Eleanor

by RA Williams

  The Mohawk had arrived on the peninsula.

  Captain Burrows slumbered soundly. His Indian mess waiter, preparing to awaken him, was startled by the sight of Taggart so covered in blood and dirt.

  Dismissing him, Taggart parted Burrows’ mosquito netting and went in.

  The quarters were sumptuous in comparison with the lads’ boltholes: entirely sealed with mosquito netting, there was a proper bed and matching mahogany desk, and a jug of rum sat beside a silver-framed photograph of Mrs Burrows.

  Taggart loosened his bread bag and sat down in the first proper chair he had seen in months. Sinking into the soft leather club chair, he leaned back, before giving the captain’s bed a kick. Burrows’ eyelids parted.

  ‘Morning,’ Taggart said congenially.

  Wiping sleep from his eyes, the captain squinted, clearly surprised by the state of Taggart, wetted head to toe in human gore and sweat and stinking like a dead man. ‘Second Lieutenant? What are you doing in my quarters? And where is Muirhead?’

  ‘Your lieutenant is knackered.’ Taggart rose and walked towards the dugout entrance, tossing the bread bag between Burrows’ legs, leaving a bloody smear on the sheets.

  ‘We’ve broken the Turks’ back beyond Gully Ravine. While you were sleeping, W Company occupied the enemy’s front-line trench. And as your tea goes cold, we are pressing into their rear.’

  Burrows sat up and kicked the stinking bread bag off the bed. It fell to the floor, spilling its contents. He reeled.

  Fifteen scalps lay before him.

  ‘Fifteen.’ Taggart turned to leave. ‘Fifteen in remembrance of 1915. The year you died here at Cape Helles. That is, if you don’t fuck right off and leave me to practise my trade.’

  Burrows stared at the Turkish scalps, trembling.

  Saluting smartly, the Mohawk excused himself.

  The shelling began anew after dark, the precious few days of relative quiet now over. The Mohawk watched from above Gully Beach as a steady stream of mules brought the wounded down from the new front. On his way up, he received nods from the ranks, followed by whispers of the Mohawk’s exploits. Climbing the trail to Y Company’s post headquarters, he watched Turkish shells randomly explode among the 29th Division’s trenches. His advance was squandered by ineffective officers, useless gits lacking an ounce of nous, again wasting Empire’s youth.

  The Turkish artillery seemed especially fierce that night, intent on retribution.

  Y Company’s HQ was tucked into an unusual location. Rather than sitting behind the front, it was right on it. A monstrous shell crater exposed a ruin or some such, with picks and shovels dotting the mounds of disturbed earth. At the end of the trench, a foreign-looking boffin in a bowler hat and round spectacles stood guard with a trench sweeper. Shotguns were uncommon in the Dardanelles.

  Turning down a communicating trench, its walls reinforced with earth-filled ammunition boxes, Taggart passed guards on stand-to. Bayonets fixed, they stood on the firing step, keenly watching no man’s land, while a corporal peered through a trench periscope. Y Company had a discipline to which he was unaccustomed.

  ‘Where can I find your commanding officer?’

  ‘Who’s askin’?’

  ‘The Mohawk.’

  ‘Christ almighty.’ Hopping from the firing step, the corporal snapped to attention without saluting, showing respect of rank without risking his superior being sniped.

  ‘It’s an honour, sir.’

  ‘Where is Captain Hadley?’

  ‘Carry on ahead. Past the command dugout, you’ll find a dump of sandbags. That’s the captain’s quarters.’

  ‘At the front?’

  ‘That’s the sort our commander is.’

  Taggart found him in his dugout, studying documents from a leather Gladstone bag. Balthasar filled his uniform like a soldier, not like entitled nobility playing dress-up. A commanding officer who situated not only his HQ but also his quarters at the front was a superior officer Taggart could respect.

  ‘Oi, Buster.’

  Balthasar looked up and gave a nod of recognition. ‘Lieutenant Mohawk.’

  ‘I’ve considered your offer.’

  Balthasar stood. ‘I understand you’ve been up to all manner of mischief.’

  ‘Perils of the peninsula.’

