The Thirty-One Kings

by Robert J. Harris

  I spotted another man crawling through a patch of long grass and made a hit close enough to send him scrambling back towards his car.

  ‘We’re going to have to keep reminding them that we don’t want company,’ I said.

  ‘They’re spreading out,’ Sandy warned.

  He was right. The Germans were forming a wide arc, making it harder to keep an eye on all of them at once.

  ‘Do you think they’re going to make a charge?’

  Sandy’s brow furrowed. ‘More likely they’ll try to pin us down while one of them finds a blind side.’

  We each took a few more shots, forcing the besiegers to keep their heads down.

  ‘I’m pretty low on ammo,’ I said, sliding some shells into my gun.

  ‘Me too,’ said Sandy. ‘We can’t hold them off for much longer.’

  ‘Gentlemen, my friends,’ said Gabriel, ‘I am sorry you have fallen into this for my sake, but I am honoured to be one of your company.’

  He propped himself up on the windowsill, ignoring his injuries and trying to bring his gun to bear. When he fired, unsteady as he was, the recoil almost knocked him over.

  ‘Listen,’ said Sandy, ‘if you two can keep them busy for a couple of minutes, I’ll see if I can sneak out back and outflank them. The element of surprise may be just enough to give us an edge.’

  ‘But if they should spot you,’ Gabriel objected.

  ‘You’ve never watched him stalk a deer,’ I told the young Austrian. ‘A shadow doesn’t move more silently.’

  Gabriel was summoning a pained smile when a fusillade hit us. Bullets hacked the door, shattered the remaining panes of window glass, and blasted chunks out of the wooden boards. All of the Germans were firing at once now in a concentrated attack.

  Gabriel jerked back reflexively. His injured leg gave way and he tumbled to the floor with a yelp of pain. I was reaching to help him when a bullet smashed through the window and hammered into my right arm. A jolt of agony made me fall to my knees, my gun clattered to the floor, and a red haze covered my eyes.

  ‘Dick, are you all right?’ I was aware of Sandy crouching beside me.

  ‘Not so good, I’m afraid,’ I groaned, clamping a hand over my wound.

  My arm hung limp and useless, a sure sign that the bone had been shattered. As my vision cleared the hail of bullets ceased and a shaft of light broke from the back of the room. The rear door had swung open, and there stood Beata van Diemen. In her hand was a Mauser machine pistol which could cut all three of us down in the blink of an eye.

  ‘Drop your weapons!’ she commanded, her voice cutting the air like the crack of a whip.

  I had never before seen Sandy turn pale, but now he looked as if he was confronted by a ghost. He saw at once the resemblance I had been so slow to recognise and it froze him on the spot. Then his soldier’s instincts took over and he quietly assessed our situation.

  Everything in her posture and the steely gleam in her eye told him she would put a bullet in each of us before he could got a shot off. Carefully he set his pistol aside and displayed his empty hands.

  Beata, dressed in a plain black jacket, riding breeches and leather boots, looked every inch the huntress I knew her to be. I understood now that the men out front had merely been a distraction, allowing her to creep round to the rear, and the sudden storm of gunfire had been timed to let her enter unnoticed.

  She cast a smile of cold satisfaction over her captured quarry. ‘There will be no more escapes for you, Graf von Falken. And you, Mr Hannay, you are supposed to be dead.’

  She eyed me down the long barrel of her gun, as though deciding whether to finish the job now. Then Sandy stood up. The moment the pale light touched his face, her expression changed. Her mouth hardened and her eyes flashed like ice.

  Sandy took a single step towards her and the air in the room crackled with the shock of their mutual recognition.

  ‘I know who you are,’ Beata whispered. ‘You are the man my mother called Greenmantle.’

  At the uttering of that name Sandy flinched as if he had been struck by a piece of shrapnel.

  ‘I was called that once,’ he acknowledged. ‘It was a long time ago and very far from here.’

  ‘She offered to lay the world at your feet,’ Beata spat, ‘to make you an emperor.’

  ‘That is the very offer the devil makes from generation to generation,’ said Sandy, almost as if he were channelling the words from somewhere beyond himself. ‘A wise man turns away from it.’

  ‘Even a wise man cannot escape his fate, Lord Clanroyden. It is a cruel destiny that has delivered you into my hands.’

  ‘I don’t suppose either of us can escape what the past has done to us,’ Sandy told her solemnly.

  He advanced towards her with slow, deliberate steps, like a pilgrim in fearful awe approaching a sacrificial altar. Gabriel and I lay wounded on the floor, mere witnesses to events that seemed to be moving forward with a relentless inevitability.

  Beata’s iron composure had been shaken by this unlooked-for encounter, but now she stiffened and levelled her pistol at Sandy. ‘Stay back,’ she warned imperiously, ‘I am quite prepared to kill you right here and now.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that at all,’ Sandy responded in a voice scarcely louder than a murmur. ‘I suppose it would be only just.’

