The Honours Read online

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Mr Garforth rolled his eyes. ‘They’re ready to hatch, you halfwit.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes, “oh”.’ He retrieved a stub of chalk from the pocket of his waxed jacket and drew a cross on the roof of the box. ‘When we come round tomorrow they might be the first of the new covey. Shut the door before they chill.’

  Delphine closed the box and tethered the broody to its hazel stick. She watched it pecking at the dirt.

  ‘Do they know?’ she said. ‘That the eggs they’re sitting on aren’t their own.’

  He pressed an index finger to his dry lips. ‘Shh!’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  His grin exposed yellow dentures. ‘They’re chickens. They don’t know anything. Long as they’ve got their routine, they’re happy. Now, come on.’

  Delphine took the last of the broodies from its nest and scattered some more grain. She stood back with her hands clasped behind her tailbone, listening to murmuring clucks and the rustle of beaks in grass. Mr Garforth walked up and down the lines of hens like a colonel inspecting his troops. Every so often he would bend and riffle through a hen’s plumage with his thumb. Near the end of the second row, he sat down and took hold of a broody with his big hands. Gently, he rocked it back and forth until it defecated in a short grey spurt.

  ‘Right.’ He took out his pocket watch. ‘That’s time.’

  She walked back to the first broody, picked it up and slipped the tether from its leg. Checking that its feet were clean, she placed it in front of its box. The bird took a last few glances right and left, then strolled back up the ramp onto its nest. She lifted the ramp, twisted the latch shut, then moved to the next box. She worked through the boxes in the order she had opened them, each time allowing the hen to walk back in of its own free will, but keeping her hands poised either side in case it tried to escape. She noticed the hen with the chipped eggs returned to its nest with an especially haughty swagger.

  When the last box was shut, she fetched a bucket and trowel and began to move amongst the hazel sticks, scooping up chicken poo.

  ‘It wouldn’t have to be loaded,’ she said. ‘You could just show me how to hold it. Like you did before. Uh . . . I mean, I wouldn’t be aiming at you this time.’

  Mr Garforth picked a bit of hay off of his trousers. He turned and looked across the meadow. Beyond the sitting boxes were the wire enclosures, ready for when the poults hatched. He scratched his backside, his nails digging into a fresh white stain.

  He said something, but the wind caught his voice and all she heard was ‘father’.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  He glanced back over his shoulder. ‘I said what does your father make of all this? Is he happy with the idea of his daughter running round the estate with a shotgun?’

  Delphine tilted the trowel; a thick dollop of excrement slid into the bucket. It stunk of ammonia and spoiled milk. Beads of sweat tickled her forehead.

  ‘Daddy is extremely busy.’

  ‘Too busy to ask for permission, yes, I understand.’

  She stabbed the trowel into the earth below another chicken poo.

  ‘Actually he’s a very famous artist.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  ‘He’s working on a new project. The Earl has let him use part of the old stables as a studio.’ She downed tools and rose. ‘Please. Just show me the basics.’

  Mr Garforth sighed and clutched at the air. ‘I said no. Why do you keep asking?’

  She looked him straight in the eyes. ‘Because I’m a delinquent and if you won’t teach me I’ll steal a gun and go shooting anyway. With your help there’s less chance I’ll kill myself.’

  He breathed in very slowly. His eyes went to his boots, which were brindled with hen faeces and mud. When he looked back up it took him a moment to speak. He lifted an index finger.

  ‘Tomorrow, when I do my evening rounds, you can come along. If,’ he brandished the finger like a cudgel, ‘if I have to crack off a shot, I’ll explain to you afterwards how I did it. Purely theoretical, mind. I’ve got work to do. But if you want to observe . . . that’s my final offer.’

  ‘Done!’ said Delphine. She grabbed the bucket and began marching back across the field. ‘I’ll put these on the compost then I’ve got to get back. Mother says I have to start taking lessons with a tutor. I expect it’ll be some stern governess with fishy breath.’ She pulled a face. ‘First class is at eleven.’

  Mr Garforth flapped his grimy hands. ‘Off you go, then. Get cleaned up!’

  She turned, and her march became a run. Soon, she had left the wire fences and huts behind and she was racing north over open fields, back towards the house. Sunlight silvered the swerve of a brook amongst ancient grey alders. The smell of fresh-cut grass sang in her nostrils, the wind in her ears one long scream.

  In the chimera room, all the animals watched Delphine. Delphine watched the Professor.

  He was big – not flabby big, just large – and his cardigan strained to contain his broad shoulders. His hair was messy, his beard patchy brown. The only sound was the hiss of his pencil stub as he sat at a table jotting notes from the selection of books spread out in front of him, tracing sentences with a thick finger before returning to the foolscap in a whisper of lead.

  He did not seem old enough to be a professor. The look of him was all wrong. He ought to be a wrestler, or a lumberjack. Perhaps he was another foreign spy, in league with Mr Propp – a mountain-man from the Urals, sent to bump off Lord Alderberen. There was definitely something funny about him – something that itched at her brain.

  Delphine felt a slap of recognition. She had met him before.

  He was the man from the train – the one with the crossword and the cigar, the one who had offered to pay for her ticket. The memory brought a stampede of associations: the stuffiness of the carriage, the frozen world outside, the hope. She fought back vertigo.

  Delphine steadied herself on the Portuguese card table that served as her desk. She gazed around the room. Glass display cases lined the walls, full of novelty taxidermy: a tortoise with three viper heads, a cat with a lion’s mane, a scorpion dove, a chimp with bat wings, a unicorn, and a creature that the little bronze plaque beneath called a ‘wolpertinger’: a rabbit with antlers, fangs and downy aquamarine wings. Each animal was posing in a diorama that implied its natural environment – the chimp-bat hunched on a tropical limb, the tortoise-hydra trudging through red volcanic sand.

  Chips of coloured glass glinted in their eye sockets. The animals seemed to be watching her, and she didn’t much care for it.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said.

  The Professor looked up from his studies. ‘Hello.’

  ‘I think we’ve met before.’

  He scratched the bridge of his nose; his eyes and mouth converged on it, as if in conference. ‘Anything is possible.’

  ‘It was just before Christmas. I didn’t have a ticket. You helped me get away without paying.’

  ‘Did I indeed?’ The Professor planted his boulder-like elbows at the extreme edges of the desk and laced his fingers. ‘Then it is providential we find ourselves in each other’s company once more. Don’t interrupt me during my studies and you may consider your debt repaid in full.’ He returned his attention to the books spread before him.

  ‘Aren’t you going to teach me something?’

  He set down his pencil heavily. ‘If I must. What would you like to learn?’

  Delphine produced a piece of paper. ‘I made a list.’

  The Professor leaned forward. ‘Go on.’

  She gripped the edge of the table, inhaled.

  ‘Major sieges: 500 BC to Present, ballistics, what plants cure a fever, what plants can you crush up to make a poison, how to make a pit trap, how to skin an elephant, pressure points that stop the human heart, explosives, ju-jitsu, camouflage, espionage, code-breaking, how to survive if you crash-land in the Peruvian rainforest, how to survive if you cr
ash-land in Arctic tundra, how to survive if you crash-land in the Soviet Union, Russian, French, sword technique, piracy, tunnelling, the Lincoln assassination, squids, the secrets of Freemasonry . . . ’ She turned the page over. ‘Animal calls, bomb-making, navigation, uh . . . poisoning . . . no, I’ve said that. Did I say that? How to make different poisons. How to catch a fish when you haven’t a net. Sailing. Oh, and how to drive a tank.’

  The Professor watched her for a moment.

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘No thank you. Sir.’

  He lifted a hand, beckoned. Delphine pushed back her chair and walked to his desk. Between her desk and his, a tasselled rug the colour of beef paste lay across bare floorboards.

  He slid a book from the bottom of the pile and thrust it towards her.

  Delphine took it. The book was crimson and heavy.

  ‘What’s this?’

  The Professor did not look up from his work. ‘Read it then write a one-thousand-word essay on your understanding of its contents.’

  She tilted it and read the spine: Early Assyrian Art. ‘This isn’t about poisons.’

  ‘Very shrewd, Miss Venner. Only nine hundred and ninety-six words to go.’ He crossed something out in a sharp slash of graphite. ‘And don’t “sir” me. I’m not a knight and I don’t care to be reminded of the fact. You may call me Professor Carmichael.’ He glanced up. ‘Stop gawping. I have important work to complete and you are disturbing me.’

  Delphine walked back to her desk in a daze. The stuffed hybrids watched as she sat down and opened the book in front of her. Its pages smelt of damp hay.

  Mother slept. When her eyelids had fluttered during lunch Delphine had bit back her excitement. Now Mother lay in her bedroom, slumped across the made bed, her breathing so shallow it was almost invisible. Delphine closed the partition door and crept out into the corridor. In the alcove opposite, an alabaster minotaur stood with its arms folded, chin raised and askance, a thick ring hanging from its snout.

  When she reached the landing, the Great Hall was empty. Everyone was with Mr Propp in the music room, awakening their kidneys. She went down the main staircase, across the chequerboard floor and out the front doors. The day was bright and gusty, twists of cloud scudding across a willow-pattern sky. She crossed the gravel and entered the stables through a side door.

  Inside was dark. Drying canvases lay against walls or propped in easels, forming a cramped labyrinth. The air was warm and still and ripe with turps. She pulled the collar of her blouse up over her nose and picked her way over jam jars and slabs of wood rainbowed in daubs.

  A narrow alley turned back on itself and opened out into a chamber. Four grey walls faced inwards. In the centre, beneath a single low-watt bulb, Daddy squatted on a three-legged stool with a cigarette in his lips, glaring at a big canvas. The palette in his right hand was a maelstrom of chocolate, russet and dirty gamboge. The colours bled down his forearm, onto the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. Paint tubes lay around him like spent shells. Three brushes stood in a jar of murky turpentine. His other hand, still wrapped in gauze, yawned hungrily.

  ‘Don’t tread on that,’ he said, without looking round. He gestured vaguely with his painting hand, fingers opening, snapping shut.

  She looked down. The floor was a brittle topography of old paint-stiffened newspaper – crags and gullies and lakes of spilt colour. At the tip of her sandal, an empty tube of Prussian blue lay stamped out like a slug.

  Daddy’s painting hand plucked the cigarette from his mouth, then felt about on the crate beside his stool till it found the chipped rim of a mug. He lifted the mug to his lips; he swigged, then looked off to one side and said: ‘Ah.’

  ‘Daddy, I need to – ’

  ‘Shh.’ His torso canted left as he put down the mug. He straightened, swept a twist of damp, steely hair back behind his ear. The light of the naked bulb brought out the leanness in his arms and jowls. Delphine’s eyes were beginning to water on account of the turpentine. She was sure Daddy ought not to allow flames in such a poorly ventilated space.

  He put a fist to his mouth, cocked his head. The canvas, as far as she could see, was a mass of undifferentiated brown behind a few slashes of white. Daddy stared at it as if the act of concentrating alone would drag an image to the surface. Plaits of smoke rose from between his knuckles and folded against the bare beams of the ceiling.

  He tipped his head back and groaned. Then: ‘Come here, darling. Mind my mess.’

  Delphine held her breath. She began picking her way towards him, sticking to patches of bare floor, taking care not to tread on anything that might crack or crunch or squelch. She drew up beside him. He smiled.

  ‘There’s my little Delphy.’ His painting hand reared up and pinched her cheek. The gauze was rough against her ear.

  ‘Ow.’ She rubbed the tender skin.

  ‘Come on. Let’s not have whingeing.’ He took a last drag on his cigarette then stubbed it out in a terracotta dish.

  ‘Daddy.’

  He put his palette down and took a tobacco tin from the crate. He began rolling a cigarette.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I need to tell you something.’

  Daddy worked the cigarette paper back and forth between the thumb and fingers of his left hand. Dry paint flaked from his fingernails.

  ‘Tell.’

  ‘The first day Mother and I got here. Before you arrived.’ Perhaps it was the fumes, but she felt the start of a headache. ‘I was walking around the house. I overheard a conversation.’

  Daddy stuck the cigarette between his incisors like a toothpick. He retrieved a matchbook from his pocket.

  ‘You’ve been listening at keyholes again, haven’t you?’

  ‘No, I . . . ’ She was about to fib, but something in his eyes made her reconsider. ‘There was a hole in the wall. The west wing is full of holes. I never meant to spy – they were talking so loudly.’

  Daddy flipped open the matchbook and tore out a match. ‘Who?’

  ‘I think . . . one of them was Mr Propp.’

  He dragged the match down the rough strip. It did not light.

  ‘You shouldn’t eavesdrop. We’re guests here.’

  ‘Daddy, he said there’s going to be a war.’

  ‘Then there probably is.’

  He struck the match and it lit with a noise like someone ripping open a present. His face rippled purple and orange. He made a cave with his hand and brought the flame to the tip of his cigarette.

  ‘He said they’ve been taking trips over the channel for secret talks.’

  ‘Who was he saying this to?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know. An old man.’

  ‘An old man.’ Daddy blew smoke over his shoulder. ‘Go to the library. You’re to spend the afternoon reading silently.’

  ‘But – ’

  ‘I won’t have you slandering our hosts.’

  ‘But he said – ’

  ‘You’ve told me what he said.’

  ‘You’re not listening! They – ’

  ‘Out. Now.’ He picked up his palette.

  Delphine took a deep breath, bunched her fists.

  ‘Daddy, I think the Bolsheviks are plotting to kill me.’

  Daddy leant back on the stool. His shoulders began to shake. The tremors moved to his arms and head and it was only when he opened his mouth that she realised he was laughing. He took a pull on his cigarette and swung round to face her.

  ‘Oh, Delphy.’ His painting hand settled on her shoulder. Gauze crackled as it gripped. ‘One whiff of a foreign accent and you think you’re Richard Hannay.’

  She tried to slip loose from his grasp. His hand clung.

  ‘It’s not a joke! Mr Propp is a spy.’

  ‘He’s not a spy. He’s a teacher and a thinker and a healer. He’s going to make us all well again.’

  Delphine stared into her father’s eyes and saw only clean burning zeal.

  ‘But I heard him,’ she said.

  ‘Per
haps you misheard.’

  ‘But he was so angry.’

  ‘Perhaps he had good reason.’

  Delphine could feel her resolve melting. What had seemed a minute ago like a fat and damning dossier now felt wispy as a fading dream. She looked down at her sandals.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Come now, Delphy, what did I say about whingeing?’ Fingers grabbed her chin and tilted her head up. He breathed yellow smoke in her face. ‘For now, this is our home.’ He had shaved unevenly. Black bristles dotted the curve of his upper lip. ‘I know it feels new and strange, but you mustn’t worry. Everyone here wants to make the world a better place. Be a good girl and play your part.’

  Smoke stung her eyes. ‘But I’m scared.’

  ‘I won’t let anything happen to you. Please. Give the Society a chance. It would make me very happy. You want me to be happy, don’t you?’

  Her head was pounding. Over Daddy’s shoulder, the canvas churned crimson, raven’s wing, Passchendaele brown. She let her arms go limp.

  ‘Yes, Daddy.’

  CHAPTER 6

  UNHAPPY AND FORSAKEN TOAD

  April 1935

  Mr Garforth hunched over a rumbling cauldron, boiling blood off gin traps. Delphine watched him from the doorway of the cottage. He wore a pair of grubby cloth gloves. Steam condensed on his cheeks and brow, droplets tugging at his whiskers. Using the head of a pick, he hooked out a pair of dripping steel jaws, rinsed them with a ladle of cold water, then tossed them into the dirt with the others.

  Mr Garforth bought the traps from Mr Wightman, the blacksmith, for twenty-nine shillings a dozen. They were big enough for rabbits but he used them for rats. He said the smaller traps were apt to amputate a limb, letting the rat escape. He said they were too light, and if you forgot to peg them down a rat might drag a gin off into the undergrowth.

  Once he was done boiling the traps he would bury them in the ground for a week to get rid of the scent of humans. Then he would replace any sprung traps along runs or around the sitting boxes. Delphine said it seemed like a lot of fuss. Mr Garforth said there was fuss and then there was fuss, and if rats gnawed their way into a box they could devour all the eggs and strip the broody to a skeleton in a single night. He said he’d heard stories from men back in France who’d had to burn the bodies of horses that had frozen to death on the battlefield, and once the fire was lit hundreds of rats began pouring out of the horses’ mouths. He said he knew of a private who lost a hand when a rat bite went bad, another who woke to find a black rat gnawing at his eyelid.