Present Tense [Round Two of The Great Game]

by Dave Duncan

  "Don't get up!” the doctor said, and walked right by him.

  It would not have worked in a proper hospital, but Staffles was not a proper hospital. The night nurses were not sitting out at a duty desk where they could view the corridor. Light pouring from an open door was the best they could manage, and apparently no one noticed the white shape flit past. The west wing had been servants’ quarters—low ceilings, painted plaster walls. Feeling the guard's eyes boring into his backbone, Smedley chose a room at random.

  There were two beds crammed in there. One was empty. The man in the other was bandaged beyond recognition, but he sounded asleep.

  Would the guard register that the doctor had not turned on the light?

  Smedley waited a couple of minutes, about two thousand heartbeats.

  Then he peeked cautiously. The guard was back in his newspaper. The light from the duty room shone unobstructed.

  The next room was not the right one either.

  Nor the next.

  The next was.

  A fair-haired head. Asleep. Just a kid, but lying on his back and breathing noisily. Exeter's black hair on the other pillow.

  Suddenly Smedley was back in Paris, three years ago, staying at Uncle Frank's on his way to Crete, sharing a room with Exeter. His heart twisted in his chest. Ye gods and little fishes, man! How can you still look so young?

  He left the door open. To close it would attract attention if a nurse had to pass by. He squeezed in between the bed and the wall, on the right side. He knelt down, dropping the clipboard. He laid his hand over Exeter's mouth.

  A wild reaction almost blew the gaff. Bedsprings creaked. Arms and legs flailed; a hand grabbed his wrist so hard he thought it would crack.

  "Shush, you idiot! It's me. Smedley. Julian!"

  A grunt. A groan. Exeter subsided. The kid in the other bed paused in his breathing—and then resumed. Smedley's heart crawled back where it belonged.

  He leaned close. “I know who you are,” he whispered. “This is on the level. No one put me up to this. I swear that! I want to help."

  The blue eyes were silver gray in the dark, even with his, staring at him from the pillow.

  "Ginger Jones came calling today."

  Exeter sucked in a long breath and sighed it out again. He was drugged and still mostly asleep. Dopey, trying not to show any reaction.

  "I don't believe you killed—I don't think Bagpipe's death was your doing. Ginger doesn't, either. I know you disappeared mysteriously from a hospital. Can you disappear from this one?"

  Pause. Very slightly, Exeter shook his head.

  That was a very deniable shake. Why wouldn't he trust an old friend?

  "Can you talk?"

  An almost imperceptible nod.

  "You won't fool them for long, Edward! Do you want help getting out of here?"

  A stronger nod. More blinks, as if Julian Smedley might not be the only man in the world with eye troubles.

  "Can you tell me what's going on?” Smedley begged.

  Another faint shake.

  "For God's sake, man! Trust me!” He felt his cheek beginning to twitch. Any minute now the tears would start. Then where would trust go?

  He waited stubbornly, sweating, gritting his teeth, fighting against twitching and weeping. He thought he wasn't going to get an answer. Then it came, a tenuous sound, like a whisper from beyond the grave and yet so close that he could smell the breath that brought it.

  "You couldn't believe me."

  "From the rumors I've heard, I can believe anything."

  A shake: no.

  "Look, I'm not going to be here much longer. I don't know how to get you out of here, and I don't know where I could take you that would be safe. Have you any ideas? Any suggestions? Anyone who needs to be told?"

  Exeter's fingers reached out and took the pencil from behind Smedley's ear.

  Smedley fumbled awkwardly to retrieve the clipboard. It had slipped under the bed. He passed it up. Exeter turned over the top sheet and wrote on the back of it. He handed them both back.

  Smedley took the pencil in his left hand and tried to take the clipboard with his stump.

  "Oh, my god!"

  Exeter had spoken aloud, almost shouted. The kid on the next bed fell silent. Smedley crouched down low, out of sight. He was shaking. He must get out of here before he had an attack of the willies! In a moment the slow breathing resumed.

  When he straightened up again, Exeter's hand gripped his shoulder and squeezed like a vise. They stared at each other.

