The Dardanelles Conspiracy by Alan Bardos (best ereader for pc TXT) 📗

Doctor Glencoe stood up slowly and stumbled out. The Staff Nurse gave Johnny a playful wink and followed, locking the door.

Johnny lay in bed contemplating his situation for the rest of the day, wondering whether or not he’d been a little rash in putting his faith in his uncle. He’d certainly underestimated Crassus’s vindictiveness. He went over every aspect of the reconnaissance he’d taken with Crassus, trying to think of some way to justify what he’d done.

Savage had been killed, but that still left Crassus as a witness and Johnny’s handwritten note. It was unlikely that the court martial would accept that it was a misunderstanding, or that Johnny had felt obliged to warn the Germans because they had told him about the bombardment. It was not much of a defence, he’d been caught red handed and now he’d meet the bad end everyone had long predicted for him.

Johnny had no idea why Crassus had brought him here rather than putting a bullet in his head, but he intended to make the best of his time and give Williams a chance to get a letter to his uncle.

A little after midnight, he heard the door to his room being unlocked and the rustle of starched cotton. A wave of excitement shot through him. The sound was more sensual than anything he’d experienced at the best mid-range brothels in Paris.

She jumped onto the bed and kissed him. The smell of disinfectant in her hair was wonderfully reassuring and homely, like his boarding school. ‘Ah ha, he never sleeps, this one.’

Staff Nurse Lee-Perkins’s sweet tender kisses distracted Johnny from his pending firing squad. ‘You were glorious, Johnny my lamb, mon biquet. The silly old crock didn’t have a clue we were pulling a fast one.’

Johnny gave his most charming of leers. ‘If you think the doctor’s given an incorrect diagnosis perhaps you should conduct a more thorough medical examination.’

‘Perhaps I should at that.’ She got off him, removed her flowing cap and red cape, then slowly began to unbutton her grey uniform. The night Crassus had brought him in, she had carefully removed Johnny’s uniform and washed the dirt from his body. He'd been rambling with a fever, regressed to his school days, he'd started conjugating French verbs. Which seemed to have stirred Staff Nurse Lee-Perkins’s heart.

She removed the last of her soiled white undergarments and stood naked. Her full, healthy figure shining with a red bloom under the harsh yellow light, as if she’d just come in from a vigorous game of hockey. Johnny didn’t think he’d seen anything like it before, except in the Louvre. ‘I thought women like you only existed in the imagination of renaissance painters.’

The Staff Nurse smiled sadly. Lovemaking tended to make her fatalistic and French. ‘I see your manoeuvre, but you don’t have to seduce me. I am not here for pretty words. I allow you to honour me because I think what you did was noble. Trying to save the lives of your men. I wish that my fiancé had been more like you, instead of getting himself killed. I also wish I’d forgotten my dreary morality and let him deflower me.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Johnny tried to sound sympathetic, but the last thing he wanted to hear when he was facing a firing squad was that her last lover had been killed.

‘I came to England to be near him, it was all such a big adventure and we would be in it together. He as a reserve officer in his father’s old Regiment and I was to become an army nurse. Of course by the time I got my posting to Belgium, he’d been killed.’

She climbed back on top of Johnny, pressing him deep inside her. She gasped and whispered in his ear, ‘But this is not possible, mon biquet.’ He felt her round breasts pressed tightly against his chest and the jarring of her hips. ‘They are going to shoot you too, my lamb to the slaughter.’

‘Not if I can help it, Staff Nurse Lee-Perkins,’ Johnny groaned. He had never been with a woman so enthusiastic and so vigorous. She gave herself up completely to the moment.

She giggled and he could feel her smile as she put her mouth on his and dug her nails into his back. ‘I think you might call me Gabrielle at a moment like this.’

‘You can stop smiling Swift, you’re not fooling anyone. There’s nothing wrong with you that a good kick up the backside wouldn’t cure,' the hard voice of Johnny’s Colonel, ‘Wakey’ Woking barked. ‘Stand up straight, man, good God, you are a commissioned officer in His Majesty’s army!’

Johnny pulled himself to attention as he was marched into the barn that served as the Colonel’s office. Fighting his nerves, he focused on the blue court martial form on the table and tried to show steely resolve.

‘Are you sure he’s fit?’ the Colonel said to the person sitting beside him. To Johnny’s dismay he saw that it was Crassus.

'Yes quite sure, sir’ Crassus said enjoying his moment. It was obvious now why Crassus hadn’t shot him. He wanted to make sure Johnny was fit for trial to maximise his humiliation, while emphasising Crassus’s own heroics.

The Colonel picked up the court martial form and studied it for a moment. Johnny knew his time was up. His Uncle had abandoned him yet again. The inevitability of it amused him.

‘Do you actually find this funny Swift, or are you pretending to be mad?’ the Colonel bellowed.

Johnny continued to smile and met his eyes. He hadn’t seen a look of such cold fury since he’d told Sir George about the affair he was having with his wife.

‘Have you any conception of the magnitude of what you’ve done?’ The Colonel put down the court martial form and unrolled the crumpled note that Johnny had