Annabel kept up with the Courier. She had watched its once-welcome tendency to be controversial steadily develop into a determined, deliberate stirring up of scandal and outrage, regardless of verity and of benefit to no one but those who profited from its sale. How much, she often wished to ask those involved in its production, had actually changed since its programme of wild exposures had begun? How many lives had been saved? This, she felt, was something that Mr Kitson had realised too; and he had relinquished his duties to the Courier, to the irresponsible Mr Cracknell, in order to assuage the torments of his fellow man. This made him worthy of preservation, and she was prepared to answer to the Heavenly Father Himself for her decision to stay with him.
Mr Styles, however, was quite another matter. Had he not been injured and requiring assistance, she might well have thought twice about exposing Madeleine to his company again. Mr Kitson, she decided, was correct–this fellow should be sent home, and held somewhere secure until his fevered mind had repaired itself. He seemed to be lapsing into a delirium, muttering on and on about how Mr Kitson was to blame for his wound, with as much bitterness as if his colleague had fired the shot himself. Then, after gazing dumbly for a while at Madeleine, who tried to put as much distance between them as possible, he began to insist that he was perfectly all right, that he wished to get up off the litter and head over to the front lines, to see how the siege was faring that day. This was all said loudly and pointedly, as if intended to impress, but all it earned him was some less than polite requests from the occupants of other litters to keep his noise down.
At last, after several painful hours, they rounded a spur to see the whitewashed walls and terracotta slates of Balaclava. The town itself was little more than a few hundred humble fishing cottages clustered together in the shelter of a narrow inlet. Crowning the hills around it were the weather-worn remains of an ancient fortress long ago abandoned to ruin, its architects and purpose forgotten. Dozens of tall ships stood in the confines of the harbour like great gothic cathedrals of wood, iron and brass, their masts shooting up like spires, their cannon leering from the high decks like long rows of gargoyles. These shining giants of the British Navy were so large and so numerous that in places they all but covered the waters of the inlet. Indeed, some of them appeared to stand not in the sea but upon the land itself, entirely dwarfing the tight huddle of huts and shacks that fringed the quayside. The massive ships shared something of the silent serenity of the ancient cathedrals as well as their scale. They were nearly empty of life or movement; few had their gangplanks down, and traffic on these was sparse.
Balaclava, in contrast, seemed abuzz with activity. Crowds filled the main thoroughfares. Caravans of travellers struggled in from the surrounding landscape at a constant rate. And on the outskirts, teams of surveyors were taking measurements and making estimates for the planned railway line up to the camps. Construction was set to begin in early February. It would, everyone agreed, transform the war.
This view of the town, as Annabel well knew, was a cruel illusion. As one approached, it seemed a place of sanity, of cleanliness and plenty, of refuge after the madness of the front. It seemed, in short, like civilisation: the supply base where food, clothing and all manner of useful items could be bought, where pipes could be lit, stories exchanged, and rest deservedly taken.
But those expecting relief from hardship and death received a nasty surprise as they drew closer. The wretched merchants of the town, they quickly found, were not decent local people peddling their wares for honest prices, but opportunistic usurers from the surrounding lands–and Annabel’s worst enemies, with whom she frequently did bloody battle. These fiends, entirely indifferent to the suffering of their fellow man, were prepared to sell goods of the very lowest quality for the very highest sums; and they had pitched their stalls, quite happily, in the midst of a plague.
Balaclava was the place where the disease-riddled Turkish Army sent its men to die. From the hills, where all looked so well, one could not see the ankle-deep effluence that ran through those crowded lanes, the scenes of desperate anguish that were being played out inside every dilapidated house and shed, and the rows of dead laid out in the streets once these scenes had reached their inevitable, unvarying conclusions. Every patch of waste ground had become a place of burial. Faces and limbs poked out accusingly from the fresh earth of shallow graves. Unspeakable smells wafted between the half-collapsed buildings, whilst the wailings of bereaved wives competed with the rapacious cries of the sutlers and hawkers.
