She had heard nothing of the captain since Lambe had taken him away. The Scots Greys, under the temporary command of Sergeant Taylor, were stationed in the mountain town of Arco, safe again in the embrace of Imperial lands, but the surgeon and his cart were nowhere to be seen. All divisions which had retreated from Cremona were to be billeted at Arco, and were even now snaking through the mountains, but Kit was torn between her desperate need to find Richard, and her anxiety for news of Ross.
On her first morning in Arco she had just set out from her lodgings to see whether she could discover the captain’s whereabouts, when she was hailed by one of Marlborough’s runners.
‘I am to escort you to the Palazzo Marchetti,’ he said. Kit, bemused, followed the ensign to a large, low, timbered house, the residence of the town mayor. Marlborough was seated at a desk in a painted chamber. To her surprise he stood and came around the desk to greet Kit.
‘Ah, the Pretty Dragoon,’ he said heartily. ‘Good and bad at Cremona, eh? We made some inroads but they are still clinging on. At Luzzara, we’ll be doing things my way, and you shall see a difference, eh? Good, plain British attack, and no skulking around. You’ll be at the forefront, I’ll wager? I’ve heard much that is good of your conduct at Cremona.’
Kit did not reply; there was little chance to speak in Marlborough’s presence. Marlborough, accustomed to young cadets being cowed to silence, carried on regardless. ‘I hear you carried a man to safety. Brave boy, skinny thing like you. He was no feather that one. Pity he died; he was a good man.’
The room darkened, Kit’s knees weakened, she felt she might fall. Ross was dead. Somewhere, Marlborough was still speaking.
‘And for this service to Her Majesty and myself, I reward you with five pistoles.’ Marlborough dangled a purse in his fingers. Kit stared at the purse, swinging like a pendulum. The little bag began to blur.
‘Sir … My lord … Your Grace … where is he buried?’
‘By the river, I think. We sent his medals to Lady Gossedge.’ The duke turned to his ensign. ‘We did that, didn’t we?’
Kit could barely speak. ‘No … no, sir, not Colonel Gossedge, Ross. Captain Ross. Where is Captain Ross buried?’
Marlborough gave a little shout of laughter. ‘Well, we thought it best not to bury him, for he is not dead.’
‘Not dead?’ A wave of relief flooded over Kit.
‘He’s in the field hospital. They’ve put it in the church, I think. He’ll be back to berate you soon enough. I’m told you had something to do with his rescue too. So you shall have …’ he turned to his ensign, ‘what is the name of the castle above us?’
‘Castello Arco, sir.’
‘That’s it. I give you leave to search the castle before the divisions come. Here, take this.’ He scribbled a dispensation and sealed it with his ring. ‘Sole rights of plunder.’
She took the paper and tucked it in the purse. ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Well, well.’ The great duke seemed discomfited by simple gratitude. ‘Off you go.’
Outside in the bright morning, Kit clasped her purse and took a lungful of freezing air. Ross was alive, she had five pistoles, and a castle to plunder too – her life with Richard could begin again in comfort and prosperity. But before she climbed the hill to claim her prize there was a visit she must make.
She went straight to the little white church and was stopped at the door by Atticus Lambe, wearing a butcher’s apron spattered with blood. Her heart sank. ‘Please, Doctor …’ She was not sure how to address a surgeon.
‘You may call me Mr Lambe.’
‘May I see Captain Ross?’
‘You may not. He is resting.’
‘Just for a moment?’
‘On no account.’
‘Is he recovered?’
‘He is much improved; I have removed the musket ball from his side. But he is still an invalid for all that and as such may not be visited. The Lord only knows what evil miasmas you carry on your person.’
He looked at her with a disapproving gaze.
‘Will you tell him that I sent him good wishes?’
‘Certainly not. I am not a post horse.’
Kit shrugged and turned away. Nothing could dent her feelings: the sun was shining, there was a breath of spring and the mountains were beautiful. As she climbed to the castle, heavy key in hand, she scattered the cabbage butterflies, sniffed the rock roses and picked late brambles from the hedgerows. She was cock-a-hoop. She was a soldier, she had acquitted herself bravely, and she had been rewarded by her commander. She had been given the key to the castle. She could ask for nothing more in the world. Her captain was alive, and Richard would soon be here.
