A Trail of Fire Read online

  And then he did reach home.

  The rubble had been pushed off the street into a heap, but not taken away. Great blackened lumps of shattered stone and concrete lay like a cairn where Montrose Terrace had once stood.

  All the blood in his heart stopped dead, congealed by the sight. He groped, pawing mindlessly for the wrought-iron railing to keep himself from falling, but it wasn’t there.

  Of course not, his mind said, quite calmly. It’s gone for the war, hasn’t it? Melted down, made into planes. Bombs.

  His knee gave way without warning, and he fell, landing hard on both knees, not feeling the impact, the crunch of pain from his badly mended kneecap quite drowned out by the blunt small voice inside his head.

  Too late. Ye went too far.

  ‘Mr MacKenzie, Mr MacKenzie!’ He blinked at the blurred thing above him, not understanding what it was. Something tugged at him, though, and he breathed, the rush of air in his chest ragged and strange.

  ‘Sit up, Mr MacKenzie, do.’ The anxious voice was still there, and hands – yes, it was hands – tugging at his arm. He shook his head, screwed his eyes shut hard, then opened them again, and the round thing became the hound-like face of old Mr Wardlaw, who kept the corner shop.

  ‘Ah, there you are.’ The old man’s voice was relieved, and the wrinkles in his baggy old face relaxed their anxious lines. ‘Had a bad turn, did you?’

  ‘I—’ Speech was beyond him, but he flapped his hand at the wreckage. He didn’t think he was crying, but his face was wet. The wrinkles in Wardlaw’s face creased deeper in concern, then the old grocer realised what he meant, and his face lit up.

  ‘Oh, dear!’ he said. ‘Oh, no! No, no, no – they’re all right, sir, your family’s all right! Did you hear me?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Can you breathe? Had I best fetch you some salts, do you think?’

  It took Jerry several tries to make it to his feet, hampered both by his knee and by Mr Wardlaw’s fumbling attempts to help him, but by the time he’d got all the way up, he’d regained the power of speech.

  ‘Where?’ he gasped. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Why – your missus took the little boy and went to stay with her mother, sometime after you left. I don’t recall quite where she said . . .’ Mr Wardlaw turned, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the river. ‘Camberwell, was it?’

  ‘Bethnal Green.’ Jerry’s mind had come back, though it felt still as though it was a pebble rolling round the rim of some bottomless abyss, its balance uncertain. He tried to dust himself off, but his hands were shaking. ‘She lives in Bethnal Green. You’re sure – you’re sure, man?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ The grocer was altogether relieved, smiling and nodding so hard that his jowls trembled. ‘She left – must be more than a year ago, soon after she – soon after she . . .’ The old man’s smile faded abruptly and his mouth slowly opened, a flabby dark hole of horror.

  ‘But you’re dead, Mr MacKenzie,’ he whispered, backing away, hands held up before him. ‘Oh, God. You’re dead.’

  ‘The fuck I am, the fuck I am, the fuck I am!’ He caught sight of a woman’s startled face and stopped abruptly, gulping air like a landed fish. He’d been weaving down the shattered street, fists pumping, limping and staggering, muttering his private motto under his breath like the Hail Marys of a rosary. Maybe not as far under his breath as he’d thought.

  He stopped, leaning against the marble front of the Bank of England, panting. He was streaming with sweat and the right leg of his trousers was heavily streaked with dried blood from the fall. His knee was throbbing in time with his heart, his face, his hands, his thoughts. They’re alive. So am I.

  The woman he’d startled was down the street, talking to a policeman; she turned, pointing at him. He straightened up at once, squaring his shoulders. Braced his knee and gritted his teeth, forcing it to bear his weight as he strode down the street, officer-like. The very last thing he wanted just now was to be taken up as drunk.

  He marched past the policeman, nodding politely, touching his forehead in lieu of cap. The policeman looked taken aback, made to speak but couldn’t quite decide what to say, and a moment later, Jerry was round the corner and away.

