They cried out in unison: ‘A l’attaque!’
Jacob pushed forward with half a dozen Huguenot cavaliers to meet the assailants, who were mercilessly swiping at the men still running back from midfield. Isaac, who should normally have been in his saddle, had two enemy horses on his tail. Jacob broke from the pack, brandishing his pistol. He steadied his posture, held his breath, and gave fire. On the impact of the ball, his target fell from his horse. Isaac, meanwhile, dived to one side, narrowly escaping a beheading.
All about, the foraging party were retaliating, many of the attackers now fleeing under fire, having spent their shot.
Bearing in mind his poor performance when wielding his sabre during his brief training, Jacob decided to dismount. Besides, his first-ever encounter on a battlefield had been on foot with buccaneers in Cuba, and, having seen them annihilate a Spanish cavalry unit, he had more faith in their ways than in those of the army.
‘Stay on your horse!’ shouted Isaac. But Jacob had already swung his leg over.
The fallen Jacobite was already on his feet, blood seeping from the musket ball Jacob had planted into his left shoulder. But with the adrenaline of conflict now pumping through his veins, Delpech no longer envisaged the man. He now only saw the target. The choice was clear, kill or be killed.
The Jacobite, a burly veteran, visibly felt the same way. He charged. Jacob parried. After crossing swords three times, Jacob could now feel his strength ebbing away under the weight of each clash, the last of which resulted in a cut to his cheek. Again the Jacobite thrust forward; again Jacob parried. But this time, recalling his buccaneer training on the deck of a ship, he stuck out a foot as his assailant passed, knocking him off balance. The Jacobite swung round erratically, too widely. Jacob deflected the blow, leaving the adversary’s guard momentarily open. With no time to think, Delpech thrust his curved sword deep into the belly. He pulled out his blade. Blood streamed out, the man went down—it was horrible. But there was no time to dwell.
‘Your back, Delpech!’ cried out Isaac on the approach of hooves to Jacob’s rear.
As he instinctively crouched, he felt a sharp thud cut into his left collarbone. Then he rolled to the ground in a muddy pool as the horseman’s blade swished an inch over his hatless head. Glancing around to take stock, Jacob managed to get to his knees as the horseman manoeuvred for another attack. But for the life of him, in the slippery mud, Jacob could not get to his feet. Facing the charging horse, he would certainly be hacked, if not trampled, to death. But then he heard a loud blast behind his right ear. Looking round, he saw Isaac holding a smoking pistol.
‘I knew I had it somewhere,’ he said as the wounded cavalier veered off his trajectory.
Isaac hurried to Jacob’s flank and gave him a hand to help him to his feet. But the horseman had visibly not had enough. He pulled his horse around for another charge.
Recalling how the buccaneers had retreated into a thicket in Cuba when faced with a mounted attack, Jacob hurled out: ‘Back to the corn!’
‘The stalks won’t stop a horse,’ shouted Isaac as they backtracked to the uncut corn a dozen yards further down.
‘No, but they will break its course!’
Their backs were against the corn stems when the cavalier came coursing upon them at full gallop, holding out his sabre with his right hand. Jacob knew that, if held with a firm wrist, at this speed it could slice through a man’s neck cleaner than a falling axe. But the cavalier had no choice but to pull on his reins as he approached the corn stems, breaking his steed’s momentum.
Unable to use his left hand to pull the cavalier off, instead Jacob slashed at the enemy’s left leg while Isaac deflected the horseman’s sabre strike. The Jacobite let out a roar of sudden pain. Isaac swiftly pulled the man down to the ground and put him to death.
*
The skirmish had finished as quickly as it had begun. While Isaac searched the dead cavalier, Jacob staggered up the slope, where his previous victim lay crumpled in a pool of blood and mud. On the far side of the cut field, dead foragers lay by their shocks of corn. The wounded were being tended to.
