The first half of Lord John and the Haunted Soldier Part 1 sees Lord John Grey pulled into an inquisition. It’s not a comfortable place to be.
To understand this novel, you need to have read Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade. Part of that book takes place at Crefeld, where John is injured when a cannon blows up. The English are holding an inquisition into the events during that battle.
John holds his own, but it’s not easy. We continue to see a sassy side of John as he faces potential legal and career issues. I am splitting this is two as it is a long section.
Breaking down Lord John and the Haunted Soldier Part 1A
The first half of the part sees John in the inquisition. It’s being held by Colonel Twelvetrees, a man named Oswald, and a Baronet by the name of Marchmont. It turns out that John knows Marchmont’s half-brother, Edgar DeVine, and this leads the inquisition to go off track a little as questions about Edgar come up. John is confused by this, but it comes up later in this part.
We also learn that the cannon was called Tom Pilchard, and John sassily says that they were never formally introduced. It’s probably not the way to go about things, but John is more concerned that the men know about Red Jamie tricking him during the Jacobite rebellion than anything else.
The interrogation is able to move back onto the events at Crefeld that day. The men want to know about Lieutenant Lister, who John didn’t actually know. He is the lieutenant who was killed as John got to the troops that day. It’s only when Twelvetrees makes a comment that this commission was not a formality as he initially expected, John decides to get up and leave.
John leaves in such a hurry that he ends up in pouring rain with no idea of where he is. He heads straight inside to a hearth to get warm, when he is accosted by Herbert Gormley, who is happy to see John. It turns out that Gormley believes John is there for another reason, and that reason is Captain Reginald Jones. Jones had sent an invitation to John, so believes John is there for that reason.
Jones and Gormley take John through a warren of rooms and corridors and through the Royal Brass Foundry. They finally get to an open area filled with pieces of ruined guns and a table of debris pieces.
Throughout all of this, John has heard the sound of gun fire. Well, it turns out that there is a reason for that. The guns are being tested in the rain to make sure that the guns work properly in wet conditions. Remember the part where Edgar leads the men to go off on a tangent? This is why. Edgar’s half-brother owns a gunpowder factory in Sussex. It’s possible that the Army believed the gunpower to be defective, and that it could have been made that way on purpose.
John now realizes that the parts of the gun were from Tom Pilchard. He doesn’t show emotion, but he does pull out a piece of leopard from his pocket. It matches half that is on the table, and he makes a note that another part is still in John’s body.
What the men want to know is whether John remembers anything from the explosion. Fed up of the questions, John asks his own about pieces of metal. When John doesn’t believe anything the men are saying, he gets his leopard piece and leaves.
Could this chapter be used in a TV series adaptation?
I’m not sure if this short story would be used in a short story. While it does give us more of John’s personality, there’s not a major need to use it. It is more of a story in between novels that just adds more to who John is as a person.
We could see this story used within an episode or two of other novels. For example, this could come up after Crefeld if Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade is ever adapted into a Lord John Grey series.
If the short story was used, then we would need to see this chapter. It starts off the bigger storyline of the novella, as Twelvetrees comes up again later.
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