The deceptively innocent smile of polite enquiry on the face of this youngest weed was stirring a sickening memory. That expression of self-satisfaction—he’d seen it not long ago. In a newspaper? Dickie had a good memory for faces and names, and it had served him well in the past. His mind scurried this way and that, and suddenly he had it. In a library last year, reading the Yorkshire Post, he’d seen a photograph, an official record of a deeply boring and pompous assembly of local personages, fat old windbags, and he’d hardly glanced at it. One of the figures, the central one—philanthropist or lord mayor, something of the kind—had snagged his attention. On taking a second look at the bald, portly fellow, hung about with sashes and ceremonial chains, every inch the masonic manipulator Dickie despised, he’d dismissed his outlandish notion. The dignitary’s name, when he checked, was at that time unknown to him: Gisbourne.

Dickie stared, assessed, added a few years to the cherubic countenance and subtracted a few curls from the shepherd-boy mop head, calculated, at last understood and hated. Every sinew in his body tightened. His breathing deepened. His greased fingers slipped into the knuckleduster in his pocket.

His voice was steady as he replied, beaming with good humour. “Ah, child! I fought side by side with men your age or younger. Boys whose voices had scarcely broken when they sang along with rest of us:

Such was the day for our regiment

Dread the revenge we will take.

Dearly we paid for the blunder—

A drawing-room general’s mistake.

“We don’t remember the names of the generals for good reason. But I will never forget the names of my fellow fighters . . . Abel, Ralph, Ernest, Herbert and Sydney.”

“Ah. I’m sorry, sir. What charmingly unpretentious names! They sound like the salt of the earth! All deceased, are they?” Digby enquired.

“No. The salt of the earth—or the common as muck, as I think you wrongly interpret that phrase—these men are not ‘deceased,’ nor do they ‘pass over.’ They die. As plainly as they have lived. But the men I speak of are not all dead, I’m happy to say. The Ernies, the Herberts and the Syds of the British army don’t die that easily, even when they’re being used as cannon fodder. My men were what Wellington considered ‘the dregs’ of the army, but they were tenacious of life. At the last roll call, I discovered that they are, for the most part, very much alive and kicking. And still killing.”

He watched one face carefully as he spoke.