“It is not possible to answer that question until we are there,” she said, again as though she were reasoning with a tiresome child rather than an officer. “We may be lucky and find a boat that fishermen have hidden in some creek or thicket. Or we could cross swimming behind floating logs, as we did twice during the march to Corunna. Or we could do better, perhaps, and make a raft if we were fortunate enough to find a house and draw nails from the beams. But let us first get to the river. Then we will think about crossing it, Mr. Graham.”
He said, on impulse, “Don’t call me ‘Mr. Graham’ when we are alone, but address me as ‘sir’ when the men are present.”
Suddenly she smiled and faced him, throwing back her head so that he saw her not as an oracle but as a young and attractive woman capable of quickening his senses. “Ah so! And when we are alone, Mr. Graham?”
“My name is Keith,” he said, blushing, and went on quickly, “We are a Scots family living in the south.”
“‘Keith,’” she said, savoring the word. “That is a good sounding name. ‘Keith Graham’—it is Celtic! I knew you for a Celt when you came into the church back yonder, but it is strange, being so, that you had never before heard a woman keen for her dead!”
She seemed to regard this as a fitting conclusion to their conversation for she turned on her heel saying, over her shoulder, “It will be safe to light a fire inside the big hut. I have salt in my knapsack and there is the French hardtack and onions. I will bring you some soup when it is made. You had better post one man in advance and the other a hundred meters down the track. There are goats on this hillside and a goat would keep us fed all the way down to the river.”
He followed her back to the others, now sprawling in and around the larger of the two huts. Lockhart had taken it upon himself to mount guard farther down the track, but the others had stripped off their equipment and Watson was already asleep, his head pillowed on the massive thighs of his comrade Straw-bridge.
“Relieve Lockhart and take turns watching the path,” Graham said, addressing Croyde. “Tell Lockhart to move along beyond the far hut and keep a lookout for something for the pot. You others”—he stirred Watson with his foot—”get inside and sleep, but first check your priming and share what cartridges you have equally! The woman is going to light a fire and make soup.”
Croyde got to his feet and shambled off reluctantly, and soon Lockhart came back, exchanged a brief word with the woman and moved on with his long, loping stride to the small promontory where Graham and the woman had talked. As he went into the smaller hut Graham could see him silhouetted against the sky, his firelock held loosely across his lean body. The straw inside the hut stank of ordure, but within a minute of flinging himself down upon it Graham was asleep.
He awoke with the sound of a distant shout ringing in his ears, and it seemed to come from the slope across which they had traveled during the night. He grabbed the pistol and rushed into the open, to find it was now full day, with the rays of the sun slanting down between the naked peaks and scattering diamonds across the wet heather. As he stood there, bemused in the strong red glare, the yell was repeated, but this time it was on a higher note and he recognized it at once as the cry of a woman, coming from a clump of twisted trees growing in a crevice on the valley side of the path. As he began to run, the sentry on the promontory swung around and Graham saw that it was the countryman Strawbridge and that he looked startled and bewildered. At the same moment Lockhart emerged from the larger hut, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and without his musket. He looked stupidly at his empty hands and then dived back into the hut, presumably to collect his weapon, so Graham ran straight on past the hut toward the gully, noting as he ran that the undergrowth lower down the slope crackled and threshed as though it was being shaken violently by the roots. Then, as he leaped into the fissure, he saw a flurry of green, but it took him a few seconds to recognize the movement as a frantic struggle involving the camp follower and Lickspittle, the woman clawing like a mad thing at the man’s beard and hair, Lickspittle attempting to pinion her by the arms.
Graham saw that the woman was half naked, that her dress was in tatters and the heavy brocaded hem had some how entangled itself in one bare arm, constricting her movement and giving Lickspittle the advantage. Under her dress she wore some kind of corset and the remains of a pair of drawers that had once been white but were now little more than wisps of cotton clinging to her knees. Her thighs and buttocks were bare and because he had never before seen a woman so freely exposed Graham checked in his rush and stared, gaping with astonishment. At that moment the woman’s thumbs found her assailant’s eyes and she pressed with all her strength, causing Lickspittle to cry out with pain and relax his hold so that she was able to writhe from beneath him, regain her feet and kick with great precision, striking Lickspittle’s upraised chin and knocking him halfway across the excavation in which the struggle was taking place. As the man rolled clear Graham shouted at her and she leaped back, seeming to notice him for the first time. For a moment she glared at him, her expression as wild and ferocious as that of a berserk animal, and then, before Graham could make a movement of any kind, she snatched at his pistol, cocked it, swung around and let fly at point-blank range.
