‘Drink to the regiment before you go?’ Gardiner raised his other hand, which held a bottle, and shook it enticingly at Ross in the manner of a nurse showing a babe its milk.
Kit could see that Ross would rather choke – but since his regiment’s name had been invoked he could not demur; he barely touched the flask to his lips before handing it back. ‘The queen,’ he said.
Gardiner doubled up with laughter. ‘The queen!’ He laughed harder, as if it was the best jape he had ever heard. ‘The queen!’ and he collapsed backwards, completely immersing himself in the fountain, still laughing. Kit wheeled her horse and followed Ross through the gatehouse, wondering what Gardiner could have seen in the space of a fortnight that changed him so.
Ross emerged with a face of stone from a very short conference with the marquis, and led his hundred horse right out of the town without a word. Kit took pride that the Scots Greys were a breed apart; that they would not share a billet with Gardiner’s disgraced men; that they were a cut above. Her one regret was the fare they might have enjoyed in Villafranca; the food in camp was no better than shipboard fare, and all of it dried for being on the road. There was no leisure to hunt and kill and cook, and Kit’s stomach grumbled for fresh meat. Oh, for a tender haunch, roasting and dripping and crackling! The venison mess in Maria’s house seemed very far away.
And so the Scots Greys rode on, day after day, and at some point in those weeks on the road Kit became one with her horse. She merely had to turn her shoulders in the direction she wanted to go for this will to be directed to Flint. The mare would stand still for mount and dismount, flick her ears backward when Kit talked to her on the road, and nuzzle the buttons of Kit’s coat, huffing and blowing and whickering with friendship. And Flint was no longer her only friend; the dragoons now knew her well enough to tease her – and she felt the balm of their teasing, for she knew it was a hand of friendship. Mr Morgan, the Welshman, was teased about his accent; Mr O’Connell, who was missing a tooth and made a whistling sound when he spoke, was called Whistler. Kit, who was ever twitted for her whiskerless cheeks and full lips, was called ‘the pretty dragoon’. It meant she belonged. Pretty she could leave aside; what she loved was that she was called a dragoon. But she took warning, too, in the name; and determined there and then that she should conceal her true age – as a girl she might look twenty, but as a boy with no whiskers on his cheek she elected that she would lose four years and claimed thereafter to be sixteen.
Growing up, she had felt a pride in being called pretty; but now she had new pleasures. She loved the long lean muscles in her legs and arms, she loved the calluses on her hands where she grasped the reins, she loved that her formerly soft white thighs were now as firm as marble and that her legs and seat no longer ached after a day’s ride. She had not seen her reflection since the silversmith’s house, but she knew she was certainly changing. She knew her hair was growing for her fringe fell in her eyes – there was nothing she could do about it on the road, but she pushed the heavy red locks to the side, and crammed them under her tricorn to keep them out of her eyes. Her back hair she sheared off, now and again, with her bayonet. She didn’t care if it curled unevenly, she just couldn’t afford for her creeping locks to steal down her collar and give her away. Even when trimmed, she wore the lengths in a pigtail down her back, greased with wax to darken the colour, and tied with twine into a neat queue. Ross, whose dark hair had also grown in a month on the road, did likewise, but with a velvet ribbon as his one remaining concession to vanity.
After many days’ ride, Kit noticed that the ground began to rise and the terrain about her changed. The flat lands had boiled and risen into looming peaks which looked fit to topple and crush them all. Vertiginous valleys cleft through the rock, and clustered villages and little onion-spired churches clung to the lofty summits. The slopes were hard on the horses and the dragoons made less and less progress every day.
