The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) (13 page)

Ben couldn’t understand why this man was so important.

Brennan closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. ‘It’s late, Mr Hope. You’ll have to forgive me, but Lady Elizabeth herself can tell you all you need to know. As for me, I’m feeling very tired and I must get to bed. We can talk again in the morning.’

Ben stood, picked up the four volumes and tucked them delicately under his arm. ‘I’ll take care of them.’

‘I know you will,’ Brennan said, rising from his armchair and laying the laptop back on his desk. ‘I don’t imagine you have a hotel booked, do you? But don’t worry. You can stay here the night. There’s a guest annexe adjoining the house. Follow me.’

Brennan left lights off as he led the way back through the house; now Ben knew why he preferred to be in darkness. Outside, the stars were twinkling.

‘Let me just feed Romulus and Remus their evening meal,’ Brennan said. He disappeared into a little outhouse near the kennels and reappeared a few moments later carrying two enormous dishes heaped with dog food, which he placed at the entrances to the kennels. The mastiffs came lumbering out and fell hungrily on the food, slobbering and gulping.

Brennan lovingly petted them as they ate. ‘They wouldn’t harm you,’ he said lovingly. ‘A couple of teddy bears, but burglars don’t know that. Isn’t that so, my boys?’ he added, cuddling the slavering beasts with unfeigned devotion.

Ben could see how desperately lonely he was.

‘Now let me show you to your quarters for the night,’ Brennan said. ‘You’ll be hungry yourself, I suppose. Help yourself to whatever’s in the kitchen. There are tinned provisions and some not too bad local wine, for the visitors I never receive.’

‘Don’t you have any family?’ Ben asked as they walked along a dark portico that skirted the courtyard.

‘I’m the last of us,’ Brennan said. ‘Nobody to leave this pad to when I pop my clogs, which won’t be long, I hope. I’ve already made provisions for Romulus and Remus.’

Ben made no reply.

‘You’re probably wondering how an old fuddy duddy professor comes to be living in such a ridiculous big place,’ Brennan said with a chuckle. ‘My academic pension would barely cover the maintenance costs. No, you see, it came out the arse of a chicken.’

Ben looked at him, wondering if his illness had touched his head a little.

‘I had an old uncle in Dungarvan who’d become obscenely rich selling eggs, of all things, bless him. He had no children – seems the Brennans aren’t much given to procreation – and I was his only nephew, and so he left me the lot. That’s when I left the rainy shores of Ireland forever and moved here, looking forward to a long and happy retirement.’ Brennan smiled morbidly. ‘Next thing, this happens to me. Oh, well. As they say, life’s a bitch and then you rot away in pieces. Here we are.’

They’d reached the door of the annexe. Brennan unlocked it and gave Ben they key. ‘Make yourself comfortable, Mr Hope. Don’t stay up too late reading. Good night.’

He turned away, and Ben watched the thin, dark figure for a moment as the dying man walked back towards the empty house and what remained of his empty life.

The villa’s guest annexe was on two floors, with a spiral staircase leading up to a narrow passage with the twin bedrooms off it. One of them had French windows that opened out onto a balcony. That was where Ben stood leaning on the stone balustrade and watching his cigarette smoke trail idly off into the warm night as he reflected over the things Brennan had told him. He wasn’t hungry, and hadn’t touched any of the provisions downstairs. Behind him inside the room, on the lush blue velvet cover of the antique four-poster bed, lay the volumes of Elizabeth Stamford’s journal.

He could only hope that he hadn’t come all this way on a fool’s errand. But it was late, and he had nowhere else to go right now.

He crushed out the Gauloise on the balustrade, showering the darkness with a tiny cascade of glowing embers, then flicked the dead stub into the thick of the bushes down below. Time to find out what dark secrets the journals had to tell.

‘Let’s get to it,’ he said out loud.

Sitting on the soft bed with the window drapes shut to keep out the mosquitoes and only a small bedside reading light shining over the pages, he spread the earliest volume of the journal open in front of him. The faded date of May 14th, 1841 on the opening entry confirmed what Brennan had said: that Lady Elizabeth Stamford had first begun to record her private thoughts and observations soon after marrying and moving to her new husband’s Glenfell Estate.

Carefully turning the pages as he read, Ben admired the quality of both her handwriting and her style, which was elegant without being mannered and vivid enough to make him visualise the beautiful, lonely young woman of nineteen sitting there at some dainty little bureau in the confines of Glenfell House putting these private words to paper, with no idea of who would come to be prying into them a hundred and seventy or so years later. It seemed strange to imagine that this journal he was holding in his hands had been written inside the very manor whose gutted ruin he’d been walking around only yesterday.

