by Sarah Rayne
There was still more than an hour before they reached Norwich. She collected a cup of coffee from the buffet car, and resumed reading.
I do think, Freide, that the cruellest part of the sentence is that it has been set for one week ahead. If Gilmore could have been taken out immediately after the enquiry and executed at once, the matter would have been over and done with. But Niemeyer would not permit it. And that, I think, was when the last rags of Stephen Gilmore’s sanity deserted him.
Some of the officers have tried to talk to Niemeyer, but he will not be swayed. The sentence stands, and anyone refusing to carry it out will be court-martialled, and probably shot for treason in the face of the enemy. I begin to think if anyone is mad in this camp, it is Niemeyer himself.
Today he decided he will not risk solitary confinement for either prisoner, in case they cheat their executioners by some means of suicide. Instead, they have been locked away in the dormitory they share with six other men, and two armed guards have been posted at the door day and night. The other prisoners have been told that to assist Iskander and Gilmore in any way will result in their own deaths.
Iskander seems unruffled by his approaching execution, although he is clearly frustrated at being confined to the room, for the sentries report that he paces to and fro, as if seeking a chink in the structure through which he might escape.
Gilmore is retreating deeper into his own haunted darkness. He sits on his bed for long hours, sketching – some of the sketches he tears angrily to shreds, but others he places with great care between sheets of card. One is of the dormitory, with the men playing cards or chess, and several of our own men peering in at him. Curiously, Gilmore has drawn himself in the picture, but he has drawn himself as seated apart from the others. I do not have the knowledge to interpret this, but I find it immensely sad.
Last evening I asked him if I might have one of the sketches – not the dormitory one, which disturbs me, but a drawing of the courtyard beyond the dormitory’s windows. Gilmore has caught the brooding shadows, but has woven into them the suggestion of a watching, waiting figure. The face is barely discernible, but it is very clear that seen in light it would not be a pleasant face. And yet the sketch has such intensity that I cannot stop looking at it.
Gilmore said, ‘You can have it if you want. I don’t care.’
‘I shall treasure it,’ I said, and meant it, but, Freide, when we finally have our own house together, I don’t know whether we would want to hang it on our walls.
When Gilmore is not sketching, he walks back and forth to the same corner of the room, and stares down at a particular spot on the ground, like a man watching the slow, crawling progress of an insect. There is no insect there, of course, but he constantly peers down at something which he can see, but the rest of us cannot. At times he retreats quietly to a corner and huddles there, wrapping his arms around his body, staring at nothing.
Today both men were permitted to write a final letter to their families. I took them when they were finished, ready to post. Gilmore’s is addressed to a place called Fosse House in a village on England’s east coat. Iskander’s is to the Netherlands – a small town which I think is just outside Amsterdam. I did not read the letter, but before I placed it in an official envelope I could not avoid seeing that it was written in French, and that it began, ‘Ma trés chére, fille. Ma bien-amié, Leonora.’
I have not pried, but I cannot help remembering asking Iskander if there was a lady somewhere who was waiting for him, and his sudden defensive look, as if he was guarding something too precious to speak of.
Whoever had edited the letters – presumably Freide Edreich – had inserted the equivalent of a chapter break here. But there was still a good forty minutes left of the journey, and there did not seem to be many more pages, so Nell read on.
Twenty
Dearest Freide,
I write in some haste and not a little turmoil.
Stephen Gilmore and Iskander have escaped. Incredibly, they walked out of Holzminden wearing the same officers’ uniforms as they did the first time, and even more incredibly no one realized they had gone until it was too late.
We have pieced together as much as we can. It seems that Iskander acquired from the medical block (I dare say we will never know exactly how he did it) a strong opiate, which he used to drug not only the two soldiers guarding him, but also the other prisoners in the dormitory. Or, if he did not drug them, they made an extremely good pretence of being deep in drugged slumber for twenty-four hours, until Iskander and Gilmore had got away. This is either very devious of them, or loyal and courageous, depending on how you look at it.
