Post of Honour (14 page)

‘Then all I can say is I wish to God I had it,’ Paul said emphatically. ‘It seems to me we rushed into the business without a thought as to what was at stake and these people here, the Walt Pascoes and the Smut Potters, are amateurs. We all know what happens when an amateur takes on a professional!’

‘They’ll stay amateurs for a bit,’ John said, ‘but that’s what I’m driving at. When they get desperate enough they’ll knock hell out of everybody. Go up to that camp and watch those cotton-spinners at bayonet practice.’

‘Not me,’ Paul told him, ‘I’ve no stomach for the business and I still think we were damned stupid to get drawn into it.’

‘Well,’ John said, ‘I can understand that, knowing you. For too long now you’ve been giving your attention to what happens in your own backyard but when you realise that backyard is at stake you’ll outdo the rest of them! That’ll be when your Puritan streak shows. Puritans only show fight when they’ve convinced themselves their way of life is threatened. After that there isn’t many who can stand up to them for long.’ He got up and knocked out his pipe. ‘Will you tell Maureen not to wait supper? I think I’ll take a turn along the river road.’

‘Do you want company?’

‘No,’ John said, smiling, ‘but if I did I should prefers yours to anyone’s. Thanks for coming down and thanks for getting my brain working on an abstract issue. I don’t know whether it was intentional but it worked!’ and he took his hat and stick and went out abruptly leaving Paul to contemplate two framed portraits on the mantelshelf, one of Roddy in his rakishly tilted naval cap, the other of the fat surprise packet Maureen had produced not so long ago, now asleep in the little room over the porch where Paul had spent his first night in the Valley. He thought, as he lit the lamp, ‘I wish those bloody fools who had poor old John Rudd drummed out of the Army on account of that Prince Imperial incident could have shared the half-hour I’ve just spent with him! Could I show that much dignity if I’d just had a telegram telling me Simon or one of the twins had been blown to bits in somebody else’s quarrel thousands of miles away?’ He sat finishing his whisky, having heard the girl whom Maureen employed as a maid clank off into the dusk on her bicycle. Presently Maureen came back and he gave her the message. ‘Well, that’s John’s way,’ she said, ‘he always is greedy with his troubles. Can’t bear to share ’em with any of us, but maybe you’ve noticed?’

‘Yes,’ Paul told her, ‘it was something I learned about him very early on. Did you see Claire?’

‘Yes and made a point of not telling her about Roddy, tho’ I rather wish I had. She almost bit my head off and the twins came in for a slap apiece. Is she that much upset about Ikey marrying the Potter girl?’

‘About as upset as I’ve seen her.’

Maureen said, as though to herself, ‘I find that very odd!’ and then, turning to face him, ‘Top up your drink, Paul, for you’re going to need it!’ and when he protested that he had already had too much whisky she took the decanter and half-filled his glass. ‘I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone, not even John, and you can please yourself whether you make use of it or not! If it wasn’t for Ikey, Claire Craddock would almost certainly still be Claire Derwent. At all events, she wouldn’t be mistress of Shallowford tucking your children into bed!’

Paul said, ‘What the devil did Ikey have to do with me marrying Claire?’ and Maureen, trying but not altogether succeeding to keep the chuckle out of her voice, replied, ‘It was a letter written by him saying you were calling for her, that got her down here that time you were laid up after the wreck. And that’s not all either, not by a long chalk! He wrote to Claire at the instance of Grace. The letter was written in her rooms that time he ran off to London.’

Said like that, bluntly and factually, it did not make an immediate impact on him. After a pause, while she waited for it to sink in, he said, ‘How do you know that? How long Have you known it?’

‘I’ve known it ever since I came here.’

‘
He
told you? Ikey told you?’

‘He did that, down by Codsall bridge a week or two after it happened.’

‘You believed him?’

‘Of course I believed him. Would a boy of his age manufacture a story like that? Besides, Ikey was never a liar.’

The implications of her story began to register. He said, wonderingly, ‘But he was only a kid! Claire came home on chance and finding me laid up volunteered as a nurse. If I remember rightly you engaged her.’

‘Claire never mentioned that letter to you? The one telling her you had been calling for her when you were running a high temperature?’

‘Never! I didn’t know there was a letter!’

‘Well boyo, there was! You can depend upon it and there isn’t much doubt that the girl took it at face value, believing what she wanted to believe. Knowing that, I’m sorry I blabbed. She probably had good reasons for forgetting. Still, I’ve told you now so it’s up to you if you jog her memory or not. The fact is she owes Ikey Palfrey her happiness, but come to think of it, so do you, for this silly business will blow over soon enough and taken all round you and Claire are as well-matched a pair as I’ve ever doctored!’

