Our Man in Camelot

by Anthony Price

  Sir Thomas continued: “So what Tony is saying is that Badon was fought just where Arthur would have fought it, and just when Arthur would have fought it, only Arthur never existed, so someone else fought it… And all I’m saying is why not Arthur?”

  He looked at Mosby expectantly.

  “ ‘It’s true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides’,” quoted Mosby. The phrase had stuck in his mind.

  “Ah, now that would be dear old Winston Churchill. A romantic, of course, but he could very often smell what he couldn’t see.”

  “And not the only romantic,” murmured Handforth-Jones.

  “Meaning me?” Sir Thomas looked at him sidelong. “Well, at my age I can afford to take that as a compliment. And there are times when my sense of smell sharpens too.” He smiled at Mosby. “So why not come out with a straight question, Dr Sheldon?”

  The attack caught Mosby by surprise. “Sir?”

  “A straight question. Something David is temperamentally incapable of asking. Or answering.”

  Mosby frowned. “I don’t get you, Sir Thomas.”

  “Tck, tck.” Sir Thomas clicked his tongue. “Now it’s you who is playing games.”

  “I am?” Mosby looked at Audley for support. “Are we?”

  “I didn’t say David was playing games,” said Sir Thomas quickly. “Indeed, that’s what makes this so interesting now: David may have his fun, but he doesn’t really play games any more.”

  “Except the ‘great game’, of course,” Handforth-Jones amended. “But King Arthur’s a bit long in the tooth for that, thank heavens.”

  Mosby couldn’t place the allusion accurately, but it didn’t take a genius to guess its meaning as Sir Thomas nodded his agreement: they knew damn well how Audley was employed.

  “True, very true.” Sir Thomas eyed Audley speculatively for a moment before coming back to Mosby. “And it’s that which makes it the more interesting, I’m thinking.”

  If only you knew, buster, thought Mosby, some of his awe evaporating. The clever men at Oxford didn’t know quite all that was to be knowed after all.

  “I still don’t get you,” he said.

  “No? Well, perhaps we’re doing you an injustice again… but it does rather look as though David is about to poach on our scholarly preserves. And that does make us a little cautious, because the last time he did that there was a certain amount of trouble and strife as a consequence.”

  Mosby remembered what Schreiner had said: Audley had had an intelligence assignment in some northern university two or three years before.

  “Huh?” Mosby fought for time behind his well-tried look of bewilderment: he was just an American dentist doing his time in the Service, knowing nothing of any of this— just an American dentist with an interest in Arthurian history.

  But the knowledge within him was cold as a sliver of ice in his heart. He had been less than fair to the clever men who couldn’t imagine Badon Hill as a security risk: to imagine anything else would be crazy, not clever.

  Except it wasn’t crazy at all. The reality wasn’t this gracious well-polished room with its gracious well-polished people in their quiet little Cotswold valley: it was a body drifting in the Irish Sea.

  He looked at Audley questioningly.

  Audley returned the look calmly. “I told you they were sharp this afternoon.”

  “Well, I wish to hell I was. All I want to know is—“

  “Mons Badonicus,” said Audley.

  Mosby blinked at him in surprise, silenced by such a major script-change.

  “Ye-ess,” Sir Thomas nodded slowly, “yes, I think maybe Badon would fit the bill if anything did.”

  “Badon?” Margaret Handforth-Jones stirred. “What bill? What do you mean, Tom?”

  Sir Thomas pointed at Audley. “David’s bill. Dr Sheldon there has caught him—seduced him, if you like, away from poor William Marshall. And he couldn’t do that with Arthur.”

  “Why not?”

  “My dear—because he’s just like your husband. Not a sentimentalist… Arthur, Camelot, Excalibur, the Round Table, the Holy Grail—he’d laugh at them. They aren’t facts. But Badon—Mons Badonicus, Mons Badonis, call it what you will—Badon is different.”

  Mosby’s awe returned, tinged with worry. Sharp was right: the guy was too goddamn sharp for comfort—altogether too damn explicit in putting his finger on what it had taken the psych, experts a whole day to come up with.

