The Brigandshaw Chronicles Box Set

by Peter Rimmer

  “Stop moaning, Robert. Nothing can ever be the same twice, or it wouldn’t be the same now would it?… You did phone Father? Well, we walk. And fast. Marching pace of light infantry. We’ll be home in less than two hours. Come on. No one will steal our luggage from the waiting room. They’ve all gone.”

  “What happens if someone takes the high road and we’re walking along by the river?”

  “We leave them a note, stupid.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Why they made you a captain, I have no idea.”

  “Neither have I… By the bye, thanks for supper last night. Not sure when we’ll get a slap-up meal like that again.”

  “Don’t be morbid. You can always rely on Mother and Granny Forrester… Best foot forward. March.”

  “And the note!”

  “Of course.”

  “Now how they made you a captain is an even bigger point of contention.”

  “Do you have a pen?”

  “Of course I have a pen. I’m a schoolmaster.”

  They had not gone fifty yards when they heard the horse and trap. Lord St Clair, their father, was holding the reins. They were all very cold when they reached the manor house.

  Lucinda’s fiancé, they found out, was John Heynes, a lieutenant in the Irish Guards. He had died on the third day after reaching the Western Front, blown apart by a German whizz-bang. There had been nothing to bury. They hugged their youngest sister but everyone was restrained. The brothers were due back in Flanders in four days’ time. Robert wondered if the fear was not greater for their mother. No one mentioned Frederick on his way to France. His ship was to dock at Calais, so there was no home leave. Too many men needed to be replaced quickly. No one mentioned the family doctor was now Doctor Smithers for fear of bringing up the deaths of his two sons, with a third still alive and fighting. If the family had not emigrated from Germany as Reichwalds, the three sons would have been fighting on the other side.

  Annabel was at home with nowhere else to go. Her impressionist painter, Geoffrey Winckle, had swapped his paintbrush for a rifle. He was a corporal in an infantry regiment. Merlin was now sure he would never see the ten pounds he had loaned his brother-in-law. They had not had any children. They had been happy for the short while. Merlin rather envied them in a way. The day after Robert and Merlin arrived back at Purbeck Manor, a letter arrived from Geoffrey Winckle saying he was now a sergeant. Someone, he said, for a reason he did not understand, had put him in for a medal. With the letter were four canvases he had done in charcoal. Robert and Merlin shuddered at the reality. Their brother-in-law was very good. All four canvases depicted the hell in the trenches. Robert even smelled the dead bodies by looking at the pictures. It seemed a pity to use good canvas for charcoal but what else could he use in the trenches?

  Genevieve was away in Norfolk living with her mother-in-law. Her father-in-law, who had once been a professional soldier, was back in France commanding a battalion. Her husband was in the same battalion. Robert and Merlin read one of their sister’s letters. It was as bleak as the Norfolk winter. The two women were trying to farm the family estate. They had recruited four young women to help them. All the young men from the village were away or dead. It was the same at Purbeck Manor. Two land girls from Corfe Castle and Lord St Clair looked after the pigs. The cows had been sold, as no one knew how to milk them except Lord St Clair and his fingers were bent with arthritis.

  Merlin gave his mother fifty pounds without telling his father or anyone else. When the war was over he would buy some more cows. Two of the family portraits in the hall gave him a smile. He was sure of it. Their eyes followed him. Twice he smiled back at them. One of the portraits was over three hundred years old and dark with age. The eyes were alive. The eyes were smiling. Merlin stopped going into the hall, preferring to go outside through the French doors in the lounge. He knew more than anyone else the meaning of his name Merlin. He even knew he was going to survive the war. He never thought about his brothers for fear of finding the truth. Like Fay Wheels, he saw things others never saw.

