‘Provocation, sir. That would just about describe a visit whose sole purpose is to expose and remove someone we consider a traitor. Maybe they’re not French, after all. And maybe the people they’re hiding from are us.’
‘Whoever they may be, they’re ahead of us,’ Lanester replied, without any trace of alarm, ‘and have continued on their way. If they were a danger, and intent on stopping us, I suspect we’d know by now. It’s not difficult for mounted men to catch up with marching infantry, even if they left Cardo after we did ourselves. And why use a route that’s more difficult than the road?’
‘We’d hear them coming.’ Markham pointed straight up the hillside, indicating an imaginary route through the maccia, which was more direct than the twisting road. ‘If they are ahead they are also above. So they have an advantage. They can see us. If they decide to set an ambush, they’ll have all the time in the world to make sure we don’t uncover it before it is sprung.’
‘We need to get to Corte as quickly as we can, man, and this is by far the best route.’
‘It is also the most exposed. And I think it was you who pointed out how much suspicion we created by the manner of our departure. What if these horsemen are Buttafuco’s? What if their aim is to stop us from going anywhere?’
Markham was having difficulty understanding Lanester’s attitude, even if his desire for haste was perfectly natural. A lot hung on a successful outcome. With only seven days left, speed was desirable, but so was security. Failure was certain if they didn’t arrive.
‘Sir, you are a Virginian, are you not?’
Lanester gave him a very sharp look, eyes for once narrowed and suspicious, which looked strange in his fat, red face.
‘What are you implying, Markham?’
‘Only this, sir. That I suspect you fought the native Indians before taking issue with your own countrymen.’
‘I did!’
‘And was the terrain not, in some respects, similar to this?’
That was a neat way of reminding Lanester that only a fool took chances in unknown territory, or assumed that a strange sign could never presage danger. The major sat on his horse, clearly ruminating, though whatever thoughts he harboured he kept to himself. When he eventually gave way his voice carried with it a trace of resentment.
‘I can see by the look in your eye that you have a suggestion. Lieutenant.’
‘Yes, sir. It is that we leave the road as well, and use the track they have created, which will be easy to follow. That way we stay behind them, remain out of sight for most of the time. And with men well ahead on point, it is a very good way to make sure we’re not surprised.’
‘Marching along a road is bliss compared to that.’ He pointed with his crop to the thick forests. The local word, maccia, had no direct translation into English. But one only had to look at it to see that such dense scrub and pines was a hellish area to progress through. More fertile local minds would, no doubt, describe it as a place of dark secrets, of evil spirits and strange apparitions. But to Markham it represented a degree of safety.
‘In addition, the men would not only have to forgo the luxury of having their equipment transported, they would also have to carry what the cart has been brought along to bear.’
‘I’m aware of that, sir. I’m also aware that some of what you have brought might have to be left behind. But I’d rather leave your claret on this road than my bones.’
Chapter sixteen
There was a long and pregnant pause before Lanester responded to what was, after all, a rather dramatic statement, his disapproval evident in the way he was pursing his lips.
‘You have a valid point, Markham, but so do I. Speed is of the essence. My suggestion is therefore that we proceed as before. But if we see any more evidence of these horsemen, we reconsider our options.’
‘There’s no guarantee, sir, that any other sighting will give us such clear alternatives.’
The look in the major’s eye left no room for further dispute. His words might be couched as suggestions, but they were his clear orders. By the time Markham made his next recommendation the man had already looked away.
‘Extra men forward, sir?’
‘They’re your command, Markham,’ said Lanester, nonchalantly. ‘Dispose them as you see the need.’
‘Sergeant Rannoch. Two men a hundred yards on point, another two at fifty, the first pair to stop at each bend, and not proceed until the following pair join them. Everyone to keep to the side of the roadway which affords the best forward view, muskets primed and ready. Bellamy, Pavin and the cart will remain in the centre.’
Yelland and Tully went right ahead, with Dornan and Hollick in between. Rannoch dropped Ettrick and Quinlan back forty paces to the rear.
‘Why us?’ demanded Quinlan.
‘Because,’ the Highlander replied, ‘you pair are used to people in pursuit of you. My guess is that you have some braw trained hairs on the back of your necks. If neither the Provost Marshal nor the Beak before him could catch you at your pilfering, I doubt John Crapaud, or any local culchie, can take you unawares. Now move!’
The whole mood of the detachment changed. What had been a relatively carefree march, with the usual quantity of jokes and insults exchanged, became tense and expectant. Markham had his sword out, his eyes darting about for that single trace of something unusual which would indicate a potential hazard. Lanester, for his part, was trying to convey by his confident air that nothing about the journey had changed.
They were several miles further on, having traversed a series of long uphill bends which took them into a thin mist, when, from his elevated position, Lanester saw Yelland and Tully stop. And as soon as the young blond marine bent down, he called softly, ‘Lieutenant, I believe your men on point have spotted something.’
‘Halt,’ Markham said, in a normal voice, holding up his hand. Rannoch and Halsey, who passed on the instruction, came to join the officers as soon as it was obeyed. Quinlan and Ettrick, well trained men even if they were light-fingered, spun round and dropped to their knees, muskets aimed back the way they’d come.
