A Question of Loyalties Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

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  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/josephinebell

  Contents

  Josephine Bell

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Josephine Bell

  A Question of Loyalties

  Josephine Bell

  Josephine Bell was born Doris Bell Collier in Manchester, England. Between 1910 and 1916 she studied at Godolphin School, then trained at Newnham College, Cambridge until 1919. At the University College Hospital in London she was granted M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P. in 1922, and a M.B.B. S. in 1924.

  Bell was a prolific author, writing forty-three novels and numerous uncollected short stories during a forty-five year period.

  Many of her short stories appeared in the London Evening Standard. Using her pen name she wrote numerous detective novels beginning in 1936, and she was well-known for her medical mysteries. Her early books featured the fictional character Dr. David Wintringham who worked at Research Hospital in London as a junior assistant physician. She helped found the Crime Writers’ Association in 1953 and served as chair during 1959–60.

  Chapter One

  The boys crept forward through the tangled undergrowth of a little coppice that had long since invaded the ruined lawns of Ashe.

  There were six of them, three of a size with their young leader, one bigger and stronger than any, one smaller and thinner. The big boy, for all his size, came last showing the group, by his face his general discomfort and bewilderment, for his wits did not match his size. But he made no complaint and no sound but the result of his general clumsiness in kneeling upon breaking twigs, dragging himself from brambles, upsetting and knocking together stones in his path. It was, however, the little chap who complained aloud of similar hazards and consequent hurts.

  ‘They have agreed the citadel, John,’ he cried in desperation. ‘Why do we go on? We are beaten, are we not?’

  The three lads who moved in exact obedience to their leader turned their heads to growl abuse at him. But John, not even turning his head, spoke briefly in a low cutting voice.

  ‘Silence, little coward! Or stay where you are, well out of sight. We go on to victory.’

  It was a bold assertion, given with such absolute conviction that the rest of the group murmured their agreement, though they had no idea how such a result could be achieved. However, their leader, having reached the edge of the spinney, with a wide open straggle of tall weeds and uncut hay to hide them from the distant ruined wall, had stopped moving, spun round to lie facing them and began to whisper his plan of campaign.

  The ruins were those of Ashe in the parish of Musbery, Devon, near the borders of Dorset. It was the home of young John’s grandmother, Eleanor, Lady Drake, widow of Sir John Drake, a parliamentarian in the late Civil Wars. She had called for the protection of a Roundhead garrison at Ashe, when she felt herself to be in peril. But she was too late. Lord Powlett, eager royalist, with a troop of Irish soldiers, marched upon the place, burned down the house and drove out the lady, who took refuge with friends in Lyme Regis, a stronghold of the Parliament.

  Six years later, when Cromwell had established the Commonwealth, Lady Drake received compensation for Ashe. Most of the house was in ruins and there was not enough money to restore more than one wing of it. Lady Drake had by now been given the tenancy of a London house belonging to a rebel royalist. So she allowed the surviving wing of Ashe house to be occupied by her third daughter, Elizabeth, who had married a young royalist, Winston Churchill, son of a loyal lawyer John Churchill, whose estate in Somerset at Wootton Glanville, near Ashe, lay under suspicion.

  This confusion of loyalties was not unusual in the Civil Wars. Country families were not all bigots; marriages of propinquity, of common sense, of equal or advantageous fortune, continued to be made regardless of high politics, regardless of the bitter, mortal struggle for ultimate power.

  So the young Churchills had settled at Ashe, he to efface himself as best he might with the study and writing of books on history and heraldry, she to the prolific production of a large family. Their eldest child, a girl named Arabella, was born in 1648, the boy John in 1650. These two thrived, though many of the total of twelve births died in infancy, following the usual pattern of breeding in those days when sanitation was primitive and medical knowledge scarcely a step from total ignorance, total lack of understanding, total reliance upon ancient custom and superstition.

  But the country air was pure and the land fertile. So humble folk out of the line of battles and armies and consequent pillage or destruction continued to grow their food in reasonable abundance and rear children who survived their difficult infancy. Those dreaded major ills, the plague and small pox, were not frequent visitors to the country villages. The village boys and the boys at Ashe were mostly strong and sturdy lads who knew and played together freely, their games very naturally based upon war, hitherto a real part of their young lives, their parents’ fortunes and continuing conversations.

  Young John gave his orders fluently and in swift short sentences. He had devised his plan a good hour previously, when frontal assault had failed and he had pulled back his troop into the shelter of the wood. He had worked out the detail as he led the long damp uncomfortable crawl through the coppice.

  ‘Mat and Hugh go forward with me. Walt, I leave you in charge of the rest. As soon as we leave you will cover our noise, if any, by beating the bushes, breaking branches, moving about. Make enough noise to give the enemy an idea we are all together still and waiting to take action.’

