Excerpt from "Lord John and the Haunted Soldier

Excerpt from Lord John and the Haunted Soldier in Lord John and the Hand of Devils

He was not sure what he had expected of Simon Coles, but the reality was different. The lawyer was a slight young man, with sandy hair, a sprinkling of freckles across a thin, homely face, and a withered leg.

"Lord John Grey… Major Grey?" he exclaimed, leaning eagerly forward over his desk. "But I know you-know of you, I should say," he corrected himself.

"You do?" Once again, Grey found himself uneasy at being the unwitting subject of conversation. Perhaps Edgar had mentioned his impending arrival; he had sent a note ahead to Blackthorn Hall.

"Yes, yes! I am sure of it! Let me show you." Reaching for the padded crutch that leaned against the wall, he tucked it deftly beneath one arm and swung himself out from behind the desk, heading so briskly for the bookshelves across the room that Grey was obliged to step out of the way.

"Now where...?" the lawyer murmured, running a finger across a row of books. "Ah, yes, just here, just here!"

Pulling down a large double folio, he bundled it across to the desk, where he flung it open and flicked the pages, revealing it to be a sort of compendium, wherein Grey recognized accounts from various newspapers, carefully cut out and pasted onto the pages. For variety, he glimpsed a number of illustrated broadsheets, and even a few ballad-sheets, tucked amongst the pages.

"There! I knew it must be the same, though Grey is not an uncommon name. The circumstances, though--I daresay you found those sufficiently uncommon, did you not, Major?" He looked up with sparkling eyes, his finger planted on a cutting.

Unwilling, Grey felt still compelled to look, and was mortified to read a recently-published and highly-colored account of his saving the cannon--the gun reported as being named "Tod Belcher"--from the hands of a ravening horde of Austrians after the tragic and untimely demise of the gun's captain. He, Grey, having personally swept an oncoming Austrian cavalry officer from his saddle, then pinned him to the ground with his sword through the officer's coat, demanded and accepted his surrender, and then (by report) had fought the gun virtually single-handed, the rest of the crew having been slain by the accident which took the life of "Philbert Lester," the doomed captain, whose detached limbs had been scattered to the four winds, and his bowels torn out. Rather oddly, the explosion of the cannon that had concluded this remarkable passage at arms was treated in a single off-hand sentence.

Whoever had written this piece of bombast had managed, to Grey's amazement, both to spell his own name correctly--scarcely a blessing, in the circumstances--and to note that the event had occurred in Germany.

"But Mr. Coles!" Grey said, aghast. "This--this--it is the most arrant poppycock!"

"Oh, now, Major, you must not be modest," Coles assured him, wringing him by the hand. "You must not seek to lessen the honor your presence grants to my office, you know!"

He laughed merrily, and Grey, with a feeling of helplessness, found himself obliged to smile and bow in an awkward parody of graciousness.

Coles's clerk, a youth named Boggs, was summoned in to meet the hero of Crefeld, then sent off in a state of wide-eyed excitement to fetch refreshment--against Grey's protests--from the local ordinary. Where, Grey reflected grimly, he was no doubt presently recounting the whole idiotic story to anyone who would listen. He resolved to finish his business in Mudling Parva as quickly as possible, and decamp back to London before Edgar and Maude got wind of the newspaper story.

As it was, he had considerable trouble in getting Mr. Coles to attend to the matter in hand, as the lawyer wished to ask him any number of questions regarding Germany, his experiences in the army, his opinion of the current political situation, and what it was like to kill someone.

"What it is like..." Grey said, thoroughly taken aback. "To--in battle, I suppose you mean?"

"Well, yes," said Coles, his eagerness slightly--though only slightly--abating. "Surely you have not been slaughtering your fellow citizens in cold blood, Major?" He laughed, and Grey joined--politely--in the laughter, wondering what in God's name to say next.