Gunner Kelly

by Anthony Price

  “ ‘Helping’ is hardly the word.” Audley shook his head. “I’m no archaeologist—and Roman Britain isn’t my field… . The truth is, I’m a wheelbarrow-wheeler, and a cook-and-bottle washer, and a hewer-of-wood and drawer-of-water, is what I am, Mr Wiesehöfer. Not a professional.”

  He had the build for manual work, thought Benedikt, smiling back at the disclaimer. But he was also a professional in another field, who wasn’t prepared to compromise his cover by lying about his qualifications for being here in Duntisbury Chase, even for the benefit of an innocent foreigner.

  “Dr Audley.” He nodded again. It would be interesting to probe that cover further, to find out how Audley accounted for his presence. But it wasn’t in Thomas Wiesehöfer’s own cover to show such curiosity yet.

  “If you want to see the villa—here it is,” Rebecca Maxwell-Smith gestured around her. “We haven’t got very far with it, but of course you’re welcome to see what there is of it.”

  “This is the end of the preliminary reconnaissance operations,” explained Audley. “The big effort starts next spring.”

  “Ah, yes.” What Audley had not added was that the reconnaissance had ended prematurely, somewhat to the archaeologists’ irritation. At first, after the General’s death, they had been allowed to carry on, with only the loss of a single day for the funeral. But then Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith had very recently indicated her wish that operations should cease for the time being, with the promise of generous financial aid the following year when she had full control of her inheritance. And with the estate trustees already obedient to her strong will, there was nothing the archaeologists had been able to do about it except to register their disappointment publicly—and their mystification at her change of heart privately. But Thomas Wiesehöfer ought not to know any of that.

  He looked around. “But you have made discoveries, so I have been told.”

  “Oh yes.” The girl nodded. “They have a fair idea of the extent of the buildings, as far as the trees.”

  “They’ve uncovered the edge of a pavement over there—” Audley pointed “—and it just may be an Orpheus one, too.” He watched Benedikt covertly as he spoke.

  “An Orpheus pavement?” Benedikt obliged him quickly. “I have seen fragments of such a pavement not far from my home, near Münster-Sarmsheim, also discovered recently—not as large as your great pavement at Woodchester, of course …But there are many villas in the territories of the Treveri, so there is always hope.” He smiled at Audley. “I may see this find, perhaps?”

  “I’m sorry—it’s been covered up again,” the girl apologised. “To protect it from the frost during the winter.”

  “Ah yes!” He transferred the smile to her. “And I’m afraid our Fighting Man isn’t on view, either.” She shook her head sadly. “They’ve taken him away for detailed study—they didn’t want to risk leaving him, once they’d found him. Did your friend in London tell you about him?”

  “Professor Handforth-Jones? Yes … that is, he spoke of a warrior. I did not quite understand … but a warrior, yes.”

  “We call him our Fighting Man.” She pointed to a larger area of excavation. “He was found there, in what may have been a barn. They think he was a Saxon, judging by his equipment.”

  “A burial?” He nodded. “It was the custom sometimes, was it not… of the Saxon invaders … to bury dead persons in such ruins?” That was what Handforth-Jones had said, anyway.

  “No.” She frowned for an instant. “I mean, it may have been their custom—I’m not a historian. But, what I mean is, they don’t think he was buried—deliberately buried.”

  “It was pure luck, really,” said Audley. “They were digging one of their trial trenches, and they hit the remains of this chap straight away, under the fallen debris of the roof—and just the way he’d fallen, too—sword in hand—literally sword in hand.” He paused for a moment, staring not at Benedikt, but across the field towards the area of excavation which the girl had indicated. “Or … what remained of the sword and the hand, anyway … and everything else he died with, so they think— helmet of some sort, and a belt with a dagger, and maybe some sort of crude cuirass even … Right, Becky?”

