Brothers in Arms (22 page)

The street ended abruptly, opening out into a huge square, hung with flaming torches and thronged with people.

Simpson turned to him. ‘Welcome to the Cours des Miracles.’

It seemed to Steel that every beggar he had ever seen outside every church in Europe must have issued forth from this place. Certainly it was from here, he had no doubt, that the same motley band went out every morning to their day’s work. But he saw through the apparent chaos. This was as well-organized an army, in regiments and companies, as ever there was. And among them, naturally, he saw the coats of the armies of France and her allies: Bavarians, Swiss and Irish. But here too were men dressed in the Allied uniforms: Danes, Prussians, Austrians and other smaller states. He wondered how many were worn for effect and how many genuine old soldiers had fallen into bad ways. In truth it was not far to drop from the rank and file to the gutter, just as it was the gutter that provided the raw material for all the armies of Europe. For the most part, though, the men and all the women here wore civilian dress, which though often of disarmingly fine cut and trim was nonetheless of another age, perhaps between ten and thirty years behind the fashion of the times. It reinforced the other-worldly aspect of the scene. For this was indeed a world within a world, the hidden, secret underbelly of Paris. The curious thing was that, quite contrary to his expectations, Steel felt safer here than he had anywhere all the time he had been in Paris.

Around the square, groups of friends huddled around open fires lit on the bare ground. Women shrieked, babies cried and dogs padded between their masters and others. The houses which framed the square were as run-down and ramshackle as their inhabitants – ancient dwellings dating, he thought, back as far as the Middle Ages. The smell of the place too was almost overpowering, the smoke from the wood fires mingling with all the sweat, ordure and aroma of cooking food in a heady
mélange
which, once trapped in the nostrils, was hard to dispel and lingered long after the original source was gone.

Simpson remarked, ‘Quite a place, isn’t it? The authorities cannot enter here. Whenever they do they just seem to disappear. But for you and me, dear Jack, spies that we are, it’s a natural second home.’

They advanced into the mêlée and pushed their way across the square. Steel could see Simpson’s objective. On the far side of the square, on the ground floor of one of the houses, was what looked like an inn of sorts. A dark, almost red light emanated from its windows, and the cracks and fissures in its fabric gave out a noise greater than the rest in the square. Above the door hung a sign depicting a butchered chicken and a pile of coins – French sous. Below it Steel read the slogan: ‘
Aux sonneurs pour les trepassés
.’

Simpson saw him staring at the words. ‘A play on words, dear boy.
Sonneurs,
you see –
sous neufs,
new coins, and
pour les
–
poulets,
chickens, which also amusingly means “night-watchmen”. Bribes for the night watch, the arch enemies of this place. Ah, here we are.’

They entered, and Steel was almost pushed back through the door by the stench. If the smell in the square had been stifling, then this was almost unbearable in its sheer intensity. The inn consisted of a huge circular room packed with tables, around each of which sat a number of men and women and on which tallow candles, along with the glow of a vast open fire, gave the room its flickering illumination. The patrons of this fine establishment were in various states of drunkenness. It seemed to Steel that all, well, certainly all the men, were armed with some sort of weapon, ranging from a musket to a billhook.

Seated in a prominent position at the main table was a man of immense proportions. His head was quite bald aside from the long moustaches which hung down at either side of his mouth. As Steel and Simpson walked into view he fixed them with the sort of curious yet predatory gaze that a fox might give a pair of inquisitive chickens who had blundered into his lair. He banged his hand three times on the table and the noise around him stopped, although the general hubbub of the inn continued.

‘Fresh blood. I smell it. I see it. Fresh blood in the kingdom of the truants.’ He squinted at them. ‘St Colombe, is that you? Who’s your friend? One of your boys? No need to bring him here, my friend. We’d have fixed him closer to your home.’ He laughed at his own wit and was instantly mimicked by his cronies.