The castle stood at the top of the hill. She had expected it to resemble the great barbican of Rovereto, but long-ruined towers reached into the sky like a jaw of broken teeth. Kit had thought to stuff her pockets with the coins and treasure that would doubtless be scattered on the floor, but in fact a wrecked wagon had been upended in the broken doorway and secured by a chain. She unlocked the chain and drew it through the wagon wheels with a rhythmic clinking clatter, rolled the cart aside and entered the castle that was hers for the day.
It was a broken place. Ruined stairs led to nowhere, two shattered towers reached into the sky like surrendering hands, and windows were open to frame blue skies and mountains. She wandered from chamber to chamber, wondering what these rooms once housed; one had a huge stone fireplace, still blackened with the smoke of ancient feasts. Kit’s buoyant mood sank into a nameless foreboding. The French had gutted the place and left their detritus behind; powder packets, ramrods, an old saddle, a broken stool. The remnants of a fire, a privy smell in the dark corners. She made her way back to the roofless great hall and then stopped as she heard a scrabbling sound. She froze, her hand flying instinctively to where her sword should have been. She picked up the broken stool and retreated into the shadow of a fractured doorway.
A pig came trotting into the middle of the cavernous room, as if it entered a forest clearing. Kit remembered Signor Castellano and his parable of the pigs in the mountains. All at once she was consumed with a hunter’s instinct. She would have this pig, and she would take it back to her fellows and they would roast it and perhaps, perhaps, Richard would come marching up the hill in time to sup with them. If this was the only booty here, very well: it was hers.
It was an epic chase, around and about the broken walls, up and down stairs, into the ancient earthworks that lay beneath the broken floors. Once she had the pig at bay in a dungeon, but he dashed through her legs and out into the light again.
A freezing rain began to fall, turning the hall to mud so that Kit’s boots slid around. At last she cornered the pig in the blackened fireplace. She threw a stool at his head and he dropped and lay there stunned, a gout of blood like a blackberry behind his ear. She wound her stock about his neck and tied the loose end to a stake, and sat in the oozing mud, elbows on knees, exhausted.
She felt a prickling at her back. Sergeant Taylor was sitting on a spiral stair that led nowhere, watching her. ‘I’m the King of the Castle,’ he sang. ‘And you’re the Dirty Rascal.’ He laughed drunkenly.
She stood slowly, backing away, shielding the pig. Taylor took a pull from a clay bottle, his eyes never leaving her face. ‘Marlborough himself gave me sole plunder of this place,’ she said. Taylor flinched at Marlborough’s name. ‘If you challenge me you must answer to your master.’
‘Plunder?’ spat Taylor. ‘You fled up the bell tower like a rat up a rope while the rest of us were fighting. And then, when it was all over, you pulled a fat old colonel from a wall like a cork from a bottle. That pig should be mine. I got my hands good and dirty in Cremona.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not again.’ He’d taken her bell at the monastery of San Columbano, he would not take her pig.
‘Thank you for the bell, by the way. I sold it by the lump to a Jew. Got a pretty price. And now you’ve caught this pig for me. Didn
’t look easy. Better than the shuttlecock, watching you chase him like that.’
He stood, tossed his clay bottle down, and started towards her down the steps. Kit’s skin started to prickle. He had a wicked little dagger in his hand, and she was unarmed. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the pig waking, staggering to his trotters and testing the extent of his tether.
Taylor came at her. She grabbed the dagger instinctively, and it nearly sliced her little finger through. Shifting her grip, her hands slippery with rain and blood, she fought furiously over the blade. Blood poured from her finger and down her sleeve, and her arms buckled, black spots mingling with the rain before her eyes. She could feel Taylor’s sour breath on her cheek as they grappled. Blind rage took her. She was not going to let this man destroy her life. Ross was alive and she was about to see Richard again. She screamed in his face: ‘The pig is mine! Mine!’ Taylor blinked in surprise and she realised she could use her rage as a weapon to overpower him. Slowly, slowly the wicked silver blade turned and with every muscle straining she forced the needle-sharp point towards Taylor’s eye. His gaze flickered in horror as she pushed with the last of her strength and felt a pop and a rush. Taylor fell back, his body slack, and she almost fell on top of him as he dropped to the ground, screaming, clutching the dagger that had pierced his eye. The pig began to scream too; the animal squeals mixing with Taylor’s until it was impossible to tell them apart. At last Taylor, writhing in the mud, found some words.
