Archival: Most Secret

By Rob Rice

Behind the scenes of history… Lurked desperate men with strange knowledge, doctors with dangerous cures, and scientists terrified by their own discoveries. Join the heir to a faerie legacy and his bloody companion on a journey that ends before the very ramparts of New Orleans and in the smoke of a terrifying battle. What was the secret Winston Churchill’s valet sought to share with his employer from beyond the grave? Meet Flight Lieutenant Neville ‘Bunny’ Edwards, who in the course of the Second World War loses his humanity, but never his courage or his determination to stay in the fighting. Illustrated by Donna Barr, http:www.stinz.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365490446

Book preview

Archival: Most Secret

Archival:  Most Secret

Rob S. Rice

Illustrated by Donna Barr

Copyright © 2001-2015 by Rob S. Rice

ELECTRONIC EDITION

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Esterhazy Press, PO Box 123, North Pembroke, MA 02358

Cover art by Sarah Miles

https://www.tigerdile.com/

Interior Art by Donna Barr

http://donnabarr.blogspot.com/2014/03/hire-artist-rates.html

Materials Related to the Disappearance of Major James MacLeod

Temp. att’d to the 85th Regiment of Foot

Letter, James MacLeod to Ld. Donald MacLeod

Dunvegan, March 17th, 1805

To my father,

In response to yours of February 2nd, just arrived by the mails,  I write to inform you of the events in the Dunter’s Glen since your Lordsp’s sale of the range to His Majesty’s government.  I grudge to tell you of the alacrity with which these men have been at their purpose, and I do in sooth bewail the loss of such a fine parcel of ours, in which I have hunted fox and hare with great pleasure.

The entire glen is overrun with the most disreputable sorts of navvies and other low cast of workers from the mainland and the alleys and gutters of as far away as Blackpool and the closer towns and islands.  These have busied themselves in the destruction of all that was green and pleasant since the surveyors completed their devil’s work and marked out the lines for whatever sort of compound they are now constructing.  You Lordsp’s failure to take me into his confidence leaves me able to make but the most general sorts of assessments as to how far their work progresses.

My first impression was that they were constructing some species of fortress, for their first work was a ditch, trace, and even an abbatis fashioned from the detritus of the trees so brutally felled in Parliament’s name.  A fortress besides the castle on our coast might be well thought of, but not in Dunter’s Glen, not where the hills separate the land so clearly from the sea and obscure all fields of sight and fire.  I did venture to speculate as some sort of naval purpose for the construction, for they did cut a deep and narrow canal between the Maidens on the western side down to the sea.  As they have at once begun to cover this excavation with flagstones and the turves they first cut in the digging, I am now at a loss to explain the entire effort.  From the height and nature of the walls they build on the inner side of the ditch, I have come to the conclusion that they build, in fact, some species of prison, and I marvel that your Lordsp. could suffer our land to be so basely used.

There are cellars of considerable depth in excavation, also a network of what appear to be cisterns of some kind.  Somewhat more comforting is a large corral built near the eastern side of the glen, where I am told by some of our employ they have goats a-grazing to improve the quality of the pasturage there.  Apparently there is to be some amount of livestock to be kept at the facility.  Supplies of salt, grain, and straw were among the earliest I saw stowed therein.

Until recently, I have been allowed to inspect the digging in my rolé as your representative.  Now that the most recent ship from the mainland has arrived, it is all I may do to observe the passage of heavy wains with the building materials from Dunvegan dock up and into the area, along with the occasional curtained coach with the Governmental seal upon the doors.  The talk among the town society is that the place is to hold those suspected of sympathy with the rabble of the French, and this is as good a theory as any, and one that the folk from London are careful not to deny.

I must pass on to you the queer words of Keeper Chaffinch, who sends, I note, ‘his dootiful respects t’the Laird.’  He at first accompanied me, with his sack and gun, on my earlier forays into the digging, but not long after the departure of the surveyors he has refused to cross the line of the trace.  Tis unco business they do here, young Laird, quoth he, And ‘tis not for the likes of me to be near to it.  I note that he has had very little if anything to do with the people coming in from the mainland.

I am puzzled and resentful, I do not scruple to say, over your Lordsp’s permission to these sort to so misuse our ancestral lands, but I am also your ob’t son in writing even so much as this to you of the doings in Dunter’s Glen.

All due respects,

Jas. MacLeod

P.S.  If you desire more specific information, you were best to write at once by the return packet, as (per your Lordsp’s express instructions) I am to Edinburgh to resume my work with my tutor there in the hope of securing that commission of which we have spoken.