  Granny Forrester was certain all the boys were going to die but never said a word. She blamed herself for loving one man and marrying another. She missed Cousin Potts more than she could ever have imagined. They were companions, comfortable in silence, feeling safe and whole together. If his first posting to an obscure colony in the South Seas had not been so sudden it might have been different. Cousins they might have been but they only found out about each other for a week. Potts had proposed. Gave her hours to make up her mind. Her father had put his foot down firmly. No first cousins were ever again going to marry in the family. The bloodline was too intermarried as it was. And much later had come Richard, her eldest grandson, and the flaw in the family genes again came to the surface. In their old age, they had been together under the same roof. Maybe it was not living in sin. They were too old for physical comfort. The Reverend Reichwald, the family doctor’s brother, now Smithers, frowned at them in church sitting next to each other in the St Clairs’ family pew. It was their silly gesture. If they could not have it when they wanted it, they would not marry at all. Granny Forrester was certain that all sins were punished. She would be punished. God would kill her male grandchildren.

  Her daughter, Lady St Clair, was permanently tired from worry. The moment she stopped worrying about one of the children she began to worry about another. It was all so silly as there was nothing she could do. Once they went away from home they were outside her protection. She prayed a lot but then she had prayed a lot for Richard and he had died from a fit.

  And the food was running low. No milk or butter without the cows. They would buy some more cows if they had the money. Then she would learn to milk. Robert and Merlin were going to shoot as many hares and rabbits as possible. The weather was cold enough to let them hang for weeks without going too rotten. Somehow it would all be better after the war but she could not see how. The St Clairs were out of money before the war. Only Sir Willoughby Potts gave them an income. When he died his pension died with him. Not having money was the second worst thing in her life, after the war. She had no idea what she would have done without Merlin’s fifty pounds. Maybe he would save their bacon if he wasn’t killed in the war.

  The idea of saving bacon made her smile for the first time in weeks. The one thing they were not short of at Purbeck Manor was pigs… Her husband definitely had a way with pigs. She could not remember the last litter of fewer than fifteen piglets. She would have to ask Robert to visit Mrs Pringle at the railway cottage. Edward, the seaman in the Pringle family, had gone down with his ship bringing munitions from America, sunk by what she heard they were calling U-boats. They had a new word for everything that was nasty. And there she was worrying again. That was three out of Mrs Pringle’s children taken by this terrible war, she told herself. First, Walter who had come all the way from Australia to die. Now Edward. Worst of all, with her worrying, she could not for the life of her remember the name of the third boy who had died in France.

  She had told Mrs Pringle in no uncertain terms to tell Albert to stay in South Africa. They never talked of Tina for fear of talking about something both of them would rather leave alone. In her plea to keep Albert safely in South Africa was the unspoken hope that Tina would stay there too. There could never be a marriage. Both understood. As a regular soldier, if he survived, a wife from Tina’s class would have him thrown out of the regiment… And not a very good regiment either. To live in a top-class regiment, Barnaby would have needed money. A private income. No, Tina was out of the question. Barnaby had to stay in the army after the war to make his living… Why did it always come back to money? Then she began to worry about Barnaby in Palestine. The Turks killed Englishmen just as willingly as the Germans, even if they were not so efficient. For a moment, she thought of the Australians and New Zealanders that had died at Gallipoli.

  Lady St Clair knew she was cursed with too vivid an imagination. Her husband could thi
nk about his pigs for hours on end without any intrusion into his mind. She wished she could do the same. No, she decided thinking back. She would have to ask the old cook to learn how to milk a cow. Even in poverty, there had to be appearances. It would never do for the lady of the manor to become a milkmaid. The people in the village would think the whole country was going what they called broke. It had given them comfort for centuries to know the lord was in his manor. When the lord was strong, the people were safe. They might not like some of the rules but that was how it worked. In every society, someone had to give the people protection.

  Turning her mind from the past to the present, she hoped the boys would not mind eating pork for the next four days for supper. She doubted if Robert would notice. And Cook had made a plum pie for him, knowing it was his favourite. They had even added a little of the saved-up sugar to make it an occasion. The fruit had been bottled when the Victoria plum trees were heavy with plums at the end of the summer. Before her youngest son went away to war.

  And then she was worried all over again, going round in a circle, starting at the beginning.

