The surgeon was still sponging Colby’s face as Brosy la Dell appeared. Inevitably, he had lost the ill-fitting lance cap and in one dirty paw he held a beef sandwich he’d begged from one of the staff.
‘Fancy a bite, Coll?’ he asked. ‘I could eat a dead horse, I’m so hungry.’
The brigade was lined up, a curiously shrunken brigade, first the 17th, four men of the 19th, only one of them mounted, then the 13th Light Dragoons. Behind them a man of the 4th was standing by his dying charger, cursing steadily, watched by his friends. As the rolls were taken, names were answered from huddled heaps surrounded by surgeons or soldiers’ wives. The 19th didn’t take long because there appeared to be only six unwounded men.
Morris of the 17th was carried past, his face a mask of blood, muttering ‘God have mercy on my soul’ in his agony, then Cardigan appeared, his tunic undone, a rent in his overalls. Reining in, he faced the remnants of his brigade. ‘It was a mad-brained trick, men,’ he burst out. ‘But it was nothing to do with me!’
There was a thin cheer. ‘We’ll go again, my lord,’ someone yelled.
Colby lifted his head indignantly. If any bloody idiot suggested
him
going again, he decided, he was prepared to stand up in front of the Commander-in-Chief if necessary and tell him he wanted his head examining.
As the surgeon finished cleaning his face, he looked down at himself His uniform was blackened, scorched, and torn in a dozen places.
Nearby, a woman was kneeling over her dead husband. Further along, another was crouched over her man, trying to persuade him to drink from a water bottle. Come darkness, they’d be down the valley bringing in the bodies of others, washing them, wrapping them in their blankets or cloaks and preparing to put them in the cold hard graves where the best of the women would place flowers for a while before taking up with another man.
War, Colby thought, seemed to be a bit different from the way it had looked at home. In books and newspapers, it had always seemed a little more noble. ‘Laying down your life for your country’, he realised, was merely a phrase invented by writers, and the truth was different.
You didn’t lay down your life at all. You probably had it blown out of you by a shell, or leaked out drop by drop through half a dozen crimson holes, like some of the men about him. Then it occurred to him that if he were going to make the pursuit of arms his profession, it was more than likely that at some time or other he might be faced with this sort of shambles again, and that it might therefore be a good idea to bone up a bit on cavalry tactics and the use of the sabre.
Finally another thought struck him: By God, he thought, I wonder if they’ll send me home! I’m wounded; they might!
In a sudden resurgence of enthusiasm brought on by good health and the resilience of youth, his spirits rose.
This time, he thought, even Georgy Markham ought to be unable to resist him. Men who’d faced death could make demands and, when they did, sentimental girls often gave way. She was always going on about how proud she was of a cousin of hers in the Navy who’d been lost in the Arctic with Franklin’s expedition a few years before.
Perhaps this little lot would give her someone else to admire: Colby William Rollo Goff, for instance.
‘The charge at Balaclava,’ Colby lied airily, ‘was nothing. The winter that followed and the heat of India during the Mutiny were far worse.’
Georgina Markham’s big blue eyes stared at him, round with admiration. Since, on the onset of bad weather, her father had taken a grave dislike to the Crimea and bolted for home and retirement, she knew little or nothing about either campaign.
‘It was a disgrace,’ she said. ‘Sending you all out there to put down those dreadful Sepoys, after you’d gone through so much!’
Colby shrugged. ‘Experienced troops,’ he explained lightly. ‘Needed us. Whole of India was ablaze.’
He looked down at Georgina as she walked alongside him through the lush afternoon meadows from the Markhams’ house. In return she gave him an enthusiastic glance, which, like the weather, was warmer than he had ever expected to see.
‘I looked forward so much to your return,’ she said.
He didn’t reply, because he wasn’t so damned sure about that. The few months he’d spent at home before going to India had hardly been a great success. Though she’d grown more luscious while he’d been in the Crimea, she had kept herself utterly beyond his reach and only once, at the marriage of her sister, Florentia, to a captain in the Diehards, had he succeeded in getting his hand round one half of that splendid bosom. Florentia’s had been a wild sort of wedding, with a lot of tipsy young officers and girls trying to be daring, and he’d managed to get her into the rose garden for a mere fingertip touch of soft flesh before she’d escaped to the safety of the buffet, leaving him full of fury and mounting frustration. From then on there had been nothing but the warm womanly smell of her, the whiff of the perfume she’d started to use, and glimpses of those magnificent plump white breasts in the low-cut gowns she wore at hunt balls and soirées, always blue like her notepaper and the ribbons with which she wrapped gifts.