P.P.S.  Signs have just been posted forbidding all access to Dunter’s Glen and the excavation, in the name of ‘The Ministry Responsible’ appearing below the Government’s Seal.

P.P.P.S.  I will have need of funds in Edinburgh, I trust to your L’s generosity in remembering the obligations and req’ments of a young gentleman of quality there.

J.M.

Letter, James MacLeod to Ld. Donald MacLeod

Edin Castle, July 2, 1810

To my father,

I write in some intemperance of feeling to you, wroth as I am over the news discovered unto me in the garrison mess by Col Williams, who was very far indeed in his cups or else he would not have been so ill-considered as to disclose your Lordsp’s special instructions for the course of my military career.  How could you have done this unto me, your flesh and son?  We have had our words and difficulties in the past, but it was my desire to win glory in yours and the eyes of other men, yet here I have stayed in Edinburgh while my fellows in rank and society cover themselves with the glory of far campaigns on sea and distant shores.

‘Sooth, it was wisdom in your Lordsp’s eyes to leave your eldest son and heir moiled in the drearyhead of the garrison here in safety, but it shall be my most unhappy lot to bear forever the shame of these long years in security in Scotland.  It is not to be born.  I shall have my chance at glory, that I abjure, as I would have but for your pulling of strings and wires among the peers and with the terms of my commissions and advancement.  It was originally my purpose within the course of this letter to thank your Lordsp. for my recent promotion to Captain and to acknowledge that the monies stipulated in your letter to the writer at MacGregors’ were delivered as demanded unto the general at the proper time.  But how might I express gratitude for something so clearly a fraud as this mock military career of mine?  I am unpopular with the mess and the Edinburgh gentry, and I feel it now true to say that it was no conduct of mine that has made me so, but rather the laughter behind hands of those aware of the true nature of my service.

It is my intention to take a season’s leave back home at Dunvegan, and I do this knowing also that that, as has been all else, is in accordance with your Lordsp’s desires.  I do not, myself, see such import to your presence among the peers in London as to justify your absence and mismanagement of our holdings on Skye, but that I shall find myself busied soon enough with the flinders resulting from your past mistakes I have the utmost certainty.

Sergeant Chaffinch will be returning with me, by, I am told, intervention of your Lordsp’s through your own agency in my regiment.  Properly, it should have been my deed to see to his own leave, but as always your Lordsp slights me and shows me little regard.  I do not like the man nor want his company.  In the process of your interferences you make me the mock of my fellows and of even our oldest servants and retainers.  This has ever been your Lordsp’s unworthy practice upon me, and I find myself in the furthest extremes of anger and despair because of it.

I will be taking a dispatch-box to the Hospital in our old Dunter’s Glen, this by the suit of Vsc. Yalding, with whom I have become friendly in our encounters in the Inns and Taverns of this dreary old city.  He has led me to believe that he shall soon advance to some role in this new Ministry within its operations in the new installation there, and so I think that even you should not begrudge me so potentially advantageous an acquaintanceship.  As the government seal shall entitle me to consideration upon my travels, that shall lessen the cost of my journey home and perhaps silence some of your Lordsp’s grumbling about the expenditures required by my proper deportment among the officers of the garrison and the gentry of Edin.  How I shall rejoice to be shed of them, as I shall be glad to be shed of you during your blessed time away in the smoke and toils of Westminster.

All due respects,

Jas. MacLeod

P.S.  Sgt. Chaffinch bids me as always, ‘hees most dutiful respects t’the MacLeod,’ and tells me to add that all is done as can be expected to be done and all due services (whatever those might be) duly rendered.  The man frightens me at some times, I am told that he is feared by the men at his command, and liked by none at the mess.  I do not understand why he maintains his place in your Lordsp’s service and affections.

P.P.S.  I send this out with the government dispatches from the garrison command, thus saving you a few more precious pence that you can undoubtedly spend better than I on the whores and vices of London.

J.M.

Letter, James MacLeod to Ld. Donald MacLeod

On the Bristol Packet, March 8, 1814

To my father,

You are quite correct, Sir, to complain that ‘I have done you,’ as you write to my mother in the letters she was careless enough to let come to my hands.  I have done you, I have done you well, and I shall be done with you for quite some time.  Your curses and queries about my unfilial thoughts and letters toward you are given the lie by your own unpaternal conduct towards me.  You have sought to keep me from the wars and glory, I have outmaneuvered you, and if I have breached your trust, why should I not do so when you deny me a chance to earn my own name and respect among men?

