Lord John And The Hand Of Devils

Page 20

A louder than usual boom from beyond the house made the clerk start in his seat and grab for his inkwell. Grey might easily have started likewise, were he not so taken aback by this sudden insistence upon his half brother’s whereabouts and relations with himself. He could only conclude that the commission had lost its collective mind.
Twelvetrees added his own bit to this impression, glowering at him under iron-gray brows.
“We are waiting, Major.”
Ought he to choose some date at random? he wondered. Would they investigate to discover whether he told the truth?
Knowing what sort of response it might provoke, he replied firmly, “I am sorry, sir. I see Edgar DeVane very infrequently; prior to last Christmas, I suppose that it might have been more than a year—two, perhaps—since I have spoken to him.”
“Or written?” Marchmont pounced.
He didn’t know that, either, but there was much less chance that anyone could prove him wrong.
“I think that I may have written to him when—” His words were drowned out by the whistle of some large missile, very near at hand, followed by a tremendous crash. He kept himself in his chair only by seizing the seat of it with both hands, and gulped air to keep his voice from shaking. “—when I was seconded to the Graf von Namtzen’s regiment. That—that would have been in—in—’57.”
“Can they not still that infernal racket?” Marchmont’s nerves seemed also to have become frayed by the bombardment. He sat upright and slapped a hand on the table. “Mr. Simpson!”
The black-coated functionary appeared in the doorway with an inquiring look.
“Tell them to stop banging away out there, for God’s sake,” the baronet said peevishly.
“I am afraid that the Ordnance Office is a power unto itself, my lord,” Simpson said, shaking his head sadly at the thought of such intransigence.
“Perhaps we might dismiss the major until a more congenial time—” Oswald began, but Twelvetrees snapped, “Nonsense!” at him, and turned his minatory gaze on Grey once more.
The colonel said something, but was drowned out by a barrage of bangs and pops, as though the Ordnance fellows proposed to emphasize their independence. Grey’s blood was roaring in his ears, his leather stock tight round his throat. He dug his fingers hard into the wood of the chair.
“With all respect, sir,” he said, as firmly as he might, disregarding whatever it was that Twelvetrees had asked. “I have little regular contact with my half brother. I cannot tell you more than I have.”
Marchmont uttered an audible “hmp!” of disbelief, and Twelvetrees glared as though he wished to order Grey strung up to a triangle and flogged on the spot. Oswald, though, peered closely at him over the tops of his spectacles, and in a sudden, blessed silence from the proving ground, changed the subject.
“Were you intimately acquainted with Lieutenant Lister prior to the occasion at Crefeld, my lord?” he asked mildly.
“I am not familiar with that name at all, sir.” He could surmise who Lister was, of course, who he must have been.
“You surprise me, Major,” said Oswald, looking not at all surprised. “Philip Lister was a member of White’s, as you are yourself. I should think you must have seen him there now and then, whether you knew his name or not?”
Grey wasn’t surprised that Oswald knew that he belonged to White’s club; all of London had heard about his last visit there. He didn’t haunt the place, though, preferring the Beefsteak.
Rather than endeavor to detail his social habits, he merely replied, “That is possible. However, the lieutenant had been struck by a cannonball, sir, which unfortunately removed his head. I had no opportunity of examining his features in order to ascertain whether he might be an acquaintance.”
Marchmont glanced at him sharply.
“Are you being impertinent, sir?”
“Certainly not, sir.” All three of them looked suddenly at him as one, like a phalanx of owls eyeing a mouse. A drop of sweat wormed its slow way down his back, itching.
Twelvetrees coughed explosively and the illusion was broken. With bewildering suddenness, they resumed questioning him about the battle.
“How long had you been fighting the gun when it exploded?” Marchmont asked, drumming his fingers on the table.
“Roughly half an hour, sir.” No idea, sir. Seemed all day, sir. Couldn’t have been, though; the battle itself had taken no more than three or four hours. So he’d been told, later.
