Soldier No More (35 page)

“Bored?” Lexy echoed the word incredulously. “But he can’t be bored— with all he’s got… And he can’t be lonely—he’s got us, Davey.”

“My dear—we’re merely the ingredients of his boredom. Boredom isn’t just not having anything to do. It’s not being able to do what you
want
to do. If you can’t do that, then everything else is weary, stale, flat and unprofitable—believe me, I know.”

“How do you know, Davey?” asked Jilly.

“Because it’s an infection, Jilly dear—a parasite in the blood that never leaves you once it’s there. It can lie dormant for a few years, but it’s there waiting for you to weaken. I know because I’ve got it too, you see—maybe not David’s particular bug, but my own special bug.”

What bug, Davey?” asked Lexy.

“None of your business, Lady Alexandra,” said Stein.

“He likes to fly planes,” said Bradford. “A common bug.”

If you say so,” Stein shrugged. “But I’m not complaining.”

Audley laughed. “You’ve got nothing to complain about. You get your jollies from the poor damned Egyptians at regular intervals. All I get to do is write books. And they’re no substitute for the real thing, I’ve discovered.”

Lexy sat up once more, this time almost as though pricked. “Simplicius!” she exclaimed.

“I beg your pardon, Lexy love?”

“You’re Simplicius—you really are! Sidonius Simplicius to the life, darling—sort of in reverse.”

Lexy love—“

“No, you
are
—it’s quite weird, darling!” Lexy turned to Jilly “You’ve read the book, Jilly—you tell him, he’ll believe you!”

Tell him what?”

“You remember! How he’s always on about wanting to write a book about that boring old saint who was martyred by some emperor or other— Saint Somebody-or-other of Somewhere—“

“Saint Vinicius of Capua? The one Diocletian parboiled?”

That’s him! And he’s always saying—Simplicius is always saying—that Vinicius lived in much more interesting times …” Lexy spread her gaze round them “… but of course he never does write the book, because he’s far too busy running the whole show from behind Galla Placidia’s skirts, which is much more interesting.”

Jilly nodded. “You’re quite right. That’s the whole point of the book— ‘What the Lord God, our Emperor, and Jesus Christ, his Caesar, purpose for Their servants’—that’s right.”

“Huh! Audley grunted derisively. “This fellow Simplicius sounds … doctrinally unsound!”

“I don’t know about that, darling—all your heresies and things are beyond me. But what he’s saying is that taking part in the real world
now
is the only proper job for a real man. Right, Jilly?” Lexy turned from Jilly to Bradford. “You’ve read the book, Mike—isn’t that so?”

“Yeah. He sure as hell didn’t regard life as a spectator sport. He wanted to run with the ball.”

“That’s exactly what I mean.” Lexy turned back to Audley. “And you want to run with the ball too, David—and get your head down in the scrum, and do all those other beastly things you get so worked up about. So you’re Simplicius, don’t you see, darling?”

Roche saw.

And, suddenly, in seeing, saw more than that.

Saw Lexy, enchanting Lexy, half embarrassed at the sound of her own voice, the lamplight catching the slight sheen of perspiration on her face—

Saw Jilly … and on Jilly’s plain little features it was the sheen of intelligence which animated that face into something close to beauty—

Saw the handsome blond Israeli, the compulsive pilot; and the dark angry American … both his adversaries—

But saw Audley most of all, and at last.

“Here’s Steffy!” Lexy held up her hand, listening. “I can hear her on the steps outside.”

“And about time too!” said Audley irritably. “I just wish she’d regulate her love life more thoughtfully—“ he cut off suddenly, frowning at the scrape of hobnails on stone, which was followed by a thunderous knocking. “But that’s not our Steffy, by God!”

Jilly peered at her wrist-watch. “It’s past midnight, David.”

“So what? We argued until three last time over Stein’s esoteric prehistoric gobbledegook, and Madame didn’t turn a hair.”

“She thinks there’s safety in numbers,” said Lexy, smiling up at Roche. “She believes we wouldn’t call it ‘an orgy’ if it really was one.”

The knock was repeated, even more heavily, and they looked at each other like guilty children, each waiting for the others to move.

“Well, someone bloody answer it,” snapped Audley. “I’m too far away.”