‘Corporal Halsey, take half the men to the rear of the cart and call in the rearguard to join you. Sergeant Rannoch, the rest in front.’
The hairs were prickling on the back of Markham’s neck as he went forward, passing the kneeling figures of Hollick and Dornan, who scurried back to the main body as soon as he told them to do so. Yelland and Tully were likewise poised, eyes searching the surrounding maccia, ears cocked for the slightest hint of an unusual sound. Yet the birds were singing not far into the woods on both sides, a sure sign that their world was at peace. The shattered wagon rising into the mist just ahead of them, and the faint outline of dead bodies in the roadway, had no effect on the creatures’ natural harmony.
Markham came abreast of his men, as they knelt in front of an elaborate peasant Calvary, the bleeding man-sized figure of the crucified Christ almost producing the kind of involuntary genuflection his mother had insisted on when he was a child. He followed Yelland’s finger, which was pointing further on, and went to examine the mud-spattered roadway, as well as the verges. Two sets of prints this time, confusing since they seemed to go in both directions, the others, more numerous, just inside the right-hand trees where the thick undergrowth had been cut back. He waved to the main group, then took the two point men into the woods.
There was no clearing this time, and Markham could see, as he went further from the road, that the horsemen had occupied this place with some discomfort, those who’d failed to dismount dislodging quite a lot of the lower greenery. But they seemed to have come here, through thick woods, on slightly diverging mule trails. The smell was very potent, that special odour of saplings and thin branches newly parted from their host plants. It was only when he examined both trails that he realised one had led to this place, while the other was their route of departure.
‘They’re close, whoever they are,’ said Markham to himself.
&nbs
p; ‘Be nice to be a mite clearer about that, sir,’ Tully whined, the tone of his voice showing his fear. He was looking about him, as if every tree and bush hid someone who wanted to kill him. That made Markham wonder if Rannoch had let slip some of what they’d seen. He doubted it, since the Highlander was good at being tight-lipped. But his men would be curious. Perhaps it was just deduction. Those who’d been on guard at Cardo had seen him and his sergeant rushing into the woods. And when they’d returned, the whole unit had been up, dressed and prepared for a fight. Then there was the manner of their leaving.
‘Let’s just assume they’re French, Tully,’ Markham replied, trying to sound reassuring. ‘Yelland, go back to the major and ask him to bring the whole party up to us. You and I, Tully, need to go forward and look at what’s up ahead.’
‘Christ!’
That exclamation showed just how rattled the man was. Asked, Markham would say that of all the men he led, Tully was the least likely to be upset by the sight of blood. He’d never seen his pig-like eyes show anything in the way of emotion, nor observed pity on the ravaged, pock-marked face. But it was there now, and Markham surmised that the marine was imagining that he was in the place of the mangled bodies they were examining.
Two elderly men, a woman and a child lay amongst their scattered, meagre possessions, each one bearing the deep open wounds caused by dozens of sabre cuts. They’d been ridden over by horses too, which had smashed their heads against the stones of the road. Corsicans, by their dress and complexion, they’d died without being able to fire off the weapons that lay beside the men’s bodies, muskets primed but not cocked. Markham followed the imprints in the softer earth of the verge, seeking the point at which they’d re-entered the forest, which he found some fifty yards away from the smashed wood that had once been their cart, in a direct line to that same mule trail which the rest of the horsemen had taken.
Returning to the bodies, he turned the men on their backs. What skin was unmarked on the faces was weatherbeaten and heavily moustached; the dead eyes, undamaged, stared back at him. Trying to imagine those eyes full of life, he felt he was looking at men who would have been just as cautious as every other Corsican peasant they’d come across on the road. How could they have stood, and allowed a French patrol to get so close that they’d died without firing a shot? Had they surrendered in the hope of clemency, to men suddenly appearing out of the woods? If they had, they’d not even been given time to lay down their muskets before they’d all been sabred. But what if the men who attacked them were dressed in Corsican uniforms? Then they would not have run, would not have seen the need.
‘A burial party, sir,’ said Markham.
‘Of course,’ replied Lanester, both index fingers pressing the top of his nose in an attitude of near prayer. ‘And a mark on the spot, so that if we find a priest, he can inter them properly.’
‘And then?’
‘Then, Lieutenant Markham,’ he responded with a sigh, ‘we get off this road. But just you make sure you get me to Pasquale Paoli in thirty-six hours, otherwise I might not be left with the time to persuade the old Liberator to help us.’
The trail they had to follow, made by mules and travelled by the locals for centuries, might be obvious, but that didn’t make it easy, and Markham wondered how they would have fared if the horsemen hadn’t partly cleared the most annoying impediments. Greatcoats and packs got snagged on twisting branches that had survived the passing cavalry, each one seemingly imbued with the sole purpose of causing mankind to curse. Major Lanester had taken to walking, his crop swinging in a constant arc as he swiped at the foliage. Pavin was using his horse to transport the most valuable items which had been on the abandoned cart, the rest loaded onto the backs of the two mules which had pulled it.
