Kit

by Marina Fiorato

  And now, Prince Eugene’s name day, the day for her new persona to be tested, loomed sickeningly close. Kit lay awake, burning with nervous excitement in the warm summer night, her eagerness to see Ross again tempered by fear of giving herself away.

  With one week to go, Ormonde met her at the foot of the stairs, took her arm and turned her about. ‘I have something for you. It is in your chamber.’

  Kit followed Ormonde through the airy passages and the great empty salons. At her chamber he stood aside and let her open the door.

  At first she thought there was someone in the room, but as she approached she could see that it was a gown, dressed upon a wooden mannequin, a beautiful dress of duck-egg blue silk rimed with diamonds that glittered like frost, with a froth of white lace at the throat and a waterfall of the same lace at the sleeves. The silk was so stiff with embroidery and crystals it could have stood on its own, and so wide that the dress seemed to take up all the considerable space between the bed and the armoire.

  ‘It is a Rockingham mantua,’ said Ormonde into the silence. ‘One of the costliest gowns in the world. It is made of Oris tissue, and woven with real silver thread. You will wear this to Savoy’s name day, and you will wear it tonight.’

  She walked around it. There were blue silken ribbons all down the back of the bodice, tied in a complicated cross-weave. She gently lifted the skirts and saw a cane frame below the petticoats to make the skirts stand out. ‘It looks impossible to put on.’

  ‘You have hit upon the very point,’ said Ormonde. ‘You cannot put it on alone. Clothes for the nobility are specifically designed so that they may only be donned with the help of servants. They like it. It makes them feel rich.’ He walked forward, and flicked the bodice lace with his beringed fingers. ‘Six women are coming to dress you. Henceforth they will be your personal maids.’

  Servants. Kit played with the ribbons. ‘You have taught me to mix with the quality; but how do I behave with servants?’

  ‘That is the least of your concerns. Behave exactly as you like; the worse you behave, the better it is. You do not need to make any allowances, or consider their feelings.’ Ormonde spoke as one who had grown up with such attitudes. ‘When the time comes to put on the mantua, they will undress you. Just stand naked as you did for me. Do not cover yourself. They are not people, so there is no need to feel shame. They will do the rest. They are all from Stresa across the water, but speak enough English to do your will.’ He turned to leave.

  ‘And, saving your mother’s nation, if you do anything peculiar, they will naturally ascribe it to your being French.’ He closed the door behind him.

  Kit was left alone, with the gown. She stood behind the thing and looked in the looking glass. She looked like a countess. The dress was a ridiculous, wonderful thing, but it scared Kit. It was her new soldier coat.

  The Rockingham mantua, which was to be worn for the name day of a prince, had its first outing for the benefit of a very different man indeed.

  Ormonde had received a letter at breakfast which he read over twice before pocketing it. All day he looked pent up, distracted and twitchy. He did not concentrate on Kit’s dancing or her afternoon tutelage, and she was left to recite the bloodlines of the royal houses of France and the streets of Poitiers by rote, while he stared from the window, fidgeting, expectant.

  In the late afternoon he abandoned her and went down to the ballroom, to sit in his favourite chair. ‘Church Hill!’ squawked the parrot at his master, and she knew then that it was Marlborough the bird had meant all this time.

  Ormonde sat in his throne until nightfall, requiring no refreshment or company. He stroked his chin, and waited. Kit and Mezzanotte played a hand of bezique, talking in the hushed murmurs that seemed to be required. After dark there was a knock at the great doors and Pietro opened them. A man in full military uniform entered and marched to the gilded chair. He wore the uniform of a brigadier, but his face was blackened with gunpowder, his clothes rent, and he bled at the knee.

  The duke sat a little straighter and removed his fingers from his chin. He regarded the man without speaking, until the soldier bent his knee and bowed. ‘My lord duke,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Brigadier Panton,’ said Ormonde. ‘I have waited a long time for you to come to my door.’

