Colonel Butler's Wolf (21 page)

That’s Housman, but I could give you plenty more—Kipling knew it too, and we Americans know how to value him even if you don’t over here.”

“I don’t know whether Colonel Butler understood a word of what you’re saying, Mike,” said Polly. “But I certainly don’t.”

“You darned well ought to, honey—living where you do.” Klobucki pointed out of the window, southwards towards the line of crags. “How many times do you think the fat guys down in Londinium—or the Roman-Britishers in the nice centrally-heated villas—how many times do you think they spared a thought for these poor cats up on the Wall? Only when the tax-man came round, I guess—and then they’d curse the over-fed, over-paid, licentious soldiery. Maybe they were all that, too. But they were still all that stood between the central-heating and the barbarians—the
barbari.”

“Well!” Polly looked at Butler, her eyebrows raised. “Mike really is making amends.”

“Not at all,” Klobucki shook his head vigorously. “Truth doesn’t make amends by itself. My amends are more—more edible.” He turned, peering back into the room.
“
Sir! Dr Gracey, sir!
”

“Why must you be so formal, Mike?” The voice that boomed in reply was startlingly deep, but with the quality of a bass pipe on a cathedral organ.

“In deference to your great age and seniority, sir,” replied the American, straightfaced. “And your stature, of course.”

Stature indeed, thought Butler. The man was even bigger than Audley, and yet without a hint of surplus flesh: simply a larger-than-life man.

“I’d like you to meet my guest for tomorrow night, sir,” continued Klobucki. “Colonel Butler—Dr Gracey.”

“Ah, Butler!” Gracey extended a huge, serviceable hand. “Charles Epton has been telling me about you—and so has my godless god-daughter. And I gather you’ve met my old friend Geoffrey Hobson when you were up in Oxford.”

“Hah!” Butler grunted, gripping the hand and meeting the shrewd eyes in the same moment. He felt the years stripping away from him, leaving him naked and unprotected: Second Lieutenant Butler, green and desperately worried about his Lancashire accent, reporting to battalion headquarters on the edge of the Reichswald, with the rumble of the distant German guns echoing in his empty stomach.

“And you are the authority on the Byzantine army, I gather, Butler?”

“Hardly the authority, sir. I’ve made a special study of their siege operations on the eastern front in the 6th century,” said Butter ponderously. “From Belisarius to the Emperor Maurice, you know.”

“Indeed.” There was a reassuring lack of interest in Gracey’s voice; it would have been altogether too gruesome if he had turned out to be himself an expert in the subject. “Well, the man you want to talk to is our Dr Audley, though he’d tend to take the Persian and the Arab side more than the Byzantine … “ Gracey looked around the room “ … but he doesn’t appear to be thirsty this afternoon. Where is David, Polly?”

“Oh, he phoned to say he’d got hung up somewhere. He probably won’t be back until tomorrow some time—he said for me to apologise to you, but apparently there aren’t any seminars tomorrow anyway.”

“There aren’t indeed. And there aren’t many senior members either.” Gracey frowned.

“And Dr Handforth-Jones sent his apologies too—“

“Ah, I know about Tony Handforth-Jones. He’s in the middle of another of his fund-raising frauds,” Gracey’s gaze returned to Butler. “I trust you haven’t any charitable funds in your gift, Butler. Because if you have, then you’ll have Handforth-Jones after you for a contribution to his archaeological enterprises. I never knew a man who was better at raising money from unlikely sources. And at spending it. He has a passion for hiring expensive machinery.”

He smiled, shaking his head in mock disapproval, and it struck Butler that Audley’s apparent hold over the archaeologist might well stem from a use of departmental funds never envisaged by the Defense Minister.

“On the other hand, if nobody’s doing any work tomorrow, that may solve the problem of tomorrow night’s dinner party —eh, Mike?”

“Sir?” Klobucki cocked his head questioningly.

“My dear boy, if I’m to honour you with a dinner cooked with my own hand, then I must have something to cook— and something worth cooking. So you’re going to have to work for your supper in the manner of your ancestors in the days when Pittsburg was Fort Pitt.”

“Sir?”

Gracey considered the young American gravely for a moment, then shook his head. “On the other hand, I doubt very much whether you could hit a barn door. But as it happens you have anticipated me in your choice of guest. I assume you are a crack shot, Colonel Butler?”

Butler stared back at him utterly at a loss.

“I’m a—a tolerable shot,” he spluttered finally.

