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Lawford’s Duty
A Passage to India: Memories, Impressions, Reflexions.
Lawford’s Duty. Copyright © 2026 by A Lady
Sable Crow who supports our fanfiction with her website SharpeTales.net.
And
Bernard Cornwell who brought Richard Sharpe into our world.
The Past: 1797-98.
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PARAGRAPH ONE
1797: 2nd February: Candlemas. 1st March: Ash Wednesday, and the bleak trek through Lent had begun. Lady Day on the 25th – old New Year’s Day. Some of the Estate people had still observed it on that date. Easter had fallen that year on 16th April. The spring had passed. Soon it had been May Eve, and then Rogationtide, and Ascension Day. Summer had arrived, and then all too quickly had come Trinity Sunday and St John’s Day. Beautiful roseate July had then fled through the cool green canopy of Durford Woods like a dryad pursued by a golden god. Lammas next, and the first of the harvest: but then suddenly it had been the end of September, and Michaelmas. October had crept by in rain and drizzle, finally vaporising altogether, condensing into a mist which had drifted above the park-land like a skein of phantoms as night had come down upon Durford Abbey on All Hallows’ Eve. November had come in. The days were now shortening, darkening, becoming chill, tempestuous and wet.
One day in November, perhaps three days after Martinmas, Francis had come from Winchester to visit him. For a little they had played chess, a game at which William formerly had had not a little skill, but to Francis it had been clear that on that occasion neither his heart nor his head had been in it. William had seemed distracted and miserable, and Francis, rather than win easily and thereby cause William to feel even worse, had put down the piece he had been about to play, and instead, concealing his distress on account of his brother as best he could, or rather, disguising it as solicitousness, he had asked him,
“What do you think might best serve to cheer you, William?”
“Just go on and take my bishop,” William had said, peevishly. “Take the lot. You might as well. It seems I have forgotten how to play.”
“I do not think that it would best serve your welfare to continue with this game. I desire to know what it is that you might deem you most need in order to be happy.”
William had turned his face away and for a little had gazed out of the window – at nothing in particular, Francis had guessed. Suddenly William had turned back to him.
“To be well!” William had burst out, sounding now as if he were on the brink of tears. “To be able to go to India and to re-join the Battalion! I feel so – useless - here! So pointless! As if I am becoming transparent! Fading into the wainscoting at last. Becoming a – a - ghost, in truth! – Charles used to call me the Ghost of Durford Abbey, did he not?”
“I recollect. Your disappearing habit.”
“His prophecy is come true at last. I am the Ghost of Durford Abbey, Francis, haunting the bloody place, drifting through the walls from one room to another, purposeless! And that’s on a good day, when I have the strength to get about. Otherwise I just sit here, not even wanting to read, staring out of that bloody window at nothing. All I want is to stop being ill, so I can return to the Thirty-Third!”
“Neither of those things is within my power to bring about. I am sorry for it. But, William, can you think of anything else I might do for you which could make your situation more pleasant here at Durford, whilst you continue convalescent?”
“Convalescent? Francis, I feel worse than I did six months ago!”
“You are suffering on account of the dreariness of the November weather and the lengthening hours of darkness, certainly, William; however, when Mama wrote to me on Saint Martin’s Day, three days ago, she was emphatic that Doctor Fazackerley’s most recent opinion was that you are much improved of late. Now, come - tell me how best I can help raise you from this mood of sad regretfulness.”
“I suppose…” William had hesitated. He had been about to say something even more disagreeably depressing but at least had had the sense to refrain from doing so, fearing that if he had gone on in this downward-gyring way Francis would think that he had been beginning to succumb to melancholy, as he had done before, when he had been twelve years old. He would have shared his fears with Mama, and William really did not need Mama to come at him with her vial of laudanum again. She had done enough harm on the last occasion.
“Yes?”
“I suppose that it would not be nearly so dreary if there were music,” William had said then, with the unconscious sigh and momentary frown of unhappiness which Francis had noted with dismay had nowadays become habitual with him when reflecting upon his circumstances. “But I can hardly expect that Mama would allow the instrument to be carried up from the drawing-room. I do not think I could sit up to it for more than five minutes at a time in any case, the way I am at the present.”
“No.” Then Francis had had a sudden thought. “William, do you recall, the front west attic – “
“Where you and Henry came to search for me that time - ”
“Oh, yes – I’m sor- – anyway, there is, or there was then, an old clavichord – you had been strumming upon it when we – I am sorry – we were only searching for you then because we were worried for you that day, we had not meant - “
“That was nine years ago; it no longer matters.”
“If it no longer mattered you would have said ‘ten years’. That you at once knew that it was precisely nine – ! Oh, William – “
“Some of the strings were broken even then – “ (sigh; frown),” William had said, closing down that topic. “It will be in a worse plight now, most likely.”
“We sha’n’t know until we have it fetched down.”
“Is that possible, do you think?” William had said, after a short pause.
“William, I sometimes think that you forget that you reside in a great house with a compliment of servants who are employed with the express purpose of rendering your life here agreeable and convenient.”
“Perhaps I do. But they aren’t my servants, after all. I often sit here all day and see no-one after they bring me my hot water and breakfast in the morning. They don’t always remember to bring lunch, or tea, or to bring candles when it grows dark, or to come to make up the fire, either - but at least I can shift for myself to throw on the occasional log, and I have a drawer-full of half-burned wax stubs.”
“What?” Francis had exclaimed, shocked. “Oh, this cannot be, that you are thus neglected! I shall speak to Mrs Milland – “ (and to Mama, Francis had thought, with a pursing of his mouth - ) “ - meanwhile, when you need anything, just ring the bell, buffle-brains!” he had gone on, affectionately, fitting action to speech, rising and pulling upon the length of embroidered fabric connected to the mechanism. “You are allowed to do that, you know.”
“I recollect that one day, when I was eleven, Charles boxed my ears when I rang the bell. I had been walking in the woods and I was hungry and it was ages until dinner-time. I just wanted a sandwich and a cup of milk. He said I had no right to trouble the servants. When the maid arrived he sent her away.”
“Well, Charles is not here now.”
“I do not wish to be a nuisance,” William had said, diffidently.
“There really is no pleasing you! You know you will have to get used to giving orders again once you are back with the Thirty-Third, so you had better start putting in some practice!”
A maid had arrived. Francis had asked her to send for Collins. Once he had appeared, Francis had instructed him to go the attic to search for the instrument and bring it to them. After an interval, once Collins and a colleague, besmirched with dust and cobwebs, had shuffled into the room with it, the clavichord had indeed turned out to be in a very sorry condition. Its wooden case was scratched; its inlay was absent in many places; the ebony and ivory veneers were missing from several of its keys; many of its brass tangents were gone, and about half its strings were broken.
“So much for that, then,” William had said, wretchedly, his hopes deflating even as he had contemplated the sorry sight.
But now Francis had got the bit firmly between his teeth.
“I shall take this to Mister Stephen Jamieson in Winchester,” he had said. “He takes care of our organ at Langbourne Worthy. He studied the art of instrument-making with Mister Jacob Kirkman, (1) late of Greenwich, and also with Mister John Merlin of Hanover-square. He had a wizard’s descendant for a master, you see! So he should be able to do something with it.”
William had smiled wanly, acknowledging Francis’s attempt to cheer him. It had now been many years since he had outgrown his childhood fascination with tales of Camelot, but nonetheless he had felt gratitude in his heart for Francis’ gently humorous evocation of those days.
“You’ll not manage that on Malachi,” William had said then, referring to Francis’s horse. Just then, from the corner of his eye he had noticed that Collins had begun to twitch. Odd. If the footmen of Durford had ever opened a book on which of them could stand immobile as a rock for longest, his money would have been on Collins every time.
“I’ll borrow a cart and one of the outdoor men,” Francis had said. “Mama won’t obj-”
Collins had just then all at once and quite without warning let out a high-pitched shriek. William had started severely, his hand to his breast.
“Good God, man, whatever is the matter!” Francis had exclaimed, as William had given a violent start.
“As far as I can tell, a spider, sir. Upon the evidence of certain sensations the arachnid appears to have insinuated itself inside my collar. It is currently attempting to creep beneath my neck-cloth.”
“You have our permission to withdraw into a private place so that you may address the difficulty, Collins.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Quietly.”
“Yes, sir.” Collins and his colleague had bowed with symmetrical precision and left the room.
Perhaps two weeks had passed. Then, towards the end of the month, Francis had returned with the refurbished clavichord, swathed in several layers of blankets and tarpaulins, in the back of the borrowed cart, together with a bundle of sheet music which he had produced from a leather satchel. William could have shed tears of gratitude - at the sight of the music, but mainly on account of the small, archaic keyboard instrument which, lacking legs (although it had never possessed any), would rest comfortably on a table-top and would be quiet enough not to disturb anyone should he play it in the night to beguile the wakeful hours when, sleep fled from him, he awoke at two, three or four o’clock, as he almost always did. The veneer had been seamlessly restored. Every missing brass tangent and broken string had been replaced, and the damaged white-on-black keys had all now had new veneers. It had been polished until it gleamed. It appeared just as it must once have looked when it had been built by a master-craftsman perhaps a hundred and fifty years before, when the head of the first King Charles had still been firmly attached to his shoulders. William had gazed at it, at first unable to think of what to say.
“Thank you, Francis,” he had said, eventually. “I do not know how I might ever repay you.”
“I need no ‘repaying’. It has been my complete pleasure to undertake a scheme the object of which was to attempt a little towards the restoration of your happiness. Oh – and – I had Mr Jamieson make this.”
Francis had delved into his pocket and, after a little probing, had eventually produced a finely-made tool of polished rosewood and gleaming brass.
“The tuning-wrench. Here – “ Francis had passed it to William, who had taken it eagerly and turned it over and over in his hands, smiling with delight at the look and the feel of the object.
“My initials!” he had exclaimed then, when he had caught sight of the elegantly engraved monogram.
“Yes. I most particularly asked him to do that, to make the instrument properly your own. Mr Jamieson knows German, as is only to be expected in his line of business. As soon as he saw what I had instructed him to engrave, he told me that WAHL signifies choice in that language. That seemed to me to be somewhat in the nature of a portent.”
“What choice, I wonder?”
“One day you will find out, no doubt. Are you going to try it?”
“Might I?”
“It’s yours, you dear beloved idiot!” Francis had said, laughing. William had laughed too. Then he had tried a few improvised bars.
“Mr Jamieson has indeed made a very fine job of it,” William had observed, after a short moment of reflection. Then - “I only wish that the skill existed which could enable the broken human frame similarly to be so perfectly restored.”
“There, William,” Francis had sighed, at that. “There.”
With the arrival of December had come darkness which had seemed to last all day - and cold – and frost - and ice - and the first snows of winter. Christmas Day that year had been due to fall on a Monday, so Advent, beginning on the 3rd, had seemed to be passing in a hurried, hole-and-corner kind of way, there and gone before William had been able to conjure much enthusiasm for the approaching festival. His health had once more began to decline perceptibly.
Christmas had come, and with it had come Charles with his new bride Amelia. They had used their fortnight-long visit to give Durford Park a thorough inspection and (surreptitiously) to take an exhaustive inventory. Amelia had insisted on scrutinising every room apart from the suite of rooms belonging to the Viscountess, and, within William’s hearing, had pronounced his chamber to be perfectly situated and proportioned to serve her for a private sitting-room once the house was finally theirs. Even Charles had baulked at that, reflecting that in Amelia he would seem to have been better paired than he could ever have imagined. She had possessed an outspoken ruthless acquisitiveness which rivalled, no, surpassed, his own.