Exhausted and clutching his left shoulder, Delpech fell to his knees, his thoughts numbed as he looked into the sky. The power to muster a prayer escaped him. So he simply watched the sun shimmering between the clouds.
After a few minutes, he felt the warm muzzle of his horse at his left cheek. As he fingered the trailing reins with his left hand, he glanced down at his red jacket, sopping wet and brown with mud. He removed his right hand from his hacked shoulder, undid two upper brass buttons, and found his white shirt sopping and crimson. ‘Dear God,’ he said. He had lost a lot of blood, but somehow he felt appeased in the sun, and he did not feel like paying attention to it.
But Isaac soon arrived to bring him round from the shock. Professional and efficient, he fastened Jacob’s shoulder and left arm with the sash of the dead Jacobite. ‘It’ll keep your arm still. You don’t want to be losing any more blood,’ he said.
‘How many?’ said Jacob, nodding to the bodies on the far side of the field. They were now being loaded onto their mounts.
‘At least five good men,’ said Isaac. ‘Come on, we’ll get you properly strapped up at camp first . . . then off to the hospital.’ Isaac gave Jacob a leg up so he could hoist himself into the saddle.
The dead foragers were attached to their horses along with their day’s shocks of corn, and the party rode into the valley back to camp.
*
Upon their arrival, a convoy of merchant carts was rolling out with their daily quota of dead from disease.
The sick were climbing unsteadily onto more carts that Jacob assumed were to take them to Carlingford hospital, where he too would be headed once he had recovered his effects. But first, he needed his wound to be properly bound, the ride back having loosened the sash and caused more blood loss.
On passing the line of sick soldiers, he picked out a familiar face, youthful but pasty and sickly. It was plain to see that Private Laverty was beset with fever.
‘Come on, come on, a warm place and some grub await youse at the hospital, lads!’ shouted the sergeant, to encourage the men to climb aboard the carts faster.
As Damon heaved his aching body into the flatbed cart, he lost his grip and slipped. He instinctively brought his other hand from his pocket to catch himself. As he did so, his rosary tumbled out and landed in the mud. Suddenly awakened by his inattention, Damon glared round quickly, then made for his communion beads, the beads that had kept him attached to God amid this inhumanity, to the Virgin Mary in the absence of his mother, to his home amid the squalor.
Behind him, Private Davies looked twice. In his delirious state, he could hardly believe his eyes. What should he do? All Catholics had been ordered to show themselves following the foiled conspiracy to infiltrate the Williamite camp. He had been warned there might still be Catholic spies among them. Davies remembered the marshal’s orders: those who did not show themselves would be treated as spies and executed.
If he called the sergeant, Laverty could be hanged. Davies did not want his mess mate to be hanged, and he did not think he could be a spy either. So what should he do? He turned with his lips pursed as Sergeant Tatlock came marching down the line. But as he did so, Davies saw the barrel of a pistol in the corner of his eye suddenly being thrust forward. It belonged to the Dutch soldier behind him.
Jacob saw it too. As Laverty reached for his beads, he looked up and caught the French lieutenant’s alarmed eyes.
‘NOOOO!’ blasted Jacob.
There was a loud detonation that covered Jacob’s cry. Damon fell to the ground, clutching the item that had helped him bear up to the inhumane conditions. It would now be the item that would condemn him as a spy after death and declare innocent the puller of the trigger. But Jacob knew Laverty was no spy. He was just a homesick lad.
‘Dear God,’ said Delpech, ‘this is madness . . .’ Then he blacked out and fell from his horse to t
he ground.
EIGHTEEN
Delpech had been meaning to get to Carlingford Castle to see Philippe, but foraging duties had taken up all his waking hours, and the weeks had passed.
Jacob, of course, encountered no good Catholic nuns to cater for the sick at the castle, as he would have in his native France. The Protestant religion forbade them. It rejected the notion that wealthy men could gain God's grace by providing cash endowments to charitable institutions. However, the doctors and surgeons could at least count on female camp followers and a few wise women to dispense basic care.
