Shining Threads

by Audrey Howard

  The front door stood open to let in the sunshine and she stepped through it into the fresh light of spring. Gardeners raised their heads from their planting and touched a finger to their caps and she nodded to them, but it was not them who held her attention.

  On the gravel driveway, stamping and blowing through her nostrils as though she knew what a great day this was, stood her mare, saddled, her coat glowing, her mane tossing, her eyes rolling in her mistress’s direction. Walter held her bridle, beaming from ear to ear, his face as red as Tessa’s dress.

  ‘She’s ready for thee, Miss Tessa,’ he said, then wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

  She walked down the steps, her legs no longer like jelly but strong and sure and when she put her face against that of the animal’s she was smiling since she knew she would survive now.

  ‘Give me a week or two, Walter.’

  ‘Happen less, miss?’

  ‘Aye, happen . . .’ and they both grinned.

  The valley of Balaclava lay desolate and melancholy. The road to the camp was a track of liquid filth. The town itself was as muddy as the plains which surrounded it. The tideless harbour was no more than a common sewer in which floated not only the waste of the bodies of thousands of men but the carcasses of soldiers, horses, dogs, cats and every other discarded and decomposing matter which could be found no other resting place.

  For weeks now those who still survived had been without proper clothing, fuel or food and to worsen matters further in this vast and mystifying war, the reason for which the soldiers themselves were not fully aware of, there was a virulent outbreak of cholera. In the camp hospitals the men lay down to die upon the bare ground and in the hospitals themselves, ignorance, dirt and confusion prevailed for want of doctors, blankets, medicines, bandages, fresh water, beds and space to put beds. Even had these been available, there was still the need for someone with the sense and energy to arrange them all together.

  The weather was appalling. There were heavy squalls with winds so strong they brought down every tent on the plateau. No fires could be lit and no food cooked and the sick and wounded lay exposed to the elements which were no respecters of rank. Generals, officers, soldiers, sick, wounded, hale and hearty lay together in the deluge and when the rain turned to snow 300 men died in one day.

  But worst of all, far worse than anything which had previously befallen them, four steam transports, ten sailing transports and four freight ships, caught by the violence of the weather were dashed to the bottom of the harbour.

  And those who were left, without blankets or rugs, socks, boots, biscuit, salt beef, or even corn for the horses which survived, must face the winter in the liquid mud on which the camp floated. Every victim on the muddy and half-frozen plains of the Crimea sent home doleful and angry accounts of his own and his brother soldiers’ suffering. It was always the same. They lived from hand to mouth with the minimum of ammunition to keep them safe from the enemy. Their lives were unendurable and when they lost them it was from overwork and exposure, not as soldiers in the heat of battle but like deserted children abandoned by cruel parents. In two weeks the number of sick increased from 13,000 to 16,000. What had become of the fine army, they asked one another, sent off so dashingly, for no other reason, it seemed, than that there had been no war for forty years and it was time for another?

  It was about this time that Miss Florence Nightingale arrived at Scutari and the hospital there.

  The two young soldiers had, with what remained of their strength, dug a hole in the hard ground, just deep enough and wide enough for them to sit, or lie side by side, drawing over it a sheet of canvas from another such hole in which four soldiers of the 2nd Hussars had frozen to death several weeks before. Thousands of men had died but the loss of life had become a condition of life itself and they concentrated the whole of their physical energy, which was scant, and the whole of their mental energy which was not much better when there is nothing to do all day but turn their minds to their memories.

  ‘Do you remember the day she’ – they never mentioned her name by unspoken mutual agreement – ‘challenged us to a race from . . . where was it? . . . Badger’s Edge or Friar’s Mere? . . . I forget, to Greenacres? She jumped that bloody gate as though it was no more than a foot or so from the ground then turned to grin at us. It was May. The sky was so blue that day and it was warm . . .’

  ‘Warm? Warm? What the devil does that mean, d’you think, brother? How does it feel? It is so long since we enjoyed it I have forgot. To be warm and dry and clean . . .’