He said nothing for a moment so that presently she picked up his glass and pushed it into his hand. ‘Get it down, lad,’ she said, ‘it’s not Irish whiskey but it’ll serve!’ and after he had swallowed the measure and still remained silent, she cocked her head on one side and said, humouring him, ‘There now, it’s not worth brooding on. What began as a hoax turned out well enough for all of us, didn’t it?’

‘In the light of what you’ve told me,’ he said, slowly, ‘her present attitude to Ikey is impossibly arrogant! Ought she to be reminded of what she owes him?’ and it was Maureen’s turn to consider.

‘No,’ she said at length, ‘I don’t suppose it would help in the least, it would probably harden her against him. How many of us enjoy coming face to face with a generous creditor after a lapse of ten years?’

For the first time since he had heard of Ikey’s intention to marry Hazel Potter Paul was able to smile. ‘You were in attendance as doctor at the time so will you tell me one thing more?
Did
I cry out for Claire?’

‘If you did I didn’t hear you,’ she said, ‘but you have to give that boy full marks for originality!’

He went out and up the drive feeling a good deal less despondent than when he had descended it. He found that his memories, jogged by Maureen’s story, were sharp enough when he summoned them. He could recall waking up after they had set his bones on the kitchen table and seeing Claire over by the window, looking as if she had always been there and would always remain there, and he could also recall his sense of relief at her presence, as though the excitement and terrors of the wreck had, in half-battering the life out of him, filled a vacuum left by Grace and given a new twist to his life. He thought, a little smugly, ‘Let her sulk! Let her indulge her damned Derwent pride, for that’s all it is now I can get a close look at it! I could puncture it by telling her what I know but Maureen’s right—it would only drive a permanent wedge between her and the boy, for what woman likes to be reminded of the tricks she played to get what she wanted? And she must have wanted me pretty desperately and Shallowford too I daresay, although I don’t blame her for that. She’s been a good wife and mother and she cares for this place as much as I do, so what have I got to complain about?’

He took a long sniff at the damp evening air and went in to begin his penance. He might have dragged his step a little if he had suspected that it would see him through Christmas and well into the New Year.

Chapter Four

I

B
y early spring, 1915, the people of the Valley were dispersed as they had not been for two-and-a-half centuries. The last exodus on this scale had occurred as long ago as July 1685, when the Duke of Monmouth came recruiting and some of the Sorrel men had been rash enough to volunteer for a shorter war that had ended, for most of them, on the field of Sedgmoor or in transportation to the sugar plantations of Barbados.

Will Codsall, Dandy Timberlake, Walt Pascoe, Jem Pollock, Smut Potter, Gilbert Eveleigh, Tremlett the huntsman and Tod Glover, the mechanic, were already in khaki, the first three overseas, the others in training camps up and down the country. Others were on the point of going, including the sons of Eph Morgan, the Coombe Bay builder, and Abe Tozer, the Coombe Bay smith, and Willis, son of the Shallowford wheelwright. Tom Williams, who was a naval reservist, and his nephew Daniel had been at sea for months, minesweeping on the same vessel off Rosyth and by the time primroses were fading in the river road hedgerows one or two of the women had left, among them Rose Derwent, of High Coombe.

The war had given Rose’s life a painful jolt but it happened that the enforced closing down of her riding school brought compensations. By May, 1915, she was married and mistress of an estate larger and more impressive in every way than that of her sister Claire, so that Edward Derwent, who had once dreamed of being freeholder of three hundred acres, now had prospects of seeing his grandchildren (providing thirty-four-year-old Rose bestirred herself) inherit two appreciable slices of the English countryside. It was an astonishing turn of fortune for the glum, taciturn man who, only a decade before, had resigned himself to dying a tenant farmer and sometimes he found it difficult that both his daughters had, against all probability, made brilliant matches. Yet it was so, for Rose married Major Barclay-Jones, DSO, on the first of May, 1915, and whilst Edward Derwent could claim no credit for getting Claire off his hands he played a vital role in disposing of the amiable horse-faced Rose, whom everyone declared would die an old maid and that in spite of inheriting her mother’s seat on a horse.