  ‘Will they not attack us?’ little George Churchill asked fearfully.

  ‘Not at once. But I need to draw their attention to where they imagine we are gathered. We will not delay. We three will reach the ruins where the old cellar steps lie under a bed of nettles. If we get at them safely, we shall be under cover and will be hid till we can see how they be disposed.’

  ‘And then?’ the big boy Tom asked slowly, looking very doubtful.

  John laughed quietly. ‘Then we shall act as we may.’

  ‘And we here?’

  ‘Go on making the enemy regard you until you hear my voice ordering a charge. Then rush over the field and grapple with them.’

  ‘But—but—’ Walt was aghast. ‘They outnumbered us before. Now we be three fewer. How—’

  John struck him lightly on the shoulder.

  ‘If we three succeed, they will be three fewer too, and those the leaders.’

  Without another word John began to crawl away at the edge of the trees and after a few minutes he and his companions
heard the party they had left begin in hesitant voices to play their part in the new attack. Clearly they had no confidence in the plan, but John had established his authority over them though he was no more than ten years old.

  It was far from perfect, this plan, for the enemy was made up of village lads who knew very nearly as much about the ruins of Ashe as young Churchill himself. Also the games of warfare they were continually playing about the place made them very familiar with one another’s ideas and methods. Of late some of the older lads had joined the village contingent. The home force, with the sequestered vicar’s son and the three boys, one John’s cousin on his father’s side, the other two from the estate, had become well drilled, most fertile in ideas. They won too easily. This was the first occasion when freshly recruited heavier stronger individuals, notably Will Layden, a farmer’s son, on the village side, looked like achieving a victory, won in the conventional way, in straight attack, be weight of numbers.

  But John, working his way through the copse to the one point where he could, unseen, outflank the enemy, was still in the ascendant. The village expected surrender. He had not openly surrendered, but had enticed them to believe he had done so. Now he could take them off their guard. His simple plan succeeded.

  Not without moments of alarm, even danger. There were still some yards of open ground between the edge of the trees and the great clump of nettles that grew in the mouth of the ruined cellar steps. This gap must be crossed without attracting the attention of any watchers who by now should be peeping over the uneven wall of the courtyard that the village had captured.

  Hesitating while his two supporters moved close behind him, ready for the dash across open ground, John chuckled quietly.

  ‘I see no heads,’ he whispered. ‘No movement in the weeds above the stones. I warrant they be overcome by their success.’

  The other two grinned at him, not venturing to speak.

  ‘We will go separately. I lead. Hugh, count ten after I am gone, then follow, moving as I move. If they take me at once, do you both go back to the rest, tell them to wait for my surrender, but without noise. Mat, if Hugh and I be taken, go you back alone to the others. If not, wait till I call to you. So, wish me good fortune, in God’s name.’

  He said the last words as he had heard men speak them when starting upon a journey and his two young followers bowed their heads solemnly before sinking flat to the ground on their bellies, their chins on their clasped hands, their bright eyes searching forward between the tall grass stalks.

  John shot up and away. He did not try to conceal his passage but leaped to make it as swift as he could, careful only to avoid tripping over stones or fallen wood and shaking his strong young legs free of entagling growth.

  He reached the nettles. With arms folded before his face he plunged through them and was hurtling down the stone steps to the cellar before he had quite realised they were there. At the bottom, in semi-darkness, he pulled himself up, panting, half astonished, half elated at the success of this vital move.

  He was still looking about him when Hugh rolled down the steps to his feet, his face scarlet from nettle stings, tears pouring from his outraged eyes.

  ‘I fell at the top step,’ he panted indignantly. ‘I brought down these accursed nettles with me. Damn them, they have my face on fire! I can scarce open my mouth or my eyes.’

  He was indeed in a terrible state and John saw he could not be used for action of any kind until the worst of the nettle sting poison was overcome.

  ‘It will pass,’ he told his unhappy supporter. ‘Stay here till I see how we find ourselves and locate the enemy positions and how we may best attack them. I will be back when I have a plan.’

  ‘And if they take you?’

  ‘As I gave orders before. Try to get back to Mat and with him to the rest.’

  John crept away, leaving his friend to suffer a slow recovery from the scorching and pricking that racked him.

  The cellar passage led in darkness in two directions, neither very safe from roof falls, but more stable at this time than in earlier years. Though the ruined house, burned and looted by the wild Irish troop under Lord Powlett, had afterwards, when the war moved right away from Ashe, been thoroughly searched by the local villagers, it soon gained a reputation for useless, unprofitable danger. One or two greedy searchers were maimed, one killed by a substantial roof fall. Thereafter folk only went to Ashe to steal building materials, a few bricks or tiles to improve their own dwellings, timbers that had not been reduced to charcoal, perhaps a dressed stone or two that took a yeoman’s fancy for his own porch.