  It was getting dark. There weren’t many cabs in this area at the best of times – none at all, now, and he hadn’t any money, anyway. The Tube. If the lines were open, it was the fastest way to Bethnal Green. And surely he could cadge the fare from someone. Somehow. He went back to limping, grimly determined. He had to reach Bethnal Green by dark.

  It was so much changed. Like the rest of London. Houses damaged, halfway repaired, abandoned, others no more than a blackened depression or a heap of rubble. The air was thick with coal dust, stone dust, and the smells of paraffin and cooking grease, the brutal, acrid smell of cordite.

  Half the streets had no signs, and he wasn’t so familiar with Bethnal Green to begin with. He’d visited Dolly’s mother just twice, once when they went to tell her they’d run off and got married – she hadn’t been best pleased, Mrs Wakefield, but she’d put a good face on it, even if the face had a lemon-sucking look to it.

  The second time had been when he signed up with the RAF; he’d gone alone to tell her, to ask her to look after Dolly while he was gone. Dolly’s mother had gone white. She knew as well as he did what the life-expectancy was for fliers. But she’d told him she was proud of him, and held his hand tight for a long moment before she let him leave, saying only, ‘Come back, Jeremiah. She needs you.’

  He soldiered on, skirting craters in the street, asking his way. It was nearly full dark, now; he couldn’t be on the streets much longer. His anxiety began to ease a little as he started to see things he knew, though. Close, he was getting close.

  And then the sirens began, and people began to pour out of the houses.

  He was being buffeted by the crowd, borne down the street as much by their barely controlled panic as by their physical impact. There was shouting, people calling for separated family members, wardens bellowing directions, waving their torches, their flat white helmets pale as mushrooms in the gloom. Above it, through it, the air-raid siren pierced him like a sharpened wire, thrust him down the street on its spike, ramming him into others likewise skewered by fright.

  The tide of it swept round the next corner and he saw the red circle with its blue line over the entrance to the Tube station, lit up by a warden’s flashlight. He was sucked in, propelled through sudden bright lights, hurtling down the stair, the next, onto a platform, deep into the earth, into safety. And all the time the whoop and moan of the sirens still filling the air, barely muffled by the dirt above.

  There were wardens moving among the crowd, pushing people back against the walls, into the tunnels, away from the edge of the track. He brushed up against a woman with two toddlers, picked one – a little girl with round eyes and a blue teddy-bear – out of her arms and turned his shoulder into the crowd, making a way for them. He found a small space in a tunnel-mouth, pushed the woman into it and gave her back the little girl. Her mouth moved in thanks, but he couldn’t hear her above the noise of the crowd, the sirens, the creaking, the—

  A sudden monstrous thud from above shook the station, and the whole crowd was struck silent, every eye on the high arched ceiling above them.

  The tiles were white, and as they looked, a dark crack appeared suddenly between two rows of them. A gasp rose from the crowd, louder than the sirens. The crack seemed to stop, to hesitate – and then it zig-zagged suddenly, parting the tiles, in different directions.

  He looked down from the growing crack, to see who was below it – the people still on the stair. The crowd at the bottom was too thick to move, everyone stopped still by horror. And then he saw her, partway up the stair.

  Dolly. She’s cut her hair, he thought. It was short and curly, black as soot – black as the hair of the little boy she held in her arms, close against her, sheltering him. Her face was set, jaw clenched. And then she turned a bit, and saw him.

 
Her face went blank for an instant and then flared like a lit match, with a radiant joy that struck him in the heart and flamed through his being.

  There was a much louder thud! from above, and a scream of terror rose from the crowd, louder, much louder than the sirens. Despite the shrieking, he could hear the fine rattle, like rain, as dirt began to pour from the crack above. He shoved with all his might, but couldn’t get past, couldn’t reach them. Dolly looked up, and he saw her jaw set hard again, her eyes blaze with determination. She shoved the man in front of her, who stumbled and fell down a step, squashing into the people in front of him. She swung Roger down into the little space she’d made, and with a twist of shoulders and the heave of her whole body, hurled the little boy up, over the rail – toward Jerry.

