Soldier of the Queen (2 page)

Brosy was squinting towards the ridge. ‘I saw Billy Russell, of
The Times
, up there when I went to report ourselves,’ he said. ‘Scribbling away for all he was worth. I expect he’s watching what’s going on.’ His plump placid face creased into a frown. ‘What does
he
know about military tactics?’ he went on in a bleat of indignation. ‘It needs a military man to write about war. Hear that next time that’s what the newspapers intend to do, in fact. My cousin owns part of the
Morning Advertiser
and he said they’d pay well.’ He paused, then went on again, chattering nervously because he was as worried as Colby. ‘That ass, Nolan, was there, too, preaching cavalry fire and slaughter. He’s been at it, they say, ever since we got here.’ He stared petulantly towards the ridge again. ‘Wish the infantry would arrive. I’d hate to go into action without ’em. Why don’t someone send a message?’

Colby shifted uneasily. At eighteen he felt devoid of experience, brains, even common sense. Every single man sitting his horse behind him knew more about soldiering than he did. Some had served for seven, twelve or even more years, and some, coming home from India on the outbreak of war, had transferred to the 19th from the 3rd Light Dragoons in case they missed it. One of them, Trooper Vaughan, who had been acting as regimental butcher down by the harbour, galloped up, grinning. He was wearing a white smock streaked with the blood of the cattle he’d been killing and carried nothing but a sabre.

‘It coom from t’enemy,’ he announced cheerfully, gesturing behind him. ‘I picked ’un up down there. Didn’t want to miss t’fun.’

Without bothering to salute, he cantered away to find his friends and Colby turned and glanced nervously at his men once more. Their reception in the Light Brigade camp the previous evening could hardly have been called warm and they had not been there an hour before they had been ordered peremptorily down to Balaclava as escort to Sir Colin Campbell, who was commanding the Highlanders guarding the port.

When the first reports of advancing Russians had arrived that morning, however, Colby had announced that, whatever ideas Campbell might have,
he
was determined to fight the coming battle in the ranks of the cavalry, and the grizzled old Scot, probably more experienced in war than any other man in Russia, had given him a grim smile.

‘This y’r firrst time in action, boy?’ he had asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then make sure you use y’r handkerchief to bind y’r sword to y’r hand. Otherwise ye’ll lose it. Do ye no’ feel the sweat on the palm already?’

His fingers moist on the reins of his horse, Colby shivered violently, aware that for the first time in his life he was about to face someone who was going to try to kill him. Another shiver ran through him. Despite the sun, the morning was chilly and he decided it was going to be a damned uncomfortable winter here on the Russian uplands. It would be a damned sight warmer by far, he thought, at the Markhams’ house at Braxby back in Yorkshire, holding Georgina Markham’s hand.

The nostalgic thought warmed him. Georgina Markham, the younger of Colonel Markham’s two daughters, lived only a few miles from his own home, was pink and white with pale yellow ringlets, and wore blue dresses to set off her charms. He had adored her since he had returned home from school at seventeen and found that the leggy creature who had lived next door and pulled his hair and hit him over the head with her dolls had suddenly developed curves and a luscious bosom that drew his eyes like a magnet whenever she appeared. He’d followed her around like a dog with the desperation of unrequited love, and in his sabretache at that moment, alongside his prayer book and his mother’s picture, there was a water colour of her, indifferently executed by her older sister, Florentia, which she’d given him offhandedly when he’d announced he was leaving for the East.

Thinking about her now, all he could see in his mind’s eye were two white arms, a soft, moist mouth like a ripe cherry and the curve of her breast. A sigh that was more like a shudder ran through his body. Christ, he thought suddenly, I wonder what she looks like with her clothes off!

The thought shook him.

He cleared his throat, embarrassed by his own imagination, and jerked himself back to the present.

Fine time to be thinking of Georgina Markham without clothes, he decided, when any minute he might be lying dead, chopped up by the enemy like a side of raw beef. Decent men didn’t think of girls in bed, anyway. Perhaps, however, he wasn’t all that decent, because when he’d returned from school, raw-boned enough to have been expelled for tossing a bullying master into the river, there’d been more than one hurried scuffle in the barn with the daughter of a local farmer before he’d set eyes on Georgy Markham’s slender whiteness.

