by CL Skelton
‘As the senior Maclaren present, will you propose the loyal toast?’
‘Thank you, Mr President,’ replied Andrew.
‘You had better have this and tell them first,’ replied, the president, and he slipped the note to Andrew.
Andrew rose to his feet. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘at six thirty this evening, Her Majesty the Queen died peacefully in the arms of her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm the Second of Germany.’
There was a long silence before Andrew spoke again:
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, raising his glass, ‘the King.’
Beloved Soldiers by C. L. Skelton
Beloved Soldiers, the sequel to Sweethearts and Wives, is the gripping finale to the Regiment Family Saga. Keep reading for a preview of Chapter One and details of where to buy the book.
Naomi Bruce rapped lightly on the old nursery door, and a foreign-accented voice called, ‘Come.’ She opened the door, very quietly, and slipped inside, closing it carefully so as not to catch the trailing silken hem of her flowing Ballet Russe-inspired gown. She waited patiently, just beside the door. She was a slender woman whose features, with their faint but unmistakable oriental cast, hinted at experience without admitting to age. Her skin was the warm colour of café au lait, and her hair, glossy black with only a few decorative strands of silver, fell loose over one shoulder in a manner quite revolutionary for 1914. Her eyes, a deep, un-English brown, surveyed the occupants of the room.
Rebecca Galloway was seated at its far end, in the clear light of the tall skylight window that faced the secluded garden of the house on London’s Park Lane. She was completely naked, her hands crossed in front of her small breasts, posed on a small stool draped in grey velvet. There were no curtains on the window and even on this grey, rainy summer day, the strength of the light made her skin seem unearthly pale, and the stillness of her face, surrounded by rippling masses of recently loosened auburn hair, glowed with a romantic frailty. She stared at the opposite wall with trance-like devotion and seemed totally oblivious of both Naomi and the tall frock-coated, white-bearded man at the easel by the hearth.
‘Excuse me,’ Naomi whispered.
‘Oh.’ Rebecca looked up, her eyes bright with life, the ethereal image shattered. ‘I never heard. Oh, do tell, what’s the time? Am I free?’ She did not await the answer, but went happily on, ‘Oh, thank God, my neck’s as stiff as a poker and I’m positively frozen. Rosie let the fire go out and Mr Leitner,’ she spoke with refined distaste, exactly as if he were not there, ‘never notices little matters like that. And I’m starving. I shall have sugar in my tea. Two lumps,’ she looked with sly malice at the artist, under her lowered auburn lashes, ‘and five crumpets.’
‘Oh, be still, woman,’ the white-haired man suddenly roared. ‘One moment. One. Please. Soon enough you will be a big fat cow. There is surely no hurry.’ Rebecca gave him another malicious look, but obeyed, finding her posture again, with the ease of long practice, and the ethereal shadow again swept her young face. There was a grunt of satisfaction from Leitner, and a few quick dabs of his long brush. Then he stood back, sighed, and said, ‘Oh, very well. Be off and stuff your silly face. We’ll finish next week.’
Rebecca sprang up, clutching her brown velvet robe, and hurriedly wrapped herself in it. Then she scurried to the hearth and leaned over the brass fender, warming her small, delicate hands over the dull ash. Naomi sank gracefully on to the blue brocade settle before the hearth, and affectionately gathered the girl’s thick hair from inside her collar, stroking it out smoothly down her back.
Leitner, midway through washing his brushes, suddenly stopped and cried, ‘Oh, charming. Charming. Wait. I will sketch.’
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ Naomi said sharply. ‘Now go away. Rebecca is escorting Robert aboard the night train. They must be in Scotland tomorrow morning.’
‘Scotland!’ Leitner exclaimed with a prim wince. ‘I make her famous, adored, art’s creature. And all she thinks of is crumpets. And Scotland. Scotland! Philistines!’
‘Yes, dear,’ said Naomi mildly. ‘Now go away like a good thing.’ She turned her back to him. ‘Art may wait a week.’
He shrugged, gathered his paintbox and brushes and made his way to the door, bowing beside the dappled grey rocking-horse and, as Naomi made to rise, assured her he would see himself out. The door closed behind him, and Naomi collapsed in a wave of giggles, her chin on Rebecca’s shoulder.
