Sion Crossing (25 page)

He had come to the Sion Crossing great house at last.

And this, of course, was always how it was with great burnings: the fire stripped away the body of the building, the higher debris bringing down weakened walls to leave the more solid chimneys, which had not only been built stronger for their height but were by nature fire-resistant. Indeed, the rest of the house might have been all wood, the most abundant material available—he could remember now having glimpsed white-painted wooden houses yesterday, some of them even substantial enough to boast two-storey columns at their porches.

But there were no fallen columns here, that he could see … except that this must be the back of the house—?

He turned towards the creek. Only a few yards, and then the ridge fell away steeply: without the trees there might well have been a splendid view from here, down and across the valley, in the great days of Sion Crossing … with the lawns and a tree-lined avenue sweeping up to a neo-classical columned front—a front on the far side like Ashley Wilkes’s Fair Oaks?

Belatedly, he remembered Lucy Cookridge’s sketch-map, which he had stuffed into his pocket back in the study.

It was as he remembered it, yet there was a detail on it which he had noticed without remarking on at the time, but which was now intelligible to him.

There it was—
Old Road.
But the path along which he had come, though the shortest distance between the bridge and the site of the house, had undulated up and down along the shoulder of the rising land above the stream—it would have been quite unsuitable for a road in the days of horse-drawn carriages. So the original route to the Sion Crossing house had been along an old road which branched off the modern highway in a wide curve, approaching the house first at an angle and only straightening for the final run-in up the avenue.

That must be how it had been … And, of course, that fitted in exactly with Lucy Cookridge’s father’s material, and his interpretation of events—

Latimer’s lip curled. In spite of himself, he was now playing the game. And, ridiculous though it was, it was not altogether unamusing. Or, at least, it might have been amusing if the theories had been his own, out of his own knowledge and research rather than another man’s. But it would be foolish of him to be annoyed with himself for knowing nothing about this whole period of history, beyond what he could remember from a novel read long ago, and the film of the novel which he had once seen. His only foolishness had been in the Oxbridge, in letting himself be tempted in the first place!

No.
No
—

The path carried on, but there was a smaller path—hardly a path at all, but more a series of occasionally used footholds—leading up the nearest mound into the midst of the ruins between the chimneys.

No
… since he was here, since he had come all this way, he could not turn back now. He had to see what there was to see.

He took the minor path gingerly, fending off what was probably perfectly innocent ivy with his stick, climbing step by step up into the ruins. At least there were no stinging-nettles: an English ruin would have been thick with them in such a place as this, at the tail-end of high summer.

It was disappointing. For there were no ruins, only the chimneys and the dimpled mounds of vegetation under which all that Billy Sherman’s boys had left of Sion Crossing was buried by the detritus of a century.

He came to the top of the mound, midway between the chimneys, and there were still no ruins … no ruins, no fallen columns, no hint of former lawns and avenues of trees.

Trees, there were. Trees in the ruins, and trees all around it; it was just … mounds and chimneys in a wood in the middle of nowhere.

And it was so small
… It was not
a great house
at all—it had never been a Tara or a Fair Oaks, Sion Crossing: it had been … it had been (he looked around him, estimating the distance between the chimneys, the area of the mounds) … it had been maybe a small manor house, maybe a large farmhouse—?

Was this really the great house at Sion Crossing? Had he got it wrong?

Or had he got it right—and all the rest was the enlargement of travellers’ tales and romantic fiction—Tara and Fair Oaks and Sion Crossing alike? He had seen larger
Roman
sites at home—at Lullingstone and Bignor, and at Chedworth, near GCHQ at Cheltenham—than this! This was so
small
—there had been no sweeping staircases between these chimneys on which southern belles in crinolines could pass each other gracefully!

He felt absurdly cheated, and the deception which historians practised angered him, which had so nearly fired his imagination: here, in this pathetic farmhouse ruin, he wished David Audley stood in his place, as he ought to have done, to test his
history
against
reality
—

He slashed his stick savagely at the nearest inoffensive sapling to punish it for his disappointment, and the sound behind him coincided exactly with the action and the thought, too late to stop either. But the sound overprinted itself on the thought, conjured up
rattlesnakes
, and twisted him round, with his stick at the ready to defend himself.

