‘Hardly defeated, Miss Gordon.’
‘Deflected then,’ she snapped, her hand waving imperiously. The evident passion made her look so much more beautiful than her pose of English reserve. ‘Stopped, avoided, deferred.’
‘Please, Miss Gordon, my poor Irish wits don’t run to such a lesson in wordplay.’
‘I dislike your condescension as much as I disapprove of your being obtuse. You behave as if any notion, in a female head, must be mere fancy.’
He bowed slightly. ‘Then I must make amends with my feet, for the mistakes from my mouth.’
‘Imagine if they were both to come here.’
‘Neither of Louis’ brothers will stir from their retreats, I’d take money on it. Even if they were titled King of France.’
There was a twinkle in her eye as she began to move, a look that hinted at secret knowledge. And added to that was just a touch of triumph. ‘Don’t be too sure about that, Mister Clever Dick Markham!’
His attempt to ask her what she meant was interrupted by the commotion at the door. An ensign, covered in dust and clearly out of breath, was scanning the room. As soon as he saw Elphinstone he ran towards him, pushing the dancers out of the way. Since the Captain had moved closer to the dancing couple, so as to keep his eye on Markham, they were able to hear the message very clearly.
‘The Dons, sir. They launched an attack on the batteries opposite the Fort de Malbousquet.’
‘Damn Spaniards,’ growled Elphinstone, ignoring the fact that many were still present. Markham was vaguely aware of Hood and his party pushing through the crowd as the ensign continued.
‘They’ve been thrown back, Captain, with heavy losses. Some of them are abandoning the defences, and taking the Neapolitans with them. If the French take advantage of their reserve, the whole line will crumble.’
Elphinstone’s voice rose, as Hanger took station by his side. He first commanded the band to cease playing, then every officer to return to his post. His eyes swung round to Markham, still holding his niece’s hand.
‘Markham,’ he demanded, ‘what’s your strength?’
‘A mere two dozen, sir.’
‘But not occupied in the line?’
‘No.’
Hanger cut in. ‘I suggest they be sent anyway, if only to give a semblance of resistance.’
Elphinstone was looking at his niece when he nodded.
‘Get your men up to Malbousquet at the double,’ Hanger ordered. ‘Hold the trenches before the sally port until the Spaniards can get you some reinforcements.’
‘Sir.’
‘And Lieutenant,’ added Elphinstone, ‘this is an emergency. You cannot fall back. You’re to die there, this time, if necessary. No more of your damned retreats.’
The only thing that made the insult bearable was the way his niece swooned.
Chapter sixteen
It was cold, and before an hour had passed the rain began to fall. A light drizzle that seemed to work its way through the necks of the rankers’ oilskin capes, it produced muted moans and curses even though Markham had ordered complete silence. The poorly constructed trenches close to the river bed, so recently occupied by Spaniards, stank, with all the filth that an army could produce beginning to float around their boots. Markham spent more time looking back towards Toulon, still lit up like an invasion beacon, than at the enemy. If they wanted to come, then he had neither the force to disrupt their preparations, nor the men to stop them. And there was certainly insufficient flow in the river to do more than wet their feet.
He was more concerned that the promised reinforcements hadn’t arrived. Out in no man’s land, scavengers were picking over the bodies of those soldiers who’d died there, as well as the wounded. The cries for some form of succour, which had filled the night air when they arrived, tended to be short-lived. Those who desecrated soldiers’ bodies were not the type to balk at dispatching to perdition someone whose property they desired.
‘We have got to get the men out of these trenches, sir,’ said Rannoch, as soon as the rain stopped. ‘The air is mortal with all this filth. And the rain will only make it worse. Half of them will be down with a bloody flux in a matter of days.’
‘We can’t, Sergeant. As soon as we put our heads above the parapet they’ll be silhouetted against the lights from the town.’
‘They should have been doused ages past.’
‘Someone forgot,’ Markham replied bitterly. ‘Just like they seem to have forgotten that we are here in the first place.’
