by Gavin Lyall
The General looked at him. “Naturally, you will accompany the Capitaine.”
“Ah, the King wouldn’t want to be bothering with the likes of an Irish squire. I’ll wait here, ’til the Captain gets back.”
Nothing showed in Gunther’s face, but a hesitancy in his movement suggested he saw a problem. Perhaps, if he didn’t want to leave O’Gilroy while he and Clement were away, Clement was the only one of the household truly on Gunther’s team.
“It is many hours to Belgium,” the General said uncertainly. “And perhaps the Capitaine will wish to take the railway from there …”
“I haven’t finished me wine yet,” O’Gilroy said.
“Who is this man?” Gunther took the offensive.
“I’m jest what ye see,” O’Gilroy said contentedly.
“An escort to a courier. L’intelligence? Secret Service – which I think you despise, mon Général?”
“Absolument.” The General gave O’Gilroy a despising look.
“Then,” Gunther announced, “you will not want him to remain an instant longer in an honourable house. We will leave him at the station in Rouen.”
“It would be best,” the General said gravely.
“Nobody,” Ranklin said, “has yet asked me if I want to go to Belgium.”
“Mais naturellement …” the General seemed puzzled.
“It will be far too late to wait upon His Majesty by the time we get there tonight – and I have heard he prefers to sleep early.” He hadn’t heard any such thing, but was sure nobody else had heard anything either. “Tomorrow we will go to Rouen, take the train for Paris, and …”
Gunther jumped in. “So you can deliver the code to the traitors in Paris?”
“Mijnheer,” Ranklin said coldly, “you have accused me, an officer in the service of His Britannic Majesty, of treachery and being ready to sell a code for money. There can be no worse insults to my honour, and only one course is open to me. I only regret that I must wait till dawn to receive the satisfaction that is my due.” And reaching across the table he lightly flicked his napkin in Gunther’s pop-eyed face. “Mr O’Gilroy will act as my second.”
Was he right? Was the casual but implacable code of the duel part of the General’s dream that they were all living?
He was right – and wrong. While everybody else was sitting dazed with surprise, the General shook his head. “Capitaine, you dishonour yourself. For a gentleman-at-arms to challenge a bourgeois seller of cigars! – no, this is not permissible. Not in a house of honour.”
A small relieved smile twitched Gunther’s moustache.
O’Gilroy leant back in his chair and drawled: “Meself, I’m no gentleman-at-arms. But I’d be no sort of gentleman at all to hear meself called Secret Service – which, General, ye’ll agree is lower than the lowest thing that crawls in yer sewers – without seeing the foul stain washed out in blood.” And he tossed his whole napkin at Gunther, now totally flabbergasted. “I’m sure the Captain will act as me second.”
14
O’Gilroy flopped onto one of the beds and said mournfully: “I think I saw this play at the Gaiety. It had an unhappy end to it.” He looked up at Ranklin. “Ye’d best tell me jest what I’ve talked meself into.”
“‘Wiping out a foul stain in blood’, that’s what. Did that come from the play?”
“It did.”
Ranklin shook his head, still trying to catch up with the rush of events. “You didn’t have to challenge Gunther like that.”
“Ye did yeself.”
“I was playing for time. Anyway, with my background – ”
“Ah, I see it now.” O’Gilroy’s voice got a jagged edge to it. “Not being an officer and a gentleman, I’m not good enough to …”
“Did you have fencing lessons at your school?” Ranklin asked coldly. “Have you ever fired a black-powder pistol – or any pistol at the sort of distance duels are fought?”
The quivering silence dwindled into the tap of rain on the window, the breath of wind in the chimney. O’Gilroy nodded. “Permission to speak more sensibly, Captain? Does it have to be swords or pistols?”
“It’s traditional. But that’s all duels are, anyway.”
“Are they always having duels in France?”
“Not nowadays. But it’s about the only place on the Continent where they aren’t still common among … among the duelling classes. Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary – I think they’ve all got laws against it. Like the law against distilling poteen in Ireland.”
