Band of Angel (48 page)

He was half mad, she saw it clearly now. The question was how to deal with him. She closed her eyes to give herself time.

“I do feel weak and confused,” she said at last. Her lips were stiff
with the effort of not shrieking, “What I think I most need is some time to get better.”

“Of course, of course”—he leaned forward with a creaking of the chair—“you’ve been ill and delirious and your mind is bound to play tricks on you.” His hands came down again on her forehead. “I’m glad you’re seeing it more sensibly now,” he said, “and don’t forget to eat your junket dear, you’re going to need all your strength.” The chummy little smile he gave her made her writhe with shame and loathing. She closed her eyes to cut him off.

It took Deio ten tedious days to build his horse shelter. While he worked, the wind from the plains cut like steel and there were constant snowstorms; every day his horses seemed to lose a little more weight and he saw how quickly his livelihood could slip away. He got some poles from a burned-down barn near Tchorgoun, a door from an abandoned village school, and when he found he lacked a strut for his last piece of canvas, Arkwright offered him two stripped skeletons. “Excuse me, dear, may I have this dance?” Chalk had joked as they hauled one to its feet. Its face wore a look of sneering surprise; there were scraps of flesh still clinging to its bones, too deep for the vultures to have picked at.

He worked with Chalk and Arkwright like a man possessed. He longed to get his horses dry again, to brush them and air the sodden rugs they stood in, to help them forget the horrors of the voyage and the hard and violent life that would soon be theirs.

They knew. He could tell by the way they watched him all day, their ears tensely pricked, as if he alone held the key to their existence. They knew their life was changing and would change again.

When the shelter was finished, its ingenious design and sturdy posts were much admired, as was his tent. His father, whose reverence for good equipment bordered on the fanatical, had bought it for him on his sixteenth birthday and driven him almost mad with impatience fussing about the stoutness of the guy ropes, the exact thickness of tarpaulin, the exact amount of wax he’d need for extra protection. Now he was humbly grateful for it and felt ashamed
when the soldiers eyed it so hungrily. Their army tents leaked like colanders; they went to bed wet, slept wet, woke wet.

So he was kept busy and the horses helped, but now that the field shelter was finished he found himself in a more or less permanent, though concealed, state of panic. He worried about Chalk and Arkwright, who seemed almost to hero-worship him and want him to be their leader at a time when he’d never felt less sure of anything. He worried about the weather and the abysmal food and the horses, in particular about Catherine’s horse, Cariad.

He’d known all along he should never have brought her—she was too young, too sensitive for war, and she played on his mind. He cringed to remember how he’d showed her off to the quartermaster at Smithfield’s. What a young prat he now seemed to himself at this distance, impatient with the two old men and their wars, disdaining a commission for himself. He’d jump at one now if it meant more food for the horses.

Nothing felt stable about his life or his character anymore, and then one day, in early November, the whole map of his world was redrawn.

It began when Captain Gosford, a handsome, competitive cavalry officer with the 13th Hussars, came down to see him, or rather to see Cariad again. He’d taken a shine to her. “Quite a nice little mare,” he’d said several times, running his hands over her bright chestnut neck and legs. “I could manage thirty pounds for her,” he said in an offhand way.

“No,” said Deio.

“All right, forty, but that’s damned exorbitant.”

“No.”

Deio had no words to explain why Cariad still felt sacred and why selling her would be the biggest test of all.

Gosford had stomped off, annoyed, but returned later that day offering to take Deio to a camp, about seven miles away, where the French horsemen, the Chasseurs D’Afrique, lived and trained.

“It’ll be a useful little recce for you Jones,” he said, “to find out how much horses are making over there.” He’d told Deio some girls
as well as horses had landed in the Kamiesch, which was near the French camp. If they made good time, they could meet them in the tavern on the way home.

Gosford couldn’t possibly know that even the possibility of lying with another woman made him feel light-headed with sorrow and confusion.

Later, he tried to wrestle with the problem: How in God’s name was he supposed to think about her now and what did she expect of him? Part of him had never felt as sure about anything as he did about his love for her, and then, at other times, he felt he was totally deluded. If she loved him how could she have left like that? Even worse, left and made herself not quite a woman by becoming part of this horrible war.

Gosford had added a postscript, a kind of a bribe. “I’ve got a good idea,” he said. “You and I could put on a bit of a display with the horses while we’re there, a bit of jumping, a charge, show the Frenchies a thing or two. You’re practically one of us now.”

Deio’s mind had leaped ahead at this.
You’re practically one of us now
meant Gosford might help him ride in a real assault with the cavalry and do something magnificent and noteworthy. He saw himself flat out on Moonshine, sword in hand, blood high, all his training, all his courage put to the test. He saw Catherine’s face lit up with pride. And then his own face crumpled into a kind of self-disgust; he was still daydreaming like a boy.

He’d agreed to go, but early in the morning on the day they were to leave, he was anxious again. The rain was pattering quite firmly now on the canvas of his tent, and walking the several yards of sucking mud that separated his tent from the field, it bothered him that his best and stoutest pair of leather boots were now so caked with mud that they looked like muddy boulders, and that there was never enough spare water or heat to clean them and oil them and dry them correctly. Details like this made him increasingly jumpy.

The horses pricked their ears when he saw them. Cariad, quick and jealous as always, stretched out her neck over the railings and watched him pour the chaff and barley into eight nosebags. He
played with her ears, told her to move her great big bum and let her nip him. While the horses ate, he felt their ribs and squeezed their necks, and did complicated sums in his head. Cariad, like the rest of them, still looked well: her eyes shone, she had food in her belly, but it wasn’t enough and it wouldn’t last and the food could get stolen. He must sell soon.

