Donald now learned how fear stimulates the intellect. The essential thing was to be armed. He would prevail upon Haighman’s conscience to give him a rifle. Donald was a fine shot; he had been the captain of the school shooting team. He would trade his Rolex watch for a Lee Enfield or a Mauser, or even a Mosin-Nagant. The last valuation of the Rolex had been 145 Troy ounces of gold. That was no mean sum. Even Haighman probably drew a salary of no more than a hundred ounces a month. Whatever it took, he would have himself a rifle. Blind determination turned fear into anger.
On the tenth day, he was led up to Team Lieutenant Haighman’s office again.
“I am pleased to inform you that the Krossingtons have agreed to negotiate for your repatriation.”
Donald was almost disappointed, having spent days psyching himself up to be discharged as extracted infestation. He was also surprised. The Krossingtons must still perceive value in the body of Donald Bartleigh Aldingford.
“The Dasti-Joneses are sending a carriage later today.”
“What happened to the young lady who survived the crash?” Donald asked.
“The one with no knickers? Oh, we did the decent thing and gave her some knickers. I don’t think she’d ever seen a pair… In seriousness, you don’t need to know that she is well. She’s in the deal too.”
“What’s her name?”
“You don’t need to know that her name is Her Decency Sally Tabetha Eugenie Krossington-Darcy.”
“I’ll remember these favours you’ve done me, Haighman. If you ever need a favour returned, don’t hesitate to make contact.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
Haighman obviously did not consider the likelihood worth taking seriously, although he was too polite to say so.
Chapter 5
Team Lieutenant Haighman escorted Her Decency Sally Tabetha Eugenie Krossington-Darcy from the administration block. Her clothes were the same as Donald’s, a set of brown canvas overalls, brown puttees and boots. She looked smaller and older than he remembered, and no longer glamorous; she could have been one of his own maids. There was a healing gash on her forehead and her left arm was in a sling. Haighman reached ahead to open the carriage door and stepped aside for her. She climbed into the cabin. Donald was but a commoner and so rode outside on the bench at the back, which he actually preferred as it was a relief to have wide open sky above his head. Besides, it was a warm, sunny day. The high position of the bench would provide an excellent view during the journey.
The driver rapped his bench with a drum stick and hailed:
“Take up your slack… Ready… At steady tempo… Pull!”
The team of a dozen men heaved the carriage into motion. It crackled through a long turn on the parade ground and rolled out through the fortress gate onto the rod-straight road along which Donald had been led ten days ago. The carriage was lightly-built in aluminium, with skinny, wire-spoked wheels about five feet in diameter that skipped over the gravel. It made an easy pull for the team, who soon found their stride in a brisk walk. The fields and hedges and water channels started to flow by.
The landscaped was dotted with settlements of cuddly thatched cottages reminiscent of the homes of dwarves in children’s story books. Small, dirty people worked everywhere. One field was crowded with children gathering weeds in wicker baskets and tipping them on a steamy fire. The next was loaded with women stooped over digging out potatoes with their bare hands. The next was being ploughed by a team of eight young men, bent over as if to dive, quivering and stumbling forward to the bark of the ploughman.
Spider-like systems of irrigation channels radiated out from header pools to surrounding fields. The header pools were kept topped up by women circulating around and around in bucket chains with the uncanny routine of a flywheel.
In surveying this human effort, Donald grew more and more perplexed that none of it was done by machinery. In truth, he had never thought much about life on the sovereign lands. This was the first time in his life he had ever seen the daily labour of sovereign natives. In his life he had only visited sovereign lands four times, in each case for a summer holiday with his family. On the last occasion two years ago, they had been borne by carriage through the crowded streets of Portsmouth to a long platform, where they boarded a vehicle like a caterpillar formed of several long carriages with steel wheels running on thick steel rails. His escort had informed him it was an heirloom from the Public Era known as a train. It turned out to be a smooth and fast way to cover distance. It carried them through miles of woodland to a charming village on a tidal estuary where Tom Krossington had arranged a cottage for their stay. Donald had never caught so much as a glimpse of the daily life of natives, nor thought to ask about them.
His wife Her Decency Lavinia of Laxbury came from a manorial clan on the Lands of Krossington. The scenes he was seeing now must be as familiar to her as their family life in London, yet she had never mentioned anything about natives struggling in mud. His daughters Marcia and Cynthia spent their holidays at Laxbury manor. Perhaps the natives lived better lives there? Or perhaps… Donald, being but a commoner, had never been invited to the Laxbury estate in ten years of marriage. He would probably never set eyes on the place as long as he lived.
A wide gravel avenue joined the main track ahead. As the carriage passed it, Donald received a perspective view towards a mansion a quarter of a mile away. The pale brown gravel drive ran up the exact middle of an expanse of striped lawn so
