Andrew Wareham

by When Empires Collide (Innocents At War Series 1)

  Rigid courtesy and good manners – emotion forced to a distance.

  The phone calls were made and three policemen arrived barely an hour later, one, the nearest village constable on his bicycle and two by pony and trap from Weybridge. The doctor drove up at much the same time and they went together to inspect the burned-out heap of ashes in the field. Tommy had to accompany them, to testify to the identity of the victim as the law demanded.

  The body was wholly unrecognisable, little more than blackened bones remaining.

  “The petrol tank was suspended under the wing, immediately behind the front cockpit, Inspector. Gravity feed to the engine – weight saving, more efficient than having to install a pump. But the petrol would have pooled around my father in the rear cockpit as a result. The plane crashed vertically from at least three hundred feet, sir, so I much doubt that he burned to death.”

  The doctor spoke to confirm that many of the bones he could see, including in the neck, had been broken, presumably by the impact, and that the aviator had been dead before he had burned.

  “Multiple injuries consequent upon a fall from height, Mr Stark, so my certificate will say.”

  The Inspector of Police agreed that seemed a reasonable conclusion; there was no reason to suspect anything other than accident.

  “Can you formally confirm the identity of the body, Mr Stark?”

  “I saw my father sit in the cockpit and watched him take off in this machine, sir. This body can only be his. Mr Sopwith and perhaps three score of others were present at the take off and saw the crash, sir.”

  “Thank you, Mr Stark. I am sorry to have to ask that question, but the law has its demands.”

  “You must perform your duty, sir. I believe that to be the undertaker just drawing up in his van, sir. May I instruct him to recover the body?”

  The Inspector looked at the wreckage and shuddered.

  “You may indeed, Mr Stark. I am glad that his trade is not mine, sir!”

  Another hour and Tommy found himself at a loss for anything to do. The small community of aviators had taken over everything possible, had organised all that they could and had placated with promises of gold coin to the farmer whose field had been wantonly crashed into and who required compensation.

  “I have sent a message into Farnborough, Tommy, to your lawyers, telling them of the accident and informing them that you will wish to attend their office at ten o’clock in the morning. While you are there, you should discover who inherits your father’s workshop and hangar here. If it is you, then be sure that there will be a purchaser among us, and we shall try to keep your mechanics in their jobs. If it is your unknown brother, then things may be different – he will have his own wishes.”

  “Thank you again, Mr Sopwith. I must speak to the men myself before I leave.”

  The mechanics had been his father’s employees, but they were older than Tommy and skilled tradesmen entitled to respect. They wore bowler hats rather than the flat cap of the common working man.

  “Mr Bolton, Mr Edwards – I am sure you share my grief on this day, gentlemen.”

  They took their hats off and expressed their condolences.

  “You know that I am no engineer, gentlemen. I cannot continue with my father’s work.”

  Both had been aware of that fact and had been discussing it all afternoon, wondering what would happen next, and just how soon they would be out of a job.

  “I do not know the exact nature of my inheritance yet, gentlemen. I shall speak with the lawyer tomorrow. The best thing will be for you to go home now and come back in the morning to make all right and tidy. I will pay your wages until the end of next week for a certainty. There is a chance that I will be able to sell the workshop as a going concern, with you in your jobs.”

  It was better than they had feared; they had thought it most likely that they would have been turned out on the spot.

  “Beg pardon, Master Thomas – sorry, sir, that should be Mr Stark, now – but if people ask to use the machinery, or want us to do a job for them, what should we say?”

  “Do all that you can, if you please, Mr Bolton. Keep the place busy if you can.”

  Tommy drove back to the Lodge; he took care not to think of it as ‘home’, for he much suspected that he would be unwelcome there within a very few days. His brother had made no attempt to make contact in the years since he and his father had come back from America, and that strongly suggested a degree of bitterness; thinking on the matter, he did not know that his father had initiated any contact either. At best - a poor best - his brother had no feelings at all towards him, Tommy thought, but he doubted that to be the case.

  The trouble was, he thought, that he knew nothing at all of his father’s first wife, or of what had happened to her; he presumed death, solely because divorce was incredibly uncommon, but he had no certainty. He had no idea where his brother had lived, had been brought up; with grandparents, he hoped; not, as a possibility, dumped into some boarding school.

  He reached the house, discovered they knew nothing of the day’s events. He broke the news to the housekeeper and let her inform the staff.

  “I shall eat late tonight, Mrs Rudge – just something cold, if you would put up a plate. I must go across to the Big House and tell them.”

  Mrs Rudge wondered what was to happen next; whether Tommy would wish to keep up a large house as a single young man. She knew about the existence of his brother, but not that he was heir to the lands.

  He changed into formal clothing, austere blacks which every gentleman must always have by him, for having to attend funerals within the respectable families of the County on a regular basis and on very little warning; he decided against the old-fashioned cravat, far less common now, and equipped himself with a wing collar and black silk tie. He let himself out and walked the lane up to the front of the Big House. Normally he wandered across the footpath through the field and into the side door, but this had to be a formal occasion. He knocked and waited for the butler to open the main door.

