Beneath Gray Skies

by Hugh Ashton

  “No more foolishness,” Betsy admonished him. “You heard what was said.”

  “Oh, I shall miss him,” said Miss Justin to Betsy as they watched Christopher’s retreating form.

  “We all will, Miss Henry. He’s a good man.”

  Chapter 8: Whitehall, London, United Kingdom

  “What if he won’t listen to me, sir?”

  “Kill him.”

  C  was in a foul mood. It was a wet, gray, windy London day. His umbrella had blown inside out on the way to his office, and a passing taxi had soaked him from crotch to ankle. His morning cup of tea had initially arrived without milk for some unknown reason, and now he had this ridiculous dispatch from Richmond.

  “Have you read this, Dowling?” he snapped at his harassed underling. “No, of course you haven’t. Shall I tell you what it says?” Without waiting for an answer, he proceeded to do just that. “We have a colored gentleman with a severely battered face, a broken rib and a couple of broken fingers, turning up on the doorstep of our Richmond Legation, clutching a piece of paper and asking for our Chief of Station by name.”

  Dowling shook his head in sympathy.

  “That’s not the worst of it, Dowling. It gets worse. Much worse. Bertie Flowers talked to him, and got his story. Apparently this chappie was set about by a gang of roughs, one of whom was the nephew of his owner—”

  “Sorry, sir? He is a slave?”

  “Wait and all will be revealed, Dowling. Please don’t interrupt me again. And don’t apologize,” before Dowling could open his mouth. “Just listen. Anyway, he was getting the living daylights kicked out of him, when suddenly out of the darkness, up turns this Confederate soldier. This mystery man turns his rifle on the assailants, breaks the kneecap of one of them with the butt, and sends him off with a helping pal supporting each side. Then he turns his attention to the ringleader, and shoves him on the nearest train at gunpoint, after relieving him of his wallet and its contents. Next he takes our colored friend back to his mistress—I suppose Bertie means his owner here, rather than his common-law wife,” C smiled mirthlessly. “There he plays the Good Samaritan, binds up the broken man’s wounds, and flees into the night, leaving the cash he’d lifted off the thug on the kitchen table. Gives his name as ‘Brian’ and left our Embassy address and Chief’s name as a contact, saying it’s his uncle’s house, and tells them he’s off to Savannah.”

  “Finch-Malloy,” exclaimed Dowling. “And Savannah’s where the troops are sailing from to Germany.”

  “I had made those connections myself,” replied C dryly. “And don’t keep bloody apologizing,” he added swiftly. “The story continues and the plot thickens. Oh yes, it thickens. Our man’s owner—his name’s Christopher Pole, by the way, but to me he seems like the Pole you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot barge if you saw this sort of thing going on—then gives him his freedom and the money, which turns out to be a pretty decent sum, by the way, and tells him to go and find ‘Brian’s’ uncle. Which he does. Bertie gets the Legation doctor to see him, and bind up his wounds. It seems that he’ll heal up quite nicely, but he really was in a bit of a bad way.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “We’re not done yet. Also in this dispatch there are two other pieces of news from the godforsaken area in Georgia where all this happened. First, the conductor of a train which passed through the fair town of Cordele, where our Mr. Pole used to live and move and have his being, on its way to Little Rock, Arkansas, reported a scuffle with an abusive drunk who claimed that he shouldn’t be on the train, and wanted to get off. In the course of the altercation, the drunk gave his name, loudly and abusively, as Lamar Fitchman, which, by a strange coincidence, happens to be the name of the ringleader that our ‘Brian’ forced onto a train at Cordele heading for Little Rock. Shortly after imparting this information to the world, Mr. Fitchman apparently lost his balance, assisted by a straight right to the jaw from an irritated fellow passenger, and fell from the caboose, whatever that is, onto the track. The train stopped, but Mr. Fitchman was dead when they discovered him. He had, by the way, no wallet on him, and was identified by his aunt, who as I said before, is Mr. Pole’s ex-owner.”