  “Put it this way,” continued Sir Thomas smoothly, “this is the so-called Dark Ages we’re talking about, and the darkest hundred years or so of that. And what do we actually know about them—know as historians know, I mean?

  “We know about very few solid facts. We know the beginning and the end of it—in the year 466 the Britons appealed to the last great Roman commander in the West, Aetius, and there were British Christians at the Council of Arles in 443. But Aetius turned them down and there weren’t any Britons at the next council in 484.

  “That’s one end of it. And at the other is Tony’s battle of Dyrham, near Bath, in 577, the decisive Saxon victory—their Gettysburg, if you like.” He nodded towards Mosby. “Myself, I’d say the battle of Bedcanford, which is probably Bedford, in 571 was equally decisive, but that’s neither here nor there. One way or another the Britons were finished by then. They’d lost the initiative for good.

  “And the middle fact—the truly fascinating one—lies between those two dates: the greatest lost battle in British history.”

  “Badon,” said Margaret.

  “Badon. We don’t know where, we don’t know how, and we don’t know who.” He swung round suddenly to stare directly at Mosby. “Or do we?”

  “We don’t,” Audley cut in sharply.

  “But you’ve got a strong clue.” There was an edge to Sir Thomas’s voice which had not been there before.

  There was the risk which Audley had understood when he had insisted on not coming straight out with the question, Mosby realised: to get the information they needed they had to go to the experts, but in their own field the experts were jealous of interlopers. That reference to ‘poaching on our scholarly preserves’, no matter how gently delivered, had been intended as a warning to the interlopers.

  “Maybe.”

  “No ‘maybe’. I know you, David.”

  Goddamn it, there was more than scholarly suspicion here. They had been sitting self-confidently on their box of goodies, sure that they knew something no one else did. But maybe they’d been a little too confident at that.

  “We think somebody had a clue.” Audley wasn’t going to reveal his ace in the hole that easily.

  “Had?” Sir Thomas frowned.

  “He’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Sir Thomas switched his frown towards Handforth-Jones.

  “If he is then it’s news to me,” said the archaeologist. “And it would’ve been in the papers for sure.”

  “Who?” Now Audley sounded puzzled. “Who’s this ‘he’?”

  “You tell us, David.”

  Audley turned towards Mosby. “It rather looks as though we’ve got two somebodies, Sheldon.”

  “Sure as hell does.” Mosby’s mind had reached the same junction. “ ‘Tisn’t likely they’ve got ours, anyway.”

  “No…” Audley thought for a moment before nodding his head towards Sir Thomas again. “And your man’s got a clue to Badon, has he, Tom?”

  “Not so far as I’m aware. But he’s been looking for one, I do know that.”

  “An historian?”

  “I wouldn’t call him that. At least, not in the accepted meaning of the term.”

  “An archaeologist, then?”

  “Certainly not,” snapped Handforth-Jones. “Not in any meaning of the term.”

  “He was an airman, actually,” said Sir Thomas.

  “An airman.” Mosby was dumbfounded.

  “An ex-airman, to be precise. Now he considers he’s been called to even higher things.”

  “He w
as a very good pilot, so I’m told,” Handforth-Jones addressed Sir Thomas conversationally. “I met a chap not long ago—he was excavating a site up in the Persian Gulf—he met him when he was leading a counter-insurgency squadron for some obscure sultan down the coast there. He was quite impressed with him.”

  “I don’t doubt it at all,” Sir Thomas agreed readily. “But good military commanders are very often deplorable politicians. The Duke of Wellington is a case in point.” He nodded at Mosby. “And your Ulysses S. Grant is another. I don’t believe that—“

  “Billy Bullitt,” said Audley.

  “Billy Bullitt, of course. Do you know him?”

  “I’ve heard of him, but never met him.”

  “A treat in store, no doubt. Because he’s the man you want to see if it’s Badon you’re after. Complete with that famous red shirt of his.”

  “Who’s—“ Mosby began, only to be instantly over-ridden by Audley.

  “But what the devil has he got to do with Badon?”

