Kit

by Marina Fiorato

  Duelling was not against the law of the army, but it was frowned upon. So Kit and Taylor headed tacitly to the accepted place where duels were fought. The Turk’s house was an ornamental eastern palace left over from Venetian rule, with pointed windows and delicate traceries, and its own slim stone bridge across the river. The Forbato bridge, which connected the Santa Maria quarter of Rovereto with the Venetian quarter, was always quiet except on market days, and because it was outside the bounds of the city, did not fall under the laws of the comune.

  Kit and Taylor walked in an odd, almost companionable silence. It was too early for many folk to be abroad; only the birds were waking, the morning mist creeping up the mountains, the gilded peaks still crowned with summer snow.

  The Forbato bridge was a delicate thing, and it was hard to believe that it had carried all the soldiers that had ever come and gone from the town. It formed an impossibly high pale arch that spanned the gorge.

  Having no seconds, Kit and Taylor drew and presented their own swords, exchanged them for examination, swapped them back. They took off their red coats and left them at either end of the bridge.

  At the coin toss the queen’s shilling tinkled high in the air, shining and spinning as it fell, and Kit chose the city side of the bridge. She was defending Bianca, the princess and her citadel, against an incursive ogre. Kit took her stance; weight spread, legs apart, knees bent, sword in hand. Taylor stood at the other side of the bridge like a squat troll. She would save this rare place from the likes of him. On that summer dawn Rovereto, with the bridge and the gorge and the snow-capped mountains and the blue cypresses and the cascade and the castle above, was the most beautiful place in the world, and he had despoiled it. With a roar of a beast he ran at her; she ran at him and they met in the middle of the bridge with a clash.

  It had never once occurred to Kit that she would lose the duel with Taylor – she was shimmering with anger on Bianca’s behalf. She had almost forgotten that deadly figure she had seen from the cathedral in Cremona, cutting through every Frenchman in his way. But she remembered him with the first strike of his sword. She almost sank to her knees with the force of it. He was not a sergeant because he could shout, or because the men feared him; he had risen because he was a good fighter. Kit imagined him on those Manchester streets, so rough that even the dogs got their throats cut, scrapping his way to the top of the dung heap that had birthed him. Each subsequent ring of his sword on her father’s blade told her the same thing.

  Desperately, breathlessly they fought; their swords speaking for them as they hacked and slashed. She had not picked up her blade since Luzzara and her unpractised muscles were slow to remember their skill. If she had thought that Taylor’s faulty sight would affect his swordplay she had been mistaken. She got one lucky strike to Taylor’s sword hand and he dropped his weapon, stumbling to one knee – but at once he grabbed the blade of her sword to help himself up and yanked it from her hand. Pouncing, she picked up Taylor’s blade from the ground and weighed it in her grasp – now she must fight with his heavier, regimental blade while her own father’s sword shone wickedly in Taylor’s meaty paw.

  Round and about, tiring, her hip pained her; she stumbled once, and it was enough – following up his advantage he was upon her at once, crushing her sword hand on the balustrade of the bridge – the regimental sword hanging over the abyss and the jade-green River Leno far below. Her hand drained of blood, grew limp, opened; and Taylor’s sword fell into the void. The combatants locked eyes, both taken aback, long enough to hear the sword plunge, many heartbeats later, into the Leno with a faint splash.

  Just as Taylor raised Sean Kavanagh’s sword high, the sun rose over the mountains. Blinded, Taylor stepped back, mistimed the kill-stroke and hit the stone balustrade of the bridge, the blade sparking and shuddering from his grip. He shook his stinging hand, cursing, and Kit moved at once, grabbing the haft of the sword as it fell. The blade calmed in her hand – a sword that cuts you once can never hurt you again. She took up her father’s blade, and now she was above and Taylor below. She plunged it through his shoulder and into the timbers of the bridge – nothing fatal, but enough to pin him like a moth upon a card. ‘Yield,’ she said, low and hard.