  Well! So there were other men who had trouble with watery eyes these days? Lot of it going around.

  "Edward—"

  Somebody screamed farther along the hall. Then screamed again.

  Smedley wanted to dive under the bed. He forced himself to stand up and go to the door. Confused voices rising in protest, more screams ... Some poor bugger having nightmares. A nurse hurried by. Then another.

  Then the heavy tread of the guard. They all went by. Splendid!

  He glanced around. Exeter was sitting up straight, face pale, eyes wide.

  "Enfilading fire, old man!” Smedley said cheerily. He waved his stump and departed.

  If one of the nurses came out to fetch something and saw a doctor in the corridor—but that didn't happen.

  Smedley went back to bed and wept until his sleeping pill took effect.

  On Sunday it rained most of the day. He practiced left-handed writing all morning. In the evening he walked down to the village and posted two letters, to the addresses Exeter had given him.

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  4

  FALLOW IN HOLIDAY TIME WAS A MORGUE THESE DAYS. IN ANOTHER week the inmates would start to trickle back, and the school year would start up again. Meanwhile, only a half dozen or so masters and three or four wives remained on the premises. Before the war there had always been a few boys in permanent residence, sons of parents abroad. The problems of finding staff, both academic and domestic, had forced the board of governors to abandon the practice of providing year-round board in the meantime. A revolution was sweeping England “in the meantime,” and only the far future would show how many of those expedients were temporary.

  Early on Tuesday, David Jones cycled into Wassal and caught the local train to Greyfriars. The service was extremely poor on that line now, but rural buses were worse, almost as rare as dodoes in the England of 1917. After a twenty-minute wait, he entrusted his mortal coil to the Great Western Railway Company once more and was borne eastward toward London. The express was packed with people, many of them servicemen. At first he thought he would have to stand in the corridor the whole way, but a young gunner rose and donated his seat to the elderly gent, for which the same was suitably grateful. Considering that Jones was bound on paying his respects to the military, the tribute was ironic.

  A couple of hours brought him to Paddington. From there he took the tube to Cannon Street and emerged into a dreary, drizzly gray morning, rank with the stench of coal and petrol. Letting the scurrying crowds rush by him, he strolled across London Bridge at a leisurely pace to his destination, Guy's Hospital.

  He spent the remainder of the morning in conversation with William Derby, another Fallow old boy—not so old, really. He could not be more than twenty-five. He had been broken and blinded on the Somme, but his morale was heartrending. The ones that needed cheering up were almost easier. Like Julian Smedley, most of them were so happy to be out of the fighting that they regarded their disabilities as blessings. In time the reality would sink in.

  By lunchtime, Jones's task was done. He did not like London. Before the war he had rarely come up to town except to pass through on his way to somewhere else. It was too big, too busy, too grimy. The war had brought to it a frantic, hothouse exuberance that did nothing to change his feelings. His new, self-imposed assignment of visiting the wounded had taken him there a dozen times in the last two months. One precaution he had learned from bitter experience was to bring
his lunch with him, so today he sat on a damp bench on the Victoria Embankment and ate his sandwiches. Ten years ago all the taxicabs in London had been pulled by horses. Now there was hardly a horse to be seen anywhere. The smell of the city had changed, but petrol fumes were hardly an improvement.

  He had the rest of the day before him. There were many other maimed young men he could call on, although none he knew of whom he had not visited at least once. He was haunted by the problem of one he could not visit, Edward Exeter.

  In more than thirty years of teaching, he could recall no boy so cursed. His parents had been foully slaughtered in a native uprising in Kenya. He himself had been implicated in another murder, and seriously injured. Now he was in danger of being shot as a spy. It was madness! What had he ever done to provoke the Furies so? Out of all the hundreds of boys Jones had taught in his career, he would have ranked none ahead of Edward Exeter.