And this time, no amount of wailing of sirens and wailing of Kommandants has recaptured Iskander and Gilmore.
The camp is in an uproar. Niemeyer is reported as being on the verge of an apoplexy, and he has stamped furiously around the camp confines, ordering arrests more or less at random, and court-martialling anyone who gets in his way. He cannot be dissuaded from sending a small party of men after Iskander and Gilmore, in order to ensure that his brand of black and bitter justice is carried out to the letter.
And I, Freide, am to be one of that party. It is partly because I have gleaned some knowledge of English, and partly because it is known I am a frequent correspondent to you and my family, and therefore thought able to send proper reports of our journey.
So now I have told you of my mission, which I should not have done. But I find such solace in knowing you will read this and that you will know what is happening, although I entreat you not to worry about me. It is true we are going to England, to Stephen Gilmore’s home on the east coast – it is believed this is where he is most likely to go, and we have the exact direction from the letter he wrote – but please be assured that the danger to us is very small. The journey has been meticulously planned, and I think the arrangements are safe and good.
But as to the purpose of the journey – oh, Freide, I am a loyal subject of our country and I will do what has to be done and obey all orders, but I am unhappy and more reluctant about this task than I have ever been in my entire life. There is such brutality and vindictiveness behind the Hauptmann’s actions. I know this is a time of war, but I believe, with Iskander, that Stephen Gilmore’s mind has been damaged by the horrors he has seen; I do not think he is in his right mind, and he should not be held accountable for his actions. Also, I cannot think it is right for such a senior-ranking officer (for anyone of any rank) to behave with such calculating cruelty.
This evening I bade farewell to my colleagues in the camp. They all wished me good fortune, and embraced me (in a perfectly manly and soldierly fashion, you understand).
I and two other soldiers are to be under the command of Hauptfeldwebel Barth. He is in high glee at being entrusted with such an important mission and has told me very solemnly that he is resolved to carry out Hauptmann Niemeyer’s orders to the last detail, and talks of how best to do so. I fear he has no imagination and precious little sensitivity. I should not say this – I certainly should not write it down – but if I am able to find a way of avoiding the vicious fate Niemeyer has decreed for Stephen Gilmore, I intend to do so. Even in the midst of this war, I can not believe that Niemeyer’s sentence is justified.
Hauptfeldwebel Barth has advised me on items I should pack, but since he has never travelled outside Germany in his life, and appears to regard the inclusion of a fresh consignment of bratwurst and six jars of pickled cabbage as necessities, I do not think I will pay his advice any regard. I have packed my woollen socks and also some flannel vests and bodices since England is known to be a chilly country.
We are to pose as Dutch émigrés (my own ancestry apparently suggested that to Niemeyer), although it is all very well for Niemeyer and Hauptfeldwebel Barth to say, airily, that the two languages are similar and the English will not know the difference. There is a considerable difference, I know that perfectly well from my Dutch grandfather. German and Dutch are two different tongu
es.
It is to be hoped the bratwurst will not go bad during the journey, because the smell will betray us to the enemy far more thoroughly than incorrect Dutch or English speech.
I have no idea when or how I will be able to write to you again – or if any letters will reach you – but I will do my very best to send you news. In the meantime, do not worry about me, for I shall be perfectly all right.
Your loving Hugbert
Dearest Freide,
This is a mad journey across Europe, and fraught with difficulties – although not, so far, with any dangers.
We are able to follow Iskander’s trail surprisingly easily, and this is because his wild story about having been a burglar appears to be true. In each town along our way, we have met stories of some great house in the area having recently been plundered. The plundering does not seem to have been done with any violence – all the burglaries have been executed with finesse and what might even be termed consideration. In Osnabruck and Munster two large houses had been broken into and various pieces of silver jewellery taken. (In both cases, the owners described the jewellery as ‘exquisite’.) In Düsseldorf, Iskander had romped through three museums, who were still mourning the loss of some seventeenth-century miniatures (described as ‘priceless’), a notebook reputed to contain original jottings of Goethe (‘unique’), and some early sketches by Theodor Hildebrandt (‘irreplaceable’).