  Merlin was woken that night in his room by the silence. Unbeknown to him, Robert was also awake in the next room, staring out of the open window into the winter night. They were both used to sleeping with horrendous noise. The wind shifted and Merlin listened more carefully. It was the guns. Someone was having a hate. Probably both sides. Merlin opened the window wide, making a noise.

  “Can’t sleep either,” said Robert from the dark. There was only one wall between them and with their windows open they were able to whisper and hear each other. Neither wanted to wake anyone else in the family.

  “Can you hear the guns?”

  They both listened for a while in silence. There was no sound from the nearer blanket of silence. The guns were an overtone. From hell. Even at home, the war was in their bedrooms.

  What sounded like a dog barking came from close to the hen run, followed by the squawking of the chickens. Used to putting boots on fast, they were out of the doors at the same moment, and running around the dark, familiar corridor, not caring if they woke the devil himself. Both had thrown overcoats over their pyjamas. Robert had his boyhood .410 shotgun in his hand, the nearest weapon he had found to snatch; Merlin was going to kick the fox to death if it did not run away. A box of cartridges banged in Robert’s greatcoat pocket. Down the main stairs more by falling, turning in the dark to the kitchen by instinct, and out the back door, racing across the hoar-frost grass, Robert put a cartridge into the single barrel of the gun, spurred on by the sound of mayhem coming from the hen run. There was something of a moon and the stars were bright, the hoar frost showing them a pale white layer on the ground. There were a fox and two vixens in the run. Dead chickens and feathers everywhere. Merlin got in one good blind kick and the predators were gone.

  “You wouldn’t have done that to a leopard,” said Robert.

  “We don’t have leopards in England… What’s the damage?”

  “Looks worse than it is. My word. Poor Mother would have had a heart attack if she had lost the chickens. That’s what happens when the hunt is cancelled. You and I will wait up tomorrow with torches and twelve-bores. I find sleeping for long impossible. We can make ourselves a thermos flask of coffee. If we don’t get that darn fox we’ll get ourselves a rabbit. We used to do this often as kids. You remember? It’s fun… Two of Mother’s chickens are dead. The rest have had their feathers ruffled… Now we really have woken up the family.”

  The electricity installed with old Potts’s money was springing up all through the house. Lord St Clair was leaning out of his window in his nightshirt.

  “What’s going on?” he called.

  “Foxes in the hen run,” called back Merlin.

  “Much damage?”

  “Chicken for dinner tomorrow.”

  “Make a change,” said Lord St Clair.

  “We’re going to wait up for them tomorrow.”

  “Good idea. Who’s with you, Merlin?”

  “Robert. We were at our bedroom windows listening to the guns.”

  “Just as well. I’m rather partial to an egg for my breakfast. Good night.”

  “Good night, Father,” they both called in unison.

  Back in the house, with the chickens flopped onto the kitchen table, Robert poked up the fire in the Dover stove and waited for the big copper kettle to boil. Neither of them would be able to sleep. The tension of being out of the front line not facing the inevitable was worse than being in the trenches under bombardment. It was their only world. The foxes and the chickens would be gone like a puff of wind, like the whole of their leave. There was something about the inevitable for both of them that made the rest of life unimportant. There wasn’t any point in anything when you were about to die. And there was nothing they could or wanted to do to stop it. Not to go back was unthinkable. The small portion of the rest of their lives was over there in the mud and cold, the noise and fear. They may be still alive but knew they had been sucked into eternity. The inevitability of their lives was right in front of them.

  The kettle boiled and Merlin poured in a little boiling water to warm the big brown family teapot before putting in two spoons of tea from the caddie. There was no milk or sugar. They would drink it black.

  They were more comfortable with each other than at any time in their lives. They sat with the fire door to the cooker open, with the chickens on the white-scrubbed table. Even inside with the door closed, they could hear the guns.

  “You imagine how many of our ancestors went to war for England from this house?” asked Robert.

  Merlin thought for a moment, sipping his hot tea. The fire was warm and he was enjoying his brother’s company.