  Taylor squinted up at her with his one eye, breathing through the pain and the defeat. And yet he smiled. He seemed disinclined to rise, so, as honour dictated, she took her sword from him and gave him her hand. But still he lay there, saying nothing, and smiling. He seemed to be waiting. She backed away from him, breathing hard, with a strong sense of foreboding. There was a shout, and footsteps boomed over the bridge. Then Taylor’s face crumpled theatrically and he clasped his shoulder, groaning. Kit turned, too late, for she was already surrounded by half a dozen men, the men Taylor had spoken to in the Gasthof. They had her arms and her throat. ‘Sergeant Christian Walsh, you are under arrest for causing injury to your superior officer.’

  She struggled like a tiger. ‘Unhand me,’ she cried. ‘I am a sergeant in the dragoons, his equal in rank.’

  Taylor rose, breathing hard, his bleeding teeth bared in a smile. He shrugged as best he could. ‘Ah, Walsh, forgive me. I did try to tell you that I was celebrating, did I not? You see, I too was decorated, for my bravery at Luzzara. You see, while you were being coddled in a hospital bed, I fought through the French lines. So you,’ he swaggered despite his wounds, ‘just fought a duel with Sergeant Major Jebediah Taylor.’ He took a pair of epaulettes from his pocket and waved them at Kit. ‘Haven’t had a chance to get ’em sewn yet. Was going to ask a local woman. Know anyone, Walsh? Know anyone?’ He laughed, and coughed, and laughed again, holding his shoulder, but more in mirth than pain. Kit lunged for him, but Taylor’s cronies were upon her, forcing her down until her knees cracked. Heavy irons were clapped upon her wrists and ankles.

  As she half-walked, half-stumbled back to town between her captors, her irons trailing and sparking on the rocky path, she could hear Taylor shouting from the bridge, his voice echoing through the valley.

  ‘By God, I’ll sleep well tonight, Walsh!’ He barked twice, as he had done in the Gasthof, and then howled, his eerie cry echoing about the valley, a dog unmasked as a wolf.

  Chapter 21

  If you do you’ll be flogged in the morning …

  ‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

  Kit was imprisoned in the dungeons of the north tower of Rovereto castle, where the miscreants of the regiment rotted until their punishments could be carried out.

  She walked about her new home like a caged lion, her fingers trailing the damp walls, a journey that took her just ten heartbeats. She fell over a little table and two crippled chairs, both missing a leg. At night – she guessed it was night – she slept on the floor, shivering. Presumably outside it was still summer. But in this pit winter had taken up camp, crouched in the old stones, and never left. She was alone, for most men were too canny to be sent to prison when there was a siege to lay and booty to be collected. She wondered whether she would still be here when the dragoons marched to Mantova. The thought depressed her spirits almost more than anything else.

  There was no prospect of escape. The only door in the dungeon was set high in the wall to be reached only by a rope ladder, which had been removed as soon as she had climbed down it. The circular chamber was entirely dark, with slick, damp walls growing with some type of moss and lichen. She thought of herself as some sort of maggot or caterpillar, living in the dark, waiting for her change.

  The court martial had been brief, and presided over by a Major Caradew, an officer Kit did not know. Tichborne and Ross were nowhere to be seen. She thought she knew the reason for their absence – Tichborne had just shown the ill-judgement to promote a private with criminal tendencies, and Ross … well, Ross had made his feelings about her very clear.

  She had stood impassive as Major Caradew had spoken her sentence; Kit would keep her rank, for in a time of war a sergeant could not be spared. She had been given a light enough sentence; she had e
xpected a discharge, but instead she had been given two hundred lashes. She was to be flogged in the castle courtyard, and, as was her privilege as a sergeant, only in the presence of fellow officers, not the general company. In many ways she had been lucky – she would not lose her rank nor her commission, but she would lose her skin. Flogging was a horror, a flaying open of the back that left a man as skinned as a beef steer at a tannery. Flogging was the punishment everyone feared. She had heard horror stories along the road; a man whose back had been turned to scarlet ribbons which fluttered behind him like a pennant. Another flogged down to the spine so the white bone showed, a third who had had to sleep on his stomach for the rest of his life.

