Lammas Night (57 page)

After she left, Ellis sat back in his chair and began filling his pipe, scooping the aromatic tobacco from the pouch and tamping it with his thumb. Graham had stopped shaking at his touch; now he merely felt drained. Mutely, he watched Ellis's hands making a soothing ritual of the commonplace.

“I imagine you're feeling just about as alone and bereft as you've ever felt before,” Ellis said after a moment longer. “I don't know if it makes any difference, but I wanted you to know that I understand what you're going through.”

“Do you?” Graham whispered.

“Yes.”

Ellis sucked on the pipe to check its draw, then struck a match and began sucking the flame carefully into the bowl. When it lit, he tossed the spent match and leaned back in his chair. Graham watched the whole operation in a daze, wondering what the older man was driving at.

“What are you saying?” he finally asked.

Ellis blew smoke over his head and suddenly looked wistful and a little sad.

“Just around the turn of the century—I won't tell you which side—I, too, had a high-ranking friend who was called to a higher destiny. I am bound by a number of oaths not to tell you who the person was. Not even Alix and David know—and no, I can't even tell you whether it was a man or a woman, though for the sake of convenience, you can think of the other person as a ‘he.' In any case, I was called upon to function in a role with which I know you're familiar. It was not easy for either of us, but we—did what had to be done. I still miss him very much,” he added.

Listening to the old man's confession with growing astonishment, Graham suddenly felt an even greater surge of kinship and affection for this man who had already been father and mentor for so many years.

“
You
were a slayer?” he whispered.

“Well, I wasn't the slain,” Ellis said with a kindly smile. “Apparently there are a fair number of us. I simply never realized you were one of them. I—did have a little assistance from other—brothers—though the ultimate responsibility was mine, of course, as it had to be. The point is that I know exactly how you feel and what a difficult road lies ahead for you. The gap between legend and life sometimes seems appallingly wide. Insofar as it's permitted in the greater pattern, I'll do whatever I can to help you.”

Graham swallowed and bowed his head, still reeling a little with the shock of revelation. Suddenly, several of the older man's comments over the past few months took on new meaning. He wondered whether Ellis had seen this coming all along—and whether he and his victim had been as close as Graham was to William.

“Were you—very good friends?” he murmured, impelled by morbid fascination to ask.

Ellis averted his eyes and took several slow, studied puffs on his pipe.

“Yes, we were,” he said after a moment. “Perhaps even as close as you and William. I know you'd like to know who it was, but I'm not even permitted to tell you when or how it was done. I'm the only one alive anymore who knows the true circumstances.” He cocked his head and looked up wistfully.

“I can give you a clue, however. It's up to you to follow it or not, as you choose. Look at the seven-year cycles during that general period. Look at any of the nobility or royalty who seem to have died under—let's say ‘unusual' or ‘convenient' circumstances. It was a substitute, not a king, by the way. I
can
tell you that. If you look hard enough, I think you'll be able to make some pretty shrewd guesses. You know what to look for.”

In that instant, Graham knew the time would come when he
would
want to delve back and seek it out. Somehow the thought even brought its own sort of comfort: the realization that he was not the only one called upon to undertake such terrible duty.

But he would not look too soon. Just now the immediate ache of the present and near future was too new and raw—the knowledge that this time
he
was the slayer and William destined to be the slain.

“How did you do it?” he finally managed to whisper. “I don't mean physically, but how—how did you find the courage?”

“It was love,” Ellis said after a thoughtful pause. “In the end, it always comes back to that. The link between the slayer and the slain is best forged by love. What possible value could there be to a sacrifice made in hate or resentment? It costs very little to lose something you hate.”

Graham screwed his eyes shut and shuddered, knowing Ellis was right. The words of that other Red William echoed in his mind from a Lammas morrow more than eight centuries past: '
Tis not the slaying, but the laying down of life for the land, the spilling of the sacred blood—yet the dying is better if it be at the hand of one who loves the victim. Dost thou love me, Wat?

