The Apple-Tree Throne Page 6

  A public-house appears out of the fug, two storeys, whitewashed and neat. There are still patrons within, though it seems a reputable establishment — I cannot hear any sounds of fighting or glasses breaking, and there are no rubbish-heaps around it. I could go in and get some porter, and drink it quietly in a corner…no. I am quite done with the human race tonight, though if pressed I could not explain why.

  I tell myself not to think about it, but whenever I stop my brain turns to it like a flower turning to find the sun, and so I keep walking, encountering no one. Inside the borrowed shoes a blister bursts, then another, and my stockings squelch with each step. A few blocks away, the last tram on the Red Line announces itself out of service with a subdued whistle, smothered in its hiss of escaping steam.

  My pocket-watch is somewhere in a blood-soaked valley in the Disputed Territory and I do not know what time it is, nor how long till sunrise. I will have to wait till I hear churchbells, and count the strokes. I think of war, and weaponry, and mercenaries, and whether my children might inherit Miss Meyers’ glorious hair instead of my rather dull blond, or her dark eyes instead of my blue; in fact, I would resoundingly, and against popular opinion, wish that they inherit nothing from me, for I have nothing good to pass to them.

  When dawn finally comes, the first rosy shine of it over the hills, I have circled around and am almost home, not weeping but with tears streaming down my silent face. I cannot seem to stop them, only mop them up with one of Mrs. Wickersley’s donated handkerchiefs. I let myself into the house, and remove my shoes, and limp upstairs, and glance timidly at the window, where Wickersley’s ghost fades with an expression quite inscrutable as the rising sun’s golden blades slice him to bits.

  As the light strengthens I take stock of the destruction the ghost wrought in my absence — a laughable duty, if it were not so alarming that he can clearly access the interior of the chamber now. In fact, I would subscribe it to my usual carelessness if I had not turned at the last moment and taken stock of the place before leaving last night.

  A cushion has been knocked from the bed; one boot has been relieved of its laces; my papers are in disarray. The bookmark has been removed from my copy of Tacitus, and the empty chamber-pot beneath the bed has been tipped over. Upon the vanity-stand, a square bottle that I do not recognize lies upon its side, still full - it seems he possessed sufficient corporeality to knock it over but not send it to the floor, where it surely would have broken. I find the accompanying note beneath the stand in what must be Alastair’s careful hand, as Mrs. Boyle cannot read nor write - From Mrs W, for yuor wund + slep.

  I pick up the heavy green glass bottle and examine the label, elegantly hand-painted— Dr. Botterill’s Finest Quality Laudanum, the script superimposed over a scantily-clad siren or nymph of some kind, blissfully asleep in a sketched heap of waves. This must be better-quality stuff than what we were fed on the ship back home, dosed from huge brown jugs to quiet the screams and sobs. With stinging clarity I recall the taste of the stuff, the black sediment that sank to the bottom of our mugs of rum-and-water and coated the tongue with the final swallow. For a few lads, no dose was high enough to bring relief, and they fell into a stupor still moaning in pain; and for a few, a single drop knocked them out so that they had to be worked upon quickly to keep breath in their body. I thought myself fortunate indeed to be in the middle of these extremes, and passed a large part of the journey without too much discomfort. Mrs. Wickersley has given me a thoughtful gift indeed.

  The bottle replaced, I glance at the rest of the room, which appears untouched. Something gleams below the desk that I had not noticed previously. I crawl beneath it, ignoring the pain in my legs, and retrieve a small brass model of a hopter, cunningly wrought so that the propeller turns and the tail moves back and forth. The incised designs are worn smooth on either side, where one would hold it in the thumb and fore-finger.

  Clearly this was a favourite toy, surreptitiously taken when he moved from the family demesne to his own house. I remember Wickersley with a sudden, painful clarity — in the command tent, vain, pompous, joyous, reckless, scribbling all over the painstakingly arranged battle-maps while the top brass looked on in either horror or approval, rearranging their miniature models and putting his fingers in their clay topographies.