  I’m to head to Mantova under Brigadier Panton, Richard had said. I might never come back. Kit dropped her cards on the table with a soft patter. Neither man seemed to notice. The brigadier stood up. ‘You might offer me a drink at least,’ he said. ‘I’ve ridden all the way from Mantova.’

  Ormonde lifted a solitary finger and Pietro was at Panton’s elbow with a decanter of Madeira and a glass set upon a tray. The brigadier filled the glass, emptied it, filled it again.

  ‘Well, Jeremiah. I take it that all went as I told you it would?’

  The brigadier took another swig of his Madeira. He did not quite meet Ormonde’s eyes. ‘Yes,’ he mumbled. ‘It was a fucking shitstorm.’

  Ormonde nodded with satisfaction, but without surprise. He sat forward, elbows on knees, hands steepled before his chin. ‘Then let me tell you what is going to happen. You will finish your drink, then Pietro will take you upstairs to your chamber. There you will find a new suit of clothes, for I do not care for my guests bleeding all over my parquet. Then you will come to dinner and you and I will talk about the next step, and I will explain to you precisely why, this time, we will be doing things my way.’

  Pietro appeared again and steered Panton from the room. Ormonde tipped his head back and rested it on the gilded chair-back. He gave a long, happy sigh. ‘It begins,’ he said.

  Kit ate little at dinner. She drank slowly, and she listened while Ormonde and Brigadier Panton spoke together, heads close, low voiced, through the half-dozen courses. For this evening at least, she and Mezzanotte were both women, neither expected to comment upon matters of war. Kit heard snatches of the conversation, and Mezzanotte, after a few attempts to draw her out, kept his peace in the face of her tense silence. She heard of the Grand Alliance plan under Marlborough to besiege Mantova, and take it back from the French. With a sinking heart, Kit realised that the campaign was an unmitigated disaster. The losses had been catastrophic. At one point Brigadier Panton, exasperated by some enquiry of Ormonde’s, broke out with ‘God, no – we lost just about every man.’ Kit put her fork down. Richard dead – staring up at the branches and the rooks with sightless eyes. Richard half in, half out of the lake – that lake of death which formed the natural moat for the city of Mantova, the lake where she’d seen her first dead body, and her second and her third. She sat like a china doll, pale and sightless in the Rockingham mantua, and waited as dolls do. Directly after dinner she sought Ormonde in his study. He was writing rapidly at his desk and did not even look up as she entered.

  ‘No.’

  She had not even spoken. ‘You do not know what I would ask.’

  ‘Panton commanded your husband’s regiment. Panton besieged Mantova. All his men are dead. You think your husband is among them, and you want to go and rummage on the battlefield, like a scavenger, to see if you can find his corpse.’

  ‘You have to let me go.’

  ‘You are mistaken.’

  ‘I will be back within the week, I swear it,’ she pleaded. ‘You have my word, as … as an Irishwoman!’

  He put down his quill. ‘Christiane …’

  ‘No!’ She lost her temper. ‘Not Christiane. Kit Kavanagh. Kit Walsh.’ The pretty French accent was gone; the strong Dublin tones were back. ‘And my husband, Richard Walsh, could lie dead on the battlefield.’ She stopped, took a breath. ‘I have to know.’

  He spread his hands. ‘I will have the rolls of the dead conveyed to me here. Then you will know soon enough.’

  But she wanted to see him with her own eyes, not read his name on some manifest. She wanted to know whether he had suffered. If he was alive she would let him be. But if he was dead she could not leave him there on the battlefield for the
crows to peck at. Faithful or no, he deserved the proper rites.

  She fell to her knees. ‘My lord duke. I beg of you.’

  ‘Get up.’ The words fell like blocks of ice. ‘Countesses do not beg.’ Ormonde’s eyes were flint, as she had seen them once before when she had puked.

  She rose, begged his pardon prettily, took her leave of him as a countess takes leave of a duke, and took comfort in his smile and satisfied nod. Then she went to her room and packed her things.