But as he read on and the minutes passed, he could see nothing yet that was even remotely explosive or contentious in what the journal’s author had to say. He was looking at the account of the day-to-day existence of a fairly typical aristocratic young woman of her time; and in 1841 it seemed that Lady Stamford had been leading a pretty uneventful life. In her measured prose she complained of being excluded from everything to do with her husband’s activities and the general running of the house.

‘I cannot bring myself to suppose I shall ever like that man Burrows,’
she wrote.
‘How Edgar came to choose such a vulgar, savage brute for his manservant is a mystery to me. But Peggy, my maid, is a sweet creature, and if it were not for the distraction of her company, and that of my dear, kind Padraig, I should certainly run melancholy mad.’

So there was Padraig, Ben thought. He’d have been thirty-two years of age when Lady Elizabeth joined the household. There was no indication yet why Kristen might have been so interested in learning more about the man.

Ben read on. Over the next few pages, Elizabeth described her resolve not to become bored with her new cosseted role as lady of the manor, and to fill her time instead with playing the piano and the harp, reading her beloved Miss Austen, and roaming the grounds of Glenfell House and the surrounding countryside with her lurcher, Aloysius. Riding was a passion, too, but she refused to condone the fox hunts Edgar delighted in, and expressed how sickened she felt at the fate of the poor fox:
‘Surely life is hard enough already for the wretched things, without being torn to pieces for the entertainment – for that is all it is, as I can very well see – of my dear spouse and his bloodthirsty friends.’

It was a few minutes later, in an entry dated October 1841, that Ben came across the next mention of Padraig McCrory. Elizabeth talked about him with warm affection; from her account, Ben quickly pieced together a vision of a gentle giant of a man, kind-hearted and obviously devoted to her as he was to her horses. A few pages further on, Elizabeth ventured to confess that it was from Padraig that she was secretly learning Ireland’s native Gaelic. Secretly, because the language was strongly discouraged under English rule, which even forbade the use of the prefix
O’
in Irish surnames.
‘I am sure that Edgar’s fury would be immeasurable if he heard me utter but a single word of “that vile tinkers’ dialect” for which he threatens to have the Irish servants horsewhipped by his man Burrows should they dare ever to speak it in their lord and master’s presence,’
Elizabeth wrote in one of her more impassioned outbursts.
‘Well, he can d— well have me whipped along with them, for I find its music as enchanting as these hills and glens he regards merely as so much grazing land.’

Other than her contact with Peggy and Padraig, her social life at the Glenfell Estate appeared to have been severely limited. She looked forward to the visits from her cousins from England, the twins Henrietta and Cecilia Wainwright who, Ben gleaned, were about ten years older than Elizabeth, and their elder brother Stephen, who was a physician as well as a noted naturalist. She often mentioned him in glowing language as being
‘quite unlike the roaring brutes who make up the majority of Edgar’s friends. Preferring to eschew their after-dinner company as they guffaw and clamour over port and cigars with their endless, wearisome talk of money and politics, this evening he again sat with us ladies and enraptured us with his accounts of his travels to lands so exotic they seem to our limited understanding to belong to another world.’

Stephen had captured rare butterflies in Brazil; had climbed mountains in Spain; had once had the honour of meeting the great astronomer and composer William Herschel at the Royal Society. Elizabeth recounted his stories in detail and, reading between the lines, Ben got the impression that she harboured a certain liking for this Dr Wainwright that went deeper than simple friendship. But even in her private journal, such things couldn’t be said openly.

It was all very compelling and Ben found himself instinctively liking Elizabeth – but this wasn’t what he’d travelled to Madeira to read about. He was getting nowhere after more than an hour, and there was still a hell of a lot of reading to do. Thinking he should skip forwards in time and pick the account up at a later point, he set aside the book and opened one of the other volumes to find the first entry dated September, 1846, cutting forward five years.

Maybe here he’d be able to discover more about the importance of this Padraig McCrory’s role in the story. The stable hand was an enigma to Ben. What had happened to him after Elizabeth had left Ireland? Had he remained at the Glenfell Estate until its downfall in 1851?

Why did he matter?

Ben was two lines in when he heard the sudden eruption of barking outside. The dogs must have sensed something. Some nocturnal wild creature, Ben thought. Maybe an owl. He remembered the way those used to set off the guard German Shepherds at Le Val.

For a second, his focus on the journal was distracted by fond memories that inevitably led back to Brooke. It took some effort to mentally shut them out, along with the noise of barking, and go back to reading.

