She lay back, as exhausted as if she’d fought him physically. She did not sleep again, but waited until the hospital was quiet, and even the groaning man had ceased his cries. The candle guttered and died and now only the saints’ gilded haloes could be seen as she rose in the silver moonlight and crept from her room. She would not spend another night in the power of Atticus Lambe.
Chapter 18
And to drink the King’s health in the morning …
‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)
No one wanted to miss the battle of Luzzara.
After months of waiting, of missteps and manoeuvres, they were to meet their enemy face to face. Men rose from their hospital beds in the little white church, boys joined the Imperial forces from the streets armed with pitchforks and their Sunday coats dyed red. Marlborough had told them that the streets were paved with gold and booty. Kit did not care for booty, but knew that she was near the end of her personal quest. Every company, including Tichborne’s, was to be at Luzzara. This time there would be no mistakes. There was no clandestine strategy; this was out and out battle in the open, just as Kit had always imagined it. Here, she would find Richard and fight side by side with Ross.
He was now fully recovered and they seemed back on their old footing, but they had shared that moment at the aqueduct and it had made them brothers in arms. They rode together; they camped together by the fire. Joy and optimism returned, O’Connell got out his fiddle again and played the old favourites: ‘The Humours of Castlefin’, ‘John Dwyer’s Jig’, ‘The Maids of Mitchelstown’. Kit kept her song inside – there was only one ballad for her, and there was to be no singing except that once, by the aqueduct, half in, half out of the freezing water, and then only to save a life. She was glad, so glad, that Ross had lived, that their friendship had survived. The only difference was Atticus Lambe, trundling sullenly behind on his medical cart like some Grim Reaper. Whenever his grey eyes fell upon Kit she felt chilled. She vowed never to get sick and need his ministrations again.
Kit had never seen so many souls gathered in one place as she saw on the battlefield of Luzzara. This was a plain between the River Po and Lake Garda – a true battlefield, a vast open space; granted, it was pitted with ditches and channels, and low fences and high bushes, but it was an interrupted plain where the Alliance forces and the armies of the Two Crowns faced each other, lined neatly, leagues apart.
Kit waited on the hill with the Scots Grey Dragoons. She clasped her reins with her tender right hand – still bandaged but better – and narrowed her eyes across the plain. A ribbon of blue wreathed the slope opposite, punctured by spears and colours with standards. Immediately before her was the martial figure of the Duke of Marlborough; in his helmet and his armour and his silken cape and his Order of the Garter, blue as the sky. But she turned her eyes from him to look along the ranked redcoats, stretching as far as the eye could see, left and right. She could not see Richard. In fact, she had not seen nor heard of him since Cremona, and she was beginning to wonder whether she had imagined him. But she had to believe he was here, was one of those red skittles on the hill. She lowered her musket from her shoulder, took out her case knife and made one last notch on the stock. Two hundred and eighty-five days without Richard. Today she would find him.
There was a long, tense silence – the horses shifted and tossed their heads, the partisans wavered in their lines, the muskets shimmered as they were brought to the shoulder. In that moment, sitting high above the battlefield on Flint’s back, she was a girl again, back in her cotton gown at the top of Killcommadan Hill, the sun warm on her back. She was ready, poised in the moment when she’d tipped forward, hung between balance and motion, just before she started to run. Then the cacophony; the trumpets sounded the attack and the drummers began their battery, the cannon rolled forth. Flint pricked her ears, ready too. And Kit spurred her on.
It was one of the most perfect moments of her life. The wind rushed by her ears, blurring the sounds of battle; her eyes streamed. She drew her father’s sword, and it shone above her in the sun. The sounds of thousands of feet and hooves on the field was like nothing Kit had ever heard – clods split and spun from the earth – soil was in her mouth, gunpowder in her nose. She was invincible. She gave an incoherent battle cry as she hurtled down the hill towards the enemy, slashing with her sword the French cavalier who rode straight at her. He fell from his horse at last and she found another, then another, crazed with battle, drunk with it. The French foot soldiers were under Flint’s feet; she cut them down where they stood. The world had collapsed to red and blue; red were spared, blue she put down. Then, out of the corner of her eye, through the chaos, she saw a man in a red coat fighting like a Catherine wheel, his sword at full length, turning like a dervish.
