Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

He was immensely relieved that she felt the same as Eleanor, although something had bothered Somers about John's death and that something was bothering Laurence now.

'How do you think the general thought it would end?' Mary asked.

'I'm not sure. Somers certainly intended to kil General Gough. Who knows whether that would finaly have been enough?'

'Why did he leave Gough until last?'

'My guess is that it was tactics. If he went for the high-profile people first—Gough and, to a degree, Mulins—there would have been many more questions asked and the risk of him not finishing his self-imposed task would have been increased. After al, if you hadn't wanted to understand John's death, not even dreaming that he'd been murdered, Somers would presumably have got away with it al.'

'And then what?'

'He said he dreamed of taking Gwen and Catherine Lovel abroad to start a new life. But I don't think he believed it realy.'

'And al for revenge,' she said.

Laurence was silent. As wel as vengeance, John's death and the pattern of his own life were simply about fathers and sons, and the struggle to make things right.

He looked at Mary. Quite late on, he'd grasped that her real question al along, even if she had never known it herself, had been why her brother had rejected her. He had an unequivocal answer to that now: her father was not who she believed him to be and, to the young and imaginative John, she was the living proof of his mother's infidelity. It was an answer he could never give her.

Instead he said, 'I hope you'l meet Eleanor Bolitho. I think you'd like her and she could tel you much more than I can about John. She looked after him during the war and even when he was realy unhappy, quite cut off from the world, she cared for him.'

He was sure Mary would realise the truth about Nicholas Bolitho as soon as she set eyes on the child, but thought Eleanor would eventualy tel her everything.

The likeness between the little boy and John was remarkable.

Laurence thought of his own father. He couldn't remember his voice or his face, just his singing in the bath and his strong, square hands. Strangely, he could recal Mr Emmett more clearly. The affable smile, the absent-minded pats as he passed by; the sudden appearances and disappearances always with a dog or two beside him; the nightly toast to the survivors of Omdurman, at which they had al giggled.

He must have smiled at the memory because Mary asked, 'What are you thinking about?'

'Nothing. Vague memories. Your father, funnily enough.'

Something was bothering her, he could tel. Finaly she said, 'John's wilingness—his need—to give General Somers every last detail of the execution: the names of those involved, the circumstances, grim as they were. It probably sealed the fate of al of them, I suppose?' There was something in the tone of Mary's voice that made him think she hoped for contradiction.

'I think John's way out of despair was scrupulous honesty,' he said. 'He needed to make his peace. He could hardly guess that Somers was using his list to conduct his own war. He wasn't just speaking to a very eminent and much more senior military man, but one who had an official role, assisting a parliamentary committee. He also thought he was bringing some sort of help to Hart's mother.'

Suddenly he thought back to Somers' last conversation with him. 'You know, I think John held back on teling him of Hart's last words. Somers had told John he was Hart's father but that the boy never knew him. To discover his son knew who he was al the time and believed he'd be ashamed of him, would have been too terrible to bear. John told Somers that Hart was incoherent after the first voley. It must have been one of the few times John evaded the truth.'

Mary's face cleared a little. 'I'm glad,' she said.

Within minutes they had turned off into a vilage. Thatched cottages bordered the main street, with a smal brook on one side. After they passed a couple of larger red-brick houses, the vilage petered out by a flint-and-stone church and a field gate. Laurence guessed the smal church to be very old, possibly twelfth century.

His eye was taken by the vast, white-chalk figure that rose up in front of them, dominating the grassy hilside above the church.

'The Long Man,' Mary said with almost proprietorial pride.

The outline, clutching a stave in each hand, was obviously pagan in design and spirit. Laurence's spirits lifted. God knows how old the figure was, or what it meant to its creators, but undoubtedly it had stood on its hilside for milennia and would stand there long after they and their strange world were reduced to dust. He found the prospect of his own irrelevance comforting.

They left the car and walked across the churchyard in which grew a yew, also of great age, its wide branches propped on wooden supports. He could see why Mary liked this place. Ahead of them lay a medieval building with a long barn at an angle. As a dark figure carrying a box across the courtyard drew closer, he saw to his astonishment that it appeared to be a nun.

'Wilmington Priory. It's a nursing order,' Mary said. They crunched across the gravel and he prepared himself for the explanation that he sensed would folow.

'The thing is,' she said very slowly, 'that when I told you Richard was lost, I meant lost. It wasn't a euphemism. He isn't dead, you see. Not realy.'

Instantly Laurence felt his hair prick on the back of his neck. Mary puled on a metal boss next to a studded wooden door, silver-grey with age, and waited.

The door was opened by another nun. She left them in a dark hal, whose only ornamentation was a black oak table, two upright chairs and four religious paintings.

'Everything I told you—how he was injured—was al true.'

As she spoke, Mary wouldn't look at him.

'In a sense he died the minute the shrapnel hit him, but although his injuries were terrible, he survived.'

Finaly her eyes moved, almost pleading, to Laurence's.

'He was brought back to England. It became obvious that he would live, but also obvious that he would never be able to do anything for himself. The damage to his brain was never going to heal. He was a child. An infant. He knew no one and nothing, he could not move. He—' She paused. 'He even has to wear baby napkins.

So he was lost, you see—the man he was, the man I'd loved. He came here and here he wil stay for the rest of his life. He wil never walk, wil never see his lovely Downs or winter seas again. A few friends come from time to time, but less and less often. His doctor is an immensely kind, wise man. It's his car, actualy. I bumped into him at the concert we went to. I thought you'd seen us talking together; I wanted to explain but to start to tel you the whole story was too much then. I didn't know you wel enough and I wanted you to like me, and the alternative was to lie, which I didn't want.'

He stroked her arm. 'It's al right.'

'As for his wife, despite her scruples before, she eventualy divorced him and married her lover. I would have married Richard then, even as he is, especially as he is, but legaly he can't make the vows. She can divorce him, but I can't marry him unilateraly. Besides, he has no idea who I am.'

She looked at Laurence and shrugged.

'So that's that.'

He removed his hand as an older nun, wearing a white apron, came into view and beckoned them to folow her. They went up a shalow flight of black oak stairs and turned into a long dormitory. The first thing Laurence noticed were the large Gothic windows, which filed the long room with light. The views over the hil and past the Long Man in al his vigour were superb. The second thing he noticed was the row of beds and the peace. Younger nuns in slightly different habits attended the patients. One man groaned as two nuns turned him from his back on to his side. The occupant of the bed nearest the door lay on his back, one eye half open, his hands moving jerkily under the sheets. A shining line of saliva ran down his chin. Laurence looked away, feeling embarrassed.