  Taggart looked about the captain’s bolthole. It was cramped, the roof reinforced with ship’s timber, safe from artillery. A civilian trunk with a curved lid sat in the corner, the name in red letters stamped on the front all but faded away – he could only just make out Balthasar. The captain most certainly was a traveller. On a chart table beside it were all manner of historical curiosities: broken vases, vivid mosaic tiles and statue fragments. A cup with long handles caught Taggart’s eye. It was ethereal in its delicacy, like palpitating wings. It reminded him of the goblin.

  A brass bicycle lamp on an upturned crate illuminated the opened attaché. By the dim light, Taggart could see what Hadley was reading: Externsteine’s Wilderzeichen. By Eleanor Annenberg. Brushing by him, the captain blocked his view.

  ‘Light bedtime reading?’

  ‘I am willing to give you free rein in the field,’ Balthasar said, closing the documents wallet. ‘But not in my quarters.’

  Raising his braces over his grey field shirt, he slipped a Webley into the holster on his belt. He wore no collar badges or shoulder titles, carrying himself with authority rather than pomp.

  ‘What’s Wilderzeichen?’

  ‘There are many ways to butter a parsnip,’ the captain replied elusively. ‘Brought your hatchet?’

  Taggart was confused by the question.

  ‘I’m off for a stroll round the manor,’ Hadley continued. ‘Expect the Turks to counter-attack at any time.’

  They made their way along a communication trench, the ranks nodding to them as they passed.

  ‘The attrition rate of your company exceeds forty per cent,’ Balthasar said.

  ‘It’s not due to the Turks. Not any more. My lads are dropping from illness.’

  ‘The same holds true for Y Company. Our superiors have decided to amalgamate us into a single full-strength company.’

  ‘Another offensive?’ Taggart asked.

  Balthasar listened as a Turkish shell screamed overhead, landing not far from the rear.

  ‘I suspect we’re going on the defensive.’

  Taggart was shown along the communicating trench leading to the ruin. The shotgun-wielding civilian remained on post.

  ‘This is my colleague, Mahmoud Hajian.’

  Mahmoud doffed his hat, tough black hair tumbling over his forehead. ‘The Mohawk, eh? Heard all about your audacious exploits.’

  ‘Hajian?’ Taggart asked, looking to the captain. ‘You’ve got a Turk here?’

  ‘Persian, actually,’ came a dry reply from Mahmoud.

  ‘This is not a soldier’s matter,’ said Balthasar, tickling a pair of oil lanterns until they gave off a low flame, ‘but one of personal importance. Mr Hajian is the right man for his task, as you are the right man for yours.’

  ‘What’s the task?’

  The Persian stepped aside, allowing them to pass.

  ‘Keep sharpish,’ the captain instructed the Persian.

  After going down a flight of ancient stairs cut into the rock, they stood in a subterranean passage, recently excavated. Taggart shivered in the cold air below ground. Adjusting the lantern’s flames, Hadley handed him one.

  ‘We’re in a long-forgotten hollow unearthed by a shell from Asiatic Annie.’

  ‘Hollow?’

  Shining the lantern down the narrow passage, Taggart’s light picked out deep gouges in the floor. Something very heavy had gone that way a long time ago.

  ‘This was Johnny Turk’s front line before your one-man offensive. A round from Asiatic Annie, the Turkish siege gun on the Asian side of the Dardanelles Strait, fell here three nights ago, creating quite a crater.’

  ‘And thus uncovered this?’

 
The captain nodded. They arrived at a massive slab of stone, blown aside. Scrawled into the bare rock above it, Taggart recognised runes:

  What it meant he had not the first idea.

  ‘They clearly didn’t want anyone getting in and finding whatever was sealed behind this blocking stone.’

  ‘Or getting out,’ replied Balthasar. ‘Turkish conscripts are not paid well, you see. They wasted little time in cracking the entrance’s seal using explosives.’

  ‘All of this to loot a lot of old trinkets?’

  The captain shone his lantern ahead to reveal a low arcade supported by a double row of columns.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Taggart gasped, slowly making his way across a mosaic floor depicting panthers and leopards stalking flocks of goats. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘An old Roman bath,’ Hadley replied, fragments of plaster crunching under his boots. ‘Long ago, in another epoch, a Roman trading settlement existed here.’

  Taggart looked around. The bath had been looted. Tiles prised up, vases smashed. Only feet remained where a statue once stood on a pedestal.

