They moved off in the same extended order, the ensign leading, followed by Watson, then Strawbridge, then Croyde, then the woman with the boy Curle and finally Lockhart marching as rearguard. Graham had studied the route ahead and detected what he thought was a continuation of the track around the wide shoulder of the mountain. Later, he thought, they would move down into the woods, but up here they had every chance of spotting the presence of a French detachment by the sparkle of polished equipment or the movement of scrub that would cause dust to rise. They were safe from cavalry, and the woman said that the chance of French infantry climbing so high was remote. The infantry, she said, marched in large bodies, owing to the presence of guerilla bands, and were therefore almost certain to stay in the valleys. The threat of rain had passed and for an hour or so the sun was unexpectedly hot, causing them to sweat freely as they picked their way along the track and over half a hundred miniature landslides, but Graham marched confidently, for at last he was beginning to derive comfort from a plan. As yet it was not much of a plan, no more than a vague idea of keeping on high ground until a break in the valley woods on their right indicated an approach to the river, but it was a great improvement on marching blind as he had marched during the two preceding days when Sergeant Fox had led.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Crucifix
They bivouacked that night in a glade of cork woods halfway up the long slope of the mountain. Lockhart shot a goat about midday, after discussing with Graham the danger of advertising themselves by the discharge of firearms. The goat was an easy target and obligingly stood still between two rocks while they deliberated, weighing the risks of alerting the enemy against the certainty of starvation. They had now covered about thirty miles over the roughest kind of country on a diet of onion soup and one boiled hare, with a few crumbs of French hardtack shared among five grown men, a boy and the woman, and Graham realized that they could not continue to march on this meager fare, that they would need solid diet of one sort or another. So he told Lockhart to shoot, and the ex-gamekeeper killed the goat with his second shot. They would have fallen on it there and then had not Graham beaten them off with the flat of his sword, telling Strawbridge, the big, plodding countryman, to give his pack to Croyde and carry the carcass across his shoulders.
As dusk fell they made their way down to the rim of the woods, where Lockhart found a deep crevice between rocks and they could light a fire without much chance of its being seen from below. It could have been observed from above, of course, but the woman said there was no danger from that direction, for if a guerilla band saw them it would be to their advantage. They could get directions and perhaps a guide, as well as the latest information concerning the whereabouts of the French. Reassured, Graham posted a sentry fifty meters down the slope and they sat around the fire watching the joints brown and sizzle in the flames. The smell of the roasting meat was unbearably appetizing, and when it was cooked they all ate their fill, tearing at the portions with their hands and sighing with pleasure as they gulped and gnawed.
Graham carried his meat some twenty paces down the cleft. He did not want the men to see his ravenous attack upon the food and he made himself a bed of bracken under the lee of a rock where the crevice was shallow and gave a view of the dark woods below. After he had eaten and washed his face and hands in the rivulet, he sat with his back to the rock, watching the moon soar over the peaks and flood the valley with cold silver light. The moon, he thought, softened the landscape, masking its terrible bleakness and loneliness which had weighed upon him so heavily during the day. With his hunger appeased, the nag of responsibility was less insistent, so that he felt almost confident and content.
Farther down the cleft he could hear Watson’s nasal voice addressing the three who were taking their rest spell, and presently a thin wailing sound reached him, Watson playing a tune on his tin whistle which he had tooted several times on the march. Graham had heard the tune before during the voyage out and guessed it was a chanty taught the infantrymen by the sailors, for Strawbridge was chanting the refrain. Graham wondered whether he should forbid them to make so much noise.
He was on the point of getting to his feet when a shadow passed between him and the sky and he saw the woman standing there, looking down at him with her hands resting lightly on her broad hips and her head on one side as though contemplating him with amusement.
“Leave them,” she said. “There is no one up here and it keeps them cheerful. It is important that they should think of themselves as an army in bivouac!”
He marveled at her understanding of men at war, and his curiosity about her increased. He said, “Stay and talk awhile, but when you lie down find a place beyond me in case of Croyde.”
He said this lightly and she laughed, a clear, ringing laugh that must have been heard by the men, for Watson’s serenade faltered for a moment. Graham realized that they would almost certainly think the woman was now an officer’s perquisite and were probably exchanging jokes on the subject. He did not care, however, for the hot food had made him feel drowsy and relaxed.
She dropped down beside him in one of those swift, serpentine movements that were so characteristic of her.
“We made good progress today,” she said, “and I think we must be within a day’s march of the river. Tomorrow we will climb higher and push south. Perhaps tomorrow night we shall find a break in the forest leading to the beach.”
He had no wish to discuss their situation, he was much more interested in the manner in which she had acquired this instinctive knowledge of men and mountains.
“I told you my name,” he said. “What is yours? Where do you come from and how did you become a camp follower? Was your father a soldier? Were you born in barracks?”