‘Oh, he’s such a pet really. But really!’ Then she got up and went to the fire, bending over it, and expertly rearranging the coals. She raked out the ash with the poker, and then with small brass tongs, piled a neat pyramid of new black coal on top of the glowing heap.
She turned away from the fire, saw the glint of something shiny on the floor by the rocking-horse, and bent to retrieve it. It was a child’s pocket-knife, well made, with a bone handle and three blades. ‘Oh thank goodness,’ she said, ‘Robert’s damnable knife. He’s been searching everywhere.’ As she straightened, penknife in hand, there was a sudden impatient hammering on the nursery door, and she grinned at Rebecca and said, ‘See?’
‘Mother? Isn’t Rebecca dressed yet? We’re going to be frightfully late, and anyhow I must come in. I think I left something …’
‘Stay out, you little beast,’ Rebecca squealed. ‘I’m not dressed.’ But the boy burst in anyhow, stuck out his tongue at her and said, ‘Who cares? You’re decent and, besides, who’d look at you? You’re ugly as a pig.’ Robert Bruce, at thirteen, was tall for his age, slim and unquestionably Naomi’s child. His hair had the same eastern blackness, his skin and eyes were darker than her own. In his travelling suit and stiff-collared white shirt he looked like an Indian princeling packed off to England for his education. But his voice, when he spoke, was resoundingly British, as was indeed his mother’s.
‘You’ve found it,’ he exulted, reaching for the knife.
Naomi withheld it, a warning look in her eyes. ‘Not difficult,’ she said, ‘I had merely to follow the nicks in the furniture. Now look, young man, you’re not taking this to Scotland …’
‘But I must. Tenny gave it me. And I must show him my Gurkha knife charge, really I must.’
‘Gurkha knife charges will be nothing compared to what I’ll do to you if you damage a single stick of furniture in Culbrech House,’ Naomi said. She proffered the knife. ‘Go on, take it. Do us all a favour and lose it while you’re there.’
‘You’re horrid, Mother. It’s my absolute best possession. And Tenny gave it to me.’
‘Yes,’ said Naomi drily. ‘Do give Tenny my love.’
She dismissed the boy, sending him to the kitchens for his tea, with the warning that he must not mess his good suit or remove the stiff collar in which he was dressed for the journey.
‘I think I’ll murder him on the train and cast his body out to the wolves,’ Rebecca said with dreamy satisfaction.
‘There aren’t any wolves left in Scotland,’ Naomi replied, unperturbed.
‘More’s the pity,’ said Rebecca.
Naomi laughed. ‘Anyone would think you were brother and sister,’ she said.
Rebecca’s expression changed. She looked wistful and said, ‘Sometimes I pretend he is my brother. Then you’d be my mother too. I should positively adore that, if it were true.’
She clutched the brown robe around herself like a lonely little girl, but Naomi only smiled and said briskly, ‘Oh, thank God I’m not, dear. Your ancestry is quite enough of a problem as it is, I assure you. Quite enough.’
Rebecca Galloway’s ancestry was more than a problem; it was a social disaster, and one which, upon her belated discovery of its true nature, had nearly proved fatal. For nineteen years previous to that discovery, Rebecca had rested secure with the rather romantic concept of herself as an orphan to the cause of Darwin. She lived in the London home of the man she believed to be her uncle, a certain Arnold Galloway, a respected, if not particularly notable, medical practitioner. Her own father wa
s Arnold’s brother, Justus Galloway, an eminent biologist, who had spent many years in Australia and the South Pacific researching Darwin’s evolutionary theory. When he was quite young, Justus married a missionary’s daughter he had met on Samoa. They returned to England for Rebecca’s birth, but set out again on another year’s explorations beyond the Cape of Good Hope, leaving the infant Rebecca behind in the capable hands of a nanny in the house of the good doctor. Alas, a shipwreck in the South Atlantic ended Justus’s brilliant career and left Rebecca an orphan in the care of his devoted and mourning unmarried brother. It was a good story. Likely enough, too, considering that even Arnold Galloway was immensely interested in biology, evolution being a speciality of his. But in retrospect, the brothers’ similarity of interests pointed neatly to a logical invention.