The roar of the explosion filled the narrow crevice in which they were grouped and the stench of burned powder set Graham coughing so that for a moment he was unable to relate what had happened to the spectacle of Lickspittle’s swarthy face disappearing under a mask of blood. Appalled, he stood looking down at the grotesque thing that had been a strong, active man as the woman, hitching the remains of her dress about her, brushed past him and swung herself back onto the path, passing Lockhart and the boy Curle, who had run over from the hut, Lockhart with his musket at the port, the boy holding a saber that seemed almost as long as himself.
“Great God!” he screamed after her as she quickened her stride. “You didn’t have to kill him, did you?”
It had all happened so quickly that Graham still found difficulty in believing that it had happened at all. One moment he had been asleep, the next poised on the edge of the track looking down on the struggle, a witness to an act of savagery that had reduced a man to the inert bundle at his feet. He stood looking down at the thing that had been Lickspittle, trying to relate it to the rascal who, a few seconds previously, had been engaged in what was to him no more than a rough and tumble with a camp harlot, and as he stared at the shattered face a sensation of extreme coldness passed over him, bringing with it a sense of shock more distressing than that which had assailed him when Captain Sowden had been killed by the dragoon or Private Morgan speared by the lancer. As the shock receded, however, he thought with revulsion of the woman who had slouched past him, tucking her bedraggled dress under her filthy corset and then, all his senses outraged, he scrambled back to the path and ran in pursuit, shouting in a voice shrill with indignation.
He called, “Stop! You hear me? Stop, I say!”
She stopped at once, turning slowly to face him with the expression of a woman accosted by a tiresome stranger when she was in a hurry. He drew alongside as Watson and Strawbridge emerged gaping from the hut.
“Great God!” he screamed at her again. “You didn’t have to kill the man! I would have told the others to thrash him and drive him out! Couldn’t you wait for the French to kill him?”
She dropped her gaze and he made the mistake of thinking it was done in humiliation, but almost at once he realized that this was not so, that she was in fact studying him from his boots to the crown of his head, as a curious person might study a strange animal safe behind bars.
“I kill any man who tries to take me by force!” she said calmly. “It is always that way with us and if you doubt me then go and ask the men. They will tell you it is so, that we have our rules the same as you people have yours!” And then, as though this was more than sufficient justification for murder, she crossed to the smaller hut and disappeared through the entrance with a final defiant
lift of her shoulder.
He stood quite still, thinking not about the attempted rape or the death of Lickspittle but about the implication of her remark, her acknowledgment of two different nations—the officers and gentlemen, the other ranks and their rabble—and somehow her statement enlarged the whole nature of this nightmarish adventure and his terrible isolation among these men and these desolate peaks and valleys.
It was true, of course, that there were two nations embroiled in war under one flag, but he had never appreciated the width of the gulf that separated them or the hopelessness of finding a bridge to span that gulf. It crossed his mind then that their sole hope of collective survival lay in some kind of alliance between the two nations, a unity that would endure as long as they were isolated and establish between them a mutual trust and confidence. He understood then that he must make his peace with the woman and followed her into the hut, where she was already busy with needle and thread on the rents in her green gown.
She was sitting tailorwise on the straw, unashamedly naked save for the tight corset she wore, and as she bent forward her full breasts strained at the laces of the ugly garment. The remains of her tattered drawers had been peeled off and stuffed into the brogues, remnants to be husbanded against a march through snow and mud. He noticed again how unexpectedly clean and fair-skinned were her shoulders and strong, well-formed thighs and how clear her complexion and eye. It was odd, he thought, that a woman could present such a healthy appearance on the kind of diet to which she had accustomed herself over the years. He would have thought that she would be sallow like Watson, or bloated and pudgy like the big countryman Strawbridge, yet her skin was as smooth as that of the women his father brought to Addington Court and there was a bloom in the face bent over the rags on her knees.
