The Road To Kandahar (Simon Fonthill Series)

by John Wilcox

  W.G. had already crossed the chasm, which because of the overhanging nature of the top storeys was only about eight feet wide. He stood on the far edge of the plank and held out his hand to Jenkins. Wide-eyed, the little Welshman began to edge along the plank, his rifle extended towards the Sikh, his other hand clenching that of Simon. Eventually, although the plank bent under their joint weight, they were over.

  Jenkins collapsed on to the roof. ‘Oh bloody ’ell.’ His round face was drenched in perspiration and his moustache resembled a drowned rodent. He looked up at Simon. ‘Sorry, sir. It’s all right for you. Nothing frightens you now. But I just can’t stand heights, see.’

  Simon smiled, a little sadly. ‘Jenkins, you’d be surprised how much I do see.’ He extended a hand and pulled him up. ‘Sorry. But you will have to do it again. We’ve got a bit more roof-hopping to do yet.’

  Jenkins’s groan was interrupted by a crack from W.G.’s rifle. ‘They are trying to follow us, lord.’ He gestured towards the hole in the roof.

  ‘Right. You cover us from here until we are over the next gap. Then we will cover for you. We must kill anyone who shows his head through the hole to stop them from seeing which way we go. But keep away from the edge. We don’t want to be followed from the streets below.’

  So began the trio’s escape across the rooftops of Kabul. It soon became clear that concentrating their fire on to the hole in the roof discouraged pursuit from that route, and the crowd seemed to have stayed in the square, probably now looting what remained of the Residency, for the streets below were empty. Even so, their escape was far from easy. Apart from Jenkins’s vertigo, which reduced each crossing to three minutes of cajoling, prodding and blaspheming, the escapers had to take care not to attract attention from below - and also to concentrate on their route back to the stable yard of their lodging. Luckily, the Sikh seemed to know this elevated Kabul as well as the streets below, and although the sun was now setting, its warm westerly light helped their navigation. Simon thanked the emerging stars also for the fact that Kabul’s architects had espoused conformity. Most of the buildings in this quarter, at least, seemed to have been built to the same height, and their plank served them well.

  After about half an hour, the Sikh gestured cautiously and they slid down the sloping roofs of two outhouses to land in the courtyard of the stables next to their lodging house. It was deserted at this late hour, except for a small boy who stared in amazement and some fear at the three dusty, begrimed figures, their faces blackened by cordite, who climbed down a drainpipe into the stable yard.

  The two horses and the donkey were in their stalls, saddles hanging nearby.

  ‘Mount up and go right away, eh?’ enquired Jenkins.

  ‘No,’ said Simon. ‘We must settle our account and take the rest of our belongings. But be quick.’

  Within ten minutes they were riding through strangely quiet streets, with W.G. lugubriously astride the donkey. Their host was clearly puzzled at their rapid departure, but happy with the coins he had earned. And, a little later, happier still when he found the fine carpet samples left behind in the strangers’ rooms. This time, Simon reasoned, they had to travel light. They must reach Roberts quickly to tell him of the sacking of the Residency and the butchering of the mission - and in time to warn him before the Amir and his forces fell upon the English outpost at Alikhal. The fact that the Amir had not gone to the aid of Cavagnari did not necessarily mean that he was behind the attack. But it was not unlikely, and in any case, he had clearly done nothing to help the defenders. The whole country would now arm itself for war. It was no time to be wandering through it, pretending to sell carpets.

  Quietly, then, they picked their way towards the city gate. As they rode, the sky ahead was already a dark blue, pinpricked by the first evening stars. Behind them, however, it was a lurid golden, as the last embers of the Residency hissed and crackled. Simon hoped that there would be enough of the building left standing to offer loot to the mob. This, he reasoned, might prevent any organised pursuit.

  Nevertheless, his heart was in his mouth as they reached the huge gateway. As when they had arrived the previous day, there were no guards mounted - there was no army threatening the city, nor levies to be collected at the entrance - and there was sufficient traffic on the thoroughfare to offer some cover to the two Persians and their Sikh attendant. The trio were not challenged, although a hundred pairs of eyes followed them as they rode through the gate.