  ‘And can you remember the time we went with Nicky Longworth and Johnny Taylor to that dog fight at the Craven Heifer?’

  ‘She didn’t like it, as I recall . . .’

  ‘No,’ the voice was soft and smiling, ‘and, really, would you have expected her to? She only went because we did.’

  ‘The poor brute was nearly disembowelled . . .’

  ‘And she brought her dinner back and then tried to pretend she had eaten something which had disagreed with her.’

  ‘Eaten something! What do those words bring to mind, Pearce? To eat something. Actually to put in your mouth some delectable, tasty, delicious, palatable food. What, though? What would you order if you could have anything you wanted?’

  ‘Roast beef.’

  ‘Yes, yes, or smoked salmon with . . .’

  ‘No, a saddle of lamb with mint sauce . . .’

  ‘Pheasant done in . . .’

  ‘Followed by . . .’

  ‘Washed down with a good claret . . ’

  ‘And then a warm, clean bed . . .’

  They fell silent. Their shoulders touched and they huddled in the faint and grave-like light cast through the heavy canvas, their backs to the wall of the dugout. They had a candle which they did not light, ever, except in the emergencies created by Pearce’s nightmares where he dreamed he was buried alive beneath a growing mound of dead and injured soldiers, as he had been at the tail end of the battle of Alma. Drew had been beside him for they had made sure as the frenzied day had eased towards nightfall that they did not become separated again. When the bursting shell had lifted a dozen or more soldiers, shredding them to an assortment of bloody torsos, arms, legs and heads, and threw them by some strange chance over Pearce, burying him for ten appalling minutes with the softness and wetness and obscene weight, it had been Drew who had dug him out. Pearce dreamed of it often, screaming as he had done then, clinging to his brother until the candle was lit and sanity returned.

  They had a blanket between them, their most treasured possession since not many were so lucky. They had an upturned wooden crate on which stood the pathetic bits and pieces so dear to a soldier far from home and which once they would have laughed over: a miniature of their mother as a girl, a few letters from their aunt and Charlie, a length of satin ribbon with a faint smell of some woman’s perfume and which neither would acknowledge to be hers, a box with brushes and a comb, razors and a tiny, prized sliver of soap.

  They each wore mud-stained breeches, knee-length boots, an army greatcoat and a peaked soldier’s cap. They were dirty with a sour odour about them for neither had washed, let alone bathed, in weeks. Their beards were dark and stiff and their blue eyes, once so vivid, clear and devilish with merry arrogance, were dulled and staring from faces old and tired beyond their years. They had seen and heard sights and sounds they would never forget. They had lost their horses and every fine thing they had brought with such high expectations from England and in each one was the common longing to survive and get home. Nothing more. To survive the cholera and the dysentery, the shot and shell the enemy rained upon them, the siege and the enemy which besieged them. Somehow to get up that invisible track to Balaclava and on to the first transport they could arrange to England. They had been taken for soldiers and had not argued since that was the only way to be fed. They existed, when they were on the duty they were forced to do, in the mud and rain and bitter cold of the trenches, returning to sleep in
wet clothes on the wet ground of their dugout.

  ‘D’you remember the fatty-cakes Cook used to make for the servants? We used to turn up our noses at them as some quaint dish of the working class.’

  ‘They’d be bloody welcome now . . .’ But the rest of what Drew Greenwood said was cut off by the clear call of a bugle and with a muffled exclamation both young men leaped to their feet, threw aside the canvas of their ‘home’ and with a hundred others began to move towards the source of the sound.

