his forehead against the horse’s shoulder. Huge muscles bulged beneath the skin, warm and eager, and the clean musky scent of the horse’s excitement filled him. He straightened then, and slapped the taut, twitching hide.
“He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.”
Grey heard the drums again, and his palms began to sweat.
Historical Note: In October of 1757, the forces of Frederick the Great and his allies moved swiftly, crossing the country to defeat the gathering French and Austrian army at Rossbach, in Saxony. The town of Gundwitz was left undisturbed, the bridge at Aschenwald never crossed by an enemy.
“Lord John and the Haunted Soldier”
Part I
Inquisition
November, 1758
Tower Place, the Arsenal at Woolwich
Hell was filled with clocks, he was sure of it. There was no torment, after all, that could not be exacerbated by a contemplation of time passing. The large case clock at the end of the corridor had a particularly penetrating tick-tock, audible above and through all the noises of the house and its inhabitants. It seemed to Lord John Grey to echo his own inexorable heartbeats, each one a step on the road toward death.
He shook off that grisly notion and sat bolt upright, his best hat balanced upon his knee. The house had once been a mansion; doubtless the clock was a remnant of those gracious days. Pity none of the chairs had made the transition to government service, he thought, shifting gingerly on the niggardly stool he’d been given.
A spasm of impatience brought him to his feet. Why would they not bloody call him in and get on with it?
Well, there was a rhetorical question, he thought, tapping the hat against his leg with soft impatience.
If The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small was not the official motto of His Majesty’s government, it was surely that, de facto. It had taken months for the Royal Commission of Inquiry to be convened, still longer for it to sit, and longer yet for inquisition to stretch out its hand in his direction.
His arm and ribs were quite healed now, the furrow through his scalp no more than a thin white scar beneath his hair. The freezing rain of November beat upon the roof above; in Germany the thick grass around the ninth station of the cross must lie now brown and dead, and the lieutenant who lay beneath that grass food for worms long since. Yet here Grey sat—or stood—a small, hard kernel yet awaiting the pressure of the grindstone.
Grimacing, he sought respite from the clock’s ticking by striding up and down the corridor, returning the censorious looks of the row of portraits hung upon the wall as he passed them—early governors of the Arsenal.
The portraits were mediocre in execution for the most part, save the one near the end, done by a more talented hand. Perhaps a Dutchman by his looks—a black-browed gentleman whose fiercely rubicund features radiated a jolly determination. Probably a good attitude for one whose profession was explosion.
As though the Dutchman agreed with this sentiment, a tremendous boom rattled the casement at the end of the corridor and the floor heaved suddenly under Grey’s feet.
He flung himself flat, hat flying, and found himself hugging the shabby hall-runner, sweating and breathless.
“My lord?” A voice from which any trace of astonishment or curiosity had been carefully removed spoke above him. “The gentlemen are ready.”
“Are they? In … deed.” He rose, stilling the trembling of his limbs by main effort, and brushed the dust from his uniform with what nonchalance could be managed.
“If you will follow me, my lord?” The functionary, a small, neatly wigged person of impeccable politeness and indeterminate aspect, bent to pick up Grey’s hat, and handing it to him without comment, turned to lead him back down the corridor. Behind them, the clock ticked imperturbably on, the passage of time undisturbed by such ephemera as explosion or death.
There were three of them, seated behind a long table, a weighty thing of carved dark wood. To one side, a clerk sat at a small desk, quill and paper at the ready to record his testimony. A single chair was placed, stark and solitary, in the space before the table.
So it really was an inquisition, he thought. His brother Hal had warned him. His sense of unease grew stronger. The trouble with an inquisition was that it seldom went hungry to bed.
The black-coated functionary accompanied him to the chair, hovering at his elbow as though afraid he might bolt, and left him there with a murmured “Major Grey” and a discreet bow in the direction of the Commission of Inquiry. They did not bother to introduce themselves. The tall, thin-faced fellow was vaguely familiar; a nobleman, he thought—knight, perhaps a minor baronet? Expensively tailored in gray superfine. The name escaped him, though perhaps it would come of itself in time.
He did recognize the military member of the tribunal: Colonel Twelvetrees, of the Royal Artillery Regiment, wearing his dress uniform and an expression that spoke of habitual severity. From what Grey knew of his reputation, the expression was well earned. That could be dealt with, though; yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir.
The third was less forbidding in aspect, a middle-aged gentleman, plump and neat in purple, with a striped waistcoat and a small decoration; he went so far as to smile politely at Grey. Grey removed his hat and bowed to His Majesty’s Royal Commission of Inquiry, but did not sit ’til he was bidden to do so.
The colonel cleared his throat then and began without preamble.
“You are summoned here, Major, to assist us in an inquiry into the explosion of a cannon whilst under your command during the battle at Crefeld in Prussia, on twenty-third June of this year. You will answer all questions put to you, in as much detail as may be required.”
“Yes, sir.” He sat bolt upright, face impassive.
A sort of rumble ran through the building, felt rather than heard, and the droplets on a small crystal chandelier tinkled gently overhead. The huge proving grounds of the Arsenal lay somewhere beyond the Tower Place house, he knew—how far away?
The plump gentleman put a pair of spectacles on his nose and leaned forward expectantly.
“Will you tell us, please, my lord, the circumstances in which you came to take charge of the gun and its crew?”
Obediently, he told them, in the words he had prepared. Colorless, brief, exact. Allowing of no doubt. Had any of them ever set foot on a battlefield, he wondered? If they had, they would know how little resemblance his words held to the truth of that day—but it hardly mattered. He spoke for the record, and was therefore careful.
They interrupted now and then, asking trivial questions about the position of the gun upon the field, the proximity of the French cavalry at the time, the weather—what in God’s name might the weather have had to do with it? he wondered.