“That was a little insensitively put, my dear,” he had murmured, chidingly. “Father is alive and well, even if he is these days usually in Bimshire (2), and Mama is still above grass, after all. So is Backstairs Billy, come to that,” he had added, with an edge of irritation to his voice, as if he had wished that his youngest brother would make up his mind either to live or to die and at any rate to stop dithering around in his current annoying state of limbo, like a sort of mournful silent pallid irksome revenant, haunting the house, forever materialising and then vanishing into the walls again, having apparently walked through them in a manner as provoking as it was disconcerting; but then, to Charles’s mind, as William had recently reminded Francis, that was basically what William always had been throughout his life to date.
“I did not mean that, Charles,” Amelia had retorted, having very much meant it. “Once he is off back to his Battalion, or Regiment, or whatever it is, or – “ (at least she had had the decency to check herself, having at last become aware of William’s presence in the Long Gallery, in which she and Charles had been walking for the last twenty minutes - it had been a very wet December day so a turn in the shrubbery had been out of the question - he having just then emerged from the drawing-room - as he had stifled a sudden cough) “ – once he is finally away to India – blessed day! – “ she had gone on, in a lowered voice – “ - I doubt he will be needing it again, what, between the Mahrattas and the fever, shipwreck and the French; and if he ever does come home to England and wishes to visit us he can always be put up in one of the guest bed-chambers in the third-floor West Gallery. Or even in the attic, if we practice economies and disencumber ourselves of a few superfluous house-maids. I am sure your Mama retains far too many oblates of that pert sorority. They have not nearly enough to do. Why, only this morning I had occasion to reprimand two of them whom I had surprised idling outside the linen-room. Mary, Tabitha, said I, if you have leisure to stand gossiping at the height of the forenoon when there is doubtless work which needs to be done in the laundry and in the scullery, I should be very pleased to advert Mrs Milland to the fact that here stand labourers fit to be sent into the vineyard - unless you do in fact have business of your own which you should be about! Yes, I am quite sure that William would be satisfied with an attic room, being a single young man of the austere military calling. I know that I should simply doat upon a charming little white attic, were I a supernumerary younger son, a soldier – and a mere Lieutenant of a Regiment of Foot, at that - charitably accommodated here at his family’s pleasure!”
“Dearest – “ Charles had ventured – and William had been indecently gratified to catch the note of nervous unease in his voice; the first time he had ever heard Charles sounding anything like rattled, and it had been delicious! - “Dearest – I wish that you had not spoken so to Mary and Tabitha. They have been here at Durford for many years - Tabitha since her girlhood, which was as long ago as the Accession of our present King – and that was seven-and-thirty years since - God save his Majesty! - and they are very excellent and diligent servants.”
“They stood not upon the order of their going, I can tell you,” Amelia had said, paying little attention to what he had said.
It will be a cold day in Hell before I ever visit you and Charles, had been William’s thought, at that, as he had stepped aside into a dim passageway at the far end of which, hidden in shadow, had been the well-remembered door to the service staircase, through which he had meant to vanish in order to avoid having to speak to them.
“Incidentally, Charles, why do you call him Backstairs Billy? I’ve often wondered.”
Christmas Day itself had proved an immense strain. It always had been, anyway, but the 25th of December 1797 gained epic status in William’s personal annals as one of the worst ever. For one thing, he should not even have been still at home. The plan had been that he was to travel to Gravesend and board the Indiaman Emily, in which passage had been expensively arranged for him, in order to depart to re-join his Regiment, which had been currently at Madras, having moved down the coast from Calcutta in August, when the rest of the convoy sailed at the end of December. But that had been in the autumn, when he had appeared to be almost well again. Then November had come, and with it yet another relapse. India had been out of the question, and now the Viscount had been scrabbling around amongst his contacts to try to find him a passage in a Royal Naval vessel instead, perhaps in the spring.
For another, the day had begun, as it always did, with the ordeal of a formal breakfast. William had barely been able stomach a half-slice of buttered toast and a small dish of tea – he never could eat when he was anxious, at the best of times, and the chief author and initiator of his anxiety by tradition long established, namely, Charles, had now been present in the House for some days - but he had had to sit there whilst Charles and Henry and Francis (whose curate had been performing the day’s duties on his behalf) had gone through the entire repertoire of pungently-scented items contained in the chauffing, or chafing, dishes upon the sideboard. The smell of devilled kidneys, and of the hard-boiled eggs in the kichuri, William had found especially hard to endure, particularly as, in happier times, he had been rather fond of hard-boiled eggs. In the end he had had to excuse himself and had rushed out of the House in order to retch noisily in the shrubbery, startling the young man who had come to cut fresh sprays of a pale-yellow sweet-smelling winter-flowering shrub with which to decorate the small tables in the lobby and the library and the greater and lesser drawing-rooms. Hothouse flowers were, of course, to form the centrepiece of the dining table and they had yet to be cut and arranged: the slight, pale-complexioned pretty young fellow with the long red-golden queue neatly gathered in a black ribbon had been about to undertake that as his next task. William had, to that point, not set eyes on him for six months; it had been, of course, the boy from the rose-garden; and now it had come to him: the memory for which he had groped, and which had eluded him, on that summer afternoon. This was the child, now grown to the cusp of manhood, whom Joseph Wright, the Viscount’s butler, had introduced to him as Mark Lucas, the son of the then head gardener. It had been all of a dozen years since that long-ago Twelfth Night in the servants’ hall. William had stammered an apology, mortified, at the same time wishing that he had known the name of the shrub with the pale golden flowers of such sweet aroma. He had been too shy to ask, and then the moment had passed. He had returned to the house feeling strangely calm in his mind and restored in his spirit. It had been the sweet scent of those winter-blooming flowers, he had thought, which had helped to calm his nerves, soothe his soul and settle his stomach, however: only that.
Calm in his mind and restored in his spirit. And then Charles, who had been watching from the window of the breakfast room for William’s return, had laughed as he had said to him,
“William, I do believe I just observed you actually startling one of the gardeners. Congratulations. I never thought you had it in you to alarm the servants so – and at so early an hour, too! No, don’t run away again, I haven’t yet wished you the felicitations proper to the day!”
It had been too much.
“Shut up, Charles!” William had said, a note of what might have been incipient hysteria in his voice, as he had fled the room a second time, this time startling Amelia, who had just then been arriving for breakfast, exercising her female prerogative of lateness at this permissive time of year. The Viscountess had been served her breakfast in her chamber, as had been the case for some time now, following a worrying incident involving a grapefruit knife in the spring of the previous year.
At least he had had the small consolation of overhearing Francis and Henry mildly reproving Charles, as he had put a blessed distance between himself and his tormentor.
Matters had gone rapidly downhill from there. Church, being gawped at by the curious villagers and the staff from the house who had not been engaged in the business of preparing the festive dinner; having to walk at the rear of the party, behind Mama, and Charles and Amelia and Henry and Arabella and the still as-yet-unattached Francis, perpetually the last and the least. Dinner - again, no appetite. William had pushed the morsels of goose, beef and venison, roast potatoes and a few miscellaneous articles of boiled and braised kitchen-garden stuff around his plate until it had all gone cold and had greasily congealed in the gravy, like those ships of the explorers caught in the Arctic ice. He had declined dessert (William had loathed plum pudding anyway; he had done so since Christmas of ’83, when he had accidentally bitten down hard upon a silver shilling and had lost a milk-tooth; there had been blood all over his napkin, and Charles had, of course, made some horrible joke about it). He had somehow managed to sip a little claret and nibble at a piece of hard yellow cheese. The meal had gone on interminably. He had hoped to be allowed to slink off to his chamber afterwards, because by this time he had begun to develop a sick headache and had simply wanted to lie down with the shutters closed and the curtains drawn; but Charles had taken him firmly by the arm (he had had bruises to show for it afterwards, but that had been nothing new) and had insisted he go with the rest of them to the drawing-room instead.
“William is going to play for us!” Charles had announced, once the party had been assembled.
“Oh, no, Charles, please – !“
“Why else have you been putting in the hours of practise upstairs – “ (sotto voce: you weaselly little bastard? ) “ - go on! Let’s have some Mozart – that air you’re always playing, the one from Figaro, about the upstart servant who’s banished to the Army for his philandering ways! (I’ll pay you out for having the effrontery to tell me to shut up in front of Henry and Francis this morning!)” (3)
But instead he had set-to with Herr Sebastian Bach’s toccata from his Partita No. VI in E-minor.
“That’s enough of that dull lugubrious out-dated German nonsense,” Charles had said, rising to his feet and clapping his hands sharply when William had been about two-thirds of the way through it. “Let’s hear Arabella sing, now! Something decent and tuneful and English, if you please. Come along. Amelia can accompany her.”
William had stopped abruptly mid-phrase. Nobody, not even Francis, had objected to Charles’s rude interruption or expressed a desire to hear the piece to its conclusion, so he had snatched his hands from the keyboard and had risen from the bench, quitting the instrument without demur. Well, that had been humiliating, certainly, but he was used to that, and at least his tactic of choosing to play what had to be just about the least festive piece in his repertoire had paid off, enabling him to do what he had always done in situations of this sort: namely, disappear. He had taken himself off into the shadows by the wall far from the fire, where he had sat for the rest of the afternoon, thinking about Parson Halston in his bereft and silent rectory in far-off Yorkshire, and wondering how he was enduring his Christmas. With Christian fortitude, probably, remembering former years when Wilfred and his friends, unattached merry young officers of the 33rd, having relinquished offers of more exciting engagements out of sheer kindness, had been there to make the day gay for the widower, all of whose children but for Wilfred, the soldier, had died. Wilfred had been a good person, a proper Christian, a light shining in the darkness of the Officers’ Mess of the 33rd Regiment of Foot. God had taken him to Glory six decades too soon – leaving his father, and William alike, both desolate.
Oh, gifts? Henry had given him a copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Thinking about this later, it had seemed to William almost like prescience, except that Henry had never had an emotionally insightful bone in his body. He had suspected that Henry had applied to Francis for ideas as to what to give him. He had been pleased with it, nonetheless.
Francis had again given him the gift of music: a piano sonata in E-flat major by an alarming young German composer who, it had been said, shared the ideals of the French Revolutionaries, name of Ludwig van Beethoven. It was only his Opus 7 and already he had been frightening the horses of the musical establishment. William had been surprised by Francis’s daring choice. Francis was a wonder. There had been a Christmas, shortly before he had turned seventeen, in ‘93, he supposed, and still unaware that he had been fated never to return to Eton, when Francis had given him the score of Sebastian Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge: for the rest of the holidays he had plagued Mrs Milland, in whose rooms the old Berkhat Shudi harpsichord had been deposited when the Broadwood grand pianoforte had arrived from London - William had been displeased at the fashionable innovation - for, he had declared, no instrument other than the harpsichord could do that music its full justice.
