Chapter 4
He knew he was dreaming, because he was eighteen again, and because the cold in that yard was the particular cold of that place and no other.
Four years he had been at the camp by then.
Four years of the same frozen mud and the same practice sword and the same men who said traitor's son when they thought he could not hear.
He had grown into his shoulders. He could hold his own against soldiers ten years older, and had, more than once, in front of an audience.
The word had gone round three weeks before the carriage came. Earl Harrington's cousin was to visit — a man with connections in the War Office who made a habit of touring the northern camps, and who was received everywhere with hats off and doors held open.
Benjamin was crossing the drill square when it rolled in. Lacquered, well sprung, with the coat of arms on the door. He stood and watched the man step down: soft-handed, well fed, laughing at something one of the officers had said. Then he set down what he was carrying and went to find Oliver.
He found him behind the forge, mending a strap, and told him what he meant to do.
Oliver did not answer at once. He was eighteen as well, and had been in that camp for a few months, and Benjamin, even thought they were the same age, was there years by now took him under his wing and helped him adjust to the everyday life of the camp.
"Ben," he said finally. "He has come to look at the camp. He is important and powerful."
"He carries the name."
"He carries his cousin's name." Oliver set the strap down. "And there are five hundred men inside this fence, and every one of them will be turned out looking for us before breakfast."
"Then do not come."
"That is not what I said."
"I am going tonight." Benjamin heard how flat his own voice had gone and did not soften it. "With you or without you. For my father. And for my mother."
Oliver looked at him for a long moment. Then he swore, quietly and with feeling, and picked the strap back up.
"Fine," he said. "I will come. And when this goes badly, you will remember that I told you it would."
They went for the guest quarters at half past two in the morning, over the low wall behind the officers' lines, and it should have worked.
Benjamin had watched the building for two days.
He knew the doors and the rotation of the sentries and he had counted every man who went in or out.
What he had not accounted for was that a man like that does not travel alone.
They were four paces inside the passage when the first of the personal guards came out of a doorway that had no business being occupied, and after that it was very fast and very ugly.
Benjamin landed one good strike and took two.
Oliver put a man down and was flattened from behind by another.
It was finished inside a minute. They were dragged out into the yard by their collars with lamps coming on all along the barracks, and by sunrise the whole camp had heard.
Commander Aldric received them at seven, standing in the middle of the square with his hands behind his back. Harrington's cousin had been waiting an hour and had spent most of it talking.
"—an attempt upon my person, Commander, in a Crown establishment, by boys in the Queen's uniform.
" He was not shouting. He was angry in the leisurely, comfortable way of a man who has never once been in real danger.
"I want them broken. Publicly, and today.
And I shall write to men who will be extremely interested to hear how the matter was handled. "
Aldric let him finish.
"These are my men," he said. "On my ground. I will decide what is done with them."
The yard went very quiet.
"You will find—"
"I will decide what is done with them," Aldric said again, in exactly the same tone, and added nothing to it.
The cousin's color came up. He looked about the yard for support and found several officers who had discovered urgent business with their own boots. Within the hour he was gone.
Aldric turned round. "The perimeter fence. The outer face, every rail of it. You will begin at the north gate and you will not stop until it is done."
Somebody by the barracks laughed out loud.
That was the whole point of it, though Benjamin did not understand as much for another four years.
A flogging would have made martyrs of them in front of every boy in that camp.
A scrubbing brush made them a joke. Aldric had chosen the brush deliberately, and it cost him something with the officers to do it, and he never mentioned either fact to anybody.
They worked the whole of that day. The fence ran three-quarters of a mile and the outer face had not been touched in years — moss and bird lime and the black grime that comes off a hundred winters.
By afternoon their hands were split. By dusk Oliver had stopped talking, which for Oliver was a considerable statement.
Boots came up the frozen ground behind them a little after dark.
Aldric stopped a few paces off, looked at what they had done, which was not much, and then at Oliver.
"This was not your notion."
Oliver got to his feet. "Sir—"
"It was not. I know perfectly well whose notion it was." Aldric paused. "You went anyway."
Oliver said nothing.
"You stood beside your friend when you knew how it would end, and when it cost you a great deal to do it." Something in the older man's face moved, very slightly. "You made me proud tonight. I shall not say so again, so you had better take it now."
Oliver's mouth opened and produced nothing at all.
"Go and eat. Then sleep." Aldric nodded toward the barracks. "You will come back to this in the morning."
Oliver did not move. "What about Benjamin?"
"Benjamin will work until it is finished."
"Sir, that is—"
"Go, Oliver."
Oliver looked down at Benjamin, still on his knees with the brush in his hand. Benjamin did not look up. After a moment Oliver gathered his coat and went, and his footsteps crossed the yard without hurrying.
"Do not expect praise for fighting for justice," Aldric said.
Benjamin did not turn round. "I did not ask for any."
"Next time, prepare better. Or do not bother trying at all."
"I did prepare." His voice came out thinner than he wanted it. "I watched that building two days. I counted the sentries. I knew the doors—"
"You failed."
He said it flatly, without heat, and the flatness was worse than temper would have been.
"You did not merely fail the attempt. You failed me."
"I thought—"
"You thought wrong. And because you thought wrong, your friend was beaten senseless in a corridor, and orders were ignored, and trust was broken. All three belong to you. You will carry all three."
Benjamin set the brush down on the rail. "I did not mean for him to be hurt."
