Gunner Kelly

by Anthony Price

  “Of course! You were given them.” He knew that wasn’t what the boy had meant.

  “No. We won them.” Benje couldn’t let the mistake pass uncorrected.

  “In a competition?”

  Benje looked at him. “Sort of.” He paused for an instant, then nodded at the tombstone. “We got them from him.”

  “From the General? He gave them to you?”

  “No—not gave.” Benje frowned, suddenly tongue-tied.

  “We both won places at King Edward’s School.” The other boy filled the silence coolly. “Everyone who wins a place at King Edward’s—everyone from here—gets a bicycle from the Old General.” He put a capital letter on the title.

  “Ah!” And with Duntisbury Royal’s inaccessibility to public transport, that was an act of practical generosity, thought Benedikt. “So you are able to cycle to school!”

  “No.” Benje shook his head again. “There’s a taxi comes for us—collects us in the morning, an‘ brings us back after first prep.”

  The other boy nodded. “And the Old General pays for that as well.”

  It was strange how they both held him in the living present, here of all places. But presumably the benefaction was endowed to outlast the benefactor.

  “ ‘Sright,” agreed Benje. “An’ it’s Blackie Nabb’s old taxi, too—my dad reckons it’s worth a fortune to him, picking us up. Says he wouldn’t be able to run it if it wasn’t for us, and Sandra Brown and Mary Hobbs—they go to the High.” He cocked his head at Benedikt. “They got bikes, too.”

  So the Old General was both directly and indirectly the village’s benefactor—but not ‘was’, rather ‘had been’ … he was falling into their confusion of tenses.

  He looked at them sadly. “But now he is dead, the Old General …”

  “Miss Becky is paying now,” said the other, boy, mistaking his sadness with the cold logic of youth.

  “Well, she would, wouldn’t she! Becky’s all right—she used to go to the High in Blackie’s old rattle-trap too, didn’t she!” Benje’s view of the Old General’s successor was less deferential than his friend’s, and so was the face he now presented to Benedikt, even though he could not yet quite nerve himself to ask the questions his curiosity had printed clearly on it.

  “Miss Becky is the Old General’s grand-daughter?” He prodded Benje towards those questions without scruple. It would not do to underestimate either of these children—it never did to underestimate any children, but these two particularly. For a start, they were perhaps older than he had at first thought, and in spite of their peasant accents they were scholarship boys as well, so it seemed. Exactly what that meant, he wasn’t sure, in the present confused state of English education, which the English themselves had not standardised and didn’t seem to understand, let alone agree on. But it was still probably true that when English education was good it was very good, and these were fledgling products of it.

  “Yes.” Suspicion, rather than curiosity, was dominant in the other boy.

  Darren, he remembered suddenly. The outlandish name.

  “You’re not English.” The first of Benje’s questions came in the guise of a statement.

  “No, I am not.” It nettled him slightly that the boy’s first thrust had penetrated his almost faultless accent. “So what am I, then?”

  “German,” said Benje unhesitatingly.

  “Or Swedish,” said Darren. “Remember those two who came through last year, who stayed at the Eight Bells? The chap who played rugger—”

  “German,” repeated Benje. “Betcha lop.”

  So the Eight Bells did have rooms. “What makes you so sure, Benje?” It was time to counter-attack just a little, to assert equality rather than any adult superiority.

  “How d’you know my name?”

  Benedikt smiled. “Benje and Darren.”

  “On the road below Caesar’s Camp,” Darren jogged his friend’s memory. “When Old Cecil balled us out—remember?”

  “Huh!” Benje didn’t like being jogged, especially in front of the stranger whose car he had touched, and most especially when that stranger was a foreigner too, that sound suggested.

  “But you are quite right.” Benedikt invested the admission with a touch of admiration: more than equality, he wanted their friendship, because with these two little mobile spies on his side he could have a mine of information open to him about Duntisbury Royal, past and present. Precious little that happened in the Chase would escape them, and David Audley was a stranger there also.

  Benje thawed slightly.

