The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

  And it was a parlous one. Betts was not the only man to complain of the apparent misconception that cavalry horses could function without food. Within a week of their arrival at Balaklava hay rations were restricted to six pounds per animal per day, and oats were a near-forgotten luxury. The effects of relentless marching, scarce and poor feed and extremes of temperature were plain to see. Once proud and pampered chargers looked dull and scraggy as donkeys. It was, as Betts said, ‘Enough to make a saint swear,’ and he was no saint.

  He was no great rider and certainly no swordsman, but this did not prevent him from joining foraging parties to the cultivated area along the Tchernaya River some seven miles away, where in early October there was baled hay for the taking. Unarmed astride a pack-pony he set off with the troopers to return on more than one occasion with hair-raising stories of Cossack ambush and headlong flight.

  Undernourished as he was he seemed to be able to subsist on less than other men, getting through days at a time on tobacco, rum and coffee and sharing his hard rations with the horses. When Harry upbraided him for this he had a plain answer.

  ‘You can do without me, sir, but you can’t do without them.’

  ‘It’s not a question of what I can or can’t do without, Betts, but of your own health and strength. You force me to say it – your life.’

  ‘Them’s my life.’

  This Harry had to concede was probably the truth. Betts had no family and his future if he returned to England was at best uncertain. While the horses lived and he could be of service to them, he too had a reason to live. He it was who still could not reconcile himself to the loss of Piper.

  ‘I hate to think of it,’ he would remark, shaking his head dourly. ‘That one was superior horseflesh whichever way you look at it.’

  ‘He’d never have survived all this.’

  ‘Maybe not, sir, but we’d have seen him right,’ was Betts’s bizarre logic. ‘How those bloody natives will have treated him don’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘He may have been rounded up by our men. The Heavies were there.’

  ‘He weren’t no heavy, sir, they’ll have had no use for him.’

  This too was correct, but when the Heavies did arrive both Harry and Betts could only hope that Piper wasn’t among them, for their delayed voyage from Varna had been a terrible one. Betts went down to the docks to witness the arrival of the first contingent of Heavies and came back chalky white and tight-lipped about what he had seen. With the onset of autumn the storms had been many times worse than anything they’d encountered and on one ship alone the overcrowding below decks had been so bad that two-thirds of the horses had either died or had to be destroyed. On another an entire deck had collapsed, sending the officers’ chargers plunging down on top of the troopers’ horses in the hold below and causing terrible confusion and carnage.

  ‘You got horses at home, sir?’ Betts asked, and when Harry replied that there were carriage and work horses, he commented dourly: ‘Best place for ’em.’

  The 11th Hussars formed the second line. Before them, to right and left, were the 13th Light Dragoons and the 17th Lancers, and behind them the 8th Hussars and 4th Light Dragoons, with each regiment’s two squadrons in line. Out in front their brigade commander on his big, white-socked chestnut sat haughty and motionless. The excitable Captain Nolan, who not long ago had hurtled down the Sapoune cliff-face bearing the order to attack, was in the front line to the left of Cardigan, his horse fretting and fussing like its rider in what was otherwise a curious pocket of quiet.

  Harry glanced at Fyefield next to him. His profile was inscrutable, but a film of perspiration shone on his forehead. On the neck of his horse, Constant, the rough coat showed several small scars.

  Sensing Harry’s eyes on him, Fyefield muttered: ‘We’ve waited a long time for this. Let’s hope we put up a good show.’

  And live to hear the applause, thought Harry. He felt the rustle of the precious letters between his tunic and his heart: the black feather was tucked into his sabretache. And live.

  It was twenty-past eleven when the trumpet sounded ‘Walk’.

  It was thought right and proper to celebrate harvest home in the usual way, because it was what Mr Latimer would have liked. And both his widow and the young Mrs Latimer confirmed this view. Not that in private they didn’t have their differences on the matter. ‘You’re surely not thinking of going?’ Maria’s eyebrows shot up.