  There was a blink at his clothing, then a cautious query.

  “Master Thomas?”

  “No, Abbot. No longer.”

  “Oh… I am sorry, Mr Stark. The master is in the front drawing room, sir; I shall take you in.”

  Abbot held the door for Tommy and formally introduced him as Mr Stark. The family – squire and his lady, son and two daughters – were waiting for the call to dinner, had heard his voice in the hall and assumed at first that Tommy was taking avail of his standing invitation to join them whenever his father was absent from home. The man of the house spoke first, as was his duty.

  “Your father, Tommy?”

  “Yes, sir. The new machine crashed on its first flight. He had insisted on taking it up himself.”

  “Perhaps that is as well, in the circumstances.”

  “I am the better pilot, sir. I might have been able to bring it down. That, however, is not a point that can ever be decided. Suffice it to say, sir, that he did not survive the accident. I am to speak to the lawyers tomorrow, sir; I had wondered if you might have any knowledge of my father’s affairs, particularly of the elder brother I was recently made aware of and who must be the heir to the entail.”

  The Squire had lived at the Big House all of his life, forefathers before him; he must know all of the business of the parish, particularly of that of a possibly scandalous nature.

  “Have you eaten today, Thomas?”

  Monkey’s mother intervened, far more of a practical nature than her husband.

  “No, ma’am. Not yet.”

  “Then you will join us for dinner, you must not make yourself ill by neglect! Business afterwards. Grace, be so good as to tell Abbot to lay the extra place.”

  Monkey ran to do as she was bid, vaguely aware that her mother was giving her something to do so that she should not burst into tears.

  “Have you spoken to the vicar, Thomas?”

  “Not yet, ma’am.”

  �
��Do not. We can arrange that sort of thing for you. You can have no great experience of organising your own affairs yet, and this is not the place to begin. Have you given any thought to your future yet, Thomas?”

  “Father had wanted me to leave home for a year or two, ma’am, to learn self-reliance. He had thought I might like to go back to America, to the West where, apparently, he met my mother. There are relatives there who he kept in contact with, or so I believe. I do not think I shall do that, though. I think I wish to fly still. I know I do, in fact. The Royal Flying Corps, if they will take me. Five years as an officer might do me good, ma’am. After that, there may well be something in the world of flying for a good pilot. I am not sure exactly how one must go about seeking a commission in the RFC, however.”

  The Squire intervened to say that his young brother, James, was a colonel, on the Staff, at the War Office, as he expected Tommy knew.

  “He will know who to speak to, the right strings to pull. Have no worry about acceptance, Tommy!”

  That was the way things were done, Tommy knew; he had in fact hoped that the Squire would be able to speak to the right person.

  Dinner was an almost silent meal – for lack of a topic of conversation other than the obvious. They did not feel that the soup course should be enlivened by a detailed description of the disaster. Tommy was, as always, sat next to Monkey, the Squire pleased that the two should be such firm friends. His wife was more than content that her second daughter should be close to a young man of breeding and possessed of a substantial private income. It was far easier if a girl grew up knowing who she intended to marry – it saved all of that adolescent havering and wavering from man to man. She had long known that Tommy was not to inherit the land, and cared little for that fact; he would always, she was sure, be comfortably circumstanced and was, besides that, growing up to be a reliable young man. It was a pity that he wished to fly, perhaps; she had rather he lived to a ripe old age, but, provided he left any children well looked-after, it was not too important an issue.

  Tommy was led into his host’s library after a single, mandatory glass of port.

  “Your father was always a friend of mine, Tommy; we grew up together. We had talked of the possibility that he might die before you were of age; he intended to tell you all, but not until you knew a little more of the world and might not be too shocked. As it is, he knew he could always pop off before then and expected me to give you a sufficiency of detail to make you ready to face the lawyers. As you know, there is an entail and the land is not his to dispose of by Will; it must go the young man who is known as your brother.”

  Tommy noticed the wording ‘known as’.

  “Do you mean, sir, that there is some doubt about him?”

  “Joseph’s first wife was a society miss, High Society of the late Victorian times. They had been wed three years when your brother came along, and just who his father was is impossible of certainty. It might have been your father; it could have been any of half a dozen others! Your father accepted the boy as his own – as was normal practice – and then walked out on her. He was in America when she died two years afterwards. Why she died is not known, but rumour insisted that she had had an abortion that went wrong; with your father three thousand miles distant there must have been scandal had she given birth to a second child.”

  “Good God, sir! What was done with the firstborn?”

  “He was brought up by her parents, in a manor in the North of England, somewhere – in Westmoreland, it may be.”

  “And he must know that my father left his mother and that she died relatively soon thereafter. That, sir, must surely have embittered him. What of the grandparents, sir? Do you know what they might have told him?”