  “You are quite right,” he repeated himself, grinning now. “Wiesehöfer—Thomas Wiesehöfer, from West Germany.” And since he judged it time to be honestly foreign he extended his hand to each of them in turn.

  For a moment the handshaking unsettled them. But they accepted the alien custom manfully, like the well-brought-up lads he had also judged them to be under their brashness, and his heart twisted between approval of them and disapproval for his own disingenuousness.

  Benje rallied first, predictably on his mettle after the debacle of the names. “You’ve come to see … Miss Becky, have you?”

  “Miss Becky?” That was a disconcertingly sharp little assumption, but having admitted it in the Eight Bells pubjic house ten minutes ago he could not deny it now. “Miss … Rebecca Maxwell-Smith is that?”

  “ ‘Sright.” The boy folded his arms and appraised him with a customs officer’s eye, as though waiting to hear what he had to declare.

  “Yes.” He would dearly have liked to ask how Benje had reached that conclusion. But he had to bind them to him with trust before he started asking questions, so that the settlement of their curiosity took priority over his own. “That is to say …1 had thought to speak with General Maxwell—with the Old General. But it is with Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith that I must speak now, it seems.”

  “Why d’you want to see her?” Darren continued the interrogation with all the delicacy of a GDR border guard.

  “It is not her I wish to see, not really.” He nodded at them, as though revealing a confidence. “It is the Roman villa—the Duntisbury Roman villa … it is on her land, yes?”

  “The Roman villa?” Darren frowned at him.

  “It is on her land, I believe—yes?”

  “Yes.” Benje nodded at him. “All the land round here’s hers—it was the Old General’s, but it’s hers now—from Caesar’s Camp to Woodbury Rings on the top, and along the stream down here, both sides—she owns the lot.” He paused. “Why d’you want to see the Roman villa? There isn’t much to see, you know.” He shook his head. “Until they started digging it up there wasn’t anything to see. It was just a field, that was all it was.”

  “My Gran knew there was something there long before they dug anything up.” Darren wasn’t going to let Benje do all the talking. “She says, when she was a girl there were lots of rabbits down there, an‘ there was always lots of stuff—bits of brick an’ such like—where they dug their holes—” He stopped suddenly. “Why d’you want to see the old Roman villa?”

  Benedikt was ready for that one. “Because I am a student of such things.”

  Benje stared at him in disbelief. “A student?”

  Darren gave his friend a sidelong glance. “Schoolmaster,” he murmured.

  “No.” That would never do! “I am not a schoolmaster. Looking at Roman things is my interest—my hobby—like stamp-collecting.” He grinned at them. “We had Romans in Germany too—did you know that?”

  “Huh!” Benje scowled.

  Benedikt looked at him questioningly. “Did you not know that?”

  Darren’s face split into a wicked grin. “Oh, he knows it! Germani multum, Benje—eh?”

  “Germani multum—huh!” Benje’s freckled features twisted. “Germani flipping multum … ab hac consuetudine differunt; nam neque druides habent, qui rebus divinispraesint, neque flipping sacrificiis student.”

  The contrast of the impeccable Latin—
or it sounded impeccable, anyway—with the boy’s accented English took Benedikt aback almost as much as the words themselves. He struggled for a moment with their meaning, rusty memories grating on each other — it was something about the Germans being different … not having Druids or making sacrifices — and then cut his losses.

  “You are a Latin scholar — ” He cut off the statement as it doubled Darren up with laughter.

  “Ha-ha-very-funny,” said Benje to his friend. Then he sniffed and turned to Benedikt. “He thinks it’s a joke that I had to learn a whole flipping page of Caesar — King Edward’s is a very old-fashioned school — everyone says so.” He blinked suddenly. “If you want to see the villa I can show you the way. It’s just the other side of the church.”

  “Thank you.” Benedikt leaned forward slightly towards the boy. “I went to an old-fashioned school too — I had the same trouble.”

  “With Latin?” Benje pointed the way.

  “With English, actually,” Benedikt lied.

  “You speak it jolly well now.”

  Benedikt shrugged. “So … one day you will speak Latin very well.”

