Past Imperative

by Dave Duncan

  What did it all mean? Who was Jumbo? What was the Valley of the Kings? Mr. Oldcastle of the Colonial Office lived in Kent—was he somehow related to the Kent group mentioned? The only person who might be able to answer any of those questions was Mr. Oldcastle himself. Now he had time on his hands, Edward was going to send him a copy of the letter. The original he would keep forever, his father’s last words.

  A patter of feet and rush of voices in the corridor announced the start of visiting hours. Alice would be prompt, she always was. Edward put away his writing and crossed his fingers. How exactly did one bait breath?…

  Alice had been the first good thing he had seen in England, come to Southampton to meet him, a poised young lady of fifteen standing on the docks with her aunt Griselda—Roland had been too busy to leave town. Edward had met him that evening and they had disliked each other on sight. Dislike had flowered rapidly to mutual contempt. Alice and Griselda had probably kept the frightened twelve-year-old from madness or suicide in his first few weeks of that strangely green, soggy, solid England, full of mists and pale faces.

  He had gone up to Fallow in the autumn, and what had been a nightmare of alienation and homesickness for all the other new boys had been a blessed release for him. That winter Griselda had faded away altogether, a mousy, kindly woman unable to withstand her famous, fanatical, power-crazy husband. Roland had grown steadily worse ever since, shriller, more eccentric, more bigoted.

  Alice had been an absent relation, rarely seen, but her letters and Edward’s had flashed across England in a single day, not to be compared to the twelve-week round trip to Kenya, and he had been grateful for her and to her. Whenever the loneliness had overflowed, he had written to Alice, and two days later her replies had arrived, full of stern comfort and practical advice.

  The years had crept by. In retrospect, he should have informed his parents how things stood between him and the Reverend Roland, but it would have seemed like tattling, so he never had. He had given no thought to words like tragedy, probate, executor…. Plans for the family reunion had been seeded, nourished, cultivated—and ultimately blasted by that inexplicable massacre just days before the Exeters were due to leave Nyagatha. The ship that should have brought them Home had brought details of their deaths.

  Even before the disaster, Roland Exeter had displayed a driving ambition to convert his niece and nephew to his own brand of religious fervor. His brother’s will had named him guardian of the orphaned boy and the twice-orphaned girl, and he had reacted like a missionary given a personal gift of two cannibals to win from the darkness.

  Alice had left school by then. Her uncle had expected her to remain and keep house in the dread Kensington mausoleum which was home to both him and his Lighthouse Missionary Society. When she had moved out and set up her own establishment, he had denounced her as a scarlet woman, damned to hellfire for eternity. That was Roly’s standard way of expressing disapproval.

  Edward had remained at Fallow, but there he had raised the banner of liberty and manned the barricades, a staunch upholder of his father’s skepticism, fighting his guerrilla war at long distance. He had not set foot in a church since the Nyagatha memorial service.

  The corridors had gone quiet again. Was she not coming? Had she been forced to return to London, or had he merely dreamed her presence yesterday?

  Were I a praying man, I should pray now.

  Most girls made him squirm and shuffle and stutter. With Alice he could just stand and smile for hours. His face ached after being with her, just from smiling.

  He had not seen her since her birthday. He had obtained a somewhat irregular exeat to attend the celebration—irregular in that his guardian had neither requested it nor known of it. Ginger Jones had stuck his neck out there, but the shrewd old housemaster had known for years how the wind blew.

  The three years’ age difference had dwindled now. In Africa it had represented the gulf between big child and small child. In England between boy and young woman. Now she was twenty-one, but he was a man in all but legal status. He was five feet, eleven and three-quarters inches tall.

  In the spring he had even grown a mustache. It had not been wholly satisfactory, and Alice had obviously not thought much of it, so he had shaved it off when he got back to Fallow. The principle was what mattered.

  Feminine heels clicked in the now-silent corridor. He held his breath.

  Alice walked in. The sun came out and birds sang. She could always do that to rooms now, even drab brown hospital rooms.

  She walked straight to the bed and for an intoxicating moment he wondered if she would kiss him, but she raised her eyebrows archly and handed him a string shopping bag full of books. He laid them on the bed.

  She dressed very well, considering her limited means. She was wearing dove gray, to match her eyes—masses of striped cotton, from wrists to ankles, with a broad sash around her waist. Heaven knew what else ladies wore underneath. She must be cooked on a day like this, and yet she did not seem so. She removed her rose-bedecked hat, laying it and her parasol on the foot of the bed. Then she pulled up the chair. Her eyes were assessing him.

  He realized that he had been staring at her like a stuffed stag. “Thank you for coming.”

  “I had to promise we will not discuss the case.” She flicked a thumb at the open door and mimed someone writing. “You are much better!” She smiled. “I’m glad.”

  “Actually the treatment of choice in such cases is a kiss.”

  “No, that’s a discredited superstition. Kisses overexcite the patient.”

  “They are good for the heart and stimulate the circulation.”

  “I’m sure they do. Seriously, how are you feeling?”

  “Bored.”

  “Doesn’t your leg hurt?”

