Band of Angel (49 page)

With a graceful shrug indicating “this was your idea,” the captain turned his horse in a few sinuous circles, demonstrated a rein-back, took the mount from a standstill to a canter, then came back to a halt without any obvious aid. It was beautiful and impressive: a dance in which neither partner needed to dominate or to yield. For his finale, Tournier picked up a bayonet, galloped at full tilt toward the sack, and, with a bloodcurdling cry, sliced it in two.

“Nice horse, nice horse, not bad at all. Bit small and weedy neck,” Gosford said out of the corner of his mouth to Deio. “You’d better show him your horse now.”

Deio got on Moonshine and as soon as he began to circle him, he knew the horse’s two weeks off had done him no favors—he felt stiff and lumpen beneath his fingers. He rode him around for a while, trying to gather him up, to inject some energy. He didn’t feel right. Finally, Tournier asked him if he’d like to try what he called Le Sharge. The going was soggy beneath the horse’s feet, mud was gathering in large, sticky lumps. The sky was dark. “Go on Jones, have a go,” shouted Gosford.

He shortened his reins, spoke softly to Moonshine; as the horse gathered speed he felt the old exhilaration.

Too late, he saw the hole in the ground that Moonshine swerved to avoid.

“Ooh la, la!” the Frenchman called as the horse hit a patch of mud, crossed its back legs and came down heavily on its side. Deio’s fall was neither painful nor serious—he leaped back into the saddle as if it hadn’t happened—but it was a shock. He rarely fell off, and he hated the kind way the Frenchman dabbed at the mud on the side of his jacket, and Gosford’s politely distant, “Bad luck, Jones.”

For one awful moment as he sat, winded and muddier than ever, on his horse, he could have cried like a child. He was coming undone.

After the riding fiasco, Tournier took them down to the tavern, which overlooked the harbor and was called, for a joke, La Caprice. From the dismal street it seemed, with its bright curtains, colored lights, and occasional bursts of music as the door opened, to be a disembodied thing, like a pleasure boat pursuing its own course through a wet and windy world.

“I can’t stay late,” said Deio as they walked in.

Gosford said Tournier’s men would take care of the horses, and they’d be back before nightfall. “Stop looking so worried, man,” he said, almost contemptuously.

This time it sounded like an order.

Inside, there was a tub of wet umbrellas and a pleasant fug of pipe and cigar smoke. Some off-duty officers lounged in comfortable chairs in front of a roaring fire.

If Gosford had been a horse he’d have been prancing, for the huge, dimpled mirror behind the bar gave back the reflection of four young women. They were brilliantly dressed in red and orange satin, their waists tightly girdled with wide purple belts shaped like corsets, their blouses half unlaced to show breasts like generous mounds of cream on top of some exotic dessert. When Deio and Gosford came into the room they pulled silly pleading faces to make them laugh.

Now, Gosford couldn’t wait to get rid of him. He ran his hands through his hair and sneaked a glance at himself in the mirror before disappearing into the crowd. Deio stood on his own, feeling
like a country bumpkin, surrounded by people speaking to each other in French. Then one of the whores reached the punch line of a story she was telling to a small man who sat at the bar with an empty sleeve. She looked at Deio above the man’s bald head, she smiled at him.

And the map inside his head changed again. It was months now since he’d been with a woman, and suddenly the urge to have one was overwhelming.

And he wanted it straightforward again, not to think, but to feel the melting peace, the sense of triumph, the loss of consciousness. It needn’t take long.

Behind the bar was a younger girl with a thin, pale, interesting face, pouring a measure of amber liquid into four small glasses. She had a cloud of blond hair and a flouncy way of putting down the glasses as if to say “I deserve better than this.”

He knew she would come to him and she did. She took his arm and led him to a table on his own near the kitchen door, speaking to him in French, which made him shake his head and scowl at her. He was sick of feeling stupid and helpless and out of place.

“Have a drink,” she said in English, and put down a glass of wine. He drank it swiftly and then another, still half looking for Gosford. Tournier appeared. His smoothly handsome, toffee-colored face was glowing. He insisted Deio drink a glass of whiskey. They talked a little more about the horses and then the Frenchman leaned back gracefully in his chair and looking over his shoulder, asked him which girl he wanted.

Duty and desire clashed briefly in Deio’s head. He told Tournier he’d left his horses with inexperienced men and was worried.

Tournier said he understood, his own horses tormented him, but sometimes you had to let up. There was too much dying and madness going on for you not to allow yourself a little fun.

“I will run through the menu, you decide,” he said. “That one,” he indicated the blonde, “is called Candide and she is quite naughty but perfectly rideable, and happy to do anything you ask within a certain reason. That one,” pointing to a redhead with short legs and a sway-backed walk, “is kind and very obliging. On that one,
elle s’appelle
Emmeline, you may use this.” Tournier made the end of his crop quiver. “It’s your choice.”

Ten minutes later, Emmeline, holding an oil lamp in front of her, led him upstairs to her room. Underneath her bed was a chamber pot and a pair of discarded stockings. A parrot-colored dress hung from a hook on the wall.

She placed the lamp beside the bed, and he could see a pipe in an ashtray and smell its stale smell. Up close and away from the blur of smoke, she was nothing special—older than he’d thought, with a deep furrow running down the side of her mouth. Apart from the fact that he liked her hair and she was younger than some of the others, he had no idea why he’d chosen her; he’d never wanted to hit a woman.