  He desperately wanted to fly the ornithopters but was never permitted to, because of his slight nearsightedness, and so he was constantly in the hop-yards badgering the mechanics and begging for looks at the engines and the rotors, to sit in the pilot-seat and the gunner-turrets, him, this same boy who had grown up playing with this mass-produced little toy. He would have been appalled the first time he saw our magnificent hopters taken down with such ease by the enemies’ great glass-stringed kites, a weapon of war taken down by a toy. Maybe nothing is a toy now. Or everything is a weapon.

  I place it gently on the windowsill, and limp to the bath-chamber.

  ***

  Bathed, shaved, teeth cleaned, hair combed, and feet bandaged, I knock upon the front door of Lindow House and am admitted to the smaller dining room, where Mr. and Mrs. Wickersley are taking their breakfast.

  “Benjamin!” Mrs. Wickersley cries, and I try to remember precisely when she began to use my Christian name rather than ‘Lieutenant Braddock.’ “You left the fête with such haste last night - I hope that nothing was wrong?”

  “No, Mrs. Wickersley.”

  “You were not offended in any way?” she says anxiously. “None of the other guests…?”

  The Major-General’s unseen eyes bore into me now despite her appearance of maternal distress, as if she is trying to look at the back of my head. What is he trying to tell me?

  “No, Mrs. Wickersley,” I tell her, and at her continued urging sit at their table, and force down a few spoonsful of porridge with honey and cream. Probably a poor idea, that cream. My stomach is a stormy sea, and I dare not eat more. I curl my hand around the tea-cup and look at them both. “I was wondering, if it was not too much of an imposition, whether I might accompany you to church this morning? I quite understand if it is not your preference,” I add hastily.

  Somewhat to my surprise, it is Mr. Wickersley who responds. “Of course. The carriage will be outside in a half-hour. Plenty of room.”

  “Is that enough time for you to go and change, dear?” Mrs. Wickersley says.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Surely you don’t mean to attend in…”

  I glance down at my outfit, which had seemed to be perfectly respectable— clean, anyway, pressed, and without any stains or burn-marks. Belatedly I realize she means she expected me to attend in uniform— perhaps not my grand dress uniform from last night, but at the very least, my spare service uniform, the only one that survived the blast, which I often wear to dinner here.

  “Let the boy alone,” Mr. Wickersley says, and I see that he is in uniform himself— two wars ago, faded, showing ancient blood-stains improperly laundered. The mourning-band is stark in its darkness against the soft old cloth. He’s old, but he’s still got all his buttons on; nothing has escaped him in this conversation.

  In the strained silence, I gulp down my tea and say, “I shall change at once, Mrs. Wickersley, and meet you in half an hour.”

  “Very good, dear,” she says, shooting her husband a look of triumph. I do not know if I have fallen in his esteem, but what I wear to church is of no importance to me, unlike Mrs. Wickersley.

  Changed, I meet them at the carriage parked near the gate. Mrs. Wickersley nods approvingly at my shabby uniform — the ghost knocked it onto the floor of the closet, and it was all wrinkles and dust when I put it on. Then she reaches up and pushes something into my breast pocket: a rose of a red so arterial and dark that it seems as if it has been dipped in blood.

  We are silent in the carriage, the rose — surely one of the last of the season, unless they have a hot-house, I suppose — filling the space with its fragrance. I sit facing Mr. and Mrs. Wickersley,
noting the space between them, big enough to fit a third person on their bench. Outside, the sleepy town rolls past, everyone in their Sunday best, children clutching their sweaty pennies for the collection plate. I wonder if any of them have coins with the Queen’s head upon them, for all that the monarchy was abolished years before I was born. There could very well be a few. All the coins were recalled and transformed, melted down for the new ones, and yet coins have a permanence that verges on human stubbornness; a coin wants to exist unchanged.

  The more prosperous families trundle past in steam-carts, drivers confidently wrenching the wide brass wheels to and fro to avoid dung and loose cobbles. I wonder if I can afford one of those now that I am back — they were far out of reach, of course, before I left. I could not have purchased enough coal to run it for a single week. I have even heard rumours that some of the lords have purchased domestic hopters, little ones that they fly around their estates and use to visit one another. I certainly don’t want one of those. And the Wickersleys think them a bit showy — certainly not for people of their bearing. But a steam-cart, certainly…

  “Are you all right, dear?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Wickersley.”

