Band of Angel (20 page)

Normally a decisive man, what drove Deio mad was how his mind flipped back and forth like a weather vane depending on his mood and state of tiredness. With other women, when things went well they went well, and when they didn’t, wallop, finished. He didn’t have the patience or the time to patch things up; with her, nothing but confusion.

Once or twice he tried to think it through in the old, clear way. Reasons for loving her: many and various; reasons for being relieved she was gone: her recklessness, her desire to travel, lack of respect, and all the rest. Sometimes he felt indignant on behalf of her father. What kind of daughter would leave at a time like this? And then the look of her over the past few weeks: the hat, the breeches, the smudged face, had called up a feeling of horror in him, and then the list would get all tangled again in his mind, and he’d see her in the moonlight in that hotel, remember the softness of her lips, the heat of her body; or times on the mountain laughing and adorable; that incredible look of gaiety, under her billycock hat; and her dancing in rhythm with Cariad’s stride, looking every inch a drover’s wife.

On the twenty-fourth day of the drove, he stood on a hill near Barnet looking down across the fields toward the smokestacks and the sooty sprawl of London. He told himself that if he could see her just one more time and set his mind at rest, he could be shot of her—of the feeling that somehow she was his responsibility—and all would be well, even better than before, because he would have faced down indecision and acted like a man.

With this thought in his head, he fell asleep that night in The
Horse and Jockey at Barnet happier than he’d felt for days. After a great day at the fair, his book was full. All that was left now was the last and trickiest bit through London and down to Smithfields.

The route planned was through Highgate to Holloway Road, then Upper Islington, Aldersgate Street, St. John’s Street, and Clerkenwell. Other cattle would be coming down Oxford Street and the western part of the city. He woke at three-thirty next morning, dressed quickly, and then shaved by the light of a candle, just in case he saw her at the end of the day.

Four hours later, he and Rob and the two boys hired at Barnet collected the penned cattle and sleepy horses and started the tricky business of persuading them to walk through London. Lewis was in a foul mood, obsessively checking and rechecking the markings of the animals until they got the beasts to trot purposefully—down narrow streets thick with pig swill, up alleyways crisscrossed with rows of grimy washing, and, at last, into elegant thoroughfares with handsome Regency houses on either side. Lewis, still nervy and mean, hit one of the cobs who was snorting at a gas lamp, and made it shy into the crowd.

“That’s good.” Deio was beside him on Cariad. “That’ll really settle him.”

“You can fuck off,” shouted Lewis. But they were doing well, until a carriage on John’s Street held them up for half an hour. Lewis cursed, and waved his cudgels and prods at a man who shouted soundlessly inside the carriage like a lunatic in a box, while the cattle milled around him, depositing dung on his fine wheels. At the next corner, a woman selling pegs stepped blindly into the herd and had to be plucked out again by Rob, who doffed his cap to her and rode on. By the time they got to Marylebone, it was past eight and rush hour and Lewis did his party trick, shouting and singing in Welsh at another man sitting obstinately in his carriage, refusing to let them pass.

And then everyone joined in, roaring and bellowing, and the cattle were about to bolt when, at the corner of Marylebone Road near a church, as his horse wheeled around, he could have sworn he’d seen her in the back of a smart carriage, leaning forward, the straight line of her nose under a black bonnet. It
was
her. No, it
couldn’t be. Now, for sure, he’d gone mad and was hallucinating. He turned again, but his horse plunged to the side of the street. The carriage moved on, swallowed in a frenzy of activity.

Then Smithfields: a stinking cavern of noise and barking dogs and bellowing beasts, and men with red faces in bloodstained clothes, yelling and screaming. For the first time in three days, Lewis smiled, as they donned their drover’s badges and penned and sorted cattle. He put his thumbs up. They’d made it in time for the butcher’s eleven o’clock inspection. Of course he’d never doubted them.

