Death of an Unsung Hero

by Tessa Arlen

  “If she was being ridden from Brook End Lane, then that was the beginning of her journey and she might have been galloping at the beginning but she simply could not keep it up. You know what, though? I’ll ride Dolly from Brook End Lane to the kitchen garden and back again. I will make her go as fast as I can, and we can time her. I think it is the only way to find out.” He had evidently not forgotten his steeplechasing days.

  “No, Harry, please don’t get up on Dolly, she is as wide as a barge, and if you come off your arm might be seriously injured this time.”

  “I am hardly at risk riding a plow horse. Where is your sense of adventure, Mama?”

  And so it was agreed that Lord Haversham would drive over to Brook End Farm and borrow Dolly for an experiment in time and speed.

  “I will be riding her with a bridle and a whip, and a saddle if I can find one wide enough. And no betting,” he said as he left the room, “this is a scientific study, not an opportunity to make a bit of money on the gee-gees.”

  But Lady Montfort had already said that half a crown would see Dolly there and back within thirty minutes. “Don’t forget to spend at least four or five minutes giving the poor thing a rest outside the kitchen garden before you turn and take her back to the pasture,” she called after her son.

  “What happens during those minutes?” he called back as he went through the door of her sitting room.

  “That is how long it will take you to come into the kitchen garden and bonk Mrs. Jackson and me on our heads,” his mother said, as if he was being particularly dense.

  * * *

  “How long have we been sitting here now?” Lady Montfort asked for the third time, and Mrs. Jackson looked at her watch.

  “About forty minutes, m’lady.”

  “Oh, Jackson, I do hope that Dolly has not bucked him off.” She didn’t look too concerned, though, in fact quite the opposite. As cool as a glass of water despite this sweltering afternoon, Mrs. Jackson thought as she looked up at the sky, which had clouded over in the past hour, to hold in the noonday heat like a tin lid on a saucepan. It was the sort of stultifying, humid weather that heralded a storm. That’s what we need, she thought, a storm to clear the air—but not until our harvest is in.

  A sigh from her ladyship. “What on earth can be keeping him?”

  “His lordship has probably only just managed to catch Dolly, m’lady,” she said and settled herself to wait for another twenty minutes or so. She was wondering how Lord Haversham could catch and saddle up a horse with the use of only one arm. “It will be quite authentic if his lordship rides her with just one hand,” she added as she remembered the weapon.

  “I do hope he notices the time before he sets off from Brook End Lane. And anyway, Jackson, what is it going to prove if he gets here in fifteen minutes, riding poor Dolly into the ground in this terrible heat?”

  Jackson didn’t answer, because she could not imagine that Lord Haversham would do anything of the kind, he was far too considerate.

  They sat on in the silence of the afternoon and after a while they heard in the distance the sounds of hoofbeats drawing closer. Lady Montfort sprang to her feet. “Here they come!” she cried as if she were waiting for news on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo. “Can you hear them, Jackson? That’s Harry on Dolly!” And they both made their way across the grass toward to kitchen garden’s south gate.

  It was Lord Haversham indeed and Dolly was evidently having the time of her life, cantering gaily up the track toward them in a cloud of dust. And on her back, with legs that spanned the mare’s broad back, was Captain Harry Talbot, the Viscount Haversham: his face was scarlet and covered in dust, his hair was standing on end in the front, and there was an interesting smear of bright green on his cheek and his white shirt as he brought the mare to a halt.

  “Harry,” cried his mother, with no thought to the fact that her son could barely speak he was so winded. “How long did it take you?”

  He slid off Dolly’s back. The mare was lathered and steaming, and all the veins stood out on her gray body now black with sweat. Harry leaned his head against her broad chest, and she gave him a playful shove with her great Roman nose. He shook his head as he tried to regain his balance.

  “She was hell,” he said, still breathless from his ride. “What an opinionated, stubborn, and thoroughly miserable plug she is.” Dolly shoved him again, leaving a bright chlorophyll-green smear on his coat shoulder.

  “How long did it take you, Harry?”