  “Oh dear,” repeated Dowling.

  “Oh, I have more,” C replied, almost cheerfully. “The two thugs whom we left dragging their wounded comrade around the boulevards of Cordele apparently decided they hadn’t had enough to drink. Somehow they managed to drop their friend in the road or something as they refreshed their thirsty selves, but anyway, he died, and they were arrested for second-degree murder, which seems to be about the same as manslaughter over here. Of course, the tall dark stranger who goes round smashing strangers’ kneecaps with rifle butts is their main line of defense.”

  “That’s how he won his Victoria Cross at Mons, of course,” remarked Dowling. “Killed a dozen Jerries in a machine-gun post with an entrenching tool. ‘Bloody Brian’ is what the Guards Brigade called him after that. He was the school fencing champion at Harrow, you know.”

  “Well, he hasn’t lost his touch, has he?” C noted. “‘Bloody Brian’ seems to be about the right name for him. We must get the silly beggar out of there soon, before he faces the tender mercies of Confederate justice. The only thing that’s saved him up to now, I think, is the way the military over there is almost untouchable by civilian outsiders.”

  Dowling shuddered to think of what he’d heard of the judicial system in the Confederacy. Tales of thirty prisoners crammed into cells meant for ten, and mass executions on an almost daily basis inside the labor camps were among the less grisly stories that came out of the South.

  He changed the subject. “Sir, what are we going to do with this colored chappie Pole? It seems rather a liability to have him running round the place telling people about his savior ‘Brian’.”

  “He’s coming here to London, Dowling,” C replied. “Bertie Flowers, once he’d got over the shock of the whole thing, took quite a shine to the bloke. He turned out to be well-spoken, perfectly literate, and even quite well-read—for an American, that is. Pleasant conversation, and a trained butler into the bargain, would you believe? And since he has a view of the CSA from the belly of the beast, as it were, I asked Flowers to send him over here. He’ll be working with you if he’s as good as they say he is.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Dowling said, a bit doubtfully.

  “Come on, you know Bertie from your days in Brussels—he’s good with his chaps, and hardly ever makes a mistake. You shouldn’t be prejudiced against this bloke Pole just because he’s American. But what are we going to do about that damned fool Finch-Malloy?”

  Dowling thought briefly. “Sir,” he pointed out. “In only one day’s time, the Robert E. Lee sets sail from Savannah for Bremen.”

  “And our lords and masters in the Cabinet rejected the notion of sending a submarine to torpedo the bloody thing somewhere in the middle of the ocean. It would have solved all our problems.”

  “Whose idea was that?” asked Dowling, surprised. It was the first he’d heard of the plan.

  “Winston bloody Churchill’s, that’s whose it was. Damn’ man thinks he’s still running the Admiralty. Actually, it wasn’t such a bad idea, when all’s said and done. We could easily have blamed the French or the Yanks or someone if they’d ever worked out it was a torpedo and not an accident. And we could have put a cruiser or two conveniently in the neighborhood and picked up the survivors and interned them somewhere handy, like the Falklands.”

  “But that’s not going to happen, sir?”

  “Correct. It is not going to happen, Dowling. Which is why I have decided I want you to go to Bremen and wait there for our friend Bloody Brian. Get him out of that damned Confederate army uniform, and bring him back here.”

  “What if he won’t listen to me, sir?”

  “Kill him.”

  Chapter 9: The CSS Robert E. Lee, somewhere in the North Atlantic

  “Armies the world over, what? Hurry up and wait. Always the wa
y.”

  Corporal David Slater wished he was somewhere else. He’d asked Brian how he could stop being seasick, and Brian told him, grinning, that sitting under a tree was a sure-fire cure. David, retching horribly, hadn’t thought that Brian’s joke was funny, and told him to go away and find a tree of his own to sit under.

