That was when the shadows in the walled garden reared up and were suddenly and frighteningly no longer shadows but men. Even from where I stood I could see who they were. Niemeyer’s men.
It was instantly obvious what had happened. Karl Niemeyer had sent his men after us – in his vindictive, selfish determination to be revenged for his brother’s shooting he had ignored the war and had sent soldiers to England, purely to recapture one man. Heaven knows how long they had been out there, but they had trapped Stephen in the walled garden. I edged closer, considering and discarding half a dozen plans. If there had only been two soldiers I might have risked a surprise attack and hoped to get Stephen away, but there were four, all armed. I tiptoed closer to get a clearer view and recognized two of the soldiers from Holzminden. The fat and essentially stupid Hauptfeldwebel Barth, and a younger man called Hugbert Edreich. Seeing Edreich gave me a glimmer of hope, because he had been a kindly and unexpectedly sensitive gaoler in the camp, always trying to help, certainly sympathetic to the likes of Stephen.
The two soldiers whom I did not know had taken Stephen’s arms, and they were dragging him against an ivy-covered wall. He was struggling, shouting to them to let him go, calling for Leonora again.
‘Leonora,’ he cried. ‘Please – oh, please …’
Edreich was looking about him, almost as if he might be seeking some way of preventing what was about to happen, but the other three soldiers were already raising their rifles. Then – and this is the part that grips at my vitals like steel fingers – they fixed the bayonets to the rifles’ muzzles. It seemed Hauptfeldwebel Barth intended to carry out Niemeyer’s orders to the last tortuous letter. Bayoneting. That had been the brutal sentence on Stephen, and I could not believe they would do it. But they were already tying him to a tree trunk, binding him tightly with a length of rope. He was sobbing and struggling, and I tensed my muscles, ready to bound forward. But it was already too late. The soldiers lined up, the bayonets tilted, and the order was rapped out. The men ran at the imprisoned figure. I heard the clash of bayonets, and I heard someone shouting. Then a single gunshot rang out.
The shocking thing – the thing that will remain with me all my life – was that the soldiers seemed not have heard the gunshot, and they continued with their grisly work. But Stephen was already dead. He had sagged against the tree, and something that was black in the moonlight ran down his face from his forehead.
From where I stood, I saw Hugbert Edreich very quietly and stealthily put a pistol back into the holder at his belt.
And now I am writing this in the long drawing-room of Fosse House, and my mind is scalded with the pity of it, and with pain and remorse. But within the anguish that I did not save Stephen is one tiny shred of comfort. He did not have to suffer the agony of being bayoneted. That single gunshot fired by Hugbert Edreich was done as an act of mercy – I know it was, I know it as surely as if Edreich had told me so. At the end, unable to save him, he gave Stephen a quick, clean death.
But even now I can spare only a small part of my mind for Stephen, for Leonora is filling my thoughts. I have no idea where she is. What I do know, though, is that the indistinct figure I saw running into the walled garden – the figure Stephen called to and followed – was not Leonora. It could not have been. Leonora could not run so swiftly and smoothly. She had a club foot, and she could not run at all …
Nell pushed away the remaining pages and went, almost blindly, to stand at the window, not looking at Michael, not looking at anything. When Michael went to her she turned away from him – the first time she had ever done so. She was not crying, but there was a dreadful blankness in her eyes, and Michael waited, not wanting to intrude, understanding that she was struggling with a deep, confused emotion.
At last, Nell looked at him. In a tight, desperate voice, she said, ‘The figure they saw— The figure Stephen followed into the walled garden— Iskander was right to say it wasn’t Leonora. What was it Booth Gilmore said about time bleeding backwards?’
‘That’s just a mad theory,’ said Michael uneasily.
‘But it’s not, is it? Because I was the figure they saw. Stephen followed me into the walled garden – he thought I was Leonora. If he hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have been caught. He wouldn’t have died. I led him there – I led him straight into the hands of those murderers.’
Michael said, very forcefully, ‘Yes, he would have died – that was inevitable. The soldiers wouldn’t have waited very long, you know. When night fell, they would have broken into the house and dragged him out. It’s what they tried to do the first time, only they saw—’ He stopped, the words of Hugbert Edreich’s letter in his mind.
I saw him open the curtains in a downstairs room and look out, Hugbert had written. There was a lamp shining in the room, and we all saw him … But who had they seen? thought Michael. I was the one who opened the curtains to look out of that window … There was a lamp shining from the desk behind me …
He thought he might tell Nell about this later, but for the moment, he said, ‘My dear love, you don’t believe that stuff about time bleeding backwards any more than I do. Stephen was never going to get away from those men – it was nothing to do with what you did or didn’t do. And it might sound weird, but I’m inclined to be glad that Hugbert Edreich had the – the guts and the humanity to do what he did.’