The Department 19 Files: The New Blood: 1919. Will Hill

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СКАЧАТЬ but he kept his mouth shut; everyone was so pleased to see him, so happy that he had returned home safely, and he didn’t want to throw their kindness back at them, undeserved though it was.

      Luck, he thought to himself, as a waiter refilled his glass. That’s all it is. The coin lands the other way up and Thorpe is commiserating with my parents. Blind luck.

      He had sent telegrams that morning to the remaining members of the Special Reconnaissance Unit, wishing them all a happy new year. What he had left out of the messages was the truth: that he would rather be with any of them than where he found himself: with Kavanagh in Somerset, McDonald in the eastern Highlands of Scotland, Ellis in his small village outside Durham, or with Potts on the edge of the Norfolk Broads.

      Anything would be better than this. Anything.

      “You shouldn’t think so hard,” said a voice Harker knew well. “It’s bad for the brain.”

      Quincey smiled, and turned round. Standing in front of him was a man he had known his entire life and another he had come to feel as if he always had.

      Albert Holmwood, the future Lord Godalming, was the spitting image of his father; he possessed the same high cheekbones, the delicate, almost feminine features, the piercing pale green eyes. He was almost a year older than Quincey, but the age gap had never been an issue, even as they went their separate ways through life. Albert had gone to Charterhouse, as his father and grandfather had before him, while Quincey went to Eton, but whenever the two of them returned to London during the school holidays, they were able to slip back into their friendship as though they had never been apart. For the majority of his life, Albert had been lazy and dissolute, and the few arguments the two men had ever had had largely been centred round Quincey’s frustration at his friend’s apparent unwillingness to use the intelligence he possessed in such abundance.

      Scandal had followed Albert everywhere, culminating in an incident that had sent whispered shockwaves through the dining rooms of London society. In 1909, when he was barely sixteen years old, Albert had impregnated Lady Jane Lindley, the only daughter of one of the oldest and proudest families in the country, creating a crisis that had taken every last bit of Arthur Holmwood’s legendary diplomacy and, it was rumoured, a sizeable chunk of his fortune to defuse. Word had reached Quincey’s ear that Lord Godalming had come within a hair’s breadth of disowning his son, but had been talked out of it by his friends, Quincey’s father included. Instead, the shame had hung round the neck of the Holmwood family for almost five years, until the spring of 1914, when Albert turned twenty-one, and something strange happened.

      Almost overnight, he changed; the boy who appeared incapable of taking anything seriously disappeared, replaced by a young man who, in quick succession, married Jane Lindley, became a doting father to Alexandra, five years old at the time, and took a position in the War Office, where he remained to this day. Quincey could see Jane in the distance, twirling the now alarmingly grown-up Alexandra across the dance floor as the girl’s grandfather watched in open delight.

      Standing beside him was a man whose upbringing and circumstances had been as different as could be imagined from the future Lord Godalming’s, but whom Albert Holmwood now referred to both privately and publicly as his brother. David Morris was born in 1892, the product of a brief liaison between Quincey Morris, the larger-than-life American after whom Quincey Harker was named, and a prostitute by the name of Jenny Lincoln. After David’s birth, she had dragged herself free, with the help of Arthur Holmwood, of the lifestyle that she had sunk into as a teenager. He had found her work as a kitchen maid in a respectable house in Kensington, and asked her to send her son to see him when he turned eighteen.

      Jenny’s employer, the wife of a plain-speaking Yorkshireman who had made a fortune in the cotton mills of Preston, had taken a liking to her and had permitted David to be educated alongside her own children, an act of kindness that his mother would never cease to be grateful for. She raised her son to be fiercely proud of the father he had never met, and despatched him to the Holmwood townhouse on Piccadilly on his eighteenth birthday with the belief, burning in his chest, that he was the equal of any man.

      From there he had gone to Sandhurst, his place secured and his bills paid by Arthur Holmwood, and across the Channel to Europe in late 1914. He was gassed at Ypres in the April of the following year, and returned to his regiment in time to survive both Verdun and the churning nightmare of the Somme. By the end of 1916, he had begun to be viewed as something of a lucky charm, having survived four of the most devastating battles of the war, and was beloved by his men, whom he never treated as anything other than equals. His run of luck finally came to an end in April 1917 at Vimy Ridge, when a bullet found its way into his knee and stayed there. He was still recovering in a field hospital fifteen miles behind the line when Quincey Harker led his Special Reconnaissance Unit into Passchendaele, and saw out the final months of the war at General Headquarters in Montreuil, before returning to London and the War Office, and taking up his role as a member of the Holmwood household.

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