Castle Orchard (34 page)

As he spoke they both heard the rapid step of Captain Allington – rapid, yet with that slight unevenness, as he approached via the stone-flagged passage that led from the offices.

‘How lame he is,’ Conway said, an edge of bitterness in his voice, mortified at the interruption.

‘Not very lame and an honourable wound,’ Mrs Arthur replied.

Allington could be heard crossing the hall and then he entered the drawing room. Mr Conway thought of the affront, that he had the right to enter any room at Castle Orchard without so much as a polite knock at a door.

Allington glanced at Mr Conway and gave a slight bow, saying as he did so, ‘You were thinking of escorting Mrs Arthur to the maypole, I dare say?’

‘Indeed not,’ Conway replied. ‘My brother doesn’t allow the boys to attend so I certainly can’t do so myself. The rector cannot be sure the festivities attached to the First of May are not too pagan in origin to be tolerated.’ He spoke gravely. Captain Allington should not fluster him.

‘But perhaps the festival is attached to the Virgin and therefore Catholic,’ Allington suggested. ‘Either way they could turn young heads from the straight path of moral rectitude.’

‘Quite so,’ Conway said stiffly.

‘You will not allow your little boys to go? However, that will not prevent them going if they wish it.’

Mr Conway, perfectly aware of the truth of this small jibe, stumbled for words, muttering something about Jacky and James doing as they were told.

Allington said, ‘Well, you will wish to be off. Your brother will need assistance in penning in his charges lest they escape and take up idolatrous habits.’ He turned to Mrs Arthur and said, ‘Where is your shawl? It will be cold later,’ and on seeing it lying on a chair, ‘there – I will take it for you.’

Mrs Arthur thought of him with his mother.
Where are your gloves? Where is your bonnet
?

Stewart Conway, unable to do anything else, made his bow and departed. Mrs Arthur looked at Allington, who immediately relaxed his expression. She said, by way of a comment on his absence, ‘You have been very busy.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And as for Mr Conway, you are so unkind to him.’

‘Wasn’t he causing you distress? What right has he to do that?’

Mrs Arthur wondered how much he understood of how distress was caused.

They left the drawing room together and went outdoors.

‘I know it’s not my business, but I’m always afraid you may marry him,’ Allington continued as they started to walk across the garden together.

‘And should I not? There are circumstances under which a woman must marry whether she wishes it or no, a woman with children. I have told you that before.’

‘Those circumstances will not be yours.’

‘Sometimes, I still fear the worst.’

‘No, no. You need not. I shall put all the documents out for you tomorrow. You will know exactly how things are.’ He spoke briskly, almost cheerfully, but she still thought there was something not right, unexplained, even should she have the jointure.

He asked her where were Phil and Emmy and she told him they always spent the evening with Annie, who took them away before too much ale had been consumed.

They started to walk towards the meadow and there they parted. Mrs Arthur watched him go, remaining by the gate, reluctant to step forward into the jolly little crowds that half-filled the meadow. What would he do? He would move swiftly through his tenants, stopping to speak to each one, never forgetting a name. He still had her shawl over his arm, but as yet she had no need of it. The inhabitants of Orchardleigh were already set to enjoy themselves. There was a pervading smell of roast pig. She was accustomed to the yearly ritual, but was it not time to say goodbye? She would certainly have the jointure. How many days would it take her to pack her few possessions, her clothes, hers and the children’s? She would go to Westcott Park, for there she could go immediately, but she need not stay. She could find a little house to rent, with a small garden and an orchard, where she could be alone with Annie and the children.

Now she stepped determinedly into the meadow. She would speak to the farmers’ wives as usual, the women from the cottages in Orchardleigh, and then she would seek out Annie. She found her and Phil watching the children wind their ribbons up and down the maypole to the squeak of the fiddle. The evening sun sent long shadows to dance on the meadow. Emmy was nowhere to be seen. She was chasing Jacky and James who were running through the crowds, hither and thither, like two plump little fishes slipping through water.

As dusk fell, Captain Allington rejoined her. She had been aware of him, never too far away, her shawl over his arm, as if he held her to ransom with it. He stopped to speak to the fiddler. The ribbons on the maypole hung limp; the children had gone, but the fiddler played on. Phil and Emmy had departed, Annie having an exact sense of when the evening was getting out of hand, losing its innocence.

Captain Allington had the same notion. He said, ‘Here is your shawl. Should you have had it earlier? I shall walk back with you. I assume the celebrations will become Bacchanalian from this moment hence.’