One morning, just after dawn, they made their way through a deep gorge. All was silent as the new sun peeped over the high crags, and Kit felt a prickle on the back of her neck, a heightened awareness and an unshakeable feeling that they were being watched. She gazed up at the heights with awe and dread and fear suddenly throttled her. If the enemy was waiting and watching to fall upon them they were lobsters in a pot, for there was only one entrance to the gorge and no possibility of escape up the steep verges. The valley was too quiet, the sun stealing down the scree until their stony path was illuminated. But no birds sang, no creatures were warmed awake to scuttle underfoot. Ross looked about him constantly, alert and watchful. The gentle chatter of the men seemed too loud in this eerie place and Ross called for quiet. Kit looked up sharply as the Scots Greys fell silent. Ross pressed his grey onwards in haste to be gone from this place. Kit kept her eyes fixed on her commander – no matter how much she disliked Ross’s arrogance, she trusted his instincts.
But Flint was of a different mind; the mare reared suddenly and without warning, nearly knocking Kit from the saddle. Kit slapped her smartly with the folded reins, but the mare reared again and turned in a circle, blocking the mounts behind her. Kit pulled savagely on the reins, then realised that the mare was genuinely unsettled. Ross turned back, exasperated. ‘If you’re having trouble with your nag, Walsh, dismount and lead her. I’ve no wish to linger here.’
Kit slid from the saddle, gentling the mare with a hand to the velvet neck. The nap of Flint’s coat was on end, prickling with fear. Kit slipped the reins over the mare’s head and led her forward; but when the horse reached a certain thorny bush she would move no further.
‘Come on,’ barked Sergeant Taylor, from the vanguard; but Kit had seen something in the bush. She dropped Flint’s reins, went to the bush and parted the thorns, dreading what she might see. She could never have predicted what nestled there.
It was a baby, so small as to be almost newborn, and curled up asleep in the branches. ‘Mother Mary,’ she breathed.
Ross rode back. ‘What’s amiss?’
She leaned in and regarded the child; so small and sweet and soft. It seemed a pity to disturb such a peaceful sleep but the child was not swaddled and the dawn had the nip of approaching autumn. She had seen a church at the head of the valley – perhaps a priest could take the foundling. She poked the babe gently with one finger.
It was cold. With a rush of chill horror, she drew the child out. A grisly cord clung to its distended little stomach, and its back was covered in scratches from the thorns of the bush. It was quite, quite dead. Unable to speak, she held the child aloft. Ross stopped in his tracks; some of the men crossed themselves. Before the captain could gather himself to speak there was a shout from the van and the rear almost simultaneously. ‘Captain Ross, there’s another one here.’
‘And here.’
The second child was halfway up the scree – too high, it seemed, to have bothered the passing horses. The other was ahead of them, right in the middle of the path.
Ross shortened his reins. ‘Dismount,’ he ordered grimly. ‘Fan out, and search the valley top to bottom.’
They found five in the end, two girls and three boys; all newborns, all naked. They had not lived long enough to be dressed. No one had cared enough to swaddle them, or to push little limbs into fondly knitted sleeves. The dragoons laid them tenderly in a little sorry row. Some, like the child in the bush, seemed untouched – two were battered and bruised and one had his little head stove in.
‘Dropped from above,’ said Taylor, and Ross nodded curtly. Kit looked up to the crags, to the little onion church. Who would cast a child from a mountain? And why? She looked at Ross, but he said, ‘Dig five graves, deep enough to be safe from animals, away from the path where they may rest in peace.’
Taylor spoke, not noticeably diffident or respectful. ‘Sir, we should rather go. We may be overlooked from the peaks, and they’re only babes.’
Ross rounded on him, his eyes very blue in a ghost-white face. ‘Bury them. And that is an order.’
The bells of the onion church had tolled eight times before the babes had been committed to the ground. Captain Ross dismounted and sat on a nearby outcrop, knife in hand, savagely whittling sticks. Kit laid the child she had found in its grave herself. She ran her finger tenderly down the tiny nose. Then she covered it up gently in a dark blanket of earth, as if she was tucking it into its cradle. She felt numb. Nothing in her training had prepared her for this. She knew that she might be called upon to fight, and would do it too, in order to reach Richard. She would scythe down grown men like grasses if need be, grown men with beards on their faces and the free will to enlist. But could the French really be making war on children? The Gravediggers, she thought, the common name for Kavanagh’s pub. Now she had turned gravedigger too.
