“But he was an officer,” Holmes pointed out. “I could find records of only two or three other officers executed during the whole War, and only one of those for refusing to fight.” It was, in truth, the most incomprehensible part of the whole affair: Gentlemen were simply not lined up and shot, and even as Gabriel Hewetson, the boy’s class must have been instantly recognisable.
“It must have been the divisional commander’s letter that did for him. ‘An example must be set,’ it said. ‘The regiment’s unrest and growing unwillingness in the face of battle is a grave danger to us all,’ it said. ‘The cowardice of one young officer whose fighting skills have already been demonstrated to be of a low order must not be allowed to infect his fellows with the urge to mutiny.’ ” Hastings rubbed his face with both hands, a dry rasp that made my own skin creep. “The words of that letter are graven on my memory. But do you know, when I finally reached the man and confronted him with the result of his letter, in the first part of September, he could not even recall having written the thing.”
His aged voice trailed into the exhaustion of despair, and he did not need to tell us that this last betrayal had been the final blow. After a minute, he went on.
“They told him the day before, what his sentence was. That was common practice. I suppose it was hard on the other men, to hear the weeping and gnashing of teeth from their condemned comrade. The next morning they took him out and shot him at dawn. Marched him with a sack over his head so the eight men didn’t have to see his face, and a square of white cloth pinned to his breast as the target. They stood him in front of a half-ruined house, with pock-holes where a previous man had been dispatched. Eight men picked up their rifles from the ground, each hoping that his held the blank. And do you know what that lad called out to his executioners when he heard the bullets going into their chambers?
“‘Aim true, boys!’ he said. ‘Don’t let me down.’ ”
And with that, Hastings finally buried his face in his hands and wept. I was not far from sobbing myself, and Holmes’ stony features concealed little of his own emotion.
It would have been a mercy to end there, to offer the man our bleak thanks and leave him to his misery. Since that was not possible, we were obliged to regroup, to ply Hastings with food and drink until he had regained his equanimity. It was distressingly like the medical attention given a man to enable him to stand with his blindfold in place.
An hour later, with a degree of colour returned to those sallow cheeks, Holmes went after the last pieces.
“You told us he had a visitor.”
“The night before the execution, yes.”
“Only one?”
“Two, in addition to myself and his batman, but one was simply a representative from his men, offering their farewell greetings. The other was an officer, a staff major I had not seen before. He asked me to leave them alone, spent perhaps two hours with Gabriel, then left.”
“Did the boy tell you who this major was, what they said?”
“He was a friend, perhaps a family member. Some person of long acquaintance, to judge by the warmth of the handshake. And the man did seem to do some good. Before he arrived, Gabriel was growing increasingly agitated—pacing in his cell, unable to settle to prayer or conversation. He had been asking me if I would take a letter to the commanding officer. He had not written anything as yet, but he seemed to think that the letter might save him. I tried to press him—if there were mitigating circumstances, health problems, if he’d lied about his age, anything that might convert his sentence, that I could present in appeal—but before I could find out what he had in mind, this major arrived, and when he left, Gabriel’s demeanour had altered entirely. Whatever they said to each other, the boy’s fear had vanished, replaced by a calm acceptance that gave him a sort of wisdom beyond his years. He seemed to radiate holiness, if that doesn’t sound like some foolish fancy of an old man. He was very beautiful.”
“And you have no idea who this red-tab major was?”
“I don’t.”
“What did he look like? Tall, short, blond, what?”
“It was fully dark. The nights were brief then, but he came well after mid-night. He was shorter than I, but not much. I didn’t see his hair. If it is important, you might ask his family. They will almost certainly have saved the letter Gabriel wrote them.”
“It was brief and uninformative,” Holmes told him.
“No, no, I mean his last letter, the one he wrote and gave to the major.”
There was a moment’s startled silence. Then Holmes said grimly, “You had best tell us about this letter.”
