“I was afraid of you.”
Caillat’s quill stopped mid stroke.
“Afraid of me?”
“Yes.”
Caillat shook his head and placed the quill back in a small ink pot then let the fresh ink run from the nib back to the pot before setting the quill down.
“Countess…”
“Juliette,” she corrected, “I am just Juliette now, until the Republic decides otherwise.”
He stroked a thick golden moustache surrounded by a week’s growth of fine bristles.
“We will work on that last answer, Juliette. But you have nothing to fear from me. I am not here to feed the guillotine. A friend once told me to wield this power with care; to correct injustice where I could. We are not savages, Madame.”
“Will you stay and work for the cause of the revolution, within these walls?”
“Yes, Monsieur Caillat.”
“Then the matter is closed. As soon as I can get word to Paris, I will. Your name will be cleared and perhaps Captain Beauvais’ too.”
Juliette showed no emotion but inside her heart danced.
That interview had been a fortnight ago, perhaps longer; Caillat was in love with her and Juliette would use that and anything else to free Julien Beauvais, the man she loved beyond measure.
Valenciennes: 14th June 1793
Sir James Murray read Trevethan’s report, tracing the recommendations with his fingers while his lips silently twitched. He had asked for the language of the engineer and had not been disappointed.
“Excellent work Major.”
“Thank you. Of course, it’s all clap-trap but you’re paying for my time so…”
“Clap-trap or not, I will show it to the Duke and he will forward it to Dundas and we will have our guns.” Murray began to write his own note, commending Trevethan’s work in the most trying circumstances.
A playful breeze danced through the command tent, ruffling a thick pile of papers being leafed through by Commissary Jackson. Often, he and Trevethan had shared the same desk and in the Major’s absence, Jackson’s work had spilt over onto Trevethan's side.
“See you couldn’t even wait to jump in my grave.”
“Well the French might have got you or Boetslaar drunk you under the table; seemed a shame to have all this space and not use it.” Jackson smiled.
“Don’t. My head’s only just recovered from three nights in the General’s company. I’ve brought half a dozen bottles of Brandy back with me. But I’m saving those for when my real friends turn up.”
“You’re a find lad. A fine lad, didn’t I say so Colonel. Every day he was away. I said, ‘When will that fine lad, Major…What’shisname…the engineer… be coming back?’”
Murray stared hard at the two men, lips pouted in thought.
“Were we in need of a comic act, I would ask for you both. But is there the slightest chance that I can get this finished? Anyway, don’t get too comfortable, Trevethan. I need you to head north again but this time to get some real work done.”
“What now for heaven’s sake?”
“The army moves to Dunkirk as soon as the siege ends. I want the route evaluated as far as Furnes. I have written to the garrison commander; he knows to expect you. If you can get close to Dunkirk then reconnoitre that too. We can’t just turn up on the off chance. London wants the matter resolved before the winter and so does the Duke.”
“So, I have wasted the last ten days drawing up plans for defences that are completely impractical and now I’m going to reconnoitre an area held by the French for a siege we don’t yet have the equipment to complete.”
Murray drummed his fingers on the table, “Quite finished?”
“Would it matter if I hadn’t?”
“No, not really; we will be in Dunkirk by mid-August. We don’t have a decent map of the area. We could do with one. How do we get the siege guns there? If we store supplies at Furnes, how long will they take to reach our front-lines? Do some sniffing around. Take Belvedere with you. And don’t get captured; would be most inconvenient.”
“Not for me,” Jackson quipped, “although I would miss your company and your ability to scrounge booze.”
“You’re the Quarter-master for God’s sake, steal your own from now on!” Trevethan shook his head at the rank stupidity of his situation.
“I need a cartographer.”
“Find one. I’m sure one of Belvedere’s dragoons can draw.” Murray spoke, returning to writing additional notes to Trevethan’s report.
“Maybe; but one who speaks German would be good. Nearly every decision that means anything seems to happen in German in this army.”
“The Duke is in charge of the siege you know.”