Simpson replied, ‘My dear Kaiser. Witty as ever. But this is not one of my “boys”, as you so quaintly put it. This man is a fugitive, an outcast like yourselves. He needs help that only you can give.’

The Kaiser stopped laughing and stood up. Steel was struck by his height, which outstripped his own six foot by a good few inches. He was a giant of a man, and heavily muscled, although this was countered by the size of his belly, grown fat from too many rich suppers at his victims’ expense. He shook his head.

‘You amuse me, St Colombe. We have a deal. You put trade my way. I dispose of your troublesome evidence. That is our deal, and it works very well. But now you come here asking for favours. You are mistaken, my friend. This is not a monastery. Is it, friends?’ He turned to the assembled company, who guffawed at the thought. One man hooked his cloak up over his head like a cowl and, pressing his hands together in prayer, walked around the table singing an incantation. ‘What makes you think, St Colombe, that you might be in the position to ask favours?’

‘I did not say that I would not pay for such a favour. And pay well.’

Simpson brought out a bulging velvet purse from his waistcoat and dropped it onto the table. The Kaiser greedily picked it up.

‘That, my dear fellow, paints a very different picture.’

Simpson continued. ‘And I dare say that by the end of the month I shall have one or two young men ready to take a dip in the river. I also have a mind to put you in the way of a certain manservant of mine who has proven himself somewhat less than trustworthy. You’ll need your very best men for this one. I shall direct you to him, and then the matter will be in your hands. You may be sure that you will find good pickings on him. And in this case, for once, you may be as cruel with him as you wish. I have no love for the man. Give him a good long death.’

So, thought Steel, already he begins his revenge upon Malbec and his cronies. First he deals with Gabriel, using the thieves. Not for the first time Steel saw how Simpson used the system which he had created and in which he was now trapped, at least until he should be removed to London and his due reward.

The Kaiser had noticed Steel and looked at him with curiosity, his head on one side, as he chewed on a wad of tobacco.

‘This is the man?’

‘This is the man I told you of. You do not need to know his name. Merely know that he is a brave man and has suffered at the hands of the authorities. See how his hands and face have been cut and beaten. He shares your hatred of them. And now he needs to become one of you. A beggar. You have the gold. You will do what you can?’

The man nodded and leered at them. ‘For you, my friend. Only for you.’ He turned to Steel. ‘Show yourself, friend.’ Steel stepped into the light. His face still bore the marks of his beating and his shirt was stained dark red with blood. He had long lost his military coat, but retained the red waistcoat. This alone marked him out as a soldier. The Kaiser noticed it at once.

‘Ah. So you’re a deserter? Is that it? War got too much for you. You’ve taken a bit of a beating. We’ll get you cleaned up. I won’t ask why you’re here or where you’re going. This …’ He held up Simpson’s heavy purse. ‘… answers all the questions I have. But, one thing. For as long as you are with us you agree to become a member of our brotherhood. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘You swear allegiance to me and no other king?’

Steel steadied himself. ‘Yes.’

‘You agree to abide by the laws of the kingdom of argot? To become a true parasite, a liar, a thief, a mendicant? All these?’

‘I do. All these I swear.’

‘Then welcome, friend.’

He spat into the fire, making it hiss, and clapped his hands. Instantly, from behind him appeared two women of indeterminate age and with skin like leather and manes of matted hair, which hung down upon bare shoulders and low-slung dresses that barely concealed their sagging, over-used bosoms. The pair moved quickly towards Steel, laughing as they came. Instinctively he backed away, but they beckoned him to them.

The Kaiser laughed. ‘Do not be afraid, sir. They will not harm you. But they will make you someone you are not and someone you never thought you would be. When they have finished with you, you will be unrecognizable to your own mother. They are true artists. Put yourself in their hands and I swear you will make a safe passage out of Paris. Your friend has paid for it. You’re going home.’