“I get yer meaning, Captain.”
“Anyway, Gunther doesn’t want a duel any more than we do, so he might just cut his losses and run.”
“I’m not betting on it.”
“Nor I – Entrez!” to a knock on the door.
The manservant brought in a large tray loaded with decanters, glasses, coffee cups and pots – even a silver cigarette box. “Le Comte mon Général vous attendra en cinq minutes, mon Capitaine.”
Ranklin studied the man: about forty and thickening up, but burly and stronger than himself. Sergeant Clement might be the only one on Gunther’s side, but this man would be one to worry about if they fell foul of the General. The butler Gaston was strictly supply train.
He nodded, dismissing the man. “Cognac? Brandy to us.”
O’Gilroy took a glass and coffee. “And what d’ye decide when ye parley-vous with the General?” He helped himself to a cigarette from the box.
“Weapons, time, place, any conditions. The useful thing about a duel is that it stops everything in place. The General won’t make any move about the code, you and Gunther mustn’t meet, Gunther can’t meet me – nothing happens until the duel’s over, and if that isn’t until dawn …”
“I see what ye … Jayzus!” He jerked the cigarette from his lips and peered at it. “What am I smoking here? Frogs’ legs? Ye’ll observe me perfect manners in not smoking this thing to the last drag. And when ye see the General, ask if he’s anything else to smoke, some oily rags from the car, mebbe.”
Ranklin smiled and pulled out his watch. “Yes, I’d better go and parley. One thing: Gunther may try to dodge the duel by offering an abject apology.”
“And what then?”
“If you accept – and you’re supposed to if it’s abject enough – then I suppose we’re back where we left off.”
O’Gilroy stretched out on the bed; the window was darkening, the room growing colder. He started to get his overcoat, then remembered it was downstairs: the butler had taken it. And he had finished his own few cigarettes – few because of Ranklin’s warning of French customs laws – so there were only those foul French things.
He could ring the bell and demand his overcoat, perhaps other cigarettes, certainly a hot drink, but didn’t want to make any move without Ranklin knowing. So he stayed as helpless as a man in a cell – or a gentleman without his servants. He smiled, as he had so often before, at that helplessness, at men who couldn’t put a stud into the shirts they owned, nor their own cars into gear. Men who were so proud of despising any skill except horse riding and shooting.
“That’s what keeps us in our place,” an old shipyard worker had grumbled to him once, “pride in our work. That’s what they teach us and all they teach us, so’s we’ll sleep easy and not be dreaming of painting the walls with their blood.”
There had been a lot of truth, as well as porter, in that remark.
He got up and poured lukewarm coffee into his cup, then added a dash of brandy, something he had only heard of doing before. It certainly tasted warmer, though in truth it must be colder. And was that being an English gentleman – just a feeling of being better than most, and probably brought on by brandy besides?
Holy Mary, and he had offered to fight a duel for such people and their damned Empire! No! He threw that thought away immediately. Anybody who thought that didn’t know Conall O’Gilroy. He was fighting – if it got that far – for himself, and fighting Gunther because he was Gunther.
>
He lived with questions – why had he joined up with Ranklin and the Bureau? why had he joined the Army before that? – which were too big to have anything but small answers, like a smile and a shrug. He had been there, he was here now, tomorrow he would be – in Hell, it seemed possible. He smiled and shrugged.
Ranklin came in with a long rifle in one hand, a scabbarded bayonet in the other and a dazed look on his face. He kicked the door shut, threw the rifle and bayonet onto a bed and said: “That wasn’t dinner we had, it was the Mad Hatter’s tea party.”
O’Gilroy got up and reached for the rifle. “What is it? Is it loaded?”
Ranklin shook his head and refilled his brandy glass. “No. No bullets. Just the bayonet.”
“Bayonet fighting?”
Ranklin tried to nod and swallow brandy at the same time. When he had mopped up, he said: “Yes. And we’re not waiting till dawn. That, according to the General, is just a popular myth. Christ, I …” he shook his head. “I’ll tell you what happened.”