Charles had given him a finely-decorated porcelain cuspidor. “Look at the detail on those roses! Work of art! It’s a Husselbee,” (4) he had explained. It’s an insult, William had thought, not incorrectly. He means only to wound me, as ever. Suddenly he had thought of a long-ago Christmas: he had been almost six years old, so that would have been in ’82 – and someone, a great-aunt or other superannuated relative of that order, someone who had been a girl before the Treaty of Utrecht, which had (amongst other things) given Gibraltar to Britain, had been signed - before the first George had come from Hanover - before it had become a joke to greet stale news with the rejoinder that Queen Anne was dead - had given him a toy theatre, complete with characters from the fairy-tales of Madame D’Aulnoy and Charles Perrault, which Mama had read to him, and which he had loved (5), cut out of stiffened paper. He had been enchanted by it. He had been particularly taken with the exquisite figure of le Roi Charmant, fair-haired and handsome, who in addition to the printed coloured inks had been adorned with blue watered silk for his coat, and with paper lace and tin spangles and silver foil; he had coruscated wonderfully in the candle-glow of the swift-falling December twilight.
Later, in the afternoon, in the lesser drawing-room, William and Francis and Henry had been sitting playing at Snap-Dragon, the three of them lively and boisterous, laughing delightedly at their game of daring, their deft quick hands darting again and again into the shallow dish filled with blue brandy-flames twisting and blowing like marsh-wraiths, the eerie light of which, in the darkening chamber as the early midwinter dusk had been coming on, had played upon their faces with sinister effect whilst they had vied to see who could pluck out the most raisins, who could endure the smart of the flames the longest. Then suddenly Charles had been there, grinning mirthlessly, the uncanny blue glow of the tongues of fire imparting something of the demonic to his rictus-like expression. All laughter save his had been cut off abruptly; for there all at once in the bowl had been le Roi Charmant, fluttering and dancing in the fierce draft of combustion - then flaring like a Roman candle -then withering - then finally vanishing in a sudden lethal blaze of deadly white light.
“For God’s sake, Charles!” Henry had exclaimed in sudden anger, leaping to his feet, outraged – very unusual in Henry, normally so placid and not given to demonstrations of passionate feeling - whilst Francis had sat frozen in shock.
William had gone on staring into the flames. Eventually he had said, his voice far-away and small –
“That is how I think I shall die.”
Mama had had her maid Curtis knit him a comforter in a particularly dispiriting shade of brown which had reminded him of when he had had dysentery in Bremen in 1795, when it had been rampant, and in his case probably exacerbated as a result of having to share a bed with two other subalterns whilst they had waited in their billet for repatriation - a misfortune which had delayed his departure to England by weeks until he had been deemed strong enough to embark.
By New Year’s Eve William had been coughing blood and had been confined to bed again, although Dr Fazz had reassured him that the blood had come from an irritated vessel somewhere at the back of his throat, the result of all the coughing, and not from his lungs. The wrong shade of red, apparently. And the pain in his side, well, that was because of the coughing too. He had probably pulled a muscle, or even cracked a rib whilst doing so. Dr Fazz claimed to have come across that phenomenon before.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he had said, cynically disbelieving.
Sometimes Mama had come to read to him – from the Bible, mainly – further evidence, to William’s mind, that he had generally been thought to be dying, once again - and seated at a cautious distance.
Once, Jessica had visited, accompanied by an older girl she had introduced as Jane, her friend from her former boarding school in Reading, who had seemed very pleased to have the chance to inspect the interior of such a grand and distinguished house (she had not seemed to be very much interested in William, at any rate). In his agitation of mind, William had received the impression that Jessica had been sent to say her farewells. They had made stilted conversation until the effort had made him cough and Jessica and the chaperone had beat a judicious retreat. After that, for a long time, there had just been letters. He had had quite a cache of those in the end, all dutifully beginning Dearest William and ending Your loving Jessica. What had come in between, he could not remember. Perhaps it was, So you are still not dead, then. Jessica had a similarly lacklustre stash of his letters, all beginning Dearest Miss Hayles and ending Your loving William. Possibly the gist of all of those had been a variation on, No, I am still not dead, a circumstance for which you have my profoundest apologies.
When William had finally sailed for Madras he had left Jessica’s letters in a drawer of his desk, which he had deliberately left unlocked, in his chamber. As he had anticipated, Charles had subsequently found them and read them. It had been, Charles had later told him, somewhat drunkenly, on the vigil of William’s wedding, possibly the dullest evening ever of his life - as William, truth be told, had hoped and intended that it should be.
The turn of ’97 to ’98 had been horrible. The view from William’s window – mist, driving rain, wind-blown leaves flying past the panes in November and December, and sleet and sometimes frost and snow in the New Year - had simply served to reflect his own internal failing autumn, and barren winter of the spirit. Then, one day in January, as he had looked, out he had espied in the middle distance away in the Park a warmly-clothed figure leaving a trail in the snow as it had trudged with difficulty in the direction of the kitchen garden. As he had watched, the figure – that of a young man, he thought - had halted and had looked up towards where William had been standing at the lighted window of his chamber - as if aware that he had been observed. Even in the indifferent light of the winter’s afternoon William had seen now that it was the red-headed boy again, Mark Lucas. He had recalled at once, with shame, the encounter of Christmas morning. Dismayed, he had stepped backwards, out of sight – but not before he had seen Mark raise a hand in greeting. He had felt it like a shock. Mark had been too far away for him to see if a smile had accompanied the gesture, but in his heart he had felt as if it had, and suddenly all the emotions of Christmas morning – to say nothing of the incident of the rose garden more than six months earlier - had burst into his consciousness, threatening to overwhelm him.
“What were you doing that day?” he was to ask him some five months later, on that hot, blissful summer’s afternoon in the small dark cottage bed-chamber filled with the scent of lavender and roses.
“I’d been leaving out fodder for the deer in the park.”
“Wouldn’t that have been a job for the ‘keepers?”
“Joe Mitchell had had a bad fall on some icy steps, sir, and was laid up, so I’d said to his wife I’d do it until he recovered. I put out old green-stuff, and roots past their best – things left over after Christmas – still wholesome, but we could never have sent them indoors to his lordship’s table. I knew the deer would like them well enough, though. It’s a bad time for them, when there’s snow on the ground.”
“That was kind.”
“Not kind really, sir, when you consider. His lordship, or Mr Charles mainly these days, they only keep the deer so they and their grand friends can shoot them at their leisure when they are so inclined. I was just delaying their doom.”
Then the spring had come and for a time the weather had turned unusually clement. Doctor Fazackerley had unexpectedly begun to smile. At one visit, in March, in the third week of Lent, as it happened, Fazackerley had said,
“I believe the occasional turn about the nearer grounds would be of benefit to you, sir, now that nature is once again deigning to present to us her more kindly and auspicious aspect.” (It was habits of speech such as that, William had thought, which had always rendered Fazackerley’s graver pronouncements so peculiarly depressing.)
So the next day William had insisted that he be dressed for the out-of-doors, properly, in day clothes; he would, he said, no longer lounge in a shirt and breeches and a banyan; and after breakfast he had spent some time walking in the shrubbery, where the warm spring sunshine had fallen upon him like a benediction; the scent of green and growing things had assailed his senses as the incense he remembered from that town in Saxony; and he had thought back to Christmas morning, and the yellow flowers, and the flame-haired gardener - that one who had last summer paid him the tribute of the rose (when he had from time to time tried to think of a reason for such puzzling behaviour his mind had continually shied away from the obvious answer, like a nervous horse at the sight of a challenging hedge) and whom he had startled on Christmas morning with his inadvertently boorish behaviour in the shrubbery. But on this occasion, he had had the shrubbery to himself for an hour; and, aware of an obscure feeling of loneliness all the more acute for remembering the rose, and the Christmas morning encounter, and the raised hand of the figure seen at a distance in the snow but a short time afterwards, he had been sorry for that.
These walks had become regular and more adventurous. Soon, the easy confines of the shrubbery left behind, William had begun to attempt longer walks in the home park; his ambition had been to walk in Durford Wood, but Fazackerley had persisted in warning him not to over-tax himself at peril of yet another relapse. Unwillingly he had complied with the physician’s advice, aware that if his health declined again, any hope of re-joining the 33rd might be lost forever. However, he had complained bitterly of boredom one day to Jeremy Collins, the footman who had been detailed to accompany him upon these expeditions. Collins had silently pondered this for a little.
“Might I offer some advice, sir?” he had said, at last.
“Please do! Oh, I wish someone would!”
“I recall when my sister was unwell, many years ago, and walking was prescribed for what we had hoped would be her convalescence, she was advised to vary her path day by day. Perhaps a little variety might be in order in your case, sir?”
“What do you suggest, Collins?”
“I believe a visit to the kitchen garden would prove beneficial, sir. It is walled, and therefore sheltered, and when the sun is shining it is often most warm and pleasant there, even should a chill breeze be blowing without its confines. The herbiary in particular is experienced to its best advantage in warm sunshine. It is a most healthful and salubrious place. You would find a visit to the kitchen garden a fine tonic, sir, for body and soul, I am sure.”
“We’ll go there then. And your sister – she recovered?”
“In a manner of speaking. She died, sir. She is now in a better place.”
“Oh! I am sorry. I mean – I am not sorry that she is in that blessed place for which we hope, of course, but that - ”
“As I said, sir, it was many years ago.”
Collins had walked with him to the herbiary, which had occupied a corner within the walled garden. Flame-haired Mark Lucas had been working there alone, singing to himself, a hymn of Isaac Watts. He had liked to sing. He had had a good (if untutored) tenor voice and had been a favourite performer at the servants’ entertainments.
“Mark,” Collins had called just then, alerting him to William’s presence – “Family.”
Mark had turned and stared, before remembering to bow, and then had smiled shyly; and William, taken aback at the sight of Mark Lucas’s hair gleaming red-golden in the spring sunshine, and stricken anew with the memory of the long-ago Twelfth Night feast, and, additionally, that of the encounter on that last Christmas morning, had responded again with momentary confusion, darting a somewhat panic-stricken glance at Collins.
“It’s good to see you properly up and about again, sir,” Mark had said then, with another small stiff bow which still did not quite come naturally; but William had supposed that was because he was unpractised, as in the course of his work he could seldom have encountered any of the Lawfords, who, he had suddenly realised, must have had something of the aspect of alarming Gorgons to the outdoor servants, who for the most part had never had to have anything to do with them in the course of their daily exertions.
“Mr William’s come to enjoy your herbs, Mark,” Collins had said, “hoping the pleasant sight and scent of them would be beneficial to him in some small way.” Then he had left William there, and had returned to his domestic duties. Mark had seemed just a little ruffled at the unexpected interruption - but not nearly so flustered as William, who, tongue-tied at first, had been so utterly thrown that he had eventually blurted out something ridiculous about lemons, something so foolish that mercifully, afterwards, he could not even remember precisely what it was that he had said, so floored he had been at the sight of the beautiful young man with the milky complexion, sweet expression, moss-green eyes and that wonderful red-golden hair; but Mark had been courteous enough to appear not to have noticed his condition of utter discombobulation (6).
“If you could persuade his lordship to build an orangery, sir,” he had responded, having grasped the essence of what William had been attempting to say, “such as Sir Thomas Talbot has lately had constructed at his seat at Margam Park in Glamorganshire – perhaps he could engage Mr Anthony Keck to build him an even finer one! Although it is a challenge to grow lemons even under glass here in England, I’m sure we could succeed at last at Durford, if we had the right conditions. We have been trying for a time now, with small success, alas. After all, we have recently had to rise to other novel challenges in the hothouse, on account of the war.”
“I’ll see how persuasive I can be; but bear in mind he has but recently added a pinery to your domain.”
“Aye, sir; and there are days when I wish he had not, begging your pardon.”
