Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  “It’s not that easy. What do I say?”

  “Say what you feel.”

  “You mean ... something like ... May I have the pleasure of ... the honour of...”

  “Let’s leave honour out of it. Pleasure, yes. Definitely. Positively. Without delay.”

  “Does that mean ... um ... now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  He straightened up. “I’m not going back to that rotten hotel.”

  “We’ve got all of Yorkshire.”

  The moors rolled to the horizon. Compared with the wet plains of France and Flanders, this was wild, romantic country. Half the sky was bustling cloud and the other half sent bright patches of sunlight racing across the hillsides. He played a little tune on the horn.

  “Well then, what about here?” He slowed.

  “Too sunny.”

  He picked up speed. After a mile, the sunlight ended. He slowed again. “What about here?”

  “Not sunny enough.”

  “For God’s sake! What difference does it make?” He put his foot down. The Daimler charged uphill and down, hammering the bumps, lurching and swaying, and finally making Dorothy laugh. This was not fright or hysteria; something genuinely amused her. He let the speed fall away. “What’s funny?”

  “Look at you, Andrew. You’re trying to fly. You’ve made me into one of your beastly Huns.” She was still gurgling with laughter.

  “Nonsense.” He recognised his tone of voice: it was Brigadier Tunney’s. Damn, she’s right, he thought. Bloody women . .. They topped a hill. Far ahead, tucked away in the next valley, was a beech wood. “There.” She pointed. “Go there.”

  Against all the odds, a cart track ran from the road to the woods. The beeches were in the lea of a hill and they soared like columns in a cathedral. “Frightfully noble,” she said. Nevertheless, when they got out of the car, the breeze was chilly.

  “More comfortable in the back seat,” he suggested.

  “No, no. This place was made for us. Everything’s so tremendously phallic. Don’t you find it wonderfully stimulating?”

  “I don’t need to be stimulated, Dorothy. I don’t need to be frozen, either.”

  “Light a fire, darling.”

  It was one of the skills his father had taught him. In five minutes the flames had seized the kindling and small logs were beginning to crackle. “Done,” he said. “Ready.”

  “Big decision.” She had found a pile of travel rugs. “Do you want me with or without the woodwork?”

  “Oh ... With. I’m not going to be shortchanged.” She liked that.

  They undressed. Each stood, hands on hips, enjoying the sight of the other. “Not hairy,” she said. “Good. I prefer men with silky skin. Your body is adorable.”

  “And so is y-yours. P-perhaps a sus-suspicion more hair than I ex-expected.” The stutter surprised him. He was trembling, too, and not from the cold. “I’m not com-complaining.”

  “French postcards never tell the whole story ... Why are you shaking? What are you afraid of?”

  “Dunno. S’pose I make a m-m-mess of it?”

  She took his hand and they lay on the rugs. “Your parents didn’t make a mess of it. Nor did their parents, and so on ad infinitum. It must be very easy. Think of all the stupid people in the world. No, on second thoughts, forget them. Forget everything. Especially the silly war. You’re out of uniform, this isn’t a battle. I’ve surrendered to you. Have you surrendered to me?”

  “Yes.” None of this made sense to him.

  “Good, good. When nobody fights, nobody loses. That’s something they never told you in the army.” They kissed, and after that all conversation ended. The exchange of pleasure made a far better dialogue. Soon he was wondering why he had ever worried.

  Above the beeches, a kestrel drifted, paused and hovered, searching the ground for food, and drifted on. It saw the glow of the fire, the gleam of the Daimler, the flicker of white flesh. It knew that this was no meal and it moved away at once.

  A minute later it flew back, not pausing, not hovering, just sailing the length of the wood and vanishing.

  * * *

  They were lying in a tangle of limbs, half sweaty, half chilled, still slightly stunned by their achievement. It took a while for the breeze to awaken them. They got up, clinging to each other, and stood beside the fire. Its warmth dried the sweat and took away the chill. The flames had a fascination, and they were looking at them when a man gave an angry shout. He was striding down the track. He had a shotgun and a dog.

  “Gamekeeper,” Mackenzie said.

