Tug of War
Authors: Barbara Cleverly
B
ARBARA
C
LEVERLY
lives in the middle of Cambridge, surrounded by ancient buildings and bookshops.
She was born and educated in the north of England at a Yorkshire grammar school and then at Durham University.
Barbara was inspired to write her first book,
The Last Kashmiri Rose
, following a successful outline sent to the Crime Writers’ Association/
Sunday Times
Debut Dagger Competition. A shortlisting and warm reception by the judging panel led to its writing in full. It was a
New York Times
‘Notable Book of 2002’, and Barbara has
gone on to write a further six Joe Sandilands novels.
Praise for Barbara Cleverly
‘The historical background of Barbara Cleverly’s novel is as fascinating as the murder. Stiff upper lip soldiers, American heiresses, handsome Afghan tribesmen
– they are all here in spades. A great blood and guts blockbuster.’
Guardian
‘A well-plotted novel . . . The atmosphere of the dying days of the Raj is colourfully captured.’
Suasanna Yager,
Sunday Telegraph
‘Spectacular and dashing. Spellbinding.’
New York Times
book review
‘Smashing . . . marvelously evoked.’
Chicago Tribune
‘An historical mystery that has just about everything.’
Denver Post
‘Maintains the high standards set by earlier Sandilands tales, blending a sophisticated whodunit with full-blooded characters and a revealing look at her chosen time and
place.’
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
Titles in this series
(listed in order)
The Last Kashmiri Rose
Ragtime in Simla
The Damascened Blade
The Palace Tiger
The Bee’s Kiss
Tug of War
Folly du Jour
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2006
First paperback edition published by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2008
Copyright © Barbara Cleverly 2008
The right of Barbara Cleverly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-84529-431-1
eISBN 978-1-78033-406-6
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
I have on my desk a tiny and very battered memento of the Great War – a soldier’s ‘Active Service Testament’. It is much thumbed
and clumsily repaired with pink sewing thread. There is a bloodstain which I have followed through to its source on a loose page of Acts 14, and I wonder if this was the passage the unknown soldier
who owned the book was reading when he was hit.
And saying, ‘Sirs, why do ye these things?
We are also men of like passions with you and
preach unto you that ye should turn from these
Vanities unto the living God . . .
Who, in times past, suffered all nations
to walk in their own ways.
’
This story is dedicated to the memory of all those who fell in the struggle to ensure their nations could continue to walk in their own ways.
Barbara Cleverly, January 2006
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Champagne
,
northern France
,
September 1915
Aline Houdart got off her bicycle and stood still, holding tightly to the handlebars. At this moment she needed to have her feet firmly on the ground and she fought down a
ridiculous urge to take off her shoes, the better to connect herself to the earth. Surely she was mistaken? The sound she’d heard was a tree crashing to the ground in the forest around her.
Or thunder. A snap of her starched headdress in the breeze as she rounded the bend perhaps. The explanations she snatched at were elbowed away by a single word: cannon. But at such close
quarters?
Aline thought at once of her parents. They would have been able to identify the make, calibre and direction of fire. Her parents knew all about cannon. In their distant youth they’d been
trapped in Paris during the Prussian siege of 1870 and, round a good fire in the wintertime, they still vied with each other to convey the horrors of bombardment by von Moltke’s fifty-ton
siege gun. Aline tried to recall their lurid accounts of the hellish din with its earth-trembling accompaniment.
The sound came again. She got her bearings and, as she stood with her face to the north, the late afternoon sun over her left shoulder threw a shadow to the east and north in the direction of
the blast. She stretched out an arm, extending the line, trying to remember what lay over there. The plain of Champagne, stretching for wide miles around Suippes and over to the bristling
fortifications clustering around Verdun. She could deceive herself no longer. This was heavy artillery but were the guns French or German? Perhaps General Joffre had begun the longed-for offensive
to clear von Bülow out of Champagne, but at all events the war was coming closer. No longer static, bogged down in trenches, not even creeping up quietly but advancing openly, snarling, in
leaps and bounds. Soon they’d hear its roar in the mountains to the south, one day perhaps in the hills of Provence. And by then her world would have been consumed, this perfect place reduced
to rubble.