  “ ‘Cept there’s no one to speak it to —

  Latin is a language

  As dead as dead can be.

  It killed the Ancient Romans —

  And now it’s killing me!“

  They rounded the end of the church.

  “But it will help you speak your own language.” Benedikt summoned up Mother’s view on the subject. “To learn a foreign language, you have to learn your own.”

  “That’s what David says. Actually, I don’t mind Latin. But I’d rather learn French — or German, of course.” Benje amended his opinion hastily, out of consideration for his new companion, Benedikt suspected.

  “German is a not-so-difficult language, I think.” Benedikt nodded, man-to-man. “But David is right—he is your schoolmaster?”

  “No. David Aud—” Benje caught himself. “He’s just someone I know, that’s all.”

  “Well, I agree with him.” That was interesting: David Audley was here, in the midst of them in the little village, and known to them—known to Mr Cecil, and known to Benje, and certainly known to Miss Becky … But someone had told Benje not to broadcast the fact of his being there.

  They were approaching a stile set in the churchyard wall.

  “We go over here …What’s your job then—what do you do, if you’re not a schoolmaster.” Benje gestured towards the stile. “Were you ever in the army?”

  “No.” He set his hand on the wall. It was odd how much the lie cost him—how much he would have liked to have won Benje’s good regard, as he surely could have done with the truth, boys being what they were the world over, whatever they might think later in their student days. “My eye-sight is not good, unfortunately. And I have flat feet.” He swung himself up, over the stile. “They would not have me.”

  “Hard luck.” Benje commiserated with him. “We’ve got a boy like that in our form—he can’t play cricket.” He looked over his shoulder. “But Darren can’t play cricket either— he can see perfectly well, but he can’t hit a ball to save his life.”

  “Cricket’s a boring game,” said Darren dismissively from behind them. “You were lucky—I don’t expect they tried to make you play it, Mr—Mr …”

  “Thomas,” said Benedikt. If they called David Audley ‘David’, they must learn to call him ‘Thomas’. He was more than half-way to getting through to them now, and if he could get on Christian name terms he would be all the way.

  “There’s the villa,” said Benje, pointing.

  The field sloped gently away from them, down to a belt of trees which must mark the course of the stream which ran the length of the valley between the ridges on each side.

  It was a typical Roman site—that was what had been said of it—sheltered and watered, just the sort of place the Romanised Britons, if not the Romans themselves, would have been encouraged to choose in all the confidence of Roman peace, with no thought for defence behind the shield of the legions.

  He looked round, to try and get his bearings. Somewhere on his left, up the valley, ran the line of the Roman road from the coast, and ‘Caesar’s Camp’ might well be its marker, if the name meant anything more than peasant legend.

  He came back to the excavation itself, on the furthest side of the field away from him, almost under the trees. Clearly, it was not far beyond the exploratory phase of the trial trenches to establish its general shape—even the two temporary huts, erected presumably to house finds and equipment respectively, had a brand-new, unweathered look; nor was much work in progress, with only a man and a youth in sight, squatting beside a grid cut in the turf which was partially covered by a great sheet of yellow plastic.

  “Come on,” said Benje. “They won’t mind as long as you’re with us.”

  They were half-way across the field before the man stood up, and became instantly recognisable.

  “Who is that?” asked Benedikt innocently. “One of the archaeologists, is he?”

  “Mmm …” Benje nodded.

  “Yes,” said Darren, coming up on his other side. “But you didn’t tell us what you do. You’re not a schoolmaster—?”

  “I am a civil servant.” The youth was standing up now. “I work for the government.”

  “Are you on holiday?” Darren was really becoming rather tiresomely inquisitive.

  “Yes.” But it was the youth who was coming to meet him, not David Audley. “I am with the embassy in London—or, I will be from next Monday. I am just starting a tour of duty in England, you see—”

  It was not a youth—it was a girl—a young woman—

  Miss Becky.

  A heavy thumping sound diverted his attention momentarily, coming from the margin of the trees beside the huts, just to his right: the front half of a horse appeared through the foliage—it tossed its head at him, and then swung round on its tether, stamping the ground with its hind legs and flicking its tail at him.

