Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘I trust you,’ he said. ‘I even hate using the word, if it means for a moment that I might not. But I don’t want to see you making mistakes that I can help you to avoid. Could I make one or two little points, Isobel? I would hardly call them stipulations. That isn’t our way of life. But firstly, you must not take it amiss if I quietly make a few enquiries of my own.’

  ‘If by that you mean pouring strong liquor into Gilbert Slack, I reserve the right to ignore your findings.’

  The nearest she ever came to nagging him was over his readiness to listen to Slack. Slack’s reminiscences did not impress her. and he had a nauseating habit of showing his scorn for Frank Lomas at every opportunity. He knew her own movements pretty well, too, and whenever he met her about the grounds he had a way of looking at her that boasted of his knowledge. Her father, on the other hand, firmly claimed that he knew how to manipulate such men. At bottom Slack was a reasonable workman, and with a little jollying along could be kept at the grind-stone. ‘The winter will come and go,’ Esmond Fuller had said, ‘and when the warm weather promises, Slack will be off again. You’ll be surprised how much of the work has been done.’

  ‘I certainly do not mean Slack,’ he said now. ‘There are more reliable sources of information.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so. Slack’s friend Harry, for example?’

  ‘Now you are merely being ridiculous. You must leave this to me. I shall be writing one or two confidential letters. You cannot possibly hold that against me. That’s point number one. Point number two –’

  Her mind jumped away for a moment. At this very time, Frank would be coming out of the mine, finding his cottage cold and comfortless. It was one of those sunless winter twilights and the sky through the window had turned already from dark blue to empty blackness. She could hardly rush out to Dead-Nettle now.

  ‘Point number two: there are certain appurtenances in this house for which I do, it may surprise you to know, cherish a sentimental affection. My pipe-rack, for example. Those two little candle-sticks in Irish bog-oak. And a few other things that perhaps I need hardly enumerate. I don’t want to have to move over to Dead-Nettle Drift to enjoy my own possessions.’

  Heavily comic, even as to a word like enumerate. There was no bitterness in this. It cast his approval on what had already gone over to the mine. She smiled faintly.

  ‘I promise you I’ll leave you your bed and bedding,’ she said. ‘And the things you stand up in.’

  ‘Point number three –’

  ‘Good heavens! Another?’

  But this time he wasn’t trying to be funny.

  ‘I do think you might find it in your heart to stay home and take tea with me now and then. Shall we say, once a week?’

  ‘Done, Father!’

  There were even the beginnings of a nip of guilt here.

  ‘But not on the same day each week, if you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I hate regular patterns. They make life seem shorter.’

  Frank Lomas would soon learn to hate the days when she did not come. And she would school herself sternly. There would be no balsam for either her own impatience or Frank’s. On the days when she stayed home to take muffins and toasted tea-cakes with her father, there would be no slipping away to Dead-Nettle at unwonted hours.

  ‘Regularity is a great comfort to some of us,’ her father said.

  ‘But you were never one for taking easy ways out were you? Haven’t you always refused to sleep on feathers? Don’t tell me you’ve settled for the sybaritic life at last?’

  This was more like their normal relationship.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘but there might come a time.’

  Two or three weeks later, in mid-December, the postman had forecast snow and there were great yellow banks of it building up in the sky over Ranters’Hill. Esmond Fuller went out of his way to be in evidence as she was about to leave the house that afternoon, to warn her that if a blizzard did start, she might find herself weather-bound.

  ‘Now don’t try to be selfish, Father. You had your tea-party yesterday.’

  ‘To have one two days running would fill my cup to the brim.’

  ‘And you’d be sure to spill some.’

  ‘Don’t say you weren’t warned. Once drifting starts in these hills, we can be cut off for days.’

  The first flakes began to fall before she reached the mine. Her horse’s mane was caked with white crystals as she reined in beside the cottage.