“How so?” William had asked, genuinely surprised.
“It is the heat and the damp, sir. The pineapple is a fruit most greedy for heat and moisture, for it comes from Orinoocoo in the Americas, where it is all devilish hotness, and wetness such as even Noah would have baulked at having to endure, so I have read, although they do retain water tolerably well once they have drunk their fill. Tending to them in a climate such as ours is a very trying business, sir, especially in the summer. The pinery must be kept at a temperature far in excess of that which obtains in the hot-house, and at an humidity which in England we never experience in nature. Five minutes there, and I find I am becoming a most fervent Abolitionist, for it causes me to understand better the hardships of the Blacks in the West Indies, when I must spend a morning seeing to the unreasonable demands of those formidable salamander-plants (7), labouring in such insufferable heats and damps.”
“Oh! I had not known that you must suffer so in the service of the pineapple,” William had said, wondering at Mark Lucas’s frankness concerning his feelings regarding the fruit (which William had always thought had had a somewhat sinister aspect in any case, suggesting as it did the scaley barb-covered eggs of some fearful mythical fire-breathing beast) and his sympathy towards the Blacks of the West Indies, in light of the Lawfords’ Barbadian business ventures, concerning which Mark must have been aware, not least because there were a couple of well-made personable Blacks amongst the indoor servants at the House who had been brought there from Barbados (who now of course were free men, as one could not, as the law stood, be a slave in England). “I hope it will be a comfort to you to know with what sincerity the Viscountess values and appreciates your efforts.”
“I am glad that your lady mother does, sir; sure, I had rather spend my days working here in the kitchen-garden than playing Shadrach, Mesach and Abed-nego in the burning fiery furnace; but I suppose there are few in this world who are so fortunate that they may choose the circumstances in which they must discharge their duties.”
William had been astonished at the freedom with which Mark had been addressing him. It seemed that two minutes had served to put him at his ease. Indeed, he had seemed to be a good deal easier than William; but soon they had been deep in conversation, until after about an hour William had begun to flag and Mark had offered to walk the recovering invalid back to the house. The way back had led through the shrubbery. William had stopped by the bush from which he had seen Mark cutting the sprays of sweet-smelling yellow flowers on Christmas morning.
“What is that one called?” he had asked.
“That’s wintersweet, sir.”
“Is that a native?”
“It was brought into England thirty years ago. It was first planted at Durford in your grandfather’s time, when he was still the Viscount. It is from China.”
“From China?” William had been genuinely surprised. He had not thought that the shrub had appeared exotic.
“Indeed, sir. A Scottish gentleman called William Aiton brought back a specimen. Its learned name is Chimonanthus praecox.” “’Very early winter flower’. A Greek-Latin chimera!”
“So I understand, sir, although I am no scholar. The Rector taught me sufficient Latin and Greek to be able to read and write and say the names, and comprehend their meaning, but that is all.”
“China is so very far! I am surprised that it thrives in England.”
“Recollect, sir, that the world is not a flat plane but a globe. China is not so far when viewed from above the Pole. We cannot travel there by way of the Pole because of the thick ice in the sea, so our ships must take the long southerly route; but Hulunbuir, for example, in the northernmost part of China, lies at forty-nine degrees North, its position above the Equator only a little less than that of the Isle of Wight, which lies at fifty degrees. And it has been observed, sir, that often these specimens from far away may thrive far better in foreign climes than they do in their own native soil. Some of our famous plantsmen find this phenomenon a great cause for concern, on account of what might possibly happen in the years to come should they begin to thrive too much.”
William had been stunned into silence by the revelation concerning the latitude of the Isle of Wight in relation to that of the town (of which he had never heard) in northern China, which he had always thought of as far away somewhere in the south-east of the world. It had made his brain reel all at once. No-one had ever told him these things. Not Miss Turnbull (notwithstanding her Globes, proficiency in the use of which had won her the position as Governess at Durford in the first instance); not his tutor, Mr Whitstable, nor any of his school-masters - and certainly no officer of the 33rd. He had never thought to think beyond the map of the world as first projected by Mercator more than two hundred years before. Impulsively then, William had said,
“Lucas - ”
“If you do not mind, sir,” Mark had said, with quiet dignity, “his Lordship always called my father Lucas, if he had cause to speak to him at all; and when I hear that name it puts me painfully in mind of him – he has been dead not two years, and we still grieve for him - Martha and Mother and I. And he was Head Gardener, and I am barely out of my apprenticeship. So I am just Mark, sir – if you do not object, and if it pleases you.”
You witless fool! William had then thought to himself, savagely. Of course his father has died! You knew he had! You’ve seen Mark playing the viol in church in his stead often enough since then! Why, he played in the band that very Christmas morning after you’d startled him in the shrubbery!
“I am sorry,” he had said, chastened. “That was thoughtless of me.”
But nonetheless, when Mark had said that he might call him by his Christian name, his heart had given a sudden bound, and he had barely kept himself from blurting out, Of course I don’t mind, and it does please me; it pleases me very much indeed.
“That’s all right, sir.”
“Mark - I’ve found this all so very interesting – I know my brother Francis, if he were here… he knows a great deal about orchids, you see; you and he…”
“Orchids, sir?”
“It’s his special study. I think he would enjoy talking with you. He plays the viola da gamba too – he loves the music of the last century – Marin Marais, Corelli, Bocchi, Gottfried Finger – “
“Sir? I am afraid I am not learned in high music. I only know how to play hymns and psalms, and carols, and the country-dances in Mr Playford’s book.”
Shut up, you fool, shut up! “Sorry – rambling. But Francis now has a living over by Winchester. He only comes here to visit, really, now... Mark… would it be allowed if I were to come by sometimes? To the herb garden or the hothouse, or – the – the pinery?”
“Allowed? Surely it is not for me to allow or disallow anything to you, sir. Of course you may come when you wish.”
“Well – I should not wish to make a nuisance of myself, is what I meant.”
“…if you don’t mind me working as we talk, sir. It’s a busy time of year, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate.”
“Oh, I shan’t trouble you. I’ll bring my sketch-book. I’ll stay out of the way for the most part.”
That first hour passed in the company of Mark, his Botanic Muse (8), had been amongst the best he had spent in the whole of his life, William thought one night, as he lay in the suspended cot in his cabin on board Néreide, concentrating hard upon the memory. He recalled that he had paid the price in the form of disturbed rest which had seen him awake at six bells in the middle watch – (no, that was thinking like a sailor! that had been three o’clock in the morning on land!). William remembered that in the night following his first visit to the kitchen garden, unable to sleep because his mind had been in such turmoil, he had been up in the small hours, playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Handel’s Harmonious Blacksmith on the rehabilitated clavichord in an attempt to calm himself. In fact, there had been many restless nights after that. The days had not been much better, his periods of rest both during the hours of darkness and in the afternoons frequently disrupted by startling dreams of an increasingly erotic nature - together with their accompanying physical manifestations. William had supposed that this was a sign that he was becoming properly well at last. He had first had such dreams – vague, unfocussed, inchoate yet still troubling, from which he would awaken conscious of an elusive nebulous yearning in his heart - at about the time when his body had first begun to change, when he had been perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old. Then, he had had at first small idea of what they had meant, or what had been happening to him, or why. As he had grown older and their import had become gradually less obscure he had naturally assumed that the dreams had been a sign that he had failed in some sinful way and that he had therefore been guilty, and so had in consequence been too embarrassed, ashamed and afraid to ask anyone for advice. When the dreams had ceased at the onset of his illness two years before, in Flanders, William had been vastly relieved, so he had not exactly welcomed the resumption of these nocturnal visitations, notwithstanding it had been a sign that he was returning to health at last. Indeed, William had found the nocturnal phantasmata particularly confusing and alarming, as it had seemed to him that the yearning which they provoked in him now had been about to take on a frightening specificity which they had not possessed in former times.
Then had come the first occasion on which William had dreamed unequivocally of Mark – of gazing at Mark, of touching Mark, of holding Mark, of kissing Mark, of – somehow - possessing Mark – and he had awoken with a start to find himself about to embark upon a shameful act, so he had leapt out of bed with a cry of disgust and an oath, and had spent the rest of the night pacing about his chamber in a state of utter bewilderment and disbelief and confusion of thought.
However, notwithstanding the protestations of the rational part of his mind, the longing for Mark had refused to leave him. In the end, worn out, he had sat down in the arm-chair by the cold ash-heaped hearth, perhaps two faintly-glowing embers still as yet not fallen to dust, and remained there, his head in his hands, until first light. Mark. What had it meant? What was it that he had wanted with Mark? At that time he had had little enough idea of what it was that a man and a woman were supposed to do together in the privacy of the bedchamber, let alone - ! There had been only blankness and mystery; but even that had proved sufficient to pitch him again headlong into a vortex of emotional and bodily longing.
After that first time, Mark as an object of desire had begun to feature frequently not only in his dreams but in his waking thoughts also. As a distraction William had taken to riding again, taking Audax on day-long expeditions to all points of the compass through the countryside around Durford, to the point of exhaustion of both horse and rider. Dr Fazz and several of the grooms had all independently told him that he was over-taxing both Audax and himself, and that he should now grant a time of rest to the two of them. Then - perhaps it had been his recollection of the image of the whirlpool which had caused it to occur to him – he had thought that a regime of cold plunges in the lake might help overcome these phenomena (having recalled that cold baths had been promoted by the Chaplain as the panacea for all undesirable manifestations of that kind when he had been at school), and so that spring William had taken to visiting the landing-stage in the lake, stripping off and diving into the chilly water quite naked, often two or three times a day (until on one occasion he had thought he had spotted movement amongst the trees on the farther shore; the presence had been – he had thought - probably - only deer - but after that he had been careful to bring an old spare shirt along and change into that before he had taken the plunge); but when he had mentioned the lake-bathing to Dr Fazackerley (the physician having questioned him regarding what manner of exercise he was taking) the old vulture had told him that on no account should he do that whilst the weather at that season of the year remained so changeable, cold one day and warm the next: he would place too great a strain upon a constitution which had still not quite recovered all its former vigour and resilience.
Deprived now of the detumescent effects of his cold-water-cure, William had begun to fear the recurrence of the nervous problem which had first been occasioned by his secret feelings for Wilfred Halston, the pleasant and kindly young Lieutenant of his company who had one morning, when they had been back in England from Flanders for little more than a fortnight, fallen down dead on the parade ground without warning (save from having remarked that he felt a little tired, perhaps, when Sergeant Bickerstaff, noting a want of colour in the lieutenant’s hitherto healthy countenance, and suspecting overly-enthusiastic imbibing in the officers’ mess the night before - it had been an unusually lively evening - had asked him humorously if he was sure he was quite well, shortly before this sad event had taken place) from no apparent cause. Mr Micklewhite had later said that Halston’s death had been occasioned by some wayward misdemeanour of his heart, which had, for reasons best known to itself, simply ceased to beat, no notice given, like a disobliging servant who simply walks out one morning without even having troubled to ask for his wages. The shock of that had, as previously noted, left William mentally prostrated, and in addition he had suffered a major relapse of the feverish illness which had first begun to assail him whilst they had still been in Flanders, and which had been greatly exacerbated by being haled around in a cart for weeks in the logistical tail behind the Battalion rather than having been found a place in a decent infirmary, which, given that the British Army had been in retreat and that the French had been pursuing them, had of course been out of the question. That had been a horrible experience: truly vile. There had been men in those carts with all manner of terrible conditions. William had seen men who had had the rot. He could still recall the stench of that, vividly enough to make him retch at the mere recollection. In some of the places where they had stopped, where there had been what passed for hospitals, with physicians who had been persuaded to give a cursory glance to the men from the carts who had still been able to walk, he had seen patients with the pox, for God’s sake! their faces half-eaten away by disease, their wits almost gone! That had given him nightmares for months afterwards. Seventeen, eighteen years old and down among the dead men! No wonder he had fallen sick with dysentery when they had finally arrived at Bremen. His strength had been almost at its extremity, and he had very nearly given up the ghost.