“Do the family not have it? Perhaps they destroyed it. I can understand not wanting to have it as a reminder. It took Gabriel more than an hour to write, earlier that evening, before the visitor came. It came to several pages, I remember that, and was addressed to ‘Father.’ I did not ask to read it; I merely provided the paper and pen.”
“The only letter the family received was a rather grubby object of less than a page, informing them that he was going into battle on the morrow and that he loved them. It was undated.”
“Most of the soldiers carried similar notes, a final good-bye in case they were killed. But there was nothing else from the major?”
“There was no letter from any major.”
“Oh, dear Lord. It must have been lost. What a great pity. But he must have gone to see them, after the War. He was some sort of family, after all.”
“They had no word.”
“But . . . he was staff.” Meaning, staff officers, secure behind the lines, did not suddenly get themselves killed in the final months of fighting. Hastings assumed that we knew this, and continued with his narrative.
“I wrote to the family, of course. But then that is how you found me, so you know that. Writing letters to families was one of the main duties of officers. I found later that there’d been heated exchanges in the House of Commons over executing volunteers, particularly when they were not even legally adults. However, the Army deemed capital punishment a necessary tool in the maintenance of moral fibre, so instead of doing away with executions, they simply concealed them from the people at home. Death notifications became merely ‘died in active service.’ My own letter refrained from mentioning the manner of Gabriel’s death, stressing instead the love his men had for him. I kept the details to myself, since I assumed the major would write and I did not wish to contradict whatever he chose to tell them. What a tragedy, that his parents did not have his final words to them. I suppose this means that Gabriel’s own letters were lost as well?”
“Do you mean to say that this major appropriated the boy’s letters?”
“Goodness. I always assumed he had. That same afternoon, I helped Gabriel’s batman—McFarlane was his name; poor fellow, he was heartbroken—to pack up Gabriel’s effects and return them to the family. There was a pretty biscuit tin where I’d once seen Gabriel put a letter from Hélène, and it was gone. I didn’t have the heart to ask McFarlane about it—he was on the edge of tears the whole time. I thought that Gabriel had instructed his man to give them to the major, or perhaps to destroy them. They might have been too personal for him to wish his family to read.”
“Do you remember McFarlane’s full name?”
“Jamie, I think it was—Jamie McFarlane. A gnarled stump of a man; looked as if he’d live to be a hundred and ten, but he died two days before Armistice. Not from injuries, either, but an illness. Pneumonia, as I recall.”
It was frustrating beyond belief, Hastings’ tantalising bits of information that lacked any evidence to tie them together. The picture of Gabriel’s last days had evolved into a ghostly sketch, but every possibility of adding colour and dimension—the major’s name, the batman, the girlfriend’s surname, Gabriel’s letters and diary—was snatched out of our reach as soon as it appeared.
“And the diary, no doubt, went the same way,” Holmes complained bitterly.
But to our surprise, Hastings
was again shaking his head. “No. Gabriel kept that with him during the night, and wrote small notes in it from time to time.” And then, as Holmes was opening his mouth to demand what in God’s name had happened to that piece of Gabriel Hughenfort’s life, Hastings’ next words dropped into the room with the impact of an unpinned grenade, tumbling over each other in his haste to explain, and justify. “He gave it to me at dawn, just as they came for him, and said to keep it safe until someone came to ask me for it, and so I kept it, and I waited, and the War ended but no-one came. No-one came! That was when I learnt his true name—only then, nearly a year after his death, did I breach its pages to see if I could find . . . But when I discovered who he was, I didn’t know what to do—I could not bring myself to write to such a family. No, Gabriel told me to keep it safe until someone came to ask me for it, so I kept it safe, and no-one came. Until you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Holmes recovered his voice first. “You have this diary?”
“Then you weren’t sent to retrieve it?” Hastings said, which sounded more a confirmation of suspicions than a question.
“Why didn’t you tell us you had it in the first place?” I demanded.