  Lady Drake had restored the one sound wing of Ashe as soon as she considered it safe to leave Lyme when the siege there had ended. Afterwards, when she had installed her daughter Elizabeth there with the latter’s suspect husband and his books, some sort of fencing was put up to keep the village out of property they had long considered common land. The fencing had no success and if the adult population of the village no longer scrounged and stole, the children still used the ruins as their playground, gradually wearing away and flattening walls, breaking up the remaining windows and doors, making new paths where none had been before, until there was no longer an overhanging wall, an empty stairwell, a tottering chimney or any other hazard, but instead a rugged mass, rather like a steep hillside and indeed in places grassed over by the action of wind and rain, blown dropped seed, small beasts and birds, all helping the children in their endless activity.

  John knew the map of these ruins by heart. He had known them all his life, growing up with their gradual relentless change. His father, who had watched his son’s development with pride, had first ruled this part of the property out of bounds. But the rule was not obeyed and could not easily be enforced. Mrs. Churchill saw no harm in the small boy’s limited exploration, nor did his nurse-maid, for it kept him occupied. Nor the villager who tended the limited garden, for it kept the child away from his territory.

  Mr. Churchill himself began his son’s education. A little later the village parson, who had been proscribed, continued it for the boy and for his younger brother as well as for his own sons, of whom Hugh was the third. Also for those of a neighbouring attorney who had been forced to retire from Axminster for Royalist views. The small literate society supported one another in cash and kind. A meagre, restricted life for these members of the gentry: a life of uncertainty, but of late years a life of growing hope.

  John took the longer of the two dark passages. It led to a point below a former small courtyard where linen had been hung out to dry on lines. The floor of this yard had been breached at the centre, letting in light. Since it led to nowhere in particular he intended to cross the laundry, still roofed, but lit by the opening in the yard, and from it up what was now a grassy slope or bank, steep but solid, to the former great kitchens.

  Having reached their open threshold John stopped to look about him. He had now, moving underground most of the way, travelled along the whole length of the ruined manor house. He expected to find the enemy installed in the former wide stable yard that lay outside the kitchens and sculleries.

  He was right. Keeping under cover of half walls and jutting brick buttresses and corners, led by voices that grew clearer as he moved, he came to a point where he could see through a slit at eye level.

  Immediately satisfied, he turned away again, followed his former route back to his friend and slipped to the ground beside him. He explained the details of their further action. It was based on his original conception, he explained.

  ‘To make a diversion while we seize Will and his immedi-guards, who at this moment, or rather who were when I saw them, reclining at their ease to the neglect of their followers and apart from them. I think you and I can secure Will if we act together. Mat must reinforce our main body and lead them. Go tell him so now and return at once. They have no lookouts yet hereabouts, have they?’

  ‘I have seen none.’

  ‘Go with all speed then and return. Join me
at the main kitchen wall. Hurry!’

  The boy’s enthusiasm, his firey determination, were catching. Forgetful now of his nettled face, though it still throbbed and smarted, Hugh leaped off on his mission while John returned slowly through the cellar passage to his observation slit in the broken wall of the kitchen.

  The plan succeeded. The surprise was complete; the diversion drew off the bulk of the enemy’s forces. This left their leader and the only one of his guards who had stayed. They were pinned to the ground in a lightning attack and soon surrendered and were made captive. Hugh, the parson’s son, was twelve years old at this time and sturdy, while John, though only ten, made up in furious energy and manual skill for his lack of size and weight. Moreover, the farmer’s boy, Will, knew there was good treatment at the manor for prisoners of war taken in these games, with light ale, bread and cheese for both armies at the end of the day.

  Casualties on this occasion were few and not serious. Under Mat’s command the diversion went briskly. Since Will, assuming victory already won, had failed to set lookouts round his prize to observe any attempt at counterattack, Mat’s party gained momentum as they rushed across the overgrown lawn from the wood. Their cries had already roused the village party, but the latter, with bloated confidence, simply set themselves to man the walls, waiting for orders to direct their next move.

  No orders came, so as John expected, confusion followed. Anger roused the village lads, but too late. The other side elated, hit out bravely in the scuffles that followed. All except little George Churchill, who was only six and saw no point in exposing himself to no purpose. He took cover at the wall and stayed there till the fighting was over.

  All the same the village side did not acknowledge defeat until John and Hugh led out their captured leaders and Will called to them that the battle was over and the victory, yet once more, had gone to the manor army.

  ‘If ye have any man injured bring him to the house,’ John ordered. ‘Hugh, see to our own men. And you, sir,’ he said with a formal bow to Will, ‘must follow me to my father, who will declare what shall be done with you and your—’