Lord John And The Hand Of Devils

Page 21

“Oh, you did not come in response to my invitation?” Jones had thick brows, like woolly caterpillars, which arched themselves in inquiry.
“Invitation?” Grey repeated, the sense of unease returning. “I received no invitation, Captain, though I assure you—”
“I did tell you, sir,” Gormley said reproachfully to the captain. “When I took your note across to the manor, they said I had just missed the major, who had already left.”
“Oh, so you did, so you did, Herbert,” Jones said, smacking himself theatrically on the forehead. “Well, then, it seems good luck or Providence has delivered you to us, Major.”
“Indeed,” Grey said warily. “Why?”
Captain Jones smiled warmly at him.
“Why, Major, we have something to show you.”
He had no time to dwell upon the Commission, at least.
It was a long gallop from the laboratory, through a maze of smaller outbuildings and sheds, then into what Gormley—shouting to be heard above the noise of rain and hammering—told him was the Royal Brass Foundry, a large, airy stone and brick building, through whose archways Lord John glimpsed strange marvels: casting pits, boring machines, a gigantic beam scale large enough to weigh a horse … and a horse. Two, to be accurate, their wet flanks gleaming as they backed a wagon filled with barrels of clay and burlap bags of sand in through the high vestibule door.
The air was thick with the scents of wet rope, drying clay, hot wax, tallow, fresh manure, and the acrid, fiery odors of an unseen forge somewhere in the recesses of the place. Gormley shouted brief descriptions of the various activities they passed, but Jones was leading the way at the double-quick, and Grey had barely time to inhale the fascinating aromas of gun-founding before he found himself propelled once more into the open air and the cold smell of rain on stone, tinged with a miasma of rot and ordure from the prison hulks on the river nearby.
The air shivered periodically with explosion; they were drawing nearer to the proving grounds. The bangs echoed in the hollow of his stomach. Jesus, they weren’t going to try to make him reenact the events leading up to the demise of Tom Pilchard, surely?
The pitted landscape of the proving grounds stretched away to the left; he could see it now. Acres of open ground punctuated by earthen bunkers, outposts of heaped sandbags, and tents of various shapes and sizes, canvas darkened by the rain. Here and there, the glint of muted light on the barrels of the bigger guns.
To his relief, though, Jones veered right and down a muddy path lined with the dismounted carcasses of ruined guns, neatly laid out like dead bodies.
He had no time to study them, but was impressed by both their number—there must be fifty, at least—and by the size of some. There must be half a dozen cannon royal, whose monstrous barrels weighed eight thousand pounds or more and must be drawn by a dozen horses.
Ahead lay a very large, open-sided shelter, roofed with canvas. Long tables lay bleak under the canvas, covered with debris. Here lay half a Spanish culverin, the breech blown off. There the twisted remains of a short gun he could not identify.
The thump of a fresh explosion reached him, muffled only slightly by the rain that drummed on the canvas overhead as he followed Gormley into the shelter.
“Why do they test ordnance in the rain?” he asked, to cover his unease, and by way of making conversation.
“Do you not sometimes fight in the rain, my lord?” Gormley sounded amused. “Useful to have bombs and grenades that will still explode when the casing is wet, don’t you think?”
“Ah … quite.” The Commission’s harping insistence upon the weather at Crefeld seemed suddenly to acquire some meaning. Likewise their insistent questioning regarding his perceptions of the powder … Edgar. Goddammit, Edgar!
It was the juxtaposition of his half brother with the notion of gunpowder that finally triggered realization.
Rain would certainly dampen the firing powder, no matter what precautions were taken. Normally, damp was less of a problem with the bombs and grapeshot cartridges, they being well wrapped, but even these would now and then fail to explode. A certain number of them simply failed to explode in any case, weather notwithstanding. And when this happened, the dummy charge must be removed from the breech before a fresh load was rammed down the barrel. Otherwise, the impact itself might cause the faulty load to go off. Or—he remembered Marchmont’s accusation with a fresh surge of fury—a hasty or incompetent gun crew occasionally did neglect to remove the faulty load, ram a fresh one, and then touch off both charges together, which might indeed fracture a gun.