She’d been lucky in her choice of day last month when she’d ventured north to look at the battlefield. It had been a quiet day at the front. She’d persuaded old Felix to get
out the carriage and the one decrepit nag they had left in the stables and drive her up to the very edge of the high country overlooking the plain with Reims at its centre. They’d found up
there an ancient chapel which, unscathed so far, appeared to have enjoyed the protective sanctity of an even more ancient Celtic grove and, from its shelter, they’d stared out in silence, too
shocked by what they saw to try to share their thoughts. The skylarks and wood doves had been making more of a clamour, she remembered, than the guns that day.
Framed by a canopy of beech leaves, under a hot August sky, the land of Champagne should have stretched out its smooth curves languorously, seductively, as it did in the coloured picture
postcards. For nearly two thousand years it had been a bountiful vineyard. Vines planted by Roman soldiers had thrived, the land had prospered.
It had taken less than one year to bring the ordered countryside to this obscene state of devastation.
Arrogant pigs, like all armies, the Romans at least had understood the lands they had conquered; they had trodden lightly and worked hard, leaving behind fertile and civilized provinces. Unlike
the present invaders. The chalky lines of their trenches tore hideous scars across the terrain, each countered by an allied trench but all advancing towards the centre where stood, blackened and
firebombed, roofless, its towers still raising defiant fingers at the enemy, the mighty Gothic cathedral of Reims.
The trenches. Clovis was there. Not riding, lance at the port, across open country towards the enemy but, in this modern war, bogged down, hedged in, crouching in the sketchy protection of one
of those scars. She’d blinked and stared at the distant battlefield swimming before her eyes. It was distorted, not by tears, but by a heat haze shimmering over the plain. She made an effort
to concentrate her thoughts on her husband, to feel his discomfort. After all these months of battle, his uniform would be quite worn out. Blue captain’s jacket and red trousers – it
was designed for cavalry officers peacocking about on chargers – a musical-comedy costume unsuitable for men wriggling on belly and elbows through mud and dust. And the steel helmet with
horsehair plume dangling down his back – what protection was that Napoleonic flourish against bursting shells and German snipers? In this heat the cuffs of his jacket would be chafing his
wrists, his high collar would be too tight, his feet blistered.
His physical state was easily imagined but with his thoughts and emotions it was more difficult to attempt a connection. Did he raise his head and glance behind him to the hills looking towards
the home he was fighting for? Were his eyes seeking the familiar outline of the grove on the hill, all unknowing, at that very moment, as she gazed down? What would he be thinking? Aline smiled. A
smile soured by a dash of irony. She knew what Clovis would be thinking. He’d be calculating the number of hods per hectare this wonderful summer would produce. If there were only hands
available to fetch in the harvest. If there were still grapes to be harvested. He wouldn’t know.
The vineyards surrounding Reims had been destroyed in the desperate German push to the south the previous summer. For two agonizing months, von Bülow’s troops had swarmed down over
the Marne in an impetuous and unscheduled dash, ravaging, destroying, stealing whatever resources they could lay hands on. Aline had fled with her son before the guns sounded, obedient to
Clovis’s instructions. But their cellar-master and his men had stayed on guard. No command, no plea, no reasoning from Aline had been able to shake these men, elderly but stout-hearted, from
their resolve to stay and guard their life’s work. A deserted château is the first to be pillaged, they’d maintained. The best vintages had been carefully concealed behind hastily
erected and plastered walls in the miles of tunnels in the chalk under the vineyard and the bottles immediately on view to a pillaging army were the less good wines, deceptively relabelled.
And their determination had paid off. Being well beyond the protecting bulwark of the Montagne de Reims and some miles distant from the river crossings, their remote valley and the
vignoble
had escaped with the lightest of German attention. General Joffre, calculating that the enemy forces were impossibly overstretched, had reversed the retreat of the French from the
north and unleashed his Fifth and Ninth Armies against the invaders. With the support of the British Expeditionary Force and the gallant dash of the French cavalry tearing into the gap between the
two halves of the German army, the Boche had regretted their incursion and made off back across the Marne to the north again. They had been unequal to the task of hauling spoil from such an awkward
piece of country, across a formidable river whose bridges had been blown up by the British, and the compulsion to lay greedy hands on heavy loot was more easily resisted when there were much richer
pickings to be had on the accessible plain around Reims.