‘Then let us go back to the rear. It is not going to make much difference, two dozen men. If those French devils come, we will have to run.’
‘I have strict orders to die here, if necessary.’
Rannoch’s harsh reply was a complete throwback to his behaviour when they’d first come ashore. ‘Then I hope you have got the sense to tilt a deaf ear to such nonsense.’
‘Pull the men back through the supply trench and get them above ground between here and the redoubt. I’ll keep watch.’
‘Sir,’ the sergeant replied, after a loud exhalation of breath. Markham wondered what he’d have said to him if he hadn’t agreed, indeed was almost tempted to ask. But he was gone, slipping along the line, whispering to each man in turn, urging them down off the firestep, with orders to follow him. The slightest noise earned the perpetrator a hissed curse. Soon Markham was alone, in the Stygian darkness, wrapped in his heavy blue cloak with only his thoughts as company, thoughts which centred on how he’d come to end up here in the first place.
His silent profanities against the Spaniards were partly due to the situation, but more to do with Lizzie Gordon. The opportunities to tumble someone like her would come rarely, if ever, outside a marriage bed. But he’d had her in retreat, mentally conceding an interest in him, manifested in her obvious jealousy, that made anything possible. She knew she was a beauty, and resented the idea of some other woman taking precedence over her in any man’s eyes. And in his experience, that lever of envy was often enough to make even the most chaste creature reckless.
Such thoughts were no good for a man in his position, stuck in a badly constructed trench reeking with the putrid odour of human filth. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for this. In America and Russia, apart from a brief period before the surrender at Yorktown, he’d fought wars of movement, in the former country hemmed in by a dense landscape, in the latter over the vast expanses of open steppe. Darkness itself held no terrors, but the feeling of being constricted did.
A slight scuffing sound brought his mind back to the present. He peered forward, trying to discern some shape in the unrelieved blackness of the night. With a vivid imagination, it was all to easy to conjure up outlines and profiles that dissolved as soon as he seemed to have them fixed. But another sound, of something hard like metal knocking on wood, had every nerve in his body stretched taut. The French might have sent a party forward to see if the trench was still occupied. That in itself was scarifying enough. But worse was the notion that it might be the scavengers. Somehow the idea that he’d have his throat cut by one of that breed made his flesh crawl. They’d strip him of everything, perhaps even mutilate his body, and leave him naked to be found by his men at first light.
His hand, holding the pistol under his cloak, was clammy with sweat. The rain began to fall again, light, thin stuff that blew into his eyes. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing up, adding to the feeling that someone was close to him. In his imagination he could hear them breathing, even the pounding of an adjacent heart, until he realised it was his own.
Suddenly, the French sent up a flare, and there right in front of his eyes, silhouetted against the stark blue light, was the unmistakable shape, wrapped in some kind of scarf, of a human head. The figure rose swiftly, an arm coming aloft with the outline of a vicious-looking blade catching his eye. He struggled to pull out his pistol, conscious that it was caught in the folds of his heavy, damp cloak. Aware that he was too slow, he set hi
mself to jump backwards as the thin flash of steel flashed by his head, and took the crouching figure in the chest.
He could hear Rannoch cursing in his ear, twisting his bayonet in his victim’s guts as his pistol came free. Another figure rose to his left, beyond the sergeant’s arm, black against the blue-lit sky, raising a club with which to smash out his sergeant’s brains. The flash of Markham’s pistol showed the face, swarthy, snarling and, though as ugly as sin, quite definitely female. She jerked back as his bullet took her in the head, and her screams were added to those of Rannoch’s prey, sounds that died away as both expired.
‘They were women,’ Markham gasped.
‘And poor souls they will be, too. The kind of men they bide with will be the sort to send them out to do the dirty work, then drink the proceeds when they get home.’
‘Thank you, Rannoch,’ he whispered, adding after a slight pause, ‘that’s not the first time I should have said that.’
