Soldier of the Queen (30 page)

Mrs Dabney was in no state to be moved so he made his way cautiously across the city to the American Legation, where Washburne informed him that the Archbishop and other hostages had been shot. ‘I think it was as well the Dabneys weren’t left where they were,’ he said. ‘I’ll see that a carriage’s sent round for them.’

Returning to the apartment, he found Ackroyd, with an apron round his waist, polishing the glasses, and Augusta over the stove in the kitchen preparing soup.

‘It’s mostly vegetables,’ she admitted.

It was curiously reassuring to see her busy. She seemed quite unperturbed and the place had a cleaner look about it that indicated she hadn’t wasted her time.

‘It’s not even our apartment,’ Colby pointed out.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘If anyone calls, it’s right that you should appear to be properly looked after.’

There was a strange possessiveness about her and at the same time a comfortable feeling that she belonged there. They were polite to each other, greeting each other like old friends as she emerged from where her mother lay in what had been Ackroyd’s bed, and Colby began to find he was even enjoying it.

Gradually the noise outside died down and, as Washburne’s carriage arrived, Augusta collected her belongings together. As Ackroyd helped her mother down the stairs and tucked her in with a rug, Augusta studied Colby.

‘I guess it’s a good job Ma was here with me,’ she said nervously. ‘I have a reputation for wildness and Pa would have been highly suspicious.’

Suddenly he didn’t wish her to leave. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘We have friends in Versailles.’ She paused as if she were waiting for him to protest. ‘Then home, I suppose.’

She looked small and forlorn and was clearly hoping he would ask to see her again.

‘I still have the locket you gave me at the Burtle House,’ he blurted out.

The forlorn look vanished and her eyes shone. ‘Why did you keep it?’

‘Thought it might come in useful. I also have the turkey feather and the sash. They didn’t protect me much. I was wearing ’em all when I stopped a piece of shell at Yellow Tavern.’

She said nothing and he went on. ‘I also have the words you spoke when I left. I’ve never forgotten ’em.’

As her eyes widened and her cheeks reddened, he swallowed, feeling remarkably nervous and unsure of himself. She was only twenty two and thirteen years’ difference could prove too much. Yet life was empty and he could see it stretching far away into old age, until he grew crusty and fat like George Laughton. He felt she could fill the emptiness and knew suddenly that more than anything else in the world he wanted her to.

‘Since you always said you were going to marry me,’ he managed, ‘why not let’s get on with it?’

She stared at him. For a long time neither of them spoke and he thought he’d done it wrong.

‘Is that a proposal, Mr Goff?’ she asked quietly.

‘Yes, dammit! I have to hurry because you move around like a streak of lightning and if I don’t act now you’ll probably disappear back to the States.’

She seemed to hesitate. ‘We’ve not known each other long, Mr Goff.’

‘We’ve known each other years! I doubt if we’ve ever been apart.’ Her eyes shone, and he went on hurriedly, feeling suddenly desperate. ‘Marry me. I’m just a horse-smelly cavalry type and I’m not wealthy. But I’m not too much in debt. Just to my tailor and bootmaker and the saddler. You’d have to live in a garrison town, which consists of mothers and their daughters and then the army, but you’ll get to know countries you’d never heard of. I want you for my wife. I want you to say you will be.’

Her eyes were like stars and made his head swim a little. For a second longer she stared at him as if she couldn’t believe her ears, then she flung herself into his arms.

‘Oh, yes, Mr Goff,’ she said. ‘Please! It’s something I always dreamed of.’

Braxby was very different from Virginia. Instead of towering tulip trees and wooded rolling slopes, there were dry-stone walls and grey houses hugging the shelter of the valleys in twisting curves. Instead of bluejays and blood-red cardinal birds there were rooks, harsh tongued in the oaks that formed a wind-break for Braxby Manor. The days were darker, too, and the riding was harder, and they hunted over stone walls and banks, nine feet of which you descended before falling the rest, but there was beauty too, she discovered, and a grim sort of charm about the empty uplands that were devoid of everything except low, wind-blasted heather.

‘There’ve been Goffs in Braxby since the Dark Ages,’ Colby explained. ‘One was a judge. Another was beheaded during the Wars of the Roses. Mostly they’ve been a mixture of farmers and soldiers, and men from Braxby have been joining the 19th for a long time. I love the place. For me soldiering’s just one sortie after another from here.’