  Once beyond the city limits, the three urged their mounts into a steady canter and headed for the dark mountains ahead of them.

  Chapter 5

  Alice Griffith nodded at the two policemen on duty outside the Corn Exchange and was thankful to find a cab rank. It was only 4.35 but already nearly dark, and the harsh wind that blew from the Firth of Forth made her grateful for her bonnet and muff.

  ‘Waverley Market, please, as quickly as you can. I must reach there before Mr Gladstone.’

  If the cabbie, perched high at the back of the hansom, was impressed, he showed no sign. He raised a chilblained finger to his tam-o’-shanter, flicked his whip at the horse and they were off.

  Inside, Alice laid aside her muff and fumbled in her bag for her compact. She did her best to inspect the face that peered back at her from the small mirror. She still retained a little of her South African tan and frowned at the thought. It was not seemly to resemble a milkmaid, and she dabbed a little face powder on to her cheekbones. Damn this wind! It made her face glow like a golden apple.

  The cabbie had turned off the main thoroughfare and was picking his way through the drably lit side streets which gave him a short cut to Waverley Market. The alleys were narrow and the soot-blackened walls glistened with recent rain. The ride was jerky, for the cobblestones were strewn with litter: sodden rags, broken red bricks bleeding their fragments into rusty puddles, a shattered cartwheel, old newspapers. Away from Princes Street and its Georgian squares, Edinburgh had no right to call itself the Paris of the North.

  Alice held a lace handkerchief to her nose and then pulled out her silver watch and squinted at its face. Good. She was about ten minutes ahead of Gladstone, who, after his marathon ninety-minute address at the Corn Exchange, would still be listening to a vote of thanks before he too set off for the Market. Her mind raced through what she could remember of the economic tour d’horizon just presented by the Great Man.1

  Once again Alice marvelled at the remarkable performance she had witnessed that afternoon. In front of an audience of five thousand people, Gladstone had spoken for an hour and a half, seemingly without notes, and had hardly hesitated in his destruction of the Tory government’s fiscal policy.

  The cab entered a wider street, better lit, and Alice scrabbled for her notebook. Gladstone had reeled off a sequence of statistics with a precision that had made Alice once turn round to see if some giant prompt sheet had been hidden at the end of the hall. She held her notes to the window. She had only been able to get down the main figures to mark the thrust of the old man’s argument: Disraeli had increased expenditure on the armed forces from . . . she waited until they clopped past a street light . . . £25,903,000 in his first year to £27,286,000 in his third. Another lamp: a deficit on India of £2,183,000 increased to six million. Yes, but what was this sum of £493,000? Why had she recorded that?

  Alice sighed and leaned back. She was simply not good enough at straight reportage and she must improve her note-taking. Part of the problem was that she was enthralled as much by the man as by what he said. She had found her mind wandering as he spoke, and although she had noted - or tried to note - his key statistics, she had also looked at his boots and wondered why they turned up at the toes, and speculated on why this defender of the poor so loved dukes, and how a politician who had presented more national budgets than any man alive could deliver these bewilderingly new figures without reference to notes.

  She was by now well used to the power and eloquence of William Ewart Gladstone - his abilit
y to construct balanced, orotund sentences worthy of Gibbon and deliver them with the passion of Browning. The address that afternoon had been the eighth of his Midlothian campaign and she had listened to and reported on them all. This marathon series of speeches - a similar number were scheduled for the following week - had been undertaken to launch his Liberal candidacy for the Midlothian seat in the general election, which the voters of Britain expected to be called in the spring of 1880. More importantly, the campaign was also marking his move from the parliamentary back benches, to which his resignation of the Liberal leadership in 1874 had consigned him, back on to the world’s political stage.

  The force, the sweep and the content of this review of world affairs had now begun to attract the attention of the international press. About twenty reporters had gathered to hear Gladstone’s first speech, earlier in the week. Today, in the Corn Exchange, sixty correspondents had clustered awkwardly round the press table, seeking room to rest their elbows as they scribbled away. This was why Alice had scurried away before the meeting had closed. She was anxious to ensure her place in the Waverley Market.