“Lord, you know I do,” he whispered aloud, catching himself in a sob. “But,
God
, why this cup
again
?”

He could feel his control slipping farther, the weight in his chest pressing more heavily with every breath, and suddenly the dread welled up and could be contained no longer. In that same instant came the clear certainty that the cup would
not
pass from him this time, any more than it had passed before.

He still might have fought down the physical expression of his grief, had not the brigadier come and perched on the arm of his chair, easing his arms around Graham's shoulders in wordless comfort and holding him when he began to shake. As once before, when Caitlin died and Graham had been unable to cry, so now the old man's touch loosed all the carefully held barriers of bitterness and mourning as Ellis rocked him like a child, letting him sob out all his grief.

Gradually, the physical reactions spent themselves. As Graham subsided, finally pulling away to drag his sleeve across his face, trying to regain his composure, Ellis casually collected his pipe and wandered over to the fireplace, where he made an elaborate show of cleaning the thing and emptying it into the hearth. When he returned, he had two stiff drinks in his hands and the pipe clenched between his teeth. He said nothing as he handed Graham one of the glasses and sat down again.

“There must be some way to get the same effect without having to taste the stuff,” Graham grumbled when he had downed half the Scotch neat and was beginning to feel its benumbing effect. “I know it's from David's private stock, but the bloody stuff still tastes like camel piss.”

“I'll tell him you said so,” Ellis said, saluting with his glass before taking another sip. “Feeling any better?”

Graham managed a brief, faint smile. “Not so as you'd notice, but at least with this inside, I don't care as much.” He tossed off the rest of the drink and made a face as he set the empty glass aside. “Sorry about the scene.”

“You're entitled,” Ellis replied. “Do you think you can handle things now?”

“You're just going to have to give me some time to adjust, Wes,” he answered softly. “One step at a time. I'm not resigned. A lot can happen in two weeks. Maybe we'll never have to do more than we've already done. Emma and the cards could be wrong.…”

The brigadier rose as if nothing unusual had occurred and moved casually toward the door.

“If that qualification makes it easier to deal with for now, very well,” he said. “Just so long as you realize what else may be necessary—and I think you do.”

As Alix came back into the room with the tea, Graham knew he realized all too well.

Graham endured the next two weeks in something of a fog, outwardly cool and efficient but numbed inside, praying that somehow he and William would yet be delivered. He saw little of anyone outside his office, for as the Battle of Britain intensified, his own duties grew heavier, the hours of sleep fewer. Only occasionally was he able to sandwich brief, unsatisfying meetings with William and the brigadier between his own long hours with his intelligence team and William's heavy rounds of royal duties.

Other than to voice quiet acceptance of the initiation plans for the eighteenth, William spoke little of the decision he had made and would not discuss it with Graham at all. Whether that was for fear of being dissuaded or because William himself was having second thoughts, Graham did not know. He wondered whether William, too, felt that if the matter was not mentioned, it somehow would not have to happen.

Those first two weeks of August brought devastating shifts in the emphasis of the war. Poor weather conditions initially prevented any serious German incursions beyond the usual shipping raids in the Channel and an occasional swipe at Dover or one of the other port towns; but by the second week, it was clear that the Luftwaffe was gearing up for a major assault.
Adlertag
—or Eagle Day—had been hinted in secret German ciphers for weeks.

Heavy cloud cover and sporadic rain kept German sorties confined to the usual harassment at the beginning of the second week, but good weather on the twelfth brought concerted attacks on the southeast coastal radar chain: Ventor, Rye, and others. Several forward fighter stations were hit, along with Portsmouth Harbor and two unprotected convoys in the Thames estuary, but at least there were no further raids on the vital radar stations. Oddly enough, the Germans did not yet seem to have recognized the strategic importance of the radar nets.