  The Robert E. Lee had been built a little before the Great European War as a luxury ocean liner, named after the great Confederate general, whose mere reputation, so it was said, had been enough to prevent the Yankees from invading the Southerners’ homeland. The Lee had been designed to take wealthy passengers between New Orleans and the islands of the Caribbean, but a number of matters had put paid to that notion. Almost no-one in the CSA could afford the prices that the Lee’s owners were asking. Naturally, no Union passengers would travel on a Confed ship, and there were not enough Europeans who had both the money and the lack of conscience that would allow them to travel in luxury on a ship where the stokers and half of the crew were slaves, kept in line with the lash. The half-slave crew also meant that the ports of most Western countries refused entry to the Robert E. Lee. And then, as a final blow to the Lee’s owners, the Great European War had started.

  The Robert E. Lee had been turned over to the government by her owners for a nominal sum soon after all these things became apparent, and she spent most of her time slowly rusting in New Orleans harbor, kept in reserve as a general-purpose carrier. Among other things, she’d run guns to the white minority in Haiti in 1914, and a small expeditionary force to the Virgin Islands in 1915, when it looked as though there was a chance of Denmark’s being invaded by Germany, and the CSA could take advantage of the distraction (the invading force had been swiftly and ignominiously repelled by a militia armed with nothing heavier than an antique 2-pounder artillery piece).

  Designed for cruises in the Caribbean, the Lee was straining in the heavy seas of the North Atlantic. As her bow pitched down, her screws thrashed wildly in the air, sending a hideous shudder through the whole length of the hull. Then, with a sickening lurch, the stern crashed down as the ship rolled to the left (left on a ship was called “port”, Brian had told David), and the creak of the plates set David’s teeth on edge.

  David, along with eleven other soldiers, was sharing a stateroom originally built for two passengers. They were sleeping in jury-rigged bunks, but traces of luxury remained. The mirror over the sink in the bathroom where David examined his face daily for the growth of a hardly existent mustache still had a gold filigree frame to it, but twelve Confederate soldiers, chewing and spitting constantly, had soon covered the red and gold carpet with brown stains. David had tried chewing soon after he’d joined the army, but it made him feel sick. Brian mostly didn’t chew, but since the Lee had run into heavy seas, he’d started to chew all the time.

  “Keeps my mind from wandering,” he had said with a faint smile.

  The company’s office was located in what had been the walk-in closet of the stateroom on the top deck where David’s Captain and two other officers were bunking. The rolling and pitching were worse there, and David found it impossible to do any of the paperwork that kept coming his way.

  The Captain was sympathetic. “Davy-boy,” (he’d long ago stopped being “Slater” to the Captain) “don’t you worry your head about these things. Time enough to worry when this goddamned bucket of bolts quiets herself down some.”

  So David spent most of his time lying in his bunk, trying to keep his stomach from parting company from the rest of his body. He and most of the other occupants of the cabin spent the majority of their time lying flat on their backs, getting up only for morning and evening prayers, and to empty the buckets that stood beside their bunks. The thing that occupied David’s mind most was Brian as he’d seen him getting back into the train that evening they stopped somewhere in Georgia on their way to Savannah.

  -o-

  They’d pulled into the town, what was it called? Corleone or something? Cordele, that was it, a little before evening, and they’d been told they had two hours to go out and buy themselves a bit of whatever they fancied (large wink from the Major who told them this). The Captain had promised dire punishments for anyone under his command who was late back to the train for evening prayer, and then grabbed David’s shoulder.

  “Sorry to do this to you, Davy-boy. I have to get the returns on the victuals back to the regimental quartermaster this evening, and King’s gone sick on me again. I’ll make sure you get your liberty some time later, don’t worry.”