  I watched helplessly as the distance between them closed. There was a terrible, elemental quality to their confrontation, as if they met not in some corner of France but in the middle of a sun-blasted desert with an arid, angry wind howling about them. I could hear Sandy speaking to her in German but so quietly I could not make out the words. It was then that she shot him.

  Sandy took the bullet in his chest and paused for a split second before falling forward onto Beata. In the same instant I saw a thin blade slip from his sleeve into his right hand. He drove the knife straight into her heart with all the life that was left in him.

  Beata’s mouth fell open, more in disbelief than in fear. The pair of them crumpled to the floor, locked in their fatal embrace, then slipped apart, each stained with the blood of the other. Beata’s dead eyes stared fixedly upward, as if straining for a glimpse of her Valhalla.

  I pushed myself up and staggered towards Sandy, falling to one knee beside him. His life’s blood was ebbing away but he reached out and took my hand in his. His fingers already felt cold to the touch. He spoke to me in a ghost of his own voice, his eyes wandering about the room as if in search of someone else.

  ‘Dick, tell Barbara I’m coming home at last. . . Tell her that I’ll be there ... to watch over her and Diana . . . always.’

  With that final breath his hand went limp and slipped from mine. He was gone, untethered at last from the harbour of this world. My heart sank and I felt shaken to the very bottom of my soul.

  Gabriel appeared at my side and crossed himself in the Roman fashion. ‘He was a great man.’

  ‘He was that,’ I responded in a choked voice.

  At that very moment the door was kicked open and the first of Beata’s gang stood framed in the doorway with a sub-machine gun in his arms. He took in the scene at a glance and ground his teeth at the sight of his dead mistress. Turning his weapon upon us, he uttered an almost feral growl and began to press the trigger.

  I started at the sound of a shot, but it did not come from the German’s gun. It was the crack of a high-powered rifle that sent him toppling over, a jet of blood spouting from his shattered skull.

  Behind him his companions cried out in alarm and looked frantically about them. They were aware that they were easy targets for whatever unexpected enemy had surprised them. One by one a series of expert shots from a band of unseen marksmen felled them all in a matter of seconds.

  Closing Sandy’s eyes, I lurched over to the door and saw our rescuers hurrying towards us. At their head, dressed for the hunt and carrying a rifle fitted with a telescopic sight, was my old friend Turpin. With him were three other men with lean tanned faces acqui
red from years of stalking wild game in the woods and mountains of France.

  ‘By all the saints - Richard!’ the marquis exclaimed. ‘I should have guessed that when the Boche came you would be here to give them a bloody nose.’

  We embraced in the doorway and I winced at the pain in my wounded arm.

  ‘Turpin, I’ve never been so glad to see a man. Another few seconds would have been too late.’

  ‘We saw the plane from a distance making its attack,’ he said, ‘and assumed the worst. With all haste we followed the sounds of gunfire and spotted the Boche coming at you.’

  Gabriel limped over to join us and I introduced them.

  ‘We shall take you to my lodge and I shall fetch a doctor,’ said Turpin. Then he became grave. ‘But where is Lord Clanroyden?’

  Without a word I led him inside to where Sandy lay in the peace that had eluded him for so long.

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ Turpin groaned. ‘This is a high price to pay.’

  ‘We can’t leave him here,’ I said.

  ‘No, we will take him,’ Turpin stated firmly. ‘We shall see that he returns to his home.’

  22

  THE FINAL BEGINNING

  That night we recuperated at Turpin’s hunting lodge. He fetched a doctor who patched Gabriel and myself up as well as could be managed for the present. A simple coffin was obtained to hold Sandy’s body.

  In the morning we set off in a small fleet of cars for Bordeaux. The Germans were too busy consolidating their hold on Paris to press any further south. Moreover, everyone expected the French government to announce an armistice within the next few days that would hand victory over to the invaders without another shot being fired.

  Blenkiron’s instructions had been to head for the airport at Bordeaux where transportation back to London would be arranged for us. When Turpin dropped us off there, it lifted my spirits considerably to find Archie and the Die-Hards waiting for us. We greeted each other warmly, relieved that we had made it through, if not unscathed.

  ‘You two have taken a few knocks,’ said Archie, noting that my arm was in a sling and Gabriel was limping.

  ‘I’m just glad to see you made it out of that farm, Archie,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I managed to get Antonia back in the air,’ Archie reported proudly, ‘but sadly she gave out on me just before Dover. I had to ditch in the sea where some navy tars fished me out and treated me to a shot of rum. It’s a damned shame to say goodbye to the old girl, but she did get me home. Almost.’

  He gestured towards the runway where a Lockheed Hudson transport plane was waiting for take-off.

