Circles of Time (19 page)

“You have your stables now?”

“Lord, no. It'll be a year before everything's done. But I'm in no hurry. I live in a sort of shack with a coal stove and a phonograph. It's not quite as grand as the Pryory, but I'm content.” He looked at his watch. “Thirty minutes before the witching hour. Anyone in particular you want to kiss on the stroke of midnight?”

“No. As a matter of fact, there's a woman I would like to avoid having to kiss.”

“Miss Templeton, you mean? Auntie Angela dug her up someplace. She's a literary person. Writes sonnets or something about virtue. After you, is she?”

“She's supposedly with someone, but she keeps zeroing in.”

“Let's have a game of billiards. I don't think I could bear hearing that poor sod croon ‘Auld Lang Syne' through his blasted megaphone.”

The older couples left the center of the floor as the band swung lustily into the latest craze tune from America and stood watching in amusement as the dancers gyrated and hopped.

“No more!” Alexandra laughed.

“I quite agree,” Noel shouted over the music. Taking her by the hand, he escorted her off the dance floor and through the crowd to the refreshment table. “Jumping about like an ape is hardly my forte.” He dabbed at his brow with a pocket handkerchief. “Although I must say you did it superbly. You have a marvelous sense of rhythm.”

“I love to dance, but
Zam-bo-anga-anga
is a wee bit exhausting.”

“They'll be playing a waltz next—to get everyone on the floor in time for midnight.” He asked one of the barmen for two champagnes and handed Alexandra a glass. “I'm not very good at toasts. Let me just say that it's a privilege to be having my last drink of nineteen twenty-one with someone as nice as you.”

“Thank you, Noel. That's very sweet.”

“Not at all. It's the truth. And I hope we'll see each other again during the course of the new year.”

“I'm quite certain we shall.”

Their eyes held for a moment and then she raised her glass and drank. He couldn't be sure what it was that he had seen in her eyes, but it wasn't discouraging. He had seen a light there—an interest.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Will you join us by dancing to the lovely strains of ‘Charmaine'? It is five minutes to midnight. Five minutes until nineteen hundred and twenty-two!”

Alexandra set her glass on the table. “I love the waltz.”

“Yes,” he said, placing his glass next to hers. “So do I. It's what I was taught in dancing school as a boy. That and the gavotte.”

They stepped smoothly into the flow of dancers, and then the lights in the room were dimmed by the servants and only the candles in the wall brackets glowed, light sparkling and shimmering from the dangling crystal reflectors behind them. Almost everyone was drawn into the gliding whirl of the dancers as they circled the shadowed room. The strains of the waltz ended, a drum rolled, and then the music … the man singing—

Noel took Alexandra gently in his arms. “Happy New Year,” he said, bending to her, kissing her with an almost brotherly regard on the cheek. No stiffening rejection this time, he realized. Slow and easy—one tiny step at a time. That was the way to go about it. That was certainly the way.

M
ARTIN SAT IN
bed, smoking a cigar and nursing a large whiskey and soda. His journal was on the bedside table beside him, but he simply wasn't in the mood to make an entry. God knows he had enough to write about if he cared to be reflective. New Year's was a time for reflection anyway. That, plus being at Abingdon Pryory, was more than enough to set his thoughts racing backward in time. But he fought the urge. It would be too easy to slip into maudlin thoughts about Ivy.

He took a puff on his cigar and then a swallow of whiskey. There were more pertinent things to jot down if he cared to write. Major General Sir Bertram Dundas Sparrowfield, in spite of discreet pressure from friends who had sought to dissuade him, was pressing his libel case with renewed vigor—prompted, Martin knew for sure now, by two jingoist war correspondents whose reputations had suffered disastrously since the coming of peace. He almost felt sorry for poor old “Bird Drops,” puttering about in his Hampshire garden and being manipulated by two rogues who hoped to change the verdict of history by getting the general a favorable judgment in court. It was all so pointless anyway. All that had been accomplished so far was a growing awareness that a libel suit was pending, and the hardening of attitudes between the war damners and the war apologists. Sales of
A Killing Ground
had zoomed. Hatchard's in Piccadilly couldn't put it on the shelves fast enough. And that vast, arcane, ponderous, exasperating, and incredibly efficient machine known as the British judicial system had been dragging its collective feet for months, wary, if not outright horrified, by the idea of a
cause célèbre
thrust into their midst. They viewed Sparrowfield's case the way they would have viewed a ticking bomb. But the ex-war correspondents urged and whispered and the old warrior pressed onward with the same verve that had carried his decimated force—in the face of harrowing Mauser fire—across the Tugela in the Boer War.

He drained half the glass and set it, with an audible sigh, on top of his journal. His thoughts drifted, the idle flow broken by a sharp knock on the door. Before he could say anything, the door opened and Anthony stepped into the room, grim-faced and pale, a dressing gown thrown across his shoulders.

“Sorry to burst in on you at three in the morning. But it's Charles. He's gone.”

Mr. Lassiter had brought Charles a glass of hot milk shortly before ten o'clock that night, as was his custom. Charles liked to sit in bed to drink it and then would go off to sleep. It was an unvarying routine. Mr. Lassiter would then go to his own room in the spacious apartment, read a detective novel until midnight or shortly thereafter, and look in on his charge before going to bed.

“I looked in on him about twelve-thirty,” he said, standing in the front hall, telling his story to Martin and William. “He seemed to be sleeping, so I went down to the servants' hall, it being New Year's Eve, and joined in the bit of celebration there until about two, two-thirty. When I went up to bed I looked in on him again and saw the bed was empty. I thought he might have been in the
W.C.
, but he wasn't. Then I went into the sitting room and noticed the door into the side corridor was ajar. Closed it myself earlier, so I knew he'd gone out.”