  The girl nodded. “They’re not sure about that. They said it was much too early to be certain. But they did get very excited about him, and they were tremendously careful about lifting him out—in the end they undercut him, and raised him in one piece … What they think—well, they don’t go as far as saying that they think it, but it’s one theory—is that the barn caught fire, and fell on him … when the villa was sacked. Because they found evidence of fire, both there and in another trench, over on the other side.” She pointed. “And the way they thought it might have happened is that he was killed in the barn here, but in all the confusion no one saw that—or no one lived to tell the tale, anyway … And the barn caught fire, and fell down, but maybe it was empty, so no one picked over the ruins, like they would have done with the main buildings—or, it could have been at night that the villa was sacked … But they didn’t see what happened to him, one way or another, anyway. He just disappeared.”

  “ ‘Missing, presumed killed in action’,” murmured Audley. “Or maybe even ‘AWOL’, as we used to record more uncharitably in some cases.”

  “It’s how he was when they found him, you see,” explained the girl. “He had his arms flung out wide, with all his equipment and his sword still in his hand, like David says. And what Dr Johns says is that if his own side had buried him they might have left his weapons with him, but they’d have laid him out properly at the very least. But if his side had lost, then the other side would have stripped him—they wouldn’t have let perfectly good weapons go to waste.”

  Benedikt looked around him. The gently sloping meadow betrayed no tell-tale signs of what lay beneath it, except where the trial excavations had been dug. It wasjust a field, with trees on three sides of it, the roofs of Duntisbury Royal peeping through them on one side, bounded on the fourth by the churchyard wall and the tree-shaded church itself. And it looked as though it had been just a field since the beginning of time.

  You must rebuild inyour imagination, was what Papa always said about sites such as this. But it required an immense effort of will to raise up a great mansion in this grassy emptiness—a house with colonnades, and many rooms, and gracious pavements on which Orpheus had tamed his wild beasts in the lamplight, where generations of people had lived.

  And then one day … one night … this dream of a great house had turned into a nightmare, with the red flower of the raiders’ fires bursting out of the thatch of the out-buildings as the house died, signalling the end of civilisation—

  But it probably hadn’t been anything like that, he disciplined himself: the end would more likely have come much more slowly and ignominiously, with the original owners of the Orpheus pavement long gone, and their uncouth inheritors squabbling in the decayed ruins with invaders who were almost indistinguishable from them, but more virile.

  The bleakness of that conclusion roused him. Whatever way the Duntisbury Roman villa had gone down into the dark, it was of no importance to him.

  He blinked at Audley through the thick lenses of the spectacles. “That is a most interesting theory, Dr—Dr Audley.”

  Audley smiled. “Not mine, Mr Wiesehöfer. And not the most interesting thing about the Fighting Man either, to my way of thinking.”

  Benedikt looked at him questioningly.

  “He was killed close to the door—almost in the doorway. They know that because of the position of the post-holes left by the door-posts.”

  “So?” He thought there was something curiously mischievous in Audley’s smile.

  “So … how was he killed? And who killed him?” Audley paused. “Supposing the barn didn’t fall on him and kill him … and if it was just about to collapse he would hardly have gone into it … did some poor frightened little Briton stab him from behind as he went in—someone lurking just inside the d
oor, say? Or did some hulking great German—I beg your pardon!— some hulking great Saxon or Jutish warrior spear him from the front, while he was defending the doorway like Horatius on the bridge?”

  Benedikt frowned. “But did you not say—or was it not Miss Maxwell-Smith who said … that he was a Saxon warrior?”

  The smile was almost evil now. “That’s what the experts think, yes. But apparently there were people called ‘foederati’ in those days, Mr Wiesehöfer.”

  “Foedus” piped up Benje suddenly. “Foedus—foederis … ‘a league between states or an agreement or covenant between individuals’—that’s the noun … But there’s an adjective foedus which means ‘foul, filthy and horrible’—Like foedi oculi means ‘bloodshot eyes’, like Blackie Nabb’s got on Sunday mornings—”

  “Benje!” snapped Miss Maxwell-Smith, suddenly much older than her years. “You mustn’t say that about Blackie.”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Benje was not overawed by his heroine. “Dad says if it wasn’t for the Old General, Blackie ‘ud ’ave been disqualified from driving years ago—” he caught himself too late as he realised he had mentioned someone the memory of whom would pain her. “Sorry, Becky!”