  ‘I most certainly am,’ replied Rachel. ‘I’d take part in the Mickelmas Charge if I thought it would make a difference.’

  ‘The baby will come when it’s ready.’ Maria preached patience admirably for a woman who was herself congenitally impatient. ‘There is nothing you can do.’

  Though Rachel knew this to be true, and tried to make light of the situation, she was terribly afraid there might be something wrong. She was over thirty and had never had a child before, nor did she have a close female relative to confide in, so she didn’t know what to think. She was a full two weeks beyond her predicted time, and the inert weight inside her was beginning to seem ominous.

  ‘All’s well,’ the doctor had told her – the same Dr Jaynes Maria had characterised as an idiot during Percy’s illness but whom she now commended to Rachel as an omniscient professional – ‘there’s nothing whatever to worry about.’

  ‘But it never moves any more.’

  ‘That’s because it’s a fine big child and there is no longer any room for it to move. The head is engaged. We must simply wait for nature to take its course.’

  His avuncular plural infuriated Rachel. ‘We?’

  ‘I used the word sympathetically.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘Then I stand corrected. But please be reassured.’

  She was not, and when she encountered Ben’s mother helping to prepare the tithe barn for harvest home, Rachel drew her aside and asked: ‘Mrs Bartlemas – may I ask you something of a rather personal nature?’

  Mrs Bartlemas glanced around warily. ‘Please do, mum.’

  ‘You have a large and healthy family. Is it normal for a pregnancy to go so long past its time as mine has?’

  ‘Oh, is that all!’ This was an area where Mrs Bartlemas had all the breezy confidence of experience. ‘There isn’t any “normal” as you put it, they’re all as different before they’re born as they are afterwards. Some are in a rush, some dawdle, some are nothing but trouble. Looks like you got a dreamer in there.’

  ‘I hope so. Do you think—’ She hesitated and Mrs Bartlemas cocked her head to one side, prompting her. ‘Do you think this means I shall have a bad time of it?’

  ‘Heavens above, no! On the contrary, the readier it is, the quicker it’ll happen when it does.’

  Another thing which experience had taught Corrie Bartlemas was the necessity and value of the great lie.

  They moved forward at the walk, over heavy ploughed ground. The pocket of silence which had seemed to enclose them was now full of the creak of leather, the jingle of bits and spurs and the soft rumble of hooves. One or two of the horses sidestepped and broke stride, excited by the sounds. The terrier scampered back and forth alongside the 8th, full of exuberant energy on this fine morning.

  On the slopes and ridges on either side the dense masses of armed men, still eerily holding their fire, were like patches of trees or scrub, a part of the landscape. Here and there the sun glinted off a rifle barrel as it the enemy were signalling a warning. Still at the walk they left the ploughed surface and were now on cultivated land, sometimes treading on crumpled vines, already crushed by the first line. Clemmie caught her foot and stumbled and Harry’s whole body was instantly bathed in a sweat of shock.

  Until that moment he had not realised how afraid he was.

  * * * * *

  By the second week in October the camp of the Light Brigade had been moved north and west to a position right of Raglan’s HQ on Sapoune Heights. But if the Commander in Chief had thought to flatter his disgrun
tled cavalry by making them conspicuous, he was disappointed.The compliment was a poisoned chalice. Conspicuous they might be but in camp, and therefore dismounted, they were also painfully vulnerable and all agreed they should not have been placed in such an exposed position.

  Also, the soubriquet ‘Look-ons’ which was now generally used of the Lights appeared doubly unjust when they were in many respects the most hard-worked division in the army. The tasks of foraging, picketing, scouting and patrolling all seemed to fall to them and as the nights grew longer and less friendly they were subjected by the enemy to what amounted to a war of nerves.

