‘Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?’
—A.E. Housman, ‘A Shropshire Lad’
Harry 1854
The last time Harry had seen Colin Bartlemas it was springtime at Bells, and his old friend’s face had been round and pink as an English apple, a picture of rude health and optimism on the day he enlisted. Now, in the furious summer heat of the Black Sea coast, that same face was shrunken and aged beyond recognition by the agony which had killed him half an hour since.
Colin’s body smelled, not just of the sickness, but of rotten flesh, so that Harry was obliged to put a handkerchief to his own face to prevent himself from gagging. Imperfectly cleaned through lack of time, a crusted delta of dried vomit spread from the corner of the dead man’s mouth, attracting a gluttonous squadron of flies: death breeding life, nature at her most brutally logical. Harry slapped briefly at the flies with his handkerchief but they were far too numerous and persistent to drive off. The burial party were watching him with dull patience. He signalled them to get on with it, and walked away.
The French, who had been the bearers of the cholera from Marseilles, had suffered worst, but with allied encampments crushed together in the port’s arid hinterland, the disease had swiftly and disinterestedly extended its empire and already the two armies had suffered tens of thousands of fatalities. Haughty, handsome young officers who, like Harry, had never smelt a whiff of gunshot outside ceremonial occasions; and indomitably cheerful fighting men, drunks, reprobates, petty criminals, the lionhearted salt of the earth – once cholera had taken hold all were reduced within hours to mere carrion, food for the humming hordes. Some poor fellows had arrived one day and died the next, barely aware of their surroundings. The practice of decent, dignified funeral parties, headed by trumpeters and accompanied by the playing of solemn music, had long since been abandoned, rendered impractical in the face of so much death. And besides, to hear the ‘Dead March’ continually throughout the day and night had a depressing effect on the spirits. In such pitiless conditions, swift and effective disposal of the bodies was of the essence.
And yet Harry found shocking the way each corpse – which only hours before had been a man of good heart and high hopes was wrapped, removed and buried. The ground was baked to the consistency of rock; it took as many as a dozen men working flat out for two hours to dig a communal grave. It was not uncommon to see at least one of them collapse while at their task, a victim either of sheer exhaustion or the early stages of the disease they were struggling to contain. Many areas, like this, were now covered with rough mounds of earth like macabre giant molehills and Harry averted his eyes from the occasional protruding hand or leg of some wretched, inadequately covered cadaver.
Here he did what he could never have imagined doing and thanked God for the manner of Hugo’s death and the peace, intimacy and dignity which had accompanied his funeral. And that led him to pray again as he so often did for Rachel, with tortured, passionate fervour.
Clemmie waited for him with head hanging. She did not acknowledge or welcome his arrival by so much as a twitch. When he put his foot in the stirrup to mount, and the saddle yielded and settled with his weight, she still did not stir. He looked back to where the burial party were already shovelling the desiccated sod back on top of the bodies. Even on the makeshift shrouds it made a rattling sound. His eyes smarted and he wiped away the sweat with his cuff. Tonight he would have to write to Colin’s parents and tell them that their eldest child and only son, the apple of their eye, had died bravely in his country’s cause without ever glimpsing the enemy. But not how. He would spare them the swift, convulsive horror of this death, the way it leeched the life from a man in his prime in no more than a few hours, leaving a husk that even a mother would scarcely recognise.
He turned Clemmie’s head and rode back towards the camp. Nothing was as they had expected. In these terrible circumstances he could no longer say with certainty whether or not it was a mercy that they would never see a charge.
Looking back on all they’d been through, it troubled Harry that perhaps the euphoria of departure had been occasioned by no more than a spilling-over of strong feeling from a bored nation thirsty for excitement. And they had been susceptible to it themselves, only too ready to lap up the babel of adulation. They’d reached Varna without a shot fired except those mercifully expended on dying animals. It was almost forty years, a whole lifetime beyond the memory of the younger men, since a British Army had ridden out to war in Europe, sure as always of their greatness.
In the dead quiet – hideously apt expression – of this oppressive, flyblown, disease-ridden encampment, Harry was haunted by doubts. Stopped in their tracks, stranded and frustrated, doubt and depression settled on the army. Allied to the old enemy, France, and the courageous but untrustworthy Turks, and ranged against still-distant Russian forces of whose strength and precise location they were ignorant, for reasons that were unclear – although the pretext was the sinking of the Turkish fleet at Sinope – they sat here on the edge of the Black Sea, sickening and dying. Supplies were poor and sporadic, medical attention inadequate, and their future movements uncertain to say the least. He could not escape the impression that they had been sent here on a magnificent whim like roundshot from a gleaming cannon that had fallen dully, far short of its target.
Harry had so far escaped the cholera, but not the equally widespread and debilitating effects of worsening morale. Whatever they had been prepared for when they set sail from England almost three months ago, it had not been this. Pride, excitement, anticipation and (he admitted it) sheer ignorance had buoyed them up. There were some, both officers and men, who had seen battle in other theatres of war, but not many in the Light Cavalry. He had always considered himself able to stand aside from the more fatuous excesses of mess and parade-ground life, but now he realised, chastened, that he was no less spoilt and unthinking than his brother officers. He saw all too clearly that the Hussars had been for him a pleasant occupation in which the possibility of actually fighting a war had figured no more prominently than a distant flag, fluttering bravely in the sunlight. And when he had imagined battle it was the sound of the trumpet, the thunder of hooves, the much-vaunted élan of the Light Cavalry charge which he had envisaged. Instead there was this. This terrible inertia, sickness, hopelessness, uncertainty – and the heat. Both men and horses were entirely unprepared for it.
