things? We’re talking about murder. There’s a principle at stake.”
Freddie dropped his cigarette on the tiled terrace and crushed it underfoot. When he finally looked up, he said a little shamefacedly, “They scared me in there today. They threatened to take it all away, everything I’ve worked for, everything I do. I don’t know how to do anything else.”
“For God’s sake, Freddie, you’re young. This war will end, life will return to normal, people like that won’t be running the show when this mess is over.”
“You really believe that?”
“I know it.”
“I think you underestimate them. Our cards are marked and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
You’re wrong, thought Max. There is.
He wanted to tell Freddie the what and the how of it, but there was no point. Freddie’s mind was made up and it was an undeniable disappointment. The two of them had always stood apart from the others. Ralph and Hugh were career servicemen trained and primed for combat. Max and Freddie were mere guests at the table of war, competent amateurs shipped in to make up the numbers after a big chunk of Czechoslovakia had failed to appease Hitler. Yes, they’d both learned the ropes in the Officers’ Training Corps at their respective schools, but the experience had fired neither of them with enthusiasm. They knew this because they’d discussed it one night when there were no “real soldiers” within earshot.
Max had been packed off to Wellington College at the age of thirteen at his stepmother’s insistence, on the grounds that the men in her family had always gone there—a perplexing line of reasoning, given the assortment of disagreeable uncles and male cousins Sylvia had brought with her into their lives. Wellington was reputed to be Britain’s most military of schools, and Max had done just enough to get by without insulting that tradition, learning to march and fire a gun and bumble around with a blackened face up on the heathland toward Broadmoor during field day.
His failure to become commander of the Picton platoon had been taken by Sylvia as further evidence of his utter fecklessness. All the men in her family had commanded their house platoons. This was a lie that, after some cursory research in the school records, he’d felt obliged to point out to her over Christmas dinner one year—his first public challenge to her authority, and a declaration of open warfare as far as Sylvia was concerned.
Maybe he was doing her an injustice, but he sometimes suspected that she’d waited years to exact a suitable revenge. The family strings she’d pulled, supposedly on his behalf, had seen him carried first to Egypt and then to Malta, and although she couldn’t possibly have known at the time what horrors lay in store for the little island, he wouldn’t have put it past her.
Perversely, surviving the war had become as much about denying Sylvia the pleasure of his extinction as anything else. And maybe, just as perversely, standing up to the Colonel Giffords of the world, refusing to be cowed by the sort of high-handed military types whom he associated with Sylvia, had its roots in the same ancient animosity.
The reasons didn’t matter. He had picked his path and was set in his resolve. Yes, it would have been good to have a companion on the road, but Freddie wasn’t essential to the plan taking shape in his head. The real issue now was one of time, or rather the lack of it. With the Upstanding set to leave for Alexandria in less than a week, the clock was ticking.
Freddie and Max quietly shunted the topic into the shadows and talked of other things, such as dinner with Ralph at the officers’ mess in Mdina. Freddie wasn’t on duty again until the following morning and asked to tag along.
“If you’ll have me, that is,” he said a little sheepishly.
“After this morning, I think we could both do with a dose of Ralph.”
They also got a dose of Hugh.
Apparently he’d become something of a regular at the Xara Palace in the past few weeks, ever since Royal Artillery HQ had relocated to Saint Agatha’s Convent in Rabat following the bombing of the Castille. Rabat and Mdina stood cheek by jowl on the ridge, almost one and the same, and Hugh had taken to stopping off for a “swift sundowner” with Ralph on his way home to Sliema.
The Xara Palace—a grand fifteenth-century building close by the main gate in Mdina—had been requisitioned by the RAF as