  There was no one abroad in the grey pre-dawn as she crept down to the boathouse. She struggled with the heavy oars at first, but at length she found her rhythm and rowed rapidly across the lake, the breeze riffling the smooth surface of the water, the clouds little puffs of cotton above. As she rowed around the gardens she saw her favourite fountain, with an extra statue – a white figure with long pale limbs, wearing a white chemise and a white periwig, blank eyes fixed upon the mountains. The statue turned its head and watched her row. It was Lucio Mezzanotte, seated in his favourite place. How much did he know of her request of Ormonde? Would he betray her to his lover? After a long, long moment, the figure raised a white hand in valediction, and she knew it would be all right.

  Her flight might have ended once again at the livery stable, but Kit had been there many times with Ormonde. The duke had insisted that Kit should become used to riding sidesaddle, and so Pietro would row them into Stresa and they would visit the livery stables. Ormonde would pick out his favourite mare, and Kit would ride Flint, who always greeted her with a delighted whicker. They’d take a turn about the lake in the pleasant sunshine. The vista was so breathtaking, and Ormonde’s company so pleasant, that she could almost forget the dreadful discomfort of the pommel, and in time became as swift riding sidesaddle as astride.

  So when she came to the stables in the pearl-grey dawn, the ostler tacked up Flint without a word and led the mare out. Kit, remembering Ormonde’s instruction on dealing with servants, did not offer explanations, but stood erect and haughty as she waited for her mount, chin high, thanking the stable boy with the merest nod.

  She led Flint through the empty daybreak streets of Stresa. Part of her education had been to understand the geography of the various regions of this peninsula, so she had no difficulty in choosing her direction. Soon she was on to the Brenner pass and away to Mantova.

  Chapter 31

  To the Devil I pitch you, says Arthur McBride …

  ‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

  Three days of riding, from Stresa to Milan, from Milan to Brescia, from Brescia to Mantova. Not so long a ride, not so great a distance; and yet she’d come much farther than she’d ever thought a mortal could travel. For she had journeyed all the way to Hell.

  When she was a young lady, newly come to Kavanagh’s and beginning to look at books, Kit had once seen an etching of the Inferno. There, in the Underworld, were pale bloated corpses on an inky plain, branches curling above like claws and grotesque creatures feeding on the dead. The print had been enough to keep her in her pew in church every Sunday.

  The battlefield at Mantova resembled it exactly. She had followed the plumes of smoke on the horizon, and by the time she had arrived at the long plain in the shadow of the castle it was all over. Had the last man died when she was sleeping in the hedgerow last night? Had the muskets fallen silent when she saddled and watered Flint this morning? Or had the gun carriages rolled away as she approached, rumbling unseen down other roads? No matter. It was finished; and the artillery was as silent as the redcoats that littered the field. Those corpses, powdered with the soot of the shot that had killed them, lay in a low dark haze of the same acrid fog, shrouding the scene. Colour seemed leached from the field, like that black and white print of long ago. Even though it was still summer this was a world where no flower lived or bird sang. Here the grotesque creatures feeding on carrion were the camp-followers and local peasants, dressed in dun rags, pulling rings from fingers, and ‘Agincourt teeth’ from mouths to sell to apothecaries; even splitting stomachs with their stilettos to look for coin in the very pluck of men. Their labours only added to the gore.

  There was no colour here save red: the colour of the soldiers’ coats and the colour of blood. The field stank like a slaughteryard. The pall of mist rolled out on to the lake, and above it hunched the city, proud and smug and untouched, besieged but unbroken.

  Kit, dead eyed, tied Flint up in a small copse and joined the scavengers. She was so exhausted from her ride she could have lain down among them, but she could not rest, not yet. As if there had not been enough blood, the pitiless mosquitoes feasted on her flesh, and she had barely the energy to flick them away. Then began the gory business of looking into each lifeless face. To begin with she would close the staring eyes – she could not bear the jealous stare of the dead at the living – but in the end she gave up. There were just too many.

  Some bodies were face down in the mud, so she turned them with her foot. Not him. Not him. To keep her horror and grief in check she began to count the bodies she’d turned carefully, aloud, as if she were in the schoolroom. One hundred, two hundred.