  “And from the castle,” he replied at last. “So long as someone survives, it’s all right. The family goes on. England goes on… Jack Merryweather is lucky to have a daughter. Even if he dies, there’s some of him left behind.”

  “And Frederick has a daughter.”

  “That’s good but he must have a son. After so many centuries, for the main line to die out would be terrible. Father to son. Father to son. Been like that since the first baron.”

  “Maybe she’s pregnant.”

  “Who?”

  “Penelope.”

  Merlin suddenly got up and opened the back door of the kitchen and looked out at the night. He listened for some time.

  “You’re causing a draught,” said Robert.

  “Thought I heard that damn fox again.”

  “What was the real matter? You bolted for the door.”

  “Fred… I had a premonition. The men think I have the sight. It’s not Captain St Clair. It’s Merlin the Magician. Maybe Mother and Father knew something about me. When I was born. It’s a curse. Father’s a romantic. Never got past the legends and his reading. Why Richard was Richard. Richard the Lionheart.”

  “Mother preferred Arthur for you. Father won. I like Merlin. It makes you different. There’s nothing different about good old Robert. Or good old Bob. Plain and simple. Don’t read too much in a name and please close the door properly… I can just hear Cook tomorrow when she finds wet tea leaves in the pot. ‘One of life’s little mysteries,’ she’ll say.”

  “You ever feel the presence of our ancestors?” asked Merlin, not wishing to be side-tracked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, I do. And those portraits in the hall are alive. The eyes follow me. Especially one old fellow. And the look changes. Today his eyes were smiling.”

  “Good portrait painters have that ability to make the eyes follow you. And I don’t want to hear any weird stuff about Fred. He is going to be quite all right. We are all going to be quite all right.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “Am I going to die?” asked Robert after a long time.

  “How the hell do I know?”

  “Merlin, sometimes you contradict yourself… I wish I had stayed i
n Africa. She married Barend but that does not matter. You would have liked Madge. There was so much peace in Africa. In the bush. Wild but peaceful. Empty, I suppose. Empty of people. Animals just kill to feed themselves. They don’t blow millions of people to pieces.”

  “What about that fox? He’d have killed every chicken in the coop and taken just one home for supper.”

  “The genet does that in Africa,” said Robert sadly. “Kills for the fun of it too.”

  “No. Man is territorial. The Germans want to expand. We want to stop them. They envy the empire. Man defends his hearth and home.”

  “Or rapes and pillages. We are the survivors, according to Darwin. The part of rape and pillage that evolved.”

  “Amazing how much nonsense we talk in the middle of the night,” said Merlin.

  “It’s true. How do you think our ancestors got their hands on this place without a bit of rape and pillage? And if we don’t stop Fritz, he’ll do to us what he did to the Saxons. And the Saxons were from the Germanic tribes. History going round in a circle. No, we’ll have to stop Fritz.”

  “There isn’t much here to rape and pillage,” said Merlin.

  “What about the girls? The villagers? It’s not only us they’re after. We poor fools in the aristocracy are meant to keep the place safe. And we will. Even if it kills us. For now and forever. We owe them that for our years of privilege. This is payday for the St Clairs. Every time we fight a war it’s payday.”

  “No. This time we’re just machine gun fodder like the rest of them,” said Merlin.

  “They look up to us.”

  “In a funk everyone looks for a leader. If you go out to Africa and take up some barren land, if you don’t kill off the locals like the Americans, they’ll breed under British law and modern medicine, and want the land back again. Stay in England. There are too few of us English to control the world much longer. The Romans found out the same. Even if you run the place far better than they can run it themselves, they want it back again. Some orator promises them the earth, kicks you out and treats his own people worse than you did. But everyone will pretend to be happy as they are being starved and murdered by their own people. Once the orator gets power, he won’t give it up unless you kill him. So they will kill him. We haven’t had a civil war in England since Oliver Cromwell. And you only have to go up the valley to look at the ruins of Corfe Castle to see what Cromwell thought of the St Clairs. No, Robert, stay in England. Teach history. Find a wife. Stop dreaming.”