“Yes, sir, so I have been told. How many weeks will it be until we storm the city, do you think?”
Murray looked up at Trevethan. “Do yourself a favour, Major. Don’t fall out with our Austrian friends. If Orlandini says six weeks, then it’s six weeks. The Duke has accepted that. He doesn’t like it any more than you but we must all make the best of it.”
Trevethan sensed there was little to be gained from reigniting questions on the conduct of the siege.
“When should I go, Sir?”
“Rest today and tomorrow. Set off the day after.”
“And my cartographer?”
“Choose who you like. The whole army is sat on its hands.”
Trevethan nodded and turned to Jackson.
“A game of cards later?”
“And a glass of something?”
“Unless you became tee-total in my absence, of course!”
Trevethan ducked out of the tent and into the heat of a summer’s morning.
Valenciennes: 15th June 1793
Muskets crashed in ragged staccato. Brandt winced and ordered the men of 2nd Battalion to reload. He watched Gauner and Richter walk the double rank of redcoats, inspecting muskets and dealing with misfired rounds. Gauner, for all his rough edges was turning into a reasonable non-commissioned officer. Brandt had heard some of what happened at Estreux. Schafer had reported the incident regarding the attempted seizure of cambric as ‘over-zealousness’; privately Roner had expressed deep misgivings about Gauner but it would be hard to break a man back to the ranks, who less than two months before had saved a battalion colour in the revolt in Halle. Besides the battalion’s resources were being tested even while they waited for the time when Valenciennes would be ready to be assaulted.
Hugo Thalberg, the captain of 4th Company had been taken ill, a stomach condition which had baffled the doctors of the battalion. It had struck ten days ago and Thalberg now cut a thin, pale figure; a shadow of the man who had marched from Hanover. The control of the Fourth had temporarily passed to Brandt, doubling his administration tasks. Junior officers and NCOs were detailed to take a share of the added burden; organizing working parties for the siege preparations or holding field drills. Brandt had taken the opportunity to practice musket drill with those men from 2nd and Thalberg’s company not sent to their digging tasks. It was a pleasant change to be away from the ledgers and accounts, even if the men’s competence was somewhat lacking.
At least he had seen Thalberg up and about this morning. He had found the captain a difficult man to get to know; a private, quiet individual who rarely spoke of home. In the early days of his condition, Brandt had written a letter over a couple of sittings that Thalberg had dictated and found himself drawn to the warmth of a family man with four daughters, the eldest of which was no more than ten years old. During these moments, huddled around the single candle perched on a tea chest in Thalberg’s tent with the officer tucked into a folding camp bed, Doctor Wexler had made a house call. His solution to Thalberg’s malady had been a foul-tasting concoction, if the look on the stricken man’s face was anything to go by.
Brandt had asked the question, despite himself, “What is in that?”
“Just some Isinglass that I have boiled down and allowed to dissolve. Milk and sugar make it pa
latable, should have our esteemed colleague up and about in three days.”
“Isinglass, what is that?”
Thalberg had collapsed back into a pillow. “Please Brandt, I don’t want to know; I just don’t want to feel like this anymore.”
Wexler cast a disgruntled look between Brandt and the patient. “It’s not a poison, man. Perfectly sound medicine.”
He administered the dose then continued to share his medical expertise.
“Isinglass, my dear Captain is gelatine from the Acipenser Oxyrinchus, made by scrapping out the swim bladder and the other vital parts.”
“The what?”
“Swim bladder... of a sturgeon…a fish about so big…”
Brandt looked blankly at the doctor who was doing his best to gauge the dimensions of the creature; Thalberg groaned and rolled over, turning his back on the two men.
The memory of the moment made Brandt smile. Then he realised that the men were waiting, eyes straying towards him, expecting orders. The drill to reload and fire began again. Three more rounds had been fired before Major Trevethan interrupted proceedings.
“Fine display, Captain, fine display.”