Richard.
She put up her sword and slid from the saddle. Somebody shouted. She ran through the ranks. Now she could see him clearly; his brown curls fell over his face just as they used to. She was so close now – close enough to see those green eyes she’d almost forgotten. Her mouth opened to scream his name. Then there was a flash, a cloud of bitter smoke and she was punched backwards though the air, lifted from her feet. There was a nameless, awful pain at her hip. Then blackness.
Kit woke to see a silver creature crouching like a spider on a table by her bed. The silver creature had a snubbed silver snout with one nostril, a long broad back, and leathery, spindly limbs like a daddy-long-legs. It was a creature from a nightmare, its silver skin tarnished, its smell acrid like urine. As her dreams fled and she began to wake, she realised what was on the table at her bedside. It was her silver prick.
She tried to sit, could not, her heart racing, her thoughts spinning in horror. She did not know where she was, or how much time had passed, knew only that she was on a bed, alone, in a stone room. There were no plaster saints floating above her head, so she was not in the church-turned-field-hospital at Arco. She looked down at her body, bandaged from chest to thigh, and grew cold. Atticus Lambe had stripped her and treated her and found out her secret.
All of the safeguards, all the deceit she’d practised for months, training her speech and her manner and her deportment, and it was her own body which had given her away.
Her truckle bed was right in the centre of the room, with a little table by her head. Her uniform was folded neatly over a nearby chair like a shed skin; she was wearing the linen shift and ragged red cross of the field hospital. She remembered then; the battle, the euphoria – then Richard, and the explosion. She’d been injured, for there was a pain in her hip acute enough to make her want to vomit when she moved. She forced herself to think. So she had been unmasked, and by Atticus Lambe, a man who had proved himself her enemy.
Her father’s sword was propped tidily by her uniform, her sheathed dagger placed neatly on the top of her pile of small clothes. Her musket – which had been in her hand when she’d fallen – was gone; and with it, all notion of time passed. She’d fallen off the calendar into this stone well – presumably, somewhere above her head, there were sunlit lands where time carried on.
There were no other patients with her – if Lambe had told no one, she could dispatch him. Battle was one thing, but cold-blooded murder? Could she do it? Her own body answered the question – when she tried to rise again she could not, for her bandaged right leg would not move at all – responding to her efforts only with a searing pain from hip to foot. She lay back, exhausted by even this tiny exertion. She was trapped.
She heard feet moving around overhead, and for what seemed like hours she waited. At last he came, first an arm appearing in the doorway, holding a firebrand high; then the doctor himself, pale and malign under the hissing torch.
‘Where am I?’
Atticus Lambe set the torch in an empty bracket. ‘You are in the fortress of Riva del Garda. My Lord Marlborough has commandeered the upstairs chambers for his war rooms, and I have been given the cellars for my hospital.’
‘Where are the others?’
‘What others?’
‘It was a mighty battle. I cannot be the only injured man.’
He looked at her. ‘But you are the only injured woman.’ He rolled his sleeves up beyond his long white wrists. ‘The wounded soldiers are in the wine cellars. Because of your particular … needs … I reserved this dungeon especially for you.’
He drew up a stool next to her, his eyes lit by the torchlight as she had never seen them. He laid the back of his cold hand on her forehead, and she shrank from his touch. ‘No fever,’ he said. ‘That is good.’ His hand moved to her cheek, and he pushed a cold thumb through her lips. It tasted sour. ‘Of course, one sees it now. Plump lips. Those eyes, shaped and coloured like a cat’s. Snub nose, freckles, white skin that has never seen a razor. Red curls. Such a pretty boy. Pity.’
