by Iain Gale
Now alone, Steel ran a hand over his face and felt the stubble. He had not had the opportunity to shave these past two days, since their last stop at an inn, and without a servant there was no water to be had, hot or cold. He would have to wait till Paris to address his appearance. He cast his eyes into the distance, and from his vantage point within the carriage watched and waited until the major and the other horsemen were quite out of sight. Then, opening the door, he climbed down from the carriage and called up to the coachman: ‘Matthews. My bag, if you will. And you can untie my horse.’
Matthews, a wiry Cornishman, lately a sergeant in the foot and now a driver in the personal employ of Colonel Hawkins, climbed down and handed Steel the modest carpet-bag which contained his effects. ‘There you are, Captain Steel, sir. An’ I don’t know what it is the colonel’s got you doing now, sir, but I can only say I’m damned glad it’s not me as is doing it.’ He shivered. ‘Gives me the creeps, this does, being so deep in France. Durn’t seem right.’
Steel undid the bag and took out a coat as Matthews un-tethered the chestnut mare that had been tied to the rear of the coach during their journey. ‘Yes, you’re right there, Matthews. But if my becoming better acquainted with the Frenchies is going to help win this war, then it’s got to be right, somehow.’
The coachman grinned, then shrugged and grunted as Steel shook out the heavy serge coat. He removed his own Grenadier’s uniform, stripped down to breeches and shirt and donned the new waistcoat, of a vivid red. It was a tight fit over his muscular form, but not wholly uncomfortable. He reached for the coat that he had handed to Matthews and drew it on. It too was scarlet in colour and faced with bright yellow rather than his own regiment’s distinctive dark blue. The lace too was subtly different, stitched in the French manner, and the large gilt buttons on the cuff lay in a plain line. In contrast the edge of the coat was richly festooned with gold lace. This was not the coat of a British officer. Steel had chosen it himself with some care. It had come from a bundle of clothing lately stripped from the bodies of the dead of O’Brien’s regiment of dragoons, Irishmen in the service of France originally raised by the late Lord Clare. Steel’s choice had been coloured by the fact that he had known its commander when, both as young lieutenants of foot in the Guards, the two had fought side by side for King William. But Steel had also seen his erstwhile friend killed in cold blood in the village of Ramillies after surrendering to a British officer – a fellow Scot who lately had been his brigade commander at Oudenarde. Well, that was an old story. And for now the coat of poor Clare’s old regiment would serve him well and he would wear it with pride, partly in memory of a brave man unjustly killed.
Matthews raised his eyebrows. ‘Very handsome, sir. You look quite the Paddy officer. And hardly a mark on it, neither.’
‘You recognize the coat then?’
‘Could I not? Fought against Clare’s at Blenheim, sir. Took off one of my fingers, the Irish bastards.’ He held up his maimed left hand. ‘I won’t forget the bloody Paddies in a hurry. Mind you, sir, they won’t forget me, neither.’
Steel laughed, and, having buckled on his sword, handed Matthews the carpet-bag into which he had placed his regimental uniform. ‘I’m sure they won’t. But now you shall forget me, Matthews. And that’s an order. You never saw me. From this moment, for as long as it takes, Captain Jack Steel ceases to exist. Meet Captain Johnson of the Irish Brigade. And now you may take that news back to the colonel.’
Matthews nodded. ‘I’ll tell him, sir, just as you told me. Good luck, Captain.’
Putting his boot in the stirrup which hung at the mare’s left flank, Steel swung himself up easily into the saddle and ordered his reins. He smoothed his great, broad-bladed sword in its scabbard over the saddlecloth and patted the animal lightly on the neck. Then he turned in the saddle and gave Matthews a last look and exchanged a nod before digging his knees into the horse’s flanks and urging her forward into a gentle trot. He went on for some way before casting a single backward glance at the fast-disappearing coach, then he pulled the horse away from the road and onto the grassland of a hillside, speckled with alder trees. The uneven ground was a little soft under her hooves and Steel took a few minutes to relax into her easy stride after so many days in the carriage. Soon, though, he felt reborn, at one with the countryside and back in control of his destiny, as far as that was ever possible. After a few hundred yards trotting gently around the contour of the hill and away from the road, Steel pulled up and took stock of the prospect before him.
