Word of Honour (19 page)

'You know I can't remember the Scholar Tan, never
having read him. In fact, I sometimes wonder if you don't
make up half of the things you say he said.'

'I don't tell you half of what he said because I don't
think you'd believe me.'

Aubrey sat up. 'George, I'm sorry. I've done my usual
thing here. I've bustled in, full of my concerns and
thoughts, and simply assumed that they're the most
important in the world.'

'Don't worry, old man. I'm used to it.'

'But you were saying that things weren't good at
home and I let it go straight through to the keeper. Tell
me what's happened.'

'Caroline
is
having an effect on you, isn't she? Good
show.'

'Caroline. My mother. My father. You. You're all
having an effect on me for the better.'

'Now there's a change. No more complete confidence
that you know everything?'

'It's a thing of the past. Mostly. Now, tell me about
home.'

George's face fell. He stood and started to pace the
length of the room. 'It's actually worse than I thought.
They've been keeping things from me.'

'Parents have a habit of doing that,' Aubrey said,
thinking about his mother's incidents in the Arctic.

'They certainly did in this case. Remember the
landslip we had last year, where we lost those outbuildings
down the side of the hill?'

'Of course.'

'We had to take out a loan to rebuild. Which we did,
without much problem. But the harvest this year was
poor, and cash has been hard to come by.' George sighed.
'The short story is that the bank wants money that we
don't have.'

Aubrey swung his legs over the edge of the bed. 'You
know my father would help.'

Aubrey's father and George's father had been in the
same unit – Sir Darius as commanding officer, William
Doyle as sergeant-major. Their closeness had resulted in
their sons growing up together.

'I know that. You know that. Father knows that. But
there is no way in the world that William Doyle would
accept money from anyone, no matter how bad the situation
is. Stiff-necked, proud buffer that he is, he has to
find a way out of this mess himself.'

'George, this is horrible.'

'Oh, it is that. Makes me want to weep.'

'I wouldn't blame you.' Then, without realising it,
Aubrey started to hum.

George looked at him sharply. 'Don't.'

'Don't? Don't what?'

'You're scheming. You're trying to devise a clever way
to do something about the farm.'

Aubrey winced, but George was right.

This was a circumstance he could do something about.
Without anyone knowing it, a quiet word with his father
– or his mother – and the Doyles' financial situation
would immediately be rectified. Aubrey knew that his
family was rich. Not just comfortable, but wealthy. The
amount of money needed to pay off the Doyles' debts
wouldn't make a dent in the family fortune.

He'd already started thinking about the best way to
go about it, to find a way to pay off the debt without
Mr Doyle finding out who was responsible. Maybe
getting the money directly into his hands so he could pay
the bank. Burying a treasure trove where he'd be bound
to find it? A long-lost relative dying in Antipodea? Or
just work with the bank, who'd then let Mr Doyle know
that the debt had disappeared.

'You've started again, haven't you?' George said gruffly.

'Me?'

'I know you, Aubrey. You can't help yourself. When
you see a problem, you want to do something about it.'

'Well, yes.'

'It's more than that, though. It becomes a challenge,
something personal. You can't leave things alone.'

'Ah. You're saying that I'm an interfering busybody.'

'That's a harsh description.'

'But accurate?'

'When you're at your worst, yes. But the trouble is, it's
also you at your best. It doesn't seem as though we can
have one without the other.'

'You don't know how comforting I find that.' Aubrey
blew air in and out of his cheeks for a moment. 'I do
want to help, you know.'

'I know. But you can't. It would break Father if you
did.' George looked at him carefully. 'Look, Aubrey,
I want you to promise me something.'

'What is it?'

'I want you to give me your word of honour that you
won't interfere here.'

'All right.'

George stopped his pacing. 'No, Aubrey, that was too
fast. I want you to
think
about this. I didn't ask you as
a negotiating gambit, something for you to counter
and then find a way around it. It's your honour that
I'm relying on here. Your integrity. Your worth as a
decent and trustworthy person. The person that I respect
and admire.'

'Oh.' Aubrey, once again, was humbled. He
had
been
treating George's request as a feint. He
had
been thinking
of ways around it.

He hadn't taken his best friend seriously.

'George,' he said. He sought for the words. 'I want you
to know that I'm not doing this because I feel trapped
into it, or that I feel shamed into it. I'm doing it because
I think I understand and I
want
to do it.' He took a deep
breath. 'George, I give you my word of honour that I
won't interfere in your family's financial problems. And
that I won't try to find a sneaky way around it, either.'

George held out his hand. 'Old man, I take you at
your word.'

Aubrey shook and was grateful – for the ten thousandth
time – that he had such a friend as George.

George shook himself, like a dog climbing out of a
river, and sat again. 'Now, what's all this about a train
accident?'

Aubrey told George about the mysterious subsidence
and the interesting conversation with the navvy. Then, of
course, he found he had to jump backwards and explain
the whole business with Jack Figg, Maggie and her Crew.
Then he had to backtrack and tell George all about the
thunderstorm attack on Count Brandt's Holmlanders,
which seemed a very long time ago.

'Busy weekend,' George said, when Aubrey finished.
'A lot to chew over there.'

'That'd be one of your metaphors, then?' Aubrey said.

George threw a book at him, without much malice or
force. Then he straightened, eyes bright. 'I tell you what,
this is dashed exciting stuff, when you look at it.'

'What is? The explosion? The Holmlanders? The
hydraulic railway?'

