Chapter Four
Four
The polished brass winked unmercifully at him in the morning sun.
Against all odds, the new day had come in viciously bright, with clear blue skies and what Duncan’s father used to call a lazy wind—it couldn’t be bothered to go around, so went right through you instead.
Alerted to some of this by the slanting blades of sunlight through the blinds in his bedroom as he woke, Duncan wore a pair of smoked-glass sharpshooter lenses against the glare when he headed out.
It got him some funny looks on the street—outside of movie stars, no one wore sunglasses this side of the Atlantic—but whether it did anything for his hangover, he couldn’t honestly say.
It didn’t feel like it. The aspirin he’d taken when he got up didn’t seem to be helping much either.
He went past the hard-gleaming brass, up the two steps, and through the double-width door under the portico, where he was greeted by a doorman and then a receptionist, who verified his appointment and led him on clacking heels across the marble lobby and up a sweeping staircase to offices on the second floor.
Subdued bustle of coming and going in the corridor, in and out of rooms with doors left ajar.
Men in suits, women in secretarial attire, carrying files or folded papers, here and there the cylindrical tubing of a map holder.
They paused and stood aside for Duncan and his escort.
Duncan glanced into one office, saw a small group of men gathered at a blackboard with a neatly chalked diagram across it.
In another, dusty-looking antique tomes lay opened on a long table.
The receptionist stopped, finally, at a handsomely varnished wood paneled door.
Knocked and gave him a reassuring, if slightly quizzical, smile.
He realized he was still wearing the sharpshooter lenses and fumbled them hastily off.
“Come!”
Exactly the cut-glass tones Niamh had described to Duncan the night before.
The receptionist opened the door, ushered Duncan into a high-ceilinged space almost as big as his whole apartment.
Turkish carpet on the polished wood floor, two sash windows almost twice the height of a man, ornate cornicing on the ceiling overhead.
Sunlight poured into the room with a bright force Duncan could have very well done without.
“Mr. Duncan Silver,” the receptionist announced.
“Thank you, Molly.” Hardy came out from behind a large mahogany desk to greet him. “Perhaps you could rustle us up some tea. Have you breakfasted, Mr. Silver?”
As a safety measure, he had not.
“I’m not very hungry,” he said truthfully.
“Just tea, then, Molly. Thank you.” He waited until Molly had left. “Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Silver. Colonel Martin Hardy, at your service.”
Duncan took the proffered hand, got a firm shake that wasn’t trying to prove anything, and a smile to match. But the smile was quick, perfunctory, and above it, hard dark eyes measured Duncan’s face with keen attention.
“Where did you serve, Mr. Silver?” Deceptively casual.
“Western Front. You?”
It was blunt to the point of rudeness. Among fellow veterans, you’d mention place names, battles, regiment. Hardy took the deflection with no more than an elegant raised brow. “Oh, like you—Flanders and France, for my sins. Coldstream Guards.”
Another smile, this one wintry. The Guards had famously taken a pasting in the early years of the war. Duncan heard their officer ranks were all but wiped out.
“Must be a change.” Duncan looked around at the office. “Forestry.”
“Not as much as you’d think, really. It is, after all, another kind of war.
” Hardy gestured to an occasional table and a couple of armchairs, all drenched in the sunlight streaming through the tall windows.
“Please, Mr. Silver. Take a seat. Take off your jacket, if you prefer. The tea won’t be long. ”
They sat. Duncan couldn’t make up his mind whether the warmth of the sun on his face made him feel better or worse. He left his jacket on. Hardy crossed his legs with officer elegance, placed clasped hands on his knee.
“Yes, as I say, another kind of war. With new enemies, and rules we have yet to learn. You, Mr. Silver, will know that more than most.”
“Never thought of it that way.” He honestly hadn’t.
“Yet you’ll agree that Great Britain is once more under threat, in all likelihood under a far greater threat than Kaiser Bill ever presented?
Vast swaths of our country taken effortlessly from us, cities under siege, smaller communities all but cut off from each other in many cases.
In the war, we were at least an island, with coasts we could defend.
Here, the enemy sprouts, quite literally, from within.
” Producing a slim silver case from his jacket. “Smoke?”