  “Did you sleep well last night? Alastair says he saw lights from the house, quite late.”

  “Yes, I slept perfectly well. I was…reading a bit. You know. Always improving the mind.”

  We disembark, and I spot Clifford Wickersley and his family climbing down from a red-enamelled steam-cart just ahead of us. His wife greets us with courteous charm, and the two children — a boy and a girl, sandy-haired but with the pale, luminous Wickersley eyes — curtsey and bow.

  Clifford avoids my eye as we exchange pleasantries about the weather, gazing into the distance above my shoulder. I cannot begrudge him this, though it is somewhat unsettling, and I follow the Wickersleys into the church, where they nod to their friends and choose an apparently familiar pew, barely looking at the others as we sit. Another woman stops me with a hand on my arm, and thanks me for my service, and all I can do is nod and slide along the pew towards the Wickersleys, his children looking at me knowingly, for I cannot even summon a smile.

  I remember this from childhood — squirming on the smooth wood, the sweet smell of the lacquer and the mustier one of incense in the hangings. My fist feels empty without a coin. And of course, it is not my own parents next to me. No, no, stop thinking about it — the past belongs there, not here.

  After mass, I am introduced to their old family friend Father Hambleton, a man of warm affect and a stout, powerful body. Upon learning that he has known the Wickersleys for nigh on forty years, I nearly blurt out “Then why did you not speak at their son’s funeral?”

  I keep mum, of course. I know the answer— and it is confirmed when my name and rank are spoken, and even more strongly when it is followed by regiment. He knows the number as he would know any holy chapter and verse. His face hardens for a moment, like ice forming across a pond, then returns to its former mild warmth. Without asking, I know that he spoke at the service for the Pondsmith boys. I wait for my heart to break, and it ticks on.

  For these people, they are all the same. One cannot be upset about their constant promotion of honour ahead of love, prestige ahead of piety, because it can never be spoken aloud. And though I am frustrated and even enraged to learn of this priest and his connexion to the family, his absence when they needed him most, when they had spent weeks petitioning the Home Office to allow their son a military funeral, I swallow it like a bitter mouthful of laudanum and assume my most polite aspect. “Father, a word? If you have a moment?”

  “Of course, young man.”

  In his office, a small but luxurious space lined with books, I am invited to sit by the fire as he pours us a drop of brandy. “Father, I — “

  “I must say I am pleased to see a gentleman of your profession seeking spiritual guidance,” he says. “I have seen a war or two in my time, as you may guess from the nags that gallop in my beard, and what I have seen is increasing evidence of what would be called heathenish behaviour, except the young men now pride themselves in calling it ‘a-theism,’ as if it were itself a religion. Pah! Pride, mind you, Lt. Braddock. Pride.”

  “Yes, Father. I — “

  “Now, the Wickersley lad, thanks be, I never heard him say such a thing,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “But perhaps he held it in his heart…the great thing, they say in their terrible pamphlets — yes! I have read them, the better to know the enemy — is that a man’s life belongs to himself, rather than to God. And a man who thinks such a thing would think nothing of throwing away God’s precious lives to…”

  “No, Father,” I say flatly. “I must stop you there. Major-General Wickersley made a mistake. He was a God-fearing gentleman.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  “Indeed I do.”

  Father Hambleton meets my gaze for a long moment, then drops it. “Well, I am only speculating, of course,” he mumbles. “Now tell me, what matter did you wish to discuss?”

  “I just had a question…” And now it is my turn to drop my gaze, filled with an obscure embarrassment that I do not already know the answer to this. “A clarification about… nomenclature.”

  “Ah?”

  “When a man dies,” I begin slowly, “he will go to Heaven or to Hell — his soul, I mean.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Or…Purgatory?”

  “That is the Catholics, Mr. Braddock.”