  “Catching and tacking her up was almost too easy; I had to find the longest girth strap and make an additional couple of holes, that’s what took the time. Then I climbed up on the stile at Brook End Lane and got on her back and she was lovely, as docile and mannerly as you like. The moment we got into the wheat field I gave her a nudge in the ribs and she just stood there. I kicked her and she just stood there. I cut a switch from the hedgerow and gave her a good whack, and off we went hell-for-leather. And then just as we were coming up to the wood she shied. Stopped dead in her tracks and just stood there snorting. She refused to go forward. I gave her another whack and managed to get her going again. But she was clearly blown, and so we ambled along until she realized that the wood wasn’t going to attack her. And then off we went at a sloppy canter—I think she even enjoyed it, the great lumbering fool.”

  “Did you by any chance look at your watch before you came up through the wheat field?”

  “Oh yes, Mama, and again as we came up to you. Oh, Dolly,” he turned to the mare and patted her on the neck, “you silly, useless girl. It’s back to the plow for you, you will never win the Derby.”

  “Harry, please.”

  “Nearly seventeen minutes. And whoever rode her up here would have had to know how to ride. I mean really know how to ride, because Dolly hasn’t a clue. If you are wondering if it was Carmichael who rode this horse, you have another think coming. The man didn’t have an ounce of muscle to his leg. He was the sort that indulges in drawing-room chatter, not country sports. He could never have made her go fast enough, if he could have stayed on her at all.” He wiped his sweating forehead with his handkerchief.

  “If it took you seventeen minutes, Harry, then I am quite sure Carmichael could not have done better,” Lady Montfort said with maternal loyalty.

  “Thank you. Does that mean that I don’t have to ride her back again?” her son asked, looking so hopeful that Mrs. Jackson had to look away so that he did not see her smile. “Does that mean I can walk her back? Because she is a completely different horse when you are leading her, a perfect sweetheart in fact.”

  “No, there is no need to ride her back to her pasture, darling, and thank you so much for helping us out.” Lady Montfort turned away, looking quite crushed. “I think we can eliminate Lieutenant Carmichael as our culprit. We are nowhere nearer to an answer, it would seem.”

  “But Dolly was ridden here on the morning that Captain Bray was killed, m’lady,” Mrs. Jackson pointed out, “if not by Lieutenant Carmichael then certainly by someone else.” She could tell that her ladyship was scraping herself back together after a severe disappointment.

  “Walter saw rider and horse just after one o’clock in the wheat field. Whoever rode her up to the kitchen garden had all the time in the world to murder Captain Bray by half past two o’clock.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Two days later, Mrs. Jackson was pleasantly surprised to find a yellow telegram envelope sitting on her desk. Her heart gave a little leap when she saw that it was from Lieutenant E. Stafford of the Graves Registration Commission in Auchonvillers, France. She groped for the back of her chair and pulling it aside was already halfway through its cryptic message before she sat down.

  PTE. P. HECTOR KIA B. OF BEAUVILLE WOOD 16 MAR. 1916.

  LIEUT. I. L. CARMICHAEL INJ. B. OF BEAUVILLE WOOD 16 MAR. 1916

  CAPT. SIR EVELYN BRAY INJ. B. OF BEAUVILLE WOOD 16 MAR. 1916

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE OTHER SURVIVOR AFTER THE BATTLE IN CAPT.r />
  BRAY’S COMPANY 16 MAR:

  PTE. S. GLENN INJ. B. OF BEAUVILLE WOOD 16 MAR. 1916

  WHAT IS GOING ON?—E.S.

  She read the telegram through several times. So there is a connection between Bray, Carmichael, and Hector: they weren’t just in the same battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, they were all in the same company, too, she thought as she made sense of the abbreviated forms. KIA means killed in action and I expect Inj. is an abbreviation of injured. And someone else had been there too on that particular day, a Private S. Glenn, who had survived the battle along with Lieutenant Carmichael and Captain Bray.

