Castle Orchard (27 page)

Mrs Arthur laid the shawl, still folded, on her knee. She said, ‘I will make a bargain with you.’

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘That you will sleep in the Blue Room until you have entirely regained your health.’

‘I don’t wish you to be subject to gossip.’

‘Your health is more important to me.’ As Mrs Arthur said this she realised it was true. His health was more important to her than anything she could think of at that moment. The idea of his being ill drove from her the decision to go to Westcott Park.

Before he could answer, Phil came in and went straight to Captain Allington and showed him his boots. Allington wished the child were not such a ludicrous caricature of Johnny Arthur.

‘Do they fit?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Show me your legs. I want to see if those bruises are gone.’

‘They are gone, sir.’

‘Let me see.’

‘I don’t like to show my legs.’

‘Why not?’

‘They are like sticks,’ Phil said reluctantly.

‘That’s of no matter.’

Phil pulled up his trouser legs. Allington said, ‘Good.’ After a moment he added, ‘A very fine leg for a boot.’

Phil’s eyes widened, great discs of blue. A credulous smile crept over his face. He pulled his trousers yet higher and contorted himself to take a proper look at his legs. He said, ‘Are you sure?’

‘Certainly. You will be the envy of every cavalry officer.’

Phil’s face was rapturous. He hardly knew himself. Mrs Arthur still had the shawl folded on her lap but as she stood up Allington took it from her and draped it round her shoulders. She put up her hand to stay him but he said, ‘I know how to keep a bargain.’

Mrs Arthur suggested to Pride that they should call a doctor.

‘Doctors or any of them medical folk, they knows less than I do,’ Pride scoffed. ‘Master has the fever. He gets it from time to time. I have the medicine. If the doctor comes they’ll bleed him, and he won’t have it. He doesn’t hold with it. They’ll drain a man’s life away when he’s half-dead. As for the fever, it frightens me, but I’ve plenty of the bark. The surgeons give it, the bark of a tree cooked up in water, though I’ve known some to put wine with it, it not being very palatable. The bark of the Jesuit tree, that’s what it is. A young officer when he had the ague, used to take a hot drink and then gallop his horse. It was meant to drive the fever off, but I’m bothered if I know if it did. Lots died of it. We got it from laying out in the dew. It doesn’t do you any good, laying out in the dew. One day for the fever, three or four days better, one day for the fever, that’s how it goes.’

Pride was a competent nurse, or certainly as far as his master was concerned. He guarded the sick room jealously and issued orders to the kitchen but it was apparent he was extremely anxious. Allington, despite his care, got no better, each bout of fever progressively worse.

‘He wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me,’ Pride said, when Mrs Arthur came up to the Blue Room. He immediately started to ramble on as only Pride could.

‘That Waterloo, ma’am, was the awfulest battle in the world. Soldiers is mad not to miss a battle. Odd, I calls it. Well, it rains all night something terrible an’ food is short come the morning. Master gets a pinch o’ tea an’ a little stir-about. I were that nervous he were cross an’ packed me off to the back with his stuff. I fret over Joe, Captain Allington’s baggage pony, for he ain’t never heard action before but Joe keeps more calm than what I do. Well, he don’t know about the French out there, thousands of ’em, ranks of ’em, all a-shouting for that Napoleon what they thinks so much of. I guards that baggage all day. They pesky foreign soldiers what run away would ’ave nicked it. When I was a soldier I never ran away. That frightens you more than staying. They blindfold you an’ shoot you in a trice if you desert, but it’s my belief nobody wouldn’t desert if they got a square meal. At ten o’clock the guns start, the smoke gets up, you can’t see a thing and it’s listening, listening, listening. The noise, the terrible noise . . . won’t they ever stop? The wounded start to come by, droves of them, faces black as soot. They’re that thirsty they’ll drink the water what the wounds are washed in. It’s the powder see. You bites the head from the cartridge an’ the powder, gets in your mouth. Very drying stuff, powder.

‘All day that battle goes, hour upon hour, and nobody knows what’s happening. When dusk comes on, it dies away. They tell me Captain Allington is dead and they tell me it’s a victory, but I don’t care what it is if my master’s dead. Night comes on. I’m too low to do much. Nothing to do, no master, no meal to get. The world’s empty like, though ’tis full of folk.’

