Excerpt from "Lord John and the Haunted Soldier"

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

November, 1758
Tower Place
The Royal Arsenal
Woolwich

Hell was filled with clocks, he was sure of it. There was no torment, after all, that could not be exacerbated by a contemplation of time passing. The large case-clock at the end of the corridor had a particularly penetrating tick-tock, audible above and through all the noises of the house and its inhabitants. It seemed to Lord John Grey to echo his own inexorable heartbeats, each one a step on the road toward death.

He shook off that grisly notion and sat bolt upright, his best hat balanced upon his knee. The house had once been a mansion; doubtless the clock was a remnant of those gracious days. Pity none of the chairs had made the transition to government service, he thought, shifting gingerly on the niggardly stool he'd been given.

A spasm of impatience brought him to his feet. Why would they not bloody call him in and get on with it?

Well, there was a rhetorical question, he thought, beating the hat against his leg with soft impatience.

If Milton's "The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small" was not the official motto of His Majesty's government, it was surely that, de facto. It had taken months for the Royal Commission to be convened, still longer for it to sit, and longer yet for inquisition to stretch out its hand in his direction.

His arm and ribs were quite healed now, the furrow through his scalp no more than a thin white scar beneath his hair. The freezing rain of November beat upon the roof above; in Germany the thick grass around the ninth Station of the Cross must lie now brown and dead, the lieutenant beneath it, food for worms long since. Yet here Grey sat--or stood--a small, hard kernel yet awaiting the pressure of the grindstone.

Grimacing, he sought respite from the clock's ticking by striding up and down the corridor, returning the censorious looks of the row of portraits hung upon the wall as he passed them--past governors of the Royal Arsenal.

The portraits were mediocre in execution for the most part, save the one near the end, done by a more talented hand. Jan Vanbrugh, said the plaque upon the frame; a Dutchman by his looks as well as his name--a black-browed gentleman whose fiercely rubicund features radiated a jolly determination. Probably a good attitude for one whose profession was explosion.

He could hear bangs and pops from the proving grounds outside; these had been audible throughout, though muffled by distance. Suddenly, though, a long, subterranean thunder seemed to shake the floor and walls, and he found himself flat on the floor, hugging a shabby hall-runner, eyes starting from his skull, sweating and breathless, with no memory at all of how he'd got there.

"My Lord?" A voice from which any trace of astonishment or curiosity had been carefully removed spoke above him. "The gentlemen are ready."

"Are they? In...deed." He rose, stilling the trembling of his limbs by main effort, and brushed the dust from his uniform coat with what nonchalance could be managed.

"If you will follow me, my Lord?" The functionary, a small, neatly-wigged person of impeccable politeness and indeterminate aspect, bent to pick up his hat, and handing it to him without comment, turned to lead him back down the corridor. Behind them, the clock ticked imperturbably on, the passage of time undisturbed by such small matters as explosion or death.