With his prior knowledge and experience of battle wounds and despite the lack of laudanum, Jacob insisted that the deep slash to his shoulder be first investigated and thoroughly rid of any cloth drawn in by the blade before being cleansed in rose oil. After the harrowing and painful experience of being stitched while held to a chair, a carer dressed the wound. She then bound the arm so that the catgut suture would not come loose.
He felt calmed as the body’s natural painkillers kicked in and the carer finished working around him. He was sitting, eyes half closed, when an older matronly carer stepped into his field of vision.
‘Monsieur Delpech, your friend is still here,’ she said as the younger carer finalised her knot to secure his sling. Jacob looked up and nodded curtly to shake the sleepiness from his mind. The lady continued. ‘I will show you to his place.’
‘Thank you,’ said Jacob. ‘I think I know where he—’
‘He has been . . . moved,’ she said with solemnity.
A few minutes later, the matron was leading the way through the great room along an alley of hundreds of ailing men lying on straw ticks. Jacob slung his bag over his good shoulder as he passed the soldiers in various stages of the contagion. Its onslaught had already taken more lives than the whole of the Irish campaign put together.
With his free hand, he instinctively covered his nose from the stench of human faeces, and thought to himself that at least Private Laverty had been spared agonising in this foul place. It was small consolation, which nonetheless helped him stave off his raw feelings of injustice. But there was nothing to ward off the guilt he felt at the death of his five comrades in the field. If he had told them to start cutting the corn from the bottom rather than from the top of the slope, the assailants might have thought twice about attacking. For they would not have had the advantage of the downward slope.
‘Monsieur Delpech,’ said the matron in a discreet tone, after turning towards Jacob as they walked on. ‘I must warn you, he has been very sick.’
‘Sick? He came here for a broken ankle!’
‘We believe he had already contracted the flux before his arrival. For it took hold the day after you left him here.’
‘But that was over two weeks ago, Madam. Why was I not informed?’
She explained that, besieged by the illness, they lacked time, resources, and space.
There was no point in discussing it further. He knew he would have been hard-pushed to make time for a ride to the hospital anyway.
‘How is he now?’
‘Very poorly.’
‘Oh,’ said Jacob, alarmed at the gravity in her face.
‘Frankly, each day, we are never sure if he will make it through the night . . .’
She then stopped at the end of a line of sick soldiers. She gestured with her hand to an inert form lying on the floor and covered over with a blanket. They exchanged discreet nods. Then she left Jacob to it.
‘Philippe,’ said Jacob. The body beneath the blanket moved when Jacob bent down and gently nudged the shoulder with his free hand, the other being bound up under his frock coat. Delpech pushed aside a bowl of untouched gruel, got down to his knees, and sat back on his heels. The patient’s limp hand slowly pulled back the blanket.
‘Philippe?’ said Jacob softly, barely able to hide his horror and grief. It was a rat-faced, beady-eyed man with a scraggly beard that glared back at him.
‘Jacob, my good fellow,’ said Philippe, his voice faint and hoarse. He had lost a lot of weight. His complexion was sallow, his skin sagging, and his eyes were sunken in their sockets. When he pushed aside the blanket revealing his upper body, Jacob saw he was but a pale reflection of the fine-looking man he had been in London. ‘You . . . you should not have come,’ he said, barely louder than a whisper.
Jacob said nothing of the wound that had forced him to visit the hospital, and he felt a pang of guilt. ‘I would have come sooner,’ he said, ‘had I known you had been taken so poorly.’
Philippe went on. ‘I am glad to see you, though, my friend.’
For want of anything better to say, Delpech gave news of the stalemate in Dundalk and the supply ships that were at last arriving from Belfast. But Philippe’s misty gaze seemed to register no engagement. He just stared vacantly back at Jacob.
‘Are you drinking? You must drink,’ said Jacob.