Pride pauses for a moment to prop Allington up in order to give him some water.

‘A battlefield is a fearsome thing, but at night it’s at its worst, with all the looting and robbing and murdering what goes on. There’s no dying in peace out there. The soldiers what ain’t dead have dropped down in heaps to sleep. At dawn I creeps out and finds a few men of his company just waking a bit. I wants to find his body. If I don’t find that, they might forget he was an officer and dump him naked in a pit. I wants him to have a funeral, a grave, and sweet, solemn words out the Bible. I wants his hands crossed on his breast an’ his uniform on, his sword, and I’d stay by and mind that grave as long as I lived – at least, I thinks I would. Nobody cares for him like I do. ’Course the uniform he’s wearing would be looted off him but I had his other, same as I keep in the cedarwood chest.

‘Two miles each way, that battlefield, two miles each way and forty thousand dead and wounded, let alone the horses. The place were heaped with horses. As for the infantry, you could see the shapes of the squares for the bodies laid there. Carnage you wouldn’t credit, but I’d seen it all before – never so bad though – ’cept the breaches at Badejos. The men from his company knows where he is. They tried to get his body off before, but it were too tricky.’

Tears came into Pride’s eyes. He wiped them away fiercely.

‘I fights for the master, that I do, in my own way. I ain’t no soldier, I’ve told you that, but there’s another sort o’ fighting, and I done that. Well, when we find him, nobody isn’t excited he ain’t dead ’cause it’s obvious he soon will be. I have that boat cloak of Captain Jameson’s on me arm, but oh, you never saw such as sight as he is, slashed to bits, his arms, his chest, his head, he’s just one bloody mess, and he’s got a dead horse on his legs. They’d taken his jacket an’ shirt, his jacket with all his little precious things he kept in the pocket, the little picture and the letter. Still, I was prepared for that. The whole world seems one bloody mess just then, the whole world as far as your eye could see, one heaving, groaning bloody mess. Some of them holes in my master was done when he were on the ground. The French ain’t particular that way. They’ll take a jab at any man what moves. I never could like a Frenchie, but Mr Emill, he weren’t a bad fellow.

‘Heave the horse off him, wrap him up in the boat cloak, carry him off the battlefield, working through the bodies, every sort o’ thing. Took ’em five days to shift the wounded off. The roads are blocked with carts, coaches, baggage, the wounded, the dying, the dead. Everyone cries for water, but there ain’t no water. Every ditch is full of blood. We gets him up in a cart. The journey’s terrible rough and we’re three hours on the road to Brussels. I walk. I reckon he’ll be dead every step I take an’ I cry like a baby.

‘You’ve got more chance if you’re an officer. Every hospital is full. That Brussels is a pretty place. They put straw in the streets and lay out the wounded, row upon row, French and English side by side and any other sort of foreigner. Funny thing, a war. The women comes out from the houses and minds them best they can. Our first billet is an awful bad place, a bit of a stable. I don’t know how to find our own surgeons, what belong to the regiment. I just lie low and mind him myself. As to the wounds, I think what a mess master looks, all gaping, not neat for his grave. You don’t want to go to your grave full of holes. I’m a tailor, ain’t I? I make a tidy of job it, neaten him up, even his head I shaves and sews up neat. The water for washing and cleaning I boils. Master always says that. Needles and knives and what-have-you. He says, “You don’t know what’s in the water too small to see.” Well, I don’t suppose there’s anything in it, but I boils it all the same. I knowed of a gentleman what sat on a doorstep and sewed up his own belly but he died as he finished the job. Master ain’t conscious, not really, but he’ll swallow if I give him something – water, gruel, wine. Then Major Wilder seeks us out. He’s come out from England, special. He gets us a real good billet in a merchant’s house, sober sort o’ folk but nothing ain’t grudged. He fetches a surgeon. The surgeon looks at master and says it’s a waste of time and to let him die quiet like. Master’s leg is bust and he has a musket ball under the knee. I do wonder the surgeon don’t take his leg off, for they gets paid for each limb they takes off, so stands to reason they take off as many as they can. Master says it ain’t so, but officers don’t never admit to that sort o’ thing. I wants the surgeon to take out the ball and splint the leg for to make him comfortable, seeing he ain’t dead yet, and Major Wilder saying the same, though the man’s asleep on his feet, he’s kindly, an’ does it. Major Wilder won’t let my master be bled, knowing how strong he feels about that. Just as well, ’cause they’d not be likely to listen to me.’