I do take delight in the mechanics by which I have won free of you, and dutifully , as your factor and agent, I rejoice to write and tell you of exactly how it has been managed.  My acquaintance with Vsc. Yalding has only flourished in the fertilizing agents of our mutual esteem and your and the Ministry’s shared disapproval of us both.  Your own actions and interferences have thwarted me.  In as much as he can discover it unto me under the provisions of the Act, Vsc. Yalding has been similarly balked in his plans and desires for the Hospital in Dunter’s Glen.  Our mutual alliance has served to give us both the opportunity that I have taken to do what I have done to you, and to advance simultaneously Vsc. Yalding’s credit within the hospital.  The curses of unnatural fathers and London bureaucrats both be damn’d all!

There is no way that you can undo the contract, I have been most careful in that regard.  The actions of my own solicitor at Glasgow and Vsc. Yalding’s own advisors helped render the contract beyond, I should fancy, even the Lords’ intervention.  How I have hurt you!  The produce of our, that is to say, your estates, the mutton, the wool, much of what has kept you in Whores and Satins in London shall go at a most advantageous price—to the Ministry—to the Ministry’s hospital for the specified span of seven years, and there is no way that you can increase these rates nor abrogate the iron terms in which I have bound you.

You may call it, as you have, a violation of trust, but I have trusted you to use me as a father should and that you have not done.  Be d__’d to your grumblings, I shall have my chance after all in this new American war.  Your own sotted generation let the Colonies slip from your palsied fingers.  It shall be my and Vsc. Yalding’s happy task to chastise these undutiful offspring of Britannia’s for their alliance with the Monster Bonaparte and the dagger they have sought to bury in His Majesty’s back.

You cannot thwart me in these desires, either, for I have given you the slip indeed.  This letter shall not be posted until I have taken ship with Vsc. Yalding on board H.M.F. Seahorse and am safely lodged in the staff of Admiral Cochrane for the punitive expeditions planned against the American coast this summer.  Vsc. Yalding has already secured our place with Captain Gordon of the frigate.  The connexions of yours which I have exploited to gain me access to Adm. Cochrane you may be well assured that I shall turn to my uses as assiduously as I have the products of your land and your earlier folly in allowing the folly of the constructions at Dunter’s Glen.  I have won free of you, and with this chance I shall eclipse you as the more worthy scion of MacLeod than ever you have proved yourself to be.

All due respects,

Jas. MacLeod

From The National Register, 3 March, 1814

…that among the forces assembled in His Majesty’s name are the great new razees that we trust with good confidence to drive at last the Yankee vessels back into their holes; moreover garrison regiments are at last freed to unleash fitting justice upon Jemmy Madison and his coterie of bad counselors, due after a long wait to receive the punishment His Majesty’s Ministers stand ready to inflict upon them.  We are told that the agents and savants of the newest Ministry, upon whose mysterious character our reporters have remarked previous, are included among the numbers assembled for the American campaign, and that by their cause in some wise shall our efforts to chastise the savages be augmented and reinforced.  Among the ships sailing this week is that of the celebrated Captain Gordon, Seahorse, 40, the voyage of which, we are certain, shall add to the already heavy burthen of Captain Gordon’s laurels and prize money…

Excerpts from the Journal of Viscount J.  D.  Yalding

March 10, 1814

At sea—Major MacLeod’s conduct weighs ever the more heavily upon me, and I am at great pains to prevent some sign of my intense dislike of the man from manifesting itself in our daily intercourse.  I find myself tasked to forestall the wicked hope that some American rifleman, or the cannon balls of one of their heavy frigates, of which we are daily in dread, might stop his never-ceasing flow of complaints, reproaches, and idle and inane chatter.

There is some restraint at table from the presence of the 1st officer, Lieutenant Graham, the Captain himself not deigning to soil himself with the company of supernumeraries such as M. and myself.  That is wisely done, I should say, at least in the matter of MacLeod.  The Seahorse has seen much action in the late wars against the Corsican, and yet who but M. should set himself up as the instructor of officers and men in the noble art of war!  His ill-informed advice, insults veiled and unveiled and patronizing criticisms of their past behavior all make him an object of contempt at best, and there is no saving courtesy or affability in the man.  He will not give respectful attention to the anecdota of the experienced men about him, and instead yawns, feigns languorous indifference, and indulges himself in such conduct that, had his family name and position not prevented, I am not so certain that an exchange of pistol fire on the quarter deck might not have rid me of him at last.