  It is not unthinkable that this P. Hector is the enlisted man in Captain Bray’s portrait. Following on this revelation came the immediate question: If all four men were in Captain Bray’s company, then why didn’t he acknowledge one of his own men, whether he was Carmichael or Hector, when he arrived at Haversham Hall two weeks ago? Perhaps he did and that is the reason why he was murdered, or perhaps his memory was not sufficiently formed to remember him! And finally: There is a connection between Hector and Carmichael, we just don’t know yet what it is!

  She sat, brows down, and tried to find the sense behind this new information. Hector, Carmichael, Bray, and Glenn. Three of these men might have survived the Battle of Beauville Wood, but now two of them were dead. And who is this Private Glenn? Was he still in France after his injury or was it a “Blighty one”—an injury bad enough to return him home to Blighty as the soldiers nostalgically referred to England. And if this was the case he must have survived the war so far, otherwise he would have been listed in the telegram as killed in action.

  Mrs. Jackson sat on in the quiet of her office. She heard distant footsteps along the corridor outside her room. A door opened somewhere and then slammed shut. Her frown grew deeper. Surely Major Andrews might shed more light on what had happened to Lieutenant Carmichael after the Battle of Beauville Wood. But will he give me information about his patients? She pushed back her chair and got to her feet. He has all the reason in the world to help me solve this mess before the men from the Medical Board arrive with their attaché cases, dossiers, and forms in triplicate. Picking up a stack of requisition forms that needed the major’s signature, she left her office and walked down the corridor, hoping that she would find him in his office.

  “Come!” the major’s voice called out as she tapped on his door. “Ah, good afternoon, Mrs. Jackson, yes, come on in. Now what can I do for you?” He was sitting in the bay window with a file in his lap and a cup of tea on the table next to him. He got to his feet and turned the chair next to his away from the direct sunlight. “Would you like a cuppa?” Without waiting for her answer, he opened the door to the orderlies’ office and returned with a cup and saucer. “Don’t suppose Lady Montfort has heard anything from Colonel Valentine or Inspector Savor? Do they really believe that Sir Winchell is our murderer?” He made an attempt to be lighthearted, but she could tell by the lines of fatigue around his eyes that he rather hoped that Sir Winchell’s arrest meant the end of this ugly business. It would sit better with the War Office bureaucrats that murder had been committed by an angry old man in the neighborhood, rather than one of their patients in the hospital.

  She took a sip of tepid tea and decided it would be best if she avoided an answer to this question. “Do you remember we found that portrait painted by Captain Bray, the one that had a strong likeness to Lieutenant Carmichael?”

  He leaned forward, and his intelligent eyes met hers and held their gaze. “Yes, but he had painted the name Hector at the bottom of the painting, not Carmichael, most intriguing. I have it over here, brought it down from the art room this morning.” He jumped up from his chair, walked over to the wall and picked up a canvas leaning against it. Then, standing close to the window, he held it at arm’s length. Mrs. Jackson joined him. “Such a good portrayal of Carmichael,” the captain said. “Almost a caricature: the oiled-down yellow hair. It is unmistakably Carmichael—his ears sort of winged out a bit at the tip and he had that habit of quirking his right eyebrow. I think Bray captured his characteristics really rather well.” He looked up from the painting; his face had the encouraging sort of look that expects an observation to be acknowledged.

  She could not help but agree. “Yes, I have to admit it is very like him.” She hesitated. “Except for the name.” Major Andrews tilted the painting and they looked down at the bottom of the canvas.

  She decided to take the plunge, what was there to lose? “Private Hector actually, sir, a Private P. Hector was killed on the sixteenth of March at the Battle of Beauville Wood. You see, sir, it would appear that Bray, Carmichael, and Hector all took part in the battle that day. Hector was killed and Captain Bray and Lieutenant Carmichael were injured. I think there might be a connection between the three of them. And I am hoping that with a little more information we can give this information to Colonel Valentine so he can solve the rest of this mystery.” He had listened to all she had said in silence, but she could almost hear him processing the facts and then carefully storing them away.