“I thought you would ask for it and then leave,” he answered slowly. “When you did not immediately do so, I realised that I wanted you to hear the entire story. Would you have stopped here the afternoon if I’d offered you the diary the minute you arrived? Gabriel deserved having his eulogy delivered once, at least. Thank you for listening.”
With an effort, he pushed himself to his feet and tottered out of the door and up the hallway to the room at the front of the house. We followed, to a book-lined room whose clammy, stale air testified to the fact that its occupation was only occasional, probably in the summer months. Certainly the books looked well read; the desk was tidy but also showed signs of long use. He went around the desk, pulled open a drawer, and took from the top of it a volume about five inches by seven, bound in once-crimson leather, the edges folded in from a lengthy stay in its owner’s pockets or pack. Hastings held it for a moment, then gave it to Holmes, who opened it just long enough to riffle through the pages before placing it in his pocket. Hastings’ gaze followed the object until it had disappeared from view, then he reached down and slid shut the drawer.
Manners—and more, compassion—demanded that we allow Hastings to assert his hospitality by serving us more of his near-Arabic coffee. With pulses racing, we eventually took our leave, thanking him for all he had done, for us and for Gabriel.
“It is I who need to thank you,” he told us. “For years I have longed to speak of that boy. It was good to say his name, even if your coming has meant that his name is now the only possession of his I have left.”
“The family will, I am sure, wish to thank you themselves.”
“They know where to find me.”
We shook hands and turned to go, but I hesitated, and looked back up at the old man.
“Will you be all right?” I asked. “Is there anything we can do for you?”
“There is nothing you can do for me,” he answered gently, and the door closed against us, the house again a faceless presence.
“That is not entirely true,” Holmes muttered to himself, and stopped in the high street to send a long and carefully worded telegram to the parish’s bishop, to the effect that one of his flock was in need of episcopy and succour.
We found the next London train to be in slightly less than an hour, and as one side of the waiting area was occupied by a weary woman with three small children and the other by an aged deaf couple, the noise precluded easy conversation. We retired to a nearby public house, ordered food and alcohol to modify the effects of the coffee that was coursing through our veins, and settled into a private corner with the musings of the young second lieutenant.
Both of us gave but a glancing look at the final pages. The agony of those entries demanded an attitude on the part of the reader that neither Holmes nor I felt capable of summoning at the moment; we were seeking facts, and although there were names there, none were immediately informative. Holmes turned to the entries dated February, skimmed through a self-consciously laconic account of battle and a rather more detailed description of the joys of the behind-the-lines delousing baths, and then went back to the front line to the night before a “push.” The next entry was dated sixteen days later, with the notation, “In hospital.”
Here we were introduced to Hélène, but as an introduction it left a great deal to be desired. The young man had spent a mere two weeks away from his journal, but during that time his life had changed so completely, it would seem that he could scarcely remember his previous existence. A good part of that, no doubt, was the consequence of having all but died in what he had so feelingly called “cream-of-man soup.” His nerves were, as the diary put it, “pretty funk,” and the shaky handwriting, which I had seen earlier on the field post-card, reflected the state of his mind.
Gabriel Hughenfort’s brush with death, however, was only a part of his transformation—or perhaps, was only the act of demolition that cleared the way for the next stage. For by the time he set indelible pencil to paper again, his mind and his heart had already grown up anew around the woman whose face he had first seen bent over his stretcher. He wrote:
It makes me smile, to think that at the first sight of Hélène I thought she was a man. Her back was to me, of course—no-one looking into her eyes would ever make that mistake, no matter how scrambled his brains!—and she was wearing a heavy leather jacket with sheepskin at the collar. Then she turned to me, checking that I wasn’t going to be thrown to the floor when we hit a pothole, and thus undo all the work the bearers had gone to. I’ve never seen eyes like that, green as the hills she was raised in. Heaven only knows what she saw. I could’ve been a Chinaman for all she could tell, or old as her father or ugly as sin. I was clotted with France, hair to boot-lace, and stinking of battle.
