Gunner Kelly (6 page)

It was an English churchyard like any other, with its scatter of newer gravestones among older ones on which the inscriptions ranged from the barely decipherable to mere litchen-covered indentation which only God could read. There was a neat little gravel path meandering between the stones and the occasional yew-tree, to divide just short of the porch, one branch leading directly to the door, the other curving round the building.

Under other circumstances Benedikt would have entered the church, as he had always been taught to do, to say a prayer. But the sun was warm on his face, and in these circumstances, in this place at this time, he judged that Mother would forgive him for breaking her rule, and would allow him to say the words of her old Englishman under the sky, as they had originally been prayed—

Lord, Thou knowest that I must be very busy this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.

Instead, he followed the curving path along the side of the church, to the newest grave of all, which had instantly caught his eye.

HERBERT GEORGE MAXWELL
CBE, DSO, MC, RA
1912-1982

The inscription was cut deep into the new headstone: it would take centuries of wind and weather to erase it.

Under the date, but less deeply incised because of its complexity, was a military badge consisting of an antique cannon surmounted by a crown, standing upon the single Latin word ‘Ubique’.

Below the stone, on the freshly-turned chalky soil, there was a plastic wreath of red poppies and laurel leaves, with a ribbon identifying ‘The Royal British Legion’ across it, and an unmarked posy of fresh flowers and greenery.

Benedikt marked the difference between the two tributes: on closer scrutiny, the soil was no longer quite freshly turned, for there were already tiny green things sprouting from it—the delicate spears of young grass and the minute broad-leaved weeds which would eventually reduce General Herbert George Maxwell’s last resting place to uniformity with all his neighbours in Duntisbury Royal churchyard and all his old comrades in dozens of far-flung military cemeteries (that was what ‘Ubique’ meant, after all, wasn’t it?).

But, where the Royal British Legion wreath dated from the original burial judging by the rain-spotted dust which covered it, the posy had been cut and carefully put together only a few hours before.

So there was somebody in Duntisbury Royal who still loved
General Herbert George Maxwell, CBE, DSO, MC, RA
, aged 70 …
CBE
was some great honour, and
DSO
and
MC
were gallantry medals, and that crowned cannon could only mean
Royal Artillery
, not
Royal Academician!

So here was the fuse … buried two metres deep, and impervious to any mischance now, but still as live and dangerous as any of the thousands of shells he had once fired, so it seemed.

But what shell, of all those thousands, had he fired which had killed him all those years after, so explosively?

They didn’t know, they said.

And who had killed him, anyway?

They said they didn’t know tha
t, either.

Half-blurred, on the edge of his vision through the spectacles, he noticed another stone, but with the same name.

He turned his head towards it:
Edith Mary Maxwell, 1890-1960
… he peered further to the left, and then to the right … they were all Maxwells here—
Victoria Mary Maxwell
—all Maxwell women, anyway—

And there was something else—someone else—on that blurred no-man’s-land—

Benje, the snub-nosed cyclist, was almost at his back, complete with his racing-bike.

“That’s the Old General, the Squire,” said the boy, nodding at the new grave. “We had a big funeral for him, with soldiers— gunners, they were.”

Benedikt nodded gravely.

“The IRA killed him,” said the boy. “Blew him up, they did. Dad says they’re a lot of bastards.”

“Yes?” said Benedikt.

But that was one thing they did
not
say: the IRA had not blown up General Herbert George Maxwell. If they were agreed on nothing else, British Intelligence and the IRA were both agreed on that.

IT MIGHT BE USEFUL
, thought Benedikt. And even if it was not useful, it would be instructive.

But most of all it might be useful.

“You knew the old general?”

The boy Benje started to nod, and then a sound behind him diverted his attention.

The other—the boy who had given Mr Cecil the rude signal—shot out from behind a nearby yew tree on his bicycle, and came to a racing halt beside Benje in a spray of gravel.

Benedikt studied them both. They were two very different types, the boy Benje extrovert and cheekily-aggressive, and the other boy … What was his name? He had heard it, but it had escaped him … the other boy was black-haired and fine-boned, and altogether more withdrawn. The only thing they had in common was their transport: the low-handlebarred, multi-geared racing cycles were identical.