William had had no desire to go through all of that again through making himself vulnerable because of his unruly emotions. He had thought that he had learned at last to govern himself, during the period when they had over-wintered at Lymington, and on the voyage down to the Cape. Yet – yet - ! he had now found himself powerless in the face of his intense yearning for Mark’s presence, which had been growing upon him, he saw now, for at least a year and perhaps for longer than that – but certainly since the more recent hour when Jeremy Collins had left him alone with Mark in the herb garden. However, he would hardly have known how to proceed, he had often thought, as he had lain in bed at night, even if the young man had materialised before his eyes, ready and willing. Nothing would ever come of it, he had been confident. Or rather, miserably convinced.
William had found that his sketching pastime had presented him with the perfect excuse for haunting Mark’s domain. His long-practised art of hiding in plain sight by making himself small and remaining still and silent, and additionally now by adopting an ensemble comprising a coat of dark green together with dun-coloured breeches and a wide-brimmed low-crowned straw hat, not unlike those which many of the gardeners wore (although in better condition), which served to shield has face from notice, quickly rendered him more or less invisible to the platoon of under-gardeners which populated the little realm of the kitchen-garth and the greenhouses, most of whom had soon grown used to him and thus had ceased to notice him, anyway - although he had seen Tom Griffiths, a burly, dark-haired, blue-eyed if somewhat short and stocky youth – nevertheless not unattractive, but whose apparently permanently petulant expression nonetheless had spoiled his features - glancing up from his work from time to time, scowling and regarding him with obvious resentment. This was the same young man, William had been sure, to whose fixed unsmiling gaze he had awoken in the rose-garden that summer’s afternoon, almost a year ago now, when he had surfaced from a light doze to find lying upon his breast, half in bloom, a single beautiful and perfect crimson rose. William had found Griffiths’s evident hostility puzzling and unsettling at first, and then he had tried to put the matter out of his mind, telling himself that Griffiths had simply felt uneasy having to carry out his duties under the eye of one of the Family. Perhaps he had thought that William had been set to spy on them, to see if they helped themselves to the produce, which of course they did, all of them, or almost all – but not holier-than-thou Mark Lucas, of course, the creeping hypocrite, he would have learned, had he been able to read Tom’s mind.
William had spent the fine days of mid-spring making a meticulously illustrated catalogue of the plants which he had seen growing in the kitchen garden - and in particular the herbs. These had fascinated him. He had not been able to get enough of them and had spent minutes on end simply burying his face amidst their leaves, inhaling their healthful restorative fragrance. With rosemary and basil in particular he had become infatuated. These had smelled, he had thought, very like the incense which he had once encountered in a church in Saxony, which had still lingered in the air hours after the conclusion of the morning’s mass.
The Past: Lower Saxony, 1795.
There had been incidents connected with theft from churches along the route of the British army’s increasingly chaotic withdrawal to the north-western coast of the German lands. Now, in this town, whatever it had been called, Captain Jarrold had detailed Ensign Lawford to investigate, to make certain that there had been no stray Redcoats inside the small church (which, unusually for the region, had turned out to be Roman Catholic) looting the place. Unfortunately there had been; he had surprised two men of the Sixth Company of the 33rd in the act of robbing the poor-box (9).
“Put that money back at once!” he had ordered them indignantly, his voice emerging as an humiliating octave-jumping late-adolescent squeak.
“You going to make us?” one of them, a big mouthy Irishman who had always seemed to be on the edge of violence - Anthony Donoghue, as far as William could remember - had answered him, mockingly.
“Donoghue! Mind who you’re talking to! It’s the Honourable Mister Lawford, and his gaffer’s a fucking Earl, so show some respect to his little Lordship!“ Donoghue’s companion, the Midlander Luke Bakewell had said, laughing in derision.
“All right, and how are you going to make us, your Honour?” Donoghue had said then, spitting on the floor in William’s general direction.
“The coins are meant for the poor, you scoundrels!” William had insisted, forcing himself to stand his ground notwithstanding the fear he had felt then – for it had been obvious that the two rankers had been desperate men, ready to do anything to hold on to the proceeds of their crime.
Donoghue had started towards him then, his musket outstretched – William had suddenly noticed with a shudder that Donoghue had pre-emptively fixed his bayonet to its muzzle as if in anticipation of just such a confrontation – surely safer than just discharging the piece with all the attendant noise and stinking smoke - laughing bitterly.
“This is what it is, see, Mister Lawford, sir. I am the focken poor!” he had told William. “You English bastards made sure of that right enough, six hundred and more years ago when you first pushed your focken noses into the affairs of Ireland and stole our land!”
“That was the Normans,” William had attempted, weakly (why had not the Scots and the Irish and the Welsh ever understood that? The Normans had planted their burnished steel-ring sabatons on the necks of the English every bit as ruthlessly as ever they had upon the necks of all the other inhabitants of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, yet it was always the English who got the blame for it! - Normans like Saer de Quincey, first Earl of Winchester, he had supposed.) Donoghue’s companion, Bakewell, had concurred.
“I’m the fookin’ poor, too, sir, even though I’m an English bastard just like yourself - we ain’t bin paid now for three fookin’ months!” he had complained, hefting his musket – it too had had its wickedly sharp bayonet fixed to its muzzle - and pointing it with obvious intent and drill-book accuracy directly at Ensign Lawford’s centre of mass. The tip of the bayonet had hovered then within six inches of his heart, but even so, William had not been able to help but sympathise – at least up to a point. This had been perfectly true. The whole basis of the relationship between the enlisted men and the King, from time immemorial, had been that he paid them to serve in his army. That was what soldati had meant, from the Romans onwards – paid men. These men had not been paid, William had known that, and so there had been a case to make that the bargain had been broken on the King’s side, and that accordingly they no longer had any obligation to obey any order of his officers. That they had not been paid, at least, was not their fault, and it had not been fair. But it had also not been fair that they had been blaming him as if he had been personally responsible for the situation. Also, they had been grown men, probably in their late twenties or early thirties, tall and strong, and he had been just a slender boy, tallish but with not much muscle on him, and who had not yet even grown out of his first scarlet coat. William had felt as if he had been back at school, in his first term, being bullied by a couple of menacing seniors who had meant to rob him of his pocket-money.
“I know, Bakewell; I’m sorry for that, but – “
“You - sorry? The likes o’ you don’t give a tuppenny fuck!”
“Bakewell, I was giving you a chance! You were in breach of Articles Fourteen, Sixteen and Seventeen just there, not a moment since – grumbling about your pay being late in the hearing of a comrade, refusing an order, and threatening an officer with your weapon – you know perfectly well that the penalty for all three is death! Now shut up and lower your musket, and – “
“ – and you won’t say another word about it. Ha! Fat chance o’ that – that would put you in breach of Articles Fourteen and Fifteen (10) right there, and they’d shoot you for that! Think we’re bleeding stupid, sir?”
“Bakewell - !”
“Look at them silver buttons on his coat, Tony – we could live like bleeding lords for six months for the price of those alone!”
“They aren’t silver, they’re – they’re pinchbeck!” William had said, for once able to think fast enough to invent a lie which might well have proved to save his life, for it had given them momentary pause. He had now been quite terrified, completely sure that they had been about to compound their iniquity by robbing and probably murdering him, too.
“Grandson of an Earl wearing pinchbeck buttons? Come off it!” Bakewell, who had evidently not been stupid, had said.
William, in a wavering falsetto, had now threatened to call for the Provosts (11) if Bakewell did not lower his weapon at once and return the coins to the poor-box.
“Piss on the Provosts!” Donoghue had cried, advancing his musket aggressively in Ensign Lawford’s general direction. “What are they but the officers’ harmen and game-keepers, hired to keep us men away from the spoils so the Honourables and Earls and Lordships can stuff their saddle-bags and turn it all into bullion to bedawb their fancy coats withall? The French have the right idea – they know what to do with scum like you, Mister Lawford - you and all your kind back in England would keep every gallows in every county town in the country busy for a year if I had my way! Roll on the French invasion! We’ll see guillotines set up in every market place in every town betwixt Portsmouth and Pitlochry, and a good thing too, say I!”
“ – and they’ll hang you for certain if you don’t do as I say now!” William had gamely gone on; but Bakewell had started as if he had heard something outside in the street which had alarmed him, and he had cried out suddenly,
“We’d best clear out while we can – stow the gab and ding him one, Tony! Then pike it! Buzz him first!”
At that, the two had run out of the church, knocking him down, Donaghue thumping him in the back of the head with the butt of his musket as he had passed him and then stabbing at him, but mercifully only succeeding in piercing the flesh of William’s upper left arm. William had been dimly aware of the sound of the heavy door creaking open and then slamming shut as the two had made their escape.
He had been still lying on the floor, half-stunned, when about half a minute later the door had opened again with a theatrical groan, and another Redcoat had appeared - had peered into the dim interior and had taken in the shocking sight of Ensign Lawford lying sprawled face-down in the middle of the nave, bleeding profusely and either unconscious or dead.
“Harry! Dick! I think Ensign – did Captain Jarrold say he was Ensign Walford? Crawford? He’s hurt!” he had called, to two so-far invisible comrades, who had then quickly come running to join him.
Meanwhile, William, hazily aware again, had been at last attempting to rise but had so far not been able to get beyond the stage of grovelling upon his hands and knees. His left arm had hurt like fire where Donaghue’s bayonet had transfixed it. It would barely support him, so he had been leaning upon his right. Then the near sight of his own blood pooling on the tiles of the floor of the nave had made him feel faint all over again. Meanwhile, the first private, the companion of Harry and Dick, had come to squat down beside him.
“Sir! You’re hurt!”
“I know I’m bloody hurt! …dizzy…feel sick… who are you? I don’t know you. Oh. You are of the Thirty-Third. I see by your facings. Oh…!”
“Sixth Company. Here, sir, let me,” the private had said, lifting William to his feet too rapidly and sitting him down upon a bench by the wall.
The sudden movement had made William feel as if he had been about to swoon again, and he had begun to slump sideways.
“Dick, hold him; don’t let him fall.” One of the other privates had stooped beside him then, and had caught him in his arms.
Slowly, meanwhile, William’s wits had been returning. He had been aware of relief that he had only incurred a blow to the head and a cut to his arm and an affront to his dignity, and had not after all received hot lead or cold steel in his gut for his pains. He had felt an enormous sense of relief, but that had done little to improve his mood.
“If you’ve come to pillage the place then you’re too late,” William had told them then, with a bad grace which he had with hindsight hoped they had deemed the understandable result of having been insulted and outraged by the two desperados who had left him lying in a pathetic bleeding heap upon the floor in front of the broken-open alms box. “Donoghue and Bakewell have been here before you.”
“We saw the bastards running off, sir – “
“This is a church, Private – ! What is your name?”
