by R. N. Morris
Contents
Cover
A Selection of Titles by R. N. Morris
Title Page
Copyright
Part I: The Call to Arms
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part II: Dreams of Flight
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part III: Purity
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Part IV: White Feathers
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Part V: Arrest
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Part VI: A House of Grief
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Part VII: Release
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Part VIII: The White Hart
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
A Selection of Titles by R. N. Morris
Novels
PSYCHOTOPIA *
The Silas Quinn Series
SUMMON UP THE BLOOD *
THE MANNEQUIN HOUSE *
THE DARK PALACE *
THE RED HAND OF FURY *
THE WHITE FEATHER KILLER *
The Porfiry Petrovich Series
THE GENTLE AXE
A VENGEFUL LONGING
A RAZOR WRAPPED IN SILK
THE CLEANSING FLAMES
* available from Severn House
THE WHITE FEATHER KILLER
R. N. Morris
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First published in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.
This eBook edition first published in 2019 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Trade paperback edition first published
in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
Copyright © 2019 by R. N. Morris.
The right of R. N. Morris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8885-3 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-606-7 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0223-9 (e-book)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
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PART I
The Call to Arms
5 August–28 August, 1914.
HOW TO JOIN THE ARMY
Any man who is able to produce a satisfactory reference as to character may enlist in the Army.
The only requirements are the following:
He must be able to produce a satisfactory reference as to character.
He must be able to read and write.
Be within the limits of age, nineteen and thirty.
Be up to the physical standards for the particular corps he wishes to join.
A recruit who is slightly below the required standards, but who is otherwise considered desirable, may be accepted for enlistment as a special case.
Under the supreme crisis today men will be allowed to join under an entirely new condition.
Their period of service will be for “three years or until the war is over.” The ordinary period is, of course, seven years with the colours and five in the reserve.
Men in the country who wish to enlist can obtain the address of the nearest recruiting station at any post office.
Daily Mirror, Saturday, 8 August, 1914
ONE
The day after war was declared, Felix Simpkins found himself on the edge of a crowd of men standing in the rain outside the recruitment station in Great Scotland Yard. The queue was four deep at its thinnest. It extended around the corner into Scotland Place, then on around the next corner into Whitehall Place.
By the time he arrived, the crowd had solidified into a single unyielding body. The mood was what the papers might describe as ‘irrepressible’. Neither the constant drizzle nor their conspicuous lack of progress could dampen their spirits. They weren’t intimidated by the looming mounted policemen in their dark capes penning them in against the wall of the old police station, keeping them out of the road so the traffic could pass.
Why should they be intimidated? They were not criminals. They had come here to do their duty. Even so, Felix thought it wise to give the horses a wide berth.
The unexpected crowds dismayed him, with their damp smells and cheery, long-suffering fortitude. They’d stand all day in the rain for their country, that was clear. Well, Felix didn’t have all day. He only had half an hour for lunch. He’d have to be back at his desk by one thirty or he’d cop it from Mr Birtwistle.
Some of those who had already succeeded in gaining entry now shouted encouragingly from first-floor windows. A few were even perched on the windowsills, their legs dangling out as they smoked. They had the air of victors who had captured an enemy redoubt after a hard-fought battle. Exhilaration showed in their faces. And something else, a kind of amazement.
It was the realization that the world had changed overnight. And forever. That was what he could see in their faces. The realization that there was no going back.
Felix watched these men with a resentful, sullen envy. They were making light of the most momentous day in their lives. Didn’t they know what it had cost him to bring himself here today? How long he had stood in front of the mirror, screwing up every ounce of his courage. And what hell there would be to pay with Mother!
It was all very we
ll for them. They did not have Mother to contend with.
He realized that he was more repelled by these men than drawn to them. Their exuberance began to feel loutish to him.
They egged each other on with flickering smiles and eyes that flashed a fragile bravado. They steeled themselves with spitting. Quick-fire wisecracks delivered grimly out of one half of a downturned mouth were met with too much hilarity. From time to time, songs burst out, not all of which were patriotic, or even decent.
