Free Speak Its Name: A Trilogy by Lee Rowan, Charlie Cochrane, Erastes Page A

will only pour it out if they get their bloody teetotalling hands on it.”
    “Can’t have that, my lord.” Darling did his duty, handed the cap back and straightened his shoulders. “Shall I tell the men to make ready, then?”
    “Yes. It’s time.”
    Darling gave him a crisp salute. Scoville returned it, and they both went back out into the blistering sun.
    The battle began slowly, as such things always did, men moving into position and advancing until the first shot unleashed the thunder. Scoville had never seen anything like it—hundreds, thousands of shrieking Afghans in their sloppy tribal attire, with their deadly efficient weapons raised high. The first row fell to British fire. The rest leapt over the bodies and kept coming, faster than the riflemen could reload. Within minutes the fight deteriorated into desperate hand-to-hand combat.
    And then the battle rose up like a living thing and tore them to pieces. In no time at all Burrows’ forces were outflanked, their ammunition spent, the disciplined lines splintering apart as the tribesmen came on and kept coming, a seemingly endless flow of swords and knives and fury. The heat and dust increased a hundredfold; sanity fled in the dull roar of howling attackers and screaming wounded. The only constant was Jack Darling at his side as the two of them tried to maintain enough control of their men to manage an orderly retreat, using their rifles as clubs.
    Scoville caught a movement from the corner of his eye—more Afghans cutting into their squadron from the right.
    “Major, behind you!”
    He started to turn. Then something slammed into him, and the world went dark.
    Return to TOC

Chapter Two
    May, 1891
    The Continental Express, transiting Germany
    The sudden clash of steel woke Lord Robert Scoville from a troubled doze. His head jerked up, and for a confused moment he looked around for the enemy. Then he realised that the sound was not the clash of arms, but just his hired railway carriage rumbling over a switch point, the metallic rattle and rumble merely the wheels on the track and the links between cars. He was a decade and a continent away from that old horror, somewhere between Zurich and Salzburg, lounging about in a private car in which everything was modern and agreeable. The comfortable divan upon which he sat would, come evening, be transformed into an equally comfortable bed. His man—for not only had Darling survived, he’d accepted Scoville’s offer of employment—was in an adjoining compartment, ready to supply anything His Lordship might require.
    The newspaper he had been reading was folded neatly beside him, and a small brocade cushion had been tucked between his face and the window against which he was leaning. Obviously, Darling had found him asleep and tidied up rather than waking him, as he occasionally did if Scoville dozed off in his study at home.
    Darling was a treasure, without question. His unobtrusive competence allowed Scoville to maintain his town home with only a housekeeper and maid who went back to their families in the evening and additional hired help for the occasional party. The peace and solitude were balm for Scoville’s soul. He no longer wished, as he had in his childhood, to be poor enough that he didn’t require servants trooping through the house at all hours. One man was all he needed. The right man.
    Scoville occasionally wondered about Darling’s origins; he’d never been able to tease the secret out of the man himself. It sometimes seemed as though Sergeant Jack Darling had materialised from the ethers in full uniform when the regiment first assembled, but Scoville suspected an investigation would reveal his gentleman’s gentleman as a gentleman in blood at least. He might be a younger son disgraced or strayed, or possibly the indiscretion of some nobleman who’d had the decency to see that the boy got a good education.
    It would be possible to hire someone to investigate Darling’s past, of course,