As the last sod of the five graves was in place, Ross stood and buttoned his jacket. ‘Fall in,’ he commanded. ‘Stand to attention. Coats on, hats in hand.’
The Scots Greys obeyed, and watched as Ross placed the five little crosses he’d been whittling into the mounds. Taylor tutted under his breath. Ross stood, his face unreadable.
‘Behold, children are a gift of the Lord,’ he intoned, his voice ringing about the valley. ‘The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them; they will not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gate. Amen.’
All but Taylor said the Amen, and mounted upon Ross’s order. No one, now, needed to be told to be silent. Ross rode ahead, still white as paper, his dark brows drawn together, his lips pinched to a tight line. No man dared speak to him until the valley of the foundlings was many leagues behind them.
Kit was shaken by the grisly discovery. The babies haunted her, and in the night, when she was dropping, half asleep in the saddle, their little forms, insubstantial and glowing, seemed to follow her. They would circle her drooping head, plump and bewinged like church-wall cherubs. By day, the babes were gone, and Kit straightened up. If she could be a man in her heart like the others, then she could ride on and leave the babies behind. If she could be a man in her mind, she would not mourn for the last breath of another fellow’s child. It would not trouble her that the mountain blackthorns had pierced the infant flesh, like Christ’s thorns, Crucifixion and Nativity cruelly compressed.
She could tell herself such things, but Ross gave them the lie. This perfect soldier, the kind of fellow they sang about in ballads, cap-a-pie in his appearance as if he’d stepped from the page of the chapbooks they sold on street corners, was more affected by the valley of the foundlings than anyone else. For days he seemed dazed with shock, his blue eyes glazed, his manner irritable.
Ross had barely blinked when they’d found a lake full of soldiers in Mantova, but for those tiny unshriven souls he had risked a hundred lives, tarried in a place of danger and spent a brace of hours making sure the children had their proper respects. Ross, single-handedly, had taught her that emotions, deep and searing, did not just live in the female heart, but were a male province too. Kit began to watch him, and once she had started, she could not stop.
Chapter 8
And a crown in the bargain for to kick up the dust …
‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)
Under Captain Ross’s command the dragoons wanted to be better soldiers. In his company they stood a little straighter, spoke a little louder, rode a little harder. Ross himself never raised his voice but expected his orders to be followed without question. Every day they heard his common phrase – ‘No man of mine’. ‘No man of mine rides without a hat.’ ‘No man of mine is ignorant of how to light a fire.’ And once, when Kit forgot to doff her hat to a passing goodwife, ‘No man of mine neglects to salute a lady.’
No one minded these corrections, or that they were couched in terms of ownership. The dragoons were Ross’s men, and proud to be so – to be numbered among the Scots Greys was a badge of honour. He would speak of the red coat reverently, as if it was a mantle of office as worthy as a judge’s robes or a bishop’s cope. When in uniform they must act at all times in a manner that did honour to their coat. That humble red felt was the queen’s cloth, and it bound them to each other, close as brothers. Ross’s devotion to his men was clear; they were his charges and his family and he loved them. Kit could see, now that she chose to see, that they loved him back. She admitted too what she had always known since he had pushed them into the brine, that he was amusing – he did not enjoy vulgarity but would take pleasure in japes and sallies, and his own taste in wit ran to clever wordplay or the ridiculousness of the human condition. She never once heard Captain Ross swear; ‘I leave,’ he would say, ‘Billingsgate language to women and cowards.’ Kit did not know where Billingsgate was, but she certainly knew the sort of language to which he referred, and was embarrassed to think that she had begun their acquaintance by spitting such words in his face. Ross managed to convey, without expressing it in so many words, that such language was good enough for the company of foot, but not quite the thing for the dragoons. And so Kit’s language, which had plunged to the very depths since her education at sea, began to elevate itself once more. She still swore, but less frequently and violently, and certainly not in her captain’s hearing.