  I nod, racking my brain for anything else I can remember from school, or the army chaplain. Clark, as it turned out in the battlefield, is an unbeliever, the very type that one expected to not exist out there; and amongst Wickersley’s Irregulars, we had the usual gamut — Cohen and Ramsaroop, in particular, used to tease him about it, arguing their various faiths as options to the God that Father Hambleton believes in — the one in whom I, until just this moment, had quite perfect if faded, childish, unthinking faith. “And there is…nowhere else a soul can go.”

  “No, none.” He chuckles, apparently relieved at the frivolity of my question. “Oh, you’ll run across the occasional old woman that in times past would have been called the village witch, who believes in such things…ghosts and ghouls and fetches and I don’t know what else. I knew a few as a child — Goody This, Biddy Such-and-such.”

  “Oh. Yes, I suppose it…does sound a bit…”

  “You are wondering about the soldiers you saw fall around you,” he intones gravely, pushing the brandy closer to me; I pick up the glass, but cannot drink. My throat has clinched shut. “I do not wonder at it. Such a slaughter. And no way of knowing that the war was nearly over, nor that you had prevented what could have been…the unthinkable.”

  “A world-war, they were calling it. Because Eleutherios had planned to expand south, and east, after the west was conquered.”

  “Yes. And then, Lord preserve us. Such an atrocity cannot be imagined. Even in ancient times, the killing would not have spread to cover all nations.” He shudders, and does not appear to be play-acting. “But I assure you, young man — and O, they are younger with every war! — the souls of your fellow-fighters are safely reposed.”

  “In Heaven or Hell?”

  “That is not for me to say,” he says briskly. “Such decisions are made at a higher rank, so to speak.”

  “Oh. Of course.” And I think of an ancient massacre I read about in an old book— Breziers, had it been? Yes, Abbot Amalric. Of both innocent and foe he had said Kill them all, for the Lord will know His own.

  Has the Lord then abandoned Theo Wickersley? No bliss in Heaven, no punishment in Hell, but an eternity of greyness and despair. The ghost waits to be called into a room, but no one will call him, and he will wait forever.

  I drain the brandy in one, and nod at the priest. “Thank you, Father,” I tell him. “You have set my mind very much at ease.”

  “Why, I am glad to be of service.
”

  It is probably a grave sin to lie to a man of God, but he is already preoccupied with other matters, and turns away from me. In the moment his attention is broken I silently pocket the brandy-glass and mumble my courteous farewells.

  There are still hangers-on in the church, gossiping amongst one another and a few clergy; I insisted the Wickersleys go ahead, as we are close to the Green Line and I can transfer at Old Church Street to get back to The Heights. No one is looking my way. I dip the glass quickly into the font, half-filling it with holy water, and leave the church without looking back.

  ***

  I try to sleep during the day, and fail, and try to read, and fail. The pilfered glass of water, covered with a saucer to prevent transvaporation, sits on my vanity, hidden behind two books. Will it still work if it has a few drops of brandy in it? And what would be best to do — hurl it at the ghost? He moves slowly, like a sheet rippling in a breeze — but if he avoids it, then I have wasted it all. I must think rationally about this. If I fail, where else can I turn? Perhaps Mrs. Boyle knows a witch or two. Or can give me the address of a local sorceror…

  At last I dress for dinner, and take the tram to McIntyre Park, and sit under a tree with a novel I do not intend to read. The sun is long and golden in a dark blue sky, and the trees still hold their heavy load of leaves, only a few of the reddest and brownest toppling into my lap. Children dart and shout around the fountain, their governesses racing to keep up; balls scamper across the thick grass like mice.

  Once more I try to picture my future children with Miss Meyers, and all that comes to mind is her, repeated again and again in miniature, as if I did not exist at all. A beautiful thought — she deserves to be seen again in the world, whereas I, dishonourable usurper, do not. I did not deserve to survive Burantai Pass, and did so only by sheer luck and the caprice of a dictatorial madman. After he killed Wickersley, it would have been the work of a moment to allow his men to kill the rest of us. But he had declared himself well-satisfied with the death of our leader. The smallest mistake, punished with the greatest severity: that was war. No one ever said Why have we been asked to die? because the answer was never for peace, or justice, or GRoB. The answer was We do not know.