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plucking his trouser-
legs from his bony knees. "This is no light matter, gentlemen! No lark for
amateurs. This is dire work! We shall be taking the law, and our lives, and
our honor, into our own hands. If it is to be done at all, it must be done in
the strictest and most permanent secrecy."
Mallory, sensing victory, spoke up with an adroitness that surprised even
himself. "My brothers and I respect your special expertise, Sergeant Fraser!
If you will guide us toward justice, then we will gladly place ourselves at
your command. You need never doubt our discretion or our resolve. The sacred
honor of our own dear sister is at stake."
Tom and Brian seemed taken aback at this sudden change of tack, for they still
distrusted
Fraser, but Mallory's somber pledge brooked no objection from them. They
followed his lead.
"You'll never see me peaching!" Tom declared. "Not to my grave!"
"I should think the sworn word of a British soldier still accounts," Brian
said.
"Then we shall try the venture," Fraser said, with a wry look of fatalism.
"I must get steam up in the Zephyr!" Tom said, rising from his chair.
"Half-an-hour my little beauty takes, from a cold start."
Mallory nodded. He would put every minute to good use.
Outside the Palace, washed, combed, and intimately dusty with flea-powder.
Mallory sought a lumpy purchase atop the Zephyr's wooden coal-wain. The
chugging little gurney had barely room for two men within its line-streamed
tin shell. Tom and Fraser had taken those seats. They were arguing now over a
London street-map.
Brian stamped out a rude nest within the wain's flabby canvas, stretched atop
a diminishing heap of coal. "They take a deal of shoveling, your modern
gurneys," Brian observed, with a stoic smile. He sat across from Mallory. "Tom
does take-on about this precious machine of his; talked my ear off about
Zephyrs, all the way from Lewes."
The gurney and wain lurched into motion, the coal-wain's wooden-spoked
rubbered wheels turning with a rhythmic creak. They rolled down Kensington
Road with a startling celerity. Brian brushed a flaming smokestack spark from
his dapper coat-sleeve.
"You need a breathing-mask," Mallory said, offering his brother one of the
makeshift masks the ladies had sewn within the Palace: a neatly stitched
ribboned square of gingham, stuffed with cheap Confederate cotton.
Brian sniffed at the rushing air. "Ain't so bad."
Mallory knotted the ribbons of his own mask neatly behind his head. "Miasma
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will tell against your health, lad, in the long run."
"This don't compare to the pong of an Army transport boat," said Brian. The
absence of Fraser seemed to have relaxed him. There was something more of the
Sussex lad about him, and less of the stern young subaltern. "Coaly fumes
pouring out our engine-room," Brian reminisced, "and the lads tossing-up their
rations from the mal-de-mer, right and left! We steamed through that new
Frenchy canal in Suez, straight from Bombay. We lived in that bloody transport
for weeks! Rotten Egyptian heat -- straight through to hard Crimean winter! If
the cholery, or the quartan fever, didn't carry me off from that, then I
needn't worry over any little mist in London." Brian chuckled.
"I often thought of you, in Canada," Mallory told his brother. "You, with a
five-year enlistment -- and a war on! But I knew you'd do the family proud,
Brian. I knew you'd do your duty."
"We Mallory lads are all over the world, Ned," said Brian, philosophically.
His voice was gruff, but his bearded face had colored at Mallory's praise.
"Where's brother Michael right now, eh? Good old Mickey?"
"Hong Kong, I think," Mallory said. "Mick would be here today with us surely,
if luck had put his ship in port in England. He was never the sort to flinch
from a proper fight, our Michael."
"I've seen Ernestina and Agatha, since I was back," Brian said. "And their
dear little ones."
He said nothing about Dorothy. The family did not talk about Dorothy anymore.
Brian shifted on the lumpy canvas, turning a wary eye on the looming
crenellations of a palace of savantry. "Don't care much for a fight in the
streets," he remarked. "That was the only place the Russkies really stung us,
in the streets of Odessa. Scrapping and sniping house-to-house in the city,
like bandits.
That's no civilized war." He frowned.
"Why didn't they stand up straight, and give you an honest battle?"
Brian glanced at him in surprise, then laughed, a bit oddly. "Well, they
surely tried that at first, at Alma and Inkermann. But we gave 'em such a hell
of a toweling that it knocked 'em into a panic. You might call that partly my
doing, I suppose. The Royal Artillery, Ned."
"Do tell," Mallory said.
"We're the most scientific of the forces. They love the Artillery, your
military Rads." Brian
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