"Do you imagine your father would be proud of you tonight?"
Benjamin got up off his knees. Slowly, because they had been down there a long time. When he turned round his eyes were stinging and he did not much care whether it showed.
"I did not know him," he said. "Not really. But I remember that he was strong. And kind. Everyone respected him."
Something shifted in Aldric's face. It was not disbelief and it was not disagreement. It was closer to regret, and Benjamin had never seen it there before, and in the twenty years that followed he would see it only twice more.
"I have heard the same," Aldric said quietly. "A man of presence. Of dignity. A lion among sheep." He paused. "Lions fall, boy."
"He was betrayed. That is what killed him."
"Exactly so." Aldric took a step closer.
"He never saw the true enemy. He handed them the blade himself, and he did it because he believed that honor would stand between him and the world.
It will not. It never has, for anybody."A finger came up and pressed hard against Benjamin's chest. "You want to fight for your family.
For justice. Then be cleverer than he was.
Be ruthless, if it comes to that. But do not give them one inch. Not one."
Benjamin said nothing at all.
"Finish the fence," Aldric said. "Think on what happened tonight. Think on why."
He turned and walked away toward the office, and at the edge of the lamplight he stopped and looked back.
Not angry. Not cruel.
Only disappointed.
That was the thing that broke him.
◆◆◆
Benjamin woke on the floor of his mother's house with his heart going hard and his shirt soaked through.
For a moment he did not know the room at all. Bare boards. A cold hearth with last night's ash gone grey in it. One window with a sack stuffed into the broken pane, and the first light coming round the edges of it in a thin grey line.
He lay still until his breathing came back to him, and then a while longer, listening. Rain in the night, by the sound of the eaves. A bird somewhere in the ruin of the west end, up under the broken roof, going about its business.
Then he got up.
The house was very quiet at that hour, and quiet was the trouble with it.
He went along the passage with his coat over his shoulders and the cold coming up through the boards into his feet, and he did not intend to stop anywhere, and he stopped anyway, in the doorway of the great hall.
The daylight had got in overnight, which it had not been able to do when Hale's lamp was the only thing in the room.
Now he could see the whole of it. The black and white marble, lifted in a third of its squares.
The great heap of plaster and lath and leaves under the hole in the ceiling, with grass growing out of the top of it.
The chandelier hanging crooked and grey with cobweb, eleven crystals left on it out of what he thought had been a hundred.
His mother had stood in the middle of that floor and made two footmen move a painting three times because the light was wrong.
She had done it in July. He remembered the July because he had been sitting on the bottom stair being bored, and his father had come through and looked at the footmen and looked at her and said nothing at all and kept walking, and Benjamin had understood even at seven years old that this was a man who had decided a long time ago which arguments he intended to have.
There were doors off the far end of the hall.
Behind one of them was a morning room where she took her breakfast, and behind another a small library that had never held anything anybody would call a book, only ledgers and seed catalogues and a great many pamphlets from men in Edinburgh with theories about soil.
He could feel them all waiting there, one behind each door, and every one of them with something in it.
Benjamin stood in the doorway a moment longer.
Then he turned round and went out.
He came down the steps and stood on the gravel and made himself look at it properly, in daylight, which he had not done yet.
It was worse than it had seemed by lamp.
The yew hedge had gone fifteen feet and swallowed its own gate.
The gravel walks were under moss and grass and had stopped being walks and become slightly harder lines in a general wilderness.
The fountain had an ash tree in it. Bindweed had got into the roses and was up over the whole thicket in ropes, and there was ground elder through everything, which meant it had been through everything for twenty years, and which meant a great deal of digging.
And beyond all of it, running the whole length of the ground where the lawn met the lane, the fence.
Two hundred yards of it at least, in both directions.
Post and rail, and the rails black with weather and green with moss, and half the posts gone at the foot where the wet had been sitting against them.
It had fallen inward in three places and outward in one.
In the fallen sections the nettles had come up through and over and made a solid mass, chest-high, so that the fence and the nettles had grown into a single thing and it was not possible to say where one ended.
Benjamin looked at it for a long time.
A man could not mend that fence. Not as it stood.
A man could not get a hand to a post, or see where the rot ended and the sound wood began, or bring a horse and cart along the lane side to carry the new timber, or do anything at all with it — until the nettles and the bindweed and the twenty-three years of ground elder had been cut back and dragged off and burned.
Nothing could be repaired until the ground around it was clear.
He stood there in the wet grass with the mist moving round his knees and thought about a boy of eighteen on his knees at the north gate of a camp with a brush in his hand, being taught something he had not been able to understand at the time.
Think on what happened tonight. Think on why.
Benjamin went back to the scullery.
He found a scythe hanging on two nails behind the door with the blade gone orange, and a billhook, and a pair of leather gauntlets stiff as wood that had belonged to somebody with smaller hands than his.
He took the blade out into the yard and found the whetstone still sitting on the wall where it had sat since before he was born, and he spent twenty minutes on the edge and got it sharp enough to matter.
He walked down to the north end of the fence, where the lane came up from the village and where any man riding past would see him.
He set his coat on the post.
And he began at the corner, and cut in, and worked west along the line — the nettles going down in swathes, the bindweed coming away in long green cables, the smell of cut green rising sharp and bitter in the cold — and by the time the sun was properly up he had cleared eleven yards, and his hands had begun to bleed inside the gauntlets, and he did not stop.