  The cab sashayed to a halt and Alice put away her notebook and descended in the gloom. If the Corn Exchange, with its air of late-Victorian hard-nosed mercantilism, had exuded middle-class prosperity, the Waverley Market was undoubted working class. Huge and forbidding, it reeked of vegetables. Fragments of sprouts, cabbages and leeks had been ground into the pavement to form a dirty mosaic.

  ‘Sorry, miss.’ The large constable, glistening in his cape, held up his arm. ‘The place is full.’ Teeth flashed under his moustache. ‘And no place for a lady, I can tell yer.’

  ‘Full!’ Alice hauled out her watch. ‘But it’s only ten to five. How many are inside?’

  ‘We reckon about twenty thousand. They’ve come from all over Scotland.’ He laughed again. ‘There can’t be that many voters in Midlothian, that’s for sure. Och, the mon’s a great attraction.’

  Alice showed her press pass, and after the customary show of first disbelief and then amazement that a woman was representing one of the great newspapers, she was ushered inside.

  It was a booming barn of a place, its iron arches and vaulted roof reminding her of the great railway stations that newly marked each British provincial city. It was true: the Market was packed, with men standing shoulder to shoulder, separated only by barriers erected - as at football matches - to prevent crowd surges which could lead to some being trampled underfoot. As Alice was led down a narrow aisle she looked above and behind her. The gallery, which swept round three sides of the Market to form a second storey, was packed with women. Something about them made Alice look again. There was hardly a bonnet to be seen, only rows and rows of head shawls, with an occasional bare head, hair swept behind into a tight knot. The men who turned to look at her as she made her way down the aisle were also dressed roughly: dirty scarves tucked into collarless shirts, jackets of the cheapest broadcloth, hard, seamed faces under old caps. At the Corn Exchange, the platform had been graced by one marquess, two earls, at least five peers and one duchess. The audience had glistened with top hats and elaborate bonnets. Here, however, it was very different. Somehow the working class of south-eastern Scotland had left their factories, fields and fishing boats to make a pilgrimage to this vegetable market to hear their champion, ‘the people’s William’, share with them his philosophy of government. It was enough to stir Alice’s radical heart, and she lowered her head to hide an unexpected tear as she was shown to the roped-off enclosure, in front of the platform, which housed the press’s long table, stretching almost the width of the hall.

  Most of the seats at the table were already taken, but Alice determinedly thrust her way to a chair that remained free. She took out her notebook and looked about her again. Unlike the Corn Exchange, Waverley Market was sparsely decorated: merely a few banners and mottoes at the rear and sides of the hall. Above the speaker’s table, however, hung a rather bizarre replica of an earl’s coronet, from the points of which flared brilliant jets of gas. Alice was contemplating the reason for such aristocratic bravura in so plebeian a setting when she felt a sharp nudge on her shoulder.

  ‘Excuse me, miss, just make way and let ’im lie doon a wee while an’ he wull be a’ right. There’s nae room else, yer ken.’

  The policeman who had spoken was carrying, with a colleague, the limp form of someone from the audience, who hung, white-faced and perspiring, from their arms.

  ‘Of course. Of course.’ Alice stood up and moved aside. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Nae. We’ll just lay ’im doon here, wi’ the rest.’

  Then Alice saw, at the side of the press table, a row of men propped against the wall; some half conscious, others mop-ping their foreheads and blowing out their cheeks in seeming exhaustion.

  ‘They’ve been handing them down over the heads of the crowd for the last hour.’ The voice came from behind her, from the man sitting next to her on her right.

  ‘Oh, how awful! I suppose it’s because it’s so hot in here.’

  ‘That and the fact that they’re so tightly packed. And half of them look as though they haven’t had a square meal for days.’

  The speaker was a young man, not much older than Alice, although he possessed the faintly cynical world-weariness of the experienced journalist. His hair was fair and worn long, so that it merged with the full moustache and trimmed beard - grown, thought Alice, almost certainly to make him look older. His frock coat was severe and correct, but his waistcoat was of a lush cream and his tie red and full-knotted. He looked at Alice now with a half-smile, his blue eyes showing a frank interest.