In addition to the burden of my ‘friendship’ with this counterfeit of a man, there are my daily requirements posed me by my duties with the Ministry.  After some of the late incidents and carefully-suppressed happenings in the vicinity of Charleston in the last American war, there was felt a need for one with the proper instructions and such training as we have to accompany our military expeditions abroad.  We know that the French suffered greatly in Spain and Russia from the actions of such manipulators as they encountered, and the morale of their army was damaged greatly by the phenomena that frightened and otherwise afflicted them.  It shall be my mission to counteract such acts of skill as we encounter, and, should some such take hold upon a man or men in the expedition, I am to undertake the methods of isolation and treatment required by the Act of 1804 and my position within the Ministry.

I do not expect that task to be particularly dire, there are simply not the forces in place in the New World that one might encounter in, say, the Basque highlands and the wilder parts of the Ardennes in France.  I do have such materials as the Ministry’s researchers could have assembled and copied and forwarded to me before the Seahorse sailed.  They are vague and ominous, and most wearisome reading to one of my own family and experience.  To another, I admit,  they might well prove most unsettling.  Ah, well.  With any fortune at all and my own family’s connexions with forces seen and unseen, I am not terribly expectant of danger in my own event.  But some malign influence, indeed, has saddled me with the ‘assistance’ of James MacLeod.

Later—I did take some malicious pleasure in seeing the discomfiture on M’s face this afternoon when a Sergeant of his old garrison remnant appeared to greet M. when he finally saw fit to curse the rest of us by joining us at the Mess.  No one can explain this ‘Chaffinch’s’ presence on board the ship, I overheard the Supercargo telling G. that he was not listed on the ship’s manifest, and from M’s colour and reaction to his appearance, I am quite sure that M. himself had rather less than no wish that this man accompany him on his American travels.  The matter is intriguing, I shall learn what I can in the course of the voyage.

March 14, 1814

None of the officers have any knowledge of the man Chaffinch, although I am told that his orders have been shown to all in authority and they are in fact quite valid and sufficient to justify his presence on board the Seahorse.  Much like the execrable MacLeod, he is to serve at Admiral Cochrane’s pleasure in whatever role can be found for the two of them together in proximity.  My own affliction with M. almost certainly means that I shall be in close contact with this new and strange individual, which undesired exposure shall at least be palliated by M’s obvious discomfort and irritation by Chaffinch’s presence.

On some pretext of needing his assistance in the copying of a Ministry document, I detained M. upon circumstances advantageous to myself in my cabin.  I put it to him bluntly as to who this Chaffinch was, and why his presence among our ship’s passengers was so obviously unwelcome to himself.  MacLeod hunched down in his coat as he might have against a chill breeze before he answered me.

He’s clearly my father’s spy, that’s the short way of it, he muttered, not looking up from the difficult and tedious text I had placed with relish before him.  He’s meant to be my bodyguard.

He took snuff and availed himself of my own fast-dwindling stock of Port.

But your father had no knowledge of what ship you were aboard, or even when you were leaving for America, you said, was my extractive reply.  I could not but wonder silently that the Laird MacLeod would still be at all chary of his ungrateful whelp of a son’s personal safety.

He nodded, his shoulders hunched over his desk.

I know.  But that’s always the way of things with Chaffinch.

He swung his elongate skull like a swivel gun until it bore upon my features. 

When I was a little boy at Dunvegan, he would always be standing wherever I had some plan or purpose of which my father would not approve.  Whatever plans I laid, wherever I laid them, he was there.  The man was more attentive to my undertakings than was ever my nurse.  He’s ostensibly my father’s Keeper, at least he was, and there’s word in the village that more than one poacher in our grounds has disappeared without sign or cause.  I never doubted that kind of talk about him.

I nodded, pretending to pay less close attention to his narrative than I in fact was, witness my exact recollection of it here.  So you hate him, then?  What is he doing in the Army?

MacLeod stared gloomily up at the deadlight above my head.  My father’s doing, of course.  No sooner had he bought my first Lieutenantcy in the Edinburgh Garrison that I found Chaffinch the Sergeant of my own company, ‘W’the espress wish o’ t’ Laird,’ as he put it, and there was nothing more to be said, even when I went to the Colonel.  I can’t abide Chaffinch.  That man has no proper reverence for me, any more than the Bodach had.

The term had, of course, Ministerial significance, and so I continued my charade of only slight interest and asked him exactly what he meant by it.

You don’t know the Bodach?  You’re quite the Englishman, John.  You smile.  The Bodach is the plague of all naughty little Highland children, and such a child was I.

Do go on.

MacLeod smiled bitterly, clasping his hands behind his neck, his shoes lifted to the table and smudging the documents upon which he had lately been working.