  “Can I help you?”

  Cool, educated voice, too full of confidence and self-assurance to allow any other emotion room in it: Miss Becky for sure—Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith, only twenty years old, but already very much the Lady of the Manor on her own land, the undisputed mistress of Duntisbury Chase.

  “His name’s Thomas—Thomas Wise—Vise—Veese—Veese-hoff—” Benje gave up the attempt in despair.

  “Wiesehöfer.” Benedikt met her gaze directly, and the sympathetic half-smile he had conjured up on Benje’s behalf almost died on his lips, because the look in those pale blue-grey eyes—more grey than blue—transfixed him: where that voice was neutral upper-class English, those eyes had the duellist’s look in them, of pistols-at-twelve-paces and then the churchyard behind him. “Thomas Wiesehöfer.”

  “He’s German,” said Darren.

  “He’s come to see the villa,” said Benje.

  “He’s a civil servant,” said Darren. “He’s on holiday.”

  “He’s an expert on Roman villas,” said Benje. “They’re his hobby—like stamp-collecting, Becky.”

  Her eyes left Benedikt, softening suddenly into more-blue-than-grey as they switched to each of his defenders in turn. “Oh, yes?” She smiled. “And he drives a Mercedes with CD plates?”

  Benedikt glanced sideways, at Benje, and made an oddly moving discovery: just as there was an emotion described as hero-worship, which he had seen on very rare occasions in the faces of men and boys for other men and other boys, so there was also one of heroine-worship, quite devoid of any sexual undertones, which a boy at least (if not a man) could have for someone of the other sex … Or which—he glanced quickly at Darren, and found no such look there—or which, anyway, this boy Benje had for this young woman, Miss Becky.

  “You know about him?” Benje didn’t sound put out by his heroine’s omniscience, it merely confirmed what he already believed, Benedikt guessed.

  “I am not… most regrettably, I mu
st admit that I am not an expert on Roman villas.” He would have to beware of Benje’s loyalty—it might be safer to cultivate Darren; but meanwhile he must head off that misapprehension. “Roman roads are more my … my speciality.” He smiled shyly at Miss Becky, and was relieved to find the remains of her softened expression still visible. “Miss Maxwell-Smith?”

  “Yes.” Without that coldness behind the eyes, and even with her hair severely pulled back into a pony-tail, she was quite a pretty girl, though she fell well short of beauty—it was a face with character bred into it, but at first sight he could not decide whether the jaw-line betrayed self-will and obstinacy, or determination and constancy.

  “I am passing by … on holiday, as my friends here have said, before I take up my post in our embassy in London.” He paused, and blinked at her as though taking time to sort out his English. “I am going to Maiden Castle, near Dorchester … and to see the country of Thomas Hardy.” Another pause. “But in London I was told of your villa, Miss Maxwell-Smith, by … by Professor Handforth-Jones, of the Society for the Advancement of Romano-British Studies.”

  He had not intended producing Professor Handforth-Jones, like a rabbit out of the magician’s hat, so early in his introduction. But Audley had come up behind her as he spoke.

  “Tony Handforth-Jones?” Audley rose to the name.

  Rebecca Maxwell-Smith half-turned, half looked up to the big man. “You’ve heard of him?”

  “I know him. He’s a good friend of mine—and a damn good archaeologist too. But he’s more into military sites in Scotland at the moment—Agricola’s line-of-march, and the location of Mons Graupius, and that sort of thing.” He nodded at her. “But he’ll have heard of your Fighting Man, for sure.” He gave Benedikt a nod. “Hullo again.”

  Rebecca Maxwell-Smith looked from one to the other of them. “You’ve already met?”

  “We’ve met.” Another nod. “But we haven’t actually been introduced. The Mercedes with the CD plates—I told you.”

  “Oh!” She caught her mistake skilfully. “How silly of me! Yes … well… Mr Wiesehöfer—this is Dr David Audley, who is helping us with our excavations.”