  “Pursuing his patriotic duty, apparently. He was up here for a week last term looking for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘very ancient book in the British tongue’. He didn’t find it, not surprisingly, but he badgered the life out of the people in the Bodleian Library, so I’ve been told.”

  “Hah!” Handforth-Jones sniffed. “And he wouldn’t leave poor old Fletcher Holland alone at the Institute of Archaeology either—Fletcher’s an authority on early English history.”

  Mosby drew breath to try his question again.

  “But—“

  “But he was after Mount Badon, was he?” cut in Audley.

  “Oh, sure. It was Badon all the time, with Arthur thrown in. In the end Fletcher got so exasperated that he insisted Arthur was actually a Scottish prince of Dalriada, or somewhere, and Badon was Vardin Hill up there—you often get transpositions of v for b. At which Billy Bullitt went off in a huff.”

  “Not that you can blame Bullitt for that. If you are an authority, or if you are running a library, you must expect to be bothered by people who want to know things—that’s what you are there for.” Sir Thomas gave a thin smile. Then the smile faded. “But he also accepted an invitation to speak at the Oxford Union—what was the debate, Tony?”

  “Oh, This House believe that Britons never will be slaves’, or some such rot.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s a line from the chorus of Rule Britannia,” explained Audley to Mosby.

  “Well, actually it isn’t—as Billy Bullitt was at pains to explain,” said Sir Thomas heavily. “It’s a line from an eighteenth century masque on King Alfred—not to be confused with King Arthur—according to him. And his point was that in Alfred’s time the majority of the Britons were slaves—to the Anglo-Saxons. But at least that was slavery by conquest in war, whereas now nobody had the guts to fight for our country —now we were all slaves, and that was all we deserved to be. We’d lost our honour, apparently.”

  “Good rousing stuff,” murmured Handforth-Jones.

  “Rousing is the word. There was practically a riot after the debate and seven undergraduates were arrested for causing a breach of the peace—“

  “Thus disproving Bill Bullitt’s thesis that they hadn’t the guts to fight,” said Handforth-Jones.

  “Ah, but it was no joke, Tony.” Sir Thomas said seriously. “They turned a car over.”

  “Yes—they thought it was his car, but of course it turned out to belong to some perfectly innocent person. And then—“

  “Now hold on a minute.” Shirley tossed back her hair and stuck her chest out into the dialogue. “Will someone kindly tell me who this Billy Bullitt is?”

  The chest instantly succeeded where Mosby had twice failed, though for a second or so it brought admiring silence rather than explanation.

  Then Audley cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. Group Captain William Bullitt, DSO, DFC, RAF retired. Or resigned might be more accurate.”

  “Group Captain?”

  “Colonel would be the equivalent in your air force.”

  “Uh-huh… And we should have heard of him, huh? “ She pivoted towards Mosby. “You heard of him, honey?”

  “Can’t say I have, no.” Mosby frowned.

  “No reason why you should have. He was a nine-days’ wonder ten years ago when he resigned from the RAF, and then he made the headlines a year or two back when he came home from the Middle East. But he’s hardly an international figure. More a colourful one—the Press loves the red shirt and the combat hat he always wears.”

  “Why did he quit your air force?” asked Mosby.

  “It was over the TSR-2, wasn’t it?” said Sir Thomas.

  Audley nodded. “That’s right. The RAF’s wonder plane of the sixties and seventies that never was.”

  “Never got off the drawing-board, huh?”

  “Oh, it got off the drawing-board. And off the ground too.”

  “But it was no good, you mean?”

  “On the contrary,” Audley shook his head ruefully, “by all accounts it was very good—way ahead of its time. But unfortunately also way ahead of its budget too. So the Labour Government scrapped it and ordered your F-lll instead. Which they also cancelled—in the end we bought Phantoms from you.”

  “Uh-huh… and I guess Billy Bullitt had a few things to say about that too.”

  “A few.”

  “I get the picture. Your Billy Bullitt equals our Billy Mitchell—“

  “Now, honey,” Shirley waved him down frantically, “don’t go making things worse. They won’t know who Billy Mitchell was any more than we knew this Billy Bullitt.”