Below him stretched the plain of Picardy, a lush valley cross-hatched with a complex patchwork of fields of crops – corn and wheat, he guessed, much of it now cut for the harvest. It was good country, he thought, tended carefully by its tenants and respected by its owners for its bounties. Soon, though, he knew that it must surrender to the attentions of Marlborough’s dragoons, and that even after they had passed anything spared would be trampled beneath the feet of the oncoming armies. That was the way of it in this country, long used to war. It was astonishing, he thought, that the peasants should invest so much time in their land when they must know that at any moment it would likely as not be ravaged once again by men who came from far away intent on but one thing – to win the next battle.
He reckoned that it would always be thus. Flanders and Picardy formed a fatal avenue between Catholic France and its Protestant neighbours, and Steel knew that nothing could change this flawed geography. Since Agincourt and Crécy men had come here from France and Spain and the Rhine, and from Britain, come to fight and to die, and in centuries to come they would come again when, just as the bows had surrendered to matchlock and grenade, new and more terrible weapons of destruction overtook their current armoury. For an instant his head was filled with a dreadful, blood-soaked vision of destruction. This was a truth of such epic, biblical proportions that he shuddered at the thought.
At that moment a chill breeze caught the treetops and cut through the dead Irishman’s red coat, freezing Steel’s blood. But it lasted only a few seconds. Bringing himself to the present, Steel clicked his tongue at the grazing mare and dug the heels of his boots into her ready flanks, and the road fell away before him. He urged her down the slope of the hill, away from the threatening form of the trees and his momentary apocalyptic vision, and within a few minutes his mood had been transformed. Steel thanked God now that he had listened to Hawkins, for despite his tedious companion and the cramped, uncomfortable coach, he knew that he had rested and was now free to feel the exhilaration of the ride. The wind felt good on his face and he knew that from now on he was on his own. In enemy territory.
He thought himself into his new persona. He was Captain Cormack Johnson, if you please. Born in Cork and raised at home by a governess, he had joined the colours at the age of seventeen and served at Neerwinden, Dixemude and Huy – all actions with which Steel himself was familiar, on occasion meeting the Irish ‘Wild Geese’ face to face. There would be no slip up there, certainly. Of course Steel had no Irish accent, but then he did not suppose that he would require one. Many of the Irish gentry he had come across, including poor Clare, had spoken with an anglicized tongue, and while they might have had a command of the Gaelic, which he did not have, to an untutored ear and, he presumed, to any Frenchman it would not have sounded so very dissimilar to his own Lowland Scottish accent.
He reckoned that it must by now be close to ten o’clock in the morning, and swore once again that come the next engagement, whenever the chance presented itself, he would find as fine a timepiece as had been liberated by Hansam from the body of a French officer at Blenheim. The early chill was passing now and the sun beat down upon the countryside. He began to itch under the thick coat and scratched at his neck.
He prayed to God that the poor bugger who was the last owner of this coat had not been severely infested. No more at least than Steel himself. For all the army, officers and men alike, even up to the great commander himself, carried with them their little frien
ds the lice, who, living in the seams of their garments, would only be destroyed if burnt or smoked out. No, thought Steel, the coat was just naturally itchy, coarser perhaps than the British model. It was a combination of that and the heat. Who knew, perhaps in Paris he might even take a bath. For a moment he revelled in the prospect. The city, so it was said, was the very seat of worldly luxury and pleasure – a cradle of vice – with such a profusion of gold ornament and decorative splendour as the world had not seen since the Roman Empire. You could, they said, get anything you desired in Paris.
Well, thought Steel, that was a hard one for a man in his position. Perhaps a year ago he might not have found it so. But now he had a beautiful wife who was in love with him, as he was with her, and thus he had no real desire for further female company. She had protested when he had announced that he must go away, but had relented with the promise of further advancement. Steel had not, of course, told her his destination, merely that he was under orders from Marlborough himself. That had been enough to calm her. He knew that she would now be content to await his return. At least she would be comfortable, even on their modest income. Although, even he admitted, perhaps a little more would not go amiss. Particularly with Henrietta’s tastes. He had his health, God and the French willing. And he had his profession. What more in truth could any soldier want but rank, wealth, health and love?