Niemeyer and Hauptfeldwebel Barth were of the opinion that we should catch up with our escapees long before they reached England; they would have no money for travelling or food, said Niemeyer, as if this settled the matter. The Hauptfeldwebel agreed. I did not question them, but I suspected that Iskander would revert to his former profession to fund his and Gilmore’s flight, and it seems I was right. It is deplorable behaviour on Iskander’s part, but at least it is making the trail easier to follow. We have even been able to find out the trains on which the two travelled, and it is typical of Iskander’s careless arrogance that he always used the first-class services. For us, issued with carefully calculated funds, that is not possible, and jolting across the border into Holland in a third-class carriage with wooden seats, no sanitation, and a pervading smell of stale onions, I began to think much might be said in favour of burgling as a career.
We had expected them to travel in a more or less direct line east across Holland, to The Hague, and from there to cross the English Channel. We found, though, that they headed a little further north. The trail led us to a small town outside Amsterdam, and it was then I remembered Iskander’s letter, addressed to someone called Leonora. I explained this to Hauptfeldwebel Barth, who thought it more than probable that Iskander had made a frivolous detour to see a lady friend.
‘We should follow him,’ he said determinedly, so off we went again. (Trains for the relatively short journey were a little better this time.)
Infuriatingly, we missed our quarry by a mere two days, but I was able to discover that Leonora’s last name is Gilmore, and that she had left Amsterdam in Iskander and Stephen Gilmore’s company. The name cannot be coincidence; if Leonora Gilmore is the lady about whom Iskander was thinking that day – that precious private memory I glimpsed in his eyes – it is very believable that he would have befriended a man he believed to be from the same family.
The gentle Dutch couple with whom Leonora had apparently been lodging regretted that they did not know where the trio were bound; Miss Gilmore had boarded with them for about a year, they said. A generous payment for her keep had been made in advance by a very charming foreign gentleman – they did not know his name, but he had been courteous and considerate. (This is Iskander in his more gentlemanly role, of course.)
As for Miss Gilmore, she had been a most charming guest in their house. Polite, ready to help with household tasks. She had attended church every Sunday, and often during the week, and she had joined in some of the church activities – she had sung with their choir as well. She had a truly beautiful voice.
But there had always been what they would call an air of waiting about her, they said. As if she was daily expecting to be collected and taken to another destination – even another country, perhaps.
‘England?’
Ah yes, that was entirely possible.
So now we are heading towards the coast where we hope to find a suitable craft to take us to England ourselves.
Ever your devoted,
Hugbert
Dearest Freide,
So finally and at last we are in England and I send this in the hope of its safe arrival.
The journey was not as bad as we feared, although the crossing of the English Channel was fraught with difficulties, and Hauptfeldwebel Barth was in constant fear that we should be shot at or sunk, for the English, say what you will of them, have a very good navy, and we had all heard stories of the Dover Patrol. I am still not sure how we avoided the miscellany of Royal Navy crafts – the armed cruisers and drifters and paddle minesweepers, not to mention the sub-marines – but somehow we did. Perhaps we were too small and too insignificant a craft to attract attention.
Halfway across, the Hauptfeldwebel stopped worrying about being captured on account of falling victim to violent seasickness which appeared to attack him from both ends, if you take my meaning. He confided to me afterwards that he felt it could not help a senior officer’s authority over his men for them to see him crouching over a pail in a sheltered corner of the deck and retching into a pan at the same time. I was forced to agree, although I feel it was unnecessarily harsh of the two men with us to dub him Chunder Guts [translator’s note: this may not have been Hugbert’s precise word, but is the nearest term that can be found], and it has to be said that the Hauptfeldwebel’s energetic consumption of some of the bratwurst was probably to blame for his condition. As I feared, it had started to go unmistakably off, and the pickled cabbage had turned a very suspicious colour as well.