‘My fucking eye! You’re finished, Walsh!’
Kit untethered the pig and turned to go. ‘As you said, no witnesses.’
Chapter 17
And sup on thin gruel in the morning …
‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)
Back at the camp, Kit handed the pig to Mr Morgan, a solid Welsh dragoon with a ready smile. He spotted her hand. ‘Buggering Christ, Walsh, you got too many fingers or something? Get away to see Lambe, before you bleed out.’
Kit looked down at the rag scrunched in her hand. It was red. ‘Give the pig to Hall,’ she said, ‘he’s a rare cook. Save some for me.’
Cradling her hand, she hurried to the white church and banged at the carved door with her elbow. Lambe came to the door.
‘What is the matter?’
She held out her hand to him. The gash was so deep it looked as if her finger was barely hanging on. The surgeon’s lip curled with scorn. ‘This is a shabby attempt.’
‘I do not understand you …’
‘Oh, I think I do. You were here this morning, asking to see my patient. You turn up again, not three hours later, with an injury that begs my attention. Is there no length to which you will not go to be in the company of Captain Ross?’
‘I assure you,’ protested Kit, ‘I had no such aim in coming here. My finger is all but severed.’
Atticus Lambe regarded her red hand for some moments while her finger throbbed. ‘Your little scheme has failed; I discharged Captain Ross at noon. And that being the case, you may come in.’
There was a dreadful smell in the church: excrement, blood and under it all the sweetish smell of incense. Someone moaned, incessantly, low voiced, behind canvas curtains. Wooden pews had been covered with tick mattresses and a soldier lay on each, bearing their wounds from Cremona. Each man lay under his own pool of light from the stained glass, the jewel colours masking the stains of their dressings; the red of blood, the brown of excrement, the yellow of pus.
Atticus Lambe picked up two chairs and set them beneath a broken window. Kit sat in the white light; Lambe sat opposite her and took her hand into his lap. Painfully, she uncurled the fingers – all had been cut when she clasped Taylor’s dagger but none as grievously as her littlest one.
She found it hard to look at the wound – the finger was cut to the quick and she could see white bone. Lambe took a fresh kerchief to clean the wound. ‘I just saw a sergeant with a pierced eye,’ he said, speaking to the cut. ‘What do you know about that?’
She winced. ‘Nothing, sir.’
‘Hmm. This is not a day of action, and yet two men have come to me injured and bleeding. What am I to suppose?’
‘I cannot tell you, sir.’
‘He will lose the sight in his eye.’
Kit swallowed. Taylor had always disliked her; now she would be his implacable enemy. ‘Will he be discharged from service?’
‘No.’ Lambe seemed pleased. ‘I have given him a patch. Men have fought with greater lacks than an eye. He had not much beauty to spoil, but his judgement of distance will be affected. So you may take solace in the fact that in battle he may well die all the faster.’
She met his gaze. He looked down at the cut again. ‘How did you come by this wound?’
Kit thought fast. ‘I drew my sword in haste, and my hand slipped.’
‘Ah. And lost your sword in the process, I see.’ He looked at the empty scabbard at her waist. ‘Your sergeant told me much the same story, except he contrived to put his eye out when drawing his dagger. I doubt our enemies have much to fear from you; you seem to be doing their job for them.’
He threw the stained kerchief into a basin. Beyond it she saw a collection of instruments: pliers, knives and even a little saw. ‘Well: your finger is all but severed and since you have been obliging enough to start the surgery for me, I should just nip the thing off.’
She looked him in the eye and raised her chin a fraction. ‘Very well. If it is beyond you to mend it, take it.’
Her gambit worked. ‘Of course I can stitch the thing. But a choice lies before you. I can take the finger, cauterise it and you will go on your way. Or I can save the finger, and you run the risk of infection and a higher amputation later. Which is it to be?’