By the end of the morning, hoarse from shouting, exhausted, and nearly a hundred and fifty guineas richer, Deio was about to join Lewis and Rob for an ale when a slight man in a smart uniform, stepped from the crowd. He cupped his hands and shouted, “horses” in his face. They went out the back so they could hear themselves speak, to the pens where the ten cobs were bunched together, showing the whites of their eyes. The man, said his name was Sergeant Dixon and he was a quartermaster for the Royal Dragoons.

“We need remounts for the Crimea, urgently,” he said. “They have to be strong, uncomplicated, over fifteen point two, and preferably bay. I’ll take this lot off your hands if you like.”

“Nice of you to offer,” said Deio, “but they’ll sell themselves, they’re nice types, and they’re fit.”

“Hop on then and show me,” challenged the quartermaster.

As he slipped the bit between her lips Deio felt a niggle of excitement in the middle of him. He jumped on without stirrups, and swung her through a crowded alleyway toward a scruffy bit of open field out the back. He rode her quietly in small circles, taking his time, tuning her to him, making her block out the din, the fear, the smell, then he rode her full tilt toward a broken-down fence, stopping her dead three feet from it by rearranging the small of his back. To watch him, you’d think he’d done nothing.

“This war in the Crimea won’t be over in a trice,” the quartermaster told Lewis later, in The Bull over a jug of ale and a pork pie. “This is confidential but I know you’ve been a fighting man yourself and these things don’t need to be spelled out. The sky is pretty
much the limit at the moment, for good horses out there. I could get your son into a fine situation.”

Lewis’s face puckered with pride.

“He’s a damn good rider,” the soldier continued. “You simply would not believe half the autumn leaves we have to make horsemen of. We had the finest cavalry in the world, now they just chuck ’em on, give ’em a few lessons, then send ’em off to war, half of them shitting their breeches they’re so windy.”

“Same at Waterloo.” Lewis was glowing with happiness. “Same thing altogether. The officers had some lovely horses, the others! Job lot would not cover it. Horrible sights I seen.”

“He’s a fine-looking young man, too. Nice uniform, plumes, parades—I think he’d take to it like a duck to water, Mr. Jones.”

“Um.” Lewis was half drunk and in a mood for confidences with a fellow soldier. “Awkward bugger mind. Sometimes, I can’t tell him nothing.”

“War’s a fine academy for most young men,” said the quartermaster. “It makes them grow up.”

“What’s this?” Deio had joined them, cleaned up and handsome in his London clothes. He sat down with his back to the fire.

“I was saying I could get you into the cavalry, smart young man like you.”

“I don’t want it.” Deio lit a cheroot.

“Well . . . Oh hang about, let me get this young man’s pot filled up.”

“The question is”—had it been possible to whisper in such a noisy room, the quartermaster would have—“we
have
to get more horses out there one way or t’other. How long would it take you to find, say, twenty more like the ones you got, train ’em up, or bring them to the Barracks at Pimlico for us to sort out?”

“I’d sort them,” said Deio, “then I’d know they were done. Three months.”

“Fifteen pounds per horse guaranteed,” said the man. “Do it right and it’ll make your fortune. You could bring them yourself, or leave it to us, not everyone has a stomach for war.”

He gave Deio a challenging look, and so did Lewis, and he felt a surge of anger; old farts thought they were the kings of the world just because they’d done it and you hadn’t.

“I could go myself,” he said. Excitement had flared up deep inside him. He could. He knew by the rapid way his father drank, and by the tense look in his eyes, that he’d be all for it. They both knew droving would be a mug’s game once the train came through. He was already thinking of the horses he’d take, and decided to take Cariad. And now he felt a hunger to see Catherine again, to tell her, and see himself made new, not a whimpering boy pleading for a kiss, but a man going away to do a man’s job, perhaps forever.