“Garrard, sir. Beg pardon, sir – but see here, sir, that’s why your officer sent us in here - to make sure you were all right!”
“Lieutenant Halston?”
“Captain Jarrold, sir. Are you? All right?”
“I am, thank you, Garrard; or I shall be. I am sorry. I forgot my manners a short while since. I am grateful to the three of you.”
“You sure you ain’t hurt bad, sir?” Garrard’s companion Dick had said then.
“We was afraid they’d have done for you! Trouble-makers, them two. Everyone’s heard of them. Right pair o’ King George’s hard bargains. You look proper shaken up, sir. And you’re bleeding.”
“I can see that - ” William had almost snapped. Then – “Pray forgive me my ungraciousness! Once more, I am sorry. I understand that you are trying to help me. Your pardon, I beg. But I think that I am, am well enough, thank you, now.” Twitching his shoulders in a sudden shiver of irritation, notwithstanding his ameliatory words, William had shaken off Dick’s protective embrace, feeling affronted and violated all over again in despite of himself, although the slightly dazed voice of reason in his brain had still been telling him, Unfair! Unfair! They are all only trying to assist you! Doing their duty! But he had hated, really hated, to be seen by common soldiers in such a pitiable state of weakness and disarray. “Garrard, you may go find your Sergeant and ask him to advert Lieutenant Halston that he may convey the news to Captain Jarrold that I am not killed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let us help you outside, sir,” Harry had said, then.
“I am all right; I can manage.”
“Very good, sir. You will see the surgeon? Mr Micklewhite? That wound in your arm - ”
“I am all right! Now rejoin the column, the three of you; for if you linger here beyond need you will all of you place yourselves at risk of being charged with desertion! Neither neglect to hand back your tickets of dispensation to Captain Jarrold. Go!”
Donoghue and Bakewell had never been seen again, which had been just as well for them; and when William had had to make his own report to Jarrold, he had said that he supposed that they must have deserted, and that he was sorry that he had been unable to prevent them, and that it must have been his fault that he had been unable to persuade them. That had been towards the end of the Flanders campaign, which had, of course, gone very badly, notwithstanding some few outstanding episodes demonstrating competence and resolve, mainly on the part of Arthur Wesley and John Sherbrooke. Discipline had been well on the way to breaking down entirely by that point but it had seemed hard to blame the men for that, as they had been left without provisions and many of them had never even been issued with winter clothing, and they had been freezing and starving, and it had been impossible to prevent them from stealing food from a civilian population which had supposedly been their allies, if they had been set upon it, for it had been either that, or die – and many of them had indeed done just that. William had not, in the end, been able to find it in his heart entirely to blame the men who had cast discipline aside and who had robbed and plundered. He had seen too many corpses of those who had stuck to the code of honour and had perished as a result. He had however never been able to exonerate to himself those who had raped and murdered. There had never been any kind of excuse, to William’s mind, for those dreadful crimes.
Flanders had gradually become a dim if ugly memory. But William had remembered the sweet smell of the incense in that church in that town in Lower Saxony, the name of which he could never remember. He had told Mark about it, how the rosemary had reminded him of it.
The Past: Durford, Spring 1798.
“It’s a woody shrub, originally from the region of the Mediterranean Sea, sir, like olibanus – that’s frankincense. I could not say whether they be members of the same wider family of plants, but I have read that some consider there to be a certain similarity in fragrance. I have never smelled incense, sir, not being of the Papist persuasion; nor never yet having travelled abroad, for all of my life, it seems, that has been out of the question, because of the wars, and it is hard to see when it will ever be possible to fare overseas again, as things stand.”
“Should you like to travel abroad, Mark?” William had asked, as the unexpected new thought had occurred to him, that a servant might harbour a wish to see the world!
But then he remembered what Mark had said about the view from above the Pole – that had been a true revelation - and that Mark was literate, and to a far greater extent than would merely have allowed him to read a few simple Gospel verses, or pages of a chapbook, or to write his name. He had read about plant specimens from far away – Asia, India, the Americas. He had already travelled to those places in his imagination. Literacy certainly expanded one’s mental horizons! It had struck William then that if every ploughboy and miner and mill-hand, every sailor and soldier – if they but learned to read - in an ideal future world without war it might prove difficult to keep them on the farm and in the factory, in His Majesty’s Ships and in His Majesty’s Regiments of Foot. They would travel, they would encounter new ideas – they might – even – and this idea was both exciting and terrifying - demand a voice in deciding who should govern them!
“I should dearly like to, sir – to see the flora. But it is not likely that I ever shall, especially now that there is war again all around the world on account of the French and their Revolution and this General Bonaparte of theirs, and his marching here and invading there and seizing this land and that, one after the other – all in the name of liberty, and equality, and fraternity, mark you! – although as far as I can see, he just wants to take all their wealth and give precious little in return - and who can say when all that will cease?”
The thought had come to William then that he would have liked nothing better than one day to take Mark with him as his companion on the Grand Tour – a tradition of which his generation of aristocratic young Englishmen had been deprived for some years now, owing to the continuing hostile situation in Europe. Ah well. Perhaps the Lakes would have to do as substitute. Or Scotland. Scotland had been a possibility. They could visit Spean Bridge and explore the Great Glen. Cousin William has brought his father’s gardener with him, so that they might tramp the mountains together, searching for rare lichens! How extraordinary! If only. If ever.
Surreptitiously William had sketched Mark. Some of these sketches he had turned into fully-realised portraits later, in the privacy of his chamber. He had had a modest but genuine amateur’s talent for drawing and painting – Charles had always sneered at him for it as he had for his similarly modest but genuine amateur’s talent for music, frequently opining that these accomplishments made him excellently qualified to be a governess – and consideration of Mark’s charms from an artistic and aesthetic point of view had passed the time pleasantly. It was when he had begun to consider them from a different perspective - as he had done when his guard was down, as he had tried to sleep at night or rest during the day - that what his tutor at school had once memorably referred to as breeches bother had inevitably begun.
The next time Francis had come to see him, he had arrived in the greater drawing-room (progress: William had now been dressing properly every day and coming downstairs at a respectable hour in the morning) to find him playing one of Mr Handel’s airs on the fortepiano. ‘Non lo diró col labbro,’ Francis had said, wasn’t that what it was called, from ‘Tolomeo’? Alexander’s aria in Act One, scene Two? William had at once blushed fierily and Francis had wondered whether that had been the fever or something else. He had never held with prolonged engagements and in his opinion, as well as being morally wrong, this business of Jessica had just been dragging on for far too long now. He had hoped his brother had not had his head turned; but then, he knew that William had been cloistered at Durford for a year now. Sighing over a pretty housemaid, most likely, he had reassured himself; it would pass, these things always did; they had with him; and William had been no Charles, and much less the Viscount, so whoever she was, her virtue had probably been safe enough.
The Present: December 1798.
Finally, one day in the middle of December of ’98, William heard the talk that they would be at Madras within the week, and he began to take an interest again, standing at the bow for hours, staring to larboard at what his carefully-inscribed notes in his commonplace-book said was called the Coromandel Coast, Cholas Mandala, the circle of influence of the Cholas, catching the strange new scents of India if he happened to be up on deck in the third watch when the land breeze blew, feeling that he was re-entering the world at last after the liminal life of months at sea. He spent so long on deck now that one day, as a shoal of flying fish, iridescent in the sunlight, suddenly broke the surface, probably to escape pursuit by a pod of porpoise, an incident as bizarre as it was unexpected occurred to him: as the creatures soared diagonally across the deck of the ship, a group of them flew into the foremast rigging and bounced off the shrouds and ratlines, and two or perhaps three of these hit him in the face before dropping to the deck, where they lay flapping with the others. Several of the hands saw the business and laughed loudly. William blushed fierily. Then one of the men took pity upon him in his red-faced confusion.
“That’s good luck, sir, that is,” he said, diplomatically.
“Is it? To be hit in the face by a flying fish is considered good luck?” William said, tightly, fighting hard against the threatening tears of mortification. He succeeded in forcing them back down into the personal ship’s well of his heart.
“Aye, sir - means you don’t have to eat salt pork again for your supper tonight!”
Cue for general mirth amongst the sailors within ear-shot, so William had no choice but to laugh too.
“Oh,” he said, managing a small, embarrassed ha-ha, reflecting that it probably was good luck, in that case, considering the increasingly circumscribed diet he had been recently enduring on account of the months they had now spent at sea. It might not even have been the first voyage of that current barrel of salt pork which they had now been chewing their way through for what had seemed like forever. No amount of salt could stave off the rot indefinitely; certainly not in this climate. He had thought he had noticed a suspicious hint of a putrid taint in the aftertaste of last night’s meal.
“I’ll take ‘em down to Cook, have him broil a couple of ‘em for you, if you like, sir, seeing as you caught ‘em, so to speak. They’re good eating.”
“That would be very kind. And would you – could you – please kindly present the remainder to the Midshipmen’s mess, with my regards? They have endured my presence at their table now for many months. I would render thanks.”
So William had fresh fish for his supper, at the price of having acquired the new eke-name of Fish-Face Lawford; but he reflected that he had been called worse things in his time, and no doubt would be again; and as he was the only member of the 33rd travelling to Madras, and as the time remaining to him on board Néreide was rapidly drawing towards its conclusion, he supposed that he could bear it.
Once the ship was at anchor below Fort St George the passengers were to be rafted ashore in batches. William had had a fairly uneventful voyage up to that point (apart from the lively weather he had experienced in the Bay of Biscay and at Good Hope, and the Flying Fish Incident; oh, and Crossing the Line just south of the Gulf of Guinea and about four degrees west, when somebody (Captain Watkins’s steward) in the guise of King Neptune, had clambered up over the side from the main-chains and demanded homage from all on board who had never before been south of the Equator, and who had then proceeded to chase him around the weather-deck brandishing a trident, to the immense hilarity of all, until William had paid him off with a purse of silver); now suddenly it looked to become perilous. He had read that there was almost always a tremendous surf on this unprotected shore (12). Now, owing to a stiff easterly breeze blowing from the Bay of Bengal, the rollers were monstrous, the spray as they broke leaping as high as the weather-vane on the spire of a village church back in England, scattering rainbows; and as he watched the progress of a raft, a kattumaram, conveying passengers from another ship (which had arrived shortly before Néreide and was currently standing off from the shore) was hit by a huge wave which spun it helplessly around. Almost immediately a cross-wave struck it so that at stood straight upright in the water. The passengers were catapulted backwards into the churning green-white sea (their screams being just about audible above the noise of the surf, to the company of Néreide). William watched from the deck of Néreide, his heart in his mouth, as the flailing figures struggled towards the shore. He was uncertain as to whether all of them succeeded in winning to the beach.