O’Gilroy was finding out how the bayonet fitted under the muzzle of the rifle. “I’m listening.”
“First, Gunther hasn’t offered any apology; I don’t understand that. Second, I made a fuss about having a doctor there – I know that’s standard practice – so the General sent to the village for the local quack. He must be in the old boy’s pocket, not expected to report this to the gendar – the police.”
“Who might also be in the General’s pocket, mind.”
“Ye-es. After a few hundred years in one place, the family in the Big House can grow big pockets.”
“Yer not telling me anything new.” And come to that, hadn’t Ranklin’s family – until very recently – held just such a near-medieval position in their patch of Worcestershire?
“So – then we got on to weapons. I said a country gentleman and a cigar merchant wouldn’t be swordsmen or know much about duelling pistols, so why not sporting rifles, four hundred metres apart? In daylight, of course. That’s when I got the bit about not waiting for dawn. And the General came up with this: the commoner’s weapon. The bayonet.
“That,” he added, “is the French Lebel, their standard rifle until fairly recently. He had a couple hanging on his walls as mementos of his campaigns.”
The Lebel, O’Gilroy reckoned, was over six inches longer and a pound heavier than the shortened British Lee-Enfield, as well as being generally more old-fashioned. With the bayonet fixed, it came to his own height, something like a cavalry pig-sticker. He held it in his left hand, testing for the point of balance.
Ranklin continued: “Then I said you hadn’t served in the Army but Gunther had told me he had, and the General said that was only in the Dutch Schutterij – a sort of conscript garrison force – and anybody could learn bayonet fighting in twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes, is it? He’s remembering how long he learnt to be a General.”
“Silence in the ranks. Get on with learning.”
Bayonet fighting is unrealistic. If you’re reduced to using the bayonet on the battlefield, you might get in one thrust before some third party stabs you from behind. But armies practise it because it makes soldiers confident in handling their rifles and is a cheap way of keeping them busy. So it gets formalised into a sort of fencing, only with two-handed swords that, if Lebels, weigh ten pounds and are six feet long.
O’Gilroy moved out from between the beds to a clear space in front of the fireplace, holding the rifle firmly in both hands. He brought it slowly down to the “on guard” position, then leant gently forward in a “point” keeping himself and the unfamiliar weapon carefully balanced. At the “withdrawal” Ranklin noticed the trained-now-instinctive twist of the hands to free the bayonet from the grip of dying flesh. O’Gilroy did it again, a little faster.
Still watching, Ranklin said: “Now we don’t have a truce until dawn, we have to think a little faster. I was hoping that when it was dark, everybody asleep …”
“There’s a back door to each wing,” O’Gilroy said, swinging the rifle through low and high parries, left and right. “Past the bathrooms and down the back stairs. The servants’ rooms in this wing are empty.”
“You reconnoitred this?” Ranklin goggled at him.
“Coming back from me bathe. Captain – ” he stopped and looked at Ranklin; “ – in our trade, don’t get yeself inside a building without ye know another way out.”
“Yes.” Ranklin nodded slowly. “Yes. Well … If you take the codes, I can pretend to everybody you’re still here. I mean, nobody expects to see you until …”
“Only it’s not yet dark and the house wide awake, and how far d’ye reckon to the railway?”
“Five miles. About that.”
“And more to a station. With them in cars after me and me not knowing a word of the language. Haven’t I heard officers talking about not dividing yer forces?”
“But if you stay here, you’ll have to go through with the duel, damn it!” But the glint of the bayonet went on weaving fierce, graceful patterns in the gloom.
“Oh bugger it,” Ranklin said. “Well – don’t believe that about Gunther and the Dutch Schutterij. I’d say German Army, maybe even Prussian. And I’m sure he thinks you were in the Army, probably still are. Only,” he added thoughtfully, “as an officer. Not with a rifle and bayonet.”
O’Gilroy turned, the last cold daylight from the window lodging on his thin, hungry smile. He lunged smoothly and checked, the bayonet barely quivering, a couple of inches from Ranklin’s waistcoat.