  “My fault—” interposed Audley quickly “—I told young Benjamin about foedus and the foederati…. We were having a discussion about the Latin language, and we decided the Roman-Britons must have made a joke of it—how their new Foreign Legion of great hairy beer-swilling Ger—Saxon— mercenary bodyguards were a filthy lot, with bloodshot eyes, like—”

  “David!” Miss Maxwell-Smith treated Dr Audley with the same disapproval as Benje.

  “Sorry, Becky.” Audley accepted the rebuke meekly, as though accepting also that Mr Blackie Nabb’s drinking habits were now under Miss Maxwell-Smith’s special protection. “The point is, Mr Wiesehöfer, that there were these Saxon foederati who were hired, and eventually given land to settle on, in return for protecting the Britons against their own Saxon folk who came raiding.” He stared at Benedikt for a moment. “So … was our Fighting Man one of the foederati being true to his salt, to the death, like a good mercenary? Or was he a raider who came up the valley from the east, or over the hill from the south, to get his comeuppance and his just deserts, eh? Only time will tell!”

  So that was it, thought Benedikt: Audley could hardly have made it plainer if he had inscribed it in deeply-chiselled stone for his benefit.

  “So! Yes …” He met the big man’s stare with obstinate innocence, refusing to be overborne by it. “That is something which only your experts will be able to tell—and perhaps not even they will be able to provide an answer to satisfy you.”

  “Were there foederati in Germany?” Benje’s eyes were bright with intelligence. “The Romans had German provinces, didn’t, they? They must have had German soldiers—they had British soldiers in their army, you know.”

  It was impossible not to meet a boy like Benje.more than half-way. “There have been German soldiers in the British Army, young man. Our Hanoverian Corps in my grandfather’s time carried the name ‘Gibraltar’ among the battle honours on the flags of its regiments—‘Mit Eliot zu Ruhm und Sieg’ was written on their standards: ‘With Eliot to Glory and Victory’—we helped to defend your rock once upon a time, under a General Eliot … And we fought in Spain, for your Duke of Wellington—”

  “Garcia Hernandez,” said Audley suddenly. “The King’s German Legion broke a French square there—the 1st and 2nd Dragoons, under Major-General von Bock … He’d already been wounded—it was after the battle of Salamanca—and he was extremely short-sighted, like you, Mr Wiesehöfer …. But he was a splendid chap, and those KGL regiments were by far the best cavalry Wellington had—the best ones on either side, in fact … the British were the best horsemen, but as soldiers they were undisciplined rubbish, most of them—Garcia Hernandez was the finest cavalry action of the whole campaign. Rommel would have been proud of them.”

  Benedikt looked at Audley in total suprise. The man had been in a British armoured regiment in 1944, of course, so he was a cavalry man of sorts—the dossier said as much. But it had also stated quite clearly that he was a medievalist when not an eccentric ornament of British Intelligence.

  Audley registered his surprise. “I had an ancestor there—at Salamanca … an idiot officer in our dragoons. He was killed earlier the same day, when they smashed the French in Le Marchant’s charge,” he explained almost shyly. “Family history, you might say … my mother’s family, Mr Wiesehöfer.” Then he nodded. “But you’re quite right about the Germans in the British service—Hessians in America, but most of all Hanoverians against Napoleon, whom they didn’t like at all… . They used to slip across the Channel and enlist in a depot not far from here, at Weymouth—the 1st and 2nd eventually became the Kaiser’s 13th and 14th Uhlans … ‘Tapfer und Tret? was the 1st’s motto at Salamanca and Garcia Hernandez—” he looked down at Benje “—Fortis et Fidelis to you, young Benjamin. Not a bad motto for anyone, foederati or native.”

  “Brave and faithful,” translated Benedikt.

  “So what was our Fighting Man?” Audley considered him, unsmiling this time. “We may never know—you may be right. All we do know for sure is that he came into Duntisbury Chase alive, and he stayed for fifteen hundred years—dead.”