Imagine yourself laying under the coverlets of your bead, your lips still sticky and your stomach pleasantly full from the barley-sugar you’ve stolen from the pantry, with a dead mouse left in the flour bin for the cook to be whipped at, to boot!  I was quite the clever lad, and the servants—save only Chaffinch—had quite the fear of my deviltry.

Fancy.

He shot me an angry look.  Do you want the story or not?  I can’t abide an interlocutor.

He could not have much fancied his own company, then, and in fact I know he does not, but I made some species of placating response and he resumed his musing.

Imagine, then, just as you’re drifting off in warmth and smugness, feeling a sharp pair of tugs on your eyelashes, sudden, spiteful yanks upon your ears, a pull on your nose… And a sense the while of a hateful PRESENCE waiting for you to open your eyelids to get the worst of it.  And when you do open your eyes and see the Bodach, he’s the image of a nasty little old man all covered with soot—he lives in the chimney—and he laughs at you with jagged yellow teeth in that horrible creaking voice… And if you CAN sleep after that, the dreams—God, the dreams, Yalding!  I was ever the Bodach’s prey.

Why so?

Oh, he’s the very incarnation of your parents’ angry vengeance, fae folk of that kind hate any kind of disorder.  My mother used to say that our house-elves had come over with our Viking ancestors from Denmark.  It made as much sense as anything, I suppose.  My younger brother had never any grief of him, but me… And the way my father would laugh when I told him of what I’d undergone, nor would he forbid the Bodach to torment me.  The man wonders why I hate him so…  Funny we’d talk of the Bodach when you’d mentioned Chaffinch.

Hmm?

MacLeod smiled again.

Chaffinch told me how to trap the Bodach in the chimney.  The imps and sprites—haven’t they taught you all this in this Ministry of yours—can’t stand some things, not all the same.  An elf or the People of Peace can’t abide cold iron, which the Bodach can—but salt!  Ah, he doesn’t like that so much, and so I’d end my evening’s depredations with a pinch of salt stolen from the table cellar tossed into the fire before I’d go to bed.  Chaffinch told me that I owed him in payment for that little cantrip.  He had me take some frightfully precious and old curiousity of my mother’s from the hearth and shatter it on the banks of that winding little stream near the castle.  I still shudder to think of why.  That’s only the first of the secrets between us, Yalding.  Chaffinch knows all about me, and lets me know that he does.  The man stares at me like he would a bowl of fish, and there’s no reverence in him for me at all.  I hate him.

With that he returned to his sluggish and careless copying, and I had much to think about myself.

March 15, 1814

The sphere was warm this morning when my hand found it under my pillow, and the s___g revealed some rather grim news that my duty drove me at once to discover to Captain Gordon.  My warning had to work through the usual allusions and caveats that my means of receiving the information were to be most carefully concealed from the crew, etc., by agreed-upon practice between the Ministry and the Admiralty.  The crew especially must know of neither s_­­­__g nor the other manipulations required of a Ministry observer, lest the idea of a ‘Jonah’ grow upon the nervous minds of the tars and dismal consequences ensue.

The report is indeed rather dire, in that one of the most powerful of the large American frigates managed to break through the blockading squadron around their harbor of Boston and is now at large in the waters through which Seahorse sails even now.  Such is the strength and past success of this particular enemy vessel that Gordon himself is agreed that she should almost certainly destroy or take us if she falls upon us.  We lack all escort and she has already shattered and captured two ships as at least as good or better than our own.

Upon the Captain’s suit, and prompted, also, by my own misgivings, I did endeavor a personal manipulation of the sphere to locate the enemy ship in question.  I had justifiably little confidence in my success, as all my efforts met with complete failure.  Some of the American vessels seem as favoured by whatever forces avail as their Chesapeake was accurs’d, and such are the influences around this particular enemy that it is a mark of fortunate circumstances that even the message regarding her was able to reach my sphere.  And so the Captain and I are in terror of the most dangerous foe that could overfall us at sea and the while we must the while keep our tongues between our chattering teeth in the fear of her—and yet say nothing!  Ah, I do well esteem my position at times such as these.  On the excuse of the weather has the Captain posted additional lookouts and watches at the guns.

Much as M’s company grates upon me, it would be something of a relief to confide in him the reasons for the tensions that have vexed me since receiving the message, but I am expressly bid by my superiors to confide as little as possible in him, given his character and the dubious circumstances of his assumption of his position as my aide and successor.  I admit the wisdom of their instructions, for all my own complicity in saddling myself with so unpleasant a rider as the egregious Jas. MacLeod.  I shall do all due penance and seek grace hereafter, as Caliban put it, for I see now the error or my ways every time MacLeod is at the mess table.  I quail at him, like a Macbeth