At 5:27 p.m. on Thursday the fifth of March, 1925, Eric Peterkin slid the envelope containing the latest manuscript he’d evaluated, with his recommendations, through the mail slot of the Looming Press offices near Aldgate, where the bowler-hatted financial hub of London bled into working-class Whitechapel. That was one obligation honourably discharged. March, he’d once been told, was the first month of the ancient Roman calendar: the promise of spring, new life, and the true turning of the years. Thoughts of slates wiped clean spurred him on as he walked down to Tower Hill and the Thames. There was London Bridge: How often had it fallen down and been built up again since the Romans first established the outpost of Londinium? Eric knew without having seen them that the surviving pieces of Londinium’s fortified walls had been incorporated into the buildings of modern London and absorbed by the growing city. Bankers now walked where centurions once marched.
In the spring of 1925, London was not a far-flung outpost, but the heart of her own empire. The Great War had come and gone, crumbling half the empires of Europe to dust in its wake—but London still stood, and the British Empire with her, ready to face a new era. In the nightclubs of Soho, the bright and the young danced to jazz under the sparkle of electric lights. In the ever-expanding Metro-land suburbs to the northwest, new families gathered in solemn gratitude for their hard-earned peace. Among the more transient populations of the docks, perhaps it was enough to spare a thought for loved ones far away and half-forgotten.
An hour’s walk and the brisk March wind brought Eric to the grand portico of the Britannia Club on King Street, St. James, and now it was dark. The lights were on in the Golden Lion pub across the street, and especially bright around the St. James’s Theatre farther down. This was the momentary lull between the bustle of day and the glamour of night, just as winter separated this year from the last. Drawing in a deep breath, Eric turned and pushed through the great oak entrance doors.
31 December, 1924
“Lieutenant Peterkin, sir!” Ted Cully, the elderly club porter, smiled warmly from behind the reception desk, a sprig of holly prickling from his lapel. “Welcome back. Business all taken care of, I trust?”
“Oh yes.” Eric had missed Christmas Day itself, thanks to an obligation to a former sergeant, but the Britannia Club celebrated all twelve days of Christmas, of which New Year’s Eve was only the seventh. Under wreaths of holly, the walnut panelling gleamed as though soaked in oil, and the polished brass fittings flared in the flicker of candlelight. This was the one time of the year when guests were allowed up the grand staircase to the club lounge, so the marbled hallways echoed with the unfamiliar joy of those normally left behind.
The one sombre note amid this Christmas gaiety was the Roster of the Fallen, a wall of brass plaques naming those associated with the club who’d fallen in battle—not just members, but their sons and brothers as well. First in this litany of sacrifice was Fitzwilliam Peterkin at the Battle of Waterloo, and Eric touched his brow in salute to his venerable ancestor. There had always been Peterkins at the Britannia.
The roster’s placement here had occurred sometime during Eric’s absence. Prior to that, its place was in the entry vestibule.
“Can’t think why we didn’t have it in here from the very beginning,” Cully said. “Easier to pay your respects without the draught every time someone came through the front door, eh?”
“Perhaps our forebears saw it as a reminder of what they’d left behind. Cold winter battles, freezing the blood on foreign soil . . .”
“That may be, sir, but I can’t say as there’s any need for our boys to freeze twice.”
“You’ve got a point there.”
Then, though he knew he wouldn’t find it, Eric scanned down to the bottom of the roster in search of another name: Albert Benson. Rather than be killed and lost on a foreign battlefield, Benson had been killed right here in the club, and the resulting upheaval had turned the Brittania’s board of officers completely upside down.
“We’ve cleared out Bradshaw’s office,” Cully said, referring to the white-bearded former club secretary—that genial Father Christmas in tweeds who Got Things Done. “It’s ready for you to move in—and the sooner the better, I say. Everyone else is gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”
“Just that. Gone. The remaining officers found themselves quite unpopular after that business with Mr. Benson, and it got worse while you were away. They decided to make themselves scarce.” The porter’s friendly geniality was marred by a note of contempt. He’d never approved of Benson, who’d served as a stretcher-bearer instead of fighting.
“Benson was a gentleman, Cully. He didn’t run away . . . like some.”
“As you say.” Cully looked aside, obstinate in his views. “Well. Nobody could say a thing against you, of course, knowing what you did to put that sorry business to rest. And as you were already named to take Bradshaw’s place, we’ve been waiting for you to do just that.”
“But . . . alone?” Eric was half-tempted to run away himself.