“So mebbe I’ll just kill him.”
“In an hour. In the courtyard. By lamplight.”
But I still don’t believe all this is happening, Ranklin thought, even if the duel was my idea. I’d just wandered into the General’s dream, feverish from the germs of a glory that infects this house where “blood” is just a fine word like “duty” and “honour”, and the dying don’t scream for their mothers. When there is real blood on the cobbles down there, God let me be the first and fastest to wake up.
Somewhere behind the Château a generator chugged into life, but only the ground floor seemed to have been wired up for lighting. Soon after, the manservant brought in a duplex oil lamp, vase-shaped and ornate but cheaply electroplated. He took the coffee cups and pots and left without saying a word.
O’Gilroy made another brief attempt to smoke a French cigarette and went back to the rifle – shadow-fencing with it, now.
Time ticked by. The General’s car came up the drive and Ranklin went out to the window at the head of the stairs to watch the village doctor – not an old quack, as he’d assumed, but a young man with a wispy professional beard – get out with his black bag. The courtyard was already being prepared by the manservant and another – the cook? – carrying a small ladder round to light lanterns fixed to the walls on the wing sides. There was some other light source at the main door, but that was out of sight below him.
It should be flaring torches to give the proper Olde-Tyme atmosphere, he thought sourly, and went back to the bedroom.
There, he tipped a little more brandy into their glasses. “Five minutes.”
“Any time. We’ll get nowhere by running now.”
“No, but the first chance we get to nobble any pursuit … Good luck.”
“Mud in yer eye, Captain. Is it the right thing now to break the glasses in the fireplace?”
Ranklin brightened. “That’s an idea. The more of the old loony’s property gets smashed, the better I feel.” He emptied his glass and threw it with feeling.
15
The whole household seemed to have turned out to watch – well, who wouldn’t? Apart from the staff they knew, and the probable cook, there were just two middle-aged women, presumably wives of two of the servants. But still barely half the number a house that size needed, and no outside staff like gardeners and stablemen.
The General himself, wrapped in a thick cape and wearing a tall silk hat, stood in the centre
of the courtyard with the young doctor and Sergeant Clement, who held a second rifle. Gunther, stripped to his shirt like O’Gilroy but, unlike him, wearing a silk scarf to hide the indelicacy of being collarless, stood back by the far wall.
Ranklin parked O’Gilroy by the opposite wing of the building and took the rifle over to Sergeant Clement. Everybody raised their hats to everybody and the General perfunctorily introduced the doctor.
“Does your principal wish to apologise?” Ranklin asked.
“He is ready to regret that he made the observation.”
As an apology it was rice-paper thin, barely acceptable, and that surprised Ranklin. Why hadn’t he made it so abject as to call off the duel and get back to the business of the code and straightforward murder?
Then he realised why and smiled thinly over at Gunther. Playing the part of His Majesty’s loyal servant, he now found himself cast as King’s Champion and defender of the Royal Et Cetera, and as such couldn’t crawl abjectly out of duels. Not if he wanted to keep the confidence of the General and an open peephole into the Ministère de la Guerre.
Turning back to the General, he became cold and careful. “If my principal were to accept this apology, what would happen next?”
The General was puzzled. “We would, if you wish, return to complete our dinner. With coffee and cognac, and if you desire, a cigar.”
“And the matter of the code?”
This time the General really was baffled. He peered at Ranklin. “The matter of the code is quite different.”
And in his mind it really was, it had no connection with the duel. Ranklin said stiffly: “Very well. You may inform your principal that my principal considers his honour so deeply impugned by the accusation that he is a member of the Secret Service, that he believes the stain can only be washed out by blood.”
And I’ll bet the author of that line never thought it would play in France, he reflected. The General shuffled away.
The doctor, who must have had a little English but no idea of what the duel was about, goggled across at O’Gilroy. Standing under a wall lamp, shirt sleeves rolled up and his dark hair tangled into his eyes, he looked like a schoolgirl’s dream of a romantic pirate.