Crabbe nodded again. ‘But one of you will have to accompany the wounded downstream.’
‘You’re the weakest, you should go,’ Knight said to John.
‘I’ll toss you for it.’ Tails you stay and I go.’
‘Agreed.’
John took a sovereign from his pocket and tossed it in the air. ‘Sorry, Knight, you drew the short straw.’
‘That’s not fair …’
‘You agreed,’ John said. ‘Too late to argue now.’
Crabbe almost asked to see the sovereign John had used. Later he wished he had. Because he knew Harry had given John a two-headed sovereign for one of his birthdays. He wondered, not for the first time, if John had a death wish …
Lansing Memorial Hospital, Basra, Wednesday 24th May 1916
Georgiana stared wide-eyed at Charles. ‘Michael’s here! In Basra?’
‘Not quite yet. His boat will be berthing in the next hour. I came straight here after I heard the wireless transmission he sent to HQ from the boat. We have to pick up Angela …’
‘What’s that about Angela?’ Theo left the ward where he’d been supervising the removal of the POWs judged fit enough to travel upstream.
‘Smythe and Michael will soon be berthing in Basra.’
‘Peter – but he’s in Kut …’
‘Apparently not. And don’t ask questions because I don’t know more than I’ve told you. I sent down to Abdul, ordered a chicken dinner to be prepared for them and Angela. And Georgie too if you can do without her for the next couple of hours.’
‘We managed without her before she arrived here. I wouldn’t like to say how, but we managed, and I daresay we’ll manage an afternoon without her now. Take her with my blessing. Careful with that man,’ he warned two orderlies. ‘He has a spinal wound, put him on a wooden board.’ He looked at Georgiana. ‘What are you still doing here?’
‘Thank you, Theo.’ Georgiana ran to the office to change out of her hospital clothes.
‘Don’t run or Sister Margaret will imprison you for flouting the rules.’
‘Will you be at the wedding tonight?’ he asked Charles.
‘I’ll have to go to the office to make up for taking time off this afternoon.’
‘It’s all right.’ Theo read the expression on Charles’s face. ‘I understand. Georgie doesn’t want to come either. After all, John Mason was her cousin and your close friend, the last thing you’ll want to do is watch his widow remarry.’
‘I heard you taking my name in vain, Dr Wallace?’ Sister Margaret appeared behind him.
‘I was hoping you’d help me check out these POWs and tell me which ones are only pretending to be ill.’
Georgiana scurried out of the office, hat, gloves, and hair pins in hand, her hair in disarray. ‘We’ll need a carriage.’
‘It’s outside. We’ll fetch Angela and go straight from the Mission to the wharf. She should be waiting for us – I sent a message to the school.’
They found Angela, white-faced with strain, pacing in front of the school. The ten minutes it took to drive the wharf crawled past at a snail’s pace.
‘There they are, still on deck,’ Charles shouted. ‘How’s that for timing.’
Angela jumped out of the carriage, and ran across the wharf without a care as to how high her skirts flew. Georgiana walked to Michael at a more sedate pace.
‘You’ve lost weight, and you’re yellow.’
‘With red spots,’ he informed her gravely. ‘But so would you be if you’d had to live among the upriver flies and mosquitoes.’ He glanced up at the window of his room in Abdul's and wondered if Kalla was there.
She finally hugged him. ‘Thank God you’re here and alive.’
‘It’s good to see you too, Georgie.’ Michael released her and shook Charles’s hand. ‘We’ve brought an acquaintance of yours down. He’s handing over patients to the medics …’
‘John?’ Georgiana cried. ‘He’s alive …’ she gripped Charles’s hand.
‘Dr Downe, Georgie, this is Major David Knight, Indian medical officer and a very good friend of John and Harry.’ Michael effected the introductions when David Knight joined them.
‘I’m sorry I’m not John. But you’re right, he is alive, Dr Downe.’
Charles paled. ‘Are you sure John’s alive?’
‘Yes. It’s a long story.’
‘We have plenty of time to hear it over lunch, Knight. On me.’ Charles waved to Abdul, who waved back.
‘Let me guess, John insisted on staying with the men going into Turkish captivity in case he was needed,’ Georgiana said.
‘Not in case, Dr Downe. He’ll be needed all right,’ David said. ‘One of the officers described the Kut garrison as a sick, skeleton army rotten with cholera and disease.’
‘Looking at you, I can believe it, Major Knight.’
‘Please don’t take me as an example of the Kut garrison. I’ve had over three weeks of full rations and rest and recuperation on the voyage down here.’
‘I suppose we couldn’t expect anything else of John,’ Georgiana declared. ‘He’s always put others before himself.’
‘Chicken dinner in Abdul’s on me, ladies, gentlemen.’ Charles reminded.
‘Is it true the entire Kut garrison has gone into captivity?’ Charles asked Michael.
‘Did I hear you right, Charles, an officer from HQ asking a journalist for confirmation of news?’ Georgiana teased.
‘News, like figures, has a habit of getting fudged in HQ,’ Charles murmured too low for anyone except Michael to hear.
‘From what I’ve heard around thirteen and half thousand men have been marched into captivity. Four thousand of those are sick or wounded,’ Michael added. ‘And approximately two thousand died in the garrison during the siege from enemy action or disease.’