Philippe shook his head once. ‘Can’t. All goes straight through . . .’ He swallowed with difficulty, then continued. ‘Listen, Jacob . . . I . . . I will not have made much of an impression on this earth . . . I fear my tracks will soon be erased. But you, my friend . . . you have a wife and family. Get out, Jacob . . . Leave this godforsaken place . . .’ Philippe’s voice was drying out. He paused again to muster more breath and gulped in an effort to lubricate his vocal cords.
‘We shall both leave here,’ said Jacob. ‘Messieurs Delpech and de Sève, Merchants of London, remember?’ But Philippe, not listening, went on with his discourse.
‘I was wrong to bring you here . . .’
‘We both came to earn a living and to fight for our beliefs, Philippe. And to prevent the spread of religious intolerance.’ Jacob could not help feeling that his voice lacked conviction.
Philippe held up a feeble hand: ‘Promise you will leave here, and I will die a peaceful man, Jacob.’
‘You are not going to die, Philippe . . .’ said Jacob. But Philippe looked desperate, and Jacob suddenly realised that a miracle was unlikely.
‘No, listen . . .’ said Philippe. ‘My only solace now is in heaven . . . with my dear wife . . . and our infant.’ Philippe struggled to swallow. Jacob suddenly feared the worst. He took his friend’s hand. Philippe went on. ‘But I don’t know what . . . what heaven will look like. Do you know, Jacob?’
For a moment, Jacob was lost. Then he remembered his Bible. He let go of Philippe’s hand, then brought out his Bible from his sack. He opened it at Revelation. He read: ‘Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.’
Philippe reached out a hand. Jacob clasped it. Philippe said: ‘Read it again, Jacob.’
*
The epidemic in Dundalk claimed the lives of over six thousand men, one-quarter of the Williamite army posted there. Philippe de Sève was buried at a Protestant church, like many Huguenots whose French names were chiselled into headstones planted in the Protestant graveyards of Ireland.
Jacob was not given immediate leave. Even a soldier with one good hand could be part of a cannon crew should the need arise, and resources were running desperately low. But Schomberg’s battle plan was still not on the table. So Delpech, against his friend’s advice, put his medical experience to good use in the castle hospital that desperately lacked hands to help relieve the sick and the wounded.
NINETEEN
Mrs Smythe was sure that if her first husband were still alive, she would be at the he
ad of a house of half a dozen looms by now.
What he lacked in business acumen, he made up for in know-how. They had made a good team, for he had the talent to learn quickly and would have nailed the French techniques if someone had shown him. If only he had not slipped off a wherry and drowned, drunk as a lord, in the River Thames.
Since that fateful day, she had managed to navigate many a rough passage without him. More recently, she had weathered the French invasion of weavers by letting out her upper-floor rooms. She had survived the storm, and now she was raring to fight back.
Her new French employee was stringing whole sentences together. Nelly, her seamstress and second niece once removed, was learning how to set up a loom in the French fashion. And the weather was not likely to get any warmer—last night had been the coldest in November so far—which was all the better for business. Ladies would be requiring those new overcoats and suchlike they had been putting off due to a hitherto clement autumn.
But since yesterday, the leaves had fallen from trees in Spittle Fields and the old artillery garden. The freezing chill now had London firmly in its grip. By consequence, the tailors that Mrs Smythe supplied would be confirming their orders at long last. But not content to sell woollen, linen, and felt fabrics, she now wanted to get on to the fineries she had secretly dreamed of producing in the Smythe weave room, ever since the French invasion began. Her plan was to offer her clientele what they craved. In other words, the finest that Lyons could offer, and at very attractive prices.
It was early Monday morning and still pitch-black outside. She had prepared her workshop the day before so that her workers could not resist embracing her plan. She had purchased end reels of silk at a good price to use as a trial run. It would be pointless spending out on thread if no one could turn it into brocade, velvet, satin, or peau de soie . . .
Land of Hope Page 19