After alighting from the boat and starting our journey to our destination, we were, and still are, uncomfortably aware of being in enemy territory. Hauptfeldwebel Barth says if we are recognized as Germans we will be shot against a wall at dawn. I suppose this is true, but, for myself, I find the people we meet to be incurious and even cautiously friendly. They are remarkably resilient and much given to their own brand of humour. We visited one tavern where what I recognized as very rude songs were being sung about the Kaiser. Fortunately, I got the others outside before they could try to join in.
We are a cheerful quartet as we go along, usually in the guise of itinerant hop-pickers or something of the kind. We occasionally risk accepting offers from passing draymen or carters, which covers the miles more easily. I am able to talk about bulb-growing in Holland, which reinforces our disguise, and is also unexpectedly pleasant. I remember so much of the stories from my grandparents, and the holidays I spent with them. My health is good, although I have developed corns on both feet from walking, but we have slathered on goose fat from a very accommodating farmer’s wife, which has helped.
Much of the food contains what the English call stodge, which is not good for the digestion, so I am glad of my mother’s peppermint cordial. But I am finding the famous English roast beef excellent, and also dumplings, and there is something described as jugged rabbit. I am uncertain whether the rabbit is actually placed inside a real jug, but it is stewed in cider, which is a local apple-flavoured wine, and very delicious. On the other hand, last night we were offered a dish of tapioca pudding which I would not inflict on anyone.
Your always loving,
Hugbert
Dearest Freide,
Yesterday we arrived in the village of Stephen Gilmore’s home. Earlier this evening I walked along a lane by myself, to make sure of his house’s exact whereabouts. And now comes a curious fact. You will remember I wrote to you of how Gilmore talked of lamps being lit for him within the house, when he or his family returned from any journey. Like seeing a beacon, he said, welcoming the traveller home and guiding him through th
e twilight.
Freide, tonight I saw those lamps burning for myself. I stood at the gates of Fosse House and I looked down the long drive, with its dark trees lining it all along, and I saw the lamps flaring against the darkness. They are warm and welcoming, and I understand now why Stephen Gilmore clung to this memory above any other. They beckoned to me in a way I cannot explain, even to you. I think Stephen is here – I think he is hiding in that house.
So now comes the difficult part of our mission. Our orders are to execute Stephen – and also Iskander. But I believe he acted under extreme distress – that he was not sane when he fired those shots. If, indeed, he did fire them, for he was so vehement in protesting his innocence.
Even if he is guilty, I have resolved that if I can find a way to sidestep Neimeyer’s command and cheat Hauptfeldwebel Barth’s resolve, I shall do so.
If I fail – if Stephen dies – I believe the memory will be with me all my life.
My dearest love to you,
Hugbert
Nell had read the section about Leonora Gilmore with faint surprise. Having found Stephen in Hugbert’s letters, she had not been expecting a second Gilmore to turn up. As Hugbert said, though, if Iskander was romantically involved with a member of Stephen’s family, it was natural that he had been drawn to Stephen. But Nell would still like to know what had happened to Iskander, and also his Leonora.
There were only a couple of pages left, and she saw with a sharp sense of loss that Hugbert’s letters had ended, and that the final brief section was taken up with a note from Freide Edreich. It was dated the year of the book’s publication.
My husband, Hugbert Edreich, never spoke of what happened in Fosse House that night in 1917, even to me. I believe, though, that the memory stayed with him all his life.
I never knew Stephen Gilmore’s eventual fate, and I never tried to find out. My husband said to me once that some parts of the past were better left sealed up, and I believe that night in 1917 is one of those parts. I always respected his deep reserve on that period of his life, and I did not ask questions, but I believe he was still haunted (if that is not too dramatic a word) by his memories of the place.