“Ah no,” she said, with her Continental inflection, “but I was born in the mountains, the Welsh mountains!” She glanced around her, adding, “They are not so different. At night they look the same!”
She had the knack of seeming to make herself comfortable wherever she happened to be, composing her limbs in a relaxed yet graceful position, with her feet tucked under her buttocks and her weight resting on back-thrust hands. When she spoke there was a tinge of mockery in her soft, lilting voice.
“You have seen my mountains, you have traveled in Wales?”
“No,” he admitted. “Apart from coming here I have never been north of London or west of Portsmouth. My father took me on short journeys before I was sent to school, but I was only a child and I remember very little of them. I have studied Wales on the map. What part of Wales is your home? Is it the north, where the big castles are?”
“It is very close to one of the castles, a village called Harlech, a wild part of the country with the sea on one side and Snowdon behind. There are not many people there. One can walk all day and see no one but Idris the Shepherd or Evan the Turf. I was a fool to leave it, perhaps!”
She said this as though she was not sure, as though it was something she had often debated with herself over the years.
“How did you come to leave it?”
”Because of Bryn,” she said. Simply and suddenly she threw up her head so that the moonlight caught her throat and her thick reddish-gold curls swung down to touch the sprigs of heather at the base of the rock.
“Bryn was your first man?”
“He was a carpenter, the son of Rees the Wood. Very clever with his hands was Bryn-boy. Make almost anything, he could, from the time he could hold a hammer and saw. Fine coffins he made, with his father to show him, but soon he knew as much as Rees the Wood, so they set him making tables, chairs and dressers for the big house in Tan-y-Llan. I was up at the house, you see, and Bryn, he was the man who took me the first—the night of the big bonfires, that was, blazing for miles about on account of the big fight!”
He gave her all his attention, for she had the Celtic gift of storytelling.
“The big fight? What fight would that be?”
“Why, the fight at sea.”
> “Ah, Trafalgar, in 1805?”
“Don’t take no account of years, I don’t, but that was the night when the bonfires were blazing in the mountains.”
“This carpenter, Bryn, he took you like Lickspittle, against your will?”
She giggled, rocking herself on her haunches so that her heavy mass of hair tumbled across her face.
“No indeed, I was willing! Bryn was a fine man, too proud to waste his life working for the people at Tan-y-Llan. So he went for a soldier over at Bangor, and me too, with his child in my belly.”
He was surprised and not a little shocked, having regard to the price she had put upon her virtue that morning, and then wondered at the plight of the pair, Bryn exchanging the peace of a craftsman’s lot for the brutal life of the barracks, and she a girl of no more than sixteen, homeless and pregnant.
“You have his child?”
“No, I have no child, Mr. Graham. Bryn’s boy was born dead. On the transport, it was, after we sailed for Kingstown.”
“You have fought in the West Indies?”
“I have been all over,” she said, and the declaration was made almost arrogantly, so that Graham realized that she found fulfillment in this hard, restless life, despising women who cleaned cottages, made beds, cooked meals and bore children in towns and villages at home.
“You had no children by Briggs or the Highlander?”
“No indeed,” she said emphatically. “Women who bear children on the march are fools. I saw five score of them fall out on the road to Coruña!” Then, seeming to tire of recounting her personal history, “You follow a family of soldiers?”
“No,” he said, smiling to himself, “from a family of merchants. To be a soldier was my own choice. My family think I am mad.”
“Ah so,” she said seriously, “but it is not always thus; there are good times as well as bad!”
“Did you have good times in garrison?” he asked, and she shrugged.
“Why, yes indeed, many, many good times. In barracks there is plenty of good meat and when the rum is served out there are sprees, with dancing and singing. There is pleasure also in learning what is behind the mountain and that is something one would wonder about all of life if one stayed at home. One is not lonely either, neither man nor woman lacks good comrades in the Army. All these things are worth the taking and one should be careful not to forget them when there is no meat or rum or when men are too cold or tired to sing!”
“Is that all? A pound or two of beef, a pannikin of rum and an occasional carouse?”
“No,” she said, looking steadily at him, “there is something else, but it is difficult to say it in English words.”
“Then say it in your language.”
She smiled and threw up her chin, rattling off a string of curious words that made no sense to him. The words seemed to bounce about on the tongue and lose themselves between the lips, yet they were musical and enriched her as a person.
“What does that mean?” he asked, fascinated.
She shook her head and replied, “I told you, it is hard to explain in your language, but it has to do with the age of my people and the kind of people they were before the English king came over the mountains to build the castles!”