They excluded him with their half-turned backs and taut, dripping umbrellas.
It was unspeakably daunting.
Without realizing it, he was at that moment backing away from the queue of would-be recruits. In every face he looked at, he saw a knowing sneer, as if his failure of nerve at the last was what they had expected all along.
He felt the roar of something heavy and malign rearrange the air at his back. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the black blur of a hurtling hansom cab tethered to the clatter of hooves. He jumped away from the disruption, almost out of his skin.
One of the mounted policemen saw the incident and attempted to steer his horse towards Felix. Felix was always nervous around horses, ever since as a child he had heard the story from Mother of a great-uncle who had been kicked in the head by a spooked horse while on holiday in Wales. Uncle Clar had never been the same again and had died from a stroke five years later to the day.
This one was a particularly large and unpredictable beast, over which its rider seemed to have little control. It was currently standing at right angles to the direction the policeman was encouraging it to go. Only when it was good and ready, with much snorting and flaring of its nostrils and twisting of its massive neck and baring of its big yellow teeth, did it finally consent to lift its hooves and shift itself. He could see the power in its muscles, barely held in by the shimmer of its chestnut coat. He had the feeling, inspired by something wild and wilful he detected in its eye, that it would rear up at any moment. He felt it held a grudge against its rider, which it would take out on any human that got in its way.
He supposed there would be horses in the army, in supply as well as in the cavalry. Of course, he had no intention of volunteering for the cavalry. Still, it would be impossible to avoid all contact with the animals.
But now the horse and its rider were looming darkly over him.
‘You there! Stop being a bloody nuisance and get back in line.’
The policeman’s coarse language shocked him. Really, there was no need for that. There was no need too for the horse’s flank to swing towards him, forcing him back.
Felix attached himself loosely to the side of the queue. This provoked a chorus of protest from the men immediately behind him.
‘I say, that’s not on!’
‘Bleedin’ queue jumper!’
‘Get to the back of the line, you cheeky blighter!’
Someone even laid hands on him, a quick shove propelling him back out into the street.
His arms flailed to keep him upright. There was boisterous laughter from the men in line. He felt the heat of a flush in his face. He turned sharply to see who had pushed him. A burly individual was squaring up to him with balled fists and a clenched face. Felix’s heart tripped. He swallowed down the coppery taste of fear.
He ought to teach that fellow a lesson, he knew that. That was what the men watching him expected. But what was to be gained from it?
They were here to sign up to fight the Hun, not to fight amongst themselves.
‘I’m sorry. My mistake. I didn’t mean to. It’s just, the horse, you see …’
The man regarded him with an angled head. ‘What are you, some kind of nancy boy?’
There were sniggers of appreciation from the men around him. Felix felt himself blush again. It was a pathetic weakness and he hated himself for it. Just like a bloody girl.
He knew that he could not let this slur to his manhood go. Not in front of this audience.
He did what he had to do.
He swung a punch at the ruffian’s head, catching him squarely on the nose. He heard a satisfying explosion of blood as the cartilage crumpled. Or perhaps he rushed at him and overpowered him, forcing him to the ground, squatting across his shoulders and hurling down multiple blows into his fat ugly face until it was a pulp. Or perhaps he contented himself with a huge gobbet of sputum which he launched into the bully’s face. And like all bullies, the man was shown up as a coward himself, backing away at the first sign of resistance.
No. Of course. He did none of that, except in his imagination.
Instead, he did what he was compelled to do. He turned on his heels and walked away, away from another fight, and from the jeers that mocked his cowardice.
Why was it that whenever it came to any test of his character, however trivial, his nerve always failed him? He was a coward, that was all there was to it. A lousy, contemptible coward. He hid it from himself, but it came out every day, in a thousand small ways. In his fear of horses, of policemen, of crowds, of burly men, of Mr Birtwistle, of steaming kettles and scaffolding and countless malign things. Why, he even supposed he was frightened of the umbrellas some of the men were handling so carelessly! It was a wonder they hadn’t had someone’s eye out already.
Did he really think that he could just come along today and enlist? And so put an end to all his fears?