Behind him, looking directly at him, there was a Confederate soldier, with a levelled rifle—

MITCHELL WAITED TO
the very edge of outright disobedience, in defiance of the spirit of Colonel Butler’s orders, in order to catch Audley before he left. And then, from the thunderous expression on the man’s face as he emerged from the lift, he almost doubted his judgement.

But not quite, so he braced himself. “Hullo, David.”

Audley emitted a growling sound, like an old dog who’d lost his best bone. “So what do you want?”

“Nothing. I was just—”

“If it’s Debreczen … you can have it: it was the finishing school for the deep sleepers.” An awful travesty of a smile accompanied the gift. “As of now, the Beast’s got all the details somewhere in its vile maw, which it will vomit up to you on demand. Jack depressed the necessary instruction before he cast me into the outer darkness.” Audley sighed. “So he trusts you. And much good may it do you—more than it has done me, I hope, anyway—” He started to move past Mitchell before he had finished speaking.

“No—” Mitchell had to swivel and skip to keep up with him “—I was just going to suggest—”

“Suggest?” Audley checked and faced him. “You know what I’ve got to do tonight? I’ve got to fly to Rome—that’s what I’ve got to do. So I’m not in a suggestible mood.” He glowered at Mitchell. “So don’t suggest anything. Just tell me what you
want
, Paul.”

Judgement was one thing, decided Mitchell. But grovelling was another. “A bit of commonsense is what I want—I realize that common courtesy may be beyond your range … I’d
like
that, but after ten years I don’t bloody well expect it.” He stared at Audley without flinching, and watched the big man’s face harden for an instant—and then collapse into embarrassment.

“I’m sorry, Paul.” Audley raised a hand—that inevitably grubby hand, with its schoolboy inkstains on the fingers—and went on to scratch his head with it. “Rome in August … even without Senator Cookridge … and what I’ve got to ask him—I shall have to crawl, damn it!”

Mitchell experienced a mixture of emotions which simultaneously elated and depressed him, quite confusing him with their contradiction. Audley had taught him … well, a lot, if not everything over those ten years … but he had never been quite sure whether he loved the man or hated him—he loved Faith, and he adored Cathy … but his relationship with Audley had been in some sense feudal, with obligation and self-interested expectation cancelling out all the bullying and the double-crossing, leaving no room for any definite emotion.

Audley tried to grin at him. “He’ll probably send me away with a flea in my ear … And that’s only if he even agrees to talk to me—” He finished scratching his head, and looked at his ink-stained hand with critical distaste, as though he wished that it didn’t belong to him.

The man could have had the job Latimer had got—for the asking … In fact—damn it all to hell!—he could probably have had Butler’s job, and with Butler’s help, if he had stirred himself to get it.

“So what do you want?” Audley abandoned his hand.

For the first time Mitchell thought of Audley as
old
—
old
now, from this moment, past any of the promotions which he had inexplicably scorned: from this moment they were
equal
…
equal
—except that now
he
, David Audley, was going nowhere … except where he wanted to go, on his own terms … and he,
Paul Mitchell
, intended to go up, on whatever terms he could get.

Audley managed that grin at last. “Something in your best interest, at a guess?”

Mitchell had just been about to substitute a certain grudging affection for whatever he had felt before. But instead he advised himself that, as an enemy, David might still be more dangerous than Jack Butler and Oliver St John Latimer rolled in one.

“Mutual self-interest, let’s say.” He shrugged. “I’ve got something to trade about Sion Crossing, David.”

The grin vanished instantly as Audley looked past him, towards the guard’s cage at the entrance. “That sounds fair enough.” He came back to Mitchell. “There’s a pub I know. I’ll buy you a beer.”

“That was what I was going to suggest in the first place.”

They drove, wife Audley giving instructions.

Over Westminster Bridge, down Lambeth Palace Road, past Lambeth Bridge … the Albert Embankment … past Vauxhall Bridge—

“Where the hell are we going?”

“Turn left here. I like a bit of privacy when I’m trading.”

They were into a maze of mean streets, maybe still on the edge of Vauxhall, maybe South Lambeth.