The period had been one of sheer agony for him, with Mrs Markham or one of the elderly aunts the family supported always within earshot. Whenever they nodded off to sleep he had immediately stepped up his assault, only to find that the eighteen-year-old Georgy appeared to have ten pairs of hands, all engaged in fending him off. He’d been allowed to say goodbye to her alone before leaving for India – but with her mother listening outside the door – and she’d told him not to be so ardent, and that the sort of thing he was urging could only be permitted between married couples. She had melted sufficiently nevertheless to say she would keep herself for him, his prize and his booty when he returned from this new campaign, though he had always had a suspicion that she hadn’t meant quite the same as he had.
He glanced again at her. His sister Harriet, who was older than he was and claimed to to have more sense, had never liked Georgy and, with years and experience, he was beginning to see why. By now there were other women with whom to compare her and, far from being the match in looks for Caroline Matchett, who lived at Hounslow and, when she wasn’t in a fit of depression and trying to drown it with brandy, was an actress of no mean repute, she wasn’t even on the same mental level. While, for sheer entertainment value, she was totally outclassed by a French dancer whom he had met in Paris – now, thanks to the reliability of trains and paddlewheel steamships, within easy reach of London – who, though of somewhat dubious ability on the stage, possessed an unparalleled virtuosity in the bedroom.
She was wearing a white dress and carrying a parasol against the heat. Thank God, he thought, she wasn’t wearing one of those bloody silly crinolines that had become all the fashion. In one of those things, a man couldn’t get within a yard of a girl and, given half a chance, he intended to. Though Georgy’s mind was not to be recommended, her shape hadn’t changed.
As it happened, Georgy’s brain was as full of ideas as Colby’s and the walk had been her suggestion. Normally she hated walking, but she had begun to notice Colby’s growing indifference. There was an aggressive maleness about him these days, she had realised, and an air of ancient wisdom, and, assailed by thoughts she knew were not part of the make-up of a pure young girl, she was aware that he had become a hard soldier, used to grabbing what he wanted.
‘I was always in such an impatience for your letters,’ she said.
He didn’t answer and she gave him a soft dewy look. ‘You have such a descriptive turn of phrase, Colby. Most men’s letters are so dull and I’m such a silly with them myself. Yours make everything clear.’
His thoughts busy, he didn’t answer. What he had taken in the past for unrequited love, he decided, was really nothing but honest-to-God lust, because she appeared to have the brains of a newt and when they’d ridden together he’d noticed disgustedly that she was frightened of her mount and flopped about in the saddle as if she were boneless. Into the bargain, until his return, she’d been carrying on a heavy flirtation with Claude Cosgro, and any girl who could feel affection for a Cosgro, he felt, must surely have a fatal flaw in her somewhere.
‘What a wonderful thing it was you did,’ she was saying. ‘Mr Tennyson’s poem made us all realise.’
‘Nothing much,’ he said offhandedly. ‘Just first over the line in the mile-and-a-half at the Balaclava meeting. Known now as Cardigan’s Bloodhounds. Every man in the regiment, whether he was there or not, thinks himself better for it.’
She drew a deep breath. ‘You looked so strong and soldierly when you came home, Colby.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘I was rotten with malaria.’
‘When must you return to the regiment?’
Colby grinned. ‘If I have my way,’ he said, ‘not for a long time. That ass, Cosgro, takes six months off regularly.’
Her lips tightened because she suspected he was taking a dig at her, but she pressed on. ‘Your medals look so splendid. Especially the one they gave you for Balaclava. It was terribly brave of you to save that man’s life.’
‘“That man,”’ Colby said coldly, ‘was Tyas Ackroyd from Braxby and having Russians shooting at me wasn’t half so frightening as the thought of what my father would have said if I’d let him be killed.’