“Yeah. Well, someone’s got to,” said Bradford. “Otherwise she’ll think we really are screwing around.”

The knock was repeated a third time.

“All right, then,” Stein stood up. “Muggins does it.”

Roche craned his neck round Lexy to get a better view, but the angle was awkward and the light confusing.

“Gaston?” Stein injected a masterly mixture of ninety per cent innocent inquiry and ten per cent surprise, as any man with two girls but a clear conscience might employ after midnight. “It’s old Gaston,” he called unnecessarily over his shoulder.

“Old Gaston?” Audley’s equally unnecessary repetition substituted a rather forced heartiness for Stein’s tenth of surprise. “Well—don’t stand there, man! Ask him in! Get another glass, Lady Alexandra.”

But Old Gaston did not seem disposed to be drawn into the Tower. Rather, he drew the Israeli out into the darkness beyond with an urgent, indecipherable mutter of words.

“What’s he want, for God’s sake?” Audley called through the doorway, at Stein’s back. “Stein?”

Mutter-mutter-mutter
. Stein took no notice of the question. “Gaston’s Madame Peyrony’s odd-job man,” said Audley across the table to Roche. “He stokes the boiler, and does the repairs, and digs the garden, and that sort of thing.”

Digs the garden
sent a shiver down Roche’s spine. If Old Gaston dug Madame Peyrony’s garden from way back, then he had planted more than roses in it, for sure.

“Stein!” Audley’s voice had lost its heartiness. “What does he want?” There was a touch of bluster about it now, and under that uneasiness. “Stein?”

The Israeli turned round suddenly just beyond the doorway, but then stood there for a moment in silence, without moving. “Well?” snapped Audley.

Stein straightened up—until he did so Roche didn’t realise that his shoulders had slumped—and came back into the light. “Well?” said Audley again.

Stein looked at Jilly. “Get your wrap, dear. We’ve got to go.”

“What’s happened?” asked Lexy.

“There’s been an accident.”

Steffy?” Lexy stood up quickly. “To Steffy?”

Jilly had risen just as quickly, pulling her wrap from the back of her chair on to her shoulders.

“Not you, Lady Alexandra,” said Stein. “Jilly will do.”

Lexy had started to move, but now she stopped. “What sort of accident?” She knew, of course. They all knew, thought Roche—they knew without the fractional pause before Stein gave up trying to edit the answer.

“She’s dead, Lexy,” said the Israeli.

ROCHE
’
S TRAVELLING CLOCK
woke him to order before dawn, into blind man’s darkness inside the Tower.

Against all the odds of alcohol and exhaustion, and the too-few hours the night’s events had left him, he became fully aware of all the co-ordinates of his mind and body long before the tiny bell mechanism had exhausted itself beneath the folds of his shirt, with which he had deliberately muted it.

He had to get up and get on with the job. Thinking about Steffy— knowing just so much, and nothing at all—only brought back the sour taste of nightmares which he shouldn’t remember, like the taste of last night’s alcohol.

He fumbled for his torch under the camp-bed; found the torch, and found the matches on the table beside him; put down the torch and struck a match to light the candle Audley had left for him—the flaring match and the sputtering candle-flame illuminated the tower room around him, sending thousands of shadows everywhere creeping into their holes, in the great rack of bottles—the bottles winking and blinking at him.

Before he could think more about it, he forced himself out of his sleeping bag and set his bare feet on the floor. And he saw, as he did so, the slim red gold-embossed book which he had pulled out of his hold-all, with his torch and his little alarm clock—which he had tried to read for a few moments in that same candlelight so few hours before, wanting to sleep and needing to sleep, but fearing to do so … Wimpy’s gift, Kipling’s
Puck of Pook
’
s Hill
…
and thought of the old Roman general on the Great Wall, with his world falling in ruins around him, listening each morning to his sword and saying to himself ‘And
this
day is allowed Rutilianus to live’…

He drew his shirt over his head, and hauled his trousers on to his legs; and pulled on his socks and pushed his feet into his shoes, and tied up the laces; and, just as automatically, picked up the torch and acquiesced in the Plan of Action he had formulated the half-night before, as he had assembled the camp-bed and unstrapped the sleeping-bag.