“Stop here.” Audley pointed. “Park over there—in that little yard.”

Mitchell watched him wedge a piece of plain white card in the windscreen. Over the years, David had done a lot of odd trading, with a great many equivocal contacts. So this was probably as much out of habit as necessity.

“There now.” Audley pointed down an even meaner street. “No one’ll lift your car from here. But we have to walk a little.”

Mitchell followed him. It was psychology, even more likely, designed simply to unsettle him before putting him back in his place.

They passed two grimy corner-pubs before Audley found the one he wanted—an even grimier one, which looked as though it hadn’t seen a lick of paint since the end of the war—the Boer War.

Mitchell looked up, at the sign above his head: there was a soldier on a horse, waving his sword, crudely painted and with no name.

“The Marshal Ney.” Audley held the door for him. “Better known hereabouts as ‘The Frenchman’. There was a Frenchman owned it … oh, about a hundred years ago, whose grandfather was one of the Marshal’s boy-soldiers at Waterloo … Or, strictly speaking, he inherited it from his wife, who was the landlord’s only daughter—or was it his widow, Tom?” He addressed the last half of the sentence to the man behind the cramped little bar.

“Widow, Dr Audley.” The man bared a set of impossibly white National Health teeth. “I told you—they done away with the old boy between them, the woman and the Frenchman … Pints, is it?” He accepted Audley’s nod, and then flashed his NHS tombstones at Mitchell as he drew the beer. “’E was a sailor, the Frog was—with ’is eye on the main chance … an’ she was it.” He placed the straight glasses side-by-side on the unpolished bar, which was as white as the holystoned deck of an old sailing-ship. “An’ then he done away with ’
er
too, they reckon—drowned by the bridge, she was … an’ got the pub, an’ changed the name.” He accepted Audley’s money without taking his eyes off Mitchell, as though he was checking him against some private rogues’ gallery. “An’ married the skivvy wot worked for ’im.”

“And got away with it?” It was obvious, but he had to say something.

“Aaargh … well, that depends wot the skivvy was like.” The man blinked, as though the checking was complete. And that only left the filing-for-the-future-reference. “Like, she knew too much … but ’e couldn’t drop ’er off the bridge too—even the Ol’ Bill might’ve smelt a rat then … An’ she was a local girl—the other two, they was from ’cross the river, see … Naow, ’e knew when ’e was laughin’—them frogs isn’t stupid—the way they gips us in the Common Market … Right, Dr Audley?”

“Right, Tom.” Audley looked round the bar, which was empty except for four old men playing crib in the corner. “Can we be private now?”

“Ah?” Pure pleasure suffused the man’s wizened face. “Double or quits? Ten minutes?”

“Fifteen.” Audley watched the publican produce a pack of dog-eared cards from under the bar. “You cut, Paul—and you look at
me
, Tom, when you cut—right?”

Mitchell cut the cards.

Four of Diamonds.
Damn!

Tom stared at Audley, and cut the remainder.

“Two of Clubs.” Tom shook his head at Audley. “Born to be hanged, you were, Dr Audley.” Then he looked at Mitchell, without looking at his card. “Don’t know you. Gotta proper name, ’ave you, Paul?”

“Dr Mitchell to you, Tom,” said Audley quickly. “And on our side. And he went to the same university as your younger daughter—for all the good that has done him … which is precious little, to date.”

Mitchell felt complimented. Or, at least, if he could find the bloody place again, that he’d got a safe house of a sort.

But Tom shook his head. “A good
eddication
—waste o’ time, Dr Mitchell. But at least you’re lucky at cards—”

The door banged open, to reveal a large youth, with others behind him.

Tom straightened up. “The other door, mate.” He pointed to his left uncompromisingly. “An’ the first drink’s on the house—if it’s not shorts. Right?”

The youth filled the doorway, struck dumb with surprise.

Tom raised himself up another inch. “You fancy buyin’ a round for the Old Bill then, sunshine?” he challenged the youth.

Mitchell was caught for an instant between studying Tom and wondering what the large youth would do. But then the door was swinging shut, and the youth had vanished as though he had never occupied it at all. And Tom was giving him an embittered look.