The Gilded Scarab (4 page)

We whiled away an hour or two with cards, until duty called and they were sent out to relieve another flight. I came out of the card games a guinea or so richer too. That was always pleasant. It would help pay my mess bill.

I went up into the main body of the ship, to wander the main troop decks and roam through the officers’ mess to the exercise rooms and the barracks in search of some sort of diversion. I found it in the engine control room, set on a balcony above a compartment that makes the word “cavernous” appear small and confined. Beyond the railing, out in the engine room proper, the darkness was complete, the lights from the control room penetrating a mere hundred yards before being eaten up by shadow. Every three minutes the gloom was pierced by crackles of colored lightning slashing through the dark like knives, making the shadows leap away to cower in the corners. In the lightning surge, huge pistons beat up and down and up and down, gleaming with polished brass and black enamel. The noise was incredible. Being trapped in a metal barrel with a dozen enthusiastic blacksmiths attacking the outside with hammers might come close.

It wasn’t one of my normal haunts. Too much steam and heat, and the smell of burnt oil got into everything. The chief stoker had raised an inquiring eyebrow at me. “We don’t often see you down here, Captain. I heard you were on sick leave. Bored, are you?”

I could hardly deny that diagnosis. “You hit nails on heads with an admirable precision, Chief. You’re a credit to your training as an engineer.”

The chief stoker laughed, and allowed me to take charge of one of the dials monitoring steam pressure in the engines. The highlight of my day, tapping a dial and calling out the numbers. To these straits was I reduced. It was a sad, sad waste of my talents.

That’s where Marks found me, with the industrious mechanics who kept the
Ark Royal
in the sky where she belonged. Marks liked to remind everyone he was a major, everyone’s superior officer and the commander’s adjutant. He kept his major’s crowns brightly polished in the delusional hope it would impress us. He was known on the flight decks as the Supreme Fusspot—and a great many other opprobrious epithets unrepeatable in mixed company.

He fussed his way into the engine control room, fussed his way past the stokers and engineers, and fussed up to me. He half ran everywhere, making little taps and dabs at everything and everyone with his podgy white hands. “Lancaster! At last!”—dab, dab at the dial—“What’s wrong with your communications device, man?”—dab, dab at my arm—“I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”—dab, dab at the dial again—“What on earth are you doing in here?”

Only one reason Marks had come looking for me. Only one. My stomach clenched.

Damn.

I managed a grin for the chief stoker, although I wouldn’t say it was one of my best performances. “I’m assuring myself that the engineering crews are maintaining the ship the way they ought.”

“Get along with you,” said the chief stoker, grinning.

“Well, I don’t know why you’re down here when the commander’s looking for you.” Marks fussed me into the elevator to the command deck, looking me up and down and pursing up his mouth until it was as prissy as a hen’s behind. He made those little dabs at the brass elevator button, tapping it half a dozen times. “Typical! Can you ever act in a way becoming an officer and a gentleman?”—dab, dab at my arm…. I got out of reach, leaving Marks looking sulky, with his mouth turning down—“Down here getting covered in oil! Really, Rafe, it’s outside of enough. You’ll have to do as you are. He sent me to find you a good thirty minutes ago.” He sniffed, and looked disconsolate, having nothing within reach to dab at. “You smell of oil.”

My mouth was suddenly quite dry. I had to swallow a couple of times before I spoke. “He won’t care about that.”

I let Marks fuss and bustle. It didn’t matter. The man was a contemptible sycophant at the best of times, and what he did or didn’t do couldn’t hurt me. Not now.

This was it.

So I did the one thing I could do. I squared my shoulders, nodded to the commander’s personal guard, and marched into the office when summoned, with my head high. Marks did his best to ensure the commander saw him shoo me in, of course. The man had to justify his existence somehow.

The commander was less outwardly sympathetic than Beckett. As I said, Beckett and I are from Minor Houses, our extended families having relatively little influence in the world except what they could get from hanging on the coattails of the great. Beckett had some fellow feeling, I think, a sense of the camaraderie felt by the little people bonding against the Convocation Houses, the eight rich and powerful families who make up the government and rule the Britannic Imperium.