He smiled, patted the horse gently on the neck and saw that he was approaching a village. It seemed a small and peaceful place, with plumes of smoke curling up into the fresh air from the crooked stone chimneys. At present, he reckoned, the people would just be entering the height of a busy morning’s work. As Steel passed along the street a few of the inhabitants glanced up at him but, somewhat to his surprise, none remarked upon the presence of the tall red-coated soldier. The truth was that they had grown used to such sights. Indeed the oldest of them could still recall the day in 1643 when the Spanish invaders had come here to be met by the French under the Duc d’Enghien at a place called Rocroi and been all but annihilated. What a time that had been. The villagers had cheered their victorious troops from the windows and festooned them with garlands. But today, as this tall, solitary horseman retraced the footsteps of d’Enghien’s regiments, there was no rejoicing. The people seemed sullen, and that broke his mood of contented levity. Somewhere a dog barked, and in a distant farm a cock crowed ceaselessly. Steel passed through the place without event, yet once again in open countryside he felt dejected, as if the mood of the place had sent a cloud into the sky directly above him. He could not quite place it, but he knew that in the space of minutes something had gone awry with his apparently flawless world. Nothing, of course, could ever be as perfect as it had for an instant seemed. Quite what was wrong, though, he had yet to discover.
He rode on, passing the wayside distance marker stones as they counted down the miles to Paris and listening to the church bells as they chimed his way by the hour through the French villages. He reckoned that he must be travelling at around eight miles an hour. It was not a bad speed, but if he were to keep his rendezvous he knew that he would have to make faster time, so he pushed the horse on, as gently as he could.
Soon the villages began to grow more numerous and larger, and then they became towns. At the town of Roye he rode at a careful pace below the walls of the citadel under the inquisitive eyes of the French garrison guards, but no one summoned him. No one questioned his presence. To the sentries too this man was merely another solitary soldier in an apparently friendly uniform, a messenger, perhaps, on his way back into France. The men on the battlements, seeing the sergeant of the guard wave Steel on with a cursory glance at his papers of travel (faked, of course), spat and cursed at the devil for his luck, for they all knew Marlborough and his accursed polyglot army, drawn from the gutters of Europe, might be here and upon them at any time. Tales were coming in daily of atrocities perpetrated by Lord Marlbrook’s dragoons upon defenceless French civilians. Fires, it was said, rose from a thousand towns and villages of Picardy and Artois. Women, it was claimed, had been raped by the dozen, and scores of innocent suckling infants put to the sword. Had the sentries but known Steel’s true identity they would have tried to string him up from a tree with no questions asked. But happily they did not know, and he was also blissfully unaware of the rumours. Confidence increasing by the hour, he made the crossroads at Conchy and took, as Hawkins had directed, the straight road to cross the Oise at Pont Ste. Maxence.
For a further half-day Steel road on. Then, as dusk began to fall and weary from two days in the saddle, he found himself on the outskirts of a dense forest. Aware that this area of the north of France was known for wild boar, and not wishing either to disturb a hunting party or to enter into an argument with one of the notoriously ferocious creatures, he decided to stay close to the edge yet sufficiently within the tree line to afford cover. Naturally, making such a circumnavigation took a good deal longer than had he plunged through the woods, and it soon began to grow dark. Steel dismounted, and having eked out the last of the stale bread and hard cheese that he had brought from the camp and washed it down with the little Tokay and brandy that remained in the two flasks that had been provided by the ever-thoughtful Colonel Hawkins, he wrapped himself in his cloak and made as good a bed as he could from the undergrowth. Sleep, as it always did when he was in the open, came to him unbidden and without much effort, and his last impression was of a canopy of trees above which the stars hung suspended in a cloudless night sky.
He was awakened shortly after dawn by a sharp cry from his front, followed by a shot. In an instant sleep was forgotten and his senses sprang into action. Instinct, which in many another man might have made him spring up and betray himself, told Steel to freeze to the spot. He pressed his taut form deep into the earth and prayed only that his horse, which, sporting an unmistakably military-style harness, was standing a few yards off, chewing happily on a patch of borage, might not yet be spotted by the intruders, whoever they might be. Cautiously and careful not to make the slightest sound, he felt to his side and found his sword. It was his most trusted weapon now. His deadly fusil he had left with the company, exchanging it unhappily for a pair of pistols, given him by Hawkins, which hung inaccessible in long leather holsters across his saddle, their ammunition held in a small leather box on a belt.