‘I will keep the finger.’
‘Very well.’
She watched him closely, anything to distract herself from the terrible, probing pain. Anything that meant she did not have to watch the sewing needle, curved like a tooth. In the end, she could not bear it. ‘May I not have something for the pain?’
He looked at her as if he had beaten her at a hand of cards. ‘We have nothing to give you. Our supplies have diminished so much as to be kept for more serious cases. But you may pass out soon enough from the pain.’
Kit nodded. Had Ross had to lie thus, awake, while Lambe dug the bullet from him? Or did an officer’s stripe buy a spoonful of laudanum?
So she sweated, bit her lips and watched Atticus Lambe. The grey eyes like water over pebbles, the black pinprick pupils that focused on her finger – the scroll of his ear, the ash-blond hair cut close into the neck. He was young – not more than five and twenty – and would have been handsome if he had not been so thin. His cheeks were hollow, his white wrists protruded some inches from his frock coat – he was too thin, too tall, too gangly; like a pale summer spider. His skin had a strange grey sheen to it; in fact he seemed all of one colour, for his teeth, skin, eyes, all were pearly grey, and his medical frock coat was of the same hue. He sweated with the effort, despite the icy mountain breeze whipping through the broken window. She knew that he saw only her finger – that she was not a human, but a challenge. He disliked her, she knew, but at this point he would have done anything to save this finger. As he worked, she found herself reluctantly admiring him. He had a prodigious skill.
At last she was stitched and bound and he unfolded his long body. He took off his pince-nez and pushed them into his breast pocket. ‘You’ll keep a good scar,’ he said, almost friendly. ‘But you’ll keep the finger too.’
She stretched out her aching arm, flexed the other fingers. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’
He considered her. ‘Oh, I think you do.’ His gaze was an awl, probing her as closely as the needle had done; urging her to understand something. But before she could reply, the surgeon had turned away from her. ‘Take the bed in the Lady Chapel. The nurses will bring you gruel.’
‘I’m to stay?’
‘Yes. The first twelve hours are crucial
for the incubation of any infection. By morning we’ll know if we need to take your hand.’ And he dismissed her with a wave.
Kit laid herself down on the little bed in the Lady Chapel as she’d been bidden. She looked at the frescoes curling about the white walls – more haloed saints. Exhausted by the events of the day, she slept, and the saints of the mountains watched her.
She was woken late in the evening. One of the nurses, a pimply boy sporting a butcher’s apron, brought her a dish of thin gruel. Her stomach growled, and she spooned it down, but she could not help but think of her pig, and his blood pudding, and his sides made of pork, and his legs made of ham, and his back made of bacon. She could almost smell him – she was sure she could smell him.
There was a murmuring at the door, and she could hear a voice – Mr Morgan, with his voice as up and down as the Welsh mountains from which he hailed, and that heavenly smell again. She heard her own name, then Lambe’s voice, curt and flat, but acquiescent. She strained to listen but the door closed, nothing happened, and she drifted again.
The next time she woke, she thought she dreamt, because she saw a little table set by her. A little silver candlestick stood sentinel, with a fine white candle burning. A crystal glass stood on the other side, brimming with rich red porter. On the table was set a shining pewter plate, not a battered army tin but round and true as the moon. It was piled with pork, done to a turn, with crispy crackling shining with fat and the plate swimming with rich gravy. Kit propped herself on her elbow, her hand throbbing anew, but she hardly felt the pain. She threw back the coverlet, and made to rise.
But at that moment Atticus Lambe entered the little room. He took his glasses from his nose, flipped his coat tails out behind him and sat down at the table. With his grey eyes fixed upon her, he took a good drink of his port, took up his knife and fork and tucked in to the pork. She watched as he sucked on the bones, chewed on the flesh and his grey teeth snapped the crackling. He ate every morsel on the plate, his eyes never leaving her, the pupils now huge and round. There was something obscene in the way he savoured the meat, and swilled his mouth with the wine. Then, finally, he crossed his cutlery, drained his porter, and left without a word, his grey eyes on her to the last. He left the detritus there, and the heavenly twin smells of meat and wine, to torture her dreams.
Kit Page 16