“They don’t like Englishmen,” Arkwright had told him knowledgeably, “they think we’re animals.”

Now she stood with one leg up on a wooden stool, her skirt concertina’d out like a multicolored fan. She licked her lips and began slowly to undo her stockings. Suddenly he heard the wind again, bashing and screeling outside the window. Everything seemed to be taking too long. Now, she separated her suspenders from her stocking tops. Her hands looked chapped and clumsy. He didn’t bother to get undressed, took off his boots only and his muddy breeches. He smelled, even to himself.

Her bed sagged and creaked as he pushed her down on it. The wind howled, a gush of rainwater ran down the windowpane.

He took her nipples between his fingertips. He was used to thinking about the creatures he rode and he thought about her briefly. She would be used to all sorts: those who lay on her sobbing about comrades killed in battle, those who used her with no more ceremony than a
pissoir
, those who craved her love and sympathy. And then, as she sighed and moaned and simulated ecstasy and terror and capture, he forgot to think about her, and then the wind simply flung itself on the window and the whole house shook and he was on his feet.

He had to get home.

But she was excited now. She tried to drag him back to bed, to kiss him, her breath faintly tinged with garlic.

She got nasty with him while he dressed and there was a muddle about money. The woman, smacking the side of her head with impatience, indicating she was not happy to be paid in English coin, which meant he had to find Tournier. He had had to hold out his hand like a child while Tournier picked through the coins in his hand. When the girl had gone, Tournier said he thought he should stay the night. He said the weather outside was terrible.

“No, I have to go back now.” Deio almost said home, but the thought of the camp gave him a pain like a kick in the stomach. It was the first time he realized how homesick he was.

“I don’t think it’s possible,” said Tournier, “it’s the worst one I’ve seen out there—even I can’t get back.”

They went to the window together. There was a loud bang, a clattering sound from the street outside. They saw a man in a fur coat being blown like a giant fur moth from one side of the street to the other, chasing his tent.

The French soldiers had their noses pressed to the window, the girls were ooohing and aahing at the size of the waves. They reared up over the harbor wall and hurled themselves down with a cracking sound like walls falling.

“It’s bigger than a storm, it’s an
ouragan
—a hurricane,” Tournier told him. “If you try and ride back across that plain you’re a dead man. Go back to what you were doing.” He winked, but Deio shook his head. He could have screamed.

They were forced to stay the night and, because the roads were blocked, until early afternoon of the following day, when there was a sudden exodus of very drunk people from the tavern. Gosford appeared, irritatingly pleased with himself and unconcerned. They walked back to the stables together through streets strewn with rubbish and broken tree branches and fallen masonry, Gosford, who had a hollow, emphatic way of making announcements, as if his was the final word on any subject, was sure the storm, though severe, would not have hit Balaclava.

“They get it full in the face here from the Black Sea,” he insisted, “we’re farther back, more protected.”

“That’s not what Tournier said.” Deio had given up any pretense of being polite.

By the time the horses had been collected from the stables and saddled up, the light was already fading from the day. The harbor was quiet after the storm, covered in a glowing silvery light, but the hills in front of them were darkening and full of massing shadows.

The horses were jumpy, shying at the fallen trees in their path. When Moonshine refused to jump a ditch, Deio, who could never remember feeling more anxious in his life, gave him a sharp crack with his whip. The only thing that mattered in the world now was getting back.

Neither man spoke during the ride home. At the edge of the plain, they met four English soldiers crammed together in a hole in the ground underneath a stone ledge. They were soaked to the skin and shivering. They looked at Gosford with blank eyes as they saluted him.

“What’s going on here?” he asked them sharply, “why aren’t you all back at camp?”

“We’d like to be,” said one who had no shoes. His toes were so blue they looked like ripe plums, “but we’ve no quarters to go to—it blew away, sir.”

“Rubbish.” Gosford rode on.

Now Deio’s fear was so great he could only hear himself and his horse breathing.

They came down from the plain, threading their way through the clumps of trees; then up the muddy escarpment that led to the tented city. But when he saw the shattered huts and the fallen trees, and most of the tents gone, his mind simply shut down.

They’ll be all right when I find them,
he told himself,
they are strong and sensible and used to Welsh storms.

But then he saw Arkwright. He stood next to Deio’s tent, his eyes large and appalled. The canvas was shredded, the central pole bent at a strange angle. His cookery pots, his bedroll, his table, gone.

“Where are they?” shouted Deio. He ran over to the shelter. The two skeletons sat side by side as if they were having a quiet conversation, and that was all.

“Where are the horses, man?” he screamed at Arkwright.

“I don’t know,” said Arkwright. “I don’t know.” And then he burst into tears. “The wind blew them away.”

When Catherine woke up at the Detention Center and saw Barnsie, she thought she was having another hallucination. She was holding a piece of soap and a tiny bowl of sago.

“How on earth did you get here?” she said.

“Sam.” Barnsie looked awfully pale and had bags under her eyes. She knelt down beside Catherine and embraced her.

“Oh, I’ve been so worried about you girl, it’s been horrible. And I can’t stay long, only about ten minutes, but I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s happened, so spit it out quickly. I have to know.”