The mule train forged steadily through all of this in the direction of the docks. Here, in the shadow of the majestic vessels that filled the bay, the chipped, uneven stones of the harbour were almost covered by messy stacks of bales and crates. A profusion of bold stamps, brands and labels indicated that they contained official supplies for the British expeditionary force, shipped out at the expense of Her Majesty’s Government of Great Britain, for immediate distribution. Yet they had plainly been standing there for days, exposed to the snow, sleet and rain, devoid of any means of transportation and destined to rot where they had been left.
Annabel was used to such waste. Like the scenes they had just ridden past so calmly, it no longer provoked her. Climbing off the mule, she looked to her companion. Madeleine appeared distracted still, thinking no doubt of the undeserving Mr Cracknell. Mr Styles, also, had renewed his attentions towards her, and was trying to catch her eye with his usual doomed persistence. The sooner this is over, thought Annabel as she knelt to check on Mr Kitson, the better for us all.
A surgeon and a harbour official, both close to exhaustion but working hard to maintain their respective professional demeanours, approached the wounded men lain out on the cold stone. Before any treatment could be given, however, a heated argument began, the official waving a sheaf of forms in the physician’s face. After wiping Mr Kitson’s brow with the edge of her cloak, Annabel turned towards the bay. Amidst the merchantmen and gunboats floated a number of weather-beaten hospital ships–the means by which the wounded were conveyed to Scutari. Conditions on board these ships, she had heard, were truly wretched. It was said that a quarter of their patients died before they even left port. Annabel felt an absolute, crippling impotence. She could do nothing more for Mr Kitson. She had wanted to save him, yet had merely delivered him to a fate that was uncertain at best.
With a start, she realised that Madeleine was gone. The foolish girl had slipped back into the squalor of Balaclava. A young woman alone in this town was in serious danger; the heathen mussulman, as Annabel had been told on many occasions, had no respect whatsoever for the unveiled female. She stood, and was about to charge off down the nearest alley when the surgeon arrived at her side.
He looked at Styles and Kitson. ‘Civilians,’ he said in a tone of mild surprise, making a note on a form. ‘What are they doing here?’
Without thinking, as she hurried away to begin her search, Annabel told him, ‘They are from the London Courier magazine.’
At the edge of the harbour, she turned back briefly to take a last look at Mr Kitson, lying unconscious on the stones. The surgeon was unravelling his bloody coat to examine his injuries. Breathing a steadying sigh, she dismissed her fears and quietly intoned a dependable passage from the Psalms. ‘Turn from evil and do good; then you will dwell in the land forever. For the Lord loves the just, and will not forsake his faithful ones.’
‘Heavens,’ exclaimed the surgeon. ‘Godwin! Have a look at this!’
Another surgeon came over, pacing along the line of ailing redcoats. ‘Dear God,’ he murmured. ‘Thomas Kitson. I sent him up to the plateau last night, to fetch an engineer. We wondered what had become of the poor fellow. Must’ve fallen prey to a sniper down in the trenches.’
‘Well, this wound is serious indeed. Broken ribs, a punctured lung …’
They looked at each other. Both knew that they weren’t permitted to send civilian casualties to the General Hospital outside town. There was only one opti
on.
‘Excuse me, sirs–Doctor Godwin, Doctor Harris–might I be of some help?’
The surgeons turned towards the speaker, a mulatto woman of about fifty years of age, clad rather flamboyantly in a feathered hat, a thick green shawl and a striped dress. She was a good six inches shorter than the two men, but her brown eyes were fixed on them with sharp inquisitiveness.
‘Mrs Seacole,’ said Godwin. ‘Are you settled aboard the Medora?’
He looked past her towards the abandoned munitions vessel moored on the far edge of the harbour that had been assigned to this redoubtable lady as her base of operations. All three of its masts had been sawn down for firewood; it was a sorry, broken thing. Godwin suspected that giving this old hulk to Mrs Seacole had been somebody’s cruel idea of a joke.