The exigencies of the voyage had been made bearable by the memory of their glorious send-off and the hope of more glory to come. For the first few days it was as though they could still hear the shouts and cheers of the huge crowd that had followed them to the docks, the boys hallooing and tossing their hats in the air, the old men with tears in their eyes, the women and girls blowing kisses and waving their handkerchiefs. Their ears rang with the music of the bands,‘Cheer,Boys, Cheer’ and ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’, stirring tunes for an expedition whose success, surely, was a foregone conclusion.
Later, when discomfort, seasickness and apprehension began to bite, they’d been able, borne on the strength of that public belief in their enterprise, to armour themselves in a sense of destiny. This after all was what they were if not exactly trained, then at least intended for. Even when in rough weather Harry went down to help calm the horses panicking in the hold, and saw in their rolling eyes the pure, violent terror of innocent victims he had told himself that the weather would pass, and with it the animals’ panic. Clemmie and Piper had no conception of what lay ahead. It wasn’t dread they felt. The difference between their fear now and their fear of a storm at home was only a question of degree. But the extent of their suffering was still terrible.
The memory of the battened-down horse-holds during the ceaseless storms in the Bay of Biscay would remain with him for ever. It was nothing less than a vision of hell: dark and noisome, clamorous with the screams of the sick and terrified horses as the pitching of the ship sent them crashing into their mangers in the fitful semi-darkness, and the oaths and shouts of the officers and men, themselves already faint and nauseous, who had stood by their heads for more than twenty-four hours and were now in danger of being trampled to death in the panic of the animals they were there to save.
Except for a very few there had been no room for the horses to lie down, but in the battering fury of the high seas they fell anyway, thrashing and convulsing against their neighbours, were hauled to their feet and fell again, on boards which were slick with blood, excrement, and vomit. With the smell of the lurching oil lamps, of ammonia, and of the vinegar thrown on the decks and wiped around the nostrils of the horses, the stench was enough to make even a well man retch, and its effect, especially on raw recruits who had never been to sea before, was catastrophic. Harry had been humbled by the stubborn, selfless courage of men, themselves in extremis, who in these terrifying circumstances put the lives of the horses before their own, going down time and again amid the lethally flying hooves, yelling oaths and endearments, using every scrap of their waning strength to right the animal, tugging and coaxing, fighting and cajoling, like a strange sort of lovemaking.
Of his own horses, Piper had suffered worst, because he trusted least. Clemmie, more familiar with his voice and touch, had seemed to believe that he would see her through, but Piper felt only betrayal. From first to last he trembled with a seismic ague of fear and incomprehension, his nostrils gaped and sucked, his neck and shoulders were encrusted with a scummy lather of sweat. In the rough seas he did not simply fall but hurled himself back on to his hocks, or reared and crashed sideways, causing further mayhem among the horses next to him. All his incandescent youthful fire and energy, the pride of the parade ground, amounted to no more than a liability here.
After the storms, came the heat. In the Mediterranean the temperature in the horse-holds rose to a toxic one hundred degrees. The surviving animals, themselves more dead than alive, hung alongside those already perished in their canvas slings like sides of meat in an abattoir. Others went mad, something Harry hoped never to witness again, and had to be shot. There would then follow the regular punishing business of dragging the heavy corpses up the companionway on to the deck and throwing them overboard. This activity, though it created more space, disturbed the other horses, so the whole grim business was undertaken against a background of stamping and slithering and the uneasy feeling that a stampede might be about to take place.
Once as he had stood on deck watching the corpses bobbing in their wake, a man next to him had said: ‘Sad sight, sir, isn’t it?’
‘One I never thought to see,’ he agreed.
‘Any of yours there, sir?’
‘No, thank God.’
‘Mine’s gone.’
Harry refrained from saying what he secretly felt, that the horses now sinking to the bottom of the sea might prove the lucky ones, and confined himself to a safe platitude.
‘At least his suffering’s over.’
‘Hers. My Lark.’
Whether this was the mare’s name or a term of endearment Harry had no way of knowing, but it touched him. ‘Poor old girl. I have a mare too.’
The man cast him a troubled look. ‘Will you be able to get us more horses, sir, when we get there?’
‘Of course. It will be an absolute priority.’
He was shocked, both by the question and by the glibness of his own lie. It was the first time that his own authority had been called directly into account. He was an officer in whom was invested not just rites and privileges but responsibility too. Of course they would need more horses – the bobbing wake of corpses testified to that – but how would that be achieved? And would it even be possible?
When they disembarked at Scutari the excitement of the horses at their new freedom was pathetic. As they led them, frisking and biting, through the shallow waves in blazing sunshine, the suffering they’d endured was all too plain to see. The pampered pets of Phoenix Park and Rotten Row were a sorry sight, and their released high spirits only emphasised their ribby flanks covered in galling and blisters, their scarred legs and staring coats.
On the sand ahead a pack of yapping, curly-tailed dogs raced excitedly among the new arrivals. When one pack horse stumbled and fell for the last time in the surf, not five yards from terra firma, the dogs fell on it in spite of the best efforts of the men round about and began tearing and shaking it when it was not yet dead, releasing a torrent of dark matter into the clear water, which the rest of them waded through, inured to disgust. Only Piper, darting and leaping like a kite on the end of his taut rein, would not pass through, and Colin was obliged to make a lengthy detour to get him ashore.
For the brief duration of their stay in Scutari, the conditions of men and horses were reversed, with the latter tolerably stabled, adequately if not satisfactorily fed, and at least content to be on dry land. The army on the other hand were billeted in an imposing but horrifically dilapidated Turkish barrack blocks, the dormitories alive with rats and the bedding so full of fleas that within twenty-four hours they were scratching themselves till the blood ran. The operation of the commissariat had largely failed, much of the supplies they had brought with them had not survived the journey in an edible condition, and very little had arrived here.
Harry and Hector Fyefield were among those deputed to round up more horses, but it was a dismal scraping-of-the-barrel exercise. Three days’ exhaustive trawling of noisome back-street stables and outlying farms, struggling with the language problem and an apparently intractable reluctance on behalf of the locals to help their brave English allies, resulted in barely three dozen animals of which more than half were runtish and undernourished and fit only for pack-duty.
