Holmes pulled the bell-knob again, and the sound died away a second time, but now there was something else: a scuffling noise, coming slowly down an uncarpeted hallway. The door opened, and we looked into the face of the prisoner himself.
Tall, so gaunt as to make Holmes seem fleshy, clean-shaven to reveal the furrows and hollows of his seven decades and more, he was dressed in an ordinary, old-fashioned suit gone shiny at the knees, but there was something about his stoop and his gaze that caused me to glance involuntarily at his ankles. He wore no shackles —at least, no tangible ones—but he stood nonetheless with the posture of an old lag at hard labour.
“The Reverend Mr Hastings?” Holmes asked. He took the man’s silence for an answer. “My name is Holmes. I wrote to you concerning—”
“I feared you would come,” the man interrupted. His voice was hoarse, either from injury or disuse. “You should not have done so.”
“There are questions to which I must have answers,” Holmes replied, his tone gentle.
“Questions that ought to remain unasked.”
“Nonetheless, I must insist.”
Hastings neither denied Holmes’ right to insist nor asserted his own right to refuse. Instead, the recognition that Holmes was not going to walk away settled over him like a weight, the latest of many, and his face aged another half decade. He turned away abruptly, leaving us to close the door and follow him down the dark hallway to the kitchen, where he filled the kettle from the tap and set it to heat.
The kitchen was pure Victorian, a gloomy servant’s quarter without the servant. The shelves and cupboards had been painted a peculiar and unappetising shade of green long before Victoria died—perhaps even while Albert was still alive. The fluttering gas lamps reflected off that paint made our host look like a corpse, moving between hob and cupboards.
“Will you take coffee?” he asked over his shoulder, sounding as if he hoped the answer would be negative so he could drink in peace.
“Thank you,” Holmes answered for us both. Hastings had yet to acknowledge my presence; however, three cups appeared on the tray. In silence, he spooned and stirred and filtered the fragrant beverage into a dented silver pot gone black with tarnish, and carried the tray out of the room as if we were not there. Obediently, we trailed after.
The sitting room needed the gas up even in the middle of the morning. The coals in the grate smoked in a sullen fashion, as if they’d been put on wet, and the lamp on the wall behind me flickered badly. Hastings laid the tray on a low table, took what was obviously his customary chair beside a taller table piled high with books, and bent forward to pour into the three cups. He took his black, and left us to add sugar or milk as we wished. The milk in the jug looked dubious, so I satisfied myself with three sugars. I stirred, sipped, and coughed in astonishment.
For the first time, Hastings noted my presence enough to glance at me. “Is there something wrong with it?”
“No, no—not at all,” I assured him. “It’s delicious.”
Actually, it was, but also powerful. The dim light and lack of cream had not prepared me for a brew nearly the equivalent of the thick Arabic stuff Mahmoud had made. It was not what I would have expected from such a frail creature.
“I drink it strong,” he told us. “It keeps me from sleep.”
Holmes glanced up sharply, as the dread permeating the word “sleep” slapped into the room. Hastings might as well have substituted the word “nightmares.”
Holmes set down his cup and got the ordeal under way.
“Reverend Mr Hastings, as I told you in my letter, I am making enquiries for the Duke of Beauville into the death of his nephew, Gabriel Hughenfort. I was given your name as chaplain to the regiment in which Hughenfort was serving at the time of his execution.”
Hastings jerked so sharply at the last word that some of the coffee splashed out of the cup onto his knee. He did not notice.
“You can’t—,” he said. “I can’t—oh my dear Lord, he was only a child, nothing more than a child!”
And then he was weeping. An aged man carrying a burden of pain raw enough to reduce him to hard sobs is a terrifying thing to behold, and Holmes and I exchanged a horrified glance before he shot out one hand to rescue the cup. I reached for the throw on the back of my seat and draped it across Hastings’ shoulders, a pointless gesture but the only sort of comfort I could come up with at the moment.
“Perhaps some tea, Russell?” Holmes murmured. “If you can find some fresher milk?”
I slid away gratefully to the kitchen, located some more promising milk in the cooler portion of the pantry, and found that he had left the kettle simmering away. In bare minutes I was back, and Holmes thrust the hot, sweet tea into the man’s hands.
The gentler stimulant did its work. When the cup held only a sludge of sugar at the bottom, Hastings drew a shaky breath and handed it over to be refilled. When that cup was halfway down, he summoned the strength to begin his tale.
“They were such children, by that point in the War—red-cheeked and frightened, trying so hard to keep a brave face, for themselves and the others. In the early days, of course, that wasn’t the case. I offered my services as soon as war was declared, so I saw the first days of the Expeditionary Force. Those men, they were hard as rocks, with no more imagination than the mules that pulled the guns. Tommy Atkins at his best—Kipling would have known them in an instant.
“And then over the winter the new generation of Tommies began to arrive, in a trickle at first, then in numbers. Strong young men from factories and farms, undergraduates and lower clerks, idealistic and patriotic and oh, how they died. The government trained them for their fathers’ wars, taught them how to handle themselves in honest battle, and then shipped them off to hell in the trenches.”
He blew out a breath, his eyes far away, seeing France nine years before. “One boy I remember, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, a shining example of English manhood. He arrived with his papers in October of ’15, and instead of keeping him back until his regiment came off the front line they just passed him on. I was there when he reported for duty. The sergeant had just brewed tea, and was handing me a tin mug when we heard the noise of someone sloshing along the duckboards. We stuck our heads out from under the scrap of tarpaulin the sergeant had rigged as a shelter from the rain and saw this sopping-wet creature with a shiny new hat and mud to the thighs, stumbling up the trench. He spotted us under the flap and waded over to the dugout.
“And then the young fool stood to attention to return the sergeant’s salute. Straightened his back, and a sniper took him, right through that pretty new officer’s cap.
“And do you know, the sergeant laughed. It sounds utterly callous, but it was such an appalling irony, to see this fresh-faced, blue-eyed boy stand up proud to do his patriotic duty, before either of us could stop him. I still see it: The boy’s hand comes up and—pop! God takes off the top of his head. What could the sergeant do but laugh? And God forgive me, it was such a shock, for a moment I couldn’t help joining him. Twenty-one years of education and responsibility going into an erect spine at the wrong instant. God’s sense of humour can be brutal.
“That was the volunteer army. It got so the sight of a newly applied set of officers’ pips made my stomach heave, we lost so many young officers. It made me rage, that all their expensive training didn’t include the basic skills of survival. Not a gentlemanly trait, I assume, self-interest. They sent us children, and we offered them up to Moloch, and they sent us more. I had a boy die in my arms whose cheeks had less down on them than a ripe peach. He was fourteen, and the recruiter who’d accepted the lie about his age should have been shot.”
Hastings’ words had welled up like poison from a lanced boil, but at this last phrase he stumbled, remembering why we were here. After a minute he started again, the flow slower now but inexorable.
“We had three executions in the units I served with. I witnessed two of them. The first was a foul and bitter affair, a regular soldier in his late thirties who’d been drunk, got in an argument with his sergeant, and shot him. The man was charged with murder, and executed three weeks later. That was in April of 1915. Two of the men on the firing squad broke down during the summer, had to be transferred to less active duty before they were charged with some dereliction of duty as well. One of the men returned to the Front the next spring, the other I heard died of septicaemia from some minor wound left untreated, a year or so later.
“The second execution was in the winter of 1916. A private standing watch fell asleep on duty, and although he might have got away with ninety days’ field punishment, he’d been warned twice before. So they shot him.