He wrenched his thoughts back yet again with a conscious effort. I wish they’d get started, he thought. I wish it were over. I wish the whole bloody war was over so I could go back home, and prance around in front of Georgy, a rough, horse-smelly cavalryman hot from action.

‘Hello!’ Brosy la Dell was staring towards the ridge again as a galloper hurtled down the last slopes from the Ridge and drew rein alongside the divisional commander. ‘Here comes the message from the high altar. That means something will happen. Thank God the Heavy Brigade won’t have the day to themselves.’

He glanced behind him. The Heavy Brigade, drawn up like the Light Brigade, waiting for orders, had already crashed into action once that morning in an entirely successful affair which had come off more than anything because of the Russian cavalry’s hesitancy.

‘It’s Nolan,’ Colby said. ‘I expect that means he’ll try to run the affair. He’s been telling everybody he knows more about it than the general ever since he came out here.’

Brosy grinned. ‘And here comes the infantry at last,’ he said. ‘It looks as though we’ll get moving now.’

He gestured at a column of red-coated men winding down the slopes, the sun glinting on their white belts and accoutrements and catching the tips of their bayonets. Colby wasn’t listening. He was watching the group of staff officers, with their plumes and bicorne hats, clustered round Nolan, who was pointing angrily down the slope in front of them.

‘The fathead’s pointing down the valley,’ he said, startled. ‘We can’t be going that way, surely! There’s nothing for us down there!’

But Nolan was still gesturing furiously. At the bottom of the valley a battery of Russian guns was drawn up facing them, backed by a mass of horsemen. On their left on the heights were more troops and guns and, though they couldn’t see them, they knew full well there were more on the Causeway.

‘It’s more than a mile, too!’ Brosy’s voice became almost falsetto with alarm. ‘The man’s off his chump!’

There was a stir among the staff officers then Colby heard the colonel of the 8th Hussars, who had just appeared, reprimanding his men for smoking in the presence of the enemy. He glanced round uncertainly. Several men in the little knot of the 19th had clay pipes in their mouths.

‘Better get those pipes out,’ Brosy said, heaving at his reins. ‘Sergeant-Major Holstead!’

‘Leave ’em, leave ’em,’ Colby snapped. ‘They might be dead soon. If it makes dying easier, then for God’s sake let ’em smoke.’

‘Won’t someone complain?’

‘I’m in command here!’ Colby spoke sharply, suddenly sure of himself. His father had always taught him that the man who ran the circus held the whip.

Brosy stared at him, but he didn’t argue and waved Sergeant-Major Holstead away as he cantered up and began to do elaborate things with his sabre in salute.

The staff-officers seemed to be arguing even more furiously now. The divisional commander was looking bewildered and Colby saw Nolan point down the valley again.

‘He’s got it wrong, surely to God,’ Brosy said.

Colby didn’t answer. His mouth was as dry as if it were filled with ashes and he tried to imagine what it would be like to be dead. Heaven, he thought, with all those angels floating about singing with upraised eyes! It seemed a boring prospect, but the idea of darkness, which was the only alternative, seemed even worse.

Perhaps it would be Brosy who would be killed, he thought, feeling better. Then even that thought troubled him. Brosy and he had been at school together, smoking, drinking, swearing and avoiding work whenever possible. They had spent holidays together, fished together, even joined the regiment together, and, in one of the mad moments of peacetime when Colonel Markham had felt his men needed some knowledge of war, had practiced the rescue of wounded together, so that it had been Brosy Colby placed ‘unconscious’ across the saddle of a led horse and allowed to slide off on to his head so that he ended up with a week in bed with concussion.

In his bewilderment and trepidation, his dislike for his missing superior officer increased rapidly. The responsibility he’d been handed was just too much for someone of his age and experience. But Claude Cosgro had never been known as a man of much sensitivity or even sense, any more than his father, while his younger brother, Aubrey, was said to be even worse. The Cosgros seemed to come in bunches of a dozen, with nothing to choose between them.

The low murmur of voices behind him told him that his men were well aware of what lay ahead. Nolan, obviously not intending to miss anything, had taken up a position now in front of the left squadron of the 17th Lancers and the brigadier-general was cantering his horse across the front of his brigade. He looked flushed and excited and, as he passed, Colby lifted his sword in salute.