  ‘Bit pranged, isn’t it?’

  ‘Johnny Turk opened a sarcophagus,’ said Hadley, pointing to six plain sarcophagi tucked between the columns.

  Taggart approached. ‘Looks sealed up to me.’

  ‘They are now.’

  He touched one, the surface rough against his hand. ‘What is this? It’s not limestone.’

  ‘It’s chalk.’

  In the lid, an engraved figure with a skull for a head grimaced at him. An apophthegm sprung from its gritted teeth.

  Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum.

  He turned to the captain. ‘Expect the resurrection of the dead.’

  ‘You’re an educated man, Taggart.’

  ‘Read Latin as a schoolboy. Now, what’s this all about? I’m a soldier.’

  ‘With a hatchet.’ Balthasar’s steady gaze met his. ‘A soldier you shall be permitted to be. What I am, though, is none of your concern.’

  ‘Permission to speak freely?’ Taggart felt unsure lest Captain Hadley think him mad and pack him off to England. He didn’t want to leave this place. ‘That night,’ he continued.

  ‘In the no man’s?’

  ‘You saw it too, didn’t you?’

  Balthasar gave him a look like a lion gives a gazelle before the dinner bell. ‘Got a few scalps on your belt now, Mohawk. So, why don’t you say what you really want to say.’

  ‘A goblin…’

  Balthasar nodded. ‘Indeed.’

  ‘It came from here, didn’t it?’

  ‘From its deviant burial in this hollow, yes.’

  ‘Whatever have you gotten yourself into, Buster?’

  ‘They are called Crimen.’

  ‘Latin again, right?’

  Balthasar nodded.

  ‘It means the guilty one, I think.’

  ‘That goblin, as you called it,’ said Balthasar. ‘It is Guilty. And not just one.’

  ‘It was feeding on the dead. On human flesh.’

  Balthasar sat his lantern on a sarcophagus lid. ‘Wilderzeichen.’

  ‘Yeah. What does it mean?’

  ‘You witnessed a wild sign and lived to tell of it. The Turkish conscripts who opened these sarcophagi were not so fortunate.’

  ‘I see,’ said Taggart.

  ‘No, I don’t think you do.’ Lifting the lantern, Balthasar turned towards the hollow’s entrance. ‘You are seeing without looking. It’s not for the Mohawk to be concerned with.’

  Even far below the lines, the whoosh of incoming artillery overhead was unmistakable.

  ‘What concerns me,’ Taggart said, ‘is losing this Dardanelles business.’

  ‘All of us are but six-shilling-a-day tourists.’

  Taggart shrugged.

  ‘You understand our holiday here nears its end.’

  The truth of this aphorism gave Taggart a dash of reality. His holiday was near its end.

  ‘You won’t rein me in?’ he asked, questioning Balthasar’s intent. ‘You’ll let me do my doings?’

  ‘I earned my quality a long, long time ago, Lieutenant Taggart. And you’re messy. You kill without elegance.’ The blackness in Balthasar’s eyes terrified even him. ‘But your primeval instincts are useful to me. Here. Now.’

  A shell plomped above, bits of plaster from the vaulted ceiling crashing to the floor. Neither of them ducked.

  ‘You just keep Johnny Turk away from this line long enough for me to bury this hollow so deep it’ll never be opened again, and you’ll get nil complaint from me.’

  ‘In for a penny,’ said Taggart.

  The floor shook violently. Turkish artillery was now targeting the British front lines. Balthasar shepherded him from the hollow. As they emerged, Taggart saw the Persian standing upon a firing step, his trench sweeper pointing towards Turkish lines.

  ‘Is it on?’ asked Balthasar.

  ‘Expecting a counter-attack at any moment.’

  Balthasar hurried along the sandbag traverse, Taggart following as he turned into the front-line trench. Men prepped bombs made of old jam tins, useful only in close action. Taggart felt his urges build within him.

  ‘This section of the line is ticklish,’ said Balthasar. ‘The Turkish are a cricket pitch away, industrious in throwing bombs into our trenches. W Company haven’t any.’

  Taggart looked to the W Company lads readying jam tins.

  ‘So,’ said Balthasar. ‘We make our own bombs.’

  Cautiously, Taggart peeked over the parapet. On the other side of no man’s land, Turkish bayonets glinted in the moonlight as they awaited orders to attack.

