Blunted Lance (34 page)

Joshua considered. ‘I’d take you home,’ he offered, ‘but Mother’s at Red Cross this afternoon. She goes to the hospital. And my sister Chloe’s out to tea. There’s nobody there.’ He smiled. ‘Still, there’s Uncle John at the farm. And Aunt Jane. They’re always at home because of the animals.’

‘Why, how about going to see them, then?’

‘It’s a long way.’

‘I’ve got an automobile.’

The automobile was a small yellow runabout with a round brass bonnet and a dickey seat.

‘Is it fast?’ Josh asked.

‘Not as fast as an aeroplane. Soon I hope I’ll be flying one. I’ll loop the loop over the house if I come to see you by air. Then you’ll know it’s me.’

‘Father says that aeroplanes have taken over reconnaissance duties from the cavalry.’

‘I guess they have. Does he mind?’

‘I think he does a bit.’

As they rattled through Braxby, Joshua pointed out the Home Farm and the cottage where Tyas Ackroyd had lived. ‘He was in the Light Brigade, too,’ he said. ‘He’s just died. That cottage belongs to his son, Ellis Ackroyd. He was wounded last year.’

Just ahead of them a girl was struggling along with a basket.

‘That’s my cousin Rachel,’ Josh said. ‘She’s older than me. She helps at the farm since she left school and does part-time work at the hospital in York. I expect she’s on her way home.’

‘I guess we’d better give her a lift.’

Rachel’s head turned as the car squeaked to a stop alongside her. Her first reaction at the sight of the uniformed young man smiling at her was one of indignation, then she saw Josh sitting alongside him.

‘Hello, Josh,’ she said. ‘What are you up to?’

‘We’re just going to the farm, because Mother’s at the hospital, Chloe’s out to tea and Grannie and Grandpa are having their afternoon nap. This is—’

As he paused, uncertain, the young man jumped from the car.

‘Micah Burtle Love.’

‘He’s some sort of relation, I think,’ Josh said. ‘He says Grannie was a Burtle or a Love or something and that Grandpa met her at his house while he was fighting the Battle of Yellow Tavern.’

Love grinned. ‘Not quite, but I guess it’s near enough. It makes us cousins about four times removed.’

By the look on Rachel’s face, it seemed to Josh she wouldn’t have minded if they’d been cousins eighty times removed and she climbed into the little yellow car cheerfully, pushing Josh hard up against Lieutenant Love and proceeding to talk over his head in the usual manner of self-important older girl cousins.

‘I had to come and look you up,’ Love said. ‘I’d heard of all you-all from my Grandfather. Why, he was always talking about the English branch of the family.’

‘He’s going to be a pilot,’ Josh said helpfully. He got on well with Rachel and he could see she was already smitten by this young man from America. Micah Love was tall and strong-looking with a straight nose, dark curling hair and a firm chin. Above all he had a yellow sports car and Josh could see that had possibilities as far as he himself was concerned.

Rachel was looking at Micah Love excitedly. ‘Philippa’s boyfriend’s a pilot,’ she said. ‘He’s a captain now and a flight leader or something. He’s already got two medals. Hedley Ackroyd. Do you know him?’

‘I guess not.’

‘Everybody knows the Ackroyds. They’ve lived here for years. Hedley’s the one with the brains. Philippa’s absolutely gone on him. She spends all her time looking at his photograph and writing letters to him. She says he’s been wounded.’

It was the first Josh had heard of it. ‘Where?’ he asked.

‘In the—’ Rachel giggled ‘—in the bottom. It’s not serious.’

‘I meant, where was he flying?’ Josh said sternly, feeling she wasn’t paying sufficient attention.

‘Oh! Near Arras, I think. He’s coming home. She says he won’t be going back for a bit, either. She’s absolutely head over heels about it.’

‘Of course she is,’ Josh said. ‘He’s shot down seventeen German planes.’

John Sutton was standing by the gate of the farm when they arrived, watching a herd of cows amble through into a field. His wife, Josh’s Aunt Jane, was watching from the door.

‘I’ve got a German aunt, too,’ Josh said.

‘Sssh,’ Rachel said. ‘Mr Love won’t want to hear about them.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, they’re Germans, aren’t they?’

‘Grandpa always says it doesn’t matter,’ Josh said. ‘I liked Uncle Karl. He was killed last year.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Love said.

‘I think Grandpa was, too.’