The voices sounded again, shouting clearly in French and closer now, and Steel’s fevered mind began to hatch a plan. Craning his neck so that he was able to peer through a gap in the foliage, he was able to see one of the figures. The man was dressed in a uniform, but none that Steel had seen before and certainly not military in design. It was of green velveteen and ornamented with gold at the collar and cuffs. On his head he wore a skullcap of the same design, and in his hand he held a long spear. Taking him at first for some courtier in a masque, Steel soon realized that he was in fact a huntsman. As he watched, another man appeared to his left, in similar dress. So that was it: he had stumbled into the middle of a boar hunt. These were the hunters, and close behind no doubt would be the quality, the gentlemen and ladies of the hunting party.
The advance party was almost upon him now. Dangerously close. Steel decided that there was nothing to do but bluff it out. Here would be a test, rather sooner than he had anticipated, of his newly assumed character. The only problem was how to make his presence known without giving the huntsmen cause to take him as their quarry and stick him with their spears. This worry, though, was quickly and violently put to flight by others of a more serious nature. Steel was already in the process of getting to his feet when his horse gave a loud whinny of distress, drawing not only his attention but that of the group of huntsmen, whose numbers had now grown to a half dozen. It was not the mare, however, but rather the cause of her alarm which now froze them all in their tracks. For not five yards away from where Steel had been asleep and where he now stood, clear in the red coat against the undergrowth, the huge form of a wild boar rose up from the dense foliage and stood utterly motion
less, staring hard in his direction. Steel reckoned it must be a good five feet above the ground and in length half that of his horse. Its head was crowned by a mane of black hair, and on either side of its flat snout was a long, sharp, curved white tusk. The man nearest Steel stared too. The boar he could understand. He was a huntsman, and this was a hunt in a forest full of such creatures. But what was this other beast? This red-coated soldier who had risen from the ground was something quite unexpected. He was wise enough to know that now was not the time to question who this stranger might be – probably, he thought, a deserter or a poacher. He resolved to deal with the matter in hand and whispered to Steel, in French, ‘Monsieur, I beg you, do not move. Stay quite still.’
Steel nodded his head and slowly eased his right hand across his body and down towards the hilt of his sword. The boar snorted, gouts of steaming breath clouding the air from its nostrils.
As he slid the sword from its scabbard Steel was aware of the baying of hounds behind him, and seconds later a pack of hunting dogs broke into the clearing. Seeing them, the boar panicked. Steel’s sword was clear now and he held it before him, as ready as he might be for the beast. But it was not at him but elsewhere that the boar’s eye was fixed. The hounds were circling him now, gums drawn back and teeth bared, snarling. Not waiting, the boar lunged forward and tore through the pack, tossing one dog to one side with a razor-sharp tusk and goring it. The dogs stood back but the boar went on and hit the most forward of the green-coated huntsmen full on. The man was thrown to the ground, winded and, Steel could see, with a slight cut to his thigh from one of the tusks. The boar stood above him now, head raised, ready to push down with its full weight and skewer the man to the earth. Instinctively, Steel leapt from his position and, landing on the beast’s back, plunged his blade hard into its head. But if he had thought to kill it he was wrong. The boar bellowed in agony and the huntsman rolled away before it had time to complete its attack. Steel clung on to its back and endeavoured to withdraw his sword. There was a noise, a shout as another of the men called across to the pack, and suddenly around Steel and the boar a dozen dogs were tearing at the creature’s flesh. Its blood flew up in gouts, and one unlucky hound was too slow to avoid being impaled upon the boar’s right tusk, where it hung, stuck through in mid-air, howling pitifully. Behind the dogs came the huntsmen. Four firm shoves from their expert pikes were all it took to finish the job. As Steel slithered off the dying creature and at last drew out the gory blade the wounded man was helped away from the scene. Steel stood recovering, and through the noise of hunting horns and shouts he heard a single voice calling desperately from behind the huntsmen.