  “Yes. Frightful moustache. Looks as if it died in the night.”

  The man kept bellowing at them. Every other word was an obscenity. He stopped when he was ten yards away. His face was thin and leathery and distorted by disgust. “What the bloody hell d’you think you’re about?” he shouted.

  “Fornication,” Mackenzie said. “And it’s far too good for the likes of you.”

  “And who the bloody hell d’you think you are?” The shotgun was raised.

  “Excuse me,” Mackenzie said. He went to the car.

  “He is Viscount Haig, son of the Field Marshal,” she told the man, and took a few steps towards him. “And I am his sister.” The man gaped, and his gun drooped. “Not the usual effect I have on men,” she said. Now he had seen the wooden leg, and he was speechless. “My brother will be with you in a moment,” she said sweetly.

  Mackenzie got his Service revolver from his valise, cocked it and fired a shot well above the man’s head. The crack-boom raised a panic in a hundred crows. The dog fled. “Be off with you!” Mackenzie cried and advanced, flourishing the revolver. Echoes were still reverberating. The man turned and ran. Mackenzie fired a second bullet into the treetops, and the man ran faster. He was two hundred yards away before he stopped.

  “Well, he was surprised,” Dorothy said.

  “Probably never seen a Daimler before,” Mackenzie said.

  * * *

  An hour after they crossed the border into Scotland, the damaged side of his face began seeping blood. He asked her to kiss it better, and she refused even to touch it with a handkerchief. “It’s only blood,” he said, and licked the trickle that had reached his mouth.

  “I don’t care. I don’t care what pain men inflict on each other. Hack yourselves to bits, if you think it’s fun. Just keep the blood away from me.”

  This angered him. It was, after all, an honourable wound. “So you’d prefer me intact?” he said. No reply.

  He stopped in a town somewhere north of Glasgow and found a doctor. Dorothy came with him into the surgery. “There’s bound to be gallons of gore,” he warned.

  “Don’t care. I need some cream for my stump.”

  The doctor took off the dressings and the eyepatch and did not like what he saw. “Did all this happen on active duty?” he asked.

  “Yes and no.”

  “His mother hit him,” Dorothy said. “She wasn’t satisfied with what the Boche had done. Very demanding woman.”

  “Well, she hasn’t improved the situation. There may be some infection. D’you see?”

  For the first time, she looked at the raw, battered face. “Jesus Christ,” she whispered.

  “If you must blaspheme, go into the waiting room.” He re-dressed the wound. “What can you see with that eye?” he asked Mackenzie.

  “Three of everything. Sometimes four.”

  “You need plenty of rest. Nothing else will replace that. No alcohol. And no strenuous physical exercise, of course.”

  The roads north became worse: narrow, twisting and stony; and he was weary. But he was determined to finish their journey. It was late at night when he stopped the Daimler in the gravel circle outside the high, iron-studded, oak double doors of Castle Mackenzie. He had to rouse the servants; they came bearing candles. “The generator gets switched off at night,” he explained.

  He was warmly welcomed. The warmth was redoubled when he introduced her as his wife
. They stood in the hall while their bags were brought in and the car was garaged. The candlelight showed several large and faded Turkish carpets that covered less than half the floor. It showed parts of granite walls. It failed to show the ceiling, although Dorothy got a glimpse of hanging banners, which proved that there must be something up there somewhere.

  They ate ham sandwiches and drank claret in the library, while a fire was lit in their bedroom. Mackenzie was so tired that he stumbled while going upstairs. She had to help him undress. He looked younger than eighteen. Maybe he wasn’t eighteen. Plenty of youngsters lied about their age in order to get into the R.F.C. He lay naked on the bed. The firelight gleamed on his chest. She watched the pale gold skin being gently nudged by his heartbeat. “Why are we here, Andrew?” she asked.

  “I forget.” He looked at her with his one good eye. “We’re going to get married, aren’t we?”

  “No. Definitely not.”

  “Why not?” His lips barely moved.

  “There’s more to be wed than four legs in a bed. Shakespeare.”

  “Well . . . I’m not going back to bloody old France.”