“Morning Major. Actually, it’s bloody appalling but we are getting there.” The two men talked while the sergeants checked the ranks to ensure that muskets had been discharged.
“We met at the Duke’s banquet, before Valenciennes. That scoundrel von Bomm spoke most highly of you, not that he would let me tell you that at the time.” Trevethan smiled and extended a hand.
“Yes, I remember. I haven’t seen Erich for a few days. He is back with his battalion now, keeping his head down, I hope. Shame really, we are an officer short and I could do with him taking over the reins of Thalberg’s Company for a bit.”
“There’s been a bit of a wave of sickness.” Trevethan banged his hand against his head, “Touch wood I have avoided it so far.”
Brandt was slightly mystified by the odd English custom.
“Did you come to watch our drill? Life at headquarters can’t be that dull?”
Trevethan smiled. “Life at headquarters is confounded bizarre, man. I…”
He made to explain about the trip to Ostend but shook his head in exasperation, “Suffice to say, if I told you half the things that go on you wouldn’t believe me. However, you can help me, most definitely. I am due north to reconnoitre our next port of call.”
“North? How far north? Paris is west if memory and geography serve me?”
“It is but that’s for another day; the army has an appointment at Dunkirk. Just about everyone on the staff knows it; I dare say the French do too. As for your geography, well you must have a pretty good memory; we don’t even have maps to help us find our arse from our elbow. The Austrians do but they don’t always appear to be in the mood for sharing their information. We are ordered to besiege Dunkirk once we are finished with this place and I am to map our route. The only drawback with that is that the French currently hold that ground and I assume they might object to my poking my nose around.”
“How does the battalion fit into that picture? Are we going with you?”
“Not all of you, just one man, if it’s all the same to you?” Trevethan ferreted around inside his jacket and pulled out the crumpled drawing of Valenciennes.
“As I said, we lack maps. I need something like this to begin to organise the siege of a town which must fall quickly. We have no cartographers to speak of and I’m sick of every conversation being in German, no offence, Captain.”
Brandt shrugged. His English was more than passable but it had surprised him how few of the British officers spoke German, the language of their ally, yet could converse easily in French.
“I still don’t see how we can help you?” Then Brandt spotted the name: Krombach.
He shook his head. “I don’t believe that. My wife thinks this boy is some sort of lucky omen for me, my Company Sergeant thinks he is a profiteer. He’s an average soldier at best, but…He drew this?”
“Yes.” Trevethan nodded his head. “If you won’t miss him, let me have him for four weeks. His maps might get us all home quicker than we hoped.”
Brandt looked surprised. “Well I have no objection, might help knock a few rough edges off him. When I tell Katerina, she will crow about her having sensed this.” Brandt laughed at the thought.
“Yes by all means. I will speak to the colonel and you can have Krombach to make your maps.”
The redcoats formed a marching column in a manner more proficient than their musket drill. Brandt consulted his pocket watch. The men working their shift at the front line would be returning to the camp within half an hour, so he offered Trevethan to follow the column in order that the temporary transfer of the redcoat to the Duke’s staff could be completed.
The column snaked its way through the British lines. As the Hanoverians marched past the tents of the 11th Dragoons, Trevethan spotted a cavalry trooper chipping away at the fuse of an unexploded French howitzer shell.
“What in God’s name are you doing, boy?” Trevethan fell out from his steady pace behind the column to witness the sight in disbelief.
Around the man, another couple of troopers sat, watching in idle curiosity. The cavalryman stopped and looked at the figure dressed in a blue jacket, with no obvious sign of rank.
“Making a regimental trophy… sir,” The trooper added the title on the likely chance that the stranger was a gentleman or an officer, perhaps both.
“Put it down; carefully… it’s still live, I can see the fuse.” Trevethan walked slowly towards the trooper.
“No, sir, it isn’t. I took it out sir. Honest I ‘ave.”
Trevethan stepped closer still and wrapped giant hands around the shell. Slowly he pulled the projectile away, feeling the cast iron sphere in his hands. He took a pace back and placed the shell gently on the ground. There was a small section of the hollow reed but it looked as if the quick match which would carry the flame of ignition had been removed.