That if they gave him a uniform to wear he would be transformed from a coward to a hero?
He would reveal his true colours eventually. At a time when his funk might put other men’s lives at risk.
So it was better really, more noble, more patriotic, not to enlist. There he went again with his convoluted self-justifications, his specious excuses and bad faith.
What was it Mother always said? ‘Know thyself.’
She used it as a box to keep him in. But perhaps she was right. He was who he was and he could never escape that.
The rain did not let up as he hurried back to the office. If he didn’t get a move on he would be late and he would cop it from Mr Birtwistle.
TWO
Of course, London was different now. There was a war on. A war was bound to change everything.
That was enough to explain the feeling of dislocation that Silas Quinn experienced as he walked the streets. The city belonged to the soldiers he saw everywhere, square-bashing in Horse Guards Parade, bivouacked in St James’s Park, massing at Victoria Station.
London had the air of having placed itself at War’s disposal. The pavements thundered with the harsh boot falls of an army on the move. It gave the place a new energy, a new purpose. A kind of glamour even, in which Quinn could not share.
But there was something indecent about it all too. It was almost abject, this surrender to militarism. An eager, blind and mindless fatalism.
He was walking along the Victoria Embankment. On the other side of the Thames, an untidy sprawl of cranes and scaffolding marked out the construction site of the new county hall. They had been building it for years, in fits and starts. Now, it seemed to have finally been abandoned for good.
Silas turned away from it to look up at New Scotland Yard as he passed in front of it. This was his place of work, from which he had been temporarily excluded. That was bound to make a chap feel out of sorts. Officially, he was on sick leave. It was for his own good, it had been explained to him. He had been under extraordinary stress. The last investigation had taken its toll on him, particularly as he had spent part of it undercover as an inmate in Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum.
He needed to take a bit of time to ‘put himself back together’. Or so Sir Edward Henry, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, had made clear.
But the listless empty days and sleepless nights had not restored him. On the contrary, he was now so discombobulated that he felt himself to be the cause of the city’s strangeness.
The declaration of war had passed him by. It was fair to say he had had other things on his mind at the time. And now, it wa
s as if he had passed from one bad dream into another.
Perhaps he wasn’t ready to go back to work after all.
The test was to look up. Logic told him that there were no soldiers in the sky, no patriotic placards, or newspaper headlines. Nothing to remind him of the war at all.
The sky was eternally the sky. Constantly changing, but always itself. So if he felt the same sense of strangeness looking up, it proved that it came from within.
It was early evening, of the first fine day they had had for some time, the first to have any promise of summer heat. August had been a wash-out so far.
The sky was still bright, as if charged with electricity. It seemed to shimmer with a supernatural potential. And, yes, he thought it as alien and unwelcoming as a city under occupation. He looked directly into the setting sun, so that when he looked back towards the buildings of the Embankment, he could see only dark, looming shapes, devoid of detail. And so he did not see her approach, or rather he did not recognize her. Certainly he could not make out the smile that she brought him, which faded from her expression without his ever knowing it had been there. It was a pity, because she so rarely smiled.
It was almost as if he had not expected her. And yet this was the allotted time and she was the one he had come to meet.
‘There you are,’ she said flatly. No hint of the smile in her voice now.
‘Oh, it’s you. I’m sorry, I couldn’t see.’
‘Why? What’s wrong with you?’
‘I had been looking at the sky.’
‘Oh, God.’ With this exasperated aside, she fell back into the habit of mockery that was her usual mode with him.
It was only now, as his eyes adjusted, that he noticed the forget-me-nots on her hat. It was a pretty hat and he realized that she was pretty too. But with her ready sarcasm and flagrant eye-rolling, he had long believed that the only sentiment she entertained towards him was contempt. He was startled by the idea that she had made an effort for him.
He heard a female throat clearing itself, and saw for the first time that she was not alone.
‘Oh, yes. This is Aunt Constance.’
A short, round woman came forward to present herself. She was wearing a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles, through which she scrutinized Silas closely. She offered him her hand, warily, as if she didn’t trust him not to run off with it.