The Honours Page 5

  CHAPTER 3

  METAMORPHOSIS

  March 1935

  Delphine caught the bullet square in the chest. Its imagined impact carried her back one step, then two. She clutched at her breastbone; warm arterial blood oozed between her fingers. She tried to take a breath. The grey sky descended. She collapsed.

  The fall knocked the air out of her lungs. She had expected the bracken thicket to cushion her.

  The year was 1916. It was mid-July, and she was an infantryman separated from her battalion in woods outside Longueval. The twig stabbing her buttock was an old bayonet wound. The dead lay everywhere.

  She listened, brown fiddleheads of dead bracken tickling her ears. Elms gasped and shushed. Men barked orders. Machine guns called to each other like strange crows. Taking a near-final breath, she smelt earth and the salty-sour aroma of burnt trees.

  This, then, was dying. It did not feel so dreadful – just a gradual detachment, a rowing boat easing away from a riverbank. She rested a palm against her chest, focused on the diminishing sink and swell.

  A wood pigeon cooed. Somebody screamed for their mother.

  She’d heard many tales from the Great War, some in story papers or on the wireless, the juicier ones traded like aniseed balls amongst hunched, furtive peers in the playground: how you could tell if a storm was on its way depending on whether the Boche corpse in the flooded shell crater floated or sank, donkeys drowning in a quagmire, soldiers strolling about bayoneting prone bodies like park keepers collecting leaves. She’d heard the stories of bullets stopped by a breast-pocket bible/hip flask/gypsy’s golden tooth, of the captain who kept a bunker full of Turk skulls, lined up in rows, who polished them like trophies and gave them names, who finally lost what remained of his reason after a botched advance, barricaded himself inside the bunker and put a bullet through his brain as the skulls looked on.*

  She could not stand to be in the house. Oh, how Mr Propp had smiled, plump and squat and harmless, turning up the waxed tips of his white moustache, bowing his bald head, ingratiating – yes, so charmed, so pleased to meet – but she had seen the hatred in those hard, grey eyes. Now, whenever she walked one of the long, dark corridors alone, whenever a door cawed open of its own accord, she felt Mr Propp’s gaze upon her. She was not afraid of him, but when she lay in her stark new bedroom, the cold silk quilt pulled up to her chin, listening to laughter made strange and mournful by its passage through the lead pipes beneath the floor, to urgent scritching somewhere behind her head, to thuds and creaks and the gasp of a guest lowering himself into a mustard bath, to the lapping of the ivy against the brickwork and to her own rapid breaths, she felt an alertness that made it very hard to sleep. If she slept, she dreamt murky, suffocating dreams that ended in jolts. And so, though she could not accept that she feared Mr Propp, she chose to keep her distance.

  Sprawled in the dirt, Delphine the wounded soldier let her head drop to one side. Bracken hung in brittle heaps. Up close, she could see smooth white threads of club fungus sprouting from each stem. A beetle ratcheted its mandibles; its antennae dabbed at the cool air. It looked big as a dog.

  She pictured bulldog-sized beetles burrowing up through the mortar-churned earth. Bullets zinged off chitinous thoraxes. Beetles stormed the Boche line, dragging barbed wire in nightmare tangles. Trench walls collapsed. Officers discharged pistols in vain before black antlers gored their stomachs. The Germans routed. They scrambled and fled across pitted, smoking ground, stumbling on severed torsos, but the beetles ran them down. Complicated mouthparts sprung apart. Heads crunched like coconuts.

  And Delphine was there, leading the charge, transformed. She marvelled at her serrated forelegs and shiny interlocking armour. Flares lit the battlefield a glorious victory red.

  Daddy would be coming soon. Mother had tried to keep the news from her but Delphine moved through the house like a phantom. Hidden passages honeycombed the west wing. The club-headed key opened them all. Most were dead ends, no more than a couple of yards long, that terminated abruptly to make way for door arches. They were choked with cobwebs, as if nobody had walked them for years.

  She had not the faintest idea why someone would go to all the trouble of constructing secret passageways only to make such a bad job of it – they were too narrow for a servant to carry a tea tray – but when she sat between walls she felt quiet and calm and nobody bothered her.