  Her skirts slowed her for the blood had turned the bottom foot of her petticoats scarlet better than the dyer’s. She found a knife and cut off her hampering skirts, leaving the circles of stained linen where they lay like a great bloody bandage.

  Somewhere a woman was keening, howling like a beast in fathomless grief. Kit chilled at the sound – a mother? A wife? A sister? She turned and a voice close by said, in English, ‘Poor little mite, he does not know his master is dead.’ She looked up too see a little, scruffy dog, a dog that had used to be white, but now was muddied and bloodied. He sat on the chest of a sprawling corpse, howling as if his heart would break. She stumbled over.

  Kit could not howl. No tears came. Nothing. She sat, slumped, looking at the face she’d once loved, and Richard looked past her, unseeing, to the branches and the rooks.

  After a long time, she did not know how long, she got up. She closed this last pair of eyes, and kissed the cold forehead. She began to drag Richard into the undergrowth. The dog bit her and worried at her sleeve; she brushed it aside – he troubled her no more than the mosquitoes. With Richard’s musket and her bare hands she dug a shallow grave in the soft summer earth, smelling the scents of home, of the farm, of the ploughshare when it bit through the earth. Perhaps all earth was the same wherever a man lived. But what a barren crop she planted in this foreign soil.

  When Richard was covered, every bit of him, she knelt and prayed. She could remember only the Hail Mary, but it would have to do; she said it three times for the Trinity. She could not remember any hymns so she sang ‘Arthur McBride’, from start to finish.

  Now she did lie down, on Richard’s grave, and slept on the soft dark earth. She was woken by a furious whinny – two peasants were cutting Flint’s leather rein from its branch; one fellow at the head collar, one fellow already on the mare’s back.

  Kit took up Richard’s bayonet, and with the skill of long practice, she pulled the man from the saddle in such a way that he knocked his companion to the ground. Foot on throat, she dispatched them both in a moment, pushing the bayonet through their yielding, concave bellies. Still she felt nothing. She left them lying there, bleeding and twitching.

  She tried to pick up the dog but he barked at her furiously, backing away on his haunches. ‘Stay, then,’ she said, not caring – and left him sitting on the barrow of earth. Without looking back she vaulted on to Flint and away. There was nothing to look back for.

  The return to the Palazzo Borromeo was a race. What if Ormonde had renounced her as a bad lot and a runaway and had abandoned their plan? Now Richard was gone, she was free – she had to see Ross, had to know whether he could love her. He seemed everything now – her future. Without him there was nothing. She had to go to Savoy’s name day.

  As she rode through the night she tortured herself with the thought that the palace would be empty, Ormonde’s chair co
vered in a dustsheet, the Rockingham mantua boxed in a chest between tissues of cool silk. But at Lake Maggiore Pietro was waiting for her at the jetty with his blank retainer’s expression. Flint was handed on to a page from the livery stables, and Pietro rowed her, without greeting or interrogation, back to the looming palace.

  Kit crept across the marble atrium like a guilty maid. The parrot perked at once, and shouted ‘Like rats in a trap!’ Kit thought of the soldiers at Mantova, of the siege-gone-wrong, the rats in a trap, and was suddenly poleaxed by grief. She still had her courage, though. The hour was late, but if Ormonde was not abed with Mezzanotte he would be in the small office, writing his letters and plotting his plots. Better to face him at once.

  She strode across the vast, dark ballroom, the moonlit muslin drapes whispering and billowing at the window. When the voice came, she was so startled she almost tripped.

  ‘I’ve seen you before.’

  Ormonde was sitting in his golden throne, still powdered and bewigged and dressed for dinner. His eyes glittered like jet. He was very drunk.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘In Ireland. You thought I’d forgotten, but I hadn’t. I never forget.’

  She stood as still as a statue, the moon turning her to alabaster. She hardly breathed.

  ‘You were in my destiny. Even then.’

  Kit could not speak. She was frightened of him for the first time – more than that – terrified.

  ‘We were meant to do this thing. For England, for all of us. And you had to jeopardise it; for what? A rotting corpse? Yes – I know all about your husband.’