And Edgar owned a powder mill. The insinuation, he supposed, was that Edgar’s mill had supplied dud powder, which had by coincidence been used to make the grapeshot cartridges he had used in Crefeld. One of these failing to go off, his own inattention or stupidity had … But this was the sheerest idiocy, even for someone like Marchmont. What—
But these fevered speculations were interrupted as Jones came to an abrupt halt beside one of the tables and turned, looking expectant.
The table was littered with shattered chunks of verdigrised and blackened brass. It had been a large cannon, a twenty-four pounder; most of the barrel forward of the trunnions was intact. And it was an English cannon—the royal cypher of George the Second showed clearly, though the reinforcing band upon which it was stamped had cracked through and the breech of the gun lay in a rubble of twisted pieces, blackened with powder.
“Do you recognize it, Major?” Gormley asked.
Grey felt an odd sense of shock, and something strangely like sorrow, as he might for an unknown soldier blown to bits beside him. Would he care, he wondered, if he didn’t now know the gun by name?
“Tom Pilchard, is it?” He reached out and touched the broken barrel, gently.
“Yes, sir.” The young man seemed to share his sense of loss; he bowed his head respectfully, and spoke with lowered voice, as one might at the bier of a friend. “I thought you might wish to see him, sir—or what’s left.”
Grey glanced at Gormley, rather surprised—and caught sight of Captain Jones on the far side of the table, staring at him intently. Blank puzzlement was succeeded by a fresh wave of anger, as realization struck him. God damn them, they’d brought him to view the carcass in order to see whether he might betray some manifestation of guilt!
He hoped no sign of his fury showed on his face. Heart thumping, he moved slowly down the table, examining the wreckage.
They had laid out the broken chunks in rough order, a giant bronze clutter of jagged pieces. Near the shattered butt, he caught sight of an oddly curved piece, and despite his awareness of Jones’s scrutiny, put out a hand to it.
It was what remained of a leopard, couchant, part of the ornamentation from one of the cannon’s dolphins. No more than the head remained, split right through. The face snarled intact on one side of the small chunk of metal, ear laid back. The other side was broken, the pitted brass already greening.
“My lord?” Gormley’s voice was questioning. Paying no attention, Grey reached into his pocket and drew out a small piece of bronze, smoothly cast on one side, rough on the other. It was heavy in his hand, dark, clean, and cold. The last time he’d held it thus, it had been still warm from his body, and darker yet, slick with his blood.
There was a murmur of interest and excitement. Gormley leaned close to see, and Captain Jones, in his haste to look, too, caught his hip a wallop on the corner of the table, making the pieces of the cannon rumble and clang. Grey hoped it would leave a bruise.
“Where did you get that, Major?” Jones asked, rubbing his hip as he nodded at the fragment Grey held.
“The surgeon who removed it from my chest gave it me,” Grey answered, very cool. “A memento of my survival.”
“May I?” Gormley extended a hand, face eager.
Grey wished to refuse, but a glimpse of Jones’s hard interest prevented him. He tightened his lips and handed the cat’s face to Gormley. Cupping the larger remnant in his hand, the young man fitted the smaller one to it, restoring the leopard’s head.
Gormley made a small noise of pleasure at adding this bit to his jagged puzzle. Grey was more interested at what was still missing.
There was a dark crack between the halves of the leopard’s head, where a two-inch sliver of metal was still missing. Missing, but not gone. He still retained that small souvenir of his brief acquaintance with Tom Pilchard—lodged somewhere in the depths of his chest. He was interested to see the dimensions of it—longer than he’d thought, but very slender—no more than a hair’s width at the narrower end.
The surgeon, digging through his chest with urgent fingers, had touched the end of the bronze splinter but been unable to take hold of it with forceps in order to draw it out—and after prolonged consultation with his learned German colleague, had decided that to leave it in situ was less risk than to attempt removal by cutting through his ribs and opening his chest.