‘My lord,’ he said. ‘There are only a few of us but I imagine you’ll be able to use us.’

Lord Cardigan stared at him with his blue pop eyes: he had a reputation as a womaniser, but his whiskers, Colby noted, were beginning to show grey and he looked old and ill.

‘Place yourselves in the middle of the first line,’ he said. ‘On the right of the 17th and the left of the 13th. Might as well have all the lancers together.’

As he rode off, upright and stiff, more men, seeing action impending, galloped up from their different duties about the field and down at the port. The 19th drew rein alongside the sombre block of the 17th – the Death or Glory boys, they called themselves; the Dogs’ Dinners they were known to everybody else from the skull and crossbones on their lance caps. Morris, the officer in command, was still wearing the frock coat of a staff officer, because he had taken over only the night before when the senior officer of the regiment had gone down with cholera.

‘With your permission, sir,’ Colby said, ‘we’ll join you.’

Morris turned, frowning. ‘We’ll be glad of you,’ he growled. ‘See you keep your line.’

Cardigan had moved forward now to a point two horses’ lengths in front of his staff and five lengths in front of the right squadron of the 17th, almost in front of Colby. He looked calmer now than he ever normally looked on parade, stern, soldierly, and upright as a steeple, his long military seat perfect. He wore the full uniform of the 11th Hussars, his old regiment, but his pelisse was not slung like everybody else’s – it was worn like a patrol jacket, its front a blaze of gold, that accentuated his slim waist.

As the last shouts of the troop officers died away, a strange hush fell over the field. Neither gun nor musket spoke on either side as they settled themselves in their saddles and fidgeted nervously with their equipment, two long lines of horsemen, first the 13th Light Dragoons, then the 17th Lancers with the small knot of the 19th between them, and finally Cardigan’s own regiment, the 11th Hussars, known as the Cherrybums from their red trousers. Behind them were the 4th Light Dragoons and the 8th Hussars, and behind them still, the Heavy Brigade, in three lines, with the divisional commander well in front where he could maintain control of both his brigades.

Fishing out his watch, Colby glanced at it. It was eleven-twenty. It seemed a particularly ominous time.

Cardigan’s hoarse strong voice came over the shuffle and snort of horses and the clink of bits. ‘The brigade will advance! First squadron of the 17th Lancers direct.’ He turned his head towards his trumpet-major who jerked at his instrument with an arm decorated with four upside-down stripes under crossed trumpets. Trumpeter Sparks behind Colby began to lick and lap his lips in anticipation.

‘Sound the Advance!’

The trumpet’s notes shrilled sweetly, to be taken up by the squadrons behind. Orders were called, harsh in a curious silence that managed to exist beyond the jingle of equipment, as if everybody was holding his breath. Over it Colby could hear Holstead’s rasping voice.

‘Git yerself in line, do!’ he was snarling at some nervous trooper. ‘And sit yer mount proper. I could read the bleeding
Times
between yer legs.’

Colby caught Ackroyd’s eye and Ackroyd gave him a reassuring grin, as his grandfather must have given Colby’s father on that muddy June day nearly forty years before in Belgium.

‘19th Lancers–!’

Colby’s voice seemed to have dried up and, as his command came out as a croak, Cardigan’s head jerked round.

‘Not yet, damn you!’ he snarled. ‘Wait for the order!’

Humiliated enough for his fear momentarily to disperse, Colby looked from the corner of his eye at his men. Knowing more about it than he did, they had been slow to respond, and not one lance butt had been jerked from its bucket by the right stirrup. Blushing, facing front again, he saw that Cardigan had wheeled his horse to face the dark mass at the end of the valley. Colby swallowed. He had a stone in his throat and a vacuum in his stomach. He glanced across at Brosy and it was obvious in the quick nervous smile he received that the same thoughts had occurred to Brosy, too.

Feeling he wasn’t very far from meeting his Maker, he tried to think noble thoughts. What things, his frantic mind asked, have I left undone that I ought to have done? What have I done, apart from thinking of Georgina Markham, that I ought not to have done? Let me come out of this one alive, he prayed. He had never had a woman and he desperately wanted to live to go home and claim Georgy Markham as his prize.