‘But John is alive.’ Charles was having a problem believing the news. He turned to look at the officers leaving the boat. ‘That’s …’
‘Maud’s father, Colonel Perry, yes,’ Knight confirmed.
‘If he’s sick or wounded, he doesn’t look it,’ Charles observed.
‘He’s a born survivor, a swinger of lead, as the Navy would say,’ Knight smiled at Georgiana.
Angela finally moved away from Peter but she didn’t relinquish his hand. ‘We have to tell Maud that John is alive,’ she insisted. ‘Right away.’
‘Why right away?’ Peter asked.
‘Because she’s supposed to be marrying my brother tonight.’
‘Did she even bother to have widow’s weeds made?’ David asked scathingly.
‘Hardly matters,’ Michael chipped in. ‘She can’t marry him now, it would be bigamy.’
‘I’ll go back to the Lansing and tell Theo.’ Angela was already hailing the carriage that had brought them to the wharf.
‘I’ll go with you. It’s good of you stand us a meal and everything, Charles…’
Charles smiled at Peter. ‘But you’d prefer to say hello to your wife in private. Perfectly understandable. Go on off, the both of you. Take the carriage, but send it back here when you’ve finished with it.’
Angela hugged Georgiana and allowed Peter to help her into the carriage.
Abdul had laid out the lunch in the bay window of a private upstairs dining room that overlooked the harbour. The chicken might have been as good as Abdul insisted it was, but none of them took time to savour it.
Sitting next to Michael and holding her brother’s hand, Georgiana listened intently as David Knight recounted stories of what it had been like for the men marooned in Kut. Charles listened intently, while Michael pulled out his notebook and questioned David about the details.
Still holding hands with Michael she looked through the window down at the wharf. A family of Arabs were leaving Abdul’s and boarding a gaily painted native mahaila, crewed by half a dozen tall, strapping natives in Bedouin garb. A fine, upstanding, grey-bearded man joined them. Behind him were two heavily veiled women, both carrying bab
ies. Two men shepherding tiny twin girls brought up the rear of the party.
‘Harry has twin daughters.’
Had Charles told her that?
One was possibly the tallest man she’d ever seen but he wasn’t the one who’d caught her eye. She relinquished her grasp on Michael’s hand and left the table.
The second man was about her height, a patch covered one of his eyes and the scarring around it suggested the socket was empty. His right arm was supported in a sling and ended at his wrist. But it was only when he looked up at her that she knew for certain.
‘Georgie?’ Michael left his seat and joined her.
He looked down. ‘We have to run down …’
‘No, Michael.’ She gripped his hand, hard. ‘Look at the children and the people with him.’
‘He’s our brother.’
‘Not any more, Mikey,’ unthinkingly she resorted to his childhood nickname. ‘He’s not ours. He’s made his choice.’
Mitkhal saw Hasan look up at Abdul’s window. He saw Georgiana and Michael staring down.
Furja left the cabin and called to Hasan.
Hasan turned, smiled at her and followed her into the cabin but not before Mitkhal saw the look in his remaining eye. And Mitkhal knew. His friend was Hasan Mahmoud but Hasan Mahmoud had not quite forgotten Harry Downe – not yet.
Long Road to Baghdad
An epic novel of an incendiary love that threatened to set the desert alight as war raged between the British and Ottoman Empires.
Mesopotamia, 1914: in the Middle East tension is escalating between the British and the Arabs. Misfit Lieutenant Harry Downe is sent to negotiate a treaty with a renegade Bedouin Sheikh, Ibn Shalan, whose tribe is attacking enemy patrols in Iraq and cutting their oil pipelines.
Greedy for arms, Shalan accepts British weapons but, in return, Harry must take his daughter Furja to be his bride.
The secret marriage leads to a deep love, to the anger of Shalan and the disgust of Harry’s fellow officers.
But war is looming, and the horrors of the battlefield threaten to destroy Harry’s newfound happiness, and change his life and that of his closest friends for ever.
Long Road to Baghdad is a vivid, moving, historically accurate account of a conflict between East and Western
Empires, based on the wartime exploits of war hero Lieutenant Colonel Gerard Leachman.
The Long Road to Baghdad series
by
Catrin Collier
The Tsar’s Dragons
The first of a trilogy based on the exploits of John Hughes, who founded a city in Russia in the 1800s
In 1869, Tsar Alexander II decided to drag Russia into the industrial age. He began by inviting Welsh businessman John Hughes to build an ironworks.
A charismatic visionary, John persuaded influential people to invest in his venture, while concealing his greatest secret – he couldn’t even write his own name.
John recruited adventurers prepared to sacrifice everything to ensure the success of Hughesovka (Donetsk, Ukraine). Young Welsh men and women fleeing violence in their home country; Jews who have accepted Russian anti-Semitism as their fate and Russian aristocrats, all see a future in the Welshman’s plans.
In a place where murderers, whores, and illicit love affairs flourish,
The Tsar’s Dragon is their story of a new beginning in Hughesovka, a town of opportunity.
For more information on Catrin Collier
and other Accent Press titles, please visit
www.accentpress.co.uk
Published by Accent Press Ltd – 2014
ISBN 9781783754243
Copyright © Catrin Collier 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, Ty Cynon House, Navigation Park, Abercynon, CF45 4SN
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
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