Hector was scandalised. ‘These people are nothing but shiftless, filthy, cheating ruffians! Why the devil should we fight for them? I swear I’d rather be lined up with the Russians than with such a crowd of ne’er-do-wells.’
Harry was tempted to agree. It seemed they had travelled this far, and suffered so much, to meet with nothing but a grudging hostility. It was now that they were glad of the officers’ wives who had accompanied their husbands, and of whom even the plainer and less spirited ones provided a reminder of a more normal life. Even Emmeline Roebridge’s endless piping complaints about the vermin, the diet, the heat, the natives and the need for any of it, were a source of some wry amusement and helped them to put up with it all more stoically.
They were in Scutari no more than a month when, in early June, the order came through that they were to embark once again for the Bulgarian port of Varna. Though as a journey it did not compare in length to the one they’d recently endured it was still almost intolerable to have to go back on board ship, and especially to consign the horses, old and new, to the stifling torture of life below decks. True to form it was Piper who refused, with every quivering fibre, to do so, and since Harry would allow no one to resort to rough tactics it took half a dozen men exercising superhuman patience for more than an hour to get him up the gangplank and into the cauldron-like heat of the hold.
They lost no horses on that three-day voyage, but if they had thought that they were moving to more comfortable and better-managed conditions they were wrong.As they approached, the Bulgarian coast presented an aspect of dramatic beauty – the luxuriant green of the alluvial plain backed by purple mountains wearing plumes of dark thundercloud – but greater familiarity did nothing to gladden the heart. The hectic colour and chaos of their arrival in the heat of afternoon provided a temporary distraction from the horrors to come. The quayside was a feverish Tower of Babel, a jabbering confluence of east and west, north and south, packed with more different nationalities, styles of dress, uniforms, and languages than it was possible to count, horses fretting and shying, piles of arms and cannonballs, a motley traffic of waggons and aribas, and the ubiquitous sharp-nosed curly-tailed dogs looking for scraps and spoiling for trouble. But as the troops began to move off, the dismal reality of Varna was apparent. A more desolate, neglected and squalid place would have been hard to imagine, the streets no more than open sewers, littered with dead dogs and busy with fat rats, very much alive. The wretched infantry were obliged to camp close to the town in what had clearly been a graveyard for Russians who had died of disease during an earlier campaign and where the water came up thick and green.
So it was with mixed feelings of relief and trepidation that the cavalry set out to their own allotted position in Devna, fifteen miles to the north.
Once clear of Varna, they had at first been struck by the beauty of the countryside. Plump, peachy Emmeline Roebridge, her sturdy gelding unencumbered by any sort of baggage, had been in raptures during the eight-hour march to the site of the cavalry camp.
‘Oh, but this is enchanting – look at the flowers! And this little path through the woods is exactly like Hampshire but even prettier, I think, and on a grander scale of course, and the birdsong – listen, George – I never imagined that going to war would be so delightful!’
The birds were certainly beautiful, from the jewel-like finches flittering among the branches to the storks, trailing their spindly legs behind great white canopies of wing. And far, far above the kites and hawks, motionless on the currents of scorching air. And above them, so high as to be mere specks in the white heat of the sky, the slowly turning black blades that they would in time learn to recognise as vultures.
Emmeline twittered away like a bird herself, the tribulations of recent weeks quite forgotten, and it would have taken an extremely churlish fellow to disagree with her opinion or dislike her for it. The wide undulating plains, soft hills bathed in sunshine and the dappled shade of the woods were certainly pleasant, and the situation of the cavalry camp itself around a fine lake and its attendant river infinitely more agreeable than the awful place they had just left.
The sense of respite and relief, however temporary, prevented them from sensing the damp fumes of infection that rose from every fold in the land and even from the shining lake itself. George Roebridge thought it quite a joke to report to the others one pellucid evening that he had been speaking to one of the exotic, brigandly bashi-bazouks, who had told him that the place was known to the Turks as The Valley of Death. Amid the facetious bravado that greeted this information, Harry alone was quiet, contemplating for the first time the possibility that he might not see Rachel again.
The Russian retreat from Silistria on the Danube in late June, following several months’ ferocious besieging of the town and a spirited (but almost spent) defence by the Turks, had little effect except to induce a slightly greater respect in the British Army for their despised allies. As Hector Fyefield commented languidly after dinner one night not long afterwards: ‘Thank God the ruffians are on our side . . . I heard they cut off Russian heads, ears, noses, whatever they could, and displayed them like damned hunting trophies on the walls of the city.’
‘Before they ate them, I dare say,’ said Harry drily, but the tenor of his remark was lost on Hector, and George.
‘Shouldn’t be in the least surprised!’ agreed the latter. ‘Plenty of fire but not a finer feeling between the lot of them!’
‘So first blood to the infidel,’ sighed Hector. ‘And much help we were to them.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Harry, ‘this means we’ll get out of this wretched hole.’
George huffed. ‘I should hope so, or the Ruskies will be starting to think we don’t care to deal with them!’
Since then thousands more had succumbed to cholera, and there was still not the least sign that Lord Raglan and his staff intended to move them. Day in day out they drilled in the heat. Weakened men were hastened to their crowded graves by the perverse insistence on ‘smartness’, and horses already ill-fed and in poor condition were ridden to a standstill. In between times their brigade commander lay around in the shade outside his pleasantly situated requisitioned villa, conserving his energy, sipping champagne and endlessly devising new kinds of meaningless activity. The officers and men under Cardigan entertained mixed feelings for their commanding officer. They smarted under his lash – both literally, in the case of those flogged for feeling to meet his exacting standards, and that of his cruel tongue – but they also felt a degree of pride in being who they were, the chosen ones, the swiftest and most skilful horsemen in the army, glittering in their matchless uniforms.