  “Throbs a bit once in a while. No, I’m in tip-top shape.”

  “You shaved off your mustache!”

  “Actually that gale in early June did for it.”

  Alice glanced over the floral display with appreciation. “Impressive! Are all of them from barristers and solicitors or are some of them personal?”

  She was not conventionally beautiful. Her hair was a nondescript brown, although bright and shiny. Her teeth were possibly on the large side, her nose might have been better had it been a thirty-second of an inch shorter. Overall, her face could almost be described as horsey—although not safely in Edward’s hearing—but she had poise and humor and he would rather gaze at her than any woman in the world.

  “Has Uncle been to see you?”

  “He has. Have you got your money out of him yet?”

  “These things take time,” she said confidently.

  “Till the Nile freezes? He’s spent it all on his lousy cannibals! He’s brought light to the heathen by burning your five-pound notes!”

  “I think it’s just his very muddled accounting.”

  She shrugged and glanced at the watch on her slim wrist—his present for her twenty-first, bought with money saved out of Mr. Oldcastle’s regular donations. “We’ll see. Let’s not waste time talking about the Black Death. Mrs. Peters has been a love, but I absolutely must catch the 3.40. Tell me what happened the weekend before Whitsun.”

  “Before Whitsun? By Jove, that was when I took the most gorgeous girl in the world out to the park and explained—”

  “Not in London. At Fallow.” Again she glanced warningly at the door, where the copper must be writing all this down. “I was tracked down at the hotel by your Ginger Jones. He gave me those books for you. He wants them back. I gather they’re all racy French novels he didn’t dare let you read when you were a pupil.”

  “They don’t sound like my cup of tea.”

  She grinned momentarily—that intimate, secretive grin that had meant mischief in their childhood and now hinted at vastly more magnificent possibilities. Or at least he hoped it would, one day soo
n.

  “You’re a big boy now. You’re going to be even taller if that leg stretches much, you know. Do you suppose the other one will reach the ground? The weekend before Whitsun you got an exeat and while you were gone there was a burglary at Tudor.”

  Why was this important, when they had only an hour to be together and the entire future threatened to crumble in ruins?—his personal future, the Empire, Europe…. Why talk about a nonsensical schoolboy prank? But her expression said it was important, and he would not argue with her.

  “Ginger knows more about it than I do. He never really convinced anyone else that it was a burglary. The bobbies listened politely and yawned. The front door was still bolted on the inside. Some chaps in Big School were in on the wheeze, whatever it was, but their door was bolted, too. A couple of juniors claimed they saw a woman wandering through the dorms, but they couldn’t have been very convinced at the time, because they just went back to sleep. It was dodgy, all right, but no one ever did work it out.” He stared at her doubt and then said, “We are discussing a community of three hundred juvenile males. Do you expect sanity?”

  Alice reached for the Times on the bed and began using it as a fan. “He said something about a spear.”

  “Oh?” Ginger had mentioned that, had he? “A Zulu assegai from the Matabele display in Big School was left in my room in Tudor. That seems to have been the whole point, if you’ll pardon an obscure pun. Possibly there had been scandalous rumors about what I was doing in town that night. Prefects sometimes make enemies, if they wallop a little too hard or too often, although I had been remarkably self-controlled for weeks before that, in anticipation of seeing you. Apart from that, nothing was missing or…What’s wrong?”

  “Where exactly was this spear when you found it?”

  “Ginger found it. He made a complete search. He has keys to all the rooms, of course.”

  “Thrust right through your mattress?”

  “So he said. Why is he riding this hobbyhorse again?”

  Alice glanced at the door, giving him a view of her profile. She looked best in profile, rather like Good Queen Bess in her prime.

  “Mr. Jones is wondering now if you were supposed to be present when the spear was rammed through your bed. Your name was on your door, right? Whoever it was broke into Big School and located your house in the files—someone had been rummaging there, too, he said. Then the intruder pulled two steel brackets off the wall to get the assegai, went across to Tudor and found your room. You were missing, and in a fit of frust—”

  Edward started to laugh and jarred his leg. “Bolting and unbolting doors from the wrong side? A lock is one thing, but a bolt is another! The old coot’s off his rocker!”

  Alice did not seem to have noticed his wince. She smiled. “He did admit he reads the penny dreadfuls he confiscates.” Then she sobered. “He now assumes that there has been a second attempt, and this time the wrong man…” She raised an eyebrow archly, waiting for Edward to complete the thought.

  “Strewth! I always thought the old leek was one of the sanest men there. Why should anyone try to kill me, of all people? I have no money. Even if Holy Roly’s left anything of the family fortune for me to inherit, it will be only a few hundred quid. I have no enemies that I can think of.”

  Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead…. Why had he thought of those lines? Oh yes, that weird dream of a Dickensian apparition claiming to be Mr. Oldcastle. Two nights ago, and yet it still stuck in his memory. Dear friends?

  “Anyone can have enemies,” Alice said emphatically.

  He thought of the letter, but he would not worry her with that until Mr. Oldcastle had commented on it.

