Authors: Paul Finch
*
When the colonel returned, he had a plan. It was ingenious but also quite simple.
“I’ve used this method to capture larger species of ape,” he said, as they re-ascended to the attic room.
“Orangutan in Borneo, chimps in the Congo Basin.
No matter how large the blighters, this was always their undoing.” The main implement of his plan was a square net, perhaps twelve foot by twelve and woven from a very fine but strong twine. “I designed this myself,” the colonel said, draping it over the inside of the broken window, having first unscrewed and removed the steel grille.
Charles nodded, though he tried to curb any show of enthusiasm. He was well aware of Annabelle watching unhappily from the doorway.
“Its border’s made from cured snakeskin,” the colonel added. “It can neither be stretched nor broken easily, so once the trap is sprung it allows the net to keep its basic shape, which I assure you
is
quite important.” He indicated four brass-ringed eyelets, each one located at a different corner of the net. “These are equally important,” he said. He turned and rummaged in his kit-bag, taking out two coils of thin, grey rope.
“As are these.
Each one is eighty feet in length. That should be more than enough for our purposes.”
He climbed up on a stool and threaded the first rope through the upper left-hand corner of the net, and then through the bottom left-hand corner, knotting the end of the rope at the bottom so that it was secure. The remainder of the rope he flung through the window into the house’s rear garden. He repeated the process with the second rope, this time using the right-hand corners of the net. Once this was done, he clicked a two-holed iron bracket into place, clamping both excess lengths together.
He turned back to Charles. “You understand what’s happening here?”
Charles nodded. “I think so.”
“It’s quite simple. As soon as our friend comes in through the window, he tangles himself in this net. But he won’t be tangled for long if we don’t quickly take up the slack down below.” The colonel pointed into the garden. “We do that, and all four corners will instantly be pulled together.”
“But Sebastian will be dragged outside!” Annabelle protested. “Think how far he’ll fall.”
The colonel eyed her. “Your brother hasn’t had much trouble with heights so far.”
“But he’ll be wrapped in that net. He’ll be killed.”
“
Which is why I intend to take this extra precaution.
Twenty paces from the house there’s an old willow, yes?”
Charles nodded. The willow sat close to this end of the rear lawn, on the bank of an ornamental pond.
“It has a stout central bough,” Colonel Thorpe added. “It’s horizontal, like a yard-arm. By my reckoning, it’s a good fifteen feet from the ground?”
Again Charles nodded, impressed. The colonel had only returned five minutes ago, and at his own insistence had been conducted around the exterior of the house, but they’d done it quickly and the fog had thickened since earlier on, concealing much detail. Colonel Thorpe, it seemed, was an unusually perceptive man.
“We loop the two ropes over the central bough before taking our positions,” the colonel said. “That way, as soon as the
blaggard’s
snagged, we pull and he tumbles out through the window. As his sister so rightly asserts, and despite his best efforts, he will fall. But if we take up the slack quickly enough, he’ll swing from that bough rather than strike the ground. And we’ll have him.”
Charles liked the plan. The use of the willow bough as a pulley-system was particularly clever. It wouldn’t just save Sebastian’s neck, if he put up an exceptional fight it would allow them to use their combined weight to reel him in.
“And just suppose, gentlemen,” Annabelle said, her voice querulous.
“Just suppose Nigel and Joseph bring him back?
How do you propose to trap him then?”
Colonel Thorpe mused on this. “
If
Nigel and Joseph bring him back, which you yourself, Miss Annabelle, have admitted is not guaranteed, we must think of something else. Possibly we wait until tomorrow, and bind him just before he’s due to change. We can have transport waiting and will take him forthwith to whichever destination we’ve decided is most appropriate.”
The woman nodded, but seemed unable to speak. Her eyes glistened as she walked quickly away.
“Just out of interest,” the colonel wondered, turning back to Charles, “what tools do the Ethiopians normally use to catch him?”
“Only their cunning as far as I’m aware,” Charles said. “I understand they’ve discovered several of his local hide-outs. They lie in wait and overpower him.”
“Must be handy fellows?”
“They’re both of them six feet, nine inches tall, at least.”
“Good grief!
More fearsome than the Zulus?”
“Physically more imposing,” Charles said.
“Perhaps not quite the warriors.”
“Putty in our hands either way, what? Native brutishness versus British ingenuity – there’s only ever one outcome.”
Charles supposed there was something in that. Six months after the massacre of a thousand British soldiers at
Isandlwana
, the Zulu horde had again met Queen Victoria’s army, this time on a battlefield close to their royal
kraal
, a place called Ulundi. He hadn’t been present himself; he was still convalescing at the time. But he’d heard familiar stories from those who’d returned: how the rolling, tawny hills had turned black with chanting warriors; how the
impis
had poured in from every direction; how the dry earth had shaken and cracked to their charge; how their dust had blotted out the sun; how the sky had darkened to their flights of spears. Of course, on this occasion the British had been ready. They’d held their positions behind stout barricades, and had blasted out volley after volley of deadly-accurate fire. And if that wasn’t enough, they’d employed several small-artillery pieces as well, and two Gatling guns. Within three short hours, the multitude of courageous Zulus had become a multitude of corpses. British losses had
totalled
twelve.