At the end of June Cardigan departed with nearly two hundred men – hussars and light dragoons – to make a reconnaissance along the banks of the Danube. The party made a splendid sight as they left, brisk and unencumbered, because their leader had decreed that food and forage be kept to a minimum and tents were unnecessary. All but the most sceptical felt a certain stirring of the heart to see them. And then they disappeared. What had been foreseen as mission lasting no more than a few days stretched to a week, and more, and there was still no sign of them.
It was nearly a fortnight later when Harry rode out with Emmeline Roebridge, he on Clemmie, she on the lighter and somewhat reduced Piper. In the wake of the epidemic military routine had relaxed, both of necessity and for the husbanding of men and resources. Even uniforms had been adapted and altered, in some cases discarded altogether in favour of more practical native clothing – loose cotton tunics and waistcoats, voluminous trousers, even, in the case of some of the more daring officers, turbans. Out of deference to Emmeline on this scalding afternoon Harry wore his uniform but it felt like a strait-jacket, and the innumerable insect bites all over his body were chafed raw by the rough material and smarted with sweat.
They rode out of the valley, and into the cool shade of the low trees that crowned the hill to the north. Here they paused and let the horses hang their heads for a moment. It might have been the rising ground, the smooth grassy hill, Piper next to him, but Harry was swept by the memory of the last ride he had taken with Hugo, when they had stood on the edge of the flat-topped hill in the clean English weather to gaze at the White Horse. When Hugo had said there was no such thing as loving too much, and when they had encountered Rachel walking in the secret woods . . .
‘You’re miles away. Captain Latimer,’ said Emmeline.
‘My apologies.’
‘Were you in England?’
‘Yes.’
Emmeline cocked her head flirtatiously. ‘A penny for your thoughts.’
‘They’re not worth even that much, I assure you.’
‘Then why not give them away?’
‘I was remembering a ride I took with my brother. Just something about the aspect of this place, the way it falls away . . . It couldn’t be more different in most respects but it put me in mind of that ride.’
‘Your brother remained at home?’
‘He’s dead.’
There was no point in sparing her discomfort, since Harry knew she would only continue her dainty interrogation until she was satisfied. Her hand flew to her mouth, there was no doubting her mortification.
‘No! Now I’m so ashamed.’ ‘There’s no need. How could you know?’
‘I do hope you didn’t think that I was implying anything . . . that your brother . . . Oh, dear, I can be such a fool!’
Harry rebuked himself for having been too blunt, and was about to end the exchange by suggesting they move on when a man came round the shoulder of the hill below them and to their right, leading a horse at a snail’s pace.
‘Look!’ exclaimed Emmeline, her sympathy directed as usual towards the animal. ‘The poor thing – its leg – shall we go down?’
‘Wait a moment.’ He got out his spyglass and focused on the figures. Horse and man resembled an illustration from Cervantes – attenuated, spavined, barely able to remain upright, the animal limping so badly that its head nodded like that of a rocking horse. Though hatless, and coated with dust and grime, the man’s uniform was just distinguishable as that of the Hussars.
‘Shouldn’t we go down?’ asked Emmeline. ‘The poor creature looks half dead, and what are they doing here on their own?’
‘Stay with me.’
The same question concerned Harry as they rode slowly down the slope, and he kept one hand on Piper’s rein as the black ears pricked forward so urgently that the points all but met.
‘There’s no need to hold on to me, Captain Latimer,’ protested Emmmeline, ‘I’m quite capable of controlling him.’ But he was adamant.
‘He’s a young horse, and nervous. We don’t want two casualties.’
The man had seen them coming, and stopped. He appeared tranced, his arms hanging loose at his sides, his head sagging. Harry had the impression that he only remained on his feet out of an ingrained habit of respect for a lady and an officer.
‘What’s going on? Where have you come from?’ he called. The man seemed to attempt to reply, but there was no sound that Harry could hear, and at that moment the horse collapsed like a pack of cards, front and back legs buckling in turn, head swaying, before crashing on to its side and lying with its saddle slewed to reveal weeping red sores. Piper shied, and Harry held him with difficulty and ordered Emmeline curtly to dismount, which she did this time without protest.
The man pointed in the direction he’d come, croaked a single word that sounded to Harry like ‘finished’, and sank to his knees.
Harry dismounted himself and went over to them. The man remained on his knees with his head sunk on his chest, as though too exhausted even to fall any further. His hair was caked with sweat and dust and round the inside of his collar was an angry suppurating crust of broken skin. The flesh of his face and neck was swollen red and covered in small cuts and abrasions and his hands were raw with broken blisters.
Harry addressed Emmeline. ‘Mrs Roebridge, would you ride back to camp and tell them we have a casualty here? I suggest you ride the mare. And if you would first give this man a drink from your water bottle?’
For once she was shocked into silence, and while he exchanged the saddles, she advanced warily on the man and proffered the bottle which he snatched and gulped at, shaking his head like a dog.
‘Hurry if you would. Leave the bottle. We’ll make what progress we can if someone can be sent to meet us.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Given a task of real urgency, Emmeline rose to the occasion, cantering away on Clemmie with as much well-bred determination and composure as if she’d been riding to hounds in the shires.
Having poured some of the water over his head the man seemed to be reviving to the extent that he sat back on his heels and watched dully as Harry inserted the neck of his own water bottle into the side of the horse’s mouth. But it seemed too far gone to respond, and its throat palpitated with shadow irregular breaths.
‘I don’t like the look of him.’
‘Nor I, sir, he’s hurt hisself.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘With Lord Cardigan’s party, sir. I was about the fittest—’ he gave the ghost of a smile ‘—so they sent me on to report.’
‘Whatever happened? Were you attacked?’
The man shook his head. ‘No, sir. Worn out, sir. Worn out, worn down, done in, man and beast. And nothing to report.’