On the thirteenth,
Adlertag
finally began, though fortunately for the British, it got off to a slow start. Intended as the decisive punch at the beginning of a four-day campaign to knock the RAF from the skies, it was an essential step to the next phase in Operation Sealion—for the Germans could not hope to land an invasion force without mastery of the Channel and the British navy—and they could not master the British navy as long as the RAF ruled the skies above.

But poor weather in the morning led to postponement of the major strike until the afternoon—and because of communications problems, part of the Eagle strike force found themselves over enemy territory early on without adequate fighter escort. In the fifteen hundred sorties flown that day, the Luftwaffe managed to bomb only secondary targets and to bag only thirteen British planes compared to their own losses of forty-five. The following day, attempting to cover their confusion, they confined their attacks to railways near the coast and a few RAF stations. By the third day, however, the German efficiency recovered dramatically.

More than seven distinct German attacks bombarded the length of Britain on the fifteenth. Beginning with a major raid on Lympne and Hawkinge airfields in Kent, just before noon, the Germans next simultaneously attacked the coastal areas of Northumberland and Yorkshire, hoping to draw off fighter defenses so that new waves of bombers might better harry the south. Although the bomber station at Great Driffield lost ten Whitley bombers on the ground in addition to other heavy destruction, and several other lesser northern targets sustained damage, the British radar gave sufficient warning for most of the raiders to be met and engaged while still over the Channel, where Hurricane and Spitfire pilots made short work of them.

By midafternoon, more waves of bombers and their fighter escorts hit Hawkinge again, as well as the airfields at Eastchurch and Martlesham and the vital aircraft factories at Rochester. Later in the afternoon, a flight of eighty bombers attacked the south coast at Portsmouth Harbor and the airfields at Middle Wallop and Worthy Down, though they inflicted little serious damage. An hour later, yet another wave hit the airfield at Croydon, near London. More sporadic attacks continued through the hours of darkness—harassment designed to fray the nerves of the British people.

Pilots of the RAF fought doggedly and effectively, inflicting more than twice the losses on the Luftwaffe than they themselves sustained, but relative losses Were of little comfort in light of absolutes. The coastal raids continued to take their toll daily; and though British aircraft production had risen to the point that lost or damaged aircraft could be replaced at the rate of over a hundred a week by mid-August, the fact remained that the replacement of trained pilots could not be accomplished by assembly lines working extra shifts. Fighter Command had fallen more than two hundred below strength by the seventeenth; and as new pilot training programs were cut to the bone and cut again in order to get pilots into the air, the life expectancy of an RAF fighter pilot fell to less than ninety flying hours. Some men were going into their first sorties with as little as ten hours of solo time in Hurricanes or Spitfires and had never fired their machine guns at a target in the air.

It was with this grim awareness that Graham rose on the morning of the eighteenth and drove to Buckingham Palace to collect William. There he and Michael heard Sunday service in the Chapel Royal with William and other members of the Royal Family and household, since William asked it, then had a light luncheon in William's quarters before starting down to Oakwood. Michael accompanied them, for William had also asked that he be present that night.

The criss-crossed contrails of distant aerial battles scored the grey rim of the horizon almost all the way to Oakwood, underlining the growing need for their journey. Close by, massed enemy bombers and their swarms of escorts pounded the beleaguered airfield of West Malling without mercy. Once, when the thump of nearby bombs even rocked the moving Bentley, Michael pulled off the road. Ahead, a disabled Heinkel crashed spectacularly in a farmer's field and burned.

The sheer physical peril of the drive from London kept the minds of all three men diverted from the less palpable but no less real perils of the night and days to come. Alix and the brigadier were waiting when they drove up the long, tree-arched driveway of Oakwood just before teatime, and the five spent a strained several hours discussing the week's war developments and the battle they had seen, waiting for nightfall. By unspoken agreement, they avoided the real reason for their coming together.

But as the afternoon wore on, the silences grew longer and the conversation more forced until, just before dusk, Graham finally escorted William upstairs and suggested that he nap for an hour or two while preparations went forward.