It was not in any way a satisfactory explanation, yet it helped him to grasp something of her approach to the profession of arms. Graham remembered talking to one of the surgeons on board the transport, an officer attached to a Welsh regiment, and he recalled the man saying that all Welshmen claimed descent from kings. They were a people, he reflected, who had never quite lost their separateness or sacrificed their spiritual independence, and in this they were like the Irish and the Scots who contributed so much to the offensive spirit of the British Army. Recruited, bullied and led by mahogany-faced Englishmen from the shires, they yet infiltrated into the higher echelons of every expeditionary force sent out by England to fight its battles. Crauford, Graham’s own divisional commander, was a Celt, and so was Picton, whereas Wellington, the Commander in Chief, was an Irishman. Pondering this, he noticed the woman fumbling in a pouch she wore on her belt, and suddenly she produced a sealskin purse, taking from it a small handful of tobacco.
“You have a pipe?” she asked, and when he told her no she began to roll a cheroot, tearing a page from a small book, the leaves of which were crowded with close print and gilded at the edges.
“What have you got there?” he demanded, sitting up.
“A book of prayers,” she said, “but they are foreign prayers and therefore of small use to anyone!” She rolled the cheroot expertly and handed it to him, striking a light with her steel spring and watching him draw the smoke into his lungs.
“It is good Navy tobacco,” she said. “Donald’s sergeant had more than a pound of it and I was wife to him for the half of it all the way from Busaco.”
She made this admission so simply that any sense of disgust he might have felt was stifled and instead he wanted to laugh aloud. He was not, however, prepared for her next statement, for she said, with the same childlike candor, “You want me before I sleep?”
He stared at her sitting quietly with her back to the rock, her hands in her lap, her feet still tucked neatly under her thighs. It was as though she was not simply offering herself as a gesture of comradeship but also as his hostess inquiring whether there was any small service she could render before she blew out the candle and drew the curtains of his bed.
He stammered shamefacedly, “No, no, I don’t want you!” And then, with a candor equal to hers, “I’ve never had a woman! Most of the other cadets went with women in Rye and later on in Lisbon, but I did not.”
“No?” She seemed surprised, but mildly so. “And why was that, Mr. Graham? You already have a wife, perhaps?”
“No,” he said frankly, “I think perhaps because they were not clean women.”
“Ah so.” She nodded, rising slowly to her feet. “I think you are wise and there is time. You are still young, Mr. Graham.”
He got up and stood facing her, aware once again of a disconcerting rush of color to his cheeks and also of a feeling of personal inadequacy.
“You have not told me your name!”
“It is Gwyneth,” she said, and as she pronounced it, slowly and carefully like a school dame teaching a child his letters, he lifted his hand and touched her cheek very lightly with his forefinger. Again it was the act of a child seeking reassurance in physical contact with someone he needed and trusted. She made no acknowledgment of the gesture, but as his hand fell away she turned and walked slowly past him to a spot where the crevice ran out onto open ground. He heard her settle herself in the bracken, and then one of the men sitting around the fire lower down the slope laughed and the laugh was taken up by the others. They were not laughing at him, he was aware of that, but the sound of their merriment increased his shame.
During his spell of sentry-go that same night Croyde satisfied his curiosity regarding the contents of Lickspittle’s belt. He was both surprised and disappointed. The canvas lining contained but one piece of gold, a half guinea, the rest of the cache being made up of a half-handful of silver crowns, twenty or more shillings and a few coins of lesser value, in all a total of about five pounds sterling. It was a pity, Croyde thought, that his comrade Lickspittle had not changed his hoard to guineas when he had the opportunity, for the belt was heavy and he was already burdened with cartridges, greatcoat, bayonet, crossbelts, knapsack and musket. He made up his mind to change the money the moment they rejoined the rearguard, even if this meant converting it to portable trinkets of the kind that most of the men picked up during the retreat. In the meantime, however, he would wear the belt just as Lickspittle had worn it, and he spent his period of watch untying and reknotting the strings and fastening them behind his back. Five pounds was not a great deal of money, but it was more than most infantrymen acquired during a campaign. Croyde had become almost reconciled to the total by the time Strawbridge relieved him, and after noting that Lockha
rt, Watson and Curle were soundly asleep he took from the canteen the largest lump of meat left over from the feast, stowing it in his knapsack between the folds of his spare shirt. Life had taught him that it was folly to leave good victuals for others simply because one’s belly was temporarily filled.
They breakfasted on the remains of the soup, and Curle was given the rest of the cooked meat to stow in his sack. Just before the rim of the sun showed over the range across the valley they ascended the slope again and then turned south, following the rough track around the interminably broad shoulder of the mountain even when it led them away from the general direction of the river. Their order of march was the same, Graham pushing on a hundred meters ahead of the next man, Lockhart covering the rear. When the easterly trend of the track became more pronounced Graham fell back for a moment and consulted the woman Gwyneth, who confirmed his opinion that it was less exhausting and also safer to continue along the path notwithstanding its curve rather than descend to the level of the valley, where there was every likelihood of encountering a French foraging party. This was the way the lancers had come, and now that the main body of Masséna’s army had had time to cross the river it was probable that the deliberate devastation of the country would force them to search both bands for food and fodder.
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