Seconds later, his concentration was broken again. This time, what he heard made him put the journal down with a start and turn to face the curtained balcony window.

He tensed, listened hard.

Silence outside. But he knew what he’d heard. The muffled crump of two silenced pistol reports, rapid-fire, one after the other. Each instantly followed by a brief high-pitched squeal. Then back to silence.

Someone had just shot the dogs.

Ben’s abdominal muscles tightened with a jerk and he sprang off the bed. He quickly reached out and turned off the little reading lamp, then crossed the dark room to the balcony window without a sound. He peeled back the edge of one of the drapes and peered out. He could see nothing but a stretch of dimly moonlit lawn and the shadows of the bushes and shrubs that filled the villa’s garden.

He eased silently through the gap in the curtains and stepped out onto the balcony, dropped into a crouch behind the balustrade and listened. The only sound he could hear was the steady, rhythmic chirping of the cicadas.

Then, as he peered through the balustrade, a movement down below caught his attention. It was followed by another. A less trained eye wouldn’t even have picked up on them in the darkness: two flitting shapes crossing the edge of the lawn towards the villa.

They moved with long, fast strides, keeping low, hugging the shadows. The silhouettes of two men who knew how to move silently and unseen over unfamiliar terrain. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. Ben had mastered the skill a long time ago, after long and persistent training and years of honing the art of war. He knew right away that the intruders were schooled in it too. Perhaps to the same degree he’d been, or close. In two seconds they’d melted invisibly into the shadows surrounding the villa.

Ben rose to his feet and peered over the edge of the balustrade. Beneath the balcony, the wall of the villa was clad in trellis thickly covered in ivy. It was a twenty, twenty-five-foot drop to the flower borders below. Without hesitation he swung himself over the edge of the balcony and scrabbled downwards, fingers gripping smooth stone and his legs dangling free for an instant before he kicked them towards the wall and let go. He dropped six feet or so before his hands locked onto the trellis and he checked his fall, pulling himself tightly into the rustling ivy. The trellis was strong and held his weight. He quickly found a foothold and began climbing down. In moments, he was standing on the soft earth of the flower beds. Ahead was the open-sided portico that skirted the villa wall and led to the main part of the house. Which way had the intruders gone?

He glanced around him, all his senses sharply focused. He could hear nothing. On the far side of the lawn, close to the high wall that bordered the property, he could just make out two patches of blacker darkness against the deep shadow. They weren’t moving. Even as he trotted silently towards them, he knew what they were.

He crouched next to one of the dead mastiffs and touched his fingers where the moonlight glistened on a shiny, wet patch. Blood, still warm, oozing from a gunshot wound.

He ran back across the grass and entered the portico, his footsteps soft and stealthy on the flagstone floor. He reached the front door of the villa and found it hanging open. They must have gone through the lock in seconds. Whoever they were, they were good. Ben slipped inside the open doorway. The mosaic-floored entrance hall was dark. Ahead of him was the broad corridor that had led him earlier that day to Brennan’s study. To his right, the brass banister rail of the curving staircase gleamed in a glow of light that was coming from above. Ben moved closer to the stairs and heard voices.

Climbing a wooden staircase without a creak in the still of the night was another art Ben had learned a long time ago, and practised many times in the course of his work. But these were marble, with a soft runner up their centre. He bounded silently up them two at a time and reached the first floor, where the banister rail curved elegantly into the wall and formed a landing overlooking the stairs and the hallway below. The voices were clearer up here. From their harsh tone, Ben had the impression that it wasn’t Brennan’s long-lost friends who’d come to visit.

From the landing led a wide passage, and a little way up the passage was a half-open door. The light was shining from the gap. Ben moved closer. The voices grew louder. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. He stopped. In the glow from the half-open door he could see the gilded frames of paintings hanging on the opposite wall. And something else.

The centrepiece of the display of antique arms was a Celtic battle shield. Irish, Ben guessed, the circular kind called a targe. Probably four hundred years old, wood and leather banded with iron. Fanned out over the top of the shield was an array of ancient daggers. Framing it left and right, with their blade tips crossed in an X below it, hung a pair of basket-hilted broadswords sheathed in steel scabbards.

Ben reached up and unhooked the one nearest to him. It came away from its wall mounting without a sound. He slipped his hand inside the steel basket and gripped the handle. It felt rough, like sharkskin. He didn’t draw the blade out, for the
zing
of steel on steel that would give his presence away. He crept closer to the door, the sword substantial and comforting in his grip.

And peered tentatively through the gap into the room beyond.