“Better than tolerable, I hope! Could you hit a moving target … “ Gracey paused dramatically “ … if your dinner depended on it?”

Polly burst out laughing. “Uncle John—the poor man doesn’t understand a word anyone’s been saying to him this afternoon. First Terry and Mike—and now you!” She turned apologetically to Butler. “Colonel, you see Uncle John just fancies he’s one of the world’s great cooks—“

“My dear, I don’t fancy anything of the sort. I am a very good cook—“

“And once in a while he has to prove it. And when this frightful American won the Newdigate Poetry Prize with a perfectly incomprehensible bit of doggerel—“

“Now hold on, Polly-Anna!”

“Perfectly
incomprehensible
—Uncle John promised him one of his dinners. And it seems you’re going to be honoured too.”

“If he can bag a brace of good Cumberland hares before lunch, that is,” amended Gracey. “I know it is a bit late in the year, but we’re far enough north here for them to be still in their prime. By rights I should jug them—hares always ought to be jugged—but that would take ten days, or seven at the very least, and we haven’t time for that. So it must be a stew, a hare stew … “

Butler gaped at him, but the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cumbria had passed beyond his immediate audience into a paradisal world of his own.

“ … a cream of vegetable soup, the imported celery is very acceptable just now. And quenelles—we shouldn’t have them at this time of year either, but I can’t resist them even though you can’t get pike … haddock poached in a bouillon of good chicken stock with a drop of white wine. Loire—or a bottle of Charles’s Vouvray—we can start with that and end with it … And something sweet to go with it then—like a syllabub. Yes, a syllabub.” Gracey looked accusingly at Butler. “And none of that nonsense about syllabub being too difficult, either. People in England just can’t cook the way they used to. Why, syllabub used to be one of the glories of the English table.”

His voice dropped an octave into the reverential range. “And the hare—in a fine brown stock, with lots of onions and carrots and just a hint of curry powder—just a hint, mind you.”

He swung towards Polly. “How many guns has your father got locked in that cupboard of his? He’s got two or three 12-bores, hasn’t he?”

Polly nodded. “He’s got a matched pair of Ferguson 12-bores, and there’s an old 410.”

“Good, very good!” Gracey rubbed his hands. “Well tomorrow, my girl, you will take a shooting party up on the Wall—you can start from the Gap up there and go westward towards Aesica.”

“Are there really hares there, sir?”

“My dear Mike, it is hare stew, not wild goose, that I intend to serve—of course there are hares there. I have it on good authority that there are. Just stay south of the Wall—along the Vallum is as good a line as any—and you should be able to bag something there, Colonel. And if you can get ‘em back to me before lunch, there’ll just be time to have it all ready for a late dinner.”

Dr Gracey’s eyes glinted again. “We shall drink the Chateau Pape Clement with it. And at the end you and I will drink a bottle of Cockburn ‘45, which we will not waste on these young people, beyond one small glass anyway.”

Butler did his best to look enthusiastic. He had encountered this terrifying enthusiasm for food and wine before, and he knew better than to trifle with it. It was certainly no time to explain that it would all be wasted on him, that a couple of decent whiskeys and one good plateful of meat and vegetables was enough for him, and that rich concoctions and sweet kickshaws—and of all things port—only made him liverish next day.

“Hah! Well—ah—I’ll do my best,” he growled. “I’m most honoured to be your guest.”

“Not at all man, not at. all! I’m glad of the opportunity of preparing dinner for someone who’s used to something better than—“ Gracey waved towards his god-daughter and the American “—than cardboard slimming biscuits and predigested hamburgers. But tell me, Butler, how long have you been a friend of Mike’s?”

Butler looked at Klobucki for support.

“About five minutes, sir,” Klobucki said without the least hesitation.

“Five minutes?”

“Well—“ A refreshing note of diffidence crept into Klobucki’s voice “—to be strictly accurate we first met about ten minutes ago, and we haven’t actually been introduced to one another.”

“Mike was making amends,” said Polly mischievously.

“Amends? Amends for what?”

“We gave Colonel Butler a rather rough welcome, I guess.” Klobucki turned apologetically to Butler. “We aren’t usually as argumentative, at least not so quickly, sir. You’ll just have to put it down to the natives being a bit restless tonight—the air’s a bit thundery, you might say.”

“Thundery?” Gracey frowned.

“Grendel’s loose,” Polly murmured mischievously.