  The only help he could think to provide was to track down Alice Prescott. He had last met her in 1914, when she had rushed down to Greyfriars to visit her young cousin in hospital. She had been a very self-possessed miss even then. Exeter had been suffering from a severe case of puppy love, but her heart—so Jones had suspected—had been mortgaged elsewhere. She had been fond of Edward, without question, because they had grown up together in Africa, but she had not spoken of him as a prospective lover.

  Jones had written to her a couple of times afterward, relaying what skimpy information he had been able to gather about Exeter's disappearance. The correspondence had withered for lack of purpose. When her famous uncle, the Reverend Roland Exeter, died a couple of years later, Jones had sent a sympathy card to her last known address. It had been returned, recipient unknown. The war had raged ever more wildly since then. She might well be married or driving an ambulance in Palestine by now.

  But he had promised Julian Smedley that he would try to devise some way of assisting Exeter, assuming that the mysterious John Three confined in Staffles was truly the missing man. In the days since, Jones had experienced no brain waves, had achieved nothing practical. He had written a careful note to the widowed Mrs. Bodgley, but she could hardly be expected to assist a boy she had barely known, one suspected of murdering her only son. The only possible helper in this affair was Alice Prescott. To the best of his knowledge, she was the only family Exeter possessed.

  He fed his crusts to the restless pigeons and headed for the underground again. Miss Prescott's last known address had been in Chelsea, a modest location that would have been handy for her clients. She had been a teacher of piano, and the nearby area of South Kensington would have provided many wealthy families with children in need of such social improvement.

  He found the flat. There was nobody home, which was hardly surprising in the middle of the afternoon. He rang a few doorbells in the vicinity, spoke with a few harried, suspicious women, and eventually found one who remembered Miss Prescott. It had only been three years, after all. He spun a yarn about news of a long-lost relative; either that or his accent convinced the lady that he was not a bill collector. After a long wait in a dim corridor, he was rewarded with an address in Hackney. Doffing his hat in salute, David Jones departed in search of the nearest tube station.

  Hackney, of course, lay on the other side of the City. He could not afford taxis, so he had a choice of bus, tram, or tube. The advantage of the tube was that it displayed maps in all the stations. Even a country yokel could not get lost on the underground.

  How often could a young lady change her address in three years?

  Twice.

  Three times, and apparently never for the better. There had been money in the family once.

  The rain had started again. By the time darkness fell, he was in Lambeth, south of the river, and not very far from his starting point at Guy's Hospital. Whatever Miss Prescott was doing in that grim, working-class area, she was not likely to be teaching piano to the pampered offspring of rich matrons.

  It had been an exhausting day, and his feet throbbed. Darkness was true darkness, too, for the threat of German air raids had imposed blackout. He knew in a purely cerebral way that the bombs did very little damage and caused few casualties—relative to the millions of people exposed, that is—but emotionally he had no desire to become a statistic.

  He found the entrance beside a tobacconist's shop and was happily surprised to see that Miss Prescott did not inhabit one of the horrible egg-crate tenements of the back streets. This was a three-story corner building, proudly bearing the date, 1896. Its yellow brick was stained by the everpresent soot of London, but it was a reasonably appealing edifice. He plodded wearily up two flights of hard, steep stairs, inhaling aromas of boiled cabbage and cooking fat. At the top he was faced with a door, four bell pushes, and four labels he could not read in the gloom. He flipped a mental coin in the dark and pressed.

  With surprisingly good reflexes, the door cracked open almost at once. Light knifed out at him. He blinked.

  He raised his hat. “I am looking for a Miss Alice Prescott."

  "I am she,” said an educated, non-Lambeth voice.

  Praise the Lord! “David Jones, Miss Prescott."

  The cultured voice said, “Christ!” and the door shut.

  Jones could not recall ever having heard a woman use that particular blasphemy, and few men either. Before he could catch his breath, the chain rattled and the door swung open.

  "Come in, Mr. Jones! This is a welcome, if rather alarming surprise. Let me take your coat. I have just brewed a pot of tea...."

  She was a very practical young lady, and self-possessed to boot. He was ushered out of the cramped entrance hall into a small sitting room and urged to take a chair. He glanced around, at first with surprise and then with something closer to astonishment.