‘We cannot have you getting killed, Lieutenant Markham. We might get a real Marine officer in your place. Then we would be totally in the shit, instead of just up to our ankles.’
In the dark, it was hard to work out Rannoch’s exact meaning. The irony in his tone was easy to detect. But the words, even then, had the capacity to diminish, even wound him.
‘Have I just been complimented or damned?’ he asked.
‘You are alive, are you not?’
‘D’you think more of these wretches will try to take us?’
They might at that. The riverbed in front provides a place for them to hide, and we have got no blue lights to send aloft. When I saw the Frenchmen put one up I expected to hear the sound of a charge.’
‘That wasn’t put up for an attack. More likely the scavengers are near their trenches as well. I suppose they tried the same thing on Johnny Crapaud.’
‘They are not the kind to care whose body they strip, that is for certain.’
Markham didn’t want to think about that. ‘Was there any sign of help on the way?’
‘None that I could see.’
‘It’d be best if we were back to back. That way we will reduce the chance of getting skewered.’
Rannoch complied, the broad shoulders in his oilskin cape providing more security to Markham than he did to the Highlander. He thought about reloading his pistol, but that would require some form of light, which would be certain to attract the attention of anyone still grubbing about in no man’s land. The rain had stopped again, and overhead he could see that the cloud cover had broken, which produced a modicum of starlight and allowed them a few feet of vision. It also dropped the temperature quite drastically, and he shivered inside his cloak.
‘We’re in for a long night, Sergeant,’ Markham whispered.
‘And a cold one,’ Rannoch murmured in reply.
The risk of one, or even both of them, falling asleep, was acute, so the conversation which followed, carried on in an undertone, was an aid to staying awake. It wasn’t long before Markham understood how little they had to talk about. The subject of improving shooting was soon exhausted, and he didn’t really wish to inquire as to the man’s opinion about his qualities as an officer. Nor was the sergeant the type to respond to personal questions, even of the most vague nature, which threw Markham back upon his own history.
‘What do you and the men know of me?’ he whispered suddenly. ‘Of my past?’ Rannoch stiffened, hesitating, clearly aware that reply with a negative would fly in the face of all logic. ‘You may speak the truth, Sergeant.’
‘I know about what happened at the Battle of Guilford,’ Rannoch said slowly, his voice deeper than normal. ‘Or, at least what was said to have happened.’
‘I was fifteen at the time,’ Markham said suddenly, aware that he was speaking of things he never disclosed. ‘We’d tried to assault the courthouse three times. The regiment was in tatters, casualties screaming for help. And they were looking to me, the only officer still standing, for guidance.’
He couldn’t bring himself to explain that he hadn’t run away, but had left his post because he’d been told what the British Legion were up to in Salisbury, a hamlet where he’d been billeted for a week before the battle. In terms of atrocities, the British army in America was bad enough. But when it came to rapine, the cavalry of Tarleton’s British Legion were in a different class. There wasn’t even a semblance of restraint on their behaviour, with their commander positively encouraging them to rape, murder and burn.
‘I stayed, for a week before the battle, with a family in Salisbury.’
‘And that is why you left the regiment?’
‘I thought we’d be rested. It never occurred to me that Cornwallis would ask us to go back into the battle. If I had, I would have stayed, regardless of my feelings.’
Rannoch’s voice was suddenly even softer than his previous whispering. ‘A girl, then?’
The quiet laugh that preceded Markham’s positive reply had more despair in it than humour. ‘Flora Imrie.’
‘The same age?’
‘Older by a year. I found out she’d been raped repeatedly before being thrown, to join the rest of her family, into the flames of her own burning house. The soldiers of the British Legion boasted to me of what they’d done — watched, encouraged, by one of their officers, Lieutenant Augustus Hanger.’
‘Christ,’ said Rannoch.
‘He was so drunk he could barely stand upright. Laughed in my face when I demanded they be punished.’
