Farthing (15 page)

So, Carmichael thought, sitting down again, you know something about me and I know something about you, but does it get me any closer to knowing whether what you’ve told me is lies and what is truth? Was

that intended as intimidation or seduction? He shook his head and made several notes on his pad.

“Check billiard room, ask all guests about billiards. Determine all bedtimes.” He looked at these a moment, then added: “Ask Lizzie about Normanby’s tea.” She’d know.

He was just picking up the last of his papers when he heard the shots outside.

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The thing itself was over in minutes; the fussing afterwards took forever. I wanted to go back up right away and see the dead anarchist, but of course they wouldn’t let me, and my being wounded gave them an excuse. The bullet had whizzed past my cheek and torn it open. The wet stuff on my face was blood, of course. Head wounds bleed a lot, even when they’re not very serious—I remembered Abby telling me that.

“Get her inside,” Daddy said, peremptorily. The sergeant from Scotland Yard put his hand up to help me dismount. Daddy, on Trafalgar, and all the other policemen, on foot, went tearing back up the hill. I slid down from Manny’s back, although it was nonsense— really it would have been far quicker for me to have ridden back to the house. We were just the other side of the ha-ha. I let Manny loose to graze with her reins on her neck; once Trafalgar had gone, she wasn’t likely to wander far. My legs were shaking a bit. I’d have been far better to stay up.

The sergeant drew an extremely clean white handkerchief out of his pocket, a real snowy white, I almost didn’t like to mess it up. “Stand still, miss,” he said.

He dabbed at my cheek, getting some of the blood off, and making it sting rather worse than it had done before. I don’t know when I started feeling it. I know I hadn’t felt it at all at first. I could feel it before the sergeant started doing his stuff, though. Even then it wasn’t all that painful, similar to, but nothing like as bad as, being stung by a bee.

“It’s just a scratch,” the sergeant said after a moment, and I laughed, because that’s what manly heroes in stories always say about the most terrible things that they’re making light of. A scratch, or a flesh wound, and I supposed it was a flesh wound as well—a cheek is definitely flesh. He looked at me for a moment as if I was mad, then he got it and laughed too. “Just a scrape, then, a graze,” he amended. “You were very lucky. Rifle wound, that is. A couple of inches and it would have been through your head.”

“Or Daddy’s,” I said, sobered. “I suppose it was Daddy they were shooting at. Nobody would want to shoot me.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” the sergeant said. “Better not to worry about that side of it yet, the why and wherefores of it, not until after you’ve seen to the practical side. You’ll want to wash that now, and get a doctor to look at it to see if they can do something to stop you scarring, and then you can start worrying about what he wanted and who he was aiming at. If you want to worry about it at all, that is, because by then it might be better to put it behind you if you want to sleep at night.”

“I suppose it might,” I said. “Just at present I’m fearfully curious though.”

“Right now you’ve got things to see to and no time to be thinking about it,” he said. “Wash the wound.

See the doctor when he gets here. You don’t want a scar, pretty face like you’ve got.”

The scarring didn’t matter, but washing it was a good idea. I didn’t want it to get infected. He handed me the handkerchief, which I’d already made rather a mess of. “I could tell people it was a dueling scar,” I

said, wadding it up and holding it pressed to my cheek.

“Young ladies don’t duel, miss,” he said, and looked at me consideringly. “Anyway, that’s not a place a

rapier would get you. Knife, maybe, not that young ladies knife fight either. Going to tell them you were a lady pirate?”

“Anne Bonney was a woman and she was a pirate,” I said. “And there was another one too, Mary…

Mary someone. They were pirates in the Spanish Main, not pirates’ wives, pirates themselves.

Anne

Bonney was a pirate captain.”

The sergeant looked at me in frank scepticism, but it’s absolutely cross my heart and hope to die
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true, and you can look it up for yourself if you don’t believe me. Abby gave me a book about them for my birthday when I was ten. “Catch your horse, now,” was all the sergeant said.