“Listen to me. Even with the fuse gone, if you cause a spark as you whittle away at that, the gunpowder could ignite. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Go and get a cloth bag and fill it with hay. Put THAT in it!” Trevethan pointed to the shell. “Take it away from the camp and bury it. You will find better trophies than this, boy. And live to tell the tale on how you came to take them.”
The trooper stood to attention. “Yes sir. Understood, sir.”
Trevethan puffed out his cheeks and turned to follow the column which had snaked ahead on the main avenue that ran through the camp, to catch up with the King’s Germans.
CHAPTER TEN
Dinner with a Countess.
Furnes: 1st July 1793
Six men had set out from the allied lines of Valenciennes; a week later they had found the border town of Furnes. Much to Krombach's disappointment, they had arrived at a time predicted by the French lancer officer. The young Hanoverian would have found a secret delight if the obnoxious cavalryman had erred but such satisfaction was denied to him, not that the luxury of conversation with Captain Bisette was permitted. Both cavalry officers had brought troopers to act as their personal valets and the French captain had decided that Krombach was clearly the valet of Major Trevethan. Bisette’s own valet, a tall and stocky young Swiss of perhaps thirty years old, offered little in the way of conversation either but that was balanced by the constant grumblings of trooper Dowie, Lieutenant Belvedere's man.
Despite Trevethan being the ranking officer, he was happy to leave the duties of daily travel to the professionals, as he saw it; the French captain's snobbish air suggested that the matter was never in doubt. As the horsemen wound a path north, he spoke to Belvedere of little else other than his prowess in the saddle and as guide, between tales of adventures in bed-chambers of the women of France.
Krombach knew a little of the Uhlans Britannique, volunteer light cavalry staffed by disgruntled French gentry and ma
nned by just about every cut-throat who could ride a horse. Nominally the formation had been attached to the British army before Valenciennes. Whatever excesses Gauner had permitted in Estreux were nothing to the devastation visited upon French citizens by these lancers.
The evening before their arrival in Furnes the conversation had turned to the events in the ranks of the 11th Dragoons; it was by this means that Krombach found out that he wore a dead man’s waterproof jacket and rode the same dead trooper’s horse. Bisette insisted that the infamous incident be told; knowing of its horrific ending. Reluctantly, Trevethan told of his part in the tale, the warning to the trooper who was trying to turn a French shell into a trophy. Dowie, squat with a high-sloping forehead and eyes that looked permanently closed, continued the tale, speaking with an accent that Krombach found impenetrable, from the look on the face of the Cornishman Trevethan, he was struggling too. Belvedere, used to the thick Northumberland dialect of the men on his estate, sat and nodded, laughed and winced in the appropriate places and translated into fluent French.
Urged on by bored cavalrymen, drinking in the heat of the day, the hapless 11th Dragoon trooper returned to the howitzer shell. He would have one more try at removing the last vestiges of the hollow reed which had been part of the fuse. Once that was out, the shell could be emptied of gun powder and the 11th would have its first trophy of the campaign.
Dowie leapt around like a demented ape, mimicking the actions of the young cavalryman who had poked and prodded at the hole in the cast iron shell with a spent horseshoe nail, causing the Uhlan trooper, Frick, to roar with delight at a punch-line yet to be delivered. The moment of triumph, the last twist of the nail dislodged the reed stem but also struck a solitary spark. The man had been hunched over his work, shell grasped between his legs.
He did not die immediately, even though the blast severed his body below the waist. Of the men around him, another died the following day and four others had injuries caused by shards of metal and bone. Trevethan wrinkled his face in pain as an ashen-faced Belvedere translated the last few details. The Uhlans Britannique roared with laughter, Bisette thumping Dowie on the back, in appreciation of a fine tale. Krombach sat and silently worried that men who viewed life with such disregard would be their guides through French territory.
The King of Dunkirk Page 13