  So David had filled in the forms (500 cans of beans, 230 bags of flour, 12 pounds of salt …) and gone back to his place in the cattle-car which formed their transport for the journey. While he was dozing, head pillowed on his haversack, waiting for the rest of them to return, he saw Brian coming back to the train all alone, a little before the rest of the company. Obviously Brian, unslinging his rifle, hadn’t seen him in the dark corner. He’d noticed something was queer, but what was it? David asked himself. The answer had soon come to him. Brian’s bayonet was fixed, completely against regulations. They were never meant to fix bayonets, except when they were ordered. And he couldn’t be sure, but it had looked like a few drops of dried blood or something on the tip of the bayonet. And Brian had some more blood on his hands, it seemed. He had closed his eyes, not wanting to know more.

  When he had opened them again, Brian had left the car. His rifle was still there, but the bayonet was no longer fixed to it. He reached out to touch the rifle, but heard footsteps approaching, and shrank back into his corner. The footsteps had entered the car and come closer, and he had felt a hand shaking his shoulder.

  “I’ve brought you some corn bread,” Brian had said, smiling. “Best thing in that godforsaken hole that I could find to bring back for you, old man.”

  David had looked carefully through the gloom for blood on Brian’s hands, but saw nothing. He had smelled the sharp smell of Army carbolic soap, though.

  He was just about to ask Brian what the heck had been going on—it seemed to David that Brian had been acting kind of strange for some time now, and he wasn’t sure quite what he had been up to, even before they started out on their train journey—when the rest of the platoon clattered their way into the truck and stopped any possible chance of a quiet conversation.

  -o-

  David’s attention returned to the Lee, pitching and corkscrewing her way through the Atlantic. He’d asked one of the sailors how much longer they’d have to suffer, and the man, seemingly unaffected by the storm, had grinned “a few more weeks” back at him.

  Brian had said that was “rubbish”, and at worst, there’d only be a few more days of it. After all, they’d been at sea for nearly two weeks now. As he thought about how pleasant it would be to be able to keep something in his stomach for more than a few minutes, Tom entered the stateroom. Tom was another of the lucky few, along with Brian, who didn’t seem to be affected by seasickness.

  “Talked to one of them sailors. He reckons things are going to get a bit easier some time soon,” Tom announced to the room of groaning soldiers. “We’re going to get into something called the ‘English Channel’ and then it’s only a day or so till we get to dry land.”

  There was a weak cheer from the bunks. Brian came in, grinning. “If the rain lets up, there’s a chance I might get a look at jolly old Blighty tomorrow, what?” The others gazed at him in bewilderment. “Oh, never mind, chaps.” He threw himself on his bunk and soon started to snore.

  Despite the motion of the ship and his nausea, David dozed off. He was awakened by the sound of the bugle calling them to evening prayer. Clutching his complaining stomach with one hand, David grasped the railing beside his bunk with the other to brace himself as he swung down. To his amazement, the ship seemed to have stopped rolling and pitching.

  Tom noticed his look of surprise. “Stopped about an hour back. I went up on deck, and it’s as purty a sight as you could wish. Sun going down over the sea and all. Never seen an
ything like it. Come on, prayers.”

  David could hardly concentrate on the prayers, as he was starting to realize how hungry he was, having kept nothing in his stomach for what seemed like months. Once or twice his stomach let out loud complaints, but luckily these occurred during the hymns, and only Tom, who grinned broadly at the sound, seemed to notice. At last, they sang the final verse of “Dixie” and Reverend Pollock (“and he really is one of them queers”, Tom had said, having long since disposed of any such thoughts he might have had about Brian. “You don’t want to find yourself alone in a room with that one, Davy. I’ve heard tales.”) droned the last “Amen.”

  “Time to get something inside you,” said Tom, as the black slave mess-boys set out the tables. “But take it easy, now.”

  The fried pork chops still didn’t hold much appeal for David, but he ate several spoonfuls of hoppin’ john, and drank a lot of cold sweet tea.

  “Feel better?” asked Tom. “Let’s go up on deck.”