“Colonel Hadrian Russell will be acting president until a new board of officers can be elected. He was president back in . . . 1910, I think. Just before the War. Anyway, he’ll know what’s what. It was his idea to move the roster in here.”
That was all very well, but it was the club secretary, not the club president, who actually got things done. Eric tugged his now-stifling scarf away from his neck, and his hand came away damp with melted snow.
Snow drifted across the shoulders of a sergeant twice Lieutenant Peterkin’s age. There was judgement in the eyes of the enlisted men before him. One or two had been in the trenches from the beginning of the War, while the young lieutenant could only measure his time there in hours. “Your men, Peterkin,” came the distant voice of the company’s officer commanding. “They live or die by your leadership. You know what you have to do.”
Was this melted snow or a cold sweat?
Wiping the moisture away on his trouser leg, Eric muttered, “In that case, I’d better have a word with Colonel Russell.”
Some people invite confessions. Others perform to an audience. More rare are those who do neither, but shine like a flame amid the fluttering moths drawn to their presence. They hold court where others merely converse, as Colonel Russell was doing right now at one comfortable end of the lounge. He was not the one speaking, nor was he, exactly, the one being spoken to; yet somehow he commanded the centre. The men orbiting him—younger, without his gravitas—spoke only through his indulgence.
Eric knew Colonel Russell by sight and by reputation. He was a handsome, silver-haired gentleman with the heavy shoulders of a former rugby hero, though his watch chain now stretched over a comfortably solid belly. He’d married one of the Carrington-Clarkes—Johanna, as Eric recalled. She’d passed away some fifteen years ago, leaving him four strapping sons; then the War came along and, with the dust of fallen empires, swept those same four sons away in its Stygian wake.
A lesser man might have crumbled in the face of such loss, but not Colonel Hadrian Russell—and such fortitude was worth as much respect as the sacrifice itself.
It took Eric a moment to breach the wall of hangers-on. Once through, the noisy hubbub, unusual for what was normally a sanctum of peace and discretion, seemed to fade into irrelevance. The warmth from the fireplace reminded Eric that he’d just come in from the cold, and that he had only to raise a hand for an attendant to materialise out of the aether and provide him with a gin and tonic. To one side, the tall window overlooking King Street was a panel of inhospitable midwinter darkness, snow drifting through the black void between them and the lights of the Golden Lion pub opposite.
“Seven passengers and the pilot, all dead,” one reedy voice held forth. “And on Christmas Eve, no less. Bad enough flying in wartime . . . Sure, our boys in the RFC were heroes—excuse me, it’s the RAF now, isn’t it? But I’d wager half their dead were down to just accident and misadventure—”
Eric never saw who the speaker was. Colonel Russell halted the ongoing diatribe with an upraised hand and rose from where he was seated—enthroned, rather—to meet Eric with a broad smile magnified by the fluctuant curves of his silver whiskers. “Peterkin! Introductions won’t be necessary, I trust? Come, join us! I mean, this is your personal armchair, isn’t it?”
The Colonel indicated the chair in which Eric usually sat to evaluate his manuscripts—his Usual Armchair—but Eric smiled and shook his head. “Hardly! I doubt the club quartermaster—if we had one—would take kindly to any appropriation of club property.”
“Then we’d better take it up with the club secretary. Hang on, that’s you now, isn’t it? Gentlemen, let us raise a glass to Mr. Eric Peterkin, successor to old Jacob Bradshaw: may we always be in such good hands!”
“Hear, hear!” laughed the men around them, and Eric, surprised at being toasted in such a public fashion, could only murmur an awkward acknowledgement. For a moment, he thought he saw old Bradshaw in the shadows, a genial smile dying under calculating eyes. Who was Eric Peterkin to usurp the old man’s place?
“You’ll do marvellously,” the Colonel assured him, dispelling Bradshaw’s ghost. “I knew your father—a fine fellow—and if even half of what I’ve heard about you is true, then I can say with some authority that he’d have been pleased and proud to call you his heir.”
“One does one’s best,” Eric replied with a self-deprecating wave of his hand. The Colonel’s reception was growing a bit too warm for comfort.
“I knew your mother, too. Not well, admittedly, but enough to know she was a lady.”
Was the Colonel trying to imply something?
The late Magdalen Peterkin, beloved wife of Colonel Berkeley Peterkin, had been Chinese, and that heritage came out strongly in the features of her son. Few people really cared in the trenches, there being somewhat more pressing matters at hand; in peacetime, however . . .