  Tessa read Drew’s letter again then stood up and strode towards the door, gathering up her crop and jacket as she went. She would ride over to Edgeclough and visit Annie. It was a week since she had seen her and in that time she had done nothing but tear about from one place to another in search of some occupation which would keep her from going mad with boredom . . . and grief. There were, after all, only so many hours in which one could ride to hounds, and besides the season had ended with the coming of early summer. She had ridden for hours across the burgeoning moorland grasses, called time and time again at the Hall with the excuse that she brought news of Drew and Pearce and though the Squire and his friends welcomed her warmly, the Squire’s lady could not quite forget Tessa Harrison’s behaviour at the ball last year. She and Robby Atherton had been the talk of the community then and after all it had come to nothing.

  March had seen the allies making preparation for the bombardment against Sebastopol. In April there was what Pearce called a ‘skirmish’ at a place called the Mamelon. In May an expedition was despatched to Kertch with the express purpose of seizing the strait which led into the Sea of Azoff through which the Russian supplies were sent, and in June the Mamelon described by Pearce was captured. In July and August the Allies crept nearer to victory, and on the ‘glorious twelfth’ Tessa accompanied the Squire and his guests, shooting grouse, partridge and pheasant, drifting very pleasantly through the late summer and autumn days, the depth of her sadness hidden away beneath her wild, high-strung laughter. It was a pity about her cousins, they said, still, for some reason known only to themselves, out there fighting in the Crimea when they might have been having such fun with them, but they had Tessa to amuse them. She was so exhilarating, reckless and willing to do anything they did in her search for pleasure, careless and indifferent to the opinions of others. She wore her new outfit, designed by herself and made up for her by a disapproving Miss Maymon who had never created such garments in her life, of black riding jacket, sleek, skin-tight breeches and a white, watered-silk waistcoat. She wore a black top hat, a white frilled stock and black riding boots and was vastly amused, she told an admiring Nicky Longworth, by the consternation of the commercial and manufacturing society of the Penfold Valley who had, no doubt, thought her roistering days had come to an end with the departure of her cousins for the Balkans. She caused a sensation on the hunting field at the start of the new season, in the company of the wild and, in her mother’s opinion, unstable fox-hunting set of Crossfold who were, they thought, beyond being amazed at anything Tessa or her missing cousins did.

  She was herself again, in other words, arrogant, conceited and charming and the harsh desolation of her nightly weeping was known to no one. They were not aware, those who condemned her wildness, that only in such desperate frivolity, the light-minded and heedless search for ‘fun’ which was the sole aim of the set of which she was a part, could she momentarily displace her deep unhappiness. The despairing misery which washed over her when she was alone was held at bay only by the total abandonment with which she flung herself into their giddy lives. What else was she to do, she asked herself hopelessly, when she was alone with her ghosts? The brief fling she had enjoyed with Robby Atherton, who had not been seen at the Hall since, was over with neither the worse for it, they were saying, though of course her reputation would never be the same again. Only she knew that she would never be the same again.

  In short, she fitted again into the world of the squirearchy, the gentry and the lesser aristocracy as she and her cousins had always done, preferring ploughed fields and recklessly taken ditches, damp drizzled mornings of moorland, wind and foul weather to the polite and civilised world of dinner parties, soirées and evenings of culture which her aunt by marriage, the socially ambitious Mrs Charles Greenwood, thought she should favour. She was known quite definitely to join the gentlemen in their after-dinner billiards and claret and to have won quite a large sum of money at some card game at the Hall. A restive colt again, she appeared to be, impatient of all restraint, though those who spoke of it agreed that at almost twenty she was long past the age to be coltish.

  ‘She’s trying to kill herself,’ they said, not at all surprised for it was known they, meaning herself and her cousins, had always been mad.

  ‘She will kill herself,’ Laurel declared when the wild, hell-raking stories of Tessa Harrison’s disdain for her own life and limb became common knowledge and her mother grew old before their eyes, agonising not only on the peril to her daughter’s physical safety, but on that to her mind.

  ‘Why don’t you come to the mill with me, lass?’ she asked carefully one day in September. ‘Come and see what you make of it.’

  ‘Drew and Pearce made nothing of it, Mother,’ she answered in that coolly impersonal voice in which she addressed Jenny Harrison, ‘so why should I?’

