Death at Glamis Castle (5 page)

An hour later, as the train reached the outskirts of Carlisle, she had an answer to at least one of her questions. The sun, which had lain before them and was now dropping below the horizon, began to cast its fading light through the window on the left-hand side of the railroad car. The train was turning north toward Edinburgh, along what was called the Waverly Route.

“It seems that we're on our way to Scotland,” Charles said quietly, and Kate felt such a wave of enormous relief sweep over her that it almost turned her giddy.

“Thank God,” she whispered, and reached for Charles's hand. Wherever they were bound, whatever Charles had been commissioned to do, it wasn't South Africa.

Stretching out his legs, the colonel began to whistle the refrain of “Loch Lomond.”

Dreadnought
Robert K. Massie

 

 

 

 

The day had been a pleasant one, and Friedrich von Holstein had allowed the window of his office to be opened. Now, the clock on the tower across the Wilhelmstrasse began to strike nine, each metallic chime sounding deeper into his awareness, until he permitted himself to withdraw his attention from the report he was drafting and raise his head. He had been so deeply engrossed in his work that he had scarcely noticed that the sun had set and that one of his clerks had lit his red-shaded desk lamp. The hour was much later than he had thought, and it was time to end another long day of service to the Fatherland. He would reward himself with his usual leisurely dinner and fine wine in a private room at the Restaurant Borchardt at No. 48 Franzosischstrasse before retiring to the three small rooms in which he chose to live alone.

As Holstein gathered his papers and stacked them neatly on the desk in front of him, he reflected wryly that the Fatherland was still more of an ideal than an historic tradition. Crafted out of a loose federation of competitive states by his patron, Otto von Bismarck, the German Empire as it existed today had been a political entity for just over twenty years. Now sixty-four, Holstein had played a major but covert role in the growth and development of this empire, working in his own quiet corner of the Foreign Ministry while political parties rose and fell in the Bundesrat and Reichstag, imperial chancellors came and went, and foreign ministers and state secretaries assumed their posts and lost them. And since Bismarck's own forced departure from public service a decade ago, Friedrich von Holstein's was the invisible hand that steered Germany's course through the maelstrom of easy animosities and uneasy alliances that marked the European community.

Holstein picked up the neat stack of papers and placed them in the top right-hand desk drawer, closing and locking it. The report was routine but necessary, only one in an endless stream of memoranda, dispatches, and letters that crossed his desk on their way to the desks of ministers and embassy officials across Europe and to Germany's friends around the world. This one, however, was bound for no more distant destination than the large oak filing case in the corner of the room, where he kept the most secret documents.

Holstein sat back in his leather-upholstered desk chair, stroking his mustache and short white beard and considering, for the hundredth time, the progress of the plan and its implications and ramifications. It might be only one in a vast, spidery network of plans and schemes in which he was involved, but it had a very great international significance. By now it should be well in motion, and all that remained was to await von Hautpmann's report of its successful conclusion.

Holstein frowned, reviewing his decision not to inform the Boy of the plan and concluding once again that he was acting correctly. Kaiser Wilhelm II—whose unpredictable immaturity and volatile childish passions had earned him the nickname of the Boy—might well have approved the scheme. It contained just the blend of conspiracy and stealthy intrigue and secrecy that the Kaiser relished, and it threatened King Edward with a deeply embarrassing revelation that might well topple the monarchy. Given the Boy's growing animosity toward the British Empire, ruled for most of the preceding century by his grandmama Victoria, he would most likely seize upon it gleefully.

But Holstein did not consider Wilhelm reliable enough to be entrusted with the details of such a potentially explosive plot. After all, the new King of England—who had so recently succeeded to the throne that he had not yet been crowned—was visiting Berlin and Hamburg just now, following the funeral of his sister and the Kaiser's mother, the Dowager Empress Friedrich. The Boy, who from time to time glowed with a sudden family sentiment, might in a moment of emotional weakness or in an effort to ingratiate himself disclose the plan to his royal uncle. It did not do, Holstein felt, to give Wilhelm any more information than was absolutely necessary to accomplish one's ends, whether they had to do with politics, the military, or espionage. The Kaiser was best managed as one would handle a poisonous snake: as long as one understood the creature's limitations, anticipated its actions, and did not provoke it, one was relatively safe to go about one's business in its vicinity. And if the plan went wrong, Hauptmann had taken great care that the business could not be traced back to Germany and the Foreign Office. If Hauptmann failed, the Kaiser would never hear of it. If Hauptmann succeeded, there would be ample time to determine what should be done with their prize, and when and how the Kaiser should be told.