  Esmond Fuller had had a premonition that she would not return to the Hall that night. But foreknowledge was no consolation; it did not help him to fall asleep.

  Chapter Ten

  When Esmond Fuller announced that he proposed to make 1904 a Dickensian Christmas, Isobel was mildly delighted that he should be thinking genial thoughts for a change. But when she heard his guest-list, she was filled with the direst foreboding: Frank Lomas, Gilbert Slack, the impervious Harry Burgess and herself: no one from the Margreave world, and no one from their half forgotten blood circle. But there was nothing that she could do about it except to wait in suspense. He had already told them that they were invited, and no force could have persuaded him to give back-word.

  When she saw the scale on which he pictured the entertainment, she wondered if advancing age was beginning to unbalance him. He had sent out orders that had enhanced his reputation with local tradesmen and written for hampers from a fashionable mail-order firm: goose and plum pudding, quails and foie gras, ham, tongue and chicken in aspic, petit fours and Mazarines, an instruction down to his own kitchen for a gross of mince-pies. And for strong drink he had laid in port and Madeira, eau de vie, an octavo cask of Vino de Pasto, Chambertin, Musigny, Meursault – and a hogshead of Christmas ale, as if that were for the mere assuaging of casual thirst between courses.

  ‘Father, are you proposing that this party should last a fortnight? You’ve enough fire-water there to put a regiment to sleep.’

  It was the word regiment that was the source of magic for him. Esmond Fuller, the industrialist with a steel spring instead of a heart, was undefended prey when the talk was of Empire and far-flung lines. He had made almost a hobby of Queen Victoria’s wars, was as familiar with exotic and desperate corners of the world as if he still had their powder-smoke in his nostrils himself. He used to maintain from his arm-chair that the prosperity of Manchester and the furnaces of the Mid-lands rested squarely on the men who faced the assegai or groaned with thirst as the life-blood drained from them. Yet he had first-hand knowledge of very few soldiers: which helped him to forgive vagabond opportunists like Gilbert Slack and cloth-headed idlers like Harry, before he had even started to explore them. ‘Think what we owe them,’ he said, till his words sickened Isobel by their very predictability.

  Slack and Harry had spent the second half of Christmas morning in the Adventurers’ – not drinking heavily by the standards adopted for the day, but returning fairly excitable and red-faced from the brisk air and the festive company. Frank Lomas had already walked over from the mine in a dark suit that was almost pathetic for its self-conscious and humdrum decency, and was facing his host in front of a massive log fire. Isobel, with not very demanding responsibilities for distant over sight of the kitchen, was sitting with them, sipping from a thimble-glass of sugared water.

  It seemed at first as if the men were going to behave themselves. Gilbert Slack, as far as he understood the concept, had evidently decided to be polite. Harry was saying no more than usual, though he had the irritating habit of wriggling his neck in his collar every few minutes or so, which drew attention to his unease in drawing-room garb. Her worst fear for Frank had been that the dominant presence of Slack would subdue him into a bumpkin-like awkwardness. But he seemed to be getting on famously with her father. They were chatting fluently about the fauna of the Veldt.

  There had been some change in Gilbert Slack’s attitude to her. Her visits to Frank Lomas were no sort of secret and she had not attempted to conceal from anyone that she had spent the n
ight of the blizzard at his cottage. Nor had she shown any embarrassment because everyone knew about it. Her strength on this issue – and I think it cost her a good deal more in nervous energy than most people guessed – was that her father never even began to question her about the occasion. And as far as Gilbert Slack was concerned, it cut from under his feet all possibilities of blackmail. He could no longer be a threat to her, because she was hiding nothing. But she continued to find him offensive. He looked at her always as if he knew, like some old friend, exactly what was going on between her and Frank; as if this was something in which he actually shared her pleasure – and as if he felt sure that he had only to wait his own turn.