  The Russians were now massed along the Tchernaya River at the north-eastern end of the broad basin divided in two by the ridge of the Causeway heights, so close in fact that a night patrol at an equidistant point could clearly see the cooking fires of both armies. Sentries and vedettes were understandably jumpy and there were numerous nocturnal alarms, all of which necessitated a cavalry stand-to. More often than not the last of these would be in the small hours only to be succeeded, an hour before dawn, by the regular stand-to which could last for a further two hours or more with only the most paltry breakfast to look forward to.

  Cholera was still with them and men debilitated by the cold, the poor diet and all manner of minor infections were increasingly susceptible to it. There was a constant traffic between the camps and the harbour of sick men being taken to the hospital ships, and the regimental bands were dispensed with in order that the bandsmen could be employed as ambulance men and makeshift medical orderlies. Without them the camps became sombre, cheerless places without so much as a bugle call to raise the spirits. As if to rub salt in this particular wound the Turkish encampments sprawled around the redoubts above the Woronzov highway rang night and day with wild pipe music, suggesting all kinds of abandoned activities not vouchsafed to the British.

  Harry wrote to Rachel: ‘You can imagine how we feel when we hear the cheerful din from the bashi-bazouks – it is terribly galling! But I must say that we also have a certain respect for these fellows who have in the main fought fiercely and well when required, who are treated contemptuously by the majority of our officers (who should know better), and who have precious little to be cheerful about in the way of material comforts. They must have an especially sanguine disposition as well as tremendous fighting spirit. We miss our music and realise just how inspiring and heartening it is now that we no longer have it. As I miss England, and Bells, and those that I love ...’

  Here Harry refrained as always from saying more clearly and personally what his feelings were, but with the letter still uncompleted he received Rachel’s with the news of his father’s death.

  It left him in turmoil. He was felled by sadness for his father for whom he had felt an unspoken kinship not only of blood but of the soul, who had died with so much unexpressed between them, and tortured also by remorse that, God forgive him, he had thought so little of him in recent weeks.

  And through all the wretchedness, like a tenacious English wild flower, there was his love for Rachel who had been with Percy and Maria and performed the services that he, their son, should have performed. And who had written to him with such simple understanding and sincerity that he seemed to hear her quiet voice. He had wept – for his father, and his mother, and for Rachel. For Hugo, gone before. But mostly, he knew, for himself.

  Rachel would always remember the music. Paget and his cronies played up a storm, the tithe barn had been bursting with it, the galloping rhythms of jigs, reels and polkas and the sweet, haunting lilt of waltzes and twosteps, and it followed her and Corrie Bartlemas as they walked through the crisp night the few hundred yards to Bells.

  Now and again the two women paused, and stood arm in arm, the vapour of their breath melting together.

  ‘Plenty of time . . .’ said Corrie once. And the next time, ‘Lean on me.’ There was no longer the need for any spoken formality between them.

  When they left the lee of the farm buildings and came round the corner of the house with the full glory of the sky overarching them, Corrie stopped of her own accord.

  ‘Look at those stars.’

  Rachel looked up, and there was a comfort in the stars’ calm, bright distance as there was in her companion’s sturdy closeness. Both, she felt, had seen so much of this experience that was so common and so unique.

  ‘They talk about the music of the stars, don’t they?’ murmured Corrie. ‘I wonder what sort of music that is . . . sad, I should think.’

  As they opened the door, Cato was there waiting for them. He rose stiffly and plodded to greet Rachel with his big head hanging and his tail waving slowly.

  ‘He knows,’ said Corrie as she patted him. ‘He knows all right. They’re wonderful, are animals.’

  Another pain surged, gripped, receded, and Rachel sank down on the high-backed chair. Now that she was back in the house she was afraid as she hadn’t been out of doors. Here was the weight of expectation and of a tribal history not her own. The young Hugo grinned carelessly down at her from the family portrait she’d so often admired. She felt alone and alienated.

  ‘Corrie . . . What must I do?’

  ‘Nothing, my love, nothing at all. Do what you want to do.’