  ‘You have more sense than the two of them put together, if you’d care to put it to some use.’

  ‘At the mill, you mean?’

  ‘Aye, why not? It helped me when I was . . .’

  ‘What, Mother?’

  ‘When I needed my mind taking off things.’

  ‘And is that what I need?’

  ‘You are still . . . still not yourself, lass,’ she said awkwardly. Neither am I, she thought and can you wonder after what has happened to us both? The very foundation of their lives had been disturbed, roots which they had thought to be securely settled almost torn out, roots which were still shaky and prey to any stray breeze which might blow against them. It was as though the rock to which they had both thought themselves firmly fastened had become dislodged and they must take care, in their fragile relationship, not to tumble down the scree which loomed beneath them.

  ‘I didn’t hear you come in last night, Tessa, and I was awake until past midnight. I know it’s the acceptable thing for young men to go skylarking into the early hours, but it won’t do for you.’

  ‘It’s a bit late to be concerned about my reputation, Mother, if that’s what’s bothering you, and I was not out all night. And besides, Nicky and Johnny are as good as brothers to me, just as Drew and Pearce were, and until they return home I’m quite safe with their friends.’

  ‘That’s as maybe . . .’

  ‘We only rode up to Friar’s Mere to see if the ghosts of the monks really do walk as they say they do when the moon is full.’

  ‘Why, in heaven’s name?’

  ‘Why not, Mother? It is no more senseless than your going each day to the mill to watch cotton being spun and woven.’

  ‘That cotton buys the line blood horses you ride and that outrageous outfit you wear.’

  ‘Mother . . . if you don’t mind I am due at the . . .’

  ‘Lass, I’m only trying to help you. To give you something . . . a purpose, a road to set your feet on again.’

  ‘Really, Mother, I have a road . . .’

  ‘No, you have not. A wild track, that’s all, and where will it lead?’

  ‘Can you honestly see me doing what you do all day? Sitting at my desk planning business strategy, dealing with commercial gentlemen from Manchester or wherever it is they come from? I would not know a bale of raw cotton from a . . . from a carding machine, nor a mule from a loom, and as for the financial side, well, it’s as incomprehensible to me as how to sew a fine seam.’

  ‘You could learn, child, and it would give you some diversion other than riding about the countryside with that wild pack of your cousins’ friends. You need something else besides . .
.’

  ‘I have something else, Mother. I have been invited to go down to Leicestershire with the Longworths. The Squire’s lady seems to have relented and pardoned me my lapse of good manners of last year. She seems to be of the opinion that having been . . . been jilted by a gentleman whom I, a member of the manufacturing classes, should not have had the ill-breeding to monopolise in the first place, I can now be forgiven. I can consider myself under her patronage, she says, providing I don’t try to marry her son.’

  The young soldier lay on the narrow cot. Every time he twisted his racked body the blanket which covered him was thrown violently aside and each time it fell, the second soldier who sat by his bed patiently recovered it and patted it tenderly back into place.

  The enormous room was filled with the subdued murmur of men’s voices, some, like this soldier, babbling in delirium, others whispering, mumbling, staring upwards into the high, vaulted ceiling, some perhaps praying, others on the road to recovery or not so badly hurt or ill, talking quietly to one another.

  There was a mixture of odours, the overall stench of putrefaction and vomit, of blood and excrement, almost but not quite masked, by the smell of good carbolic soap and antiseptic.

  A nurse stopped and put a hand on the brow of the soldier in the bed, smiling at the man who sat beside him. She was decently dressed in a neat grey gown over which she wore a huge white apron. Her hair was confined in a white cap and she reminded the soldier of a capable nanny he had had as a child. There were a dozen or more just like her, moving from bed to bed; others were scrubbing floors, up to their elbows in buckets of lye-soap as they patiently attempted to keep at bay the cholera, the typhus, the dysentery and the half a dozen other diseases which were killing more men than had been cut down in battle.