  She stretched out her arm and, with one fingertip, touched his heartbeat so lightly that the finger gave a tiny kick with each throb.

  “You’re too beautiful,” she said. “If you grow old I’ll kill you.”

  Next day it rained. He wore old, shabby tweeds, much patched with leather. “Belonged to my father,” he said. They had breakfast in a room as big as the mess at Gazeran. They had the castle to themselves; his sisters were all in London with their mother. “Won’t they come back?” Dorothy asked.

  “Not in a hurry. Mother has a place in town. She probably thinks I’m skulking around Soho.”

  “You can’t skulk in a Daimler.”

  He stood up abruptly, and wrapped some bacon in toast. “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.” He went out. She heard orders shouted, doors slammed; then silence. She sipped her coffee and read some old newspapers. Mata Hari shot by French firing squad. More Zeppelins over London. Fierce fighting in Ypres Salient. Board of Trade appeals for less pleasure motoring. “Too late,” she said. “Anyway, it wasn’t all fun.”

  He came back three hours later, very wet and muddied to the knees, and holding a rifle. “Come and see,” he said, and gave her an umbrella.

  Standing in the rain was a horse with a dead stag across its back. “One clean shot. Halfway up the mountain. He dropped where he stood. Never heard me fire. A very Christian kill.”

  Blood dribbled down the horse’s flanks. “What is this?” she said. “Some sort of Caledonian gift-offering?”

  “It’s supper. Fresh deer’s liver, absolutely yummy. Thank you, Bobby.” A servant led the horse away.

  “Do you feel better now?”

  “Better than what? Wait a second ...” He saw a shape flying in the mist and aimed and fired. It veered away.

  “God in heaven!” she said. “Can’t you stop killing things?”

  “Bloody heron. They eat our trout.”

  “What if I eat your silly trout? Will you shoot me?”

  She was annoyed, but he was still very pleased with himself. “I might,” he said, “if you were poaching.”

  * * *

  He soaked in a hot bath. She sat and watched. They both drank whisky. “Tell me, then,” he said. “The blessed woodwork. How did it happen?”

  “Oh ...” She looked away. “My mother wanted me to be a ballerina. Actually, she wanted to be a ballerina herself, but child-bearing had got in the way, which was obviously all my fault, so she pushed me into ballet school. I was about three, and very small and not nearly strong enough, but I had to dance and dance and dance, until one day the leg conked out. Some kind of paralysis. No way back. Better off without it, the doctors said.”

  “Hell’s bells. Who needs a mother, eh?” She shrugged. “Still,” he said, playing boats with the loofah, “they were probably right, weren’t they? I mean, a conked-out leg is no use to anyone. You’d just end up a cripple.”

  She kicked the bath with her wooden foot. “I am a cripple.”

  “Yes, but not like a chap with a crutch.”

  She stood and kicked the bath repeatedly, until white paint flaked off. “When you can do that, you can lecture me on cripples.” She sat down and gave herself more whisky. “Anyway ... what smacked your face, apart from mother?”

  “Shell splinters. They had to travel a long way to hit me, fortunately. Otherwise I might have lost this eye altogether.”

  “How awful. A conked-out eye is no use to anyone, is it? You’re better off without it. They make very good glass eyes nowadays, you know.”

  “Oh, go to hell.”

  “That’s the trouble with you soldiers. You never see the joke in war.” She kicked the bath one last time. “You’re too one-eyed. I’m off to lunch.”

  She had eaten and gone by the time he came down, so he ate alone. He thought of her, sometimes angrily, more often eagerly; until he couldn’t wait any longer and he abandoned the meal and went in search.

  She was at the window of a turret, looking out at three other turrets and two spires. “You might as well live in St Pancras station,” she said. “Handier for the shops.”

  “The whole place is a fraud. It’s a glorified shooting-lodge, put up by some Victorian grandee who went bankrupt and threw himself from this very window.”

  “Not possible. It’s got bars on it.”

  “He was dreadfully thin. All that worry. Couldn’t eat.”

  “Uh-huh.” Obviously she believed none of this.

  “It was a real castle, once. There’s a genuine lump of the original stone underneath one of the lavatories.”

