A Soul of Steel (11 page)

RETIRED, DUE TO DEATH

In the
same cheery parlor where we three—Irene, Godfrey and I—had first heard the puzzling story of poor little Louise Montpensier and the odious forced tattoo, Mr. Stanhope unfolded another tale as compelling, one that would draw us from our rural Paris nest and into greater danger than any of us suspected that placid summer day.

He had dressed for the occasion in some clothes of Godfrey’s that hung quite as limply on his spare frame as the shapeless foreign robes in which we had found him. Despite his privations, I sensed in this onetime acquaintance the same tenacious survival spirit I had seen in the late Jefferson Hope, the American frontiersman who had tracked wrongdoers for twenty years before seeing them punished only days before his own death from a heart condition.

I recalled Mr. Stanhope’s odd comment that he had been called “Cobra” in Afghanistan, and his teasing hints to me that he knew intimately the customs of such a savage place, even those between its men and women.

I really did not care to hear his tale for fear it should deprive me of a young girl’s one moment of breathless admiration. Such moments were sufficiently rare in my life that I did not care to have one tarnished, not even by the person who had inspired it a decade before.

Irene had ensconced our guest in the tapestry-covered bergère, a kind of French easy chair, with—appropriately—an afghan over his knees. I had made it during Irene’s many private home singing concerts, when she was often accompanied by the parrot Casanova’s razor-edged counterpoint.

Godfrey had filled Mr. Stanhope’s lean brown hand with a snifter of the finest French brandy. Irene sat back, veiled in her favorite accessory for hearing bizarre tales, a haze of cigarette smoke. Mr. Stanhope accepted another vile cylinder from Godfrey with a faint smile of pleasure.

“Egyptian.” He nodded to Irene. “Excellent taste, Madame, for an American.”

“I do have excellent taste, Mr. Stanhope, as you can see by the quality of my associates.”

Mr. Stanhope eyed Godfrey and me in turn, then grinned. “Call me ‘Stan,’ I beg you. I have been too long among strangers, among those who would call my name only to distract me while a dagger tickled my ribs.”

“Stan?” I repeated unhappily. It is a common name, more suitable for a plumber than a gentleman or a soldier. I admit that “Emerson” had reverberated in my memory and imagination much more euphoniously through the years.

“An Army nickname,” he explained gruffly. “It is short and it is sweet, and it does not remind me of days forever lost.”

I dropped my eyes, unable to argue with the depth of emotion evident on his face.

“It began in the Army, the story you will tell us,” Irene prodded thoughtfully. She was ever impatient for the meat of the matter.

“Indeed. So do most tales of death and betrayal and bloody incompetence. The details of our country’s Afghanistan adventure from eighteen seventy-eight to eighty-one have faded already in the public awareness, and for good cause. The Great Game Russia and Britain played across the barren steppes of Afghanistan was not glorious for England.”

“You refer to the eighteen-fifties’ rout, the retreat from Kabul and the slaughter of the civilians,” Godfrey put in. “The Afghans do not appear to be governed by the rules of honorable warfare.”

Mr. Stanhope gave him a sharp glance. “No nation wages civilized warfare, Mr. Norton, though we emphasize the atrocities done to us rather than those our own side commits.”

Irene inhaled impatiently from her slender, dusky cigarette. “Why would someone wish to kill you now, over a war that you admit is already long forgotten?”

“Perhaps because I do not forget.”

“Ah.” She settled into the armchair with the innocently arch pleasure of Lucifer curling himself up before the fire. “Those who refuse to forget can be troublesome indeed. What memory do you carry that is so valuable—or so inconvenient—to someone? We already know that you seek to save the life of a man you do not know. Why is your own in danger?”

“I still am not convinced that it is.” At this assertion, Godfrey elevated the distorted lead ball without comment.

Mr. Stanhope nodded wearily. “Hard to argue with a spent bullet. I think I know the marksman. He would not have missed unless he had meant to.”

“But,” I put in, “we had bent down to catch the cat just then, do you not remember? Our heads were down.”

“According to where it entered the bedpost,” Godfrey added, “the bullet would have passed through your head had you remained decently abed instead of chasing cats with Nell.”

“Nell?” Our guest stared at me with some confusion.

“A nickname,” I explained a trifle smugly. “It, too, is short, far more efficient than ‘Penelope,’ and Mr. Wilde cannot make endless coy classical allusions on it.”