And he had a better introduction to them both there. “Those look good bikes—BSA, are they?” He eased his accent, the better to communicate with them. “You are brothers?”

“Me and him?” Benje threw the question back contemptuously. “You must be joking!”

“You do not look like brothers—no.” He searched for an opening. “But you bought the same machines.”

Benje shook his head. “We didn’t buy ‘em.”

“Of course! You were given them.” He knew that wasn’t what the boy had meant.

“No. We won them.” Benje couldn’t let the mistake pass uncorrected.

“In a competition?”

Benje looked at him. “Sort of.” He paused for an instant, then nodded at the tombstone. “We got them from him.”

“From the General? He gave them to you?”

“No—
not gave
.” Benje frowned, suddenly tongue-tied.

“We both won places at King Edward’s School.” The other boy filled the silence coolly. “Everyone who wins a place at King Edward’s—everyone from here—gets a bicycle from the Old General.” He put a capital letter on the title.

“Ah!” And with Duntisbury Royal’s inaccessibility to public transport, that was an act of practical generosity, thought Benedikt. “So you are able to cycle to school!”

“No.” Benje shook his head again. “There’s a taxi comes for us—collects us in the morning, an‘ brings us back after first prep.”

The other boy nodded. “And the Old General pays for that as well.”

It was strange how they both held him in the living present, here of all places. But presumably the benefaction was endowed to outlast the benefactor.

“ ‘Sright,” agreed Benje. “An’ it’s Blackie Nabb’s old taxi, too—my dad reckons it’s worth a fortune to him, picking us up. Says he wouldn’t be able to run it if it wasn’t for us, and Sandra Brown and Mary Hobbs—they go to the High.” He cocked his head at Benedikt. “They got bikes, too.”

So the Old General was both directly and indirectly the village’s benefactor—but not ‘was’, rather ‘had been’ … he was falling into their confusion of tenses.

He looked at them sadly. “But now he is dead, the Old General …”

“Miss Becky is paying now,” said the other, boy, mistaking his sadness with the cold logic of youth.

“Well, she would, wouldn’t she! Becky’s all right—she used to go to the High in Blackie’s old rattle-trap too, didn’t she!” Benje’s view of the Old General’s successor was less deferential than his friend’s, and so was the face he now presented to Benedikt, even though he could not yet quite nerve himself to ask the questions his curiosity had printed clearly on it.

“Miss Becky is the Old General’s grand-daughter?” He prodded Benje towards those questions without scruple. It would not do to underestimate either of these children—it never did to underestimate any children, but these two particularly. For a start, they were perhaps older than he had at first thought, and in spite of their peasant accents they were scholarship boys as well, so it seemed. Exactly what that meant, he wasn’t sure, in the present confused state of English education, which the English themselves had not standardised and didn’t seem to understand, let alone agree on. But it was still probably true that when English education was good it was very good, and these were fledgling products of it.

“Yes.” Suspicion, rather than curiosity, was dominant in the other boy.

Darren
, he remembered suddenly. The outlandish name.

“You’re not English.” The first of Benje’s questions came in the guise of a statement.

“No, I am not.” It nettled him slightly that the boy’s first thrust had penetrated his almost faultless accent. “So what am I, then?”

“German,” said Benje unhesitatingly.

“Or Swedish,” said Darren. “Remember those two who came through last year, who stayed at the
Eight Bells
? The chap who played rugger—”

“German,” repeated Benje. “Betcha lop.”

So the
Eight Bells
did have rooms. “What makes you so sure, Benje?” It was time to counter-attack just a little, to assert equality rather than any adult superiority.

“How d’you know my name?”

Benedikt smiled. “Benje and Darren.”

“On the road below Caesar’s Camp,” Darren jogged his friend’s memory. “When Old Cecil balled us out—remember?”

“Huh!” Benje didn’t like being jogged, especially in front of the stranger whose car he had touched, and most especially when that stranger was a foreigner too, that sound suggested.