When Josh returned to the Manor, the postman was just cycling away and there was a large Daimler outside with a liveried chauffeur sitting at the wheel. Sitting in the hall was Aubrey.

‘’Lo, Aubrey,’ Josh said.

‘’Lo, Josh.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Father’s come to see Grandpa. But he’s still asleep so he’s talking to Grannie in the drawing-room.’ Aubrey faced his cousin proudly. ‘My sister May’s got engaged to a lord,’ he said. ‘Lord Tinsley. He’s Lord Lemprier’s son.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, he’s a lord, isn’t he?’

‘I wouldn’t marry a lord.’

Aubrey eyed Josh doubtfully. Up to that moment, he’d never had any qualms, but from the way his cousin spoke it seemed there were grave dangers in marrying a lord.

‘Why not?’

‘Well, who wants to marry a lord, anyway?’

Aubrey smiled. Josh’s objection clearly wasn’t based on very sound foundations. ‘Father says I can join the Regiment when I’m eighteen,’ he went on. ‘He says it’ll be useful. Meeting people. That sort of thing.’

‘Is that the only reason? I shan’t join the Regiment because of that.’

‘Why will you join?’

‘To serve my King and Country.’ Josh had a feeling he was being priggish but it was a good closing line and he headed for the drawing-room, leaving Aubrey still waiting for his father.

As he reached the door, he saw it was open and his Uncle Robert seemed to be angry.

‘Look, Mother,’ he was saying. ‘You can say what you like, but I feel something should be done. The house can’t be split down the middle. My chap, Sleete, could make the arrangements.’

Lady Goff answered quietly and she seemed to be hanging on to her temper with difficulty. ‘Your father,’ she said, ‘will do what he thinks fit, I’m sure.’

‘But it can’t be left in the air for ever, can it? Dammit, Mother, he’s getting old. I’ve noticed it particularly in the last year.’

‘So you’ve come to me?’

‘Well, you’re a lot younger, aren’t you? I expect you make the decisions these days.’

Lady Goff’s chin lifted. ‘I have never made the decisions except in my own department.’

Robert laughed. ‘Then you ought to start, Mother,’ he said. ‘I always thought Americans believed in get-up-and-go.’ He lit a cigar and puffed blue smoke. ‘Something’s got to be decided, and, as I say, Father’s getting old—’

‘I hope you’re not suggesting he’s non compos mentis.’

Josh looked round. Aubrey was watching him from the hall. ‘What’s non compos mentis?’ he whispered.

‘Dunno. What are they going on about?’

‘Dunno. This place, I think.’

‘Why?’

‘I think Uncle Robert wants it.’

‘Why?’ Aubrey looked puzzled. ‘We’ve already got a house.’

Inside the drawing-room, Robert was speaking again, trying to reassure his mother. ‘Of course he’s not non compos mentis,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think he has the same grasp on things he used to have. Not since the Regiment was cut up. The Somme seems to have knocked the stuffing out of him.’

‘It might have knocked the stuffing out of you, Robert—’ Josh noticed how cold his grandmother’s voice had become ‘—if you’d been part of it.’

‘Oh, Mother, surely you don’t believe all that tradition nonsense they preach, do you? You’re American—’

‘We had our traditions, I remember, even in America.’

‘Well, I think I ought to talk to him.’

‘Not today, you will not, Robert!’ The old woman’s voice was frigid with anger. ‘Certainly not today!’ She held out a letter. ‘I’ve just heard from Lucy Ellesmere that Ned’s been killed. Your father doesn’t know yet but he soon will.’

Robert was taken sufficiently aback not to argue. ‘When shall I call again then?’ he asked.

‘When he’s ready to see you. Your father’s a man capable of great feelings, Robert, something I sometimes feel you’re not. And if you dare say a word to him about financial matters until he wishes to hear you I’ll never forgive you.’

As Robert went out of the drawing-room, he was frowning deeply and chewing at his cigar so much he never noticed Josh standing beside the monk’s chest that graced the wall by the door as he snatched up his son.

Josh stared after him, troubled. Inside the drawing-room his grandmother was staring out of the window, her back straight, a small rigid figure with a face stricken with misery. It bothered him so much, he crept through the open door.

‘Grannie,’ he said. ‘Micah Burtle Love’s come.’

She started and turned. ‘Who?’

‘Micah Burtle Love. He’s over at Uncle John’s and Aunt Jane’s. We had tea there. I think Rachel’s gone on him already.’