Something in the man’s voice, now that he was more animated, made Harry study him more closely. He was trying to get to his feet, using the horse’s rutted flank as a lever, but he couldn’t manage it.
‘Stay where you are,’ said Harry, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘I believe we know each other.’
‘Believe we do, sir. On board ship.’
‘That’s right.’
‘They got me another horse, sir.’ The man grimaced. ‘This one.’
The next morning the rest of the reconnaissance party returned, unrecognisable as the proud column that had left camp two weeks earlier. Even the most ardent of their brigade commander’s admirers couldn’t but feel that this had been a mission of profligate waste. The men were drawn and drained, carrying their saddles and almost dragging behind them their wrecks of horses, many of whom could scarcely put one foot before another and would not have looked out of place in a knacker’s yard.
But Harry had seen enough weary and fruitless suffering in the space of the last few months to last him a lifetime. It was the face in profile of the commander as he rode rigidly and haughtily upright past the onlookers, that impressed him most. A face with a long, patrician nose netted with red veins, a sensual petulant mouth, fine curling hair and whiskers, and light blue eyes whose hooded lids and arched brows gave the whole a supercilious expression.
Above all, Harry saw the face of a man engorged with vanity, spoiled by pride, and impregnably certain of his own rightness.
The days toiled by. Harry ached with homesickness. Not only for his family and friends, and the familiar detail of the place where he had grown up, but for England itself, his homeland, in the soil of which his flesh and blood had its roots, and was buried. The smell, the light, the shape of England, its capricious but benign weather, the outline of its towns and villages that was like a secret language, the sound of its streets and the quiet pulse of its rivers. He had travelled before, been to Paris, Rome, and Vienna – it was almost unbelievable that he was now less than a hundred miles south of the Danube delta – yet he felt, but for the identity conferred by his constricting uniform, lost.
At night, heartsick for Rachel, he scarcely slept. But when the heat was less intense he attempted to banish her by sifting through his other memories as though they were entries in a commonplace book. He had a particular recollection of one morning in the spring of 1851, when he and a group of fellow officers had been out riding in Hyde Park. Their route had taken them down Rotten Row, alongside the enormous glass structure that had been erected to house the Great Exhibition. The Crystal Palace held no particular fascination for the Hussars, since they had watched it go up from its inception, but on this particular morning it was full of infantrymen, marching up and down the wooden floors like toy soldiers in a giant dolls’ house. As Harry and the others rode by the front rank of soldiers kneeled, raised their firearms to their shoulders and fired a round of blanks into the huge space above them. Pigeons clattered in alarm from the roof and the less experienced horses danced sideways. The soldiers rose and continued with their pointless marching.
‘What the deuce are they up to?’ enquired George Roebridge of Harry over his shoulder.
‘Polishing the floor?’
‘No dusters.’
‘No dancing either,’ commented Fyefield, ‘more’s the pity. It’s going to be packed to bursting with the British working man, his wife, children, dog and dog’s dinner, gawping at the achievements of their betters.’
‘Exactly!’ exclaimed George, with the air of a man who had stumbled on an important scientific discovery. ‘That’s it – they’re testing the building. Seeing if it can take the punishment. The perfect occupation for a standing army in peacetime.’
By this he meant, of course, the perfect occupation for infantrymen, and his observation was greeted with general laughter. Harry considered reminding Hector Fyefield that the working man of whom he was so dismissive had had a hand in the manufacture of some great achievements. But he did not do so, and the conversation turned to other things as they advanced on Kensington Gardens, the gloss and glitter of their turnout attracting general admiration in the spring sunshine.
It occurred to Harry now that Roebridge’s facetious comments notwithstanding, the activities of the infantry in the Crystal Palace that morning were more purposeful and of greater use than their own, and possibly even than that of the British expeditionary force stranded at Varna. And the thousands from every walk of life who had flocked to the Great Exhibition had at least contributed to a general celebration of peace, prosperity and scientific advancement. But only three years later those same crowds had exulted in the departure of cavalry and infantry alike on this uncertain and ill-prepared errand. Harry was a younger son of no special ambition or talent, who like his brother officers had purchased his commission and become a member of the exotic tribe that was the Hussars. But unlike Hugo he was by nature a thinker, and here where there was unlimited time for thinking, that was not an easy or comfortable thing to be.
Least comfortable of all were his thoughts concerning Rachel, which would not be banished. The image of his brother’s widow was with him always, retreating when duty drew his attention elsewhere, but always returning unbidden. That he was in love with her he could no longer doubt nor deny. At this distance he could with impunity admit what he had always known: that he had fallen in love with her on the day, at the very instant, that he met her. But distance had also served to turn his love into an obsession. He could not see her, nor talk to her, he could not demonstrate his feelings by the performance of even the smallest service. Worst of all was the possibility that he might not come back. It seemed increasingly likely that he might die here in Devna, unused and unsung, and join a pile of stinking corpses in a communal grave like poor Colin Bartlemas. And even if he were to survive this, the immediate future held only uncertainty and danger. In the meantime Hugo’s child would be born in October, while Rachel was still in mourning. Loyalty, decency and every kind of social prohibition were ranged against him and served only to intensify his feelings. He was in turmoil.
He had written to her just before their departure, and again since arrival here. In his effort to convey only what was fraternally correct he feared both letters might have seemed cold and stilted, and the fact that he had received no reply appeared to bear out these misgivings. But then why would Rachel, whose heart and mind must be wholly preoccupied with the terrible loss of her adored young husband, be in the least affected by the tone of letters from her brother-in-law? He wished neither to appear cold nor to overstep the bounds of propriety, while all the time burning with fierce, unexpressed passion.
It coloured all that he did. When that evening he sat down at the entrance to his tent to write to the parents of Colin Bartlemas, it was with the shameful awareness that his letter, its style and content, might at some point reach Rachel’s notice, and so it was doubly important that both should be apt, sensitive and well considered.