  “Yes, I suppose they might have been in the same regiment, but there are or were probably over a thousand men in the Glorious Glosters, they couldn’t all have known each other. Now if they were in the same battalion or better still the same company, that would be another thing entirely.” Major Andrews put down the painting, straightened up, and stood there looking at her. “And what I would like to know, Mrs. Jackson, is how did you manage to come by this information? How did you know both Carmichael and Bray were in the same regiment at Beauville Wood?” His eyes were no longer thoughtful but alert and curious. Oh my Lord, what have I done? In my impatience I might have completely ruined all our work. Gone was the easygoing Major Andrews; he was looking at her in a way that made her feel distinctly uncomfortable, as if he was in the middle of making a difficult decision.

  She drew herself up. Whatever you do now, Edith, you have to be straight with this man, he is far too perceptive and much too intelligent to brush off with some incidental excuse. “I have a close friend who is with the Graves Registration Commission in France. After I found Captain Bray’s painting I wrote to him about these men: Carmichael and Bray. I included the name of Hector since that was the name on the painting. And he sent me a telegram with the information I just gave to you. I know it is none of my business, but if you are willing to help me find out a little more, we might be able to help the police clear up this mess before the Medical Board review. Her ladyship does not want the hospital closed, Major Andrews, any more than you do.”

  He stood tugging on the corner of his mustache for a moment or two. And then to her relief she caught the bright, humorous glance of his eyes as he said, “Yes, I see exactly what you mean. Something happened between the three of these men, didn’t it? Something conveniently hidden, perhaps by Captain Bray’s amnesia.” They gazed down at the portrait of Lieutenant Carmichael or Private Hector. “Bray had still some way to go to regain his memory when he painted this in April,” the major said almost to himself. Then he gestured with his right hand toward his desk and the chair on the other side of it. Teatime was over, and their meeting had become formal. Mrs. Jackson sat down in the upright chair on the other side of the desk from the major. His face was empty of expression. She was still unsure which way this conversation was going to go.

  Major Andrews leaned forward, resting his folded arms on the top of his desk. “Like all war heroes, Captain Bray took risks—he took tremendous risks to save his men, and he was well liked and respected as a leader. He was mentioned in dispatches, recommended at one time for a Victoria Cross. But what a price these heroes pay.” He rapped the top of his desk lightly with his knuckles as he recalled Bray’s history. “According to the filed report, Captain Bray and a small group of his were cut off from the rest of his company at Beauville Wood. We have no idea what happened because when Bray struggled back to our lines two days later he was pretty much done for. He brought
with him a private whom he had half carried, half led for miles. The man had been wounded in the head and had lost his sight. Bray was in a pretty bad way, he had sustained a minor injury, but he was completely exhausted, drained from months of combat. The only thing he could report was that out of the four of the men stranded near to the enemy lines, only he and the private had survived so far. He had left a dead man behind and he thought that a fourth man was missing; he was practically incoherent. That is all his commanding officer entered in his report for that day, but it was the eighteenth of March when Captain Bray made it back. When he regained consciousness two days later, his memory had gone completely—he was no longer lucid—and he was sent home to Craiglockhart with amnesia as a direct result of battle fatigue and what the newspapers like to call shell-shock.” He sat back in his chair and folded his arms. It was up to her to ask her next question.

  “Sir, would you be prepared to take a look at Lieutenant Carmichael’s file, to see if there is anything in there that mentions Beauville Wood and the battle that day?”

  He was already pulling open desk drawers and searching for a key to the cabinet in which he kept his patients’ information. “Carmichael, Carmichael,” he muttered as he flicked through the card dossiers in the top drawer. “Yes, here it is.” He walked back to his desk, tossed the file down on its surface, and stood over it turning pages. Mrs. Jackson forced herself to stay in her chair.

  “Yes, it says that Lieutenant Carmichael survived the Battle of Beauville Wood with a mild injury to his head, which may have caused him to suffer shock. He was rather a puzzling patient.” He looked across the desk at her and she felt a little stir of excitement. Now we are getting to it, she thought as she watched him look back down at the closely written pages. She had noticed before that when the major was pondering a problem he often hummed in a soft, tuneless drone, but now he was completely silent.