The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery(78)
It may be vain to believe someone, somewhere, at some time, will want to read what I have written, but although I do not admit to many faults, I do admit to some, and vanity is probably one of them, so I will believe it.
I have decided to write this in English. I learned a good deal of the language while in Holzminden and also on my travels, and I’m rather proud of my skills. And since this deals with events in this English house it seems appropriate.
It was the very young owner of this house who caused me to come here. Stephen Gilmore. A gentle soul, Stephen. He believed entering the conflict between his country and Germany to be noble and inspirational. Like thousands of other eager, idealistic young men, he went off to war, to the sound of cheering crowds, with flags waving and military bands playing, seeing only victory and glory. No one had warned them about the horrors and the despairs and the nightmares lying in wait.
I saw the nightmares, but I saw them from a distance, reporting for my newspapers. Like those stylish and disdainful reporters at the Crimean War, I sat on a safe hillside or in a field, partaking of smoked salmon and Chablis, exchanging languid observations with other newspaper men and writing about the theatres of war – theatres as bloody as anything ever dredged up from the pit of the Grand Guignol.
But bodies were shattered, eyes and limbs were splintered. And minds cracked.
When I met Stephen Gilmore in the prison camp at Holzminden where I had been ignominiously taken after being captured at Verdun, at first I thought him weak. Later I came to understand he was far from weak: he had fought his nightmares and his demons and he still fought them. A weak man would have given in to them. Stephen had not.
My reasons for escaping from Holzminden were not entirely altruistic. I genuinely wanted to get Stephen out of the camp, but I wanted to escape for myself, as well. I wanted to rejoin Leonora.
Leonora. She was like no lady I have ever met before or since. She was seventeen, convent-bred, small-boned and fragile with one leg slightly askew so that she limped when walking. She had a rather sallow skin, dark hair and eyes, and no one would ever have called her a beauty. But the moment I saw her I knew that even though I might live a dozen lives, and even though worlds might burn and mad Prussian emperors storm across continents, I would never feel the same about anyone ever again.
Astonishingly, the convent years had not quenched Leonora’s natural joie de vivre. Despite her sheltered life and the nuns’ teaching, she took to the life of burgling as smoothly as silk. She took to love-making with the same delight as well. In my defence, I did try to fight that temptation, but one night, somewhere on the borders of Holland, Leonora metamorphosed from obedient waif into beckoning sprite. Like the fantasy play Love in a Dutch Garden, which I saw at the beginning of the war, a harlequin moon lay against midnight skies, and violet twilight enveloped the old rose gardens of a wayside inn. Nightingales even sang outside our windows. And no man is an angel all the time, and certainly not in such a setting. On that night, like Scaramel in the play, I was tempted and I yielded.
Afterwards, with the Kaiser’s crazed stranglehold tightening on Europe, I left Leonora in Holland, in a comfortable, safe guest house with comfortable, safe people, and made my way back into Germany to gather more material for war articles.
If only I had not done so.
I have to be honest and say the first escape attempt from Holzminden was never intended to include Stephen Gilmore. I thought his mind was too fragile for him to cope and for me to trust him. But somehow he became involved, and it was as easy to abstract two German officers’ uniforms for the attempt as one. And he was Leonora’s cousin … So I took the risk.
On my own I might have succeeded. I might have talked my way through the guards – my German was very good by then – but Stephen, fearful and damaged, drew attention to our ploy, and found himself surrounded by armed guards. In desperate panic, he snatched a gun from them, although God alone knows how he managed that, and retreated into the gatehouse.
It was certain he would have been shot – all the camps had orders to fire on escaping prisoners – and the guards were already taking aim. From where I stood, held by two of them (but not very firmly), the only thing I could think of was to create a diversion. No one seemed to have realized that I, too, had a gun – a Luger pistol which had been with the stolen German uniform, and which was more or less hidden in the belt. There are times in life when you have to take risks, and I took one then. I fired the pistol, not particularly aiming at anyone. The fact that it hit one of the senior officers – actually the camp commandant’s repulsive brother – was unintentional and disastrous. Everyone assumed that Stephen, cornered and panic-stricken, still in possession of the gun, had fired the shot. No one noticed when I kicked the Luger into a corner of the courtyard, because everyone was running around shouting orders. The commandant flew into a rage, I was hauled off to the cells, Stephen was dragged out of the gatehouse, and we were both sentenced to death – I for the escape attempt and impersonating a German officer, and Stephen for the same crime, along with the attempted murder of Heinrich Niemeyer.
To have confessed I had fired that shot at Heinrich would not have made matters any better. We would still have been executed. That was when I knew I had to get Stephen out of Holzminden and back to England.
Somehow I did it. I drugged some of the guards and bribed the others (there are times when having been a successful burglar is very useful), and we got out. I am not providing any more details, because I intend to write my memoirs, and I am not giving away the facts here. Suffice it to say we escaped, and I got both of us into Holland, to where Leonora was living.