  “You refer to my brains, good looks, and personal magnetism, of course. Admittedly they arouse enormous envy wherever I go, but that’s only to be expected. Rival suitors are the real threat. Seeing the burning love you bear me in every bashful glance, consumed with jealousy, some dastard seeks to clear me from the field. Who can it be, this wielder of spears who opens bolts from the wrong side of…”

  Alice raised both eyebrows and he stopped, feeling stupid. She did not speak, but her eyes said a lot. Ginger must have his reasons. Explain one impossible intruder and you might be able to claim another? Did a bolted door in the Grange case make Edward Exeter the only possible suspect in the killing of Timothy Bodgley?

  “It’s an interesting problem,” she said, toying with her gloves. “What about the woman the boys thought they’d seen? Did they mention her before or after the unbolted door was found?”

  “I have no idea! I can’t believe you’d swallow any of this. You are usually so levelheaded!”

  “Reliable boys?”

  “Good kids,” he admitted.

  “Mr. Jones said that perhaps you, as prefect, uncovered some hints that the masters didn’t. Often happens, he said.”

  “Not in this case. Most of the chaps tried to blame the suffragettes. The Head was pretty steamed. He canceled a half holiday because no one would own up.”

  “Is that usual?”

  “Communal punishment, or no one having the spunk to own up?”

  “Both.”

  “Neither,” he admitted. And even rarer was the absence of any retaliation on the culprits by those who had suffered unjustly, but there had been none of that at all, or he’d have heard of it.

  Into his mind popped a sudden image of solemn little Codger Carlisle, nervousness making all his freckles show like sand, babbling of a woman with long dangling curls and a very white face. He could have been describing that half memory from the Grange that still haunted Edward! Codger would never be capable of telling a convincing lie if he lived to be a hundred. It must be coincidence! Or else in his drugged stupor in the hospital Edward had remembered that testimony and converted one fiction into another.

  He returned Alice’s stare for a moment before he realized that she was genuinely worried. “Forget the silly prank, darling! It was months ago. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what happened at the Grange, the thing we mustn’t talk about. Let’s talk about us!”

  “What about us?”

  “I love you.”

  She shook her head. “I love you dearly, but not that way. There is nothing to discuss, Edward. Please don’t let’s go through all that again! We’re first cousins and I’m three years older—”

  “That matters less and less as time goes by.”

  “Nonsense! In 1993 I shall be a hundred years old and you will only be ninety-seven and still pursuing wenches when I need you to wheel me around in my Bath chair. I hope we shall always remain the best of friends, Eddie, but never more than that.”

  He heaved himself into a more comfortable position, although he had tried them all and none of them was really comfortable now.

  “My darling Alice! I am not asking you for a commitment—”

  “But you are, Edward.”

  “Nothing final!” he said desperately. “We’re both too young to go that far. All I’m asking is that you consider me as an eligible suitor like any other young man. I just want you to think of me as—”

  “That was your final offer. You asked a lot more than that when you started!”

  Her fanning had grown more vigorous. He ran a hand through his sweaty hair. Ladies’ garments were even less suitable than gentlemen’s for this unusually hot summer. In a way he was fortunate to be wearing only a cotton nightgown, but how could man woo maid when he was flat on his back with one leg in the air? “Then I’m sorry I was so precipitate. Put it down to transitory youthful impatience. You said you had no intention of making any final—”

  “Edward, stop!” Alice slapped the newspaper noisily on her knee. “Listen carefully. Our ages don’t matter very much, I’ll agree with you on that. That is not the problem. First, I will never marry a cousin! Our famil
y is odd enough already without starting to inbreed. Secondly, I do not think of you as a cousin.”

  “That’s promising!”

  “I think of you as a brother. We grew up together. I love you very much, but not in the way you want. Girls do not marry their brothers! They do not want to marry their brothers. And thirdly, you are not the sort of man I should ever want to marry.”

  He winced. “What’s wrong with me?”

  She smiled sadly. “I’m looking for an elderly rich industrialist with no children and a very dickey heart. You’re a starry-eyed romantic idealist student and strong as a horse.”

  Edward sighed. “Then may I be your second husband and help you spend the loot?”

  Eventually they found their way to happier ground, talking about their childhood in Africa. The whites they had known had all died in the massacre, of course, but their native friends had survived. They speculated on who would now be married to whom. They talked of all sorts of other things, but not what he wanted to talk about, which was their future together. He discovered several times that he was lying there like a dead sheep, smiling witlessly at her, just happy to be in her presence. And at last Alice glanced at her watch and gave a little shriek and jumped to her feet.

  She clutched his hand. “I must run! Take care of yourself! Look out for Zulu spears.”

  He felt a heavenly touch of lips on his cheek and smelled roses. Then she was gone.

  Later he looked through the books Ginger had sent and decided that they were definitely not the sort of thing he wanted to read in a hospital bed, and probably not ever. That came of being a romantic, starry-eyed idealist, he supposed. Most of them were suspiciously tatty, as if the old chap had read them many times, or they been passed around a lot. Then he chanced upon a flyleaf bearing an inscription in green ink:

  Noël, 1897