  Around her the estate spread ripe and anonymous. South of Alderberen Hall were lawns, then patchy woodland all the way to the gatehouse in the southwest. Bending round the west and northwest of the house was the boating lake, and beyond that, to the far west, was the village of Pigg. To the north was the thick dark mass of Prothero Wood, a mile or so of salt marshes then the sea. To the east, where she lay now, Prothero Wood gave way to farmland.

  She knew Daddy was coming because she had heard Mother asking Alice the maid to place a telephone call. When Daddy reached the Hall, Delphine would tell him what she’d overheard. Mr Propp was a warmongering foreign spy, negotiating with England’s enemies (Bolsheviks? Germans?), preparing for a surprise invasion across the channel. There was no sense telling Mother – she had already fallen for Mr Propp’s unassuming charms.

  All Delphine had to do was speak to Daddy alone, and the whole rotten plot would be unearthed. He would praise her ingenuity, her Great British pluck. Certainly, the reclusive Lord Alderberen – whom she had yet to meet – would be most grateful that she had rooted out two conspirators lurking under his own roof.

  Back in her imagination, she stomped across the French battlefield towards the ruins of a bombed-out chapel. Dead horses lay beside craters half-flooded with brown water. The chapel reminded her of the dinner hall at St Eustace’s. In the few remaining windows, stained-glass saints gazed down upon shattered pews, spent ammunition cases, mud.

  Delphine entered through a low, stone archway – slow, implacable, kicking aside tables, empty bully tins. She sniffed for her quarry.

  From the depths of her throat, Delphine emitted a gleeful clicking. She turned to face the figure cowering beneath the altar.

  The crunch of a twig. She opened her eyes and found herself staring into the twin barrels of a shotgun.

  ‘Keep still.’ The muzzle bobbed inches from her nose. ‘Twitch and I’ll blast you so full of shot they’ll have to hunt for bits of you with a magnet.’

  Delphine ran her tongue over the backs of her incisors.

  ‘Um, lead isn’t magnetic,’ she said, frowning.

  She looked up the length of the gun, to a crimson-faced old man. Tussocks of chalky hair capped plate-fungus ears. His green waxed jacket was jigsawed with dry mud.

  ‘Since breakfast I’ve returned fifteen creatures to the Lord’s eternal custody. No odds to Him if I make it sixteen.’ The old man took a couple of steps back, lowering the gun to waist height but keeping it trained on her head. ‘Sit up.’

  Delphine made a show of hoisting herself onto one elbow, then the other. Moss fell from her hair as she dog-shook it.

  ‘I’ve got spies all over these woods.’ Fleshy pouches hung beneath his eyes. ‘But your lot never learn, do you? Think you can come crashing through here doing whatever you like, and I won’t notice.’ He jabbed the gun at her. ‘Well, I do notice. If there’s so much as a leaf out of place, I notice.’

  Delphine took a shaky breath.

  ‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said, ‘but you’re messing with the wrong person.’

  He laughed. He actually laughed.

  ‘Go on. Get up.’ He gestured with the gun barrel.

  She stood. The elm copse was bordered on one side by a hedgerow and, beyond that, a field. She was damp from lying down; the wind whipped round her legs and she shivered.

  ‘You and your friends pleased with yourselves?’ he said.

  Delphine raised her chin proudly. ‘I don’t have any friends.’

  From the other side of the hedge came a noise like someone shaking out a bathmat. They both turn
ed to look. A pheasant throbbed into the air. At twenty feet its head snapped back and it dropped.

  Delphine blinked.

  ‘Look at you,’ said the old man. ‘Butter wouldn’t melt.’ He herded her to a gap in the hedge.

  Through a frame of jagged twigs, she saw the pheasant thrashing amongst lush green wheat. It rolled onto its belly and stood, shaking dirt from its cream and brown-dappled wings. It accelerated to a dash and took off. A blur of flapping. Its neck lurched back and it fell.

  The pheasant attempted a third take-off and the same thing happened. She squinted up at the spot where the bird kept stopping.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘through you go. What’s wrong? Not so eager now you’ve been caught in the act?’

  Her fear was levelling off into curiosity.

  ‘Why can’t it fly?’