And it was all an invention. Rebecca had learned, in one shattering afternoon in her nineteenth year, that there had never even been a Justus Galloway or any missionary bride. Nor was Arnold Galloway any relation of her own. She was in truth the daughter of an Irish whore. The woman had gone into labour in the gutter outside Arnold Galloway’s home. A compassionate man, bound by the Hippocratic oath, Arnold had the lice-ridden creature brought into his own spare bedroom, where, after a frightful three-day labour, the child was born, scrawny and half dead.
He put her aside and tended to the fast failing mother, who, victim of severe malnutrition and the conditions in which she had lived, died soon after. He pulled his fine linen sheet over the aged twenty-year-old face and wearily turned again to the infant. She was still breathing and he went through the formalities of caring for her in the feeble hours he believed remained for her and, amazingly, she lived.
It astounded him. Everything was against the infant, but she held on to life with extraordinary determination. She thrived in his care, and became a pretty, enchanting creature, a changeling of a child, fat and pink-cheeked, fair-haired and beautiful, hardly the offspring of the grey, wasted girl he had seen to a pauper’s grave. The child captivated Arnold Galloway, partly by her beauty, but more by an appeal to his pride. He felt, after the weeks of struggle with the infant, as if he really were her father, and could not bear to see the product of his talent, skill, and luck squandered on an East End foundlings’ home.
It was a gallant but foolish act. As a bachelor, getting on in years and used to living alone, he really had little vocation for rearing a young girl. But he kept her, and with a succession of nannies, raised her as his own. He invented Justus Galloway, his missionary bride, and the whole romantic story almost as a game to amuse. But the child believed him, and grew to be a woman, pretty, tempestuous, lonely, and very romantic. Then, in her nineteenth year, the whole foolish little play-act came crashing down on his head, and on hers.
Rebecca was introduced by chance to the student son of a well-known land-owning family. They sat side by side at dinner and were enchanted with each other. The next day a calling card arrived, the day after, flowers. It was all absolutely too lovely. When a shy, polite request came next for her attendance at a party at the young gentleman’s Dorset home, Arnold Galloway decided things had gone too far, and must be set right before any social awkwardness might occur. With characteristic bluntness, he called his young niece to him, the invitation still in her hand, patted that hand apologetically and told her the truth.
She listened politely, a little unimpressed, as if the whole were another fairy tale. It was only when he took the invitation from her and quietly put it on the fire that the import of what he told her reached home. She went to her room, and sat alone, refusing dinner or any companionship. He heard her sobbing in the darkness, late at night, and assumed a little guiltily that this, like other childhood sorrows, would in that tearful way be resolved. He retired to his own bed and did not hear her rise, dress herself, and leave the house in the still hour before dawn.
Rebecca walked alone through the dark streets of London, too miserable to be frightened, and arrived at Waterloo Bridge with the first grey light of morning. She hoisted herself up on the parapet and seated herself with skirts flowing about her and legs tentatively extended to the grey, filthy water of the Thames. At precisely that moment a lone hansom cab clattered on to the deserted bridge. The noise startled her, hastening her decision, and she scrambled up, teetered awkwardly on the narrow parapet, and steeled herself to jump. The sudden move saved her life.
Naomi Bruce, the hansom cab’s occupant, returning at a totally unacceptable hour from a tête-à-tête dinner with a titled gentleman, was curled contentedly on the leather seat, her mind on other things. A dreamy glance out of the half-shaded window was all the attention she gave the Thames. But her eye, in passing, caught a flutter of movement, the whirl of a skirt, and she sat up, stared, and then rapped with desperate haste on the roof of the cab.
The cabhorse clattered to a halt and the driver, turning his attention from the roadway, also saw the girl. He shouted, but before he could move from his high seat, his woman passenger had leapt down into the street. She ran swiftly towards the parapet where the girl hesitated, her eyes darting swiftly from the river below to the cab and its shouting driver. She seemed mesmerized by the man and the shying horse and only noticed Naomi when she was feet away.
‘Leave me alone,’ she gasped, drawing back as if the river behind her offered safety. She was suddenly an innocent abroad in the night world of London. Naomi, bejewelled and satin-clad in the dawn, was frightening, mysterious and awesome.
‘Get down off there at once, you stupid girl,’ she ordered imperiously.