He nodded slowly and savored his brandy. “I forget that you have traveled far, as well. This is better than salty tea,” he declared suddenly.

“Whyever should you drink salty tea?” I wondered.

“Sugar is a rare and expensive item in Afghanistan, so precious that they drink their tea with salt. Even salt is so treasured that it is saved for only the tea.”

“A most uncivil place for an Englishman!”

“You are right, Miss Huxleigh, which is why, after this second Afghanistan war, we English retreated to the civilities of India. Even the ferociously ambitious Russians appear to have tempered their hopes in regard to the area.”

“Then why did you stay on?” Irene demanded.

“I could not return.”

“Why not? You were unwounded, and you had a medal. That is more than most men take from wars.”

“How did you—?” He attempted to rise but his weakness— or the brandy, or both—forced him to fall back.

“I searched your most intriguing apparel and found it in your shoe.”

“That is no way to treat a guest, Madame.”

Irene’s golden-brown eyes glittered like murky gaslights through the blue fog of her cigarette. “You are not a guest, my dear Stan; you are a puzzle.”

He frowned. “I begin to fear I have fallen into the lair of one more lethal even than Tiger.”

“Your suspected marksman,” Godfrey prompted.

Mr. Stanhope looked at me. “Your friends are formidably quick, Miss Huxleigh.”

“They are curious as cats, I admit, but I do nothing to encourage their tendencies. Despite this indefensible interest in the most private affairs of others, they have been of actual assistance to some. Pray do not judge them harshly.”

My comment brought a bitter laugh. “The opposite case is more likely,” he said. “Very well. I will tell you what you wish to know, though it’s an ugly story.”

Irene held his gaze. “First, does that medal I found in your shoe belong to you?”

He started up again, fire burning in his pale eyes. “Before God, Madame Norton, you tread where the Tiger himself would hesitate. I would not dishonor myself by bearing another man’s medal.”

Irene shrugged. “A good part of mankind is more casual in such matters than you, and I imagine a great many of them populate Her Majesty’s troops, especially in these degraded days.”

He subsided, noticing that each of his aggressive gestures had caused Godfrey to sit forward in his chair with a decidedly tigerish expression.

Once again he looked to me for enlightenment. “I trust that Miss Huxleigh does not suspect me of purloining medals.”

“Never!” I replied. “I fear that my friends are more influenced by your present appearance than your honorable past, Mr. Stanhope.”

He laughed then, softly, at himself, his hand stroking his beard. “I look a bloody wild man, I suppose. I had forgotten... Even when I first came to Kabul, and found myself adept at the local languages, my fellow officers looked at me aslant. It is not the done thing, you know, speaking the lingo like a native. Better to shout at them in English; they will not do what we wish in either case.

“Yet a talent I had, and few could speak Afghan or the various dialects. So they made me a spy.”

“Ah!” Irene exclaimed rapturously, lighting another cigarette with a lucifer snatched from a dainty Limoges box painted with hyacinths.

The scent of sulfur starched the air. Irene imbued even the most masculine occupation with an instinctive femininity—unless she wished to pass for a man, and then she doffed her ladylike habits in one fell swoop, as if they were an opera cloak.

Godfrey nodded. By the engaged arch of his raven eyebrows I could see that the milieu of the mystery—a foreign clime, military matters, past treachery—were capturing Godfrey’s interest as Irene’s earlier, more domestic investigations had failed to do.

I, of course, could not have been more indifferent, save for the subject of our inquiry.

“A spy,” Irene repeated in a dreamy, thrilling voice. “Sarah would love it.”

Mr. Stanhope shook his head. “Grubby, thankless work, but Army life did not suit me. I liked being off on my own in the crowded native bazaars, eavesdropping among them, dressed like them, bandying a few words, as I realized that I could indeed pass as one of them.”

“You must have been invaluable to the command,” Godfrey commented.

“Not I. I was too lowly to report directly. I needed Tiger for that.”

“Who is this Tiger?” Irene asked. “He sounds intriguing.”

“I don’t know. That was the point of the names, was it not? He was just Tiger, and I was Cobra.”

“Cobra,” I breathed. “It sounds so, so—”

“So much more dramatic than it was,” he finished. “Serpents are supposed to be silent and swift, and that is what the occupation of spy demanded. My task was almost too easy,” he mused. “My mastery of language is instinctive. I can hardly explain it—”

“An ear,” Irene put in. “Singers call it perfect pitch. What others need to study, one can reproduce in an instant. I myself am able at languages, but you must be a born master. Do you sing?”