‘But you put your own safety at risk by giving up your horse.’
Colby grunted. ‘Didn’t make much damn difference,’ he said. ‘The Commissariat, the Russian winter and that fool, Raglan, and his staff killed her off in the end.’
‘I’m sure they did their best.’
Colby sniffed. Criticising the staff always seemed to be regarded as something lacking in good taste if not even bordering on the sacreligious. ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘it was about as good as a snot-nosed drummer boy could produce without trying. Raglan’s tendency to avoid giving orders made him about as effective on a battlefield as a regimental mascot, and eighteen thousand casualties, of which less than two thousand died in battle and most of the rest of neglect, seem to indicate he was also a bit bonehead.’
She noticed he grew more brusque and forceful on the subject of the army, and brought the conversation back to where she could cope with it.
‘They say you got your medal from the Queen herself.’
‘That’s right. Special parade. Hyde Park.’
He had stood rigid in the sunshine as the small plump figure had walked between the lines and, as he had looked down on the homely shape of his monarch, the thought that had been in his mind, he remembered, had not been one of pride or awe, but simply that she’d have made a damn good Goff.
Georgina’s eyes were on him again. He had changed a lot in the years he had been away, broader across the shoulders and leaner in the body with the puppy fat gone. He was not tall but he was slim-hipped, fierce-eyed in a dark Spanish way, and strong-faced with an assured manner that made her suddenly doubt her ability to handle him.
‘The malaria,’ she said, ‘has left you thin.’
‘And yellow as a bloody Chinee!’
His replies, devoid of the flattery she was used to, left her at a loss. She wracked her brains and, for something to say, tried to remember what she’d read in
The Times
that morning. ‘This war that has started in America,’ she came out with. ‘It’s a terrible thing, don’t you think? Men are always wanting to fight.’
‘You could hardly expect ’em to behave like middle-aged spinsters.’
‘But
civil
war! Like fighting your own brother! Like Cain killing Abel!’
Still chattering, she led him between the trees. The weather had gone mad and the day was a scorcher, full of the sound of bees. Finding a stream and a grassy bank covered with poppies, celandines and daisies, she sat demurely alongside him, spreading her skirt and taking off her shawl.
‘It’s so hot,’ she explained. ‘You won’t think I’m fast if I unbutton my dress a little at the throat, will you?’
Colby was all for unbuttoning the neck of her dress if it gave him a glimpse of that glorious bosom of hers. She was lying back in the grass now, smiling up at him. Her hair had come loose and lay in a blond cloud about her face. By God, he thought, startled, she wants me to kiss her!
He tried it, gently, warily, and to his surprise, after a preliminary flutter, her arms came up and swept round his neck. He’d been right, he decided, it wasn’t love he felt, just plain ordinary lust, and he could feel his loins stirring. He touched her breast and was surprised again when one of the dozens of hands she’d always seemed to sprout on previous occasions didn’t come up and push it firmly away.
Hello, he thought, what’s this? She wants to indulge in a little fun and games, by God! After the constant parading of her virtue, it was a new idea that required some taking in, but her mouth was moving under his, her lips parted with passion.
‘Colby,’ she breathed. ‘Do you love me?’
Encouraged by the fact that she hadn’t stopped him unfastening the last one, he was busy unfastening another button, and he left the question unanswered.
‘You are so naughty to do that,’ she whispered. ‘And I expect you think I’m terrible to permit it.’
He was about to protest that if she persisted in lying about in this tantalising fashion, she had to expect a certain amount of sauce, when she sighed. ‘Why must men spoil everything with passion?’
That magnificent bosom of hers was rising and failing swiftly now and he was kissing the hollow between her breasts. Her hand was on his, not restraining but with convulsively clutching fingers, and he could feel her swift breathing on his cheek.
‘Oh, Colby,’ she murmured. ‘We are so wicked. May God forgive us for what we are about to do.’
He lifted his head, startled. He’d just been enjoying a roll in the grass, like any other hot-blooded young man, and he’d imagined she’d been enjoying it, too, like any other hot-blooded young woman. But she seemed to be expecting more!
‘Tell me what I must do,’ she breathed. ‘I know so little about these things.’