Naturally, he must spare them the squalid details of their son’s death. But neither could he avoid the painful fact that Colin had died long before facing the challenge of battle he’d so welcomed. His personal effects – his cap badge, penknife, wallet, pipe and prayer book – looked a pitifully small legacy on the ground next to Harry as he laboured, scratching out half a dozen attempts before arriving at what he hoped was the right note.
My dear Mr and Mrs Bartlemas,
It is with the greatest sorrow that I write to inform you of the death of your son Colin who was also my own true and lifelong friend. At a time when the so-called ordinary soldier is too often seen as a ne’er-do-well for whom no serious role in civilian life is possible, Colin was a recruit of whom the Army could be justly proud, the more so because his true and honest heart was always in the countryside and the work that he knew – the horses, the dogs, the woods and the fields around Bells. After I had entered the Army he once told me that if there were to be a war he would join up to do his bit, and when the call to arms came the very qualities that were so much admired by those of us who knew him ensured that he enlisted.
I know that now, reading this letter, you can think only that he is gone, and of your own loss, which my own much humbler experience can help me in some small way to appreciate. But when in time the first pain of that loss is dulled, please remember that Colin’s tragic and untimely death was caused by his good and stalwart character, a character loved by all who knew him ...
Here Harry broke off and stared out over the sea of tents. Along with the ever-present flies, a dull, sour smell hung over this place. The bubbling chorus of lakeside frogs, which had so diverted them at first, now sounded like nothing so much as hollow laughter. Here and there men stunned by the heat lay on the ground as if already dead.
He returned with an effort to his writing.
He bore the pain of sickness courageously, and I know that you were in his thoughts when he died. (Harry did not in fact know this, nor even believe it, since the extremes of cholera did not allow for the luxury of reflection, but the spirit of it was true.) I enclose some of his things, and hope that along with them you will accept my very deepest sympathy.
Yours,
Henry Felix Latimer
Harry worked on the letter until there was no light left, and set it aside with a sense of relief.
The next day he read it through, despaired of its jejune, well-meaning sententiousness, and threw it away. The voice did not sound like his, nor the subject like his rough and ready friend. Those at home who knew them both would have to take his feelings on trust. He parcelled up Colin’s possessions, wrote three simple sentences to accompany them, signed himself ‘Harry Latimer’ and left it at that.
He had the strong conviction that Rachel, above all, would know instinctively what lay behind the letter if she were to see it, and not think the less of him for it.
He had last seen her a week before they had embarked for the Crimea, when he had returned to Bells to make his farewells. He’d been shocked by his father’s apparent frailty, and asked his mother if there were any physical cause, beyond those of old age and bereavement.
Maria responded with the slight show of temper that was, with her, a sure sign of anxiety.
‘He will not eat! Whatever is put in front of him, no matter how much trouble has been taken, he turns his head away—’ she demonstrated the turning of the head in a histrionic way that was all her own ‘—as if just to look at it makes him feel sick!’
‘Perhaps it does. Has he been seen by a doctor?’
She made a small, impatient sound and flicked her hand. ‘He refuses. And besides, neither of us has any faith in doctors.’
‘But he looks so terribly thin and pale. I think you should send for Dr Jaynes whether or not Father wants it.’
‘Dr Jaynes is a stupid old fool,’ declared Maria. ‘I shall look after my own husband myself.’
‘But if Father won’t allow you to look after him . . .’ Harry allowed the comment to hang, but she turned away and her failure to answer confirmed him in his opinion that both parents were terribly afraid.
At dinner that night, he noticed that although – perhaps out of regard for his son’s presence – his father did not spurn the food in the manner demonstrated by Maria, neither did he do more than stare at it, and push it around somewhat, so that soup, fish, meat and pudding were all removed uneaten.
Percy did however suggest that the two of them have a glass of port together at the table, and when Maria had gone, Harry spoke his mind.
‘Father, you aren’t well.’
‘Out of sorts, merely.’
‘Much more than that. You’re too thin.’
‘Nothing tempts me . . .’ Percy held up his glass and peered into it. ‘Except this.’
‘But you’re wasting away. You must eat.’
‘I don’t wish to.’ The tone was almost petulant.
‘Then you must make yourself, not just for your own sake but Mother’s. And mine, too. The regiment embarks in a few days and I can’t bear to think of leaving you like this.’
‘Ah, blackmail now.’ He smiled thinly, rubbing his face with a hand that was already skeletal, the bones standing out like twigs.
‘Look on the food as medicine, force it down if you have to. But eat.’
Percy favoured Harry with the chilly look which in spite of his reduced condition retained much of the power that had always been able to quell offspring and employees alike. ‘Am I to understand that you are—’ he narrowed his eyes in a threatening imitation of disbelief ‘—ordering me to do so?’
‘Yes.’
They stared at one another. Harry felt his father’s gaze flicking back and forth across his own, as if trying to read it. Then the paper-fine eyelids lowered slowly, once, in a kind of acknowledgement.
‘I’ll do my best. But I promise nothing.’
There had been no news from his parents as yet. It added to Harry’s sense of helplessness that while he was doing no good here, he could not help his father either.
The morning after his conversation with Percy he had ridden over to Bells to call on Rachel. It was cold and a light rain was beginning to fall but still, he was told, Mrs Latimer had walked up to the churchyard to Mr Latimer’s grave.
‘But that’s a steep climb of two miles at least,’ said Harry in disbelief.
‘Two and a half sir.’ Jeavons assumed one of those expressions at which more senior servants quickly became expert, indicative of a host of personal opinions kept perfectly under control for propriety’s sake.
As he rode up the hill on Darby with the rain spattering in his face, Harry reflected that he seemed surrounded by people with no concern for their own wellbeing. The thought of Rachel trudging up here in her condition was a worrying one. It occurred to him that Hugo had been so much loved, so vital a force in the lives of those around him, that his loss had robbed them of all judgement.