The lady’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘It is comfortable enough, thank you, but I think I shall try to find myself something a little more … permanent.’ Her South Seas accent purred softly through the word. ‘I heard you talking about this man here. Is he a friend of yours?’
Godwin sighed. ‘An orderly, madam, and a most capable one. Injured during an errand I sent him on, by the looks of it.’
‘And now he must be loaded on to a hospital ship. You are afraid he will perish before he reaches the hospital in Turkey–which he surely would, by my reckoning.’ She reached into a large leather satchel on her shoulder and produced a roll of clean bandages. ‘See to your soldiers, good sirs. I will take this man aboard the Medora. What is his name?’
‘Thomas Kitson, Mrs Seacole, but there are forms I must complete, and—’
Ignoring him, she crouched down beside the stricken orderly and began binding his wound. ‘There, Thomas,’ she said gently. ‘Mother will look after you.’
Doctor Godwin stopped talking. Like most at the harbour, he did not know exactly what to make of Mary Seacole. A mulatto nurse claiming to be an army widow, she had come out to the Crimea at her own expense and was utterly set upon helping the soldiery, for whom she seemed to have a boundless affection. The surgeon supposed she was simply a member of the strange carnival that sprang up along the fringes of every war; he was quite sure, though, that no harm could possibly come to Kitson in her care. He looked to Harris, who shrugged. The decision thus made, both turned towards the man laid out by Kitson’s side. There were tears running down his face, and he was mumbling inaudibly to himself.
‘Who’s this other one?’
‘Don’t know the name. He’s from the London Courier, apparently.’
Godwin studied the civilian’s wound. The crude dressing was soaked, but the wound beneath was not desperately serious; the musket-ball had missed the bone by over an inch. He had lost a lot of blood, which had no doubt precipitated his present delirium, but not so much as to suggest that an artery had been punctured. There were many more grave cases arrayed along the dock; Harris was already losing interest, his attention claimed instead by a shuddering private a few places down the line. It occurred to Godwin that he could spare this fellow both the long voyage to Scutari and the disease-ridden hospital at its end.
‘Well, as he has no military duties to perform, I see no reason why he shouldn’t go back up to the plateau. All this needs,’ he said loudly to the man, ‘is regular bathing, fresh bindings and a long period of bed-rest. Do you hear? You write your reports from your cot, sir.’
The man seemed to nod, but did not stop his mumbling or focus his staring eyes.
Doctor Godwin started re-dressing the leg. He shouted for an orderly; one ran up a few seconds later. ‘This man will be on the next cart back to the camps. Ensure that he is taken to the tent of the London Courier–someone will know where it is.’
5
The H. M. S. Mallory kept her distance from Sebastopol, steaming in a wide loop around the mouth of the inlet that held the besieged port. Her passengers, however, shared none of this cautiousness. They rushed over to the deck rail as soon as the enemy’s base came into view, whipping out a great arsenal of telescopes and binoculars. Five tall ships had been scuppered in the harbour to form a barrier against hostile vessels. The waters of the Black Sea covered their hulls completely; hundreds of gulls could be seen perching upon the bare remains of their masts. To either side were large coastal batteries, studded with cannon. There was some thrilled chatter as artillery rumbled over on the plateau, sending up clear trails of smoke.
These passengers were, for the most part, that species of traveller referred to somewhat dismissively as war tourists: boys barely past adolescence visiting idolised elder brothers, unscrupulous would-be novelists and artists hoping for some exciting material, or simply wealthy loungers seeking diversion. The few professional men on board found themselves to be completely outnumbered. Charles Norton and his sonin-law Anthony James, not wishing to spend any longer cooped up in their cabin, were obliged to stand next to the roaring paddle-box in order to escape the crowd and review their notes.