  He stood and made a little bow. ‘Campbell. John Campbell. Central News.’

  ‘Oh, the news agency.’ She extended her hand. ‘Alice Griffith. Morning Post.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ He shook her hand in a manly, collegiate fashion. Alice liked that.

  ‘How did you know? I don’t think we’ve met before.’

  Campbell laughed and showed crooked white teeth behind the beard. ‘Oh, come now, Miss Griffith. There can’t be more than three or four ladies working on news coverage in Fleet Street. And few of them have covered a foreign war. I heard you were here and I am pleased to meet you. I read your reports from Zululand with pleasure and admiration.’

  To her annoyance, Alice felt herself blushing. Compliments about her appearance and femininity she could always take without embarrassment. Her sexuality was strong and she was not averse to flirting - with the right man. But tributes to her work from fellow professionals were rare. As a woman in a male-dominated profession, she was more used to being met with distrust and disapproval from colleagues she encountered on assignment.

  ‘You are very kind,’ she said, a little coldly. ‘Were you at the Corn Exchange?’

  ‘No. I am here to do a full verbatim report. As you know, the Great Man doesn’t give out texts - he doesn’t even seem to use notes - so papers such as yours use people like me to do their bread-and-butter stuff. The old varmint speaks for so long that one man can’t cover two speeches in one day and get it on the telegraph in time.’ He suddenly frowned. ‘You’re not doing full verbatim, are you?’

  Alice laughed. ‘Good gracious, no. I can’t do a word of shorthand - although,’ she added hurriedly, ‘I do admire people who do. No. I am here to do what I think is called “a colour piece”.’

  ‘Really?’ Campbell regarded her again with that air of direct interest which Alice found faintly disturbing. The blue gaze seemed to take in every feature of her face and body without leaving her eyes. ‘What does that mean?’

  Alice laughed a little too loudly. ‘Oh, it’s the latest idea of our editor. He wants me to report, analyse the main thrust of the speeches and give background colour too. Rather as a correspondent would from abroad - particularly from a campaign, say.’

  ‘Hmmn.’ Campbell tilted his head to one side slightly, while holding her eyes. ‘I don’t seem to remember reading any of
those in the Morning Post.’

  Alice felt herself flushing again. ‘No. As a matter of fact, my stuff seems to be appearing in the leaders, if it appears at all. The colour and the analysis is kept, but the newspaper’s editorial policy is overlaid, so that opinions are inserted which, frankly, I don’t completely share.’ She felt she had gone too far. Why was she revealing to this young stranger feelings of which she was only just becoming aware?

  He nodded his head. ‘Ah, I see. So you are not exactly sympathetic with the strong Tory views of the Post?’ His half-smile had returned.

  Alice paused for a moment. ‘Mr Campbell, I have always felt that one’s political views should remain one’s personal property, until, that is, one is prepared to share them.’ She smiled sweetly, rather pleased that she had regained her composure. ‘Don’t you agree?’

  ‘No, not entirely. But it is of no consequence. For my own part . . .’

  But his words were drowned by a great cheer which rose from the hall as side curtains on the platform were pulled apart and the speaker’s party filed on to the stage. The cheering reached a climax as Mr Gladstone appeared, nodding gravely in thanks to the audience as he strode to his chair. Alice’s eye took in again the familiar figure: the wisps of hair and the side whiskers, contrasting strangely in their whiteness with the black eyebrows; the long stern face, with deep seams running from the nostrils to the jaw; the upstanding white collar cutting into the flesh of the neck; the severe black tie, inelegantly knotted; the rough tweedy jacket, waistcoat and trousers; and those dreadful boots. The figure of Liberal Britain; the awkward, long-winded, cussedly moral and very rich opponent of expansionist empire.

  Appropriately before such an audience, it was a local blacksmith, William Fairbairn, who proposed that the Earl of Rosebery should take the chair, and this was met with acclaim. His Lordship wasted no time in introducing the star speaker, and then the old man was on his feet and on his way again.