  His eyes widened. ‘Magic.’

  Delphine tried to look disdainful. ‘There’s no such thing.’

  ‘That’s odd coming from a gypsy.’

  ‘Oh! I am not a gypsy.’

  ‘Just a common poacher, then.’

  She glanced down at her spread palms, speechless – and, she realised, rather flattered. She inhaled, balled her fists.

  ‘Let me go.’

  The old man leaned back. ‘No.’

  ‘You can’t keep me here. You’ve got no right, you – ’

  ‘Shut up.’ He thrust the shotgun at her face.

  ‘This isn’t fair! I haven’t – ’

  ‘I’m carrying the gun. I decide what’s fair.’ He snorted, spat a gobbet of snot into the dirt. ‘Torturing my birds – that’s not fair.’

  The flames were rising again. She shut her eyes, tried to slow her breathing. Pink and green stars fizzed in the darkness.

  ‘Hey!’ said the old man. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you!’

  Her cheeks prickled with heat. She heard the whumph of the pheasant pounding its wings, the squawk as it fell. This was how it always went. They wanted you to get angry. They knew you hadn’t done anything wrong so they’d taunt you and taunt you until your head went bad and you really did do something wrong, and then they’d round on you, triumphant: Look! It runs in the family!

  She opened her eyes.

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe your father’s too soft to give you a – ’ His sentence cut off as she struck him across the temple. She was not strong but the backhand came as a surprise to them both; she twisted with the blow, shoving the shotgun aside with her other hand. He let go, her heel slid and she pirouetted. She planted her foot. Her mouth tasted of copper. She was facing him. She was holding the gun.

  The old man glanced from the shotgun to Delphine. With his hair ruffled on one side, he looked like a sleepwalker. The barrels were pointing at his chest.

  ‘Easy now,’ he said.

  The shotgun was heavier than she had expected. Little fluorescent worms writhed at the edges of her vision. She felt groggy and outside of herself. Holding the gun did not feel like she had expected. She did not feel powerful. She wanted to give it back.

  ‘Brace it against the soft bit next to your armpit,’ he said. He patted the spot on his coat and mud fell away in flakes. ‘Keep your arms relaxed. If you hold it tight it’ll buck up and your shot’ll go high.’

  She hesitated, adjusted her posture.

  ‘Not against your collarbone. The fleshy part. Start like this,’ he stood with an invisible gun tucked between his elbow and flank, ‘and imagine you’re pushing a billiard cue. Step forward and push towards your target.’

  Cautiously, she lowered the gun to her side, then stepped forward, pointing it just as he’d shown her; sure enough, the butt settled into the nook beneath her shoulder.

  ‘Good. You don’t need to be squinting down the sights at this range, either. Just point and shoot.’ He was not smiling. ‘Get caught up in half an inch this way or that way and you won’t be able to react if the bird breaks unexpectedly.’

  Delphine felt her left arm – the arm supporting the barrel – beginning to tremble.

  ‘Marksmanship is all about footwork. If your posture’s right, the rest is easy.’ He mimed holding a shotgun, pivoting at the waist as if tracking a hare over open ground. ‘Anticipate its path then step where you want the bird to die.’ He demonstrated by placing his left foot forward.

  Delphine took a step back. Her forefinger found the coarse metal of the trigger.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ she said. ‘Uh, please.’

  ‘Of course if your target’s right there in front of you, best to take your shot while you’ve got the chance.’ He took another step towards her.

  She stepped back again. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Can’t think what you’re waiting for.’

  She let the shotgun dip. ‘It’s not loaded, is it?’

  He reached out and gripped the barrels. ‘First rule of game shooting: never point a gun at a human being, loaded or unloaded.

  You may hit or you may miss,

  But for ever think of this:

  All the pheasants ever bred

  Don’t make up for one man d – ’

  Delphine flung her end of the shotgun downwards. The heavy stock hit his foot. He creased, his face twisting shut. She ran.

  She followed the hedgerow, soles skidding in leaf mulch. A low bough swung for her head – she ducked, accelerated. When she glanced back he was puffing, red, limping. He had aged twenty years – she saw him now for what he was: a blustering old fool, a pathetic codger versus a spry twelve-year-old, and she laughed at the idiot she was leaving behind and the world tipped and she headbutted the dirt.