Now that she could see Ross in a different light – not as a lofty, entitled English gentleman but as a man to admire – he seemed to warm to her too. He sought her company as they rode – he on his favourite grey Phantom, and she on Flint – and it became a habit with them to ride together. Kit recognised that he was taking the trouble to educate his greenest, youngest recruit. And it was working. As the days passed, and the calendar of notches on her musket stock grew longer, his speech no longer seemed so clipped and gentlemanly to her, and she knew her own speech had become more like his. Her Dublin brogue was softening and she began enunciating more clearly, finding her vowels shortening, her consonants hardening. Sometimes she caught herself pronouncing something in the English way, and wondered what Richard would say when he saw her again. At nights along the road she would bed down later and later, preferring to stay at the fireside until there were only one or two hardy souls awake with Ross and her, and sometimes, on rare occasions, she would be alone with her captain. At those times it occurred to her, fleetingly, that she would miss his friendship when she was reunited with Richard – she rehearsed the notion of the two men, husband and captain, becoming acquainted; Ross striding into the snug at Kavanagh’s and ordering a jorum of port. But she dismissed the fantasy almost at once; the two men would have nothing whatever to say to one another.
Once Ross asked her about the marks on her gun. The stock was now stippled with notches, tallied with four and one across, like miniature versions of the gates on her father’s farm. Kit thought for a moment. ‘They mark how many days since I began my journey,’ she replied with perfect truth. And indeed, her life without Richard was quite a different path to the one she had trodden before. She journeyed with Ross through entirely unfamiliar terrain. She acknowledged that Ross could tell her things that Richard could not. She enjoyed the captain’s society, not just for the balm of friendship, but also for the fact that he was a man of information. Ross was a man of possibilities, he had travelled widely for one so young, and been promoted far beyond his years. He was a man who could be described in that one tantalising word that she’d always loved; that wonderful, troublesome word that had brought her here. He was a man of Adventure.
It was Ross who enlightened her on the whole business of the war. They were sitting by the fireside, their seventh night in the mountains, a week since they’d found the children. She and Ross sat awake the longest, long after the other dragoons had wrapped themselves in their blankets, watching the dying of the fire. Ross did not, for once, seem inclined to talk, but Kit was anxious for news. They had climbed a steep gradient all week, ever since the valley of the foundlings, and she knew that the higher she climbed the nearer she came to Richard. ‘Are we
near to Rovereto, where Captain Tichborne awaits?’
He raised his eyes as if it were an effort. ‘We should reach there tomorrow, or the next day, perhaps – we are very near the Imperial borders.’ He sounded tired, but Kit would not be discouraged. ‘Have you fought in many lands, sir?’
‘Too many,’ said he. ‘And after a time they begin to resemble one another. But I learned very quickly that everywhere has a horizon – ride towards that before the enemy gets you, and you’ll be all right.’
She digested this. ‘You said we approached the boundaries of an empire. Do we then leave Spain for Imperial lands?’
He sat up straight, his brows drawn together. ‘Spain? What do you mean?’
‘Well – if we are reaching a mountain border, have Tichborne’s regiment already left Spain?’
Ross clasped his hands together. ‘Let me properly understand you. You are asking me if we are about to leave Spain?’
Kit’s voice was small. ‘Yes.’
He laughed, throwing back his head, and the dragoon nearest him grunted and shifted in sleep. She felt a little uneasy and foolish, but was glad to see him laugh, for he had not even smiled since they found the babes. He wiped his eyes and shook his head. ‘Christ, boy, you think we’ve been in Spain all this time? Since Genova? You think those great cities, Genova, Mantova, Villafranca, that they are in Spain?’
She shrugged unhappily. ‘Is not Parma in Spain? I could’ve sworn … someone said the name in an alehouse once …’
‘Well, you’ve bested me there, Mr Walsh. Palma is in Spain. Parma is in Lombardy.’ Kit, who didn’t know the difference, held her tongue. A pox on all educated gentlemen.
‘And since we are at war with Spain, they would have trussed us like chickens and snapped our necks had we landed at Palma.’
‘Wait.’ Kit was confused. ‘That is … I thought … the French … do we not fight the French?’
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