Page 6 of Lord of the Lost

Chapter Two

The first horse he’d bought near Paris, he’d sold in Calais, and for a profit. That, combined with the money he’d carefully hoarded since the war, had been enough to buy passage to England, and a horse once he landed – but little more. From Portsmouth he had travelled rough, having no need of comfort or companionship in a land at peace, where that fact was comfort enough.

Not enough to stop the dreams, of course, not enough to stop the ghosts from haunting him, not enough to stop him from starting at every sound in the trees beside the road. Perhaps nothing would ever be enough to stop all of that.

The weather was cold, but with rain rather than snow, and he simply went on, barely eating or resting, needing, now, to reach his destination, to see what he found there, for good or ill. He had sent no message – he had simply stepped out of the life he’d led since the war had ended, and set off to return to the one which duty required him to live.

Now, as he got closer, reaching territory he had ridden over so many times as a young man, the hills, forests, and the sheet of grey February clouds which he had expected to arouse memories did not seem, in truth, all that familiar any more. The grey weather matched his grey mental state, where emotions no longer lived.

He could not reconcile these hills and dales now - when he kept expecting some Frenchman to leap from behind a tree and charge with a glistening bayonet, to rend and stab and kill, to leave him lying in the mud - with the hills and dales of his childhood memories. Several times he flinched at the movement of a squirrel, or the cry of a bird - and several times he laughed at his foolishness, though in truth he was not in any way amused.

The war is over...

Father is dead...

Those thoughts repeated in his mind, like a litany of change, a listing of impossible things which had come to pass.

Finally, at the end of a long day on the road, he rode into Grimstoke Village, down the rough and muddy earthen road – the Romans had not thought it necessary to have a proper road leading to an uninteresting town in the south west of England – and to the village tavern, The Mare’s Mane. The sun had set by the time he reached it, and lantern light flickered across the faded picture of the mare on the aged sign above the door. Village men stood outside the tavern. When they saw Devlin, worn from the road, but riding a horse of good quality, rapier on his hip, travel stained breeches tight around his well-toned legs and wearing boots of obvious quality despite their dirt, they looked at him, curious. Then one of them, perceiving, despite his beard, the echoes of his father’s face in his own, called out.

“Your Grace? Is it you, come back from the war?”

For a moment, a shiver ran through him, at being called ‘Your Grace’, an odd feeling, not quite emotion, yet not the total absence of it, either. But this was why he had come back – duty – the duty to take on the title, and every responsibility that came with it.

“Yes, it is.”

A mutter went through the crowd, and others came out of the tavern, and the nearby houses. They stood at the side of the road, some taking off their hats and tugging their forelocks in respect. He felt like an imposter.

None of it seemed real at all.

“Your Grace!” they called, “Your Grace! Your Grace! The Duke has come home!”

Devlin was more comfortable around working men than he had been before the war. Most of his friends over there, in fact, had been men of this sort, only younger, and now dead. He looked at them now, these people – his people – and found the need to speak with them, as if that might make it all seem less like a dream.

“Can you tell me,” and he stopped just shy of three old men, “is there any news? Was a decent funeral held for my father? Is all well at Grimstoke Castle?”

One man, older than the rest, with gaps in his teeth and leathery skin, stepped forward.

“The funeral, Your Grace,” the man said, “was well attended – your father was respected. From what I’ve heard, all is well at the Castle, but you have been sorely missed.”

Devlin nodded.

“Thank you, old fellow.”

He turned his horse back to the road. The last two miles to home. Home – what was home? He no longer knew what that meant.

He kept his horse to a walk as they went up the long curve of road towards the Castle, his mind roiling. Until now, he had not considered, in any detail, things like his father’s funeral. He should have been there, should have supported his mother and sister in their grief. Instead, he had been hiding in France, living as a simple groom, trying desperately to forget – the war, the world, everything. Guilt assailed him, for he knew that nothing he might do now would ever make up for not having been there.

Yet even that guilt was a strangely distant feeling – he knew that it should cause him great anguish, but what he felt was just a pale imitation of that sort of feeling. He was beginning to think that he might never truly feel again, that he would remain more like the lost, detached from the world, but not truly gone.

He looked up at the looming bulk of the Castle, the place where he had grown up, the place which was his home, and saw nothing but a pile of stones, built into haphazard layers in various styles, where succeeding generations had added on to the original medieval keep. When he’d been a boy, visitors had often remarked on the strange appearance of the place, but to him, it had simply been normal. Now, in the darkness of the evening, he saw it as they might – huge, almost threatening, oddly piled together, stark against the slightly paler sky, where the last blue of late twilight was still showing.

Still, it was home – riding up to it should have made feelings well up within him - happy memories and the like – but nothing touched the aching emptiness which had been his since his injury. He knew that he should feel things, he even knew, approximately, what he should feel – but he simply didn’t feel it. It was as if he looked at himself from the outside, studying his lack of reactions like some naturalist studying insects.

It is not Grimstoke Castle that is strange, the only strangeness comes from my lack of feeling, he thought. Am I a skeleton? Am I a ghoul? Am I some ghastly, unfeeling creature? Am I a ghost, who knows not that he is dead?

When he reached the Castle, there was barely a light to be seen. He dismounted on the gravel of the forecourt, and looked around, but nothing moved, no one came out to him. His horse whinnied and, when a faint answer came from around to the side, Devlin led him to the stables. At least the whinny of the other horse gave some indication of life!

The stables were lit by a single lantern at the door, and at first no one moved – until Devlin, feeling more ghost-like by the minute, called out.