  III

  “A FASCINATING OLD mechanism.” The priest nodded towards the contraption of cog-wheels and weights and ropes which Benedikt had been dutifully studying for the last five minutes. “They say that it is the oldest clock in England still in working order. But that is not strictly true, of course, for it was silent for many years, and it has been extensively restored.”

  As though it had been listening for its cue, the mechanism jerked suddenly, and the ropes on the wall quivered, and somewhere far away and high up a bell rang in answer to the movement, joining the other bells which had been calling the faithful to prayer. In God’s world it must be time for evensong, to give thanks for the day’s blessings and to pray for safety during the hours of darkness to come.

  The priest plucked nervously at the folds of his long black cassock. “Mr Wiesehöfer?” He smiled tentatively at Benedikt.

  A priest? But a priest, of course! Who better, in a cathedral, than a priest?

  Benedikt nodded. “Good evening, Father. I am Thomas Wiesehöfer, yes.”

  “Mr Wiesehöfer.” The priest looked half relieved, half fearful. Perhaps he really was a priest. “If you would follow me, please.”

  Benedikt crossed the nave silently in the wake of the black cassock, pausing only to pay his duty in the central aisle in conformity with his guide. There was a small gathering of evening worshippers far down the rows of chairs towards the high altar, he observed. It would have been pleasant to have been able to join them—it would have been something to tell Mother in his next letter, the reading of which would have pleased her. But he had other gods to worship now, the unforgiving old earth-bound gods of man’s world.

  The priest waited for him by a doorway, flanked by an elderly black-gowned verger who regarded him with a mixture of disapproval and slight suspicion as he squeezed through the half-closed door into the gloom beyond.

  It was a cloister. He turned, expecting the priest to follow him, but the man remained in the gap, unmoving.

  “Down to your right, Mr Wiesehöfer—you will see a light.”

  Benedikt looked to his right. On one side the cloister was open, but the evening had come prematurely for the time of year under a canopy of low clouds and the passage ahead of him was full of shadows. Far down it he could see a faint yellow light diffusing out of a gap in the wall.

  He turned back to the priest. “Thank you, Father.”

  To his surprise, he saw the priest’s hand, pale against the cassock, sign the cross for him. “God bless you, and keep you always in His mercy, Mr Wiesehöfer.”

  Then the door closed with a thud which echoed down the cloisters ahead, towards where the light waited.
>
  Amen to that—his own thought mingled with the blessing.

  But why all the precautions? The blessing was fair enough, and better than fair, and any man far from home might feel the better for it. And it had been a good contact. But this was their territory, where their writ ran on their terms. So … why all the precautions?

  The wall on his left was rich with memorial tablets, all probably dedicated to the departed faithful of the diocese but which he could not read in the half-light. Then, of course, the English loved their memorials: they had a Roman weakness for cutting words into stone, as he had observed in the body of the cathedral, not merely to recall its past servants, but also the servants of the state who had died in their imperial wars and lay in faraway graves. Their ‘Fighting Men’, indeed!

  The opening out of which the pale yellow light came was a doorway: a tiny arched doorway, so low that he had to duck his head to pass beneath it.

  “Mind the step, Captain Schneider,” said a voice which he had never heard before—which was certainly not the voice of the Special Branch man Herzner had introduced to him.

  Outside, the light had been pale, but inside it was bright enough to make him blink at the single unshaded bulb which hung low in the little room, surrounded by the smell of old stone and damp, slightly flavoured with furniture polish.

  Polish—polished shoes—highly polished shoes, glistening ox-blood red-brown … then trousers with old-fashioned turn-ups in them, immaculately creased in expensive British tweed, lifting his eye up, past the matching jacket, and the Old School or regimental striped tie.

  “Captain Schneider—” Above the tie, the face was fierce, almost brick-red, to match the receding pepper-and-salt hair, and unmistakable from its photographs “—I’m Colonel Butler… and Chief Inspector Andrew you already know.”

  Benedikt snapped into top gear. Chief Inspector Andrew, slender and sharp-faced, and sharp-witted, he did already know, and had expected; but Colonel Butler he also knew, but had never met, and had certainly not expected to meet here—now. And Colonel Butler changed all his points of reference.