“But you are quite right.” Benedikt invested the admission with a touch of admiration: more than equality, he wanted their friendship, because with these two little mobile spies on his side he could have a mine of information open to him about Duntisbury Royal, past and present. Precious little that happened in the Chase would escape them, and David Audley was a stranger there also.

Benje thawed slightly.

“You are quite right,” he repeated himself, grinning now. “Wiesehöfer—Thomas Wiesehöfer, from West Germany.” And since he judged it time to be honestly foreign he extended his hand to each of them in turn.

For a moment the handshaking unsettled them. But they accepted the alien custom manfully, like the well-brought-up lads he had also judged them to be under their brashness, and his heart twisted between approval of them and disapproval for his own disingenuousness.

Benje rallied first, predictably on his mettle after the debacle of the names. “You’ve come to see … Miss Becky, have you?”

“Miss Becky?” That was a disconcertingly sharp little assumption, but having admitted it in the Eight Bells pubjic house ten minutes ago he could not deny it now. “Miss … Rebecca Maxwell-Smith is that?”

“ ‘Sright.” The boy folded his arms and appraised him with a customs officer’s eye, as though waiting to hear what he had to declare.

“Yes.” He would dearly have liked to ask how Benje had reached that conclusion. But he had to bind them to him with trust before he started asking questions, so that the settlement of their curiosity took priority over his own. “That is to say …1 had thought to speak with General Maxwell—with the Old General. But it is with Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith that I must speak now, it seems.”

“Why d’you want to see her?” Darren continued the interrogation with all the delicacy of a GDR border guard.

“It is not her I wish to see, not really.” He nodded at them, as though revealing a confidence. “It is the Roman villa—the Duntisbury Roman villa … it is on her land, yes?”

“The Roman villa?” Darren frowned at him.

“It is on her land, I believe—yes?”

“Yes.” Benje nodded at him. “All the land round here’s hers—it was the Old General’s, but it’s hers now—from Caesar’s Camp to Woodbury Rings on the top, and along the stream down here, both sides—she owns the lot.” He paused. “Why d’you want to see the Roman villa? There isn’t much to see, you know.” He shook his head. “Until they started digging it up there wasn’t
anything
to see. It was just a field, that was all it was.”

“My Gran knew there was something there long before they dug anything up.” Darren wasn’t going to let Benje do all the talking. “She says, when she was a girl there were lots of rabbits down there, an‘ there was always lots of stuff—bits of brick an’ such like—where they dug their holes—” He stopped suddenly. “Why d’you want to see the old Roman villa?”

Benedikt was ready for that one. “Because I am a student of such things.”

Benje stared at him in disbelief. “A student?”

Darren gave his friend a sidelong glance. “Schoolmaster,” he murmured.

“No.” That would never do! “I am not a schoolmaster. Looking at Roman things is my interest—my hobby—like stamp-collecting.” He grinned at them. “We had Romans in Germany too—did you know that?”

“Huh!” Benje scowled.

Benedikt looked at him questioningly. “Did you not know that?”

Darren’s face split into a wicked grin. “Oh, he knows it!
Germani multum
, Benje—eh?”

“Germani multum—huh!”
Benje’s freckled features twisted.
“Germani flipping multum … ab hac consuetudine differunt; nam neque druides habent, qui rebus divinispraesint, neque flipping sacrificiis student.”

The contrast of the impeccable Latin—or it sounded impeccable, anyway—with the boy’s accented English took Benedikt aback almost as much as the words themselves. He struggled for a moment with their meaning, rusty memories grating on each other — it was something about the Germans being different … not having Druids or making sacrifices — and then cut his losses.

“You are a Latin scholar — ” He cut off the statement as it doubled Darren up with laughter.

“Ha-ha-very-funny,” said Benje to his friend. Then he sniffed and turned to Benedikt. “He thinks it’s a joke that I had to learn a whole flipping page of Caesar — King Edward’s is a very old-fashioned school — everyone says so.” He blinked suddenly. “If you want to see the villa I can show you the way. It’s just the other side of the church.”

“Thank you.” Benedikt leaned forward slightly towards the boy. “I went to an old-fashioned school too — I had the same trouble.”