Holstein smiled into his mustache. Ah, yes, Hauptmann. He was a good man, reliable, resourceful, and fearless. In connection with his espionage work for Gustav Steinhauer, the former Pinkerton private detective who was now in charge of German Intelligence, Hauptmann had enjoyed a great many successes in the past several years—more than enough, certainly, to blot out any lingering embarrassment he might have felt after the disappointing failure of his weapons-smuggling scheme in Rottingdean in '97. Holstein, who often found much fault in the work of subordinates, could find none in Hauptmann or his smuggling plan, for it had been splendidly conceived and skillfully executed, to the very end. That it had failed was due neither to negligence nor poor planning, but to the intervention of a single man.
²

Holstein stood and began to button his rusty black frock coat. As was his custom when one of his subordinates failed, he had required Hauptmann to provide him with a full written report documenting the circumstances—in this case, including a dossier of the man who had so adroitly cheated Hauptmann of success. He glanced again at the wooden cabinet, which held (among other secrets) the report Hauptmann had prepared after the operation's unfortunate conclusion. There was no need to consult either the dossier or supporting documents to refresh his memory, for Holstein could picture its contents as he could mentally picture and recite from each document in every file in his office, a faculty that both awed and terrified his clerks.

The recollection of the last line of the file gave Holstein a twinge of concern, but it was only fleeting. There was no need to worry. Lord Sheridan was a most interesting man, one whom he might like one day to meet, but in the final analysis, his lordship was nothing more than an amateur and a dilettante, one of those British aristocrats who gadded hither and thither in pursuit of his own precious interests. And lightning did not strike twice in the same place. Hauptmann would return soon with his prize, and they could decide what to do with it.

Holstein finished buttoning his coat, put on his hat, and went to the door, locking it behind him, closing away Hauptmann's defeat and the rest of that unpleasant affair at Rottingdean. The thought of Lord Charles Sheridan would not disturb his dinner.

Traditional Scottish ballad

 

 

 

 

Constable Oliver Graham was a usually cheerful young man, so far as any Scotsman may be deemed cheerful, for he was satisfied with his life and his work to a degree that most people of his acquaintance were not. Glamis Village and its environs—the constable's precinct stretched almost to Kirriemuir to the north, Forfar to the east, and equal distances to the west and south—were both beautiful and peaceful, with only the occasional drunken farmer or quarrelsome neighbor or vagrant cow with which to contend.

Besides this, Oliver Graham had been born and lived all of his twenty-three years in this place, and he knew every man and his land and all his beasts, every woman and all her children (or as many as could reasonably be known, given the evident fertility of those in his district), and every bend and turn of the footpaths and the roads, which he patrolled regularly on his bicycle. He possessed the confidence of his superior (Chief Superintendent Douglas McNaughton, who was headquartered in Forfar), the respect of the citizens of the district, and a cozy cottage with a sound thatch, inherited from his father and mother, who were old and lived for their comfort with his sister in Dundee.

Indeed, it was no wonder that Oliver Graham's heart was warmed with a genial proprietary glow when he thought of his precinct and all it meant to him. Given the many successes he had achieved at a relatively young age, the constable might perhaps be pardoned for the smugness with which he contemplated the satisfactions of his work and his life.

However, Oliver Graham did not have quite all that he desired, and in one vital area felt himself to be sadly deficient. The constable was in want of a wife, a lack which he had only recently begun to feel strongly and which he hoped to remedy as soon as might be. He had fastened his expectations and hopes upon a young woman whom he had known from childhood, with whom he had played in the streets of Glamis Village and in the woods and fields around the great castle. Indeed, Oliver Graham and Flora MacDonald had in their youth been childhood sweethearts, trading innocent kisses and love-tokens in the shadows of the tall pines, hiding love notes under a rock near St. Fergus Well.