Free [Dept. 19 Files 03] The New Blood: 1919 by Will Hill Page A

back bedroom.”
    Harker smiled. He had stayed in the back bedroom of the Thorpes’ home more times than he could remember, but the room would always remind him of his childhood, of the times that he and Andrew had read ghost stories by candlelight, had sneaked milk and biscuits upstairs and ate and drank in nervous silence, listening for the sounds of footsteps in the hall, trying their hardest not to giggle at the sheer recklessness of their rule-breaking.
    “I’d love to,” he said. “Thank you.”
    “Don’t be silly,” said Mrs Thorpe. “I’m sorry about the biscuits, but sugar and butter are harder to get hold of than gold these days. I’ll just fetch the sandwiches.”
    She hurried back out of the living room, leaving him alone with his friend’s father again. Martin Thorpe managed an unconvincing smile, then dropped his eyes.
    “Was he brave?” he asked, his voice little more than a whisper. “My boy. Did he do his duty?”
    “Yes, sir,” said Quincey Harker. “He did his duty.”
    There was nothing more to say.
     
    Three days later Harker had seen in the year 1919 in the grand ballroom of Arthur Holmwood’s country house as a string quartet urged men and women across the dance floor, and voices and laughter filled the air. The party felt like a communal outpouring of jubilation, of relief at having emerged more or less intact from the long years of horror. Quincey found the joyous display sickening, an insult to the millions of men and women who had not come home, who were lying dead in the cold mud of western Europe instead of drinking champagne and singing ’Auld Lang Syne’, but he kept his mouth shut; everyone was so pleased to see him, so happy that he had returned home safely, and he didn’t want to throw their kindness back at them, undeserved though it was.
    Luck, he thought to himself, as a waiter refilled his glass. That’s all it is. The coin lands the other way up and Thorpe is commiserating with my parents. Blind luck.
    He had sent telegrams that morning to the remaining members of the Special Reconnaissance Unit, wishing them all a happy new year. What he had left out of the messages was the truth: that he would rather be with any of them than where he found himself: with Kavanagh in Somerset, McDonald in the eastern Highlands of Scotland, Ellis in his small village outside Durham, or with Potts on the edge of the Norfolk Broads.
    Anything would be better than this. Anything.
    “You shouldn’t think so hard,” said a voice Harker knew well. “It’s bad for the brain.”
    Quincey smiled, and turned round. Standing in front of him was a man he had known his entire life and another he had come to feel as if he always had.
    Albert Holmwood, the future Lord Godalming, was the spitting image of his father; he possessed the same high cheekbones, the delicate, almost feminine features, the piercing pale green eyes. He was almost a year older than Quincey, but the age gap had never been an issue, even as they went their separate ways through life. Albert had gone to Charterhouse, as his father and grandfather had before him, while Quincey went to Eton, but whenever the two of them returned to London during the school holidays, they were able to slip back into their friendship as though they had never been apart. For the majority of his life, Albert had been lazy and dissolute, and the few arguments the two men had ever had had largely been centred round Quincey’s frustration at his friend’s apparent unwillingness to use the intelligence he possessed in such abundance.
    Scandal had followed Albert everywhere, culminating in an incident that had sent whispered shockwaves through the dining rooms of London society. In 1909, when he was barely sixteen years old, Albert had impregnated Lady Jane Lindley, the only daughter of one of the oldest and proudest families in the country, creating a crisis that had taken every last bit of Arthur Holmwood’s legendary diplomacy and, it was