This was ancient forest of a density the like of which Markham had rarely seen: tinder dry in the summer, well watered in winter, and heated to grow in the spring, though the strong winds which buffeted the island tended to bend the trees so that many of them seemed stunted. Progress was further slowed by caution. The men on point, if they got too far ahead of the main party, simply disappeared into the abundant greenery, yet they were the people who had to warn the rest of any danger.
Uphill they struggled, coming upon the road again every so often, an obstacle that couldn’t be traversed until the undergrowth on the opposite side had been checked to ensure that the horsemen ahead of them had continued on their way. Sometimes they crossed other tracks, narrow overgrown routes worn away into gullies by countless feet, routes that led God only knew where, the lifelines of old Corsica, which predated the building of the French road. Markham tried to imagine fighting in this, trying to pin down an enemy who knew his way when you didn’t. But he had to abandon that when Gibbons dropped back from point, his hand up to indicate that they should all halt.
‘A cluster of buildings, sir, like one or two of the little monasteries we’ve passed. The roadway is no more than forty feet beyond, with all the woodland cleared in front.’
Markham, taken forward to the edge of the trees, was struck by the lack of activity. He could, by listening carefully, hear the sounds of small bells, which denoted animals, sheep or goats, free to wander. But a place like this should have dogs, and they would surely bark at the approach of a stranger. A wisp of smoke rose from the central chimney on the main building, the slight odour of burning pine pleasant to the nose. That was the only thing that was pleasing. The rest, the sheer tranquillity, gave the clearing an air of deep foreboding.
‘Gibbons, go back to Sergeant Rannoch, and ask him to bring the men forward and take up a defensive position on the line of the trees.’
‘And you, sir?’
Gibbons had no right to ask such a question, and while Markham was aware that most of the man’s concern was fear for his personal safety, there was a small amount of that same worry allotted to him. How different it had been when he first met the marine! Gibbons, along with the rest of his command, would have seen him dead without a flicker of sympathy. But shared danger had fashioned them into something very different, a unit where a ranker felt he knew his officer well enough to overstep the boundary between them. To cover any effect that thought engendered, he jammed his sword into the earth with excessive force.
‘This will act as a marker. I am going round the perimeter to make sure our friends on horses made it across the road.’
The eerie silence, added to the deserted nature of the place, was somehow more disturbing than what Markham expected, which was the same scatter of dead bodies they’d observed on the road. Here there was nothing human. Little paddocks occupied the space between the main stone building and the road, containing a few goats and sheep. They were grazing contentedly, or lying dozing in the straw-lined wooden bothies that skirted the forest at their rear. On the building itself, the small bell in an aperture above the studded door, surmounted by a crucifix, identified it as a religious dwelling, one of the tiny monasteries of the type that dotted the island. They’d passed several of them on their way here, each a small, subsistence enclave, peopled by a few poor monks and their attendants.
The front door stood ajar, a gaping hole that invited him to enter. But Markham ignored it, crawling all the way to the highway, looking in both directions through the thin mist, which eventually became like an opaque white blanket. Still observing no sign of danger, he skipped across the road and edged along the treeline, until he came to what he sought, the deep imprints of the cavalry hooves, heading on into another set of mule trails through the forest.
Confidence restored, he walked boldly out into the open, heading straight for the door to the little monastery. It was dark inside, dingy and full of the smell of church he remembered so well. An odour of wood and beeswax, a dryness so total that it seemed the dust never moved. The residue of fading incense filled the small interior, furnished with a few polished pews facing the tiny altar that lay at one end.
It was like stepping back into his own childhood, to
a world where priests stood as direct representatives of an all-seeing God, men to whom even his maternal grandfather, a highly respected doctor, deferred. He tried to contain the memory of childish pleasure, the love of the ceremony and incomprehensible Latin liturgy, of candles burning and incense swinging. But reality intruded: his envy of the boys chosen to serve at Mass, a task denied to him by his birth; the looks his family party received, discreet but unfriendly, as they entered the church, young George condemned more than anyone by the knowledge that he attended his father’s Protestant church as well. The divide between his parents, both in station and religion. The wearing away of a harmony between them strong enough to withstand any censure, fraying it until it became acrimony. It was hard to conjure up the face that had so ensnared Sir John Markham, all too easy to replace it with the sad eyes and puffed cheeks of an old woman who drank too much.
‘Jesus,’ he said softly, his voice echoing off the bare white walls, ‘there’s no peace anywhere.’
He blinked when he exited, the mist having lifted enough to allow a refracted sun through, suddenly feeling that the smells he remembered so fondly were musty rather than endearing. The damp air was full of odours of earth and wood, and clean enough to wash away his memory, bringing him back to the present and its problems. As he turned the corner he felt, such was his sudden loss of breath, as though a hand had grabbed at his throat. The entire party were lined up, Lanester in the middle, their weapons laid out on the ground in front of them. Behind sat a line of caped French cavalry, every carbine aimed at a British back.
Honour Redeemed Page 19