She wished he would go. She wanted to think, to plan, and she could do neither under his gaze. His eyes travelled down her body. ‘It was very interesting, operating upon a woman again. I have not opened up a dame since I was at Saint Bart’s. And they were corpses, of course.’ He sniffed. ‘Mostly whores. I once opened one up with a child inside.’ He broke off and smiled pleasantly. ‘But why am I taxing your patience? You will never need to know this. Childbearing is not in your stars.’
She shuffled on to her elbows with an effort and studied his face. Was he mad? Did he not know she was a woman?
‘I mean, of course, that although you are female, you will never bear a child.’
He sat back, as if he had played an ace at the card table. She watched him, numb with shock, her dry lips working. Never bear a child. The surgeon gave a merry laugh. ‘Forgive me. Let me begin at the beginning.’ He folded back the coverlet and raised her gown. ‘The musket ball entered your body here at the hip.’ He pressed on the place where blood had seeped through the bandage, and a fiery pain shot through Kit. ‘It chipped the ball joint and travelled into the womb, rupturing the lining. I removed the bone fragments from your hip and staunched the bleeding in the uterus wall. I sewed the womb as, you will remember, I once sutured your finger; no mean task, I assure you, for it is as thick as cow’s liver.’ Kit shook her head, dazed – was he actually expecting her to congratulate him on his tailoring? ‘I did an admirable job, but the rupture will never allow the implantation of a viable foetus.’ He replaced the covers, stood and brushed his coat, as if she had infected him somehow. ‘Well; I imagine you wish to be alone with your thoughts.’ He extinguished the ring of torches, one by one, and left her in total blackness.
She cried then. She cried from loss; not the loss of Ross or Richard or even Kit the soldier, but the loss of her future children, children she had never known she’d wanted until now.
After that Atticus Lambe would come to her each day, draw up a chair as if he were to begin a cosy fireside chat, and then torture her with his words. At these times his eyes were black, his pupils huge, the pale grey of his eyes diminished to the tiniest halo about the darkness. She thought to herself – he is mad. He would talk, constantly, of Captain Ross – never by name, but always as ‘him’.
‘I thought about letting you die.’ He spoke matter-of-factly. ‘You were bleeding profusely. It would have been so easy to let you bleed out. And then you would never see have seen him again.’
Kit swallowed. She tried to adopt his dispassionate tone. ‘Why didn’t you?’
He did not quite look at her, but changed the subject. ‘He had a wife, you know.’
Kit was startled. ‘Ross?’
‘Yes. He met her at Oxford. She was his tutor’s daughter. Our tutor, of the Greek language. We sat in his room, Ross and I, and what times we had!’ His wistful face looked almost pleasant. ‘Our tutor would tell us of Jason, and Hercules, and Achilles the great hero of Troy. He would tell us of the love the Greeks held for each other – a higher love between men, of the mind as well as the body – not the grubby rutting of men and women.’ His lip curled. ‘But he was stolen from me, by that chit of a don’s daughter. His family was against it; second son, destined for the Church or the army, but still the apple of their eye. But he married her anyway. Diana, she was called. A delicate thing. He settled her on his estate in Renfrewshire with his mother. By the time he bought his commission Diana was with child. The bull had got a calf on his heifer. Then he went to Flanders and the child came early. Diana’s doctor was a village quack, and mother and babe died on the childbed.’ Again, the passionless delivery, with just a hint of professional scorn. ‘He blamed himself for being absent, for moving her from Oxford, where she would have had access to the best medical minds.’ He sniffed. ‘And since then he has fought every campaign they would give him. Trying to get himself killed. So of course, because he courted death, Fate turned every blade from him and he dodged every bullet.’
Kit thought of Ross at the walls of Cremona, taking a case knife from a French body, cutting his own hand with the blade so it might never harm him again. She said, in the same spirit of candour, ‘I think, now, he cares to live.’