  But Kit would rather shed her skin a thousand times than her jacket. More terrible to her in her sentence than the words ‘Two hundred lashes’ were the words ‘the prisoner is to be stripped to the waist’. Once they took off her coat, tore off her shirt and unbound her breasts, she was lost.

  She had been close, so close, to finding Richard. ‘He’s here somewhere,’ Tichborne had said. And now, before she could complete the quest, she would be unmasked, and sent home.

  Her flogging was to be in two days, and she knew that one of them had passed for she had been thrown two parcels of food by a cheery guard who would usefully shout ‘breakfast’ or ‘dinner’ as he threw them down. She contemplated trying to grab him, tying him up with her belt. She still had her sword, so she could dispatch him straight; but she was not the type to kill in cold blood. Besides, the castle housed Marlborough and Savoy too and would be guarded to the hilt.

  After the second parcel the grille was opened and the rope ladder let down. ‘Christ,’ said a voice that set her heart beating. ‘Bring me some more lamps. And a bottle and a bird while you’re about it.’

  She heard a faint protest from above, then the voice cut it short. ‘Do it.’

  Ross set the lamp he held down on the little table, and Kit, blinking, saw her prison for the first time. There had been a Bible with her all this time, lying loose leaved and curled with damp on the table – a Bible and no light to read it by.

  She felt great joy to see Ross, but was ashamed of her hovel, of the damp and the dark and the smell of piss and worse. The lamp was the only light, so his eyes were tawny like a hawk’s, his hair bronze and the reds and golds of his uniform leached to saffron and black. She studied this new Ross, guardedly; remembering the last time they’d spoken, his coldness, his anger. She wondered what he would say first – then she would know. He looked about him wryly. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘As lodgings go, it is not the best appointed I have seen.’

  She smiled. He was not the angry martinet from the silk post, this was the Ross who had joked with her along the road. ‘Flint misses you,’ he said.

  She smiled, to cover a pang. ‘And I her.’

  ‘Kit,’ he said, and the word sounded lovely in his mouth – at the silk post it had been all ‘Mr Walsh’. Ross sat forward, his face serious. ‘You will soon be mounted on Flint again, riding at my shoulder to Mantova. We’ll have some fine old times again, I assure you. The siege of Mantova will be a famous victory. Take your flogging like a man, and when it is over all will be as before.’ He sounded overly hearty, trying to cheer her.

  She looked at him sadly. How little he knew.

  Ross misinterpreted the silence. He sighed, and shook his head. ‘I have never wanted to disobey an order until this one. I wish I could take you out of this place, help you escape. But the army has been my life; and something in me will not allow it.’

  ‘I could give a name to it,’ she said, low voiced. ‘I would call it honour.’

  He looked at his feet. ‘Whatever it is, it prevents me. I cannot let you escape.’

  ‘And I would not like you as well as I do if you did.’

  He seemed taken aback, but bowed a little. ‘I have, however, commuted your sentence – you will now receive one hundred lashes, not two. Your punishment, however painful, will be a gesture only. I told Major Caradew there were mitigating circumstances.’

  Her heart beat slowly and painfully. ‘What circumstances?’

  He stood. Outside the circle of light she could no longer see his face, but his voice echoed around the tower. ‘Kit. I am not proud of the way I spoke to you when last we met. I was …’ he searched for the words, ‘angry and disappointed.’ The words he found did not seem to be the ones he sought, but he went on. ‘I was troubled that my … that one of my men would act so; it seemed a deed without honour, and not like you. I believed you had more than a modicum of respect for the fairer sex. Furthermore, I sensed that some of our mutual experiences – I am thinking in particular of the valley of the foundlings – had furnished you with the knowledge that the coming of the army can bring particular hardships to women, hardships of which I felt sure you would not wish to be a part.’

  She thought of baby Christiana. ‘You are right. I would never act so.’