  He saw what she was doing and was already leaning, pushing forward, straining to reach . . . the boy struck him high in the chest like a lump of concrete, little head smashing painfully into Jerry’s face, knocking his head back. He had one arm round the child, falling back on the people behind him, struggling to find his footing, get a firmer hold – and then something gave way in the crowd around him, he staggered into an open space, and then his knee gave way and he plunged over the lip of the track.

  He didn’t hear the crack of his head against the rail or the screams of the people above; it was all lost in a roar like the end of the world as the roof over the stair fell in.

  The little boy was still as death, but he wasn’t dead; Jerry could feel his heart beat, thumping fast against his own chest. It was all he could feel. Poor little bugger must have had his wind knocked out.

  People had stopped screaming, but there was still shouting, calling out. There was a strange silence underneath all the racket. His blood had stopped pounding through his head, his own heart no longer hammering. Perhaps that was it.

  The silence underneath felt alive, somehow. Peaceful, but like sunlight on water, moving, glittering. He could still hear the noises above the silence, feet running, anxious voices, bangs and creakings – but he was sinking gently into the silence; the noises grew distant, though he could still hear voices.

  ‘Is that one—?’

  ‘Nay, he’s gone – look at his head, poor chap, caved in something horrid. The boy’s well enough, I think, just bumps and scratches. Here, lad, come up . . . no, no, let go, now. It’s all right, just let go. Let me pick you up, yes, that’s good, it’s all right now, hush, hush, there’s a good boy . . .’

  ‘What a look on that bloke’s face. I never saw anything like—’

  ‘Here, take the little chap. I’ll see if the bloke’s got any identification.’

  ‘Come on, big man, yeah, that’s it, that’s it, come with me. Hush now, it’s all right, it’s all right . . . is that your daddy, then?’

  ‘No tags, no service book. Funny, that. He’s RAF, though, isn’t he? AWOL, d’ye think?’

  He could hear Dolly laughing at that, felt her hand stroke his hair. He smiled and turned his head to see her smiling back, the radiant joy spreading round her like rings in shining water . . .

  ‘Rafe! The rest of it’s going! Run! Run!’

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  Before y’all get tangled up in your underwear about it being All Hallow’s Eve when Jeremiah leaves, and ‘nearly Samhain (aka All Hallow’s Eve)’ when he returns – bear in mind that Great Britain changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, this resulting in a ‘loss’ of twelve days. And for those of you who’d like to know more about the two men who rescue him, more of their story can be found in An Echo in the Bone.

  ‘Never have so many owed so much to so few.’ This was Winston Churchill’s acknowledgement to the RAF pilots who protected Britain during World War II – and he was about right.

  Adolph Gysbert Malan – known as ‘Sailor’ (probably because ‘Adolph’ was not a popular name at the time) – was a South African flying ace who became the leader of the famous No. 74 Squadron RAF. He was known for sending German bomber pilots home with dead crews, to demoralise the Luftwaffe, and I would have mentioned this gruesomely fascinating detail in the story, had there been any good way of getting it in, but there wasn’t. His ‘Ten Commandments’ for Air Fighting are as given in the text.

  While the mission that Captain Frank Randall recruits Jerry MacKenzie for is fictional, the situation wasn’t. The Nazis did have labour camps in Poland long before anyone in the rest of Europe became aware of them, and the eventual revelation did much to rally anti-Nazi feeling.

  I’d like particularly to acknowledge the assistance of Maria Szybek in the delicate matter of Polish vulgarities (any errors in grammar, spelling, or accent marks are entirely mine), and of Douglas Watkins in the technical descriptons of small-plane manoeuvres (also the valuable suggestion of the malfunction that brought Jerry’s Spitfire down).

  The Custom of the Army

  Introduction to

  The Custom of the Army

  One of the pleasures of writing historical fiction is that the best parts aren’t made up. This particular story came about as the result of my having read Wendy Moore’s excellent biography of Dr John Hunter, The Knife Man – and my having read at the same time a brief facsimile book printed by the National Park Service, detailing regulations of the British Army during the American Revolution.

