Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(36)

“Balls. Do you want to talk about what happened to you?”

Silence except for footsteps and the whisper of the wind.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Saul said at last. “If you’ve read the trial report, or any summary, it’s entirely fair.”

“Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

“It is. Don’t imagine there’s a better telling that excuses me. I was stationed in Mesopotamia, in a garrison town. I had a lover, a local man. It never even occurred to me that he might be an Ottoman agent—or, rather, that his priority was his own land, and not mine. Or me. I didn’t think. I didn’t think I was telling him anything, either. But of course I had to slip out to meet him, we had to arrange assignations—I might as well have handed him the layout of the fort and the rotas, in the end, with everything I told him.” He looked up at the sky, not wanting to see Randolph’s face. “I loved him, you see. It wasn’t just casual for me, and I thought he cared for me too. I believed it.” That was then, when his life had been charmed, the world ripe for the taking.

“He sent me an urgent letter, that last night, summoning me to an assignation. It meant I wasn’t there when the Ottomans attacked, so I lived, unlike very many others. I was court martialled with all the attendant humiliation, spent two years in gaol, and came back to my family disowning me and the end of everything I’d worked for. I still don’t know if he sent me that letter because he cared for me or the opposite. Certainly, if he’d hated every second we spent together and everything we did, sending that letter would have been a fitting revenge. I can’t tell you how often I have wished I’d died that night.”

“That, I understand,” Randolph said. “It does seem such an easy way out, to those of us left behind. Take the heroic end, and let someone else clear up the mess. Have you ever wondered what your lover felt?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Well, perhaps he hated you and your touch.” Randolph spoke with clinical calm. “Or perhaps he had to make a choice between love and country. Perhaps he set out to entrap you, but perhaps someone said to him, Get us this information or we’ll expose your man, we’ll kill him. We’ll kill you. There were no easy choices in that bloody war, and no single decisions. And if you were considered as culpable as all that, they’d have shot you.”

“They wanted me to shoot myself,” Saul said. “When they let me out, I was put in a room with a bottle of whisky, a revolver, and a single bullet.”

Randolph paused for slightly too long. “That’s a hell of a hint.”

“It was, rather.” He’d sat there for an hour or more, turning the bullet between his fingers. “I didn’t take it, obviously. I, uh, had some idea that, since I’d served my sentence, I might find a more positive way to atone than blowing my brains out.”

“It would have been a waste of brains,” Randolph said. “God knows we don’t have any to spare. You do realise that you were far from the only man spilling secrets in bed? There was a British general in France whose desire to impress Parisian whores was such that his staff eventually used him to leak doctored information. The only rooms they put him in had comfortable beds, but that’s rank for you.”

“Are you serious?”

“Entirely.”

“That...doesn’t make me feel better, in fact.”

“I’m not trying to make you feel better. You made a bloody great balls-up with appalling consequences. With a slightly different set of circumstances it would have been a minor mistake and no harm done.”

“But it was done. People died. We, they, only just held the fort against the Ottoman attack. If it had fallen—”

“If. What if your lover had felt Britain would be a better ally for his country than the Ottoman Empire, or Russia? What if our glorious nation had given a damn for Mesopotamia’s wants?”

“What if, knowing the hostility of the locals, I hadn’t started an affair with one?”

“What if we didn’t have damn fool laws about who to fuck?” Randolph suggested. “Really, dear chap, if we were permitted to conduct our business without fear or shame or gaol, would you have been sneaking secretly out, or would you have been in your bunk with a charming sergeant, or writing letters to the boy you left behind?”

“But—”

“But me no buts. You were a pawn in a damned complex game, and you were played and sacrificed as such. I’m glad you weren’t taken off the board altogether.”

There was no pity in his voice, no awkward searching for excuses. It was profoundly refreshing. “But pawns have to obey orders. I didn’t. The simple, clear rules—”

“Oh no, no, no,” Randolph said. “Don’t give me simple. Do not give me the done thing or the rules of behaviour. We both know better than that.”

“Why not? Those rules are there for a reason.”

Randolph put his hands in his pockets, tipping his head back to squint at the hazy sky. “Flanders, the War Beneath. My family was there from the start. The Glydes are the oldest family of arcanists in England, with letters patent from half a dozen monarchs. If there is occult aristocracy, it’s us. And we marched out to war: my father, Uncle Jessamy, Aunt Clothide, my cousin Theresa, her brother Gerald and his wife, my cousins Vernon and Valentine, me. Doing our duty under the orders of a pack of power-hungry generals who believed they could wield our knowledge as weapons.