Then, too soon, it seemed, it was his turn. He shrank from the thought. For one thing, now that it had come to it, he found that he did not want to leave Néreide at all! She had been his home for more than five months. He had become used to her ways and to her people. At this moment, he felt, he would have been happy to remain aboard her forever, sailing the great oceans, never setting foot on dry land again. There was nothing he wanted less in all the world now than to have to clamber down the side of the ship (which to his appalled sight now seemed as fearsomely high above the surface of the ocean as the summit of the great sea-cliffs which he had seen from afar as they had passed the Canary Islands months before) onto the flimsy tossing raft, which from his perspective high above upon the weather-deck looked like a toy, but there was nothing for it; so, affecting a sang-froid which he was very far from feeling, William contrived to get himself down the side somehow and then sat with what he hoped seemed the nonchalant air of a man settling into an armchair at his club to read a newspaper, as if he did that kind of thing every day; and the horrible memory of the kindle of kittens that Charles had drowned in the rain-barrel whilst he had stood watching, too afraid of his brother to try to stop him, coming unbidden to his mind, prayed that he was not about to meet an identical fate, although he felt that he would have deserved it for what he had allowed Charles to do unchallenged to the poor innocent creatures. That was the trick, William said to himself, having found himself remembering incidents from his Flanders days - that encounter with his runagate compatriots, the desperados Donoghue and Bakewell, in the church at – he still could not remember the name of the place. So many villages and towns that had all looked the same, most of which had had -dorp or -burg in their names. It don’t matter if you feel utterly terrified, so long as you don’t look it - and, crucially, don’t act on it. Feeling terrified in a battle didn’t make you a coward in the estimation of your comrades, because you all felt terrified – terror was the only sane response to the prospect of imminent ghastly agonizing mutilation or death, after all - it was showing it that did – be as terrified as you like so long as you keep a straight face and stand your ground, he remembered Captain Hughes telling him and the other Ensign, the second one before Fitz-Gerald, who had been all out for fame and glory, what was his name, Ned Gleadless, thereafter known in Battalion lore as Headless Gleadless, who had doughtily stood his ground in the face of concerted artillery fire from the enemy instead of prudently ducking, as William had (earning a rebuke from Captain Jarrold, of course, for failing to set an example), as soon as it had become obvious that the French gunners had found their range, and whose head had in consequence been knocked off by an eight-pound cannon ball on its fourth graze, after a couple of minutes of determinedly showing how not frightened he was.
It was jolly hard not to show it when you were being whirled around and tossed up and down in the surf on a craft which was, at the end of the day, a mere raft comprising the trunks of seven banema trees lashed together, using fastenings which no British seaman could ever have dignified with the designation ‘knot’, with jute rope, though; and rope, moreover, which looked like it could unravel at any moment, sending him and all the other passengers on the raft to the bottom of the Bay of Bengal.
There followed several fraught minutes as the boatmen did their best to bring the small craft to the shore without its being upended or capsized in the relentless, pounding surf. Finally, soaked through, scared beyond fear and beginning to feel a resumption of the sea-sickness he thought he had left behind him some months previously, William succeeded in half-wading, half-stumbling ashore, helped on his way by another enormous breaker which at its last gasp thwacked him on the backside and sent him staggering up the beach (he was all right, but Gulliver in his pocket was never to be quite the same again). Once safely on dry land he fell on all fours, his head spinning (the strand heaving under him as if it had still been the wretched raft), retching convulsively. For a second or two he thought himself back on Chesil Beach when the transports meant to be taking the 33rd to the West Indies in the autumn of ’95 had run aground in a storm (what dreadful scenes on Albion’s rocks!) (13). In that instant the distressing memory of the offensive acrid barracún stench (14) of hundreds of unwashed bodies in the ‘tween-decks of the transport after seven fruitless weeks at sea rose like his gorge in his memory, and he vomited in earnest; and then he was back in India again. When he looked up, there was Sergeant Bickerstaff gazing calmly down at him with the impassive interested attentiveness of a natural philosopher studying some exotic specimen, offering him a handkerchief, which he gratefully accepted. Bickerstaff had evidently been waiting on the beach for some time. With him was a detachment of six enlisted men, ready to escort William and his ample baggage. The men were staring stolidly out to sea, for it was not fitting that they should see an officer thus, making an exhibit of himself, appearing little better than a drunkard in a gutter.
“Welcome to Madras, Mister Lawford, sir,” said Bickerstaff, impassively.
“Corporal Bickerstaff!” William scrambled at once to his feet – too fast; his head swam, his gorge rose once more; he fell to his knees again, and dry-heaved. Bickerstaff deferentially leaned down and offered his hand, and helped him to stand. Spray-drenched, whey-faced, dreadfully dishevelled as he was, William nonetheless beamed with delight at the sight of the familiar face; then he noticed the additional chevron on the sleeve of Bickerstaff’s scarlet coat.
“Welcome back to the Havercakes, sir,” Sergeant Bickerstaff was saying, meanwhile. “It’s good to see you again after all this time. We was beginning to think you was never coming back.” (Which, being interpreted, William thought, was probably Bickerstaffian for We all thought you was dead.) “I hope you had a good passage?”
“It was most tedious. Uneventful. I suppose that was a good thing, actually. Although it had its moments.”
“The novelty wore off for me before we got past Ushant, sir. Ten solid months we was on the Princess Charlotte! Well, apart from all those weeks we was ashore at the Cape, with the 12th. Good times.”
“Ten months?”
“She wasn’t the fastest ship, sir. And we had a power of hanging around to do at Cape Town waiting for the Colonel to catch us up, if you remember.”
“Only too well. I think there were some Dutch to chase off, too, at one point, but of course I took no part in that.”
Bickerstaff looked him up and down.
“Dutch, pff! That wasn’t even like a grouse-shoot, which I knows about, as I used to be a beater, when I was a boy. Well, sir, there’s more of you than there used to be, side to side, might I take the liberty of observing,” said Bickerstaff, lightly indicating his own shoulders. “And I swear you must have grown two inches taller since you left us at the Cape!”
“I have. When I went up to Town to be measured for my new uniform, oh, over a year ago now – I was supposed to sail with the Company convoy - my tailor expressed himself uncommon surprised and pleased at the improvement. It fitted me well then. I am afraid I have lost a little weight since, what with the voyage, for I was often sick.”
“All in all, you’re looking very well, though, sir,” Bickerstaff lied, kindly.
“Thank you, Jem! And I see they’ve made you a Sergeant! I should have said so at once. Congratulations!”
“It would have been better, sir, if it hadn’t been to replace old Bob Stackpole, what died of a quinsey on the way up from the Cape to Calcutta just after you was taken off – but on the whole that was a pleasant run, not like the trip back down to Madras as we had - such a voyage as I hopes we never has to endure again - but I thank you all the same.”
“I’m sorry to hear about poor Stackpole. Decent man, good man. What happened on the way to Madras, Sergeant?” William was beginning to feel all the better for the first sight in many months of a friendly (if slightly lugubrious) face.
“First off, we hadn’t even left the Hooghly and the old Earl FitzWilliam runs aground on a mud-flat. They has us all out upon the mud-bank, heaving and straining at the cables for all we was worth. Took us hours to refloat the old tub, it did! You remember the Princess Charlotte, sir, what many of us came out on in Seventy-Six - she was a proper tight ship, only a year old - but the FitzWilliam, twelve years if she was a day, worn out by the passages round the Cape! and even then they only managed to kedge her off at last after we ditched all the saltpetre she was carrying – a thousand bags! We’re going to regret that, mark my words, sir. Nothing like Indian saltpetre for to make the old black powder go with a bang. Then there was the bloody flux, of course. The water was bad. Captain Frazer had had the barrels filled from a lagoon what had any amount of filth in it – and he knew it!”
“Captain Frazer being - ?” “Company man, sir. Master of the Earl FitzWilliam. There was dead dogs floating in it! Bloody dead bullocks! Mules, horses, cats, you name it. We all saw! Colonel Wesley, Wellesley I mean, now, o’course, was practically spitting blood over it, but I expect that bastard Frazer got away with murder in the end - that’s what it was! Murder! Pardon my language, sir. We was all ill with the flux, every last one of us. Fifteen of us died. Fifteen! Good men all! And us being only a single-battalion regiment! We’re told a new draft will be coming out, but the Lord knows when.”
“Simply dreadful, Sergeant! I am sorry. From what you say, it sounds as if there has been serious negligence. I am sorry for the flux. I had dysentery in Flanders and I at least have some idea of what this kind of affliction is like, although I expect this visitation was far worse.”
“I recollect. Here’s what it is, sir,” Bickerstaff had then gone on in a confidential tone – “ - four hundred and thirty Havercake Lads dead in the last five years, they say – half a Battalion! - and only six of those killed by the enemy! What a bleeding disgrace!”
“I agree that it is very shocking. Many died of the cold in Flanders, and of want - and many drowned, I fear, those times subsequent we were sailing to the West Indies but were driven back by storms, and wrecked. It was a mercy that there were no more lost in that manner. I have often thanked Almighty God for my own deliverance, both in Flanders and on the West Indies transports. But we should not speak of these things openly, I feel, for it discomfits the men.”
Thinking that it was time to change the subject, for he feared that he and Bickerstaff would be straying close to putting themselves in peril of infringing one or other of the Articles of War at this rate, William marshalled and mastered his trembling limbs and began to walk up the beach. Bickerstaff ordered the men of his detail to collect the officer’s luggage and pile it onto a cart, and then he began to walk with him. The Sergeant continued his tale of woe as they moved off the sand and onto the marginal scrubland above the foreshore.
“And the Fitz leaked like a sieve after all that pulling and straining to get her unstuck – her timbers was sprung in at least two places so the gaps had to be fothered - we was having to pump day and night, even though no-one barely had the strength, after all that straining at the cables in the heat, and wading in the mud – no-one had hardly the chance to recover - and then the flux hit us like a runaway brewery wagon on Trooper Lane (15) because of the poisoned water! And the whole voyage took nearly four weeks – four weeks to go eight-hundred mile! We barely made it to Madras! We was convinced we’d go down in the Bay. I swear the old tub was settling under us by the time we was standing in. The day we dropped anchor, I heard the carpenter calling out four and a half then five feet in the well! Colonel Wellesley told him to hold his tongue – I suspicion he was afraid the men would start to panic.”
“How very trying it must have been,” said William, and he did mean it, although it must have sounded to the men on the beach like a threadbare platitude from a privileged officer whose thoughts for the most part were only for himself - but he did feel so very, very weary all at once.
“I hope you had a pleasant voyage out, anyway, sir,” Bickerstaff said.
“Tolerable, at least – until half an hour ago,” he had responded, staggering suddenly as he did so. The bloody land had betrayed him again - it was still behaving in a way terra allegedly firma never should. Bickerstaff shot out a solicitous hand to steady him.
“You’ll soon find your land legs again, sir.”
“Thank you, Sergeant - and thank you for meeting me. I am indeed very grateful. I had seen myself cast up upon the beach like Robinson Crusoe, else, solitary and helpless.”
“Only right we come for you, sir, knowing as how you’d have a powerful lot of baggage, meaning no offence.” Bickerstaff nodded in the direction of his men, two of whom were staggering under the weight of William’s sea-chest, which they were endeavouring to lift into the cart. “They really should send you young gentlemen a list. Most of what’s necessary you can get in Madras these days, or so I am reliably hinformed.”
William looked ruefully at the not inconsiderable store of his worldly goods which were still piled on the beach (it was amazing, he thought, that they had got it all ashore without incident) and blushed. Suddenly he felt ashamed for bringing that great pile of belongings and causing inconvenience to men who already had had such a great deal of work to do. He should have thought, properly. But all he had been able to think of, in the days before his departure from England, had been Mark…
“I am really sorry - about Stackpole. I remember he was married?”
“Mrs Stackpole died off the Canaries, sir. She was in the family way and couldn’t stop heaving up her guts. Sorry, sir, no thing to say of a lady, and Mrs Stackpole was a lady, most particular and refined. Casting up of her accounts, I should have said. Buried at sea, at any rate. But she and Sergeant Stackpole are united in Glory now, sir.”