His description went on, the only references to her identity or appearance so obscured by infatuation as to be useless. She was green-eyed and tall, and strong enough to lift a grown man into the ambulance, but everything else was poetry and song. One could not even be certain that Hélène was her given name and not a lover’s affectionate substitute for an unbearably ordinary, even ugly, true name.
Finding the VAD driver behind “the face that launched a thousand ships” (the young man’s rather hackneyed phrase which had made me suspicious of the woman’s true name) was going to take some doing. I thought I might know where to begin, however, and as Holmes glanced at his watch and made to go, I proposed, “Shall I take Hélène, and you the major?”
“As usual, Russell, you speak the very words on my tongue. And Simpson’s at eight to compare notes?”
I glanced down at my travel-worn dress and the gloves that badly wanted cleaning. “If we must, but I shall have to go by my flat to retrieve some clothes.”
“Give my regards to the Qs” was all he said. He, after all, should have to make a detour to one of his bolt-holes to exchange his own clothing, so I could not complain.
We took our seats on the train and spent the trip with the Hughenfort diary on our knees, but made few notes. We arrived in London, claimed the bags we’d left there, and went our separate ways.
My taxi deposited me in front of the modernistic block of flats in Bloomsbury in which I had taken a furnished suite of rooms several years before, and somehow never bothered to replace with a more permanent pied-à-terre. Or a more comfortable one—I always forgot, when I’d been away for a while, how awful the place actually was, all chrome tubes and glass. It had matched perfectly the persona I was assuming at the time of the original let, but was, I realised suddenly, a ridiculous place to maintain on the off chance I might need to act the social butterfly in the future. Too, the furniture the actual owners had chosen was beginning to look decidedly out of date. Time for a change, I thought, and dropped my bags on the floor.
A gentle knoc
k followed by the rattle of a key in the lock told me the doorman had informed my housekeeping couple of my arrival. I greeted the Quimbys, husband and wife, and apologised for not warning them of my arrival.
“In fact,” I said, “I asked the doorman to let you be. I’m only here for a change of clothing; no need to turn up the radiators and buy milk for that.”
But Mrs Q was already unloading a picnic hamper to make tea, and I submitted to her sense of propriety.
There was hot water for a bath, and the clothes hanging in the large and ornate bedroom were free of moth and must. I sorted through them, mildly grumbling at the change in hem-lengths over the past two years, and noticed that they had been recently gone over with brush and iron. Mrs Q had to be bored, caring for a household of ghosts, but I did not know that I could do much to change that, not with this place. I couldn’t even ask how they spent their days, since both would be offended at my concern. It simply Wasn’t Done.
The next time I passed through the kitchen I put my head around the corner into the portion given over to a butler’s pantry. Q shot to his feet, a polishing cloth in one hand and one of my shoes in the other.
“Does your wife’s cousin Freddy Bell still keep his finger on London properties?” I asked him.
“Well, yes, I believe he does, mum.”
“Good. I’d like to get out of this place, set up an establishment of my own. Maybe you and he could put your heads together—along with Mrs Quimby, of course—and see if there’s anything on the market just now. House or flat, but larger than this, with quarters for you and Mrs Q. We’ll probably decorate it ourselves—and not like this place.”
A whisper of approval slipped past his professional face at my final phrase; I gave him a sympathetic smile and left him to his polishing.
It took me a while on the telephone (an instrument of white and gilt) but I succeeded in locating the woman I sought. She was a dispatch rider in London at the time I had met her, a suffragette doing war service, but she had been a driver in Belgium until a stray shell had hit her ambulance, killing the other VAD attendant and the patients they were transporting. She herself had been made deaf by the explosion, and although a certain amount of hearing had returned, she blithely declared that near-deafness was an advantage to a London driver. Having ridden pillion with her once and been fully aware of the curses on our trail, I could only agree.