But when – long before she saw him – he’d found her, he understood. She was crouched by the grave, setting seedlings in the sodden earth with her bare hands. She wore a cloak but in spite of the rain had thrown it back off her shoulders so that her arms were free. Her pale hair was in an untidy, countrywoman’s bun, and where it had come loose around her face he noticed that the damp had given it a slight curl. Or perhaps (and this thought thrilled him) this curliness was natural, but generally subdued into that quiet, perfectly controlled elegance.
She sat, too, in an attitude that was robustly practical rather than ladylike: crouching, but with one leg extended to the side to accommodate her thickening belly. The extended leg was visible almost to the knee, wearing a red and black patterned stocking and a heavy, mud-encrusted black boot. Harry had never seen such a thing outside the theatre and to encounter it here, in the drizzle of this hilltop churchyard, had a dizzying effect that made him catch his breath.
She worked away unselfconsciously, occasionally shifting to the side to get to a fresh patch of earth. She did this unceremoniously, putting one hand on the ground, gripping the folds of her skirt in the other and performing a little hitching motion, accompanied by a small but audible grunt of effort.
Darby nodded his head glumly at the rain and the sound of the bridle made her look round. She seemed not in the least suprised to see him.
‘Harry, it’s you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to spy.’
He dismounted and dropped the rein over Darby’s head. She rose heavily to her feet and rubbed her hands, first one against the other and then on her cloak. They were still muddy, there was no question of kissing either of them, so he gave what he felt to be a rather ridiculous little bow. ‘I’ve only been here a matter of seconds.’
‘I think you can be forgiven. I can see that I’m a spectacle.’ This was said with no note of apology, and even the hint of a smile. ‘How are you, Harry?’
‘Well. I hope you don’t mind – that I’m not intruding? Jeavons said you had walked here.’
‘Yes, he did very politely try to dissuade me, but I like to walk.’
‘You’re in good health.’ It was half statement, half polite enquiry.
‘Perfect.’ She indicated the grave. ‘I’m trying to make Hugo’s last resting place a little less austere. But that’s really only an excuse. I like to come up here and grub about, and be with him. It’s companionable.’
‘Am I intruding?’
‘Harry . . .’ She tilted her head, gently admonishing. ‘It’s a great pleasure to see you, especially as I know you’re leaving soon. Oh!’ She wrapped her cloak around her as the rain intensified. ‘Shall we seek sanctuary for a moment?’
Harry left Darby at the entrance to the porch and they went in. On this overcast morning it was dim inside the church, and the rain rattled like shot on the windows. She took off her cloak and spread it over the back of one pew, then went to sit in the pew in front, where he joined her. His senses were overwhelmed by her proximity, and the peculiar sense of intimacy conferred by these surroundings. Her dirty hands, her disordered hair, the moisture on her face and the mud on her boots and clothes, all these he found almost unbearably seductive. He had never before seen her other than armoured in her customary restrained and unshowy elegance, so that though she was wearing more and heavier clothes than usual it was something like seeing her without clothing at all.
But if Harry was unsettled, Rachel had never seemed more at ease.
‘This is where we were married,’ she said softly, gazing around as if reminding herself. ‘Do you remember our wedding?’
‘How could I forget? It was a great day. I’d never seen Hugo so happy.’
She looked at him. ‘He was solemn. So very solemn, when I walked up here to stand next to him.’
‘That was the measure of his happiness.’
‘Yes, I believe that too. I never knew anyone as carefree as Hugo, but on our wedding day he was . . .’ she sought the word ‘. . . careful.’
All the time she was speaking she had been rubbing her wedding ring with her thumb, so that now the gold stood out bright on her mud-stained hand. Harry would have liked more than anything to take the hand in his, but instead he said: ‘He loved you more than he ever thought he was capable of loving. He was in awe of his own feelings.’
‘I was fortunate,’ she said, unaware that he was talking of himself, ‘the most fortunate woman in the world. I often think of all the bright and beautiful young hearts that must have been broken when this thin, plain old widow came along and ensnared their Hugo with her witchlike wiles.’
She was only half joking, and now unthinkingly he laid his hand on hers. ‘You are none of those things.’
She smiled. ‘Certainly not thin . . .’
‘And he was never in love until he met you. If there were girls who thought otherwise, then they were mistaken.’
‘That’s a comfort.’ Her manner changed, became more lighthearted, so that although there was no suggestion that he do so, he removed his hand from hers. ‘And what about you, Harry?’ she asked. ‘Is there some lovely creature in London who will be pining for you when you go to war?’
‘No.’ He tried to fall in with her manner. ‘Not unless there is someone who has successfully kept her feelings from me.’
‘You must write to us if you can.’
‘Of course!’ He was eager. ‘As often as it’s possible.’
She stood up and he followed suit, stepping out of the pew to let her go first. It had stopped raining, but in the porch the flagstones were wet and littered with leaves and twigs blown in from the churchyard. Darby stood with his head and shoulders under cover and Rachel went over to him and patted his neck. She didn’t look at Harry when she said: ‘You’re taking Piper with you.’
‘If I may?’
‘Of course. He should be ridden, whatever the circumstances, and who better to ride him than you?’
‘It won’t be easy on the horses.’
She stood back and gave him a direct look. ‘Nor on the men, I imagine.’
He took Darby’s reins. ‘I wonder, would you like to ride?’
‘I don’t know how. It isn’t one of my accomplishments.’
‘I simply meant that I could lead you, to save you the walk back. This old gentleman’s very quiet, you need do no more than sit on board and hold the pommel.’
She laughed, amused both by the idea and her own inexperience. ‘But how shall I get on?’
He pointed to the wooden bench at the side of the porch. ‘Can you stand on that? If you use my arm to lean on.’