'Well, all of it really. But I was most interested in the
Rokeby-Taylor goings-on. I mean, everyone knows about
Rokeby-Taylor, but all this about his shoddy business
dealings is fascinating.'

'You're not thinking of your journalism again, are
you?'

'It's the sort of hard-hitting stuff that makes reputations.
Imagine the headlines! "Rich Dandy Betrays the
Country by Not Doing the Right Thing".'

'I think they have people to do the headlines, fortunately,'
Aubrey said. 'But let's not get too carried away.'

'You know, I might skip
Luna
entirely. I'm sure I could
approach the proper newspapers directly with this. Then
those Lunatics would have to sit up and take notice.'

'George. Stop. Wait. Listen for a moment, please?'

George blinked. 'Aubrey?'

'It may not be the best idea to bruit these suspicions
about right now. There's more investigating to be done,
and even then I'm not sure about how useful it would be
to publish such details.'

George jabbed a finger at him. 'You're talking about
silencing the voice of the people. Censorship. I'm
shocked, I tell you. Shocked.'

'George, it's not the voice of the people I'm talking
about. I'm talking about your possibly writing a piece
about events and people without foundation. There are
such things as laws of libel.'

'Ah, libel. Yes.'

'And as well, there is the tricky area of things that are
kept silent in the national interest.'

'Lovely phrase, that. It can mean whatever you want
it to mean. Especially if you're the one making the
decisions.'

'No doubt it has been used for ill in the past. But
surely you can imagine a situation where it could be
important to the lives of innocent people to keep some
things out of the public gaze?'

'Now, that's a slippery argument. No-one is going to
argue against the lives of innocent people. But once a
precedent has been set, then it's always easier to find
other cases where secrecy is useful.'

'You're right.' Aubrey scowled. 'Hmm. What about if
I leave it to you? You need more information before you
can put together anything meaningful. I need more
information before I can see if there
is
anything useful
or meaningful. Then you decide what you'll do with it.
As long as you talk with me before you send anything
anywhere.'

'Dash it all, old man, of course I'd talk to you. And
your father, too. I'm not a simpleton. These are delicate
times, for all of us.'

'That they are. And Caroline? She's back in college?'

'Arrived before you did. Obviously caught an earlier
train.'

'She didn't have a midnight excursion to the hydraulic
railway to contend with. Not that I saw, anyway.'

'Mustn't underestimate Caroline Hepworth.'

'Not under any circumstances.' Aubrey stood and
brushed off his jacket. 'Now, if I hurry, I can do my
pre-reading for my Parameters and Parallels lecture.' He
groaned. 'Don't you hate it when professors try to come
up with a snappy title for their subjects?'

'Smacks of desperation. They may as well call it
"Dry as Dust: an Introduction".'

T
HE NEXT DAY
, A
UBREY WAS LIKE AN ARROW
. D
ESPITE HIS
misgivings, his Parameters and Parallels lecture was
stimulating, full of knotty stuff. Professor Maxwell
covered the blackboard with dense equations, using
strange Eastern characters, intermingled with more
modern operator symbols. Then he wove a freeform
lattice of connectors and explanations until the whole
array was a tangled basketwork of fiendish complexity.
The professor – a rotund, balding fellow – stood
back and smiled at his handiwork before asking,
without any guile at all, whether the group had any
questions.

After that it was Introduction to Ancient Languages.
Just as stimulating, but in a completely different way.
Aubrey found he needed two notebooks – the first to jot
down the course of the lecture, another to scribble down
his thoughts about a universal language of magic,
thoughts that were continually sparked by Professor
Mansfield's points. At the end of the lecture, with some
ambivalence, Aubrey realised the second notebook was
much, much fuller than the first.

As Aubrey wandered out of Professor Mansfield's
lecture he felt as if his head was bursting. Language was
the key to magic, it was a well-established principle.
The more he learned about early languages, the closer he
came to the basic building blocks of enchantment.

It made his head buzz.

A blow came from behind and nearly knocked him off
his feet.

'Sorry, old fellow,' the gowned undergraduate who had
collided with him said, but he didn't wait to see if Aubrey
had been hurt. He galloped off with a number of others,
all heading along the cloisters in the same direction.

Aubrey shook his head to clear it and realised that
dozens of others – students and dons – were all on the
move. Portly, gangly, old, young, it was as if the entire
campus had become lemmings and were stampeding
towards a particularly juicy cliff.

Then Aubrey realised where they were going. His feet
came to the same conclusion a few seconds early so
that he was already moving when he confirmed that the
Sheffield Lecture Theatre – one of the largest on campus
– lay ahead.

He was quickly part of a throng. 'What is it?' he asked
a frantic-looking don who was waddling as fast as his
bulk would allow.

'Haven't you heard? Ravi is going to give his first
lecture!'

Aubrey soon left the don behind, which was fortunate,
because he just slipped into the lecture theatre before the
doors were closed.

The seats were all taken. Aubrey contented himself
with standing at the back.

Dwarfed by the massive lectern, Lanka Ravi was
arranging his notes.

Lanka Ravi was a small man, extremely neat in
everything apart from his hair, which was black and
shiny. It had been pushed back behind his ears but
threatened to escape at any minute. If it did, Aubrey
feared for those in the front row of seats.

The excited chatter in the theatre ceased immediately
Lanka Ravi looked up from his notes. Then he launched
into his presentation.

For an hour, the small man detailed several new spells,
applications of the Law of Action at a Distance. These
spells covered the blackboard and were clever, if not
startlingly innovative. His voice was as his appearance:
neat, precise. He had a distinct Tamil accent.