Abercrombie, though, was a big gun, above me socially and politically. He was a member of Convocation House Huissher, and was high in his House hierarchy—one of the current Huissher’s nephews, no less. No fellow feeling there at all. He was a gruff bastard on a good day—not that I had ever seen many of those, since I seemed to sour his life by breathing—and he was no less gruff because he was telling his most troublesome aeronaut about the arrangements for my release from service.

As I expected, he talked about the medical retirement as a fait accompli. All that remained was to explain what it would mean in practical terms. “Notice of the financial arrangements has come through from the Treasury, Captain. Your salary will be paid until the end of the year. Your gratuity has been calculated as a one-off payment of six months’ salary and will be remitted to your bank by the Paymaster General’s office next month. You have also been granted a pension for life rated at one-quarter of your present salary. That will be payable from 1 January.”

That little? Surely I’d earned more than the minimum? “I joined up in September ’90, sir. That’s nine years’ service, all of it on active duty here or in India. Surely the payment should be closer to three-quarters of a year’s salary?”

“You can blame the Treasury for that. They’re economizing again. This is an expensive war.”

I refrained from rolling my aching eyes. The Treasury was the fiefdom of Convocation House Gallowglass, and I had no influence or contacts there at all. “Is there no appeal, sir?”

“Enhancements to medical retirement gratuities have always been at the Gallowglass’s discretion, Captain. Six months’ pay is all that is mandated legally.” Abercrombie pushed the paperwork across to me. “Do you have House resources you can call on?”

Damn. Only the bare minimum the law allowed. Nothing extra for service above and beyond. Damned parsimonious. “No, sir. I’m House Stravaigor, as you may remember, but a cadet branch. The House saw to my education, of course, and purchased my commission, but I can expect no further aid there.”

“I’m sorry, Lancaster.” And surprisingly Commander Abercrombie did sound sorry, although it must have really stretched his imagination to envisage the privations and problems faced by ordinary people who didn’t have his privilege to sustain them. The commander looked as though he’d bitten into a lemon. “You are one of the most skilled aeronauts I have ever commanded, and you’ve served Her Majesty well.”

Well, there was the sop to soften the blow. How it must have hurt the commander to admit it! He was right, of course. I was the best aeronaut on the ship. I may have joined Her Britannic Majesty’s Imperial Aero Corps in an act of desperate rebellion rather than patriotic zeal, but I loved flying fast little aerofighters, the faster the better. I owned that clear blue sky out there. Nothing could come close to the sheer joy and exhilaration of, as Shakespeare has it, soaring up from the sullen earth. At least all the wars and skirmishes that delighted the Imperium had allowed me to fly and get some damn excitement out of life.

Flying had become my life. And now it was gone.

I tightened my mouth against the sigh that I would die before allowing the commander to hear, pulled the papers toward me, and signed. A lump sum of six month’s pay was better than nothing at all, and the pension might just about keep body and soul together if I wasn’t choosy about how well. It was something, anyway. I wasn’t entirely destitute. I returned both copies of my discharge papers to the commander, who scrawled an elegant signature over them and handed one copy back.

“Perhaps,” said the commander, “I can now run this ship without you whipping up half the crew into a frenzy over cards and gambling….” He paused as if waiting for a response.

Oh, for heaven’s sake! I enjoyed playing at piquet or whist or faro, and a guinea a point added spice to the game. I had deft hands for throwing dice at hazard, and knew the form of every racehorse in England. Guilty as charged, obviously. Still, despite Beckett’s acid comment about card sharping—the doctor was a notoriously bad loser—I was hardly running an illegal gaming hell. It was enough to make me the target of Commander Abercrombie’s periodic rages against gambling and drinking and womanizing on his ship, of course. Abercrombie was a teetotaler in every aspect of vice, with an old-maid’s horror of the seven deadly sins. What a miserable life he must lead.

Abercrombie snorted. “Not to mention sending the other half into a frenzy of an indelicately emotional kind.”

He was talking about Beckett’s nurses again.