“Really? Oh, no. I meant, no doubt. Amen, anyway. Hallelujah. May they rest in peace. God certainly moves in a mysterious way, as Mr Cowper tells us.”
“Hindeed. I ‘opes as you ain’t become a Methody, sir? Colonel Wellesley, Wesley as was (you might not have noted the change of spelling?) ain’t fond of them in his Regiment. Stirs up trouble, they do, so he says.”
“No, no, of course not. My brother is a Canon of Winchester, and my grandfather is in the House of Lords, so I had better not be, eh?” William laughed nervously. “But the Methodists have many of the best tunes, like the Devil himself, what?”
“That is hardly decent, sir, if I might be so bold as to venture, and no offence meant.”
“Of course not. I am sorry, Sergeant. No offence either meant or taken. That was frivolous of me. Again, my apologies.”
The cart was now loaded. Pushing it off the beach and onto less hindering and difficult ground was hard work, but the men were all grinning at him now. It seemed a little over-familiar, but William was touched, nonetheless.
“You young chaps that likes to bring the kitchen sink out with you, eh, sir?” said Bickerstaff, good-humouredly, then, nodding at the heap of the young officer’s treasured possessions in the cart, which included a crate of Williams’s Kerseymere and Woollen Cloth Powder, another of his favourite bergamot-scented soap (the tax he had been obliged to pay on that had been phenomenal, so he was particularly relieved that that item had not ended up lost from the raft and floating out to sea), and, rather bizarrely, an antique clavichord cocooned in an oiled and padded canvas bag marked Fragile, a totally redundant legend since neither the seamen of Néreide nor (probably) the rankers here on the beach had been able to read; and he had not been able to keep himself from smiling back once again.
He was feeling a little better now. Hopefully the horrible feeling of being still on a ship tossing on mountainous waves leagues out in the ocean would soon pass completely. He did not care for how, in the last fifteen minutes, one moment he felt perfectly well, and then the next it seemed as if the land were heaving around him, and then the feeling passed, only to return, and then his only wish once again was to lie down and die. He knew that it would eventually cease, of course, but that knowledge was no help whenever the vertigo and the nausea returned.
“Lead on, then, Sergeant Bickerstaff!” he said. “I can’t say how glad I’ll be to see Captain Hughes again. He was very kind to me – he visited me when I was at home, during my convalescence.”
“Mister Lawford, sir,” said Bickerstaff, suddenly solemn. Ever alert for hints of ill-omen, William’s ears had almost twitched as he noted an ominous shift in the Sergeant’s tone. “I must tell you, sir, there’s been quite a few – changes - since you was last with us.”
“Changes?”
“Poor Captain Hughes is dead, sir.”
William gaped at Bickerstaff.
“Dead, Sergeant?”
“Regrettably so, yes, sir. Died of the bloody flux back up in Calcutta, not long after we got back from that business in Manila. We was supposed to go and take the Philippines from the Dutch, sir,” Bickerstaff volunteered, noting William’s blank look. “But no sooner that we got there, word came that Boney was sending an army to Egypt in the hopes of sailing to India to the Tippoo’s port of Mangalore, to march on the three presidencies, so back we went again. But o’ course, Lord Nelson, God bless him, that great man, put a stop to all that even before we got back to Madras, at the Nile.”
“Ah, we heard of that at Cape Town. Néreide had barely left Spithead but what Nelson gave the French a damn good drubbing at Aboukir Bay. But of course we heard nothing of what had passed there for many weeks after.”
“Well, sir, we didn’t hear no more of Manila, after that, neither.”
William’s mind flew back to that day he had seen Hughes at Durford, had sat with him sipping lemonade and eating seed-cake as they had chatted so amicably together in the rose-garden! His mind working rapidly, William said –
“So…” playing for time whilst he calculated the likely outcome of Hughes’s demise. “So, it’s Captain…?”
“So it’s Captain Morris now, sir.”
Captain Morris! Exactly the conclusion to which he had himself had been coming in that very same moment, although he had been hoping that he had jumped to it and got it wrong. That was bad news indeed, if what he feared was true! Why could not someone else have stepped in and purchased the commission? But, he told himself, but, but - it was a common enough name, wasn’t it? Even in 1798 when the British Empire had been still in its relatively salad days, the world had probably already been liberally sprinkled with Englishmen named Morris. It could be anyone –
“That’s not Charles Morris, is it?” he said, hoping against hope.
“Why, yes, sir! The very one. Lieutenant Morris. Formerly of the Fourth Company, like yourself, sir.”
All right – all right – William thought, trying to think calmly. He conceded that there were indeed thousands of Morrises at large in the world, and surely scores of those must have been christened Charles! There was still all to wish for! Nonetheless, he had to bite the bullet.
“Lieutenant Charles Morris, who was such a – such an arse – in Flanders? Remember that time, when - ” He bit his lip, suddenly remembering, fully aware now that he was forbidden to indulge in criticising his fellow-officers in front of the men. It was bad for morale; not seemly; unbecoming. He must get into the way of these things again, now he was back with the Battalion! Then hope died.
“Indeed it is, sir. Captain Charles Morris now – “ Bickerstaff said, with emphasis, and William felt the slight rebuke, and reddened at once, knowing that it was deserved – “ - and Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill for good measure – Hakeswill’s the senior Light Company Sergeant. He’s had his chevrons since ’89. Ran the recruiting parties out of Halifax for years, you might recall.”
“I have heard the name.”
“Then he was with Three Company, but Morris had him brought into the Light during the voyage. He’s a bit… Just a warning, sir. Things are a bit… tricky at the moment.”
“Thank you for letting me know, Sergeant. I shall bear in mind all you have told me. And – and please forget what I just said concerning Captain Morris with regard to Flanders. That was ill-spoken of me, and I apologise.”
“My memory is as a palimpsest new-scraped and awaiting the quill, sir.”
“Sergeant – I must say I am impressed! Half the fellows with whom I was at school would not have known what was a palimpsest!”
“My Aunt Augusta was a governess, sir,” said Bickerstaff stolidly. “She brought me up once my mother died. She was married by then, to a drum-major of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the Twenty-Third, you know, sir: a fellow she had run foul of, at Easter at Brighton in the year Fifty-Eight. A case of having to marry, if you discern my meaning.”
“So?” William said. Bickerstaff’s sudden and unexpected change of register had aroused his curiosity about the man.
“So I know my grammar, sir. Aunt Augusta brought me up proper, with books, and the like. It’s just, in my line of work, it’s better if I perform in character, as it were - go along with what the men expect of a Sergeant. For what I believe is called credibility, haha!”
Looking at Bickerstaff with renewed respect, William followed him up the beach.
End-Notes
1 Also known as Jacob Kirchmann, of Alsace, 1710-1792. A noted manufacturer of keyboard instruments.
2 A jocular name for Barbados, amongst that class of person who had commercial interests there.
3 Non più andrai: Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso, No more, you amorous butterfly, Notte e giorno d'intorno girando; Will you go fluttering round by night and day, Delle belle turbando il riposo Disturbing the peace of every maid, Narcisetto, Adoncino d'amor. You pocket Narcissus, you Adonis of love. Non più avrai questi bei pennacchini, No more will you have those fine feathers, Quel cappello leggero e galante, That light and dashing cap, Quella chioma, quell'aria brillante, Those curls, those airs and graces, Quel vermiglio donnesco color. That roseate womanish colour. Tra guerrieri, poffar Bacco! You’ll be among warriors, by Bacchus! Gran mustacchi, stretto sacco. Long moustaches, knapsack tightly on, Schioppo in spalla, sciabla al fianco, Musket on your shoulder, sabre at your side, Collo dritto, muso franco, Head erect and bold of visage, Un gran casco, o un gran turbante, A great helmet or a head-dress, Molto onor, poco contante! Lots of honour, little money, Ed invece del fandango, And instead of the fandango, Una marcia per il fango. Marching through the mud. Per montagne, per valloni, Over mountains, through valleys, Con le nevi e i sollioni. In snow and days of listless heat, Al concerto di tromboni, To the sound of blunderbusses, Di bombarde, di cannoni, Shells and cannons, Che le palle in tutti i tuoni Whose shots make your ears sing All'orecchio fan fischiar. On every note. Cherubino alla vittoria: Cherubino, on to victory, Alla gloria militar! On to military glory!
W A Mozart. Le nozze di Figaro. 1786. Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte after Beaumarchais.
4. The product of a famous (but fictitious) pottery in Burslem. In reality it would have been a Minton.
5. This probably constituted William’s introduction to the French language.
6. Not a word. But then, what William was feeling at this point probably had no words to describe it.
7. There was a folk-belief that salamanders were engendered by fire. Ed.
8. Erasmus Darwin. The Loves of the Plants. 1789.
9. William never had any luck when it came to dealing with looters: on the day before the Battle of Talavera he failed to stop a rabble of Spanish musketeers of Cuesta’s army from ransacking some British baggage-waggons (Ensign Christopher Denny in a letter home to his mother dated 27th July 1809, now held in the collection of the Museum of the 44th East Essex and South Essex Regiments of Foot in the Museum at Oaklands Park, Chelmsford; his final letter home, as it turned out, for he was killed in action the following day); and in Coimbra on the way to the Lines of Torres Vedras following the Battle of Busaco the following year – when Lawford spotted a private of the 52nd hurrying along with a whole ham half-hidden beneath his jacket, he cried indignantly “Private! Where did you get that?” and the man simply grinned, pointed to a butcher’s shop a short way away, and replied, “In there, sir, but you’d better hurry, for there’s only one left!” (Lieutenant John Bullen: The Peninsular War Journal of an Officer of the South Essex: 1817) Lawford later told a friend that in some ways he was glad he had been rendered hors de combat that night in Ciudad Rodrigo, on account of what he had subsequently heard of the prodigious and shameful looting and drunken rioting, raping and murdering carried out by the British soldiers following the fall of the city, which he feared he would have been quite unable to assist in stopping; and again, at Badajoz later that spring, and at San Sebastian in 1813. (Lt-Col Peter d’Alembord: Letters from Portugal and Spain: a Peninsular Memoir: 1821.)
10. Bakewell and Donoghue would have been word-perfect in the Articles of War, which were read to the men on a regular basis, usually at the time of Divine Service. That they are well aware of the penalty for their actions but persist in them anyway is a sign of their desperation.
11. Experienced sergeants of the cavalry regiments were used to enforce order and discipline amongst the Redcoats. At this point in the history of the British Army there was no dedicated body of Provosts, or Military Policemen, until Wellington introduced such a unit into his Peninsula army, having been impressed by the French use of gendarmes to keep order in their own ranks.
12. The beach at Madras, modern-day Chennai, whilst superficially resembling that of, say, Bournemouth, is far more exposed to the conditions of the open ocean.
13. George Smith on the wreck of the Indiaman Halsewell. 1787.
14. At some point during his early youth, William, along with Francis, had been made to accompany the Viscount on a voyage to Barbados with the purpose of their becoming acquainted with the means by which much of the wealth of the Lawford family was generated (Charles and Henry, Heir and Spare, having already made their own prudently separate visits). No doubt William had learned at first-hand the horrible power of this frightful miasma to sicken and disgust. It arose from the circumstance of too many unwashed bodies pent in too close confinement for too long. It was also to be encountered in the gaols and troop and convict transports of the era.
15. Trooper Hill is the steepest hill in Halifax, the Yorkshire West Riding town where the 33rd had their depot.
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