  ‘There’s my new kite over there. She’s a much bigger ship, as you can see. Though I have to confess I’m completely stumped as to what to call her.’

  ‘Did your Aunt Antonia have a sister, perhaps?’ I suggested.

  ‘You know, I never thought of that. Let’s see . . . Cordelia? No, that won’t do. Millicent? Absolutely not! Dash it, something will come to me.’

  The Die-Hards had quite an adventure to recount and I was not to hear the entire story until we were in the air. In the meantime Jaikie gave me the gist of it.

  The firefight outside Le Pégase had been ferocious, especially when a squad of German troops arrived to take possession of the precious prisoner. Jaikie had made a dash to the roof and shinned down a drainpipe into an alleyway. He dodged his way to where the others were holding out and they took off in their bullet-riddled car.

  Fortunately for them, Beata had realised they were merely a diversion and sent all the men at her disposal in pursuit of Gabriel and myself. The damaged Delage gave out after only a few streets and the Die-Hards proceeded on foot.

  ‘I’d caught a bullet in the calf,’ said Dougal, ‘but Doc patched me up well enough so I could keep up.’

  ‘Knowing that the Germans would be busy occupying key government and strategic positions, Thomas devised a route that got us past them all,’ Jaikie explained. ‘Dougal and I, during our reconnaissance of the city, had spotted a number of boats tied up along the Seine, and we borrowed one of them to take us beyond the enemy lines.’

  The normally reticent pastor chipped in with some further explanation. ‘They’ve not had time yet to organise river patrols, so we slipped away with no trouble at all.’

  ‘Once back on land we ran into a French motorised unit making an unhappy retreat westwards,’ said Dougal, ‘so we threw in with them.’

  ‘And did our best to cheer them up with a few Jacobite songs,’ Peter added with a chuckle. ‘We Scots know a thing or two about bouncing back from a drubbing.’

  We walked across the tarmac towards the plane and Gabriel couldn’t help but smile at the Die-Hards as they joked and laughed among themselves.

  ‘I shall never understand the Scots,’ he said. ‘Their religion is so grim, their country so cold, and yet they are the most romantic of people.’

  ‘If we’re going to pull a victory out of this conflagration,’ I said, ‘we’ll need men with that sort of fighting spirit.’

  ‘Richard, one thing above all is very important to me,’ Gabriel said earnestly. ‘Your prime minister must broadcast a message that will be heard across Europe, a call to resistance, so that all of my friends will know that Roland has arrived safely at the court of Charlemagne.’

  ‘I think I can promise you,’ I said, ‘that once you’ve delivered your information about the thirty-one kings, Churchill will have some strong words to say on the subject.’

  We all fell silent as we watched Sandy’s coffin being loaded aboard the plane.

  I was aware of The Pilgrim’s Progress in my pocket and of Mary’s words from many years ago when we strolled together through the St Germain forest. ‘Before the pilgrimage can be completed,’ she reminded me then, ‘the best of the Pilgrims has to die.’ For my friend that long journey of hope and hazard was finally over.

  For the rest of us it was just beginning anew.

  However matters may go in France or with the French Government or with another French Government, we in this island and in the British Empire will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people. If we are now called upon to endure what they have suffered we shall emulate their courage, and if final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gains, aye. And freedom shall be restored to all. We abate nothing of our just demands - Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, all who have joined their causes to our own shall be restored.

  What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over... the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.

  But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL’S SPEECH TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, 18 JUNE 1940, THE DAY AFTER THE FRENCH SURRENDER

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  John Buchan wrote five novels featuring Richard Hannay. It has been a privilege to be granted the opportunity to continue his adventures and to introduce him to the Gorbals Die-Hards from Buchan’s marvellous Huntingtower series. Many thanks to all those without whose assistance Richard Hannay would still be in unhappy retirement.

  My wife Debby has been, as ever, my sounding board, chief researcher and most demanding editor. Kirsty Nicol dug up all manner of useful information on everything from train timetables to vintage c
ars. Elizabeth Wein provided additional aeronautical information. My son Jamie was the one who gave me the nudge needed to get the whole project started. The unfailing enthusiasm of the whole team at Birlinn/Polygon has been a constant source of inspiration. The facilities provided by the University of St Andrews library and the Department of English have greatly helped in the creation of this novel.

  Peter’s story about the Scotsman and the bucket in chapter eleven is a true story originally told by Gregor Macdonald of the Cameron Highlanders. You can find it on page fifty-five of St Valery: The Impossible Odds (ed. Bill Innes, Birlinn, 2011).

  For more information on The Thirty-One Kings and my other projects, please visit my website at www.harrisauthors.com.

  R.J.H.

  THE THIRTY-ONE KINGS

  Pegasus Books, Ltd.

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  Copyright © 2018 by Robert J. Harris

  First Pegasus Books hardcover edition September 2018

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  ISBN: 978-1-68177-854-9

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  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.