Trophies by J. Gunnar Grey Page A

She
pulled on her gloves with angry jerks. "Come along, Charles."
    I followed her and didn't look back — until
Hardenbrook, who huddled on one of the soft tan chairs in silence,
called my name. Beside the carved door, I glanced over my
shoulder.
    "Good luck." His usually smiling voice was
sad. "Remember Bottom."
    I thought Hardenbrook meant to tell me not to
be afraid of being an ass, that sometimes it's good for the soul. I
gave him my night-time grin — he really was my friend, after all —
before following Mum out of Corwald Prep forever.
    For years, I followed that dictum. For years,
I misunderstood his real meaning and, as usual, didn't stop to
think it through.
    See, Bottom had been completely and horribly
wrong. Even though he had known he was right.
     

Chapter Five
    current time
    I knew, if I went to the gallery party that
night, there would be a battle in the House of Ellandun.
    I looked up from the ring I was polishing and
stared at myself in the mirror of my old dressing table. From the
familiar framework of the Army white shirt and black four-in-hand
tie, my all-too-ordinary face stared back at me. In preparation for
wearing uniform amongst civilians, I'd done all the little
personal-grooming tasks, and I was as presentable as I was going to
be. And there was no getting around it: it didn't make all that
much difference. I'd been born ordinary and ordinary I
remained.
    The ring I'd polished was the one from Aunt
Edith's hat box and I couldn't decide why I'd bothered. At best it
was garish. A bit of polish, some swiping with a soft cloth, and it
glittered shamelessly, oak branches twining about the big blue
glass rectangle and the wearer's finger. I angled it toward the
overhead light; the flash reflected from the mirror and sliced
around the room like some sort of Star Trek weapon. I'd
never seen Uncle Hubert wear anything like it. Granted, I wasn't
the world's keenest spotter, but this was of a size not to be
overlooked even on his big hands.
    I sighed, set it on the dressing table atop
the chamois, and rubbed my eyes.
    The ring reminded me of nothing so much as my
declaration to the world, at the age of eleven, that my life's
ambition was to be a burglar. Of course I became nothing of the
sort: after a dozen wrong turns, I fell in with Sherlock and the
gang, and now I'm a safecracker and lockbreaker for NATO special
forces. But the family's last memory of me was a would-be juvenile
thief and, later, a college drop-out, kicked off the Cambridge
campus for reasons unnamed and sent back to Boston in disgrace.
    The family. To me, that term was not a
compliment and I reserved it for William and my father; my mother
died years ago. Never mind that Patty, her parents, her brothers
and sister, and Aunt Edith all shared blood with me, too. When I
meant any of them, I referred to them by name. The impersonal term
implied an impersonal relationship and that was the way I preferred
to keep the family.
    By attending the gallery party, I was making
myself available to them for the first time in seventeen years. No
one who shared genetics with me could possibly bypass such an
opportunity to attack.
    On top of that, Father and William united
would outnumber me, always an important consideration for a
military man. And I couldn't forget that I was a military
man, a lowly Regular Army captain — in the U.S. Army, the colonial
army — whereas both my father and William were nationally-known
barristers on the proper side of the Atlantic.
    Damn them. I pressed my palms against my
closed eyelids. Damn them both.
    I'd received notes and presents, birthday and
Christmas, from Father without fail throughout all the years I
lived with Aunt Edith. But he never returned for me and never
visited me, not even during the eight months I'd spent at Cambridge
University in England. No words had passed directly between us
since I was eleven, only greeting-card platitudes. I could only
take his long silence to mean he did not approve of the