“Danish.” Shay studied the young man on the page. In full military gear, he was worlds apart from Shay. “Thank fuck for that. I thought you were going to tell me I was German.”
“What’s wrong with being German?”
“Nothing… to me, at least, but my nan would’ve hated that even more than me being a nordie. She was a bitter old crone.”
“She sounds lovely.”
“She was when she was baking. The rest of the time she had more bite than Chernobyl.”
“Anyway,” Ollie said.“Rudolph was a second lieutenant in the Danish army at the height of the war. In this picture, which was taken on the seventeenth of April, 1864, the day before the Battle of Dybbøl, he was eighteen years old.”
“Eighteen? Wow. That’s so young to be that rank.” Shay traced the page with his fingertip. “I mean, it is now. Probably not in those days, right?”
“Right, and especially not in times of war—a war Denmark was losing. Leading up to the events at Dybbøl, the Prussians had laid siege to the Danes. For two months they bombarded them—the most intense bombardment in military history up until that point—then, on the eighteenth of April, 1864—”
“They attacked?”
“Yes, and the Danish forces were overrun very quickly, which was hardly surprising considering they were outnumbered four-to-one in most places.”
Shay hunched over the book, probably obscuring his face from the camera. “What did that mean for him? For Rudolph?”
“Everything,” Ollie said. “At the point when his position fell, the Prussians weren’t taking prisoners. If the Danish troops had any chance of surviving, they had to fight their way out. Rudolph led what became a suicide attack on the Prussians. He fought bravely, and his brigade held up the Prussians for an hour or two, but by the end of the day, over half of them were dead.”
“Did he make it out?” Shay’s eyes were molten, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge of the desk. “Or was he killed in action?”
“He made it out.” Ollie absorbed the sag of Shay’s shoulders. “And that was the end of his military career. The Dybbøl offensive pretty much ended the war. The Danes signed a treaty on the thirtieth of October that year, and by then, Rudolph had already returned home.”
“What happened next? For him, I mean. I don’t care about the war.”
“Not many people do,” Ollie retorted. “That’s why no one understands how Europe came to be the way it is, but I’ll save that lecture for another day.”
“You’re a clever man.”
“Not really. I just read books.”
Shay leaned impossibly closer. “You don’tjustdo anything.”
Yet again, Shay had thrown a totally left-field statement at Ollie and rendered him mute. Ollie opened his mouth. Shut it again.
Shay smirked. “I mean, could I have found all this shit online if I’d looked hard enough?”
Ollie snorted. Couldn’t help it. “You won’t find your soul on a computer, Shay.”
“Right,” Shay said. “Andthat’swhy you’re a clever man.”
It didn’t make any sense, but Ollie was coming to accept that not much about the Shay Maloney he couldn’t find in the history books did. The flesh and blood an inch away from him was complex—intricate—and perhaps Ollie could dig forever and never truly understand him. “Do you want to know what happened next or not?”
“I want to know.”
“Rudolph went home and married a girl from his home town. They had a son and a daughter, and when the youngest was two years old, they emigrated to Scotland.”
“Scotland?”
“Yes.” Ollie made a mental note to remember Shay’s tendency to respond to most of his statements with an incredulous one-word question. “We’re going there next, I think? After your gigs here?”
Shay nodded, his gaze far away. “Something like that. I lose track when the bus is moving.”
Lucky him. For Ollie, when the bus was in motion, every second seemed to last an hour, unlike now, when the two hours he’d set aside to film this segment were already almost up.