  They drank Christmas ale, thick, fruity and sweet, on top of whatever else they had imbibed, and sat down at table at about three o’clock in the afternoon, still in an atmosphere of exaggerated respect for each other, though noisier now than any of them realised, including her father. There was a flush over his cheek-bones that she had never seen there before, and he plied the men with mountains of food as if he were experimenting for some purpose of his own to see how much he could press into them.

  And at the same time, he was pushing them into military reminiscences.

  ‘I suppose your officers did their best at Christmas time, wherever you happened to be, to introduce something of the festive spirit?’

  ‘Officers!’

  Esmond Fuller was tolerant about their contempt for their leaders; he did not, clearly, believe it to be justified, but he treated it nevertheless as something that he expected and that amused him. Gilbert Slack, as far as a full mouth and the tricky enunciation of the words permitted, tried to be explicit – and portentous.

  ‘No, actually, sir, our officers: well, Major Aspinell we’d have followed anywhere, and did. But for the most part they were just a social club, a race apart, you might say. They knew very little of what was going on in the ranks, and wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it if they did. It was the N.C.O. s who held the army together.’

  Fuller turned towards Lomas.

  ‘And you were an N.C.O.’

  ‘Aye – the janker-wallah corporal.’

  This was from Hurry, fully drunk now, emboldened and foolish.

  His tactlessness earned him a perceptible nudge from Slack; but too late. He had aroused Fuller’s interest.

  ‘What does that mean, janker-wallah corporal? I thought that jankers was a term taken over from the Indian Army, and that it meant men under punishment. Am I to understand that Frank was in charge of disciplining defaulters?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ Slack began, still eager, from some strategy of his own, to see the peace kept. But Lomas stepped in with his own blundering sense of honesty.

  ‘What they are trying to tell you is that I was given my stripes by accident.’

  He proceeded to tell a story which had the others in fits of laughter, though he did not smile himself.

  It had happened just after Colenso, one of the first major defeats of the campaign, and one that shattered the confidence of that segment of British society that understood it. The battalion was in disarray, still collecting its stragglers, its uniforms torn and caked with mud, the soles half torn off its boots, its rations late and decimated, water in short supply.

  Lomas, as was by no means infrequent in his service, was at that time a convicted defaulter for some minor misdemeanour. He had had a penchant for unwitting disciplinary offences since his earliest recruit days, was prone to be caught red-handed in every ‘crime’he committed, and was the natural scapegoat for two thirds of the sergeants and corporals in his company. As a man under punishment he came regularly into the particular province of the Provost-Sergeant, a past master in the art of the intolerable. The Provost-Sergeant had brought with him all the way from their barracks at home an old bucket and a length of iron chain which were kept rusting in water in the day-time, to be brought up to a high polish in their off-duty hours by the men confined to barracks. In action, the most obnoxious of fatigues were always reserved for these miscreants. And one of the Provost-Sergeant’s most subtle tortures was to have his janker-wallahs parade before him every half-hour, on each occasion with some laborious variant of uniform or equipment. A full, finnicky lay-out of every item in a man’s kit, five minutes before Lights Out, was one of his favourites.

  Lomas suffered it all with what must have amounted to a bovine resignation. He knew what it was to have a period of jankers prolonged for slothful compliance. The Provost-Sergeant, catching sight of him in the chaotic laager after Colenso, had suddenly ordered him to appear before him in a quarter of an hour in full ceremonials.

  Then on the scene came General Sir Redvers Henry Buller, a veteran of the Chinese War of 1860, a V.C. against the Zulus – the man who, some have said, originally and personally invented spit and polish. The state of the battalion disgusted him: a dirty soldier was a potential coward. Bayonets were not made to be camouflaged in ambush: they were meant to flash in the sun. And in the middle of his searing reprimand of Lomas’s commanding officer, he spotted Lomas, standing at attention beside the improvised guard-compound, in his red tunic, with ball-buttons of apparently pure gold, a knife-edge crease actually sewn into his blue patrol trousers, his number one boots brought up to a mirror-like shine by the extraction of all grease from the leather with the handle of a hot spoon.