Pride paused for breath. He said, looking at Allington, who was asleep, ‘Don’t seem fair to lose him now. Still, the Good Lord didn’t want him then so I dare say He don’t want him now.’

Mrs Arthur could see Pride was exhausted, not only by his constant nursing but by all the things he felt a need to say. He believed he, and only he, could keep his master alive. After several days she managed to get him to take a rest while she stayed in the room herself. He made sure there was nothing to be done before slumping down on a truckle bed in the corner and immediately falling asleep. It was with reluctance he temporarily left Allington to her care, but sleep he must.

She had some mending on her lap but it was difficult to concentrate. Pride constantly filled her head with the horrid images of war and her spirits recoiled from them.

Allington opened his eyes. They were bright with the fever. He said, apparently looking at her, ‘I love you.’

She could not tell how conscious he might be, but it was not the moment to take him seriously. She wondered in how many languages he could say it. She thought of him flirting with olive-skinned Spanish girls amongst those shadowy arcades and curling balconies, young officers lounging in the hot dusk of a foreign town, of vines, trellises and orange trees. He had told her he had learned the bolero but Pride said the dance wasn’t decent.

‘In how many languages can you say that?’ she asked.

He was so long in replying, she had given up expecting an answer but eventually he murmured, ‘Four, maybe five.’

He closed his eyes again. She looked at his white face and thought of nursing Matthew, how his sturdy little form had got less and less, his face wan and thin. She had taken him in her arms, willing her own strength to go from her to him, but he died all the same.

Phil said a prayer in church. ‘Please make Captain Allington better. I need him to look after my mother and Emmy. He’s given my mother a cloak and a shawl to keep her warm. She wants to pay him some money but he won’t take it. Why shouldn’t he give my mother a present if he wants? Why is this bad?’

Emmy came to church with them now. She had promised to keep still and she did, she hardly moved a muscle. Her willpower was extraordinary. Phil liked to have Emmy in church but he also liked to have his mother to himself.

Outside, it was cold. Robert Conway came up to Phil. He said, ‘Is Captain Allington any better?’

‘No. He is sick. He will die.’

Robert clenched his hands together. ‘You are lying.’

‘Maybe he will die. Pride gives him medicine made from the bark of the Jesuit tree.’

Robert frowned. ‘That seems a curious medicine. Does Captain Allington think it right?’

‘I don’t know. He’s too sick to say.’

‘He cannot, cannot, cannot die.’

‘Captain Allington belongs to Castle Orchard, to us. He’s not yours.’

Robert scowled at him and walked off. His father, the rector, was just coming out of the vestry door. He said, ‘Well, my boy, you have waited for me, which is an unexpected pleasure.’

Robert walked along beside him, scuffling his boots in the mud. He said, ‘Papa, why did we say no prayers in church for Captain Allington?’

‘Why, my dear fellow, it is because I know nothing of Captain Allington. He has never come to church.’

‘But he must have a soul for you to care for. You say you care for all the souls in the parish, yet you say no prayers for Captain Allington, who is a hero and nearly died fighting for his country.’

‘My attempts to visit Captain Allington have borne no fruit.’

‘I dare say he doesn’t like to be visited. What has that got to do with saying prayers for him?’

‘I fear he is not a righteous and godly man, though as a landlord he has proved agreeably efficacious. He’s not a man I should like you to emulate, Robert, however heroic he may have been in the past. He’s a gambler. You know very well how he obtained Castle Orchard, though such things are not for the ears of children.’

‘You said he was a much better landlord than Mr Arthur was.’

‘That is so, but I am persuaded he’s not moral.’

‘Do you say prayers to make him more moral?’

‘I have not, dear child. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. You surely point me out my duty. I have been confused by Captain Allington.’

‘You must say prayers, first for him to get better, or the others might be wasted.’

‘Such prayers are never wasted, Robert. You have a mixture of logic and levity in your tone for which I don’t quite care.’

‘Please, Papa, just pray to make him better.’ Robert unexpectedly burst into tears.

‘There, there, don’t take on so. We shall say prayers for his health and his redemption. He must remain innocent without his being proved guilty, whatever my brother may say.’