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Grey couldn’t stand to watch him read through Charles Carruthers’s postmortem denunciation, recalling each damning page as Hal read it. He stood up and went to the window of the library that looked out into the back garden of Argus House, ignoring the swish of turning pages and the occasional blasphemous mutterings behind him.
Hal’s three boys were playing a game of tigers and hunters, leaping out at one another from behind the shrubbery with shrill roars, followed by shrieks of delight and yells of “Bang! Take that, you striped son of a bitch!”
The nurse seated on the edge of the fish pool, keeping a tight grip on baby Dottie’s gown, looked up at this but merely rolled her eyes with a martyred expression. Flesh and blood has its limits, her expression said clearly, and she resumed paddling a hand in the water, luring one of the big goldfish close so that Dottie could drop bits of bread to it.
John longed to be down there with them. It was a rare day for early April, and he felt the pulse of it in his blood, urging him to be outside, ru
Siverly. The name floated in the darkness behind his eyes, pasted across the blank face of an imagined cartoon major, drawn in uniform, an outsize sword brandished in his hand and bags of money stuffed into the back of his breeches, obscene bulges under the skirt of his coat. One or two had fallen to the ground, bursting open so that you could see the contents—coin in one, the other filled with what looked like poppets, small wooden doll-like things. Each one with a tiny knife through its heart.
Hal swore in German behind him. He must have reached the part about the rifles; German oaths were reserved for the most stringent occasions, French being used for minor things like a burnt di
He turned round to see Hal on his feet, pale with rage, a sheet of paper crumpled in one hand.
“How dare he? How darehe?”
A small knot he hadn’t known was there dissolved under John’s ribs. His brother had built his own regiment, the 46th, out of his own blood and bones; no one was less likely to overlook or condone military malfeasance. Still, Hal’s response reassured him.
“You believe Carruthers, then?”
Hal glared at him.
“Don’t you? You knew the man.”
He hadknown Charles Carruthers—in more than one sense.
“Yes, I believed him when he told me about Siverly in Canada, and that”—he nodded at the papers, thrown in a sprawl across Hal’s desk—“is even more convincing. You’d think he’d been a lawyer.”
He could still see Carruthers’s face, pale in the dimness of his attic room in the little garrison town of Gareon, drawn with ill health but set with grim determination to live long enough to see justice done. Charlie hadn’t lived that long, but long enough to write down every detail of the case against Major Gerald Siverly and to entrust it to Grey.
He was the fuse that would detonate this particular bomb. And he was all too familiar with what happened to fuses, once lit.
“WHAT IS THIS?” Hal was frowning at one of the papers. Grey put down the book in his hand and came to look. The paper was in Carruthers’s handwriting, as painstakingly executed as the rest; Carruthers had known he was setting down evidence for a court-martial and had done his best to make it legible.
It waslegible—insofar as Grey could make out the various letters that composed the words. But the words themselves looked like nothing he had ever seen before.
Йistigн, Fir na dtrн nбisiъn.
Йistigн, le glуr na hadhairc ag caoineadh san goath.
Ag teбcht as an oiche.
Tб sн ag teacht.
Tб an Banrion ag teacht.
Sй na deonaigh, le gruaig agus sъil in bhfiai
Ag leanъint lucht mhуir an Bhanrнon.
It looked like the sheerest gibberish. At the same time, there was something … civilized—was that the word?—in its appearance. The words bore all ma
“Have you ever seen anything like that before?” he asked Hal. His brother shook his head, still frowning.
“No. It looks vaguely as though someone had made an effort to transliterate Greek, using the Roman alphabet—but the words certainly aren’t Greek.”
“Nor Hebrew,” Grey said, peering at the first line. “Russian, perhaps? Turkish?”
“Perhaps,” Hal said dubiously. “But why, for God’s sake?”
Grey ran through in his mind what he knew of Carruthers’s career but turned up no particular co
“Everything else in the packet pertains to Siverly and his misdeeds. So logically this must, too.”
“Was Carruthers particularly logical?” Hal eyed the stack of papers. “He’s legible, I’ll give him that. You knew him a great deal better than I, though—what d’you think?”
Grey thought a lot of things, most of which he didn’t intend to speak out loud. He had known Charlie Carruthers fairly well—in the Biblical sense, among others—though for only a short time and that time, more than ten years ago. Their meeting in Canada the year before had been brief—but Charlie had known Grey very well, too. He’d known who to trust with his inflammatory legacy.
“Not particularly logical, no,” he answered slowly. “Rather determined, though. Once he’d made up his mind to something, he’d see it through.”
And he nearly had. In spite of a failing heart, Carruthers had clung to life stubbornly, compiling this damning mass of testimony, determined to bring Major Gerald Siverly to justice.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice,”he had whispered in John’s ear, during their last meeting. Grey picked up the little stack of papers and shuffled them neatly into order, smelling in memory the scent of that attic room in Gareon, near Quebec. Pine boards, hot with a stifling turpentine perfume. Soured milk and the moldy sweetness of mouse droppings. The scent of Charlie’s skin, sweating with heat and with illness. The touch of his deformed hand on Grey’s face, a light touch but strong with the force of memory.
“I hunger, John,” he’d said, his breath heavy with approaching death. “And you thirst. You won’t fail me.”
Grey didn’t intend to. With slow deliberation, he tapped the papers on the table, squaring them, and set them neatly down.
“Is there enough here, do you think?” he asked his brother. Enough to cause a general court-martial to be called, he meant—enough to convict Siverly of corruption, of abuse of his office. Of misconduct amounting to the murder of his own men. Siverly did not belong to Hal’s regiment, but he did belong to the army to which Hal—and Grey himself, come to that—had given most of their lives.
“More than enough,” Hal said, rubbing a hand over his chin. It was late in the day; the bristles of his beard made a tiny rasping sound. “If the witnesses can be found. If they’ll speak.” He spoke abstractedly, though, still puzzling over the mysterious sheet.