Rebecca hesitated, hearing Nanny’s authority echoing in the glamorous stranger’s voice. She whispered, ‘Go away.’
‘Get down,’ Naomi said.
Rebecca grew defiant. ‘No. I shan’t. I … I’m going to jump.’
‘Jump? Ridiculous. Now get down before you fall, you silly ass.’
The cab-driver, having calmed his horse, hastened towards them, and his boot-heels thudded suddenly in the stillness.
The girl looked up and shrieked, ‘Get away from me,’ taking her eyes from Naomi who leapt forward with startling agility, caught her arm and wrenched her off the parapet. She landed, shrieking, on top of her rescuer and they both collapsed in a heap of skirts and petticoats at the feet of the amazed cabbie.
Naomi sat up, dismissing the cabbie’s hesitant offer of his hand. She neatly brushed her gloved hands together and glared at the girl emerging from her own dishevelled tangle of lace and lawn. ‘Well, my dear,’ Naomi said, ‘is that performance done with, or have I to look forward to a second act?’
‘I want to die,’ moaned the mortified Rebecca.
Naomi stood up, looking down at the girl with a faintly wry smile. ‘Very well. Like all the rest of us, you no doubt shall. A little patience is all that is required. In the meantime, shall we have breakfast?’
After breakfast, wrapped in one of Naomi Bruce’s gorgeous embroidered dressing-gowns, warm and snug before the morning-room fire with Naomi’s white Persian kitten on her knee, Rebecca Galloway told her story. Over her protests, Arnold Galloway was summoned by telephone, and he, after hours of frantic worry following the discovery of her absence, arrived shortly afterwards in less than good humour.
‘After all,’ he said gruffly, ‘it was hardly as bad as all that.’ He looked across at his erstwhile niece for response, but she remained curled rebelliously on the pale green ottoman by the white Adam mantel, looking at Naomi Bruce for support.
So it was Naomi who said, with deceptive mildness, ‘Oh? Was it not?’
Galloway had decided to bluff this one out. He was terrified of this elegant woman but he wasn’t about to let it show. He stood, legs apart, feet firmly planted on the green and blue Persian carpet, head down, his hand rubbing his goatee and his moustache twitching. He looked at Naomi Bruce over his half-glasses in his diagnostic posture.
‘It was hardly a disaster,’ he said. ‘Just a ‒ let us say ‒ a change. A change of plans. It wasn’t a
s if she was being put out on the street like ‒ like her wretched mother. Not at all. I never promised her anything. Social standing or any of that. I never said she could marry just any person she fancied. After all, what girl can?’
‘Most girls,’ said Naomi, again very mildly, ‘can expect to marry into the circles in which they are permitted to move.’ Her eyes were very distant as if she was thinking of something else, far off in time, beyond the pretty drawing-room.
‘Well, naturally. But there are exceptions. Rebecca is, well, an exception. It does not mean she can’t have friends, a good home. After all, I’ve given her that. And everything I have will go to her. She will not do without, materially.’
‘There’s a little more to life than that,’ Rebecca cried suddenly in a choked, bitter voice.
Naomi waved her quiet with a jewelled hand.
‘For God’s sake, madam,’ Galloway suddenly exploded, ‘the girl’s origins are not unknown, there’s been no secret, no conspiracy. People are decent enough to ignore them for most purposes, but when all’s said and done …’
‘She may come to lunch but not to bed,’ said Naomi.
‘Really, madam, must we be so crude?’
‘Oh, I suppose not,’ Naomi said with a sweet smile. ‘I do understand, you know. Mustn’t taint the bloodlines, now, must we?’
Arnold Galloway felt distantly that she was talking through him, in some way, as if some other ghostly personage had entered the room and the conversation, and it was to that person that she spoke. It was a queer feeling and made him uneasy. He shuffled his feet and said, ‘After all, the girl can take up an employment if she wishes something to do with her life. She could be a nanny, or a governess, and live in splendid style. Such people do, with the right families.’
‘Oh, of course,’ Naomi clapped her hands, her dark eyes brightening. ‘The perfect solution. Of course.’
Rebecca Galloway looked up suddenly from the white kitten on her knee. Her eyes were full of silent distress and a deep sense of betrayal.