The war continued to stagger from crisis to crisis. The summer weather was appalling and leading the 19th Lancers through the steadily falling rain, Dabney’s eyes were bleak as the wind blew the drops of water from the rim of his steel helmet on to his cheeks.

Behind him the column of horsemen splashed along the muddy road, occupying most of its surface so that men on their own two feet had to step aside. The road seemed to be packed with troops, shuffling infantrymen, transport units, artillerymen, ambulances, all edging out of the way as the Lancers slogged back to their camp after yet another false alarm, yet another false hope of a breakthrough that would permit them to charge to Berlin. Instead of a charge there had been only a weary wait in the rain, cold and hungry and soaked to the skin, with a few horses and men killed for nothing by shellfire, and then the tramp back again, shapeless figures under the shining rain-wet capes, faces shadowed by heavy helmets, their horses weary, their ears drooping, their coats streaked with water, their legs splashed with mud.

The Flanders countryside looked grey and sodden. Somewhere up ahead where the guns rumbled, soldiers were trying to push forward through the waist-deep morass. Off the road, mules and horses, their coats plastered with mud, were struggling fetlock-deep, and guns were sinking beyond their wheel-hubs as they fired and having to be abandoned because nothing on earth could manage to drag them free. Lorries sent to help, tractors even, sank with them in the increasing wilderness of mud and water.

The rain had laid a thick mist over the land and because the earth was grey, everything else in the sodden landscape was grey, too. Lorries were grey. Guns were grey. Horses were grey. Men were grey. War, Dabney supposed, was a grey business. There was nothing to relieve the monotony of the drabness as far as he could see, nothing but a flat, soaked landscape with broken houses, their shattered rafters sticking up like the ribs of some long-dead animal among the stark and mutilated trees. Already it took nine hours to bring a wounded man from the front line back to safety.

Yet the newspapers continued to call what was happening a success, hailing advances that seemed to bring only casualties but no sign of victory.
The Spectator
had even congratulated the General Staff on the new blows that were being delivered and was suggesting that all the lessons of the past three years had been well learned and were now being applied with science and resolution. Staff work, they claimed, was irreproachable.

At a bleak crossroads – as bare as a Lincolnshire railway halt – a group of tanks had gathered just off the hard surface. There was a strong smell of petrol fumes and hot oil in the damp air and the ears were filled with the throb of engines as the grey mud-plastered monsters waited.

A colonel wearing the badges of the tank corps was sitting in a car shouting at a young staff officer in an immaculate uniform who stood alongside. It was clear from the cleanness of his uniform that the younger officer had come from headquarters. After this waste of ugliness, headquarters always seemed achingly, spotlessly clean.

‘It won’t work,’ the colonel was raging. ‘I’ve said so before and I’m prepared to say so again! To whoever wants to know! It’s impossible!’

As the staff officer turned away, his face pink with anger, the colonel lifted his head and Dabney saw it was a man he had known at Colchester. He looked up and managed a twisted grin.

‘Hello, Dab,’ he said. ‘You people been trying to charge through the gap again?’

Dabney gave him a bleak smile and the colonel gestured angrily. ‘It’s pathetic, isn’t it? They try on this breakthrough-with-a-charge-into-the-gap thing about once a month, when it ought to be obvious that as far as the tanks are concerned this bloody battle’s finished and done with.’ He gestured at the weeping sky. ‘Flying Corps and cavalry, too, it would seem to me. Can’t you knock some sense into those idiots at headquarters?’

‘I’ve long since stopped trying,’ Dabney said. ‘Is there something new on?’

The colonel drew a hand across his face. ‘They want us to put on another show. You’ll be hearing, I expect. They simply won’t believe it when we tell ’em these monsters of ours are useless in that bloody bog out there.’ He gestured at the grey lozenge shapes just off the road. ‘We could win the war with those beauties you know, given the right conditions – and if
we
were allowed to say what
are
the right conditions. The bloody money spent on the initial barrage at Passchendaele would have built over four thousand of those machines. Enough to win any war. At the very least it would have provided the aeroplane engines we need to make ’em go faster. But nobody bothers! All they ask for is another attempt at a breakthrough to exploit your horses.’

‘The idea of a cavalry attack’s mad,’ Dabney snapped. ‘A man on a horse sticks out like a pea on a drum. If they try to launch us in any numbers the slaughter will make Balaclava look silly. For a commander even to gallop round his squadrons when they’re deployed’s courting suicide.’