Death at Glamis Castle (30 page)

She pulled her hand away and touched his scars again, speaking quietly. “I know you don't want me to ask, Charles, but it's time that you told me what happened in the Sudan. Colonel Paddington mentioned it when we were on the train—the business about your refusing the Victoria Cross, I mean. And resigning your commission.”

He was panicked. How could he tell the woman he loved the truth after he had kept it from her for so long? Come to that, what
was
the truth? Therein lay the problem, of course: he had not explained it to her because he had never resolved the matter in his own mind. He knew he wasn't a coward, but he was certainly a fraud. That was what the Army, for its own purposes, had made him. He took a deep breath and spoke.

“Yes, I suppose it's time I told you. You're probably the only person in the kingdom who hasn't heard the tale of my trumped-up triumph, and I'd rather you had it from me— the truth, that is. The King knows, or thinks he does, and Andrew, and Paddington. It's probably part of the reason I was chosen to command here.” He tightened his jaw. “But they're wrong, all of them. They only know what the Army reported, you see. They—”

“Excuse me, love.” Kate propped herself on her elbow, her face half-shadowed in the moonlight. “
What
tale haven't I heard? I know that you were a hero in the Sudan; I've caught snatches of that, here and there, and it's made me very proud of you. But what's this about people being wrong?
Who's
wrong?”

He spoke quietly. “The people who think I'm a hero.”

“And you're not?”

“That's the Army's version.” The words were bitter in his mouth. Would she still be proud of him when she heard what really happened? “The truth is that I got a lot of good men killed for little reason, and was made a hero for it.”

“I see,” she said gravely. “So that's the end of the story. Where does it begin?”

He pulled himself up, sitting against the pillow. “After I finished my studies at the military academy and the Royal Engineering School, I got myself posted to Cairo. I wanted to study the glories of ancient Egypt, you see: the pyramids, the Sphinx, bones and fossils, all that. It fit into the Army's plan for me very well. I was put in charge of a survey unit, laying out roads and the like. All quite peaceful, and lots of opportunity to pursue my own interests. But about that time, Gladstone sent Gordon to evacuate Khartoum.”

“Oh, dear,” Kate said. She lay down against him, her warm cheek against his bare chest. He could no longer see her face, and was glad.

“Yes. It was a singularly unwise move. Once there, the bloody fool decided to make a stand, apparently thinking that the British would decide to hold on to the Sudan. But they'd already given it up as a bad show, so he was out there on his own. Eventually, though, the Government realized that he'd have to be rescued, or there'd be a political disaster. So off we went—a motley collection of infantry, artillery, and an improvised camel corps.”

“To relieve Gordon?”

He heard the surprise in her tone, and the dismay. He dropped a kiss on her forehead and tangled his hand in her hair. “We almost succeeded. On our way south, we didn't have much contact with the Mahdi, so one morning I left the camp at Abu Fahr with a small detachment, to go out and survey a wadi.” He paused and added ruefully, “Of course, it was the fossils I was after. The evening before, we'd passed an interesting outcrop, and I wanted to have a closer look. On the way back, we were joined by a foraging party led by Captain Blake. As we got near the bivouac, we heard fighting, and when we topped the ridge, we saw Dervish troops swarming all over the camp.”

Kate took his hand from her hair and kissed it. “How awful, Charles.”

“It was, rather,” he said bleakly. “To hold them off, the men below had formed into a square. Blake ordered us to open fire from the ridge, but our fire had no effect, for the Dervish force had broken into the square. In desperation, Blake ordered his men to fix bayonets. But he'd no sooner given the order than he took a bullet in the head. He fell, and everyone looked at me. Without much thinking about it, I waved my Webley, shouted something—God only knows what, ‘For Queen and country,' or something equally silly—and ran down the slope, straight into the melee. My men followed me, pell-mell, and Blake's men followed them. I fired until my revolver was empty, then picked up a Henry-Martini rifle and got a cartridge into it.” The words seemed to burn in his throat, like something corrosive. “There was a Dervish right in front of me with his spear drawn back, ready to fling. I pulled the trigger a split-second too late. The spear point sailed past my left shoulder. The shaft stopped abruptly, almost touching it, and when I turned to see what had happened, I found it was embedded in the chest of my young sergeant. I will never forget the look of surprise on his face.” He swallowed hard. “That was the last thing I recall until I woke up in hospital, with everyone making a great fuss over me. They made out that I had personally saved the regiment, managing somehow to drive the attackers off—long enough, anyway, for what was left of the regiment to regroup. But of all the men who followed me down that hill, thirty or forty or so, I was the only one left alive.”

“Oh, dear God.” Kate raised her head, and he saw tears in her eyes. “Still, if their sacrifice saved the others—”

“The point is,” he interrupted roughly, “that I've never been sure of that. All I know is that my men trusted me and died because of it. And in the long run, nothing we did that day made a ha'pworth of difference. An advance party got within sight of Khartoum whilst I was unconscious and discovered that Gordon and the entire garrison had been slaughtered.”

“But you
earned
the Victoria Cross,” she said, frowning. “Why did you refuse it?”

“Because I couldn't stand the thought of becoming a military institution,” he burst out, desperate to make her understand. “The hero of Abu Fahr. That's what they were up to, of course. The Army needed heroes, to distract from the loss of Gordon and his men. But the whole thing made me feel like a fraud, don't you see?”

“Yes,” she murmured, “I do see.”

“I hoped that refusing the V.C. would put paid to it. But it didn't. I had to resign, as well, and get away. And even that wasn't enough. Bits and pieces of the story got out, and my refusal and the resignation only made the whole thing seem more heroic. In the end, I had to accept a knighthood.”