  ‘The doctor is coming?’

  ‘He is, Little’s gone for him. But you’re not sick. You’re having a baby.’

  ‘But it hurts.’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘How much worse will it get?’

  The great lie must now be modified. Corrie chose her words carefully. ‘It’s going to get stronger, but that’s because all the time your baby’s getting closer.’

  Rachel gripped her hand. ‘You won’t go?’

  ‘You may depend on it.’

  ‘What about your own family?’

  ‘Dan’s at the dance, he’ll take them home. And Mercy’s there too, even Ben won’t dare give her any trouble.’

  They stayed in the hall for a while, with the door standing open, the music drifting in. Rachel sat in the high-backed wing chair and Corrie perched next to her on the chest, clasping her hand, tapping on the back of it with her fingers in time to the tunes. Cato lay before them, gazing with heavy-lidded patience. When his mistress gasped he thumped his tail encouragingly.

  It began to feel cold and Corrie got up to close the front door. As she did so the fiddlers in the barn struck up with something fast and furious and they could hear the whoops and cheers of the dancers taking the floor with renewed vigour.

  The next two pains were closer together and they made their way upstairs with Cato following at a respectful distance, stopping when they did, waiting, moving on. Corrie lit the fire in the bedroom while Rachel took off her clothes, and the dog stretched out before the pale new flames with a contented sigh.

  Rachel asked for the window to be opened but Corrie demurred.

  ‘You’ll let the warmth out.’

  ‘I’m hot. And I want to hear the music’

  That was at eight o’clock. The doctor didn’t arrive, but they managed together.

  Just before midnight Paget on his own began playing a last, wistful waltz: a dance for lovers. And Rachel’s baby was born, and laid on the pillow next to her. Round and pink with wide, opaque eyes and thick black hair which as it dried sprang into elfin curls.

  ‘But she’s beautiful!’

  ‘What did you expect?’ Corrie laughed as she set about the clearing up. ‘A monster?’

  ‘She has hair like Hugo’s . . .’

  ‘She does, a good head of hair. And I tell you why she’s the belle of the ball.’ Corrie rolled a sheet briskly around her two forearms.

  ‘The longer they wait, the prettier they are.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘Because they’re properly cooked, that’s why.’

  ‘Just think, Corrie, no one knows she’s here except you and me. Isn’t that nice?’

  ‘A secret for a little while, then.’

  ‘Th
en we must let Maria know . . .’ Rachel touched her daughter’s cheek, where the skin was fine as air. ‘And you must tell Ben – and ask him to come and see me.’

  ‘All in good time.’ Corrie came to the head of the bed and stood looking down at them. ‘And what are you going to call her?’

  Harvest home was over. The doctor came as the last revellers left the barn and began the walk home down the long, starlit hill, beneath the pale horse that leapt for the moon. Belle Latimer slept, while her mother bled.

  After two hundred yards they broke into a trot, and the Russian artillery on either side of the valley opened fire. To maintain their steady pace beneath the fusillade became an act of collective pride. The parade ground could not inspire courage, but it had instilled the discipline which made courage possible.

  The first volley of shells exploded around the front line. A minute later a white-eyed horse came plunging furiously back through the ranks, terrified of its lolling, bleeding burden. Harry retained a swift and terrible impression of the officer still upright in the saddle, staring wildly, chest slit to the heart and jacket scorched, empty sword arm raised in a gruesome parody of leadership.

  ‘Nolan!’ shouted Hector. ‘Got what he wanted at last!’

  Granted this glimpse of the glory to come, they trotted on.

  Harry had written at once to his mother, and found himself curiously lost for words. His heartfelt expressions of grief and sympathy appeared stilted and inadequate, and he only hoped that she would read into them the genuine feeling that was there. After all, whatever the shortcomings of his own relationship with his father, Maria’s had been a full, complete flowering. Her grief would not be stained, like his, by remorse.