There was not the slightest doubt that Augusta was welcome. The Ackroyd family – who seemed to fill a whole row of Home Farm Cottages – were all turned out on parade by Ackroyd to meet her, all the women sturdy country types, the men a mixture of straight-backed ex-soldiers and stoop-shouldered farmers who had followed the plough.

The big house had a neglected look, because there had been no one to look after it for so long, but in spite of fireplaces that created enough draught to draw a cat up the chimney, it had possibilities. Oh, it had such possibilities, she thought delightedly.

The fact that she could ride and understood animals got her off on the right foot straight away as they all trooped round the stables, accompanied inevitably by Ackroyd grooms and Ackroyd stable boys. It intrigued her to watch them all together, startled to realise that her husband-to-be had a supreme confidence in the correctness of his behaviour that came unquestioned from his background. He wasn’t acting a role and she realised that his family had behaved throughout all their history exactly as he was behaving now. He belonged to a privileged group and he paid for the privilege by accepting the responsibility for the people around him, treating them all with good humour and consideration, exactly the same with a dark-visaged horse dealer trying to sell him a horse and kicking its forelegs into a more becoming position as he was with the bishop, who was some relation and had agreed to marry them. It warmed her heart. The family – Colby, his sister, her husband – all seemed so unaffected by jealousy, envy, greed or anything else, they made her own entirely normal relations seem trivial by comparison.

Intrigued at having a foreigner in an area which had fought all its life to avoid having ‘foreigners’ – even from other parts of England the neighbours called in ones and twos to meet her. A plump, pale-faced woman with too-red lips who introduced herself as Georgina Cosgro claimed with a comfortable possessiveness that jolted her, to be one of Colby’s old flames. Brosy la Dell’s wife, Grace, as kindly, good-humoured and easy-going as Brosy, put her at case.

‘He had a crush on her as a boy,’ she said. ‘That’s all. Don’t worry about her. Concentrate on the regiment. It’ll be quite as much part of your life as Braxby. Perhaps even more. It’s something you have to get used to.’

It sounded terrifying, but Grace was reassuring. ‘It’s a restless life,’ she pointed out. ‘All ups and downs. But you develop a philosophical attitude to it. There’s one thing, though: You’ll never be without friends. You’ll be sad, happy, homesick, ill or well, but it’ll always be in the company of other army wives who understand. I grew up in the regiment and, though I sometimes hate it, I wouldn’t exchange it for anything.’

Quite obviously, Colby considered she should become involved in the mystique that was the regiment as soon as possible, and almost the first thing he did was take her to the regimental chapel at York Minister and let her stand for a while beneath the tattered banners that hung in the vaulting silence. They were dusty and torn and hung in nets to preserve them, and she found it hard to understand why they appeared to mean so much.

From York, he took her to Ripon, where Harriet lived, and from there to the regimental depot where he showed her the instrument with which Trumpeter Sparks had sounded the regiment into action at Balaclava. It was an ordinary-looking trumpet in a glass case, with a fading coloured cord, and it was dented and bent because Sparks’ horse had been shot and he had fallen on it. Though it seemed to be regarded with awe by everybody who stopped in front of it, she found it hard to see the reason for the reverence.

‘I shall never belong,’ she said. ‘It terrifies me. All the worship of those old flags–’

‘Colours,’ Colby corrected her stiffly.

‘Very well – colours. The way you put the names of your battles on them, remembering all the blood and all the misery.’ She gestured helplessly. ‘Why do you set so much store by it?’

He gestured. ‘A soldier can only be brought to the highest efficiency by making him believe he belongs to a regiment that’s superior to all others. That’s the army’s strength. They don’t fight for the Queen. They fight for the honour of their regiment.’ He smiled. ‘You’re lucky. You’re marrying into a good one. Not so good as to be snobbish, but good enough to be concerned with its people. In some regiments you have to be inspected, checked for breeding, and promise never to let the side down.’

‘Do you think I might?’

‘It’s sometimes hard to keep up,’ he admitted. ‘But army wives are a tough lot and they’ve had to endure capture, wounding, imprisonment, kidnapping, shipwreck and God knows what.’

She looked at him, alarmed, and the smile became a grin. ‘But,’ he added, ‘a surprising number of them have lived to tell the tale and bore their grandchildren with it.’

Since Augusta’s family were already in Europe, it seemed easier for them to stay there and the wedding was brought forward with a haste that set a few tongues wagging.