“Now that’s right! But how—?” The American stared at the girl in surprise. “Have you been talking to Dan McLachlan?”

“It was Dan, actually.” Polly nodded.

“What do you mean ‘Grendel’s loose’?” snapped Gracey, looking from Polly to Klobucki quickly.

“Search me, Uncle John,” said Polly. “It was Dan at his most mysterious—he never got round to telling us who this character Grendel is, did he, Colonel? Or should I know him?”

Gracey raised an eyebrow. “Hardly, my dear. But what the devil is this all about, Mike?”

“Well—“ Klobucki began awkwardly “—it’s kind of difficult to explain … “

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Polly interrupted him hotly. “Will someone kindly tell me who Grendel is?”

“
Beowulf
”
Butler rasped. “He comes in
Beowulf.
”

“And who’s B—?” Polly turned accusingly on the American. “Darn it, isn’t that one of those hairy Anglo-Saxon poems you’re always complaining about?”

“My dear girl,” said Gracey, “so far from being a hairy Anglo-Saxon poem,
Beowulf
happens to be the only surviving Old English epic and one of the greatest pieces of early medieval literature. Now, Michael Klobucki, what is all this nonsense about Grendel?”

“Sir—it’s like this—“

“Explain so that my ignorant god-daughter can understand, if you don’t mind.”

“Mind? Why, surely, sir! You see, Polly-Anna, your ancestors had this thing about trolls—sort of half-men, half-monsters. The trolls had it in for the humans, on account of their being descended from Cain, and they lived out on the moors or in the fens and lakes … like the one under the crag out there. .. and if a troll moved in on the humans he’d first come at night and sit on the roof and drum his heels on it. And if they didn’t take the hint, then he’d wait until they were all dead asleep—and probably dead-drunk too—and he’d creep in and kill a few and drink their blood. And there wasn’t a thing they could do about it except pack up and go and live somewhere else.”

“Unless they had a really great warrior among them,” said Gracey softly. “A Hero.”

“Sure—if they had a genuine Hero, preferably with a magic sword and a miraculous chain mail vest,” Klobucki nodded. “A sort of John Wayne and Wyatt Earp—or like maybe Shane.”

“And Grendel was a troll?”

“That’s it, honey—a Troll First Class who moved in on King Hrothgar’s great hall of Heorot, so no one dared live in it for twelve years, until young Beowulf showed up for the show-down.”

“You make it sound more like a cowboy film.”

“Hell, that’s what it is! All good epics are the same, just the costumes are different—it don’t matter whether they’re set in Camelot or Dodge City—and the O.K. Corral’s no different from Heorot Great Hall, see.”

No different, thought Butler. No different the same way as Agincourt and Waterloo and Mons and Alamein had been no different: take away the legend and the common factors were dirt and death.

“So exactly where does Castleshields House figure in this interesting theory?” asked Gracey. “Because if you intended to cast it as Heorot, with Charles or myself as the unfortunate King Hrothgar, I should be obliged if you’d explain your reasons.”

“Well, sir—“ Klobucki’s ugly face flushed. “The way Dan’s got it doped out, there’s something goddamn queer going on— the way the Master of King’s told us to watch our step … but you’d better ask him than me, the Master, I mean.”

McLachlan had been indiscreet to a degree, but not completely loose-mouthed, for Klobucki did not appear able to extrapolate from Grendel to Neil Smith’s death. That at least was something.

“I see.” Gracey looked at the American narrowly now. Unlike Klobucki, he might well guess that there was more to that tragic accident at Petts Pond than was generally known, but he could know nothing for certain unless Audley had primed him. “And just what is this goddamn queer something, eh?”

“Oh, no—don’t you ask me!” Klobucki shook his head warily. “I’ve seen enough trouble and strife of my own to want any of yours just now. I don’t want any part of it. Back home I’d guess you call me a two-time loser already, but here I’m just a foreigner who wants to keep his snotty nose clean— and I don’t want to be sent home just yet.”

“You said the natives are restless, though.”

“So I did, sure.” Klobucki’s eyes flashed behind the thick lenses. “That’s just a feeling down in my gut. Maybe it’s imagination—or indigestion. Or maybe I just fancied I’d heard those heels drumming on the roof beam.”

Gracey looked round the room meditatively. Following his gaze, Butler noticed that they had been left high and dry in their own corner by a tide of interest which seemed to have drawn everyone else to the windows overlooking the croquet lawn.