‘That scar on his face,’ Rannoch prompted, which led Markham to believe he might know more than he was saying.
‘I paid for that. There was no one to stop him taking revenge.’
‘I wonder you are still alive.’
‘The surgeons of the British Legion were bigger drunkards than the men. They didn’t sew up his face very well. But I reckon I only survived because they gave him rum to dull the pain.’
‘They won at Guilford without you.’
‘Yes, Sergeant. But the cost was so high we had to retreat to Williamsburg. The thing I remember most is the carts full of wounded men, none of them receiving any attention. We were passing through a land inhabited by the same people as us. They spoke the same language, had the same customs, some must even have been related. But they shot at us. And after Salisbury and a hundred places like it, who can blame them?’
‘Kin against kin usually turns out to be the worst.’
‘You sound as if you know. Did you serve in America?’
‘I did. In the Twenty-ninth Foot.’
Markham nearly blurted out ‘Where?’, but stopped himself just in time. That regiment had been in America for decades, fighting throughout the Seven Years War with little distinction, so ill-disciplined that they were damned by General Wolfe before, during, and after his Quebec campaign. Responsible for the Boston massacre of 1774, in which half a dozen protesters had been shot down, the 29th Foot were credited with igniting the spark that started the whole bloody conflict that became the American Revolution. Some of the men who had fired that day had been convicted of manslaughter, which resulted in their being branded with the letter ‘M’ on the thumb.
‘Then you would have come home with as much credit as me.’
Rannoch snorted, angrily. ‘Rankers do not get credit. They get half-starved, beaten and robbed of their pay. They are lined up by men who are rich and stupid, and ordered forward in line so that they can be killed. When their lords and masters err, it is the bloody soldiers who pay. And when those poor souls return to their homes, they find the land they grew up on taken away.’
‘Why are you in the army, Rannoch?’
The ripple of anger was discernible through the man’s back, a feeling so intense that he was actually trembling, and Markham thought he heard something that was like a cross between a snarl and a sob. Rannoch too was being forced to remember, and perhaps experiencing a pain similar to that Markham had suffered when he realised that Flora Imrie, the first love of his youth, w
as dead.
‘Half starvation is a muckle better than the thing whole. I come from a place where keeping a sheep alive is more important than the life of a man, woman or child. I know, because when I have had to bury them, I was barred from using land that was fit for grazing.’
‘I was no more glad than you to get home,’ Markham murmured quickly.
Rannoch merely grunted, clearly unwilling to be any more open. So Markham kept talking, aware as he painted the balanced picture of the intervening years just how much he was leaving out. His mind was working on two levels, one recalling the truth and the other filleting it into a cheerful story. Not that he lied exactly, just that he indulged, as all people do, in the right to keep some things hidden. Thus his love of the bottle, after his return from America, was recounted as manly and amusing instead of destructive; the failures of his various ventures blamed on circumstance instead of stupidity.
Likewise, his decision to join the Russian army as a mercenary officer sounded romantic, when in truth it had been more to do with an empty purse and unbridled libido. Rannoch knew nothing of Muscovy, which filled an hour while Markham shared his knowledge of a nation whose love of drink outshone even that of the British; of soldiers who lied comprehensively and often, but laughed when exposed; of officers and men who were brave, romantic, clever and downright stupid, all at the same time, soldiers who could endure hardships of campaigning that would make any European wince.
He recalled part of the conversation he’d had with Lizzie Gordon, so talked of Major André. But Rannoch knew nothing of Hamlet, or Shakespeare, or even a modern playwright like Sheridan. It brought home to him just how narrow a world he’d occupied, and how far it was removed from the lives of ordinary mortals. And it was impossible not to compare his conversation with the more intimate words he’d spoken to Eveline Rossignol. He realised, not for the first time, how much easier he found it to talk to women than men. Was that because they were less inclined to judge him harshly, or because dignity was not so important as it was to his own gender?
A Shred of Honour Page 22