They went through the gate and entered the yew square where, at some moment, he had had a bench placed. He indicated, without speaking, they might sit for a moment but as he did so the fiddler in the meadow turned from playing jigs and struck up a waltz.

Mrs Arthur sat down. Abstracted, she was listening to the music, which had swept her back to another garden – her father’s – and to another time, another place . . . the lilacs in bud, the dusky shadows of an April evening and the sound of the pianoforte.

She turned to Allington and said, with conviction, ‘It was you, that April, 1815, long ago.’ She supposed, when he had stopped to speak to the fiddler, that he had requested that tune.

‘Yes,’ he replied starkly.

For a long moment she could say nothing.

Allington then said, ‘I didn’t tell you.’

‘Why not?’ She thought, why had he not told her?

‘You had forgotten. I hadn’t. Besides, you thought it didn’t abound to your credit. It certainly didn’t abound to mine. You were rather a wild little thing, though innocent. I took advantage of you, graceless scamp that I was.’

She thought, How could I have forgotten him, the sharp dark eye, the rib-hugging midnight blue of the jacket? She said, ‘Do you ever forget anything?’

‘Certainly not that.’

‘My Cousin Charles, those other young officers – did you know them all?’

‘No. I knew one of them. He knew your cousin. We had met by chance and decided on travelling together. I was on my way to Cornwall to say goodbye to my stepfather. As for forgetting things, the thing people really want to ask but in my case don’t usually have the temerity, is my experience of Waterloo. Of that, I remember little.’

‘Perhaps you prefer to forget it.’

‘Maybe, but battles are confusing things. One would need to have climbed a hill to see the two square miles of Waterloo. The smoke obscures your vision. We were very wet that morning. We had had no cover and there was little to eat. Plenty of jokes and laughter; trying to get a fire to go, clothes sodden, Pride trying to get me to change my shirt. There is a bit of a mist but the sun will break through. I had always been fond of the sight of an army first thing in the morning, the slow stirring of a great beast, lines of horses, the stained-glass colours of uniforms, scarlet and blue, the black of the Brunswicks, the green of the Ninety-fifth, the Scots in their petticoats. We go to our deaths very well dressed, but rather less so when we’ve lain in our clothes all night. I say to myself, “I shall never see this again. This is the end.” Well, the end it was, but not as I foresaw it.’

He came to a halt.

Mrs Arthur said, ‘You mean you thought you would be killed?’

‘Yes. Soldiers get such premonitions from time to time. In my experience they are usually right. One of my fellow officers is beside me, crouched over the fire, getting smoke in his eyes, trying to light a cigar. I can see him now. His groom is just behind him holding his charger, the steam rising from its wet back. There is a deal of noise all down the line as the infantry test their weapons. I say, “This is the end.” He agrees. He says, “We’ll win, and all of us soldiers will be put out to grass as surplus to requirements.” It was odd I chose to speak to him. He had never liked me much, mistrusted what was known as my cleverness. I said, “That may be so, but I shan’t live to see it.” He reprimanded me, tried to rally me a bit, but it was he, not I, who died that day.’

Mrs Arthur, sitting beside him, the May Day revelry, the fiddle, alive in the meadow behind them, thought of waltzing in her father’s Devonshire garden with this veteran, youthful soldier, so soon to be facing his probable death. It was no wonder he lived as he did, kissing the passing girl.

Allington said, ‘It was then I thought of the letter. I always carried in my pocket my mother’s miniature and the letter my father had written her, the one I saved from the fire. It may seem strange, but I had never read it – it hadn’t seemed my business. I knew my pockets would be rifled. Battlefields are strewn with letters – did you know that? The last letters from home all lying about in the mud, trampled. I suppose I hoped that letter would make some mention of myself.’

Allington paused before adding, with a deprecating smile, ‘Ah, but the previous Captain Allington had a lyrical pen. The mention of an infant would hardly have become it. I wished I hadn’t read it, such a passionate love letter to my mother. I lost it with her miniature in its seed-pearl frame, but I remember it.’

He then said, more briskly, ‘But of Waterloo itself I know little, a blank space in my head. I remember opening my eyes in the middle of the night and looking at the moon, the clouds racing across its face, so that it came and went. The battle was all over. I don’t even know how I came to be there. I’m certainly in a great deal of pain and a horse, mine or someone else’s, is straddled across my legs. From time to time it struggles. There’s a Frenchman close to me. He’s sitting up with a pistol on his lap. I can see he’s a cavalry officer, a cocky-looking fellow. I say – God knows why I say it, amidst the massed horrors of the aftermath – ‘Is this honour?’

‘Why yes,’ he replies, in perfect English, and then, after a moment: ‘I have looked you over, