The Honours (17 page)

DELLAPESTE

INTERLUDE 1

June 1935

T
he man known as Ivan Propp attached brass electrodes to a tiny, shivering, hairless creature, and prepared to transmit.

A candle burnt in a tin holder on his desk. He poured himself a second glass of 1865 calvados and dragged the dust sheet off the rest of the apparatus. The little chubmouse, blind and pink, scratched at the walls of its glass prison with its antler nubs, mewling to its brothers and sisters in the cage on top of the cupboard. Ivan sipped his calvados and grimaced. Sending a cross-channel wire was
une activité très désagréable
.

He found himself thinking in French more and more these days. Russian came to him only when he wrote, and the language of his homeland even less – only when he made a conscious effort, and sometimes on waking, and as he passed into sleep, as if that part of his life had already crossed the threshold and was waiting for him to join it.

He lifted the black earpiece to the side of his head. His index finger hesitated over the Morse key. Inside the larger glass partition of the telegraph apparatus, the mother chubmouse scrunched her eyes shut. She was the size of a Christmas pudding. Two patches had been shaved into the sandy fur on her fat back. Electrodes winked in the candlelight. She chirruped – he thought it had started, waited for the beeps in his ear, but it was just pre-message anxiety. These fleshy, docile creatures were not so insensible. They knew what was coming.

Just as he was reaching for his pocket watch, the mother chubmouse's jaw began to tick. In his ear, the ready signal cycled: MESSAGE BEGINS . . . MESSAGE BEGINS . . .

He took a pencil and transcribed. As the message continued, the mother chubmouse whined and bucked and stropped her antlers against the glass, overcome by a weird, disembodied torment. The electrodes read her discomfort as discrete units of current – a dot or a dash – and the equipment beside her compartment converted this into sound.

He spent a moment translating.

GIRL STILL MISSING STOP REQUEST MEETING TO DISCUSS STOP GUNS NEEDED URGENT STOP KIND REGARDS AS STOP

He reread the message, then screwed it up. Glancing towards the empty fireplace, he briefly contemplated the journey. The calvados had dampened the knifing pain in the small of his back, but as he placed his palm on the desk and tried to rise several ancillary pains replaced it. He dropped the balled message in his ashtray and touched a match to the top.

In its glass compartment, the baby chubmouse flinched at the sudden, flaring light. He waited till the message had burnt away to black flakes. He drained his glass, then placed a finger over the Morse key.

Pardonnez-moi, mon enfant
.

He began to tap. With each stroke, the hairless chubmouse pup convulsed, as his finger completed the circuit and sent electricity through its plump and wrinkled body. In the box alongside, the mother chubmouse lay inert – it was not her child.

But he could picture a creature, in a land so distant yet so dizzyingly close, writhing at each stab of the key.

MESSAGE BEGINS . . . MESSAGE BEGINS . . .

Ah, what agony to be a mother. To be so awake, to love so honestly. For what was love, if not feeling another's suffering as your own?

ACT TWO

July–September

Threescore years and ten the Lesser Threshold takes and holds in trust until the traveller's return. The angel and the lower creature are exempt: the former because he inhabits an unchanging, supermundane vessel, the latter because it has no soul.

–
Transportation And Its Practice
, A. Prentice

CHAPTER 11

IN BALANCE WITH THIS LIFE

July 1935

R
ain fell into the gravemouth, dripping from the wings of black umbrellas. Hunched and shivering beside Mother, Delphine watched it drum the lid of Mr Kung's coffin as men with ropes lowered him into the ground.

Mr Propp began to sing. He stood at the foot of the grave, dressed in black, a fist to his heart. Alice stood beside him, holding a brolly over his shining head. Propp sung in a minor key, in a language Delphine did not recognise. The scale sounded Middle Eastern, full of strange intervals, ululating, mournful.

The stench of grass and wildflowers and wet July earth was stifling. Delphine pushed her shoe against the sodden ground; brown water pooled around the toe. She glanced at Dr Lansley, on the opposite side of the hole. He had a leather glove pressed to his mouth. He regarded the pit with a look of disapproval. He seemed to despise Kung for giving up so easily.

Propp finished his song. He stepped forward and tossed a handful of dirt onto the coffin. It landed in a clod and washed away. Dr Lansley stepped forward, soil balled in glove. A big wedge of earth broke loose beneath his foot. He wobbled. Dirt sloughed into the grave. Miss DeGroot, wrapped in black satin, grabbed his collar and pulled him back.

Everyone took a step away. Dr Lansley stood in the rain, fruitlessly
slapping his sopping sleeves, blowing a spritz of moisture out of his thin moustache. One leg of his trousers was painted in mud.

‘I'm going for a bloody drink.'

Delphine spent the afternoon on the beach, watching the sea. Warm rain fell, fragrant with heather. It pelted her scalp and her ears and the nape of her neck, and she barely felt it. Spume washed over broken shells. She watched the waves, kept expecting Mr Kung to break the surface, kelp slopping from beneath his bowler hat, a boyish smile on his face as he strode shoreward, ready to reclaim his shoes.

As the tide went out, she walked to the pits she had dug at the mouth of the marshes. She plunged her crab hook into syrupy silt, dragging it around till she felt the scrape of iron on chitin. Most of the time the crabs gripped it with their pincers, clung on even as she lifted them dripping into her bag. It was their tenacity that did for them.

Why had Mr Kung killed himself? And why, if he really was a foreign spy, did she feel so sick and shaken by it?

Her shadow began to lengthen. Chunks of petrified tree jutted from the mud like rotten teeth. She took her bag filled with the day's catches and headed for the tunnel.

Delphine followed the tunnel from the beach to the wine cellar. At the top of the cellar stairs, she pushed a long brass key into the lock and opened the door. Finding out which keys fitted which locks had been a long, risky process.

She stuck her head out and looked both ways. The corridor was empty.

She locked the door behind her and headed left, past the game larder, where woodcock, teal, partridge, goose and pheasant hung glumly. Next door was the gun room. She unlocked the door with a second, smaller key, stepped in and shut it behind her.

A leathery smell hung in the cool, still air. On three walls, shotguns and hunting rifles of various sizes stood vertically in racks. Two locked glass cabinets housed vintage guns: a double-barrelled French
flintlock from 1760, a British Navy seven-barrelled Nock volley gun, a mahogany case containing a pair of silver-gilt blunderbuss carbines from the Caucasus. A punt gun with a two-inch barrel ran the length of the left-hand wall. She had read they could take down a flock of geese in a single shot.

She took a shotgun from the rack: a Westley Richards hammerless ejector, barely two years old. She squinted down the sights, stepped and swung, tracking the trajectory of an imaginary bird. The flesh beneath her collarbone ached. Shooting still hurt like blazes, but she was getting stronger. She wiped a smudged thumbprint from the walnut stock, then slotted the gun back in place.

She went over to a set of office drawers. They were supposed to be kept locked. The front of each drawer was labelled with an index card. She slid out the drawer marked ‘3', opened a couple of cartons and slotted her leftover cartridges into the gaps.

A cough from the hallway.

She cast around for refuge. The gun room was all display cases and empty space. She flicked off the light and as the filament died she threw her back to the wall beside the door. The door opened inwards, hiding her.

‘Hello?' A man's voice, hushed, querulous. It was Professor Carmichael.

She bit her lip.

He took a step into the room, pushing the door wide as he entered. She dodged before it could bump her shoulder.

‘Hello?' The floorboards creaked as he shifted his weight.

She noticed her spoils bag lying in the middle of the floor. Amongst all the wood and steel and leather, the green canvas was obvious. The thump of a shoe. Another. The far wall filled with his shadow.

‘Can I help you?' A woman's voice from the corridor: loud, common. The Professor's soles scraped as he turned. Pressed against the wall, Delphine exhaled thinly.

‘I, uh . . . '

‘Mr Carmichael.' It was Mrs Hagstrom. ‘How did you get in there?'

‘Uh, uh, it was open.'

‘“Open”, he says. So if it's not barred and padlocked that's an invitation for you to come and go as you please?'

‘I'm sorry, I – '

‘“Sorry”, is it. That's the song now.' Delphine could hear a
whap whap
as of a blunt object striking an open palm.

‘It's Mr Propp,' said the Professor. ‘Pay, uh – Miss DeGroot is concerned as to his whereabouts. I was looking for him.'

‘In the gun room?'

‘Yes.'

Mrs Hagstrom stomped forward and grabbed the door handle. Delphine flinched. She could hear Mrs Hagstrom's panting through the inch of pine.

‘And is he in here?'

The Professor audibly sagged. ‘No.'

‘You're sure?'

‘Mrs Hagstrom, may I – '

‘Mr Carmichael – '

‘Actually, uh, it's Profess – '

‘
Mr
Carmichael.' Mrs Hagstrom inhaled. ‘If Mr Propp needs a place to contemplate life's great mysteries, you can rest assured it won't be down here. If he wants to fritter away his days ogling his belly button that's his lookout and his folly, but the moment he comes my side of the green baize I shall be after him with a carpet beater, inner peace or no. Some of us . . . ' she swept him from the room and slammed the door, ‘have work to do.'

Delphine heard her sorting through the big ring of keys like a gaoler. There was a reassuring
clunk-clack
as she relocked the door.

‘Now,' said Mrs Hagstrom, her voice clear and strident, ‘off with you. Go on! Off! Off!' Delphine listened to Mrs Hagstrom herding the Professor down the corridor. She allowed herself to exhale. So, Propp was off on his travels again.

A blast of damp heat hit Delphine the instant she entered the kitchen. She had sneaked round to the north side, to make it look as if she had come into the house via the servants' entrance, but the ruse was unnecessary; the room was such a commotion of clanking and yelling
that she could have entered through the chimney and no one would have noticed. The shelves were heaped with apparatus like a wizard's laboratory: copper pans, tureens, jelly moulds, weights and balances, whisks, ladles and heavy-bottomed pots. At the far end, several geese turned on a spit above the range, dribbling fat that hissed as it hit the flames, while behind them black kettles thrummed with water.

Mrs Hagstrom stood a short distance from the fire. She had her sleeves rolled up. Sweat glued hair to her brow. She bellowed commands without looking up from her work, the thwack of her blade keeping time.

Delphine wove round the back of Alice, who was cracking egg after egg into a pudding bowl, and presented herself to Mrs Hagstrom. The heat from the range was incredible; it came in waves, a physical thing that pushed against exposed skin. With the flames, the clouds of moisture and the clangs of industry, standing in the heart of the kitchen was like standing on the footplate of a steam engine.

‘Ah, Miss Venner!' called Mrs Hagstrom, the bang-swish-bang of the cleaver hacking her speech into a platter of discrete, confusing clauses. ‘A perfect disgrace, as usual, sauntering in, a whisker before, dinnertime, your skirt splattered, with muck the likes, I've never seen. And here I was, thinking your Mother, had forbidden you, from leaving the, house without her, permission. You look as if, you've been crawling, through a sewer pipe,' the cleaver arcing down through another shallot, ‘and surely that can't, have been
your
bag, I saw a minute, ago just lying there, on the floor of the gu – '

Delphine slammed a lobster on the table like a telephone receiver. Its pincers were tied with parcel string. The lobster and Mrs Hagstrom exchanged bemused glances. The cleaver hung in mid-air. Mrs Hagstrom looked at the cleaver, set it down.

‘Come with me,' she said.

This, then, was Mrs Hagstrom's weakness.

In the laundry room, Delphine handed over the lobster and two crabs – haggled down from four – in exchange for use of the servants' bath, a change of clothes, and Mrs Hagstrom's silence. The
air in the laundry room was warm and damp and cloying. The crabs were cold from the sea. Mrs Hagstrom put them in a bucket. She stood over the bucket, looking down.

Ten minutes later Delphine emerged from the bathroom in the scratchy blue housedress Mother had insisted she wear tonight. Her skin felt tender.

Mrs Hagstrom snatched up Delphine's hands, inspecting the fingernails.

She released them. ‘Hmph. That'll have to do.'

Delphine held out her muddy clothes. Mrs Hagstrom tumbled them into a ball which she wedged beneath her armpit.