He realized, with a faint sense of nightmare, that his hands were beginning to tremble, and as unobtrusively as possible, curled them into fists on his knees.
They returned to the battle, making him go through it again, and once more, and then again: the number of men in the gun crew, their separate offices, how the gun was aimed—a pause, while he explained to a frowning Marchmont exactly what quoins were and that, no, the placement of these wooden wedges beneath the cannon’s trunnions affected nothing more than the altitude of the barrel, and could not possibly have contributed to the explosion—what shot had they been using—grapeshot, for the most part—what was the fucking weather like, which member of the crew had been killed—the loader, he didn’t know the man’s name—and exactly who had put the linstock to the touchhole during that last, fateful firing?
He clung to the colorless, rehearsed words of his testimony, a feeble shield against memory.
A faint haze of smoke from the proving ground had seeped through the cracks of the windows and hung near the egg-and-dart molding of the ceiling, gray as the rain clouds outside.
His left arm ached where it had been broken.
Sweat ran over his ribs, slow as seeping blood.
The ground shook under him, and he felt in his bones the invisible presence of Prussian dragon-riders.
He wished to God they had not told him Lister’s name.
The thump and rumble of distant explosion had resumed. He began to try to identify the sounds as a means of distraction, wondering, An eight? Or a coehorn? at a series of regular, hollow thumps, or thinking with more confidence, Twenty-four pounder, when the chandelier rattled overhead.
“It rained in the night,” he repeated for the fourth time, “but it was not raining heavily during the battle, no, sir.”
“Your vision was not obscured, then?”
Only by the sweat burning in his eyes and the billows of black powder smoke that drifted like thunderclouds over the field.
“No, sir.”
“You were not distracted in mind?”
He gripped his knees.
“No, sir.”
“So you claim,” Marchmont said, with distinct skepticism. “Do you not think it possible—or even likely, Major—that in the heat of battle, you might conceivably have ordered your crew to load a second charge before firing the first? I think such an eventuality would have provided an explosion of sufficient force as to rupture the cannon, would it not, Colonel?” He leaned a little forward, raising an interrogative brow at Twelvetrees, who looked more po-faced than usual, but nodded.
A small smirk of satisfaction oiled Lord Marchmont’s lips, as he looked back at Grey.
“Major?”
Grey felt a sharp jolt in the pit of his stomach. He’d come expecting official tedium, the meticulous dissection of accident required by those whose business such things were. He hadn’t looked forward either to the endless questions or to the inescapable reliving of the events at Crefeld—but the last thing he’d expected was this.
“Do I understand you aright, my lord?” he asked carefully. “Do you insinuate—do you dare to insinuate—that I … that my actions caused the explosion which—”
“Oh, no, oh, no!” Oswald leapt in hurriedly, seeing Grey draw himself up. “I am quite sure his lordship insinuates nothing.” But Grey was already on his feet.
The clerk looked up, startled. There was a smut on his nose.
“Good day, my lord, gentlemen.” Grey bowed, jammed the hat on his head, and turned on his heel.
“Major! You have not been dismissed!”
Ignoring the outbreak of exclamations and orders behind him, he strode beneath the trembling chandelier and out the door.
Grey was so exercised in mind that he took no notice at all of his surroundings. Emerging into the portrait hallway, he did not wait to be shown out, but stamped off via the most direct route that presented itself. In consequence, he found himself a few moments later outside the house, in the midst of a raging downpour, but with Bell Street, where he had come in, nowhere in sight.
He paused, breathing heavily, thought of skulking back into the manor house to ask direction, dismissed that notion instanter, and looked round for an alternate means of egress.
He was surrounded by a cluster of smaller buildings, mostly wet brick, roofed with rain-slick slates, and with a profusion of small, muddy lanes leading to and fro among them.
No wonder they called the bloody place “the Warren,” he thought grimly, and was inclined to find his present confusion merely a continuation of the morning’s aggravation. He chose a direction at random and set off, cursing the Arsenal and all its works.