When she saw the drove making its way down Marylebone, she closed her eyes tight and breathed so hard that a line of sweat dripped under her hat. She didn’t look up until the carriage had reached the Marylebone Road end of Harley Street, because if she did, it simply couldn’t be borne. She had to do this now. The cabdriver swore and cursed as if there wasn’t a lady in the back, and said that cows and carriages didn’t go together. He told her a rambling story about a fellow he knew who’d been gored walking down Oxford Street and how he’d taken revenge. She barely heard him.

Not telling him to turn back took all her strength. After a series of stops and starts while the animals passed, they arrived an hour late, outside an elegant town house with a brass door plaque: The Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances. She watched a flock of starlings take off into the blue skies, and a woman buy a bunch of violets from a street vendor, then she walked toward the solid oak door with her two suitcases in hand. She was so nervous she could hardly breathe.

A fat woman with a face like a cross red chicken opened the door.

“Yes?” she snapped.

“Good day to you, ma’am,” said Catherine, “I’ve come to be a nurse.”

The woman sighed. Her hands were flecked with flour.

“Round the back,” she said.

At the back door, a young girl who had a heavy cold said, “Cub in.” She took her through the kitchen where the stout woman was mashing potatoes in a cloud of steam.

“Cook’s gone,” whispered the girl to Catherine. “Mrs. Clark has to do everythid.”

“Stop gassing, Millie,” snapped Mrs. Clark, “take her up to her room and take the brush up with you. She’ll have to turn it out herself now, there’s another one coming at eleven-thirty.” They made their way up the shadowy corridor where mops and pails were arranged with military precision. On the wall above them was a row of bells, each one connected to a number.

“They’re new, them bells,” the maid informed her. “Miss Nightingale’s wineglass system. They went in last week.”

Catherine smiled politely, not understanding, and followed her up a flight of stairs to the first landing. Everything was so neat: the wood on the backstairs gleamed, the blue-and-white curtains on the landings were starched and tied back crisply. On each landing, between the curtains, was a jug of cornflowers and white phlox, carefully arranged.

On the second floor, a white-haired woman in a nightgown burst from a row of identical doors, gave a girlish shriek and shot back into her room again.

“She’s a silly old trout.” The maid glared at the closed door and made a rude gesture. Catherine looked away shocked.

They were puffed by the time they’d reached the third landing, where Millie, between gasps, told her that some of the women who came here were as good as gold, and some were a pain in the neck, “very demanding and treats you like dirt.”

“Why are most of them here?” asked Catherine.

“Tired,” said Millie shortly, “some have conditions, some are fizzy and hysterical, others are bronchial. We have cancers, feminine conditions, most is just clapped out. This is you.” She opened a scruffy door with her foot. “Make yourself at home.”

The wretched room she walked into was so tiny that if you stretched out your arms from side to side you could touch the walls. In the corner was an iron bed, and above it a slanting garretlike ceiling with a crack in it that showed the lathes of the roof and, through them, white light. Someone had left a dirty, gray camisole on the piece of string that ran from one side of the room.

“She was a dirty girl.” Millie’s voice had fallen to a confidential whisper. “She drank, and didn’t ever clean up after her. Mrs. Clark
hates that, so now you must clean and after that come downstairs. The second sitting for lunch is in one hour. Wait for your bell.”

When the door closed, Catherine took off her shoes and lay on the bed, trying not to mind that it was narrow and lumpy. It didn’t matter, she told herself, she had arrived: a new job and a new life and it was bound to feel strange at first. She got up, hung her two dresses on the string and put her books and hairbrush on the windowsill. Then she took Deio’s lapwing necklace out from her bodice and squeezed it till her knuckles went white. It was so annoying to miss him so much. Her mind was playing tricks with her. She unwrapped the watercolor Eleri had done of her mother and propped it on the washstand. Mother’s slanting, tawny eyes looked back at her with a kind of wistful amusement.

There was three-quarters of an hour before lunch and she didn’t know what to do, so she dozed until a broom banging against the wall woke her up. A voice was singing. She walked out into the dark corridor and knocked on the door.