Steel had watched the day break. Or, to put it better, he had seen the sun rise but, rather than shining it seemed to hang limp in the sky, an angry orange orb, obscured by mist. There was no joy in that grey dawn. Normally he would have expected to hear the chatter of songbirds in the trees, heralding the new day, but there were no birds in this place of death, just as there were no trees, only the pale orange sun and the empty muddy landscape stretching far into the horizon, the endless dull brown landscape with its unforgiving, all-consuming, every-orifice-invading mud. It seemed to Steel that the mud had sucked up the very freshness from the air and spewed it out in the inescapable fetid stench and constant noise. His head was filled with an interminable thrumming which entered the brain as readily as it did the soul. He knew exactly what that must be. It was the sound of the Allied siege guns taking up the daily rhythm of their unceasing bombardment of the city of Lille.

The army had been encamped here since the first week of September, although the first attacks had begun in August, and Steel had joined them two days ago, directly on his return from Paris. His journey through northern France had been thankfully swift – swift, that was, once Simpson and his associates had secured his safe passage from the city. They had hidden him for a week and a half in the stinking piss-pot of the Cour des Miracles, and then at the end of August he had made his escape from Paris. By that time the city had been in such a state of terror occasioned by the news of the siege of Lille that the wandering progress of a blind beggar through its easternmost streets and out through the porte de Belville was nothing remarkable. Most of the populace, thought Steel, seemed to have been huddled into the city’s churches praying for deliverance from the armies of the Allies, and the remnant of the city guard that had not been mobilized and sent to the front to stem the tide of Marlborough’s army were too busy reorganizing the defences of this defenceless, unwalled, unmanned capital to take any notice of Steel.

Of course his horse had long since vanished from the inn at which he had lodged her almost a month previously and would not be seen again. With the
grand peur
at the imminent arrival of
le bel anglais,
as he had discovered Parisians liked to call Marlborough, the inns were almost deserted and there had been no carriage ride home. But while some people fled the city, others profited, and he had been only too thankful to pay for a new mare, without asking where she had come from or to whom by rights she belonged. On the French side, he found everywhere on his return journey through this ravaged countryside, no questions were asked of the tall unshaven man in the red military waistcoat who paid in gold and went as quickly and inexplicably as he had appeared. For no sooner had he left the city than Steel divested himself of his disguise and adopted his usual air. For too long he had walked bent over, the way he had been schooled by the Kaiser’s whores.

He had begun his journey back to the lines in good spirits, but the horse, predictably, had quickly gone lame and Steel had endured a steady five-day slog on foot followed by a ride on a new horse that had taken him the best part of another week. Finally he had arrived at the Allied lines, although so vast was the undertaking of the siege that it had taken him another day and a half to regain his unit. That had been last night, and this morning’s dawn was made no more welcome by the hangover brought on by the four bottles of Rhenish wine that Captain Laurent, the commander of Number 2 company, had cracked open to celebrate Steel’s return to the fold – that and the not inconsiderable quantity of brandy sent down to him in the lines by the regimental mess.

Of Marlborough and Hawkins he had as yet heard nothing. It did not entirely surprise him, for, while Steel’s Grenadiers, along with the remainder of Farquharson’s Foot, were entrenched in the siege lines to the north of the city attached to the force of Prince Eugene, the Duke and his ‘family’ were encamped on the southern side with half of the army and only last week had been preparing to fight a pitched battle out in the open against Vendôme, at hideous odds. The Marshal, however, had decided not to risk all on such an engagement, and now Marlborough was back on the attack, seeking to pacify the city. Steel, frustrated, wondered whether he might not hear any news of their intrigue and the success or failure of his mission. Had Charpentier passed on the letter, as he had promised? What had been Louis’s reaction? Was peace a possibility? All these questions and more were constant thoughts. All that he asked was to be told.