  “How interesting. A large fraud, surrounding a tiny bit of truth, which nobody ever sees. Why does that sound familiar?”

  “It can’t be me, so it must be you.” It was a cheap remark, made in anger at her mocking jibe, and he regretted it. “Caledonian peace offering,” he said quickly, and gave her the record from Cleve-Cutler.

  There was a gramophone in the music room. As the needle made its preliminary hiss, he took her hands. “I can’t dance,” she said. “I haven’t got the feet for it.”

  “Stand on my shoes. I’ll dance for both of us.”

  Poor Butterfly,

  Neath the blossoms waiting.

  Poor Butterfly,

  For she loved him so ...

  She hung from his shoulders, so that he scarcely felt her feet on his. When she began to sing, he knew that he had done something right, at last.

  I know he’ll come to me,

  Bye and bye.

  But if he don’t come back

  Then I’ll never sigh or cry,

  I just must die ...

  Poor Butterfly.

  The record spun to an end. They were left in what had to be an embrace.

  “I say,” he said. “May I —”

  “Yes.”

  “Have the pleasure. I was going to say —”

  “You talk too much.”

  As they went upstairs, she said, “Hugh thinks I’m the Poor Butterfly, and I think he is.”

  “Were you ...” It was too late to stop. “Were you ever ... um ... intimate with him?”

  “Hugh couldn’t be intimate with the Queen of Sheba if she wore nothing but his spurs and his Sam Browne,” she said; which made him laugh, and that made her smile.

  * * *

  Next morning there was blood on his pillow; quite a lot of blood.

  The castle had a telephone, but it wasn’t working. One of the servants bicycled seven miles to the nearest doctor. When he came, a police sergeant was with him in his car.

  The doctor changed the dressings. “This should have been done yesterday,” he said. “I don’t like the look of some of those stitches. What the devil have you been up to?”

  “Oh ... rest, and quiet reflection.”

  “Hogwash.” He tested Mackenzie’s heart and lungs and bl
ood pressure, and shook his head. “A week in bed. Alone. If you don’t lie down soon, you’ll fall down.” He scribbled a note. “Hospital in Edinburgh. See this man. He’ll help you.”

  The sergeant replaced the doctor.

  He said he had received a telephone call at the police station from Mrs Mackenzie in London. Of course it was an awful long way, and the line was all crackles and whistles ... Still, it seemed that Mrs Mackenzie had lost her big car, the Daimler ... It was a pity the details weren’t exactly clear ... And wouldn’t you know it, she was cut off by the operator. Military priority, or some such blether ... There was no escaping the war, was there? Congratulations on your medal, sir. He said goodbye and rejoined the doctor. Mackenzie and Dorothy watched the doctor’s car rattle down the long drive.

  “That policeman knows the Daimler’s here,” Mackenzie said. “He’s heard the gossip. He’ll probably telegram my mother. She’ll probably tell that fat-faced brigadier. We’d better leave.”

  “Where would you like to go?”

  He tried to scratch his stitches, until she pulled his hand away and held it. “I haven’t any money,” he said.

  “You own half of Argyll.”

  “I don’t inherit until I’m twenty-one. I get an allowance, but I spent it all in France.”

  “Look around. There must be money here. Somewhere.”

  “Mother has a study. She always keeps it locked.”

  “Wake up, Andrew. If at first you don’t succeed, cheat.”

  He went away and came back ten minutes later with a felling axe. She watched as he hacked away at the study door. The noise attracted a couple of servants. “It’s all right,” she told them. “A cat got trapped in there, that’s all.” They left. He chopped through the lock and the door swung open.

  There was a massive bureau-desk, and it too was locked. “Mistrustful old bat,” he said, and attacked it.

  Inside was a cashbox. Also locked. “You miserable bitch!” he shouted. He stood it on end and swung the axe as if splitting a log. After three blows the lid fell off. They were forty-seven pounds richer.

  “Where shall we go?” she asked. “Since you’re not going back to France.” He sat on the floor. His face was shining with sweat. Below the dressings the sweat was pink. “America?” she said. “I have friends there.”