Grey had been in no condition to contribute to that debate, nor did he remember everything they’d done to him, but he recalled—and with no sense of shame whatever—the warmth of tears running down his face at the news that they did not propose to hurt him any more.
He hadn’t wept through all that terrible day, nor the ones that went before it. The dissolution, when it came, had been a blessing, acknowledgment of mourning for the lost, acceptance of what remained of his life.
“Major Grey?” He became aware that Gormley was squinting curiously at him, and shook off his memories abruptly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I only asked, sir—when the gun blew up, did you hear anything?”
The question was so incongruous that he actually laughed.
“Did I hear anything? Beyond the explosion, you mean?”
“Well, what I mean, sir …” Gormley struggled for clarity. “Did you hear just a loud bang, same as you would when the gun was fired? Or perhaps two bangs, right close together? Or a bang, and then a … clang? Metal, I mean.” He hesitated. “I mean … did you hear the sound of the gun breaking?”
Grey looked at him, arrested.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I believe I did. A bang and a clang, as you put it. So close together, though … I couldn’t swear …”
“Well, they would be,” Gormley said eagerly. “Now, what I understand, sir—this wasn’t your regular gun?”
Grey shook his head.
“No. I’d never seen it before.”
Gormley—Grey could not help thinking of him as “Gormless,” the name was so the opposite of his small, quick cleverness—creased his narrow brow in a frown.
“How many times did it fire before it exploded?”
“I have no idea,” Grey answered shortly. This was beginning to echo the bloody inquisition he’d been through half an hour before, and he had no intention of repeating himself ad infinitum to a series of questioners of descending seniority. To forestall more questions, he seized the moment to ask his own.
“What are those?” He pointed to the broken barrel where several half circles scalloped the edge, quite unlike the jagged shear of the rest.
To his surprise, Gormley stiffened and glanced uneasily at Jones, who gave the young man a flat, blank sort of look.
“Oh. That’s … nothing, sir.”
The devil it is, thought Grey. But he had had enough of mystifications and dark hints. Moved by impulse, he picked up the smaller fragment of the leopard’s head, restored it to his pocket, and bowed to Jones and Gormley.
“I have business elsewhere, gentlemen. I bid you good day.”
He turned on his heel, ignoring cries of protest. To his surprise, Captain Jones positively sprinted after him, catching him by the sleeve at the edge of the shelter.
“You can’t take that!”
Grey glanced at the captain’s hand on his sleeve, keeping his eyes fixed there, until Jones’s grip relaxed.
“I beg your pardon, Major,” Jones said stiffly, standing back. “But you must leave that bit of metal here.”
“Why?” Grey lifted a brow. “The fragments will be melted down, surely?” Such a small bit of brass couldn’t be worth the tenth part of a farthing.
Jones looked taken aback for an instant, but rapidly regained his confidence.
“That bit of metal,” he said in severe tones, “is the property of His Majesty!”
“Of course it is,” Grey agreed cordially. “And when His Majesty likes to ask me for it, I shall be quite happy to give it to him. For the moment, though, I shall keep it safe.”
Taking a deep breath in preparation, he wrapped the edges of his cloak around himself, pulled his hat well down, and dived into the rain. Jones didn’t follow.
He had a decent sense of direction and was used to finding his way through foreign towns and open country alike. Keeping in mind the directions Gormley had given him as they sped through the Warren, he was able to find his way back past the maze of the proving grounds to the foundry, pausing only now and then to take his bearings.
The din in the foundry seemed almost welcoming, a cheerful, self-absorbed racket that was completely uninterested in Major Grey and his experiences on the battlefield at Crefeld. He paused for a moment to watch a moulder beating with an iron rod at a great heap of clay that sat on a bench before him, while an assistant shoveled handsful of horse dung and wool clippings into the mix, counting as he did so.
In the next bay, men were winding rope carefully round a tapered wooden spindle, some ten feet long, that sat in a sort of large trough, suspended in notches at either end—the cannon mould to which the clay would be applied, he supposed.