They were making this hazardous journey for the sake of William Fairbairn’s cherished project–a floating mill and bakery. Such a machine, he had told them with his usual enthusiasm, would be able to supply the entire British Army with fresh, wholesome bread, and would be entirely safe from contamination and disease. It sounded positively absurd to Charles, but he had humoured the old goat; a trip to a war-zone to indulge one of his whims would place him very firmly in the Norton Foundry’s debt. James, however, had listened to him ramble on with genuine interest. And now, on the morning that they approached Balaclava, he was revealing the conclusions he had reached about the possible design of this unlikely contraption. It could be built on a base of two iron-screw steamers, he said in his intent, enthusiastic manner; a simple process of adaptation could produce an engine capable of grinding up to a thousand pounds of flour every hour. As they passed Sebastopol, rounding a steep headland, he began to go into further detail. Norton looked away, out to sea.
He had learned much about his son-in-law over the course of their two-week voyage. The man’s brain never seemed to stop working. He was always sketching out plans, jotting down notes or poring over one of the scientific volumes he had lined along the sides of his valise; or he would be nodding in silent agreement as he read unsavoury radical journals such as the Westminster Review or the London Courier.
James was formidably ambitious, far more so than Norton had ever realised during the eighteen months or so that they had been acquainted. Charles had always considered him devilish clever–he had valued him for it, in fact, and been pleased that his daughter had married someone who could match her in this regard. On occasion, however, when they spoke, Norton was sure that he detected appraisal in James’ eyes, as if the fellow was looking him over and making an unfavourable assessment. He sees a failure, Charles thought, a man of limited vision and accomplishments who has risen as high as he ever will; someone whose lack of ability has held back his own business and who, at the age of fifty-three, must still jump at the Fairbairns’ every command. He compares himself against me and is determined to do better, damn him, both for himself and for my daughter.
Balaclava’s bay was so crowded that the Mallory had to wait for over an hour before it could unload its passengers. Norton found that he was immensely tired and a little nauseous, and wished only to sit upon dry land; James, meanwhile, was noting down names of ships and making drawings of the hills around them. They were told that they had to disembark quickly as their vessel could only be at the quay for twenty minutes. It would then be taken to the rear of the bay, returning three days later to collect them and sail back to Liverpool.
The docks were jammed with people, military and civilian, drawn from a range of nationalities. It was far from the ordered British base Norton had hoped for. Army liaisons came forward to meet some of the war tourists; others obtained directions from officials and trailed off into the town in groups of two or three. Norton peered up the lanes after them, rapidly concluding that Balaclava was about as uninviting a place as he had
ever encountered. It was positively medieval in aspect–were it not for the shabby uniforms one would not think one was in the middle of the nineteenth century at all. He resolved to remain as close to the sea as possible. Then he glanced down into the water and saw a decomposing camel bobbing in a stew of offal and splintered wood. The sight was so hideous and unexpected that he almost cried out.
His son-in-law, however, was unsurprised by their surroundings. ‘It is quite as bad as has been reported, isn’t it?’ he said calmly, adjusting his pebble spectacles. ‘If a firm was run like this, Charles, it would sink within a week.’
Norton, a hand over his mouth as he tried to hold in his last meal, did not answer.
James looked around. ‘Where is our Royal Engineer?’ he asked. ‘Mr Fairbairn said that there would be one here to meet us.’
‘I do not know,’ Norton replied, lowering his hand impatiently. ‘How the deuce would I know, Anthony? I’m sure he’ll show himself in due course.’
James hefted his valise on to his shoulder. ‘I could take this chance to climb around the side of the bay and begin the survey. Do you object?’
Norton indicated that he did not, thinking that Anthony James could jump off the blasted harbour for all he cared. He walked along the dock, keeping his eyes on the horizon and taking a cigar from his coat. As he lit it he could not help looking back at the camel. The animal had drifted a short distance out into the bay; he watched as it was caught in an undertow, its stiff legs breaking the surface and revolving grotesquely.
The Street Philosopher Page 30