“But that was for the photograph you took of the Queen at her Jubilee,” Kate objected. “The one she liked so much.”

“Another bit of Royal subterfuge,” he said. “You don't know what they're like, those Royals. When Victoria wanted something, she got her way, regardless. And Edward is no different.”

“I do know, a little,” Kate said in a musing tone, “from listening to Toria. And I think that Prince Eddy might not have been so different from you.”

“Eddy?” Charles frowned. “I'm not sure I understand.”

“You didn't want to be a hero, he didn't want to be a king. He must have felt that he somehow wasn't worthy, or deserving, or even up to the task. I think his earlier peccadilloes—all that erratic behavior that worried the Royal Family so much—might simply have been a protest against an accident of birth. Given a choice between being a king and going into exile, he chose exile. You say that you felt like a fraud; perhaps he felt like a fraud, too.”

“If it's true,” Charles said somberly, “I pity him. Born to be king, but knowing he didn't have it in him. And being pushed to do something he couldn't do—”

“Being forced to marry a woman he didn't love,” Kate put in. “By the Queen, whose only concern was to preserve the Royal dynasty.”

Swept by a powerful surge of feeling, Charles tipped up her face. “Yes, I pity him,” he said. “I pity any man who cannot have what he wants. Who cannot have what you and I share.” He paused. He felt better now, much better, but perhaps she wasn't yet satisfied. Suddenly he was overwhelmed by a sense of grave misgiving: how would she feel about him now that she knew his secret, the secret that he had kept from her so long? Half-fearing to hear her reply, he said, “Have I answered your questions, Kate? Is there anything else you'd like to know?”

She touched his lips with her finger and smiled, loving, teasing, playful, a smile that eased and delighted his heart. “Does my hero want me?” she whispered.

And once again, there was no more talking.

“Songs of Travel and Other Verses” Robert Louis Stevenson

 

 

 

 

The darkness was not absolute, for the moon, dim and pale, shone a flickering light through the window, and there was still a glow from the fire that had done little to warm the chilly room. Long after Charles had gone to sleep, his hand gently cupping her bare breast, Kate lay awake, thinking of all he had told her, shivering at the thought of how near he had come to death and wondering at the way he had held his feelings within himself all these years.

She could understand his resentment at being made into a hero when he himself doubted his heroism—doubted, even, the idea of heroism itself, when men like Gordon could sacrifice thousands of soldiers and civilians on the altar of self-aggrandizement and absurd dreams of glory. She could understand, as well, Charles's grief at the loss of his men: over fifteen years had gone by since Abu Fahr, but the anguish could still be heard in his voice when he spoke of the young sergeant who had been surprised by death. He was not the sort of Army officer to insist on the prerogatives of birth and breeding; he knew that the distinctions between classes were paper-thin, and would never have held himself above his men. No wonder they had followed him so willingly down the hill and into the terror of battle—and no wonder he blamed himself for their loss. But she could not understand why men kept such terrible secrets to themselves and refused to talk of the things that troubled them. A question suddenly occurred to her: would she and Beryl ever dare to put this tale into one of their stories? She had her doubts, but Beryl was incorrigible. Smiling, Kate put her hand over Charles's and held it as she fell asleep.

Kate woke abruptly as the great clock at the top of the tower struck twice, the sounds shivering eerily into silence. She had been dreaming of her conversation in the tea pantry that afternoon with Gladys. In her dream, the girl repeated several times what she had said earlier: that she had seen Flora carrying a large tea tray, heavily laden, going in the direction of the old part of the castle. “That part's haunted,” Gladys said, giving her coppery curls a warning shake. “I'd never gae there meself.”

Once awake, Kate's dream remained with her, and although she curved herself closer to Charles's warmth and firmly closed her eyes, she could not go back to sleep. For whom had Flora prepared that tea tray? Why had she taken it to the old part of the castle? The questions chased one another through her mind like the castle's fretful ghosts, rattling their chains, jostling her into restlessness.

Kate herself was not inclined to wander through haunted hallways in the dead of night, but the bold and incorrigible Beryl felt differently about such adventures. As Kate moved closer to Charles and tried to return to sleep, Beryl kept prodding her. Glamis was the oldest inhabited castle in Scotland and certainly the most ghostly, and night was the time when all those ghosts would be out and about. Famous ghosts, like the Gray Lady, Earl Beardie, the tragic Monster of Glamis, perhaps even Bonnie Prince Charlie or Sir Walter Scott. If she and Kate were going to gather ideas and material for the book, there would be no better time than tonight. Beryl grinned invitingly and cuffed her on the shoulder.
Shall we have a go, old girl?

No, not tonight,
Kate replied, as she fitted herself more snugly against Charles and pulled the covers over her head. The past two days had been long and tiring, and she was weary. They could explore the castle tomorrow, she promised Beryl. Tonight, they would sleep.

Suiting the deed to the thought, Kate closed her eyelids. A moment later, however, they were wide open again, and the irrepressible Beryl was poking more questions at her.
Well, if you're not interested in the castle's ghosts, Kate, what about that odd business of Flora and the tea tray? Where was Flora going? Why? Surely we ought to at least go and have a look. What are you afraid of? A few moldy old ghosts?

At last, wide awake and feeling exasperated with Beryl's relentless upbraiding and her own inability to sleep, Kate slid away from Charles, climbed carefully out of bed, and pushed her feet into her slippers. Charles turned over with a muffled sigh but did not seem to wake, as Kate, shivering in her nakedness, found the white flannel nightgown she had not bothered to put on earlier and dropped it over her head. Then she pulled on her flannel knickers and shrugged into her green dressing-gown, wrapping a thick woolen shawl around her shoulders for extra warmth. It might be August, but Glamis Castle held the chill of centuries of winters.