For a change, Yorkshire’s rugged soul relented, and the weather was not only fine but actually warm, though there were clouds building up over the Pennines and a strong wind sending shredded whisps across the Brack to change it from blue to a leaden purple as they covered the sun.

The detachment from the 19th arrived early, waiting outside the church in a splash of rifle green, red and gold among the dark suits of the men and the gay dresses of the women. Augusta appeared from the house that had been lent to her family for the wedding, riding with her father round the village green in a smart borrowed carriage, decorated with white ribbons and lace and driven by one of the Ackroyds in his best tweeds, with a bunch of white flowers in his cap and holding a whip decorated with a paper frill that looked as if it had come off a lamb chop.

The wedding dress had been made in a hurry and was a fraction too tight, so that she knew that all through the ceremony she would have to keep drawing deep breaths to survive. Her father was in a sombre mood and when she taxed him with it, he shrugged.

‘What can any father feel, Gussie,’ he said, ‘When he knows he’s going to leave his daughter in a foreign country.’

‘Colby’ll look after me, Pa.’

‘I hardly know him!’

‘I do. That’s enough.’

‘Augusta Dabney, I’m still worried.’

‘Pa, I’m not. I love Colby. I’ve loved him ever since the day I first saw him. I’m very proud that he’s seen fit to ask me to be his wife.’

‘He’s a soldier, Gussie.’

Augusta looked at him with a mixture of pity and anger. ‘Then, Pa,’ she said, ‘I’ll be a soldier’s wife.’

As they entered the church in an atmosphere of ancient stone and candle wax, the sight of so many uniforms startled her. The whole damn church seemed to be full of soldiers, she thought, all in green, red and gold, their plumed lance caps lined up together on a spare pew by the door like a lot of eggs on a table. When she saw Colby waiting alongside Brosy la Dell, she gasped. He had an ideal figure for a cavalryman, medium height, lithe and spare, with flat thighs and strong hands, and she had never seen him in uniform before, let alone in full dress. Taller in the tight-fitting jacket and narrow overalls with their double gold stripe, he seemed a blaze of colour and manliness. In his right hand he held a black lance cap ornamented with brass and surmounted by a square frame covered with cloth coloured to match the facings of his jacket.

Ackroyd had worked hard on him and the buttons, brass ware, gold cord and pipe clay shone. As he turned to look at her she felt her knees go weak. He didn’t smile, however, and she wondered wildly if he were as scared as she was.

There was an archway of swords as they left the church and a shower of rose petals and a fiddler to lead them across the green to the carriages. The guests all seemed to be either soldiers, local bigwigs, farmers or farm workers, their red Yorkshire faces shining with soap. Augusta’s mother wept on her shoulder, unable to decide whether to be proud or miserable, and as Harriet dragged her round, introducing her, she was aware of a few searching looks and a few embarrassed smiles as harsh Yorkshire accents clashed with soft Virginian. The storm which had been threatening all day arrived as they scrambled into the carriage that was to take them to the station. Because it was October, they had rented a house at Melton Mowbray to get in some hunting and they ate their evening meal together quietly, both of them a little nervous of their new estate. Dammit, Colby thought, I feel worse than I did when I joined the regiment, all thumbs and elbows. Opposite him, Augusta was eating quietly, her face pale in the candlelight, and he was surprised to see how confident she looked. When she said she felt tired and was going to bed, he stayed downstairs long enough to let her get organised. Women needed time to do their hair and titivate themselves, he knew.

He found it strange to think he was going to share his bed with a woman for the rest of his life. For a moment he toyed with the idea of having a drink but decided in the end not to bother, and tried instead to read the paper. Somehow none of it made sense. There was trouble on the Gold Coast, he saw, where tribal factions were quarrelling among themselves and the Europeans were yelling for somebody to come and stop them. It would be a nasty business, he decided. The Gold Coast was a sickly set of problems, he’d heard, and British control was limited to a few coastal strongholds, with a garrison that consisted mainly of coloured troops and a few unwanted naval vessels, while the Europeans spent most of their time recovering from one illness or another. He was on the point of lighting a cigar when he remembered that Augusta was still waiting, probably nervous over her initiation into the married state. He’d heard it said that some women didn’t even know what they were supposed to do and some men had to wait weeks before they finally managed to consummate the marriage. Good God, he thought, why didn’t mothers tell their daughters what it was all about?