Ten minutes of tramping through rain and mud left his clothes wet, his boots fouled, and his temper fouler, but he was no closer to escape. A shattering boom! from very close at hand made him veer suddenly sideways, fetching up against one of the myriad brick buildings, heart thundering in his chest. He pressed a hand hard over it, and tried without effect to calm his breathing.
His hands and feet were chilled to the bone, but he felt fresh sweat trickle down his ribs, further dampening his already clammy linen. Not that it mattered; he would be soaked to the skin in another few minutes.
“Oh, the devil with it,” he muttered to himself, and seizing the nearest door handle in sight, shoved it open.
He found himself in a low-ceilinged room that smelt strongly of sulfur, hot metal, and other noxious substances. It did, however, have a fire in the hearth, and he headed for this like a racing pigeon homing to its cot.
He slung his cloak forward over his shoulder and closed his eyes in momentary bliss at the feel of heat on his legs and backside.
A sound caused him to open his eyes, and he saw that the noise of his entry had attracted a young man, presently gaping at him from a door on the far side of the room.
“Sir?” said the young man tentatively, taking in Grey’s uniform. The young man himself was in shirtsleeves and breeches, a slender chap with dark, curly hair and a face of almost girlish delicacy, perhaps a few years younger than himself.
“I beg your pardon for my unseemly intrusion,” Grey said, letting his cloak fall and forcing a smile. “I am Major John Grey. I was unfortunately—” He had begun some explanation of his presence, but the young man’s eyes forestalled him with an exclamation of surprise.
“Major Grey! Why, I know you!”
“You do?” For some reason, this made Grey somewhat uneasy.
“But of course, of course! Or rather,” the young man corrected himself, “I know your name. You were called before the commission this morning, were you not?”
“I was,” Grey said shortly, fury returning at the memory.
“Oh—but I forget myself; your pardon; sir. I am Herbert Gormley.” He bobbed an awkward bow, which Grey returned, with mutual murmurs of “your servant, sir.”
Glancing round, he saw that the strong odors came from an assortment of pots and glass vessels scattered higgledy-piggledy across an assortment of tables and benches. Wisps of steam rose from a small earthen pot on the table nearest him.
“Could that be tea?” Grey asked dubiously.
It could. Gormley, clearly grateful for the opportunity to be hospitable, snatched up a filthy cloth, and using this as a pot holder, poured hot liquid into a pottery mug, which he handed to Grey.
The tea was the same grayish color as the mud on his boots, and the smell led him to suspect that the mug was not employed strictly as a drinking vessel—but it was hot, and that was all that mattered.
“Er … what is this place?” Grey inquired, emerging from the mug and waving at their surroundings.
“This is the Royal Laboratory, sir!” Gormley said, straightening his back with an air of pride. “If you please, sir? I’ll fetch someone directly; he will be so excited!”
Before Grey could speak to stop him, Gormley had darted back into the recesses of the building.
Grey’s uneasy feeling returned. Excited? The revelation that everyone in the Warren seemed to have heard about his appearance before the commission was sufficiently sinister. That anyone should be excited about it was unsettling.
In Grey’s not inconsiderable experience, for a soldier to be talked about was a good thing only if the conversation were in reference to some laudable feat of arms. Otherwise, a prudent man kept his head down, lest it be—this unwary thought evoked a sudden memory of Lieutenant Lister, and he shuddered convulsively, slopping hot tea over his knuckles.
He set the cup down and wiped his hand on his cloak, debating the wisdom of absquatulating before Gormley returned with his “someone”—but the rain was now slashing ferociously at the shutters, driven by a freezing east wind, and he hesitated an instant too long.
“Major Grey?” A dark, burly soldier in a Royal Artillery captain’s uniform emerged, a look of mingled welcome and wariness upon his heavy face. “Captain Reginald Jones, sir. May I welcome you to our humble abode?” He offered his hand, tilting his head in irony toward the cluttered room.
“I am obliged to you, sir, both for shelter from the storm and for the kind refreshment,” Grey replied, taking both the offered hand and advantage of the pounding rain to indicate his reason for intrusion.