‘Even without the arm.’ She put one hand on the back of the bench and hoisted herself up, strongly and with no loss of dignity. ‘And now?’
He held the stirrup, and Darby stirred, his big hooves clopping on the stones. ‘He’s going to go without me,’ Rachel exclaimed.
‘On the contrary, he’s looking forward to having a passenger. Put your right foot in the stirrup and sit sideways on the saddle. You couldn’t ride this way on Piper, but this one has a back as broad as a table.’
‘I shall take your word for it.’ She followed his instructions. ‘Well – here I am!’
‘Are you comfortable? Do you feel secure?’
‘At the moment, but then we’re not moving.’
‘Off we go.’
When Harry looked back on that journey down the hill from the church to Bells he saw that it was the closest he came to an expression of his own feelings for Rachel. Leading the horse carefully, pausing now and again to check that she was secure and comfortable, he took a quiet pride in being her protector, and in seeing her safely home. When they reached the house he led her to the stable yard and allowed her to dismount by herself, only offering her a steadying hand as she stepped down from the block.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I enjoyed my beginner’s pleasure ride. Perhaps in the future you could teach me to ride properly.’
Ever since then he had cherished this small suggestion like a talisman, a hostage to fortune that would take him back to Bells to be of use.
By the second week in August the armies camped around Varna might have been forgiven for thinking they had endured the fires of hell and could not suffer much more. But if so they were punished for their complacency with the outbreak of a real fire that laid waste half the town and provided the pretext for troops of all nationalities to sack the other half. In spite of the enormous weight of manpower assembled in so small an area the generals issued no orders to control the excesses of the troops, though Harry and a handful of fellow officers were detailed to ride down to Varna and help enforce discipline and contain the worst of the looting.
Having rounded up fifty or so blackened miscreants from the streets and driven them stumbling back to camp it was clear that the British soldier had confined himself to drinking what was left of Varna dry.
‘You would have thought,’ drawled Fyefield as they saw to the horses, ‘that they might have shown a little more imagination. They might as well have been in some provincial fair in England.’
‘Thank God for it,’ said Harry. ‘What would you prefer – rape, pillage, wholesale plunder? A bit of drunkenness is almost excusable.’
‘True,’ Fyefield acknowledged. ‘Just so long as it doesn’t addle them completely before the real action starts.’
In the darkness, somebody laughed.
It was impossible that such an impasse could continue indefinitely. Some sort of movement had to take place, and two weeks after the fire the order for embarkation to the Crimea came through: on 5 September.
Men were still dying as they boarded the ships, but even the sickest were lugged aboard in the grim conviction that it would at least be preferable to die on the deck of an English frigate than the polluted soil of a Middle Eastern port.
In spite of everything, spirits rose. To be back on the move, to be closing on their objective, to be going, at long last, to confront the enemy – all this improved morale.
As Harry and the Light Brigade drew nearer to the embarkation point at Varna the evidence of cholera was still all around. The mass of hasty, shadow graves that disfigured the dry soil like a rash were many of them desecrated, dug up by scavenging dogs and by the Turks for blankets, the limbs of despoiled corpses jutting out like rotten tree roots. The dogs barked and snapped at them, to keep away. Once when Clemmie stumbled Harry looked down to see a human head beneath her hoof, half the face still clinging to the skull, an eyeball hanging from its socket. If they had thought Varna a squalid place on their arrival there, it was nothing to its condition now. There was only one thing to cheer Harry. Seeing in passing the French Post Office, pretty much dismantled, he called in with no very high expectations, to be handed no fewer than three letters – two of them from his parents and one from Rachel – which had got stranded there following the embarkation orders. These he kept, to read on the voyage.
But at this late stage Piper would not board. Harry’s new groom, a wizened cockney sparrow named Betts, was at his wits’ end. He was a genius with horses and had immediately seen in Piper a rare breeding and spirit, but his charge’s furious terror was more than he could manage on his own. Grudgingly, barking instructions and abuse, Betts stood aside for the sailors to take over. But nothing that anyone could do in the way of ropes, chains and sheer brute manpower could move Piper without doing him an injury. Eventually he was so severely exercised, and his helpers so beside themselves with fury and impatience, that there was nothing left but for Harry himself to lead him back down to the quay and stand there, with Betts in attendance, attempting to comfort and quiet him.
The bustle and racket all around was no help to either of them. Sweated up and sensing treachery on every hand, Piper was uncontrollable, lunging, rearing, kicking and sidling, stretching his neck with his eyes starting from his head and his ears laid back flat so that his pretty head took on the mean, flattened look of a cobra.
Betts’s eyes darted here and there. ‘This is no place for ’im, sir.’
‘I know that, Betts, but perhaps a few minutes here will persuade him that boarding ship is a better alternative.’
The little man shook his head.‘It’s going to get him beside ’isself.’
He was right. When after some ten minutes on the quayside they attempted to lead him to the ship once more, even Betts was unprepared for the ferocity of Piper’s resistance. He simply threw himself backwards with all his considerable force, as he had done on the ship from England, scattering assorted traders and hawkers, and sending for six several barrels of fish and vegetables over the slippery cobbles and into the water. Betts, who had a gammy leg, was sent flying. As Harry struggled to tighten his grip on the headcollar he lost his footing and let it go altogether. Piper, at full stretch already, sprang away from him like an arrow from a bow and was gone, careering through the crowds like a whirling dervish, snapping and kicking up his heels, creating a wake of Middle Eastern pandemonium, screams and ululations and arms uplifted in supplication.
Betts’s walnut-face was unreadable. ‘That’s a waste, sir,’ he said. ‘That’s a wicked waste.’
When Harry sat on deck that night listening to the soft sounds of the pipe and mouth organ, and the croaking and rustling of the dying, he wept in the darkness for Hugo’s beautiful horse, now food for vultures in a foreign land.