There had been little to occupy Rose after the Government had emptied her stables in the hectic days when the High Command still had visions of cavalry charges over open country. Almost every hunter in the Valley had been bought and carted away and Hugh, her brother, ran High Coombe very efficiently with the help of his father, a hired hand too old to enlist and a couple of boys. For a time she mooched about in the dairy and then, at her father’s instance, volunteered to serve in the YMCA canteen at the camp on the heath where she found herself the only woman among several thousand men. This would have been gratifying to most spinsters of thirty-four but it caused hardly a flutter in Rose’s heart. She had always preferred horses to men and easily parried the passes made at her by homesick middle-aged men and even a few younger ones desperate for feminine society. She made friends with some of the senior officers, however, among them the stoutish, loud-voiced Major Barclay-Jones, who, as a former hussar, bitterly resented his enforced association with sweaty infantrymen and stinking motors. The Major, a rather explosive little man of five and fifty, had been blown out of retirement by the trumpet blast of August 4th and it was not long before the frequency of his visits to High Coombe put a thoughtful look on Edward Derwent’s face. Unlike everyone else in the Valley he had never quite despaired of getting his elder daughter off his hands. He made a few discreet inquiries and was encouraged to learn that Major Barclay-Jones was a widower, owned a large estate in Gloucestershire, had two sons serving with the Army overseas and had been joint master of a famous hunt up to the time of rejoining the colours. It was this last piece of information that stimulated Derwent for he was a man who struck bargains with the minimum of sales talk, his method being to concentrate upon the most obvious selling point of the merchandise. Claire’s selling points had been numerous, among them her pretty face and what Grace would have called her ‘ripeness’, but Rose’s selling point if she could be said to possess one, was limited to her seat on a horse, a factor hardly likely to be overlooked by a man who had served thirty years in the 11th Hussars and had been master of a fashionable hunt.

In a matter as important as this Derwent could curb his pride. He approached his daughter, expressed a mild liking for the major and asked her bluntly, ‘If the man had said anything as yet?’ Rose, who could be obtuse, replied, ‘Said anything about what, Father?’ whereupon Edward, with a grunt of exasperation, took himself off to Shallowford and came riding home on Snowdrop, one of the two hunters left in the Valley, the other being Rose’s mettlesome four-year-old Prince, the horse she had once hoped to school into a national steeplechaser.

To give Rose any real chance at all, Edward decided, it would be necessary for the major to see her mounted on a good horse and also to watch her handle an animal that even the grasping Government Commissioners had left behind as too spirited for their requirements. By this time Derwent had taken Claire into his confidence and on her advice left nothing to chance. There being no hunting anywhere within hacking distance he arranged to borrow Snowdrop for a week and offer the major an hour’s pleasant exercise in the saddle on the afternoons he was free. Once he saw Rose in the saddle, once they were alone in the woods, Derwent decided, it seemed likely that Rose’s selling-point would become apparent to him. If nothing resulted what had any of them got to lose?

It succeeded with a speed that astonished him. On his return from their third excursion Major Barclay-Jones was so full of admiration for Rose that he stayed on for supper, drinking nearly a bottle of Edward’s sloe gin and pronouncing ‘The Gel’, as he called her, ‘the possessor of a spanking seat and the neatest pair o’ hands in the business!’ Encouraged by Derwent and another noggin of gin, he went even further: ‘Watched a lot o’ good nagsmen in my time,’ he added, after Derwent had murmured modestly that Rose was reckoned the best horsewoman west of Melton Mowbray, ‘but she tops ’em, Derwent! Tops ’em by inches! Dammit man, I watched her put that temperamental joker at a five-bar on the far side of the wood! Nothin’ rotten mind you—good solid timbah, by God!
Flew it!
Flew it with a foot in hand at full gallop! Joy to watch! Lovely action! Dam’ sorry I couldn’t follow but the old grey is past it, like me, since I tied in with those blasted foot-sloggers!’

A day or so later, however, the major showed that he was not quite past it and put the seventeen-year-old Snowdrop at the bole of a fallen elm which he cleared with less than an inch in hand. He was so delighted with himself that he proposed on the spot and Rose, too astounded to accept or refuse, stuttered that he had ‘better talk to Father’, Providing, of course, ‘that he wasn’t joking’. He laughed all the way home at this but he was not joking. He was among the dwindling number of optimists who still believed that as soon as better weather set in the two-million-strong German Army dug in across north-eastern France would be herded back across the frontiers by a few regiments of British cavalry, waiting with drawn sabres to exploit a gap torn in the enemy’s lines by Sir John French’s Territorial drafts. It therefore followed that my midsummer he would be back at Lavington Court with all his commandeered horses restored to him and a new pack of hounds in the kennels. The mere prospect of sharing life with a gel of Rose Derwent’s calibre persuaded him that he was good for another twenty years in the saddle.