  She spat mud. Her leg was trapped, her leg was broken – no, she’d just tripped in an old badger sett. She contorted, pulled free. He was nearly on her. She rolled onto her hands and knees and scrambled into the hedge.

  Branches clawed and snapped. A bramble snagged her cheek; she batted it away. A hand caught the neck of her cardigan; she tried to double-back and shrug out of it and another hand clutched her shoulder.

  ‘Now I’ve got you, you devil.’

  She wriggled and hissed. He began dragging her out.

  He was a lot stronger than she’d expected, his arms like oak roots. She kicked and felt it connect. He cursed, then again as she bicycled her legs, dragging him into the hedge with her. He did not let go.

  ‘Get off!’

  ‘Shh!’ he said. He was so close she smelt his sour tobacco breath over the fragrant undergrowth. Warm spittle spritzed the nape of her neck.

  ‘Let go! Let me – ’

  ‘Shut up!’ He clamped a greasy palm over her mouth. She bucked and swatted. ‘Damn child! Just shut up for one damn second . . . and look.’

  Delphine lifted her head. A few thin branches hung between her and the field.

  A red-haired lad of maybe seventeen strolled through the young green wheat with his hands in his pockets, puffing on a cigarette and kicking up dirt with his galoshes. He walked to a spot close to the pheasant, which had just righted itself again. He took a final drag on his cigarette, tossed it into the mud. After glancing around the field, he crouched and pulled a wooden peg out of the ground. He began barrelling his fists. The pheasant toppled like a drunk. Wheat parted around the bird as it skidded towards him. She heard it slap its wings against the dirt, making throttled protests. It stopped at his feet. He took it and held it to his chest. The pheasant looked around making small, soft noises. He ran a hand over its plumage as if smoothing the creases out of a favourite dressing gown. With the slight grimace of someone opening a jam jar, he wrung its neck.

  She flinched, despite herself. The old man made a noise through his clenched teeth.

  The boy eased a fishhook from the pheasant’s beak. He fed the bird into a canvas bag, along with the spooled fishing line. He collected some stray feathers, lit another cigarette and walked off, whistling.

  The old man took his hand from her mouth.

  ‘Well, I’ll be,’
he whispered. ‘I only hired him three weeks ago, the cheeky . . . ’ He glanced around at the hedge. He began shuffling backwards. Grunting, he lifted himself onto one knee, placed both palms against his thigh and hoisted his other leg up. He took a moment to catch his breath, then waited for Delphine to stand.

  They brushed themselves down. He picked wet leaves from the wispy remnants of his hair. She found something grey-green and foul-smelling on her skirt. A gust of wind made the elms purr.

  He dragged a sleeve across his nose, snorted.

  ‘Even?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  He extended a palm.

  ‘Henry Garforth,’ he said. ‘Head Keeper of the Alderberen Estate.’

  Delphine eyed his hand. It was a knot of contradictions: huge and callused, bony and quivering. The liver-spotted webbing between his fingers hung like dust sheets over a defunct exhibit. A thick white scar ran from his wrist to the pad of his thumb.

  She held out her hand; his swallowed it. His skin was pumice-rough.

  ‘Delphine Venner,’ she said as he pumped her arm.

  ‘Right,’ he said, letting go, ‘and now the formalities are out the way, you can bugger off back to Pigg.’

  ‘I’m not from the village.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I live at the Hall.’

  A grot of black mud clung to his eyebrow. It dipped as he frowned.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I live with my mother in the east wing, in the room with the butterfly paintings.’ She started walking back and forth along an invisible tightrope. ‘We’ve been here two weeks, well, a week and six days actually. My father is coming on Saturday. He’s a famous painter. He killed five men. Germans.’

  ‘You should be in school.’

  ‘Don’t go to school.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘They said I tried to start a fire but I didn’t, and they said I tied up Eleanor Wethercroft in the boiler room and left her there overnight, which I did,’ she said, without looking up.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Garforth. He stooped and picked up his shotgun.

  ‘What are you going to do about that man?’ she said.

  ‘You mean young Mr Gillow?’