I think I was about fourteen when I discovered how useful charm was. All of the girls and most of the boys giggled and blushed when I smiled. And as for diverting a tutor righteously angry about a missed essay, or my father, angry about pranks played on the vicar… child’s play. Being charming
worked
. So I spent a lot of time at the mirror practicing until I’d perfected the smiles, the sparkle, the brightness about the eyes.

It still worked. I was, though I say it myself, popular, and my company sought by all. At a ball, many of the gentlemen gathered around me for talk and cigars while the ladies repaid any slight interest with sweet, coquettish smiles and come-hitherish looks over the tops of their fans. They were susceptible to the effect of thick dark hair and dark eyes, although I’d wager they’d reconsider if they knew both came from my Anglo-Indian grandmother. Still, I was never at a loss for a partner at a ball, especially when I was in dress uniform. Many a lady—and her mother—had a soft heart when it came to a man in regimentals.

I often wonder if all those people were blind. Because no matter how gallant I was to the ladies, not one of them noticed it went nowhere. Not one. Not even the commander who more than once had loomed over me at a ship’s ball or in the mess to make it clear he was on the watch for impropriety. Because if they had been watching, they might have seen I was indifferent to the ladies and very, very discreet about the gentlemen. I really am not a fool. I kept that passion very quiet and never allowed it full rein on board ship. Abercrombie would have burst a blood vessel.

Which was a temptation.

The one saving grace to enforced retirement was that I no longer needed to suffer silently another unwarranted slur about my character. It was hard to fold my copy of the signed papers one-handed and put it in my breast pocket, but I managed it. “You know, Commander, in general I don’t think rich dilettantes do a great deal of good in society, but Miss Nightingale is to be commended for her foresight in providing the right kind of diversion from the monotony of service life. The nursing service at least makes war a trifle more bearable.”

The commander turned so puce that perhaps a breaking blood vessel was a certainty. Well, I no longer needed to care about staying on Abercrombie’s good side. If the man had one. So I smiled and saluted. I don’t believe there is a man in the service who could salute with as much insolence as I could. I’ve practiced that too. Abercrombie turned a fetching shade of burgundy and waved me out of the office with an audible “Good riddance!”

Well, that cut both ways. I wouldn’t repine about the loss of his company, either.

Next day every aeronaut on the ship escorted me to the starboard flight deck. They lined the entire route from my cabin to the deck, and my hand ached from the number of them catching it and wringing it. Every one of them said some variation of “We’ll miss you, Rafe. Good luck, old chap, and keep in touch.” I had a stupid cold, or something, and could barely speak a word in reply. My throat hurt.

As I passed, they fell in behind me and marched along in my wake. I reached the flight deck at the head of a small army. Beckett was waiting for me there, and his nurses formed a lachrymose guard of honor as I walked to the aeroshuttle that would take me to Koffiefontein to catch the train to Cape Town and a regular aeroship service home. Some of the men lamented with them—possibly, as I commented to Hugh Peters, because I had made them all pay their gambling debts before I left. But there may have been other reasons, and more than one held my hand longer than the world would consider polite or seemly. Some missed opportunities there, apparently.

I got a manly hug from Beckett. Hugh gripped my hand and wished me well. The poor boy had tears in his eyes, and he didn’t owe me a farthing. It was a fitting end to my military career, I suppose, that the last thing I saw of the
Ark Royal
was my batman’s grief and a nurse weeping into a capacious handkerchief about the size of a hospital blanket.

I should have asked her if I could borrow it. My eyes stung fiercely that day. Dust, perhaps. Yes. That’s most likely. Dust.

I kicked my heels in Cape Town for two weeks while awaiting transport, which at least meant the doctors there pronounced my arm healed and removed the damned cast. Cape Town isn’t a bad place to spend some time. I managed to get in a little walking around the city, and the scenery is quite spectacular. It wasn’t until 12 November 1899 that I arrived home, when my civilian-service aeroship landed at the aerodrome at Friary Park, north of Highgate. It was dawn and quite a contrast to the Cape. The ground was white with rime frost and the sky heavy and dark with the threat of snow.

I had spent most of my leaves at Le Touquet or Cannes, and it was seven years since I had last set foot on my native soil. I wasn’t quite thirty years old. I had no career, a fortune no man would call large and absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life.