But Colonel Russell was already checking his pocket watch. “Speaking of ladies, mine—plural—should be here any minute. Gentlemen, family calls and I must take my leave. Try not to burn the place down in my absence, eh? Peterkin, walk with me, if you will.”
“Don’t you forget all about us, now!” one of the other gentlemen called as they parted to let Eric and the Colonel through.
“Ugly as you are, I wish it were so easy!”
More laughter. Returning a wink, Colonel Russell put his arm around Eric’s shoulders and shepherded him away.
“I’ve never actually met your mother,” Colonel Russell said as they stopped on the landing of the grand staircase, under a massive painting of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. “I hope you’ll forgive the fib. But one or two of our friends upstairs needed some convincing, and we can’t have dissent in the ranks if we mean to get anything done.” He nodded up at the painting. “People do tend to forget, don’t they?”
“About Palomides?” Eric’s eyes went to the Saracen knight, the one dark face among the crowd of pale Europeans.
“Hah! No, I meant Arthur.”
King Arthur, in the painting, was a handsome fellow of dignified bearing, with piercing blue eyes and a mane of golden blond hair. Every knight around him had been modelled after a founding member of the club—Pellinore, for instance, had been modelled after Fitzwilliam Peterkin—but King Arthur himself, as befitted such a mythic figure, had been drawn entirely from the artist’s imagined concept of the ideal sovereign.
Standing in Arthur’s shadow was another figure: Sir Kay, Arthur’s foster brother and seneschal according to the legends. Where the other knights had their swords drawn, Kay’s was sheathed, his gauntleted hands folded in reserve. He was the knight who stayed behind while the others went out questing for glory, who made sure Camelot remained standing and welcoming when they returned—much like the club secretary, come to think of it.
Colonel Russell, his focus still on King Arthur, let out a sardonic chuckle. “Such a fine Anglo-Saxon face! Even though the legends say he was primarily concerned with defending the Celtic Britons from the invading Saxons, back when they were the foreigners. And Arthur wasn’t even a Briton himself. All those stories describing him as the secret love-child of Uther Pendragon by the Lady Ygraine, they’re just myths. The real Arthur Pendragon was Italian—yes, a dark-haired, dark-eyed Roman centurion by the name of Lucius Artorius Castus, with an aquiline nose and a swarthy Mediterranean complexion. Hardly the average Englishman!”
“I’ve never given it much thought, I admit.” Perhaps Kay was an allegory for the Britain that had adopted Artorius Castus as their own.
“The Arthur we know is a myth, Peterkin. He never died in the Battle of Camlann: he went on to become the Roman governor of Dalmatia and died there. But what does that matter, when a man’s been dead for so many centuries? Myths are distillations of meaning. We put this myth on the wall because it reveals who we are. Rome traced their heritage to Troy by way of Aeneas, and we trace ours to Rome by way of old Artorius Castus. We are the heirs to the Roman Empire, Peterkin—that’s what the myth means. The Romans built London Bridge, and we rebuilt it every time it fell, because that is our legacy: Rome in all her imperial glory, not some godforsaken tribe of woad-painted Celts.”
Eric didn’t have to imagine the polish and discretion of the Britannia Club as an offshoot of imperial Rome: the columns of the lobby were already classical in form and placement, and the architectural detailing taken directly from Roman antiquity. High above, a waxing half-moon sailed over the enormous skylight of this modern atrium—
For a moment, he remembered Albert Benson, sprawled across a mosaic floor, stabbed to death like Julius Caesar in the forum.
Shaking the bloody memory away, he told the Colonel, “You’re not the first to imagine a kinship with ancient Rome, I’m sure.”
“Nor the last.”
“Perhaps.”
Colonel Russell considered him for a moment more. Perhaps he’d expected a more enthusiastic response. “The trouble with this modern generation, Peterkin, is we’re far too caught up in causes that make no difference. We leave behind the constants; we forget that we still walk in the ways set down by Rome, and a man without a history is a man without a self.”
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot, eh? That’s a line from the woad-painted Celts — who, let’s not forget, also claim descent from Aeneas of Troy by his grandson Brutus and the Trojan refugees he brought with him.”
“Hah! The supposed first king of Britain, more of a myth than even Arthur!” Colonel Russell’s demeanour brightened once again, and he clapped Eric on the back. “You’re a good man, Peterkin. I’ve every confidence that between the two of us, we’ll soon have this ruddy club sorted to our satisfaction. That’s a campaign we’ll want to discuss, and soon; but not, perhaps, right away. You want to meet my ladies first.”