A Whispered Name (25 page)

2

The Prior cornered Anselm
while he was unloading crates of pears off a trolley outside Saint Hildegard’s,
the fruit-press shed. In all seriousness, he said, ‘The Dew of Hermon …

Anselm
raised a hand. This sort of thing happened to Priors. They’re responsible for
the livelihood of a monastery. Between reading the Rule and the Fathers, they
occasionally get visions of the shelves in Tesco. He was about to say something
harsh when Benedict waved from the shed, pointed at Anselm and tapped his ear,
which meant that Sylvester had transferred a telephone call from reception.

The
voice took flight without introduction. ‘My research, of necessity, takes me
frequently to Saint Catherine’s House in London —where the national indexes for
births and deaths in England and Wales are helpfully stored. Many of my
great-great-grandfather’s comrades are in the lists and it’s my painful duty to
check basic details knowing that they are of marginal importance. In a moment
of boredom I decided to enquire after one Owen Doyle.’

‘Yes?’

‘I
rather got carried away Have you got a pen to hand?’

Anselm
gestured frantically at Jerome who, with Benedict, had just lugged a heaped
crate towards the press. The former always carried an ink pen in his top
pocket. It had been a gift from his father. ‘Go ahead.’

‘He was
born on twenty-first January eighteen ninety-six.’

‘Yes.’

‘In the
parish of Saint Stephen, Bolton, Lancashire.’

‘Yes.’

‘At the
time of his birth, his family address was three-five—nine Leyland Park Avenue,
of that town.’

Sarah
paused while Anselm scribbled, repeating out loud what he’d just heard. Fruit
thumped into the press like heavy rain on a roof.

‘The
father was named Colum, occupation mill worker, the mother was Alice, maiden
name Lowther.’

‘This
is tremendous,’ said Anselm, not quite sure what he was going to do with the
information. But Doyle had been close to Flanagan. He was the absent presence
at the trial.

‘There’s
one hitch.’

‘Oh?’

‘Owen
Doyle died on the twenty-fourth of August nineteen hundred and eight at the age
of twelve years eight months:

‘What?’

‘Cause
of death tuberculosis,’ continued Sarah in an even, reading voice, ‘certified
by Kenneth Spinks LMSSA. The father, Colum, was present at the death.’

Anselm
slumped on to a stool. His brother monks, satisfied that he was all right,
returned to their work, leaning on the limbs that lowered the press.

‘I made
a few phone calls,’ continued Sarah, ‘and people really are enormously helpful
if you only ask the right question in the right way Owen is buried in Blackburn
Road Cemetery in the far left-hand corner as you enter the main gates. It’s an
iron cross among failing slabs of stone.’

Anselm
noted the details, thinking hard, trying to link this development to Flanagan’s
secret crisis … and to Herbert.

‘I’ll
send you a copy of the birth and death certificates,’ said Sarah, ‘though they’re
of little if any use. Whoever enlisted in nineteen fifteen was not baptised
Owen in the parish of Saint Stephen.’

Watching
Benedict and Jerome, heads bowed and pushing, Anselm fell into a kind of
trance. The pressure fell inexorably on to the soft pears and juice tinkled
into a vat. It was a wonderful sound, stirring some forgotten simplicity in his
depths. Fountains had a similar effect. He listened, gratefully.

Part Four

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Preparations

Herbert drew back the gate
and Father Maguire pressed his face further into the wall as if he’d been
caught and didn’t want to be identified — like a smoker behind the school
sheds. When Herbert reached Duggie’s billet he stepped into a kind of oven. It
was as though fires had been laid in every corner, though in fact the grate was
cold and the windows were open. It was a lovely fading evening.

‘…
then we’ll have to find somewhere else,’ shouted Duggie at Chamberlayne.

Both men
turned in Herbert’s direction. Each was breathing heavily Chamberlayne thrust
out a document and stared at Herbert — his expression telling him that they
were comrades; that what was unfolding they would handle as brothers. Herbert
nearly sobbed at the gesture.

‘A
rider just brought it from Brigade.’

The
Order had originated at Division level. Herbert quickly read it, starting after
the preliminaries.

The
sentence will be carried out at 5.45 a.m. adjacent to the west walls of the
monastery at OOSTBEKE facing the Divisional camp. The exact location should be
two hundred yards from HUT 42.

The following detail from the 8th (Service) Battalion, Northumberland
Light Infantry will be selected tonight:

Regimental Sergeant Major

Provost Sergeant

Escort: 1 NCO & 2 men

Firing Party: 1 officer

1 Sergeant

12 men

Burial Party: 4 men

The NCO in charge of the escort should be able to identify Private
FLANAGAN.

The firing party should be assembled at 4.15 a.m. in HUT 42 and
confined thereto. The men need not be informed of the duty for which they are
being detailed until 4.30 a.m. on the 14th instant.

All other necessary arrangements will be made by this office.

Please return Proceedings after promulgation.

Herbert’s
head fell back. Flanagan was to be shot by his own battalion. The Regimental
Sergeant Major was Joyce. The men to be gathered in HUT 42 knew already what
they were being detailed to perform. Why else were they expected to get up at
4.00 a.m. and wait in a shed?

‘The
Abbot won’t let us use his walls,’ said Duggie, trying to be calm. ‘He won’t
let us do anything on the abbey’s land. And it stretches for miles around:

‘But,
Sir,’ said Herbert, his mouth sticky, ‘we can’t do this, we can’t ask Joyce—’

‘Captain,
thundered Duggie, swinging around, ‘we don’t
ask
the RSM anything. We
TELL him. Do you understand? This is the British Army Not some Benevolent
Society for the distribution of alms. We are at war, and this is
part
of
war. It’s a
nasty
part of how we WIN. One of the many many nasty parts.’
Duggie scratched viciously at the flea bites on his face. ‘Look, I’ve done what
I could … I’ve tried to get the lad out of the frying pan: He sighed as if he’d
reached the top of a hill. ‘Pemberton blew my arse off. Said I should never
have kicked up that nonsense about intention. Apparently it’s gone to the top
and we can expect a directive on the subject — throughout the BEF.