That and of course to be spared this stinking trench. He wondered what now would be their move. His men, he knew, would be sure to be picked for the vanguard of any attack, as likely as not for the hopeless task of storming any breach that could be found in the walls, risking their lives for fame, glory and riches. To be honest, thought Steel, at this moment I don’t really care about glory and wealth. What I really want is to live and to be with Henrietta and to settle and enjoy a family. It was a disturbing thought for one whose adult life had been spent in constant danger on the battlefields of Europe, taking care of his men as one would one’s own children. He was part of a sacred brotherhood. No one ever had, could, or ever would call Jack Steel a coward, and he thought the worse of himself for even contemplating not going on to serve to the end with the Grenadiers. But there was something strangely appealing about the prospect of a life of peace for one who had always considered himself a man of war. Perhaps it was only a natural reaction to his current surroundings, a desperate need to see a vision of the future as something other than this hellhole of fetid mud and dead flesh.

He knew the men were pleased to have him back, and thankfully they had suffered relatively few casualties among the old hands and the officers. In fact to date Farquharson’s had fared rather better than many other regiments, although Steel knew too well how quickly that might change.

He pulled on the new boots he had bought in Paris and was fastening his waistcoat when there was a discreet cough at the door of the tented dugout that now served as home.

‘Company rounds, sir. Mister Hansam and Mister Williams are ready, sir.’

Slaughter was certainly pleased to have him back, and there was no need for him to say it. Steel knew that the Grenadiers were his men and always would be. He had made them into a fighting force, and they trusted him for it – those at least who knew him, for, despite their relatively light losses, they had still been party to a new intake of replacements. As much was set out in the mountain of paperwork that had greeted Steel on his return the previous evening and which he had been putting off handling. Well, he thought, at least the company rounds would delay that chore a while longer.

‘Very good, Jacob. I think we’ll make a start.’

His first task was to discover which of the Grenadiers remained alive after the previous night’s work, which if any had perished, and which were being treated for their wounds by the company apothecary, Matt Taylor. Please God, Steel thought, let there be none with the surgeon. That sawbones was nothing more than a butcher whose trade lay in hacking off shattered limbs in an attempt to let a man live. Names were missing from the roll, some familiar, some new to him. Some of them belonged, he knew, to men who lay out there before the city which lay before them, half a mile distant. Between the trench and Lille itself lay a vast plain of churned earth, gouged with cannon-fire and littered with the bodies of the thousands of attackers not fortunate enough to have survived the numerous ill-conceived attacks which Prince Eugene had launched to date. What, wondered Steel, could be the point in having good men climb out of the trenches and advance in close order towards a fortification whose defenders had only to hold their fire until at short range their devastating firepower mowed down the attackers like corn beneath the scythe. This was not the way to wage war, and Steel felt sure it would not be the future. In years to come men would discover some other way to fight. Trenches such as this vile pit would cease to be necessary, and men would no longer climb over a parapet to certain death and uncertain glory. He surveyed the empty plain, devoid of all vegetation now. Of course the first action of the besiegers had been to sweep the area clear of all crops and possible sources of forage. What the dragoons had begun the showers of cannon-fire had finished. And when this was over, he thought, when the crops once again came to be planted outside the walls of Lille, they would most certainly grow well, for the soil would be made all the richer by dead men’s blood and bones. That would be their sad legacy.