  ‘I believe that now,’ said the voice. ‘I made enquiries among the men and learned two things.’ He paused in his pacing, at the edge of the light. ‘I discovered that you challenged Taylor, believing him to be of equal rank to yourself, and that he practised a deception upon you – no,’ he held a golden hand high in the dark, ‘not of an overt nature, but a deception of omission to conceal his promotion, which is a falsehood of its own kind. Moreover, I heard it said that you and he fought over an offence to the mother of your child. I questioned Southcott and Hall and they told me that they had seen you defend the same lady from Taylor’s attentions nine months ago in this very town. Further enquiry at the Gasthof provided me with the information that you challenged Taylor on behalf of the lady and her child. A red-headed child, Kit.’ He sat at the table with her once more, and clasped his hands before him. ‘The red hair of two men in my troop; yourself, and Sergeant Taylor.’

  She said nothing, but looked at his hands. The fingers long and strong, the nails square and short, a faint silver line across the back of one hand. ‘I ask you now; is the child Sergeant Taylor’s?’

  How she wanted to tell him then! But she had made a promise to Bianca; and could not now link her reputation with another man, and certainly not a man such as Taylor. She framed her answer carefully. ‘If someone asked a question of you, sir, taking into account all you said just now, and asked you for an answer that would compromise a lady and make an already vexing situation harder for her, what would you say?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘I would probably say, Kit, that I can make free of my own business, but that honour prevents me from making free of a lady’s.’ He looked at her. ‘And so? Does the child belong to Sergeant Taylor?’

  She met his eyes – a tiny candle burned in each. She said, in a voice heavy with meaning: ‘I can make free of my own business, sir, but honour prevents me from making free of a lady’s.’

  He held her gaze for a moment and then nodded. ‘Then I owe you an apology. I should have trusted in your character – I should have trusted you. You have acted like a man of honour and I most heartily beg your pardon for suggesting otherwise.’

  Her hands lay on the table so close to his; a paler colour of butter, with tapered nails and the heavy scar on her little finger. A woman’s hands – it seemed so clear to her – why could he not see? She moved her scarred little finger to touch his in forgiveness, when the grille in the door above slid open with a clang. ‘Captain, sir? Your vittles.’

  Ross rose from his seat; a tray was passed down with a roasted chicken upon it, a jug and two clay cups. Ross set the tray before Kit and went back for the two lamps the jailer handed down. She turned her attention to the heavenly chicken and tore it limb from succulent limb. She ate without shame, for she’d had nothing worth eating since the night at the San Maurizio when Bianca had dumped Christiana in her lap.

  Ross watched her indulgently. ‘Good?’

  ‘Marlborough himself must never have had so fine a bird,’ she said, through a full mouth.

  ‘Yo
u’ve made short work of him,’ he said, for the carcass sat before them, picked clean, standing jagged like a bone crown.

  She tried a jest. ‘So will I look, come tomorrow,’

  Ross’s smile dropped from his face too soon. He poured the contents of the jug into the clay goblets, and raised his cup to his lips. ‘A few bad moments, Kit, that will be all.’

  She drank and the liquor kindled her throat and belly. She suddenly felt free with Ross – free to abandon their rank and speak as the brothers they had been. There would never be another time. She cocked an eyebrow. ‘You sure?’ she asked, very Dublin. He set down his cup. ‘Yes.’

  He stood and unbuttoned his jacket, then in one fluid movement he pulled his shirt over his head and turned his back to her. ‘This is how sure I am.’

  She stood too. ‘When?’ she said.

  ‘Many years ago – in Spain. I was a young ensign.’ He glanced over his bare shoulder. ‘You are wondering, I expect, what my crime can have been. Nothing quite so honourable as yours, I am afraid. It was instead the crime of a tired young puppy who had spent his pampered youth in feather beds. There, Kit; now you know the worst of me. I slept on my watch. And I have never done it since.’

  She looked at his gilded back in the light. It was broad and finely muscled and smooth. No, not smooth – there were scars there, laid across it like tiger stripes. She looked closer, reached out.

  Now with his back turned she had the courage to touch him – the cold pads of her fingers stroked his warm flesh, so softly she thought he must not feel it. She gently traced the silvery lines, the map of his past pain.

  He flinched a little.

  ‘They don’t still hurt?’

  ‘Not a whit,’ but his voice sounded jolted; by the memory, or her touch?