Throwback Thursday: The Mystery of the Forgotten Soldier

Each week we are taking a look back at the authors, stories, and poems that captivated us in 2019, and offering the issue to you for the author price of 25% off. Today we offer you an excerpt from The Seven Swans: The Mystery of the Forgotten Soldier by Mel Anastasiou, from Pulp Literature Issue 21, Winter 2019. 

At sixty-two, Spencer Stevens longs for lost chances and long-ago true love. He’s the proprietor of the Seven Swans, a derelict Hertfordshire canal pub rich with past mysteries. In this installment,  Spencer’s survival depends upon a war horse’s great heart, and his lasting happiness upon his investigative talents.

The Seven Swans: The Mystery of the Forgotten Soldier

by Mel Anastasiou

Chapter One

When a fellow my age makes up his mind to pursue youthful dreams, he had better be one of two things. Either he must be wealthy, in top physical form, and retain a full head of hair, or he must be gifted with a supremely optimistic view of the world. I had the head of hair of the former and nothing of the latter. Nonetheless, I was on that June morning in Hertfordshire, the Garden County, creating a daring plan for my own future. I was a fairly old fellow, setting out to do the impossible, viz. to get back the love of my far-off youth, who was living in America, and married to somebody else. The plan I was concocting involved several other people, who might not be quite so ready to risk their own endeavours in the pursuit of my own. It was up to me to see my plotting safely through. 

All for love, I told myself. I placed a cooler, vital to my scheme, beside the picnic table between the canal and the Seven Swans pub. The cooler stood open and ready for action along with several rolls of kitchen towel. I fiddled with a bag of plastic cutlery. This might sound dramatic, but so be it: I awaited my luncheon guests with mixed feelings of daring and trepidation. 

I had gone to great lengths to please with my selection of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. I was of course a dry alcoholic, equipped with all the regrets, past and present, of that particular condition. Still, the bottles of shandy were safe from me. The cans of Guinness were more of a temptation. Those cans were earmarked for my elderly builders and mentors, Stan and Eustace. Sunshine glinted off bottles of lemon and orange squash, danced along the folded wrappings of cellophane sandwiches—egg and cress, cheddar and pickle, always safe choices—and a more adventurous selection of bags of crisps, including lamb and mint, and Coronation Chicken flavours. In all my years here in the UK, as an expat Canadian, I had never grown accustomed to the adventuresome national taste in crisps. I had a private theory that this sort of bold individuality had, in macrocosm, gone a good way towards winning two world wars. 

I unscrewed the top a bottle of lemon squash, twisted myself around on the picnic bench seat, and stuck my feet out in their battered old trainers so that they caught the full June sun. I examined the Seven Swans pub with a critical eye. It was a long way from being ready to open and resume business. The window on the canal side was as yet unglazed, and I smelled beers from centuries past, as if the Seven Swans were breathing out like an old fellow across his pint glass. Still, we had made some progress here, Stan and Eustace and I, and I raised my lemon squash bottle in salute.

To my left along the canal, a narrow boat chugged round the bend towards me, its green and red painted sides striped with shadows from the willows and rowans overhead. Branches waved in the late morning breeze as if to hurry the boat along. But narrow boats cannot be hastened. Like history, friendships, French cooking, and true love, narrow boats move in their courses and at their own speed, and there is nothing anybody or anything can do to quicken their pace. 

Contrariwise, for me, the time for slow progress had passed. In my plans to retrieve Holly from the past into our future together, I had reached a point where action was recommended and even required. However, romantic action on an intercontinental scale requires money, and I had less than none. I grimaced and tipped lemon squash down my throat.

The narrow boat reached the Seven Swans. I read the name painted on the prow: The Narrow Escape. Sweat gleamed on its captain’s brow, and the hot noise of his diesel engine made speech impossible. On impulse I tossed him a bottle of cold shandy and an egg and cress sandwich. He let go the wheel, caught one in each hand, and touched his brow with the bottle. I saw him untwist the cap and swig at the shandy as the willow boughs closed round the back of the narrow boat and he moved out of sight.

I was not alone for long under the willows, for here at a swift hobble came the spry, expert renovating duo, Stan and Eustace. Both carried pint glasses half filled with servings of well-poured Guinness. The pint glasses were what Stan and Eustace termed loans, from the well-established Bearded Lamb public house. It was these two old fellows’ practice to walk off with glasses from the Bearded Lamb, and over the last month or so I might have completely equipped the Seven Swans with pint glasses they’d brought with them. However, it seemed wise to wash and return the glasses to the Bearded Lamb’s proprietor at least once a week. Not out of friendship, for I had long since stopped hoping that relations between that publican and myself would thaw. No, I returned the glasses for my own private satisfaction, the way office workers who dislike their jobs bend to collect and toss crumpled, discarded papers into distant waste paper baskets. The world did not watch, nor did it applaud these small moral efforts, but they felt good and were the right thing to do. Philosophical treatises have been developed out of less.

We three gazed at the Seven Swans pub, now somewhat revived under our handiwork.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I easily recognized that the hand was attached to Angelica, as I’d felt that same hand on bits of me quite often over forty years, when we were married.  Angelica spoke in my ear. “I certainly hope that you’re improving, as well.”

To find out what happens next, pick up your copy of Issue 21, Winter  2019 here!

Along with the Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries, Mel Anastasiou writes the Fairmount Manor Mysteries, starring Stella Ryman, and the Monument Studios Mysteries, starring Frankie Ray and Connie Mooney. As well, she is the author of two illustrated writing guides for Pulp Literature Press. Follow her at MelAnastasiou.wordpress.com and on twitter @melanastasiou

Save even more!  Get Mel Anastasiou’s Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries, The Labours of Mrs Stella Ryman, and The Writer’s Boon Companion, a $53 value, for the special price of $40!