  “Nothing, in person, because I very much doubt they ever met him. I believe, though again I rely more on rumour and gossip than fact, that the Duke was much put out with his daughter and refused to lend her his countenance, and consequently accepted the care and possibly the cost of the boy and saw to his upbringing, but all at a distance. I know for a fact that His Grace of Darlington was not present at her funeral. I am told that the boy was educated by tutors, for fear that his existence at school would have been blighted by mockery and abuse. So he has grown up alone, I suspect. I know that he has not lived in London; I have never met or seen him there and my brother is an habitué of Town Society. He has remained in the country all year round, so I suspect that he has never entered Society at all, probably for lack of an income as an adult.”

  This was worse even than Tommy had feared.

  “I had not expected to remain long at the Lodge, sir. From what you say I must be well-advised to pack my bags immediately and be gone before he arrives.”

  “I wish you would not, Tommy! If you do so, then you appear to offer him yet another cold-shoulder – you deny him the opportunity to seek reconciliation, in the unlikely event that that may be his intention. From your point of view, it is to cut yourself off from a man who may be your closest relative. You could also give some thought to the larger issues – I am leader of Society in our little world, and be very sure that you will always be welcome in my house, Tommy! If you have left without meeting your brother, then I am forced to take your side against him, to create a division locally. I will do so if need arises, do not doubt that – if for no other reason than that Grace would be outraged by my failure to support you! But, if at all possible, I would like to keep the peace locally.”

  Tommy had not considered the wider ramifications of the affair. The parish was effectively governed by the two families; they provided the magistrates and appointed the workhouse overseers and approved the new County Councillors – even if they were then to go through the formality of election. The local Member of Parliament dined with them frequently, and listened to their words. Conflict between them could cause considerable local distress.

  “I shall do all I can to keep the peace, sir. I had not thought further than my own comfort, but you are quite right to point me in the proper direction.”

  “Good lad! Where will you go if you must leave the Lodge?”

  “Mr Sopwith has offered me a room for a few days, sir. Better I should not come here, within whistling distance of my old house – from what you say that must lead to ill-feeling. I will probably then set up a small place of my own – if money allows, of course – a house that can be a base, if I am to be a soldier and likely to be posted to any airfield in the Empire.”

  “Quite right! But you must visit very frequently, you know – not merely once a week formally, or I shall have my ear very thoroughly bent by the womenfolk, just in case it might be my fault!”

  “The advantage of a motor-car, sir. It is very easy to travel ten or twenty miles now.”

  The Squire possessed no such devilish contraption and had no present intention of purchasing one, but he was forced to admit that the nasty, smelly things were of use – in certain circumstances. They would never replace the horse, of course, and he much suspected they might be no more than a passing fad, like flying.

  Monkey managed to slip out of the drawing room after evening tea and to intercept Tommy on his way home; she was quite convinced that her mother had not the least idea of her whereabouts. That lady glanced out of the window and smiled, quite unconcerned; her daughter was still ignorant of grown-up matters and Tommy was a responsible young man; she would trust both out of her sight.

  “Tommy!”

  “Oh! Should you be out here? It’s quite dark, you know!”

  “Bother that! Will you have to go away, Tommy?”

  “Yes. I must, sooner or later. But not far and not for long, Monkey. If I join the RFC – and I expect I shall – then I must go to the Central Flying School at Upavon over on Salisbury Plain, and then I would be posted to one of the aerodromes – and they are still being located to a great extent, but are mostly in the South here.”

  “But, you can fly already.”

  “Yes, but I know very little about the mili
tary.”

  “Will you visit us here?”

  “Often.”

  “Promise? You won’t forget about us in the excitement of your new life?”

  “Promise! Don’t you forget me, either.”

  “I shall never, ever do that, Tommy.”

  He heard the intensity in her voice, realised that she was making a commitment. She was only young, he thought, a little girl who should not be making any pledge of any sort… She was Monkey, as well, and he could not cause her pain by setting himself at a distance.

  “Nor me! You are too young yet, Monkey. In a year or two, when you are grown up, then we can talk about promises again.”

  “I have made my promises, Tommy! Goodbye, for now.”

  She suddenly grabbed at his head, pulled it down to her and clumsily kissed him before running into the darkness and finding the side door.

  Tommy walked down the road to the Lodge where he let himself into his father’s study. The room had never been closed to him, but he had entered it infrequently in the nature of things; now he sat down in the swivel chair at the desk, the man of the house. He wondered just what he would discover next day, how he would be situated financially. He hoped he would be comfortably off, but knew now that he would find his own way even if he was left wholly destitute. He was a man now, he had to be if he was to support a wife before too many years were gone by…

  Tommy had never dealt with lawyers before – he had never needed to; his father had been there to handle that sort of thing. He stood in the main street and glanced at the brass plate in front of the red brick, respectable old house, converted into offices as the residents had moved to the outskirts of the town and commercial premises had taken over to create a modern High Street.

  ‘Morton, Dingley, Padgett and Crumb, Attorneys at Law’ – that was correct; he was to see a Mr Knatchbull, a grandson of one of the original partners and now a partner in the old firm.