So Rose travelled to Gloucester to meet his elderly half-sister (fortunately for everyone the possessor of yet another spanking seat) and because it was war-time, and everybody’s movements were uncertain, the wedding took place almost at once, a colourful little ceremony in Coombe Bay church with the groom in full regimentals and an arch of swords provided by officers from the camp. It was the first military wedding that had taken place there since the days of the South African war and the Valley was delighted. There were no bridesmaids, Claire acting as Matron of Honour, but the little church and yard was crammed, boys scrambling on to the granite obelisk of Tamer Potter’s grave in order to get a better view. Nobody in the Valley remembered Tamer that sunny May morning, but by macabre coincidence, Tamer was remembered vividly elsewhere that very same night.

All day on May 1st, 1915, the German U-boat that had been lurking off the Firth of Forth for a week or more stalked the minesweeper
Venturer
,
butting north towards Scapa Flow and the
Venturer
had two Sorrel Valley men in her crew. One was Tom Williams the leader of the fishing fraternity in Coombe Bay and the other was Tom’s nephew Dan, who had been his uncle’s crewman up to the time they left the Valley together. Dan was not a naval reservist like his uncle but had decided to share his active service because he was attached to him by ties stronger than blood. During a severe squall off Nun’s Head in the winter of 1910, when Dan was an inexperienced lad of seventeen, Tom had put life and boat in jeopardy to rescue the boy swept overboard in a heavy sea and ever since they had been inseparables. The boy had a great respect for his uncle’s seamanship whereas Tom was now linked to Dan by one of the strongest superstitions of the sea; having saved a soul from drowning he must abide by him for the rest of his natural life. At 2 a.m. sharp, on the morning of May 2nd, the U-boat fired two torpedoes, striking the
Venturer
aft and amidships and folding her like a hinge. She sank in six minutes and as there had been no chance to launch boats the nine survivors, including Tom and Dan, climbed aboard the only means of escape, a venerable life-raft that looked about as seaworthy as a soup-plate. Luckily the sea was no more than choppy but as they had but one paddle, and were all half choked with oil, their chances of making landfall seemed slim. Then, to their dismay, the U-boat surfaced, an officer addressing them by loud-hailer and speaking, to Tom’s amazement, what he would have called ‘Gentry English’.

‘How many are you?’ he asked and when Tom replied ‘Nine!’ the sleek, grey shape manoeuvred alongside and someone lowered a jar of rum and a bag of ship’s biscuits. The officer then gave Tom his position but when Tom told him that they had no means of making way, and that their only chance was to be picked up by daylight, a tow-rope was thrown aboard. For more than two hours the strange convoy moved westward, travelling at a speed designed to prevent the men on the raft being washed clear. When the U-boat cast off as the first streaks of dawn showed in the sky Tom saw that the Scottish coast was not more than five or six miles distant. It was difficult, he felt, to thank the man who had just sent his ship and most of his crew to the bottom but clearly some kind of acknowledgement was required, so he climbed unsteadily to his feet and bowed and the U-boat captain, standing on the conning tower, waved his hand and shouted, ‘Witness, gentlemen, we are not barbarians! Good luck!’ and went below. Within minutes the vessel had submerged and Dan Williams, drunk with excitement and several draughts of German naval rum, said, ‘Well, sod me? If that don’t beat all!’ but his uncle sternly admonished him for profanity and set about trimming the raft and distributing biscuits while the second mate, having fetched up what he hoped was the last of the oil in his stomach, set off the first distress flare.

It was not until they were being counted aboard a destroyer’s launch three hours later that Tom remembered another shipwreck, one that had occurred more than five hundred miles south-West of their present position, an occasion when, so to speak, the boot was on the other foot and roughly the same number of Germans had been hauled ashore half dead in Tamer Potter’s Cove and ferried to Coombe Bay as soon as the tide-race permitted. He did not see these two rescues as a coincidence but as an exercise in Divine book-keeping. There were nine German survivors out on that rock and there was enormous significance in the number. He thought about it all the next day when they were being fed, cosseted and fitted out at the Sailors’ Rest in Aberdeen and when, a day or so later, he and Daniel boarded the train for a nine-day survivors’ leave, he said to the young man, ‘Daniel! There’s zummat us’ll do the minute us gets to the Valley, zummat as
calls
for doin’, I reckon!’ Daniel could think of several things that he would like to do but since they included petting Eph Morgan’s daughter and sinking a quart of homebrew at The Raven, and since he was aware that his uncle would frown on both indulgences, he merely said, ‘Arr, an’ what’ll it be, Uncle Tom?’