The clerk scratched industriously away, recording it all.
“You had had previous experience in fighting a gun of this type?” That was the roundish gentleman with the striped waistcoat and the discreet decoration. The baronet had called him Oswald, and suddenly he realized who the man must be—the Honorable Mortimer Oswald, Member of Parliament. He’d seen the name on posters and banners during the last election.
“I had.”
Oswald cocked an eyebrow, plainly inviting him to elaborate, but he kept silent.
Twelvetrees fixed him with a cold eye.
“With which regiment, when, how long?”
Blast.
“I served informally with the Forty-sixth, sir—my brother’s regiment—Lord Melton, that is—during the Jacobite campaign in Scotland under General Cope. Was detailed to a gun crew belonging to the Royal Artillery after taking up my commission, and trained there for six months before coming back to the Forty-sixth. More recently, I was seconded to a Hanoverian regiment in Germany, and saw service there with a Prussian artillery company.”
He saw no need to add that this service had consisted largely of eating sausages with the gun crew. And as for his so-called service with Cope … the less said about that, the better. He had, however, actually commanded the firing of cannon, which the members of the board very likely had not, Twelvetrees included.
“Cope?” said the baronet, seeming to rouse a bit at the name. “Gentleman Johnny?” He laughed, and the colonel’s hatchet face tightened.
“Yes, sir.” Oh, God. Please God, he hadn’t heard the story.
Apparently not; the man merely hummed a snatch of that mocking Scotch song, “Hey, Johnny Cope, are ye walkin’ yet?” and broke off, looking amused.
“Cope,” he repeated, shaking his head. “You must have been very young at the time, Major?”
“Sixteen, sir.” He felt his blood rise and his cheeks flush. Nearly half a lifetime. Dear God, how long would he have to live, in order to escape the memory of Prestonpans, and goddamned Jamie Fraser?
Twelvetrees was not amused, and cast a cold glance at the nobleman.
“Had you commanded a gun in battle, prior to Crefeld?” Bloody-minded sod.
“Yes, sir,” Grey replied, keeping his voice calm. “At Falkirk.” They’d put him in charge of a gun and allowed him to fire several shots at an abandoned church before retreating, for the sake of practice.
Oswald emitted a hum of interest.
“And what sort of gun did you command on that occasion, Major?”
“A murderer, sir,” he replied, naming a small and very old-fashioned cannon, left over from the last century.
“Not quite so murderous as Tom Pilchard, though, eh, Major?”
He must have looked as blank as he felt, for Oswald kindly elaborated.
“The gun you served at Crefeld, Major. You did not know its name?”
“No, sir,” he said, and could not help adding, “we were not formally introduced, owing to the circumstances.”
He knew before he said it that it was a mistake, but nerves and irritation had got the best of him; the constant thumping from the proving ground beyond the house made the floor shake every few minutes, and sweat was running down his sides inside his shirt. The price of his momentary lapse was a blistering ten-minute lecture from Twelvetrees on respect for the army—in the person of himself, he gathered—and the dignity of His Majesty’s commission. All the while Grey sat upright as a ramrod, saying, “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” with a countenance of perfect blankness, and Oswald wheezed with open amusement.
The baronet waited through the colonel’s tirade with ill-concealed impatience, stripping the barbs from his quill one by one, so that tiny feathers strewed the table and flew up in a cloud as he drummed his fingers.
From the corner of his eye, Grey saw the clerk lean back, looking faintly entertained. The man rubbed his ink-stained fingers, clearly grateful for the momentary break in the proceedings.
When at last the colonel subsided—with a final ugly jab at his brother, his brother’s regiment, and Grey’s late father—the baronet cleared his throat with a menacing growl and sat forward to take his own turn.
Grey was inclined to think that the growl was aimed as much at Twelvetrees as at himself—-noblemen did not like to hear others of their ilk rubbished in public, regardless of circumstance. The lack of amity among the members of the commission had become increasingly apparent during the questioning, but that observation was of little value to him personally.
The clerk, seeing the end of his brief vacation, picked up his quill again with an audible sigh.
Marchmont—that was it! Lord Marchmont—he was a baronet—set about a brisk dissection of Grey’s experience, background, education, and family, ending with a sudden pointed inquiry as to when Grey had last seen Edgar DeVane.
“Edgar DeVane?” Grey repeated blankly.
“Your brother, I believe?” Marchmont said, with elaborate patience.
“Yes, sir,” Grey said respectfully, thinking, What the devil …? Edgar? “I beg pardon, sir. Your question took me unexpectedly. I believe I last saw my half brother”—he leaned a little on the words—“near Christmas last.” He remembered the occasion, certainly; Edgar’s wife, Maude, had badgered her husband into bringing the family to London for a month, and Grey had accompanied her and her two daughters in their raids on the Regent and Bond Street shops, in the capacity of native bearer. He recalled thinking at the time that Edgar’s affairs must be prospering markedly; either that, or he would return to Sussex bankrupt.
He waited. Marchmont squinted at him, tapping the mangled quill on the papers in front of him.
“Christmas,” the baronet repeated. “Have you been in correspondence with DeVane since then?”
“No,” he replied promptly. While he assumed that Edgar was in fact literate, he’d never seen anything of a written nature purporting to emanate from his half brother. His mother kept up a dutiful correspondence with all four of her sons, but the Sussex half of that particular exchange was sustained entirely by the efforts of Maude.
“Christmas,” Marchmont repeated again, frowning. “And when had you last seen DeVane, prior to that?”
“I do not recall, sir; my apologies.”
“Oh, now, I am afraid that won’t do, my lord.” Oswald was still looking genial, but light glittered from his spectacles. “We must insist upon an answer.”