Steel looked down at his boots and wondered how long they would stand up to these conditions. Long, he hoped, for they were uncommonly comfortable and there was not much prospect of commissioning anther pair in the near future – unless, of course, they were to march into Paris in triumph after Louis’s surrender. He had no idea whether his mission, which had almost cost him his life, had been a success or a failure. He had sent a runner to the Duke on his return with the simple message that the mission – the delivery, at least – had been accomplished. Nothing more. As yet he had received no reply. He had not expected to. His role in the affair was over, he presumed. He waited for the next assignment and wondered what plan the Duke might now have up his sleeve. If only, he thought, the bloody Dutch had not put paid to his plan to take Paris. Steel knew it had been achievable, and better surely than this living hell. He stared at the bottom of the trench in which he was standing, ankle-deep in mud. The water table was high in this part of Flanders, and in some places the trench was no more than four feet deep. The difference between this and the height of a man was in general made up by placing gabions, wicker baskets filled with stones and earth, on top of the parapet to a height of three feet. For the most part this worked admirably, a firestep being all that was needed for the attackers to oppose any sally from the city. In the case of Steel and the Grenadiers, however, their height became for once a disadvantage, often making them very nearly level with the top of the gabions. With caution now, Steel mounted the firestep and, crouching, peered over the parapet. It was as well that he did. Directly to their front through the morning mist he saw a sudden bright orange flash, and then another and another. He knew the sight only too well. Knew what to expect.

Not waiting for any further prompting, Steel leapt from the firestep, ducked down into the trench and yelled, ‘Ware cannon. To you front.’

With a shriek the first cannonball flew high above his head and screamed away into the rear of the besieging army, followed by a second, a third and the others of the salvo as the French within the citadel sent over their first response of the new day to the Allied bombardment. Steel waited, counted to twenty, and then got up again and brushed off the mud which had clung to his breeches. He was aware that Sergeant Slaughter was watching him.

‘They seem to be getting closer, sir, don’t you think? Perhaps they’ve seen you.’

‘Don’t flatter me, Jacob. It doesn’t suit you. Besides, I hardly think the shot are too particular as to whom they land on.’

‘You’re right there, sir. One of them took away poor young Harrison last week. Silly bugger. Took his head clean off at the shoulders. Had to throw his coat away. New issue too. Shame. Not that any of the men would have wanted it anyways. He never was very particular about his personal matters.’

‘Stank to high hell, Jacob, is what you mean to say.’

‘More than the rest of them, sir. We used to say you could put him in a casemate and he’d clear it of rats quicker than any terrier. Poor bugger. Won’t miss the bloody smell, though. A walking sewer, ’e was.’

Steel and Hansam laughed. Williams managed a smile. It was the sort of graveyard humour that now permeated the company and all the men of the Allied army who had lived in these trenches for the last month. And it was not badly meant. Harrison was gone now, and nothing could save him or any of the others, and if a light-hearted joke at his expense could bring some relief to their condition, then what did it matter? And who would hear them? Certainly no kin of Harrison’s. Wherever they might be, thought Steel.

There was another whizzing sound in the air above them.

‘Heads down, lads. Here they come again.’

It had become a familiar routine. The Allies would start their barrage before dawn, the gunners stripped to the waist sweating in the night to send shots raining into the city, causing as much confusion and panic as possible. And then, when they paused, the enemy would reply. Generally, the French fired three bursts before settling down for the business of the day in which they would maintain a steady, if somewhat weak, fire for hours on end. Their timings were predictable, and it was quite possible for the Allied troops to avoid being hit if they only remembered when to expect them. What troubled Steel was how on earth the French might be finding the ammunition to keep up such a rate of fire. As far as he was aware the Allied army completely surrounded Lille. There was surely no way supplies could be got in. Either, he concluded, the French had a huge underground storehouse of ammunition, which given Marshal Vauban’s ingenuity in his siegeworks was not beyond possibility, or there was a breach in the attackers’ entrenchments.

Steel and his small party walked along the line of the trench looking at his men as they sat against the parapet. Most had removed their ornate mitre caps for fear they might be shot off or present too tempting a target for the French gunners, and instead they had adopted plain black or red skullcaps, often worn over a small inner cap of steel. Their scarlet coats, already faded to brick red, were now covered in dried mud which turned them a strange shade of brown, and to a man they looked more like a crowd of farm labourers than a company of grenadiers. But Steel knew that their fighting spirit had not dimmed. They were still his men, even if they would rather be anywhere else on earth than in this stinking ditch in Flanders.