Five minutes later the two officers were down in the garden, under the willow tree. Each man had looped his rope over the branch above, as the colonel had described, and was now waiting quietly. It wasn’t yet eleven, but the blanketing fog was deep and still. The house, though less than twenty yards in front of them, was only vaguely visible, its gas-lit casements little more than smeared blots in the gloom. The air was frigid: at their feet, the mown grass had feathered with frost; to their right a film of ice had formed on the pond. Time passed laboriously. Every so often a sound would cause the men to glance overhead, but they never spotted anything untoward. Charles then had a discomforting thought. From the branch above, the two ropes curved up like rat-lines towards the black aperture of the attic window. Thanks to the fog, they weren’t obviously visible, but he could see them and his eyes, he fancied, were not as good as the multi-faceted orbs that the locust-thing now possessed.
“The ropes,” he whispered. “Won’t he be suspicious?”
Colonel Thorpe chuckled. “He’s an animal,
Brabinger
. Don’t credit him with more intelligence than he’s due.”
“Animals have instincts, don’t they?”
“Well … that’s true.” The colonel gave it some thought. “Almost fell
foul
of it myself, once.
On the
Komoe
.
I was hunting ivory with a party of Dutch. We’d singled out a small herd, but it was mating season so we had to devise a ploy to draw the bull away. Finally, I had some of the boys attack in feint. The bull followed them into the bush for about a hundred yards, but then seemed to sense something was wrong. He turned around and came back.
Appeared behind me, right as I was taking aim at the matriarch.”
The colonel tapped his ear. “Luckily I heard him coming, but even so it was close. I just had time to shoot him through the brain.”
“Surely that’s the point?” Charles replied.
“No, the point is I still bagged him.
And the rest, one after another.
Animals have good instincts, but so do we. And we have intelligence and superior planning as well. However, to be on the safe side … are you armed, as I asked?”
“Yes.” Charles slapped his overcoat pocket. There was a six-chambered Smith & Wesson revolver inside it, fully loaded.
The colonel nodded. “Good. So am I.”
He reached into his capacious kit-bag again, and this time produced a brown case, which at first looked as though it should contain a cello. The colonel opened it, however, and took out two parts of a very impressive weapon. When the parts were snapped together, it was four feet in length and looked something like the combination of a high-powered hunting rifle and a heavy-bore shotgun. It had a huge wooden stock, which had been so lovingly polished that even in the dimness of night it glinted, and gorgeous iron scrollwork all down its body and the full length of its twin barrels.
“Good Lord,” Charles breathed.
“The same weapon I used to bring down that angry bull,” the colonel said. He broke it open and inserted two bullets, each of which was at least the length and girth of a large man’s thumb. “Nothing that lives on Earth can resist the stopping-power
of a
cannon like this.”
“Please don’t let Annabelle see it.”
The colonel closed the gun, and stood it against the tree. He picked up his rope again. “You’re obviously smitten by this young lady.”
“I was.”
The colonel glanced around. “You
were
?”
Charles wasn’t sure why he was giving such private information to a man he barely knew. Possibly because they’d both served in the
Colours
, and were now comrades-in-arms on another dangerous enterprise. Generally, he felt he judged men well, and Colonel Thorpe, now he’d come on board, seemed a solid, reliable sort.
“Our opinions differ on the subject of Sebastian, as you’ve seen for yourself,” Charles said. “But there’s more to it than that. I think the Zulu war put something between us. For a brief time Annabelle thought I was dead. She’d even got used to the idea. I suspect my first letter to her afterwards came as quite a shock.”
“Understandable.”
“Yes, but there’s something else.
Annabelle is a very gentle and understanding girl. She has what I might call a broader vision of humanity than the rest of us.”
The colonel raised a querying eyebrow.
“She’s grown up in the company of Nigel and Joseph,” Charles explained.
“Two men from a far-off land, from a completely different culture.
Yet despite that, they’ve always been wonderful with her.
Kind, attentive.
They’ve performed their difficult duty in the most careful and sensitive way. It’s been as though Sebastian – well, first it was Annabelle’s father, but now it’s Sebastian – it’s been as though he’s a patient rather than a prisoner. And Annabelle has always felt absurdly grateful for this. She’s come to view these men as family friends, almost as uncles rather than servants.”
The colonel nodded, as though he’d heard this kind of nonsense before. “And you’re now going to tell me she thinks it wrong of you to have helped put the Zulus in their place?”
“Something along those lines, yes.”
“It’s never occurred to her that the Zulus and the
Ethiopes
live at opposite ends of a continent into which Great Britain could be sunken and lost a hundred times over?”
“I’ve mentioned that.”
“Or that there’s no actual relationship between those races at all? The Zulus are Bantu, the
Ethiopes
are Berber.”