I caught Manny, who hadn’t gone far, but didn’t want to come. She was eating clover, which was terribly bad for her and likely to blow her out if she got too much. I had to drag her away from it. I’ve always wondered why horses have so little sense of self-preservation. It’s amazing really that they lasted long enough to be domesticated and looked after by people. Still, if they had more self-preservation I don’t suppose they could be ridden into battle, not that anyone does that anymore, not since that time the poor

Poles tried it in ‘39 and got mowed down by tanks. But Manny had cavalry horses in her ancestry—she’s a direct descendant of Greatgrandfather’s mare Agincourt, whom he rode into battle in the Indian Mutiny and the conquest of Sind. Perhaps horses who are descended from more peaceful ancestors have more sense.

“I’ll take him back to the stable for you if you like, miss,” the sergeant said, dubiously, looking up at

Manny as if she were an elephant.

“Her,” I said. “And I’ll take her, she knows me, and I get the feeling you’re not all that happy with horses.”

He laughed. “Not so many of them where I come from, miss.”

“Where do you come from?” I asked. We were walking along now, me leading Manny.

“Camden Town, in London,” he said.

“No, there wouldn’t be many there,” I said. I knew Camden Town, at least I’d been through it. It was one of the poor areas that suffered a lot in the bombing. Just a few weeks before, David had told me about lending money to a family there to rebuild a shop they used to have. I couldn’t tell the sergeant about that, of course. It was business, and David had told me in confidence. I’d have liked to have told him though, if I could.

“The police would have taught me to ride if I’d wanted to, but I never did. I don’t care much for horses, great huge things that would step on you as soon as look at you. They’re obsolete now, to my way of looking at it, so I learned to drive instead.”

I laughed. “Cars are nice too, and you’re right, horses are mostly just for fun these days. But Manny’s very gentle. I don’t know about police horses—they use them for crowd control, don’t they? So I don’t suppose they can be gentle.”

“I never did any of that. I went straight into the Yard after being a runner, miss,” he said.

“My name’s Lucy,” I said, because I didn’t want him calling me “miss” when we were being so friendly;

it didn’t feel right. Anyway, “miss” is wrong; now I’m married it ought to be “madam.”

“I’m Sergeant Royston, Mrs. Kahn,” he said, confusing me, and making everything revert to stuffy formality where we had been having such a nice conversation. It disconcerted me that he knew that,

knew my name, knew who I was, and kept on calling me “miss.” Some of the servants who had known me for years still called me “miss” and “Miss Lucy,” but there it was a case of finding it difficult to break a habit. There wasn’t any habit with Sergeant Royston, and still he didn’t treat me as if I was really married. That made all his friendliness before when we were talking about pirates and horses seem like a sham.

“Come along,” he said, after I’d just stood there for a moment, one hand on the handkerchief and the other in Manny’s reins. “You really ought to get inside, Mrs. Kahn. We don’t know that the terrorist your father shot was alone.”

I hadn’t thought of that before, but he was right, the woods could have been crawling with assassins. I

walked on thinking about that, which made my back feel sort of super-sensitive. I kept feeling I
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needed to keep my spine very straight just in case. I was relieved when I came around the corner of the house to the stable yard.

I took Manny in. Harry came rushing up right away and took her from me with lots of clucking about how terrible these murderers were and what a blessing Daddy took the gun. It was, too, so I started thinking about that. How strange to be alive because of Harry wanting jugged hare!

Sergeant Royston went off somewhere, probably back up the hill to look at the dead terrorist, where he’d doubtless been dying to be all this while he’d been wasting time looking after me. I went into the house.

Everyone was gathered round in the hall as if to hail the conquering hero, which made me want to laugh. I

suppose I was feeling a bit hysterical. Mummy wasn’t there, but I think everyone else was, even Angela, and a lot of the servants. David came up at once and hugged me. He seemed far more shaken at the scrape than I was. He was terribly pale. “You could have been killed,” he kept saying. “Oh Lucy, my darling, you could have been killed!”

I think I did go into shock then, which I hadn’t before. Maybe it was David saying that or maybe it was knowing I was safe inside again. We went into the library, just the two of us, and Jeffrey brought us tea, which we both drank gratefully. I didn’t even notice whether it was China or Indian. After I’d had it, Sukey took me to the downstairs bathroom. That was the first time I got to see my face in the mirror, and it looked perfectly frightful. Fortunately, most of it was dried-on blood, which came off as soon as Sukey attacked it with warm water and cotton wool.