  ‘Now, there’s something like a soldier.’

  And he ordered Lomas to be made a Queen’s Corporal on the spot, a substantive rank honoris causa from which nothing less than a court martial could demote him.

  ‘But sir, this man is a defaulter.’

  ‘What does that matter? A man isn’t a soldier until he has shown that he can take field punishment.’

  So Lomas became a further embarrassment to his commanders in the most unexpected way. What was to be done with him now? Harry had the answer. Although he was still not drunk enough to say the words aloud in front of Isobel, he mouthed them silently for the sake of Frank and Gilbert.

  ‘Shit-wallah.’

  They had made Lomas Sanitary Corporal. He had been put in charge of the small band of camp-scavengers, latrine diggers and night-soil disposers.

  ‘They say an army marches on its stomach,’ Gilbert Slack began to say.

  ‘You mean that Frank was a cook?’

  ‘Not exactly. In the same line of business, you might say, only further down the line.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Isobel did. She had already coaxed this part of Frank’s story out of him in her own way.

  ‘I think we’ve heard enough of this,’ she said.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ her father intervened, ‘by a coincidence I have just been having a correspondence with Frank’s former commanding officer over quite a different matter – and what he has to say about his qualities as a soldier are so glowing that it might be an embarrassment for him to hear them in company. And you, sir –’

  He addressed himself in a not unkindly manner to Slack, but with a firmness that even in his state of inebriation, Slack could not miss.

  ‘You, sir, should be the last man to poke fun at a comrade-in-arms. It is acknowledged in despatches that he saved your life.’

  ‘That’s true, sir,’ Slack conceded. ‘And for that reason –’

  For that reason, driven into shrill, hysterical high spirits by the secondary shock, the delayed reactions of terror and relief, Slack had promised Lomas treasures untold if ever he could make his way back to Dead-Nettle Drift. In the long hours of that dark night, cut off from their main body, waiting for the dawn before they could know whether there was any salvation for them, he had talked wildly and with maudlin sentiment about Margreave and the wealth to be wrested from its hills.

  ‘You’ve been a miner, Frank. Those buggers up there have all given up trying. You could make the fortune of a life-time in three years, if you were prepared to stick it out. And it wouldn’t be like those old coal-pits of yours.
Not in any way.’

  Lomas had fastened on to it like a vision.

  ‘And he had to kill a woman to do it,’ Harry said, belatedly, the topic almost already talked out. The drink seemed to be fuddling Harry into a new kind of pride, a pride in being the bringer of scandalous news.

  ‘Remember the look on her face, Frank?’

  ‘What does it matter whether it was a man or a woman?’ Slack said. ‘When she’s got the butt of a Mauser to her shoulder, there are some things you don’t worry over-much about.’

  ‘You mean she was a partisan?’ Fuller asked, disconcerted at an unromantic aspect of heroism.

  ‘I think we’ve all had enough of this story,’ Isobel announced. ‘When you take things out of their context, you do justice to no one. I’m quite sure –’

  But she did not in fact know what she was quite sure about. She stole a look at Frank, the fringe of familiar beard, the huge honest face, the clear suggestible eyes. Was it true that he had killed a woman? In cold blood? It was plain, as Slack said, that war was war, and if someone was pointing a gun at you – or your friend – then chivalry obviously went low on your list. Even if the friend was Gilbert Slack.

  All the same, if you had killed a fellow creature, were you ever the same?

  ‘And there’s another thing we ought to ask Frank –’

  Harry again. The sooner he drank himself insensible –

  ‘We ought to ask Frank –’

  Gilbert Slack and Esmond Fuller leaned forward simultaneously across the table to silence him – but it was the older man, suddenly, unexpectedly authoritative, yet without a spoken word, who did the trick. Harry seemed to slump in his place.