Free The Madagaskar Plan by Guy Saville Page B

the government, is highly respected. When I saw him at Christmas, I told him how sorry I was. He brushed away a tear.”
    “He took this.” Burton raised his handless arm. “And the lives of the men I led.”
    “But killing his own wife, the mother of his daughter! He even has a CBE, the king pinned it on him.”
    “If a lord of the realm can call Hitler our friend, you can have a CBE and blood on your hands.”
    Somewhere a clock chimed: one, two, three, four, the sound dissolving into the cold. His aunt folded a tea towel and pressed it against his shoulder to absorb more blood.
    “You have to believe me,” said Burton.
    “If it’s true what you say, why did you go to Africa? You told me you were giving up that life.”
    “Cranley tricked me. Tricked me with the one thing I couldn’t refuse.” Burton hesitated again. “The chance to kill a man.”
    “Who could have mattered so much?”
    He had waited till after his twenty-first birthday before writing to his aunt; any sooner and he feared he might be shipped to England and her custody. By then Bel Abbès, the Legion fort that made him a soldier, had been home for five years. Patrick offered him his quarters for some privacy. Outside, the dunes hissed as the wind beat across them. The sky was a dirty pink; Burton remembered the blush of the sunset on the paper. He wrote a simple letter, omitting the terrible details, and informed his aunt that his parents had passed on.
    “I never told you the truth,” he said, fixing his eyes on his scarred, misshapen arm. “There was no consolation in it. Mother didn’t die; she left—vanished—years before, with no explanation. The man I went to Africa for, the one I wanted to kill, knew why.”
    “Who was he?”
    Burton hadn’t spoken his name since Africa. Now he came vividly to mind: his ogre’s frame and bald head, those eyes—black as the devil’s hangman. “Walter Hochburg. He was a pastor when he came to us; I was just a boy. Now he’s the governor of Kongo. He vanished the same day as Mother.” He had imagined countless possibilities for her—all of them foul. “We offered Hochburg kindness and charity, and he repaid us with misery. I wanted revenge.”
    “Revenge is vanity. Did Madeleine know any of this?”
    “Everything.”
    “And what did she say?”
    “She told me I was chasing ghosts, pleaded with me not to go.”
    “But you did, Burton.” His aunt tossed the tea towel onto the table; it was soaked the color of wine. “If it’s true about Cranley, you left her when she most needed protecting.”
    He had no reply. The needle broke his skin again.
    His aunt sewed in silence till she finished and knotted the thread. She put a pad doused with liniment over his shoulder, secured it with a bandage, and draped the spare shirt over him. Then she took the blood-soaked tea towels to the sink and rinsed them under the tap.
    Burton watched his aunt and wished he had told her about his affair with Madeleine long before—but he’d heard too many tales of his errant grandfather to share that confidence. He guessed she was offended by the lack of trust. What bound them was as shallow as blood: she’d needed a nephew to spoil, and he’d wanted a place to seem like home. That, and a woman they rarely spoke about. Burton had a sudden sense of his aunt when he was away and there were no party guests, only Pebble and the remorseless thud of the sea. He understood that loneliness, and so had Madeleine—that’s why the two women had befriended each other.
    His aunt wrung out the tea towels and flicked her hands dry. “You’re as selfish as your mother,” she said, speaking with an ancient resentment he had never heard before. “She went to Africa without a thought of what she left behind.”
    “It wasn’t like that with Maddie. I needed the truth.”
    “Did you find it?”
    He shook his head. “But I had to try. I wanted to lock up the past for good, and Madeleine understood that.”
    “Eleanor