  The address might be questionable and the wallpaper regrettable, but the furnishings were not. The tiny space was almost filled by an upright rosewood piano, two armchairs, and a sofa; they were old, yet neither worn nor faded. The rug underfoot was thick and bright. The curtains were velvet, the little tables oak. The mantel above the gas fire bore several Royal Doulton figurines and a silver-framed photograph of a man in uniform. A marble-topped cupboard with a two-ring gas cooker and a gently steaming kettle served as kitchen. The cup and saucer were Spode.

  The crusts of the family fortune had taken refuge in Lambeth.

  His wondering gaze turned to the walls and the watercolors.

  "Yes, they are genuine Constables,” Miss Prescott said drily. “You will have a cup of tea with me since you are here?"

  One of the more embarrassing problems of advancing years ... “If I may just freshen up first?"

  "Of course! First door on the right. Let me find you a towel."

  The WC was the size of a chicken coop. The bathroom opposite was little larger, but any indoor plumbing at all ranked the flat well above average for the neighborhood. She would share the facilities with the other tenants on the floor, of course. Considering the housing situation in London at the moment, she was doing very well. Her plain, serviceable suit had suggested that she was in some sort of clerical work, certainly not munitions, like so many thousands of British women now. Idiot!—there were no munitions factories in the heart of London. As he dried his hands, Jones decided that Alice Prescott was almost certainly a secretary of some sort, and she could walk to Whitehall from here.

  He returned to the sitting room. She smiled up at him and said, “One lump or two?” Thus might a Roman matron have invoked the household gods.

  She was not classically beautiful—her nose and teeth were too prominent. Had she possessed her cousin's jet-black hair and startlingly blue eyes, she might have been striking. Even with nondescript coloring, she was a handsome young woman.

  Jones accepted the tea with gratitude, took a sip, and found himself impaled by a very direct gaze.

  She wasted no words. “Where is he, Mr. Jones?"

  "I am not certain of this, I have not seen him, but ... Do yo
u remember Julian Smedley?"

  "Yes."

  "He says Exeter is in Staffles, a temporary hospital in Kent."

  "Under what name?"

  "A pseudonym, of course. ‘John Three.’ He is pretending to be suffering from amnesia, but Smedley is certain it's your cousin."

  Alice bit her lip. All she said was, “Go on."

  With tea soaking through his fibers like ambrosia, Jones recounted the tale. His feet were throbbing and burning inside his shoes; his knees ached. He did not want to think of the journey home that awaited him, but hotel rooms in London were an impossibility now.

  She murmured an apology and held out a plate of biscuits. They had not been in evidence when he came in. He limited himself to one. As he talked, he became vaguely aware of other changes in the room. The fire had been lit ... a table moved ... Ah! The photograph had disappeared from the mantel. Interesting!

  When his tale was done, she did not at first comment, which was a surprise. Instead she said, “And how are things at Fallow?"

  "Much the same. We feel the pinch less than most, I expect."

  She raised her eyebrows in frank disbelief. “Then how does it feel to be raising the next crop of cannon fodder?"

  "Not good."

  She smiled bitterly. “How bright and glorious it seemed at the beginning! When I last saw Edward, he was far more upset at his broken leg keeping him out of the war than he was about being a suspected murderer. Another cup? And now we all know better, don't we?"

  Uneasy at hearing such defeatist sentiment, Jones accepted another cup.

  As she poured, she said, “Edward turning up in Flanders I can understand. He would have enlisted as soon as his leg healed. No question. But to enlist he would have needed an identity. Turning up without any clothes on sounds..."

  Again she turned her intimidating stare on her visitor. It would not have disgraced Queen Mary. “I do not attend séances, Mr. Jones. I do not read fortunes in tea leaves, nor consult Gypsy witches at fairgrounds. And yet I am convinced that whatever my cousin was mixed up in three years ago was more than natural."

  Jones sighed. “I have been trying to avoid that conclusion ever since it all happened, but I think I agree with you. There were too many locked doors, too much of the inexplicable. A rational explanation ... There wasn't one!"