‘Why
shoot Flanagan, for God’s sake?’ asked Herbert. ‘What does Brigade want?’

‘What
does Division want,’ corrected Duggie. He looked at Herbert as if he were a
little slow ‘They want to give morale a quick kick before we go back—’

‘Morale,’
said Herbert, bewildered. ‘We lost eighty—five per
cent of our men, and our morale needs a
kick.’

‘I
know, I know’ Duggie was exhausted and hot. ‘They mean an example. They mean no
one can even think of stepping back. We have to take Passchendaele Ridge.
Remember, Herbert, this lad took a quick vacation, even if we don’t know why’
Again he scratched his face, his temper rising. ‘It’s not my job to understand
why.
Damn it. I’ve only made recommendations to mercy and they’ve all been
heeded. I can’t be that surprised if they ignore me for once. You know, Herbert
… military law … Wellington’s code, tarted up? Well, it may have been
dreamed up for the Regulars and not the Volunteers, but most of ‘em are
volunteers or conscripts now And they all have a pocket book with a warning in
it, telling ‘em what’ll happen if they bugger off. Flanagan’s got what he
expected, believe me. He’s less surprised than we are.

Chamberlayne
poured some whisky into three glasses and handed them round.

Duggie
raised his portion as if he were a connoisseur checking its colour and said, ‘Gentlemen,
we have “an unpleasant duty to perform”. That is the term of art. Now, let’s
get on with it.’ He drained his glass and dropped on to a stool by the empty
grate. ‘Edward, send a chit to OC Companies. Tell them to supply four men each.
Inform Father Maguire that he can attend Doyle through the night and to the
moment of execution. Tell the RMO, Tindall, that he should join the detail to
witness and confirm death and provide a certificate to that effect. I want to
see Joyce, on his own, now.

‘Sir,
you said Doyle,’ observed Chamberlayne.

‘Did I?’
said Duggie. ‘Slip of the tongue. I meant Flanagan, of course.

Chamberlayne
started typing, swiftly with various fingers. His jaw was rigid and the dark
rings around his eyes seemed to pulsate with shadow.

‘God,
where are we going to shoot him?’ said Duggie, looking into his glass.

The
problem with the camp was that it was utterly flat, like all the landscape
around Ypres. Apart from the hop frames and a few patches of woodland there was
nothing on the horizon. The land was a great table reaching to the coast. There
were no quarries or farm walls — places to draw up a detail with ‘an unpleasant
duty to perform’.

In his
mind, Herbert saw a scattering of mauve and yellow flowers at the mouth of a
track. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘if you walk past the school for a mile or so, you come
to a wood. It’s fairly thick, but there’s a wide path that leads to a clearing.
A barn faces the entrance.’

Duggie
tapped his teeth, thinking. ‘Edward, give the Abbot a ring. Tell him if we can’t
do it beneath the trees we’ll do it on the side of an open road.’

Chamberlayne
instantly picked up the phone, dialled, waited and then spoke in fluent French
to a Père Koopmans. When he’d put the phone down, he said, ‘The Abbot wishes me
to inform you that the woods are not his; that if they were he would forbid you
entry; and that wherever we choose to shoot this man — in the light or in a
shadow — it will be seen from on high and ring throughout eternity to our
disgrace.’

‘What
did you say?’ asked Duggie.

‘I
replied that I was most grateful, and that I feared he was right on both
points.’ With that, he started swiftly typing the chits for the company
commanders. The speed, the sense of time having become vastly important,
impressed itself upon Herbert. He began to shuffle on the spot, as if there was
something he might do, only not knowing what; as if water had burst in an
upstairs pipe and he didn’t know where the stopcock was located. ‘I’ll inform
Maguire and Tindall,’ he said, and then chewed his bottom lip.

Duggie
nodded, rasping his forehead and grinding his teeth. Herbert ran outside, past
a sleeping general’s dog, and had reached the courtyard gate when Duggie called
him back. He’d opened the skin above one eyebrow and his whole face was red
from the grating of his nails. ‘Look at me,’ he said.

Herbert
dared not … he knew well enough the frown that revealed restraint and
gentleness.

‘Look
at me, Herbert,’ ordered the CO.

Herbert
faced not the soldier but the man who might have been a teacher, the loved
master of a public school, inflexible but yielding when least expected. ‘This
is not your fault. Flanagan was finished the moment he met Doyle.’

Chapter Twenty-Nine

In the Cellar

Flanagan was marched from
the parade ground along the dusty road to the school at Oostbeke. He didn’t
know the guards on either side, or the NCO marching in front as if he was on
full view to the Field Marshal himself Each member of the escort had a fixed
bayonet. Uncertainly Flanagan descended the cellar steps. Corporal Mackie was
waiting.

‘Belt.’
He pointed at the buckle. ‘Remove it.’

Flanagan
obeyed and Mackie slowly rolled it up.

‘I’ve
got no hard feelings against you,’ he announced, completing the coil. ‘You have
my pity.’

The
arched door banged shut and Flanagan was alone. He’d slept in the cellar for
two weeks but now everything seemed different. The camp bed, the table, the two
chairs. It was as though Flanagan had never seen them before. Arranged neatly
on the table were some sheets of paper, a few envelopes, a pencil and a candle.

‘What
can I write?’ he cried. His mind span. How could he find last words?