He said levelly, “Very well, what happened before I arrived on the scene?”
“I went there to wash,” she said, “and he came over and stood looking down at me!”
“You took off your clothes in front of him?”
“No!” She looked outraged. “How could I have shot him if I had stripped?”
The qualification interested him and it began to dawn on him that the moral code of these people was far from simple. To strip under the eyes of a man, it seemed, was on open invitation, but to wash oneself was so far removed from enticement that it justified self-defense to the point of murder.
“He did not offer you money or food?”
She threw up her head and laughed, so harshly that again he blushed and felt confused.
“He offered me nothing, but if he had I would not have accepted anything from a man like that! I lay for soldiers, not for the dregs of the jails, Mr. Graham!”
He nodded slowly, for it seemed that everything she said carried within it the seeds of logic.
“You will be grateful to me before we find the crossing,” she went on carelessly, “for he was the kind of man who brings ruin and failure to any detachment. I have seen them flogged and I have seen them hanged, but what use is that when more and more of them are drafted into the ranks, when every transport brings another company of them to repair honest wastage? The provost should hang them as they come ashore from the transports, before they have a chance to infect promising men!”
“There is his comrade,” he said. “Are you not afraid Croyde might want to revenge himself on you?”
“I am not afraid of Croyde, for there is a man who will soon find someone else to lean upon. If it is not Lickspittle it will be you or one of the others!”
She put away her needle and bit the thread, slipping the tattered dress over her head and rising swiftly to her feet.
“You have no other clothes in your pack?”
“I have enough,” she said shortly, thrusting her broad feet into the brogues and stooping to fasten them.
He rummaged in his valise and drew out a pair of clean cotton drawers, handing them to her with a grin. “Take these, it will be cold when we are not on the march!”
She took the garment and studied it, feeling the texture of the material with finger and thumb. She seemed surprised by the gift, so much so that she was unable to find words to express her thanks.
He left her then and went along the path to the spot where Lickspittle lay. The sun was clear of the peak now and the mists in the valley were violet tatters, through which he could see an endless vista of woods broken by outcrops of naked rock. Nothing moved down there, and Lockhart, his musket held loosely across his breast, might have been a figure of stone standing sentinel on the edge of the plateau. Graham felt somebody touch his sleeve and saw Watson, his face puckered with anxiety.
“’E took ’im, sir! Croyde took ’im an’ wouldn’t let none of us ’elp. Pushed us orf, ’e did, and said he’d do it lonesome. Over there!” and he pointed to where the path ran between two masses of fallen rock.
Graham shaded his eyes and saw the lumbering figure of Croyde moving down the path, with the body held against his breast. Obviously the stupid-looking felon had some feeling for his crony in spite of what the camp follower had claimed, for as Graham watched he laid the body on the ground and began to scrabble among the shale. Graham turned away, telling the men to share the dead man’s cartridges and search his pack. They emptied it onto a flat-topped rock and out fell twenty or thirty items of campaign loot—a small brass crucifix, a silver thimble, odds and ends that seemed hardly worth the taking. Graham paused over a small piece of bone about two inches long and saw Watson looking at him with an expression of intentness.
“Can I ’ave that, sir? It might work for me!”
“What is it?” Graham asked, turning it over in his hand.
”It’s wot they call a relict, sir, one o’ them saint’s toes or fingers. I was there when Lickspittle took it from a church when we passed through one o’ them towns before we got detached. It was in a kind o’ glass case wi’ writing underneath but we couldn’t read the writing and Sergeant Fox who knew their lingo told us it was a relict! So Lickspittle went back an’ took it.”
“Why do you want it?” Graham asked curiously, for it seemed odd that a man who was prepared to rob a church should look for security from the Devil in the proceeds of that robbery.
“Oh, I dunno, sir,” said the sweep, wriggling with embarrassment. “It’s kind o’ good luck, maybe!”
