Soldier No More

'Gaston's Madame Peyrony's odd-job man,' said Audley across the table to Roche. 'He stokes the boiler, and does the repairs, and digs the garden, and that sort of thing.'

Digs the garden sent a shiver down Roche's spine. If Old Gaston dug Madame Peyrony's garden from way back, then he had planted more than roses in it, for sure.

'Stein!' Audley's voice had lost its heartiness. 'What does he want?' There was a touch of bluster about it now, and under that uneasiness. 'Stein?'

The Israeli turned round suddenly just beyond the doorway, but then stood there for a moment in silence, without moving. 'Well?' snapped Audley.

Stein straightened up—until he did so Roche didn't realise that his shoulders had slumped—and came back into the light. 'Well?' said Audley again.

Stein looked at Jilly. 'Get your wrap, dear. We've got to go.'

'What's happened?' asked Lexy.

'There's been an accident.'

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Steffy?' Lexy stood up quickly. 'To Steffy?'

Jilly had risen just as quickly, pulling her wrap from the back of her chair on to her shoulders.

'Not you, Lady Alexandra,' said Stein. 'Jilly will do.'

Lexy had started to move, but now she stopped. 'What sort of accident?' She knew, of course. They all knew, thought Roche—they knew without the fractional pause before Stein gave up trying to edit the answer.

'She's dead, Lexy,' said the Israeli.

XIV

ROCHE'S TRAVELLING CLOCK woke him to order before dawn, into blind man's darkness inside the Tower.

Against all the odds of alcohol and exhaustion, and the too-few hours the night's events had left him, he became fully aware of all the co-ordinates of his mind and body long before the tiny bell mechanism had exhausted itself beneath the folds of his shirt, with which he had deliberately muted it.

He had to get up and get on with the job. Thinking about Steffy— knowing just so much, and nothing at all— only brought back the sour taste of nightmares which he shouldn't remember, like the taste of last night's alcohol.

He fumbled for his torch under the camp-bed; found the torch, and found the matches on the table beside him; put down the torch and struck a match to light the candle Audley dummy5

had left for him—the flaring match and the sputtering candle-flame illuminated the tower room around him, sending thousands of shadows everywhere creeping into their holes, in the great rack of bottles—the bottles winking and blinking at him.

Before he could think more about it, he forced himself out of his sleeping bag and set his bare feet on the floor. And he saw, as he did so, the slim red gold-embossed book which he had pulled out of his hold-all, with his torch and his little alarm clock—which he had tried to read for a few moments in that same candlelight so few hours before, wanting to sleep and needing to sleep, but fearing to do so ... Wimpy's gift, Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill . . . and thought of the old Roman general on the Great Wall, with his world falling in ruins around him, listening each morning to his sword and saying to himself 'And this day is allowed Rutilianus to live'. . .

He drew his shirt over his head, and hauled his trousers on to his legs; and pulled on his socks and pushed his feet into his shoes, and tied up the laces; and, just as automatically, picked up the torch and acquiesced in the Plan of Action he had formulated the half-night before, as he had assembled the camp-bed and unstrapped the sleeping-bag.

The very automation of these simple actions carried him beyond the getting-up which had been no more than the reverse of lying-down. What the Tower had once been, before Audley had worked on it, he still wasn't sure: it was the size dummy5

of a great dovecote or a small defensive donjon . . . but there was nothing now in it to indicate which it had been, if it had been either of those, only the new wooden floor beneath his feet and the new wooden ceiling twelve feet above his head, with the smell of the fresh timber faint in his nostrils.

He flashed the torch-beam around him. Well. . . maybe it had been both those things in its time: in the bad old days Aquitaine had been famous for its petty barons, who had all needed their castles, and this Quercy region of it had also been celebrated for its dovecotes and pigeon-lofts, over which the avaricious peasants had litigated endlessly to establish their rights to the valuable bird-droppings. On balance, judging from the thickness of the wall in which the doorway was set rather than from the total lack of windows in the room, he was inclined to guess castle bastion originally, even though he had seen nothing outside very clearly in the yellow beam of the Volkswagen's headlights to support that theory; most of his attention had been caught by the little cottage in the trees just below, which the lights had transformed into another Perrault fairy-tale house, with its dormer windows and pantile roof.

Not that it mattered either way—whether this was the last remnant of the Beast's castle or Beauty's father's pigeon-loft; what mattered now was that it was Audley's tower, remodelled for his purposes—for his argumentative orgies down below and . . . according to Jilly, for his writing work-room above, up that ladder and beyond that trap-door.

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Of course, the odds were long against there being the sort of final evidence he required for certainty up there, waiting to be found, especially if Audley had so little suspicion of Captain Roche that he was happy to let him bed down in the Tower . . .

He raised the trap-door cautiously, until he felt it lodge against something.

Books everywhere . . . books and learned-looking periodicals

—a stack of English Historical Reviews, and another of the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society beside it, right under his nose, just above floor level— books and periodicals and mounds of type-written papers covered the floor of the work-room. Either Audley hadn't got round to having bookshelves made, or the round walls of the Tower had defeated his carpenter.