  “Wasn’t he the one who bombed the battleship?” said Handforth-Jones.

  Mosby clapped his hands. “That’s right. Back in 1921— he said planes could sink battleships. So they gave him an old German one, and when he’d proved his point they said ‘Get lost, you bum—and don’t show your face round here until after December 7, 1941’.”

  Shirley sighed theatrically. “You have to forgive my husband. Outside of teeth and King Arthur he’s got a butterfly mind.”

  “Not at all,” said Mosby. “If Billy Bullitt’s anything like Mitchell then he must be quite a guy.”

  “More like quite a fascist, according to some people,” said Faith Audley with a sudden flash of vehemence.

  “A fascist?”

  “Now hold on there, love,” protested Audley. “He may have been a pain in the neck for some of your Labour friends, but now your schoolgirl prejudices are showing. He’s never had any known political connection, left, right or centre.”

  No known political affiliation: the phrase welled up in Mosby’s mind. He had seen it recorded on a dozen files, it was one of the first checks in any security profile.

  And now, on Audley’s tongue, it meant one thing only: the British had run such a profile on Billy Bullitt.

  But just maybe not well enough.

  VII

  NOBODY SEEMED TO mind Mosby’s going off by himself on foot after breakfast, ostensibly to explore the village, even though he had used the same excuse to do the same thing after dinner the evening before. In fact everyone seemed pleasantly relaxed, bent on doing their own things along the several lines they had agreed during the evening meal, with no second thoughts and consequently no need for further discussion.

  “Make sure you see inside the church this time,” admonished Margaret, as she heaped potatoes into a bowl. “It’s really quite a good one, and there are some super views from the top of the tower.”

  “It isn’t locked, then?” Mosby repeated his explanation for the previous expedition’s omissions. “The church, I mean?”

  “Good heavens, no. Why should anyone want to lock it? There isn’t anything of value there unless you count the Mothers’ Union banner… which incidentally I’ve promised to repair. It’s got the moths in it, or something.” She smiled at him over the potato peelings. “You wouldn’t be a dear and collect it on the way back, would you? It
’s waiting for collection inside the vestry…”

  As he made his way down the hill between the now familiar (and, as usual, empty) canyons of Cotswold stonework, Mosby reflected that for once General Ellsworth would be proud of him.

  The General was a keen advocate of Good Relations between his officers and what he termed ‘the Indigenous Community’. As a result, while enlisted men were encouraged by every means to stay on base (since the only relations they could be relied on to establish with the natives were sexual), certain mature and reliable officers were practically ordered to do their bit in the cause of Anglo-American friendship. Mosby had hitherto not qualified for this unpopular duty, because the General clearly didn’t regard him as a suitable representative of the American way of life. But now, with a tale of the Mothers’ Union banner which would lose nothing in the telling, he had the means of changing all that.

  The General would also be proud, if not surprised, at the way he had handled himself yesterday, too, he decided. It wasn’t simply that he’d mentioned Billy Mitchell, one of the General’s heroes, but also that he’d implemented two of the highest Ellsworth precepts, Co-ordinated Effort and Delegation of Authority, as to the manner born: Audley, Shirley and Sir Thomas Gracey were for the time being doing all the work, while he busied himself with a little gentle Data Monitoring and Operations Analysis. Which was exactly what he should be concerned with at the Informational Phase of his Implementation Structure Programme.

  What was strange, almost disturbing, was the comfort he now derived from his virtuous condition. In his late-night debates with Doc Hollister on the essential nature of the Service mind, and in particular the devious mind of General Ellsworth, they had always ended by agreeing that it was high in crap and low in credibility; or as Doc McCaslin put it, ‘Man cannot live by jargon alone.’ Yet here he was, on assignment at last, instinctively playing it by the General’s book.

  Self-analytically, he decided that it was his involvement with Shirley that was to blame. Or, to be fair, it was the personnel controller who had united Agent Sheldon with Agent Morgan in simulated wedlock in the belief that nothing was liable to develop between them except maybe a little casual sex, which wouldn’t inhibit their efficiency.