‘I think so too. But only since you came along.’ There was real pain in his voice. The surgeon looked down on her. ‘Do you think you saved him that day?’
She did not need to ask which day. The retreat from Cremona. The aqueduct. Arthur McBride.
‘You do,’ Lambe said accusingly. ‘You think you saved him. But you didn’t. I saved him, not you. You pulled him from the mud, which is an office that a mule could render him, but it takes a man of science to save a life. Did you know he’d stopped to wait for you? I heard as much as he raved. “Kit,” he’d say, “catch up.” Patients say all manner of things. I could tell you more than a priest.’ His eyes bored into her, and she wondered what she had said in her delirium. ‘He turned back for you and got himself shot. You weakened him. You are the heel of Achilles. His weak spot. I understand. You think you’re in love with him.’
‘By God,’ she said, suddenly understanding. ‘If I am not, I know who is.’
He flinched, as if slapped; stood, and stalked from the room.
She lay back, her heart thudding. The heel of Achilles, he’d called her. This she did not understand, but she understood ‘weak spot’ all right. Had she compromised Ross at Cremona? Had the same thing happened to him at Cremona as happened to her at Luzzara? Both of them had run to the aid of a loved one. Did Ross, then, have feelings for her? She did not know – but she knew one thing for certain. Atticus Lambe loved Captain Ross. And Atticus Lambe was jealous of Kit Walsh.
Kit considered the nature of such a love. Lambe was convinced that the love between men was a higher thing, prescribed by the Greeks. What if he was right? What if it was not a low thing – a cooper’s beefy hand on the thigh, the ‘coney-catchers’ of Dublin docks sniffing the air for young untried boys – but a thing of nobility, as lofty as the sacrament between man and wife?
If Ross had feelings for her, they must have been of the nature of the Greeks – for he believed her to be a boy. Had he changed, after the death of his wife, to find himself unable to love a woman again? It seemed a long stride from marriage and consummation with a woman to the love that Atticus Lambe desired, the love that had once been so graphically described to her by Maria van Lommen. Or had Ross developed feelings for her because he knew, on some level, that she was female? It was all so confusing, but her last waking notion was one even more discomfiting. Was she, as Lambe maintained, in love with Ross?
In the first days in her hospital-prison Kit had no way of knowing which hours were passing, but in time she began to distinguish day from night by the faint noises of the outside world. When carts went rumbling over the drawbridge and children played about the moat, it was day. Then, too, she heard footsteps overhead and the groans akin to those she’d heard in the sanctuary at Arco, and knew that Lambe was dealing with his patients in the cellars. When jug-bitten soldiers sang in the street, or an owl hooted in the keeps, it was night. She began to think of the outside world as a place she would never go again. She did not
know whether the regiment missed her, whether Lambe had told them of the woman who’d been masquerading in their midst, or even whether the Grand Alliance had won the battle of Luzzara.
Outside in that world people were divided into petticoats and uniforms, and were identified by which one they wore. But she learned in her dungeon that character had nothing to do with a person’s sex. The self inside was clean and white like the core of an apple, and it mattered not whether the apple’s skin was red or green. She was still herself, still Kit. She wondered whether love too was not a matter of sex, but was attached to a person. Was Kit the woman as lovable as Kit the boy?
She realised too, over the next many days and weeks, how much she needed Atticus Lambe; and that he needed her as much as she needed him. Now she knew his secret love he sought her out. He was her saviour; but she was also his. Many times she thought about telling him about Richard – that she just wanted to find her husband, then she would leave and never trouble him again. Might he let her go, might he even help her, in order to be free of her? But something stopped her. She did not want him to bend his malign gaze on Richard. So she held her tongue, as Lambe loosened his.
In many ways, he did right by her. He changed her dressings assiduously and fed her gruel with his own hand. But although he gave her nothing but food and water, he medicated himself constantly from the ranks of little green bottles he kept in a cabinet in the corner of the dungeon.
Kit Page 17