“Where does that corridor lead to?” Martin asked him.

“To a short flight of stairs. There's a door at the bottom opening into the garden. That door was ajar, too.”

“Has he ever done this before?”

“No, sir. Never. He'll take a walk by himself in the daytime once in a while, but he's never done it at night.”

Lord Stanmore came into the hall followed by half a dozen of the male servants, all of them dressed for the cold. Some were carrying electric torches.

“We'll pick up more torches and lanterns at the stables,” the earl said grimly. “The grooms have been woken and we'll fan out and search for him. Do you have any idea what he was wearing, Lassiter?”

“Not much, near as I can judge. I looked through his wardrobe and his winter coat's still hanging there. Robe and pajamas, I'd say … and carpet slippers.”

“Good God,” the earl muttered. “It must be freezing out there this time of morning.” He turned to one of the servants. “Round up a couple of blankets, and don't forget to bring the brandy.”

They stood out on the terrace and a sense of fear gripped all of them. Scud clouds raced across the moon and it was bitterly cold. The earl turned up the collar of his overcoat and glared off across the dark gardens toward the inky shadow line of Burgate Hill and the mass of Leith Woods.

“That's where he'd go. Leith Woods.”

“I think so,” Lassiter said. “We walked there this morning, sir, and he lingered a long time.”

They moved off through the gardens and down to the stables where the grooms were waiting for them, their electric torches winking in the darkness.

“We'll spread out when we reach the woods,” the earl told them. “Call his name loudly and search the undergrowth carefully with your torches.”

He strode off, the others hurrying along behind him in silence. Down the bridle path and then over a stile and across the fields, the frosted grass crunching under their feet. The woods loomed in the distance, gray-black and sullen under the moon, skeletal branches of wintry trees ingrained against the sky. An owl hooted far away on Burgate Hill. And then they heard it, deep in the wood, the sound of it cutting to the heart, rooting every man in his tracks—the sharp crack and thudding echo of a gunshot.

I
T HAD BEEN
coming to him all day in brief, disjointed flashes: images and words … the sounds of voices. All dimly remembered for the briefest of moments. One image had been so vivid he had sat under a tree in Leith Woods, holding his head in his hands, struggling to keep the image alive, in focus—to sort it out and give it meaning. But it had escaped him, as all the images escaped him, and they had walked back to the house for breakfast.

After breakfast the images had come again, quite strongly and with increasing frequency. Walking slowly around in the sitting room, he had touched the covers of books on the shelves, feeling keenly that he had touched the books many times … in some hazy past. Here? In this place? He did not know. Scraps of thought flooded him, but he could not make sense of the patterns. A jumbled whirl that made his head ache. He had spent most of the afternoon sleeping, but even his dreams had been disturbing—a stream of swiftly moving pictures, like motion-picture film running crazily through a projector … like the time at the barracks when he had run a Broncho Billy cowboy film as a treat for the men and something had gone wrong with the machine—everything speeded up and the men laughing and shouting …
What barracks? What men?

There had been music in the house tonight, and the people who had come to visit him had been the people he had been seeing all day, moving in and out of his thoughts. Lying in bed after drinking the warm milk, he had remembered a tune. Lilting and beautiful; he had whispered its name—“‘Charmaine' … ‘Charmaine.'” Lovely. A haunting sound played on a gramophone in a farmhouse … and they had marched to the tiny village in the summer, heat waves rising from the dusty road and the men singing …

The voices of the men loud in his ears before fading away. But who were those men? … That village … where was it exactly?

He had lain in bed in the darkness staring into a void, searching for one solid thing to grasp on to.

“I was …”
he had said,
“a soldier … in the farmhouse … and there was a gramophone … which we played … and then … we went up to the line … and … took over trenches near Fricourt.”

But where did all that take place? And when? And who was he?

It was always quiet in the woods. One could think calmly there. One could, perhaps, by sitting very still, put all of the tiny pieces together and make sense of them. Draw all the fragments of image and sound into a cohesive whole.

In the woods—deep among the trees.

H
E SENSED DIMLY
that he was cold—colder than he had ever been before. He tried to tuck his naked, bleeding feet under the bramble-ripped fringes of his dressing gown. A ragged man, he was thinking, seated in the wilderness.

“But what man … who?”

Only the owls answered, calling from the branches far above his head.

“I am …” he whispered. “I am …”

He was called by a name. Charles … Charles Greville, or Major Greville. But the name meant nothing to him. There was no solid person behind that name. It was like being given a number, a depersonalized string of digits. And yet …
someone
… a shape of substance was rising from the murk.

A twig snapped not too far away. And then another. He stiffened against the trunk of the tree and strained to listen. Again—closer now—moving past. He dropped silently to his hands and knees and began to crawl with infinite care through the underbrush and the piles of dead leaves.

To make a sound was death because Thompson, out on patrol one night in the wood, had sneezed and the Fritz machine gun in Mild-and-Bitter sap had opened up and four of his men had been killed and three others wounded, including Thompson with a nice Blighty in the shoulder. Or one could touch a hidden wire running to the Boche trench which would set a tin can moving and old Fritz would toss stick grenades on you. No … no … silent as the grave was the ticket … slow movements of elbows and knees … feeling ahead of you with your fingers as you went … cautious … cautious … never mind the barbed wire that tore the flesh … never mind the slimy feel of a dead man's face....