  I wasn’t looking for anything in particular in either of these books, just reading for background, general information on the period – and the always-alluring chance of stumbling across something fascinating, like electric eel parties in London (these, along with Dr Hunter himself – who appears briefly in this story – are a matter of historical record).

  As for British Army regulations, a little of that stuff goes a long way; as a novelist, you want to resist the temptation to tell people things just because you happen to know them. Still, that book too had its little nuggets, such as the information that the word ‘bomb’ was common in the eighteenth century, and what they meant by that: in addition to merely meaning ‘an explosive device’, it referred also to a wrapped and tarred parcel of shrapnel shot from a cannon (though we must be careful not to use the word ‘shrapnel’, as it’s derived from Lt Henry Shrapnel of the Royal Artillery, who took the original ‘bomb’ concept and developed the ‘shrapnel shell’, a debris-filled bomb filled also with gunpowder and designed to explode in mid-air after being fired from a cannon. Unfortunately, he did this in 1784, which was inconvenient, as ‘shrapnel’ is a pretty good word to have when writing about warfare).

  Among the other bits of interesting trivia, though, I was struck by a brief description of the procedure for courts-martial: ‘The custom of the army is that a court-martial be presided over by a senior officer and such a number of other officers as he shall think fit to serve as council, these being generally four in number, but can be more but not generally less than three . . . The person accused shall have the right to call witnesses in his support, and the council shall question these, as well as any other persons whom they may wish, and shall thus determine the circumstances, and if conviction ensue, the sentence to be imposed.’

  And that was it. No elaborate procedures for the introduction of evidence, no standards for conviction, no sentencing guidelines, no requirements for who could or should serve as ‘council’ to a court-martial, just ‘the custom of the army’. The phrase – rather obviously – stuck in my head.

  The Custom of the Army

  All things considered, it was probably the fault of the electric eel. John Grey could – and for a time, did – blame the Honourable Caroline Woodford as well. And the surgeon. And certainly that blasted poet. Still . . . no, it was the eel’s fault.

  The party had been at Lucinda Joffrey’s house. Sir Richard was absent; a diplomat of his stature could not have countenanced something so frivolous. Electric eel parties were a mania in London just now, but owing to the scarcity of the creatures, a private party was a rare occasion. Most such parties were held at public theatres, with the fortunate fe
w selected for encounter with the eel summoned onstage, there to be shocked and sent reeling like nine-pins for the entertainment of the audience.

  ‘The record is forty-two at once!’ Caroline had told him, her eyes wide and shining as she looked up from the creature in its tank.

  ‘Really?’ It was one of the most peculiar things he’d seen, though not very striking. Nearly three feet long, it had a heavy, squarish body with a blunt head that looked to have been inexpertly moulded out of sculptor’s clay, and tiny eyes like dull glass beads. It had little in common with the lashing, lithesome eels of the fish-market – and certainly did not seem capable of felling forty-two people at once.

  The thing had no grace at all, save for a small thin ruffle of a fin that ran the length of its lower body, undulating as a gauze curtain does in the wind. Lord John expressed this observation to the Honourable Caroline, and was accused in consequence of being poetic.

  ‘Poetic?’ said an amused voice behind him. ‘Is there no end to our gallant major’s talents?’

  Lord John turned, with an inward grimace and an outward smile and bowed to Edwin Nicholls.

  ‘I should not think of trespassing upon your province, Mr Nicholls,’ he said politely.

  Nicholls wrote execrable verse, mostly upon the subject of love, and was much admired by young women of a certain turn of mind. The Honourable Caroline wasn’t one of them; she’d written a very clever parody of his style, though Grey thought Nicholls had not heard about it. He hoped not.

  ‘Oh, don’t you?’ Nicholls raised one honey-coloured brow at him, and glanced briefly but meaningfully at Miss Woodford. His tone was jocular, but his look was not, and Grey wondered just how much Mr Nicholls had had to drink. Nicholls was flushed of cheek and glittering of eye, but that might be only the heat of the room, which was considerable, and the excitement of the party.