“It didn’t bring Lickspittle much luck,” Graham said, making the first joke of his military career, and was cheered when Watson chuckled as he pocketed the bone.
“Ah, I reckon the thing on’y works on the ’oly sort, like me!” he said, and Graham turned away to hide a smile, reflecting that of all these men Watson had the kind of perky courage most likely to mark him down as a survivor.
He issued orders to pack up and prepare to move off, and as the gamekeeper Lockhart rejoined them he said, “We’ll give Croyde a few minutes to bury his friend. When he returns keep a close watch on him and don’t leave him alone with the woman!”
“No, sir,” said Lockhart respectfully and, looking down the path to where the distant figure of Croyde was still bent over the body, he added, “It will be as well to bury ’un while the French are close. The wolves will get ’un in any case in a night or two.”
“Wolves? There are wolves up here?”
“Yes, sir, I’ve seen tracks!” And he slung his musket and went into the hut to collect his share of Lickspittle’s cartridges.
Croyde was not much dismayed by Lickspittle’s death and was not, in fact, engaged in burying him, although he made a pretense of collecting pieces of rock so long as he thought he was being watched. Uppermost in his mind when he had claimed the right to dispose of the body had been Lickspittle’s money belt, a broad strip of sail canvas worn around the waist. Croyde had been aware of the belt for some time, although he had never handled it and not once had Lickspittle referred to it during the months that had passed since they were taken from the condemned pen at Lewes jail and added to the unlikely-looking bunch of recruits s
elected for the draft. Croyde had known Lickspittle since they were urchins fighting for existence among the watermen of Deptford, sleeping in empty hogsheads and glad to fill their bellies on the scrapings of the garbage cans and fish stolen from the carts passing between Billingsgate and the quays.
When they had been captured, of course, all their possessions had been confiscated, and thus it was a source of bewilderment to a slow-thinking man like Croyde that his companion had soon set about building up another fortune which, presumably, he carried about with him in the sailcloth belt. He had watched Lickspittle very carefully since disembarkation at Lisbon almost a year ago, and although he had never seen him salt gold away he had watched him dispose of items of loot in billet and bivouac and knew with certainty that Lickspittle had the proceeds of such transactions about his person.
He tumbled the body this way and that without pausing to wonder how and why Lickspittle had met his death. It was something to do with the woman they had found in the church, but beyond that Croyde did not trouble himself. His kind of brain could grapple with only one problem at a time and just now he could think of nothing but the belt. Lickspittle, he thought irritably, wore an unconscionable number of garments. He tore open the tunic, ripped up the shirt and groped beneath the close-fitting woolen garment that Lickspittle wore like a coarse skin. When his fingers touched a bulky protuberance below the waist he gave a grunt of satisfaction, and after running his hands around the small of the back he found the fastening knot and flung the body over on its face in order to get a better purchase on the tough material. It was too strong to rip, so he took out his knife and slit the woolen garment from shoulder to thigh. There was the belt, a flattish girdle about four inches wide, and as he slashed at the string he could feel metal through the canvas and began to gibber with excitement. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure that his actions were not too closely observed and then crouched forward, stuffing the heavy belt into his breeches pocket. With the sudden acquisition of wealth a new personality took possession of him. He wanted most desperately to count the money on the spot, but he checked himself and made a zealous display of covering the body with fragments of rock and handfuls of gray, moss-clotted soil. When all but one arm had been thinly covered he stood up, sweating with exertion and very conscious of his new self, for it even crossed his mind that it might be a good idea to mark the grave in case he could return at some time and go through the pockets, which he had overlooked in his eagerness to get at the belt. He thought better of this, however, reflecting that it was unlikely that they would come this way again and also that Lickspittle was not the kind of man to carry loose gold in his pockets. Satisfied, he rejoined the file and gathered up his equipment. When it was dark, he told himself, he would find a rock or a bush at some distance from the others and count Lickspittle’s fortune. He would then repair the string fastenings and wear the belt as Lickspittle had worn it, snug around his belly.
Too Few for Drums Page 7