‘Don't think you can go making a habit of this,' she said. ‘Next time I may be occupied by my duties – which are many and arduous – and you'll be left to make your own excuses. Now, get yourself to the dining room. What with all these distractions dinner'll be ash and cinders. Go on, before I come to my senses,' and she shooed Delphine upstairs.

Delphine's belly growled but no one was starting.

Lord Alderberen tapped his spoon against the rim of his wine glass and kept tapping until everyone fell silent. He set the spoon down. Vapour rose from his tomato and shallot soup, bathing his rumpled bluish face.

‘Noble colleagues – if I may say a few words before we begin the evening meal.' His head bobbed in a steady trickle of affirmation. He looked to Propp, who nodded for him to continue. Lord Alderberen usually took meals in his bedchamber. His presence at the dinner table was both awkward and momentous.

‘We have,' he said, in a voice with the wavering quality of a gramophone recording, ‘all of us, been affected profoundly by the events of last week. But in times of great adversity, we also find cause for great hope. Mr Propp and I have always said that the Society, if it is to be an engine for
real
change and not yet another cabal of pompous drawing-room philosophers, must demonstrate its efficacy through action. Rarely has this efficacy been demonstrated so resoundingly as on Wednesday, where quick thinking, skill, and
grace under fire ensured that Mr Kung reached hospital with a minimum of delay.'

He lifted his glass. ‘A toast.'

Everyone raised their drinks. Delphine shrank back in her chair, cheeks glowing.

‘To Dr Lansley.'

To Lansley
, repeated the diners.

Delphine was dumbfounded. No one objected. Even Daddy said nothing. Lansley accepted their praise, circling his glove like a traffic policeman.

Delphine was about to protest when she caught Mother's glare.

Propp gripped the arms of his chair and rose. ‘My dear brothers and sisters, I add only this: you see now why we must work. You see now how very little time we have.' He regarded the guests with his big, dark eyes. His gaze came to rest on Delphine.

Under the table, Delphine curled her toes. She refused to look away.

Propp sat. He picked up his spoon. When he lifted the first spoonful of soup to his lips and blew, everyone else started to eat.

After dinner, Delphine went below stairs and ate supper.

Mrs Hagstrom cut up some sandwiches and piled them on two plates: half were goose and half were crab. She laid out some butter and a jar of plum jam and more bread, and strong, hot tea in a big green pot that took both hands to carry. Alice and Mr Garforth and Mr Wightman the blacksmith and Mr Garforth's assistant Reggie Gillow shuffled onto the long benches either side of the table and began to help themselves. Next to the doorway sat a little black woodburning stove, its seams creaking as it heated up. On a corner shelf, the wireless crooned softly.

‘Nice of you to join us this evening, Martin,' said Mrs Hagstrom.

Mr Wightman nodded. He was wearing a checked cotton shirt with the cuffs buttoned back and his hair had been combed flat across his dented head. He had been at the Hall a lot recently, undertaking minor repair work on a room in the east wing where the rain got in.

‘Ta, Mrs H, this is lovely,' said Reggie. Reggie had not lost his job over the pheasant business, so either he had been innocent, or – and this was the explanation Delphine thought more likely – Mr Garforth had not had the heart to sack him. The sun had brought his freckles out; they jostled as he chewed.

Mr Garforth tutted. ‘Don't talk with your mouth full, boy.'

Alice was beaming. ‘Reggie doesn't get anything like this at home, do you, Reggie?'

‘Just greasy tea and a clip round the earhole.'

‘Well, if you don't watch your manners I'll make you feel right at home,' said Mr Garforth. ‘And
elbows
.'

Reggie slid his elbows off the table. ‘Sorry, Mr G.'

Delphine munched on a jammy doorstop and gazed over Alice and Reggie's heads at framed photographs, pristine against the lime-washed brick. The largest picture showed a pair of dray horses chained one behind the other to a game waggon, on which dead pheasants hung in dozens from long metal bars. She could not see the grass for corpses – they carpeted the ground. A man was looking into the camera with a sullen expression. He had three pheasants in each hand.