Now the rain was coming down harder than before. The tarpaulin flapped with a muscular sound like a ship’s sail.

“Want a hand?” Arkwright was sloshing through the mud toward him in his miserable boots. “This lot looks set in for the day.”

Deio cursed. He hated to leave the horses in damp rugs and wanted a clear day to get them off. It still wasn’t too late to cry off.

“I’ll fill the hay nets,” he yelled back. A surge of wind took his hat off and it was gone, with a sound like fire sucked up a chimney, over a puddle and into a ditch. Clambering over the straw to retrieve it, he felt for a moment a ridiculous figure. He was sick of the mud and the cold. He pictured the tavern the captain had described, saw it rosily lit with a big fire, and a bowl of soup served by a girl.

“Any chance you could keep an eye on the horses this morning for an hour or so?” he asked Arkwright. “I’m going to the French camp with Gosford. I’ll bring back some meat and some eggs and some grain, if I can find it.”

It took a lot to thrill Arkwright, but now his gray lips were twisted into almost a smile.

“I’m detailed for tomorrow night,” he said. “Can you get back before then?”

“Oh God man,” Deio replied confidently, “I’ll be back before feed time. I don’t like to leave them long.”

Arkwright said it was a wise move to get more food before theirs ran out, but in the end he went because he wanted to.

Gosford was a tall young man, well-muscled and with a pouty, aggrieved-looking mouth. He had dressed himself in full military uniform for this expedition, but the cherry coat was already
sodden and a large wet curl was plastered to his forehead below his hat.

“I shan’t be able to stay out long,” Deio warned Gosford as soon as he saw him. The thrumming wind, the condition of Gosford’s horse, was making him nervous. “I want to be back by four or five to feed my horses.”

“So, let’s get mobile.” Captain Gosford leaned down from his horse. “It’s a fair hack over there.”

Much to Gosford’s amusement, before they left camp, Deio spread squares of padded tarpaulin under Moonshine and Troy’s saddles to protect their backs and packed nosebags and towels to dry them off. Gosford asked if he had packed them a clean handkerchief and some sweeties, too. Deio was tempted to ask what his secret of success with horses was, but that would have been too cruel—his poor beast was standing wretchedly outside the compound, almost too tired to eat the hay he’d given it. In the end, he’d lent him Troy to ride, and the horse was dancing on the spot even before they left the camp. Gosford was thrilled by him. He bounded up the track out of the camp, up a high stony hill down from which water gushed like a stream.

From the distance came the occasional crackle of gunfire, followed by a slow, deep thumping sound. Gosford took no notice of this at all and they were silent for an hour, which Deio liked. It felt so good to be riding out again, but then Gosford started to talk, without drawing breath, about the promotion system in the cavalry, which he said was rotten to the core.

“First-class men get overlooked all the time because they can’t afford to pay.”

“Is that the only way?” said Deio.

“Not the only way.” Gosford’s small, pouty mouth shuddered unpleasantly.

“You can meet a senior officer’s wife and give her a damn good you know whatting. I’m not joking.” Rain had plastered another of Gosford’s curls to his forehead. His pale eyes bulged.

“Well, well, well,’ said Deio.

“You have to learn to work the system otherwise all the spoils go to old and greedy men.”

“Ah.”

“And if you’ve got something to offer, something out of the ordinary, it’s a question of how you offer it best.”

And you’re palling up with me in the hopes of another kind of commission. The pieces of the puzzle slotted gently into place in Deio’s mind. Gosford wanted to act as his agent. He was not in the least surprised or offended. For this was the world as his own father saw it: every man for himself. Dog eat dog, and a bargain always to be struck.

After a few hours ride, they arrived at the stables of the Chasseurs D’Afrique, half a mile on the other side of Kamiesch, a pleasant harbor town with a main street running steeply down to the harbor.

Deio knew that the Chasseurs had a reputation for being among the finest horsemen in the world, and was immediately impressed by their setup. Their stables, freshly painted and sturdy, had been built to last, not flung up overnight. At their approach, two black boys in woolly hats stopped adding dung to an immaculate heap and came to hold their horses.

Their contact, Captain Joel Tournier, clicked his heels when he met them. An urbane man with a charming smile, he ushered them into the tack room and offered them a cup of coffee that, after the foul green coffee of the camp, tasted heavenly.

He took them on a tour of the stables and boasted discreetly about the system of care and exercise that he had implemented.

“On this side,” he said, “we put our fit horses that have been in the war but are happy to go again. This one, César, is very brave, pat him, he expects to be treated like a hero.” A Selle François, large and dignified with a deep scar on his neck, accepted their caresses then turned away.

“Here are the invalids. They get complete box rest and treatments for cannonball wounds, simple strains, and bayonet holes. Here is our coward—we call him White Feather.” He patted a dun gelding. “He went out twice and fainted with fear both times, now he is only used for the reconnaissance.”

In the last row of stables was a group of some twenty horses who, he told them, had arrived the week before from North Africa. Deio didn’t reckon much on them, thinking them weedy, Arab-looking types, but Tournier said they were tough. They were training them to charge.

After a while, Gosford’s look of polite delight in all this was beginning to slip a little. “Oh come off it, Tournier,” he said in the awkward, bluff manner that so offended some of the Frenchmen, “let’s put an end to all this hot air and see them in action. We’ve got some decent new horses ourselves you know.”

So the Frenchman told Deio he could choose any horse he wanted from the noninvalided group and Tournier would ride him. Deio chose a gray with clever-looking eyes that he guessed would be three-quarters Arab. When their horses were tacked up, they went out to a large and partially waterlogged field behind the stables. In the middle of it were several stuffed sacks suspended from a hangman’s pole.