Once that was off, I just had a row of cuts, a scrape, really. I did look like a pirate or maybe a gangster’s moll. Sukey dabbed Dettol over the scrape, which made it burn and hurt worse than it ever had. She fussed over me dreadfully. I resisted all her efforts to make me go upstairs to lie down. I couldn’t see what good it would do. She had already called the doctor, to look at Daddy’s arm, and insisted that he’d see me as well, over my protests. It wasn’t the kind of thing where stitches would help. She fastened a strip of gauze across it, held on by sticking plaster.

Then the police came back, which I’d known they would, which was why I’d resisted going up. I knew they’d want to talk to me. The doctor came at the same time and took Daddy off upstairs to patch him up. A police van was also there, which I suppose was for the corpse.

I was just hanging around, waiting for the police to want me and letting David fuss over me, when

Mummy came into the library. She was wearing ordinary clothes, country tweeds, but she still managed to look like a dreadnaught sweeping into some foreign harbor to claim it for the British Crown. She sat down under the bust of Portia and arranged her skirts as carefully as if they had swept the floor.

“Mr. Kahn,” she said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d let me speak to my daughter alone.”

I immediately grabbed David’s hand. “Anything you want to say to me, Mummy, my husband can also hear.”

“Do you have to be so tiresome, Lucy?” she asked, as if I were twelve years old.

David would have left us to it, but I clung onto him and wouldn’t let go. As it was, I think he only stayed because I was wounded. I wanted him there not just for comfort but because she wouldn’t be so savage in front of a witness. David said once he thought I was too afraid of Mummy and that gave her power, that if I stood up to her she’d back down—though when I did stand up to her, about marrying David, she didn’t back down an inch, ever. Daddy forced her to come to the wedding, and she was threatening right up to half an hour before to go in mourning clothes.

“I don’t want to intrude on your privacy, Lady Eversley, but Lucy wants me to stay,” David said.

“Oh very well, what does it matter anyway,” she said. “While you’re here, Mr. Kahn, I’ll take the
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opportunity of asking you if you’d speak at a subscription dinner we’re having in London on June sixteenth. It’s a dinner for managers and businessmen, and the idea is to put across the case against the menace of trade unionism and Bolshevism. I wondered if you’d like to give the financial angle.”

“I’d be happy to give the financial angle against Bolshevism, if you mean against the USSR,”

David said, giving a little bow. “That is, I can tell them that collectivized economies and human nature don’t work well together, and even explain some financial details of that. But I’m afraid I see nothing very much wrong with trade unions, financially, there’s no reason the workers can’t combine to get a better deal for all of their labor, any more than would be true of a steel manufacturers group doing the same with their steel.

Labor is the worker’s capital, Lady Eversley.”

“But they have no right to withdraw their labor and paralyze industry,” she said.

“By the same argument you could say that a factory owner has no right to close his factory and throw thousands out of work,” David said.

Mummy frowned, clearly without an answer to David’s lucid reasoning. “Well maybe you’ll keep to the

Bolshevik side of things and leave the unions out,” she suggested.

“I’d be delighted, Lady Eversley,” David said, giving me a look that said: See, I told you your mother would become reconciled to the marriage eventually! I gritted my teeth.

“And Lucy,” she said, turning to me. “When you speak to the police about this assassin, this double-murderer, who is, I hear”—she turned to David—“actually a card-carrying Bolshevik, the next thing to a fifth columnist. In any case, Lucy, make sure you tell them your father shot him in self-defense.

We need to put up a united front here. If there’s any suspicion that your father needn’t have shot him, it could become difficult. The police are, of necessity, not really gentlemen, and they sometimes like to feel they have power over a person who is a gentleman. I don’t suppose for a moment that any jury would bring in a verdict against your father, but let us make sure there is no possibility that it will need to come to that.”

“I really didn’t see what happened,” I said. “I know he shot first.” I put my hand up to my check.