He looked confused, for good reason. “I’ve joined a chorus or two at camp. I’m reasonably true, but no soloist.”

“Irene,” I put in, “is an opera singer.”

“Retired,” she added swiftly.

He nodded. “Due to death.”

“Due to
reported death,
which is much the same as the real thing.”

“Naturally,” I explained, “Irene has this perfect pitch she mentions. So she understands your gift.”

“More of a curse,” he said wearily. “It has kept me from England for a decade. But you ask about the medal. It was awarded to me for spying. That was before the court-martials came, and the charges in the aftermath of Maiwand. I might have lost it if I had stayed around, but I didn’t.”

“You didn’t go home to England,” Godfrey said, frowning. “Where then did you go?”

“Where no Englishman and no Russian would find me. I went the length and width of Afghanistan. To the brutal mountains of the Hindu Kush that thrust against the ceaselessly blue skies, to the farther mountains north of Kabul, through the eye of the Khyber Pass’s twenty-seven miles of legend and death where brigands play gatekeeper, into the far eastern Afghan hills toward China, to the ice-bound lake along the Russian frontier. Into no-white-man’s-land.”

“You lived among the natives for ten years?” Irene’s question was not so much incredulous as admiring. “You passed as they? You vanished, Mr. Stanhope, from the world of Berkeley Square, even deserted the comfortable hill stations of India’s English settlements? What a... role... you must have played, have lived. And in all that time no one disturbed you?”

“No. Even when I visited India again, I buried myself in obscure native villages. Few civilized men ventured into that terrain. I wanted to lose myself, and it was easier than one might think.”

“Why?” I asked, appalled at the waste of this fine man in that ungodly wilderness.

“I was sickened of war, of my kind, of myself. We lost at Maiwand, and there was treachery in it. Our troops took their stand in a deep ravine outside the village, but Tiger had failed to report a subsidiary ravine meeting it at a right angle. Through that sheltered slash in the terrain the Ayub Khan poured his formidable artillery. I was able to warn only one man the night before the battle, a friend, Lieutenant Maclaine. He pushed his own battery of artillery forward to cut off the Ayub’s secret secondary attack, though Brigadier Burrows ordered him back to the agreed-upon battle lines.”

“Where did you spend the battle?” Godfrey asked with interest.

“Unconscious near the village,” Mr. Stanhope said bitterly. “I was attacked leaving camp. When I awakened, our forces were in retreat. Some British medical man came to tend my battered head. Even as he bent over me, a bullet knocked him aside. I now wonder if that ball was meant for me, even then. But I was swept up in the panic of retreat, and still half out of my head. The Afghanistan fighters harried our flanks through the mountains to Kandahar, which was the nearest Afghan city where we had troops garrisoned.”

“And Maclaine?” Irene asked. “The young lieutenant who defied orders to forestall the treacherous attack. What happened to him?”

Mr. Stanhope regarded her with empty eyes, over his empty brandy snifter. “Captured while foraging for water near the village of Sinjini during the retreat. Held hostage along with five sepoys in the camp of the Ayub Khan.”

Irene winced, while Godfrey rose to refill Mr. Stanhope’s glass. My old acquaintance stared into that bubble of crystal as if he saw the battle of Maiwand in it.

“You cannot imagine the heat and the dust,” he said. “Our troops had recorded temperatures at one hundred and fifteen degrees Fahrenheit in June, when the
bad-i-sad-o-bist-roz,
the hot west winds-of-a-hundred-twenty-days, whip up dust devils all month, and this was almost July.

“We danced with dust until all was swirling, murky confusion punctuated by the screams of men and horses and camels. We had to abandon some of the field guns, abandon some of our wounded. Luckily, I had been attacked before I had managed to change from uniform back into my spy garb. I would have been a dead man for certain in my native robes amidst that mob of rampaging men.

“We stumbled back to Kandahar, an organized retreat in name only. The public soon knew the outcome: how we settled in to defend the city against siege; General Roberts’s famous forced march to Kabul of ten thousand fighting men, eight thousand ponies, mules and donkeys and eight thousand followers, in three weeks, over three hundred miles of desolation at the very apex of the heat. This turning tide washed over the Ayub Khan’s forces and resulted in his retreat, although he promised that the five prisoners would not be harmed. In the changing fortunes of war, soon the British were sweeping into Ayub’s abandoned camp.”