Duncan shook his head. He’d never acquired the habit, even in the trenches.
Hardy arched the elegant eyebrow again, but he made no comment. He took a cigarette for himself, leaned forward to light it from a heavy onyx lighter stood on the table between them, then sat back and smoked for a moment or two.
“I’m curious to know,” he said finally. “If you don’t think of what we face as a war, what keeps you going back into the Forest as you do?”
“They pay me.”
“Yes, I know that.” Trickling smoke idly from his nose. “Quite highly, too, if the one or two cases I’m familiar with are anything to go by.”
Best leave that one alone. If Hardy meant the business with Viscount Savin’s son, or the Canning family mess, then he had levels of access Duncan didn’t want to think about. And if not, well, then he was just fishing and fuck him into a muddy crater for that.
“My fees vary.”
“Indeed. According to what, I wonder.”
This hangover was going fucking nowhere. “What do you want, Colonel Hardy?”
“Hmm.” There was an onyx ashtray on the table to match the lighter.
Hardy leaned in and knocked ash off his cigarette.
“Yes, they said you were blunt. What do I want, Mr. Silver? I suppose you might say I need to satisfy my professional curiosity. We live in times of smoke and mirrors, and cheap conjuring for effect. Séances and revenants and bloody fairies at the bottom of the garden—I assume you saw that asinine piece by Conan Doyle in The Strand a couple of years back?”
“Heard about it.”
“Yes, well. As I say, times of cheap conjuring for effect. But I have no use for a cheap conjuror, and would like to spare myself the embarrassment of being seen to hire one in error. We are newly established here at the commission. It wouldn’t do to jeopardize the faith being placed in us.”
“And what faith is that?”
Hardy shrugged. “That we can hold back the darkness.”
—
The tea came, pushed in on an ornate trolley by a matronly woman with a pink shiny face. She parked beside the occasional table. Demure clinking of good china as the trolley rolled to a halt. Hardy nodded his thanks.
“Ah, here we are—Harrogate’s finest. And cake, too! You are spoiling us, Mrs. Clifton! Thank you, you can just leave it for us.” He beamed at Duncan. “Shall I be mother?”
He set about pouring for them, as if it were the thing he’d been trained for his entire life. Mrs. Clifton closed the door discreetly behind her. A stillness settled into the sunlit room.
“Tell me, Mr. Silver,” Hardy not looking up from his task. Voice as careful as his gaze on the teapot and cups. The tea sparkled as it poured. “Did you ever see…angels? Over there, I mean. At the front? At Mons, perhaps? Or later, at the Somme?”
“No.”
Hardy distributed teacups and saucers, milk jug and sugar pot. He served slices of the cake onto small plates and laid them out.
“I see. Did you perhaps encounter…other things?”
Duncan shifted impatiently. “I was not at Mons. And from what I hear, that whole thing was shite the church made up to boost morale. Ghostly bowmen, wasn’t? The shades of Agincourt? Arrow wounds on the bodies of German soldiers?”
“I’ve heard that said, yes.”
“But that’s not what you’re talking about?”
Hardy finished with the tea service, took his own cup, and cradled it between his palms as if for warmth.
“I saw arrow wounds not long after Mons,” he said quietly. “And the arrows that made them. But those wounds weren’t just on the Germans.”
“No, I don’t imagine they were.”
“Arrows the likes of which I’ve never seen, before or since.
Black and filigree silver, so they caught the light, as if the shafts had been…
embedded with shards of crystal. When you looked at the fletching, it was thick, too thick for just feathers.
It seemed to move. Like something alive, like…
leeches attached to the shaft. And the wounds were…
” Hardy looked up, manufactured a small, apologetic smile.
“Well. No one wanted to touch those arrows.”
He sipped some tea. Cleared his throat.
“The first time was a reconnaissance mission. Woods on a slope to the northeast of our position. The Germans had been scarce, considering what advances they’d already made.
Command suspected a pincer movement, so we were detailed to sneak up there and take a look.
I took eighteen men into those woods, Mr. Silver.
I came back out with only two. What do you say to that? ”
“I’d say you got lucky. Did you see what killed your men?”