  ‘Reciprocity, Lieutenant Mohawk.’

  The artillery ceased.

  ‘Keep the Turk off me,’ Balthasar continued. ‘Do that, and no man’s land is your abattoir.’

  Taggart’s surprise kept him silent.

  The shrill sound of a whistle from the Turkish trenches signalled the counter-attack. Unbuckling his holster, Balthasar handed over his service revolver.

  Looking at the pistol, Taggart asked, ‘Won’t you be needing this?’

  ‘I don’t need a gun.’ A nod and he was gone over the parapet, rushing towards the enemy lines before they counter-attacked.

  The Mohawk joined him, creeping into no man’s land as his head began to pound. What was to become of his proclivities when he left the Dardanelles?

  It was early days.

  ❖❖❖

  31 MARCH 1929

  ST DUNSTAN’S,

  BLOOMFIELD HILLS,

  MICHIGAN

  They are whole ‘entities’, entire social systems, the functioning of which we have attempted to describe. We have looked at societies in their dynamic or physiological state. We have not studied them as if they were motionless… or as if they were corpses. Even less have we decomposed and dissected them…

  —Mauss, ‘The Gift’

  ‘Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum.’

  Elle’s voice echoed through the church’s nave. The congregation of students, masters, administrators and colleagues in Brooks Brothers suits and Vitalis-slicked hair hung on her every word.

  ‘Expect the resurrection of the dead.’

  Verbalising it made her smile. Made what motivated her every waking moment more real.

  Seventeen years had got behind her. A degree from the University of Michigan and a PhD in ethnology hanging from her belt, the once incorrigible Elle had become the broad-minded and optimistic Dr Eleanor Annenberg. Like Father, cautious and captivating; like Mother, witty and gritty. Since the night Titanic sank, her passion had remained unchanged: to find the truth of the horror she’d witnessed, and in doing so, to learn the identity of the man who had saved her.

  Steel – a material more precious than gold in Detroit – had made the Annenbergs wealthy. But after Titanic, the noise and chaos of the growing city lost its charm for Father. Selling off his steel mills to Henry Ford, he moved the family t
wenty miles north to the forests and farms of Bloomfield Hills. On a dilapidated apple farm, he built the first great house outside the city, filling it with artwork and furniture the family brought back from their many Grand Tours of Europe.

  Franklyn Annenberg had no interest in buying respectability. Instead, he built St Dunstan’s, a college-preparatory school named after the English village from which his grandparents had emigrated. To design the campus Father envisioned – Arts and Crafts with a Bauhaus flair – he retained a renowned Finnish architect. St Dunstan’s would be the most inspiring prep school in the Midwest.

  Not satisfied with preparing only boys for university, Mother saw to it that a girls’ school was built on the opposing shore of St Dunstan’s lake. There followed an art museum, and finally a science institute, the ethnology department now directed by Elle. Prestigious universities came calling, due in no small measure to the Great War’s slaughter of a generation of men. But as was oft true in a capitalist society, nothing came without a price. Elle could almost see those Ivy League chancellors licking their chops at the prospect of getting their mitts on some of her father’s money.

  St Dunstan’s offered her what no university could guarantee: funding. This allowed her to search for proof of her theory – to expect the resurrection of the dead.

  She tolerated the patronising masters who resented a woman in their Old Boys’ Club; she would have accepted funding from Detroit’s Hebrew mafia if it got her closer to the truth of what she had witnessed on Titanic.

  There had never really been any doubt in her mind that she would end up back home.

  ‘Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum,’ she repeated, the excited susurrus of her audience fading. ‘Lurking out of sight in every epoch of civilisation.’

  She took in the packed-out stalls and side aisles of the nave. Earlier in her career, at least half her students would ditch her final lecture before the Easter holidays. No longer. She had learned that a good mystery with lurid lashings kept her audience glued to their seats.

  Word spread fast that Dr Annenberg’s vivid tales were better than any penny dreadful. Soon enough, the lecture was moved from her classroom to the school’s two-hundred-seat assembly hall. By the time Elle tenured, requests to attend her lecture were coming from as far away as California. It was moved again, this time to the only building capable of seating five hundred – the newly completed and, fortunately for her, yet to be consecrated, St Dunstan’s church.