The very automation of these simple actions carried him beyond the getting-up which had been no more than the reverse of lying-down. What the Tower had once been, before Audley had worked on it, he still wasn’t sure: it was the size of a great dovecote or a small defensive
donjon
…
but there was nothing now in it to indicate which it had been, if it had been either of those, only the new wooden floor beneath his feet and the new wooden ceiling twelve feet above his head, with the smell of the fresh timber faint in his nostrils.

He flashed the torch-beam around him. Well… maybe it had been both those things in its time: in the bad old days Aquitaine had been famous for its petty barons, who had all needed their castles, and this Quercy region of it had also been celebrated for its dovecotes and pigeon-lofts, over which the avaricious peasants had litigated endlessly to establish their rights to the valuable bird-droppings. On balance, judging from the thickness of the wall in which the doorway was set rather than from the total lack of windows in the room, he was inclined to guess
castle bastion
originally, even though he had seen nothing outside very clearly in the yellow beam of the Volkswagen’s headlights to support that theory; most of his attention had been caught by the little cottage in the trees just below, which the lights had transformed into another Perrault fairy-tale house, with its dormer windows and pantile roof.

Not that it mattered either way—whether this was the last remnant of the Beast’s castle or Beauty’s father’s pigeon-loft; what mattered now was that it was Audley’s tower, remodelled for his purposes—for his argumentative orgies down below and … according to Jilly, for his writing work-room above, up
that
ladder and beyond
that
trap-door.

Of course, the odds were long against there being the sort of final evidence he required for certainty up there, waiting to be found, especially if Audley had so little suspicion of Captain Roche that he was happy to let him bed down in the Tower …

He raised the trap-door cautiously, until he felt it lodge against something.

Books everywhere … books and learned-looking periodicals—a stack of
English Historical Reviews
, and another of the
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
beside it, right under his nose, just above floor level— books and periodicals and mounds of type-written papers covered the floor of the work-room. Either Audley hadn’t got round to having bookshelves made, or the round walls of the Tower had defeated his carpenter.

It
had
been a defensive tower, not a dovecote, that was for sure: on one compass-bearing the archer’s embrasure had been opened up into a full-size window, and Audley had had his work-desk built there, to give him light for his work, but the three surviving arrow slits gave the original game away. Only that wasn’t the game he was playing now …

He found, and quite quickly from the filed papers and the card-index system, that the man’s researches fell neatly into the two parts he had expected—so neatly, so eloquently, that an inner glow of self-satisfaction began to warm away his early morning self-doubting.

Really, it was quite perfect … the contrast between the magisterial— almost ponderous—scholarship on Charles Martel and his 8th century Franks and their Arab-Berber adversaries in Western Europe, and the very different notes on King Gaiseric and his 5th century Vandals, who had popped up in the central Mediterranean like the wrath of God two hundred years before the Arabs.

Except for the identical hand-writing, which was curiously childish and unformed, and the passion for logical and meticulously recorded detail, it might almost have been the work of two different men: the painstaking and respectable Dr Jekyll-Audley, who never strayed outside the facts, and the Mr Hyde-Audley, who slavered over Vandal atrocities in North Africa, with scandalous conjectures about their sexual habits … and was plainly and unashamedly committed to the Vandal Cause, where Jekyll-Audley maintained a lofty impartiality appropriate to the author of
The Influence of Islamic Doctrines on Iconoclasm in the 8th Century
.

But, at the same time, there were distinctive and tell-tale similarities which betrayed the consubstantiation of the two Audleys. Both were fascinated by religion (though, typically, Hyde-Audley inclined towards the Vandals’ Arian heresy), and they shared an equal obsession for military detail, Jekyll-Audley’s notes on Prankish and Arab weaponry and tactics being equalled by Hyde-Audley’s on the development of King Gaiseric’s navy—

Hyde-
Palfrey
-Audley—

With a start, Roche realised suddenly that he was no longer reading by the light of his torch: while he had been burrowing into the papers and the index, drawn ever deeper into them by his study of the two Audleys, the dawn had crept up on him out of the dark to fill the window right in front of him. Below him the morning mist had already started to fall away from the ridge. It still filled the whole valley, blanking out everything to within fifty yards of the tower, with the shapes of small junipers and scrub oaks indistinct on its nearest margin.