Читать книгу The Department 19 Files: The New Blood: 1919 - Will Hill, Will Hill - Страница 5

HAMPSTEAD, LONDON 6th JANUARY 1919

On the day that the course of his life changed forever, Captain Quincey Harker was sitting in his father’s study thinking about his friends, both living and dead.

After a week’s official rest and relaxation in Rome that had proved to be anything but restful or relaxing, Harker and the four members of his Special Reconnaissance Unit had made their way back to Britain aboard an ocean liner that had been converted into a troopship: her portholes blocked, her towering black and white hull painted grey, 12-pound and 4.7-inch guns bolted to her decks. They had spent Christmas Day somewhere in the southern Atlantic, steaming towards Southampton, and had toasted their fallen comrade, the man who was occupying Harker’s thoughts once again.

Quincey had been taken to London in his father’s Ford, after bidding farewell to his squad mates on the bustling dock, and immediately thrown headlong into a welcome-home dinner for which he had no appetite for whatsoever. He smiled his way through it, acknowledging each new toast with as much gratitude as he could muster, and excused himself as soon as it was appropriate to do so. The following morning he caught a train to Winchester, and knocked on the door of the house where Andrew Thorpe’s parents lived.

Their faces had crumpled with grief at the sight of him, but they had welcomed him in with a frenzy of hugs and tears. He had known them since he was twelve, since the first time he had accompanied his friend home from Eton for the weekend and found a generous warmth of hospitality entirely at odds with the reserved quiet of his parents’ home. The Thorpes’ house was always loud, and warm, and smelt wonderful; Elizabeth Thorpe’s dangerously moreish cakes and biscuits had been what had prompted her son to try out for the Eton football team, for fear of his waistline expanding further, where he and Harker had met for the very first time.

As Elizabeth busied herself in the kitchen, Harker joined Martin Thorpe in the living room. A small Christmas tree stood in one corner, decorated with silver balls and loops of gold tinsel. Two strings of cards hung either side of the fireplace and sprigs of holly lay on the mantelpiece, surrounding a black and white photograph of Lieutenant Andrew Thorpe.

“It’s good to see you, Quincey,” said Martin. “We prayed every day for you to be safe. Especially after…” The words died away and the older man’s eyes filled with tears.

“Thank you, sir,” said Harker, feeling a lump in his throat. “How are you holding up?”

“One has to get on,” said Thorpe. “Liz has been keeping busy, but then she always did, as you know. He’s been gone more than a year already, can you believe that?”

Harker nodded.

“The anniversary was a hard day, no two ways about it,” continued Thorpe. “But at least we have a gravestone to visit. So many families had nothing to bury, but we were able to say goodbye to him. I want to thank you for that, Quincey. For not leaving him behind. It meant the world to his mother and me.”

“He’d have done the same for me,” managed Harker, his heart heavy in his chest.

Martin Thorpe nodded. “He would. He loved you like a brother.”

“The feeling was mutual,” said Harker. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t bring him home to you safely. I’d give anything to change that.”

Thorpe smiled weakly at him. “We know that, Quincey. There wasn’t much left of his letters after the censors had done with them, but he told us how you looked after him and the rest of your men. We know you did everything you could.”

“I tried,” said Harker, feeling tears rise in the corners of his eyes. “My very hardest. I wish it had been enough.”

“Who’s for tea?” asked Liz Thorpe, bustling into the living room and putting a groaning tray of crockery and biscuits on to the low table before the fire. “Quincey, you’ll stay the night, yes? I’ve already made up the back bedroom.”

Harker smiled. He had stayed in the back bedroom of the Thorpes’ home more times than he could remember, but the room would always remind him of his childhood, of the times that he and Andrew had read ghost stories by candlelight, had sneaked milk and biscuits upstairs and ate and drank in nervous silence, listening for the sounds of footsteps in the hall, trying their hardest not to giggle at the sheer recklessness of their rule-breaking.

“I’d love to,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Mrs Thorpe. “I’m sorry about the biscuits, but sugar and butter are harder to get hold of than gold these days. I’ll just fetch the sandwiches.”

She hurried back out of the living room, leaving him alone with his friend’s father again. Martin Thorpe managed an unconvincing smile, then dropped his eyes.

“Was he brave?” he asked, his voice little more than a whisper. “My boy. Did he do his duty?”

“Yes, sir,” said Quincey Harker. “He did his duty.”

There was nothing more to say.

Three days later Harker had seen in the year 1919 in the grand ballroom of Arthur Holmwood’s country house as a string quartet urged men and women across the dance floor, and voices and laughter filled the air. The party felt like a communal outpouring of jubilation, of relief at having emerged more or less intact from the long years of horror. Quincey found the joyous display sickening, an insult to the millions of men and women who had not come home, who were lying dead in the cold mud of western Europe instead of drinking champagne and singing ’Auld Lang Syne’, but he kept his mouth shut; everyone was so pleased to see him, so happy that he had returned home safely, and he didn’t want to throw their kindness back at them, undeserved though it was.

Luck, he thought to himself, as a waiter refilled his glass. That’s all it is. The coin lands the other way up and Thorpe is commiserating with my parents. Blind luck.

He had sent telegrams that morning to the remaining members of the Special Reconnaissance Unit, wishing them all a happy new year. What he had left out of the messages was the truth: that he would rather be with any of them than where he found himself: with Kavanagh in Somerset, McDonald in the eastern Highlands of Scotland, Ellis in his small village outside Durham, or with Potts on the edge of the Norfolk Broads.

Anything would be better than this. Anything.

“You shouldn’t think so hard,” said a voice Harker knew well. “It’s bad for the brain.”

Quincey smiled, and turned round. Standing in front of him was a man he had known his entire life and another he had come to feel as if he always had.

Albert Holmwood, the future Lord Godalming, was the spitting image of his father; he possessed the same high cheekbones, the delicate, almost feminine features, the piercing pale green eyes. He was almost a year older than Quincey, but the age gap had never been an issue, even as they went their separate ways through life. Albert had gone to Charterhouse, as his father and grandfather had before him, while Quincey went to Eton, but whenever the two of them returned to London during the school holidays, they were able to slip back into their friendship as though they had never been apart. For the majority of his life, Albert had been lazy and dissolute, and the few arguments the two men had ever had had largely been centred round Quincey’s frustration at his friend’s apparent unwillingness to use the intelligence he possessed in such abundance.

Scandal had followed Albert everywhere, culminating in an incident that had sent whispered shockwaves through the dining rooms of London society. In 1909, when he was barely sixteen years old, Albert had impregnated Lady Jane Lindley, the only daughter of one of the oldest and proudest families in the country, creating a crisis that had taken every last bit of Arthur Holmwood’s legendary diplomacy and, it was rumoured, a sizeable chunk of his fortune to defuse. Word had reached Quincey’s ear that Lord Godalming had come within a hair’s breadth of disowning his son, but had been talked out of it by his friends, Quincey’s father included. Instead, the shame had hung round the neck of the Holmwood family for almost five years, until the spring of 1914, when Albert turned twenty-one, and something strange happened.

Almost overnight, he changed; the boy who appeared incapable of taking anything seriously disappeared, replaced by a young man who, in quick succession, married Jane Lindley, became a doting father to Alexandra, five years old at the time, and took a position in the War Office, where he remained to this day. Quincey could see Jane in the distance, twirling the now alarmingly grown-up Alexandra across the dance floor as the girl’s grandfather watched in open delight.

Standing beside him was a man whose upbringing and circumstances had been as different as could be imagined from the future Lord Godalming’s, but whom Albert Holmwood now referred to both privately and publicly as his brother. David Morris was born in 1892, the product of a brief liaison between Quincey Morris, the larger-than-life American after whom Quincey Harker was named, and a prostitute by the name of Jenny Lincoln. After David’s birth, she had dragged herself free, with the help of Arthur Holmwood, of the lifestyle that she had sunk into as a teenager. He had found her work as a kitchen maid in a respectable house in Kensington, and asked her to send her son to see him when he turned eighteen.

Jenny’s employer, the wife of a plain-speaking Yorkshireman who had made a fortune in the cotton mills of Preston, had taken a liking to her and had permitted David to be educated alongside her own children, an act of kindness that his mother would never cease to be grateful for. She raised her son to be fiercely proud of the father he had never met, and despatched him to the Holmwood townhouse on Piccadilly on his eighteenth birthday with the belief, burning in his chest, that he was the equal of any man.

From there he had gone to Sandhurst, his place secured and his bills paid by Arthur Holmwood, and across the Channel to Europe in late 1914. He was gassed at Ypres in the April of the following year, and returned to his regiment in time to survive both Verdun and the churning nightmare of the Somme. By the end of 1916, he had begun to be viewed as something of a lucky charm, having survived four of the most devastating battles of the war, and was beloved by his men, whom he never treated as anything other than equals. His run of luck finally came to an end in April 1917 at Vimy Ridge, when a bullet found its way into his knee and stayed there. He was still recovering in a field hospital fifteen miles behind the line when Quincey Harker led his Special Reconnaissance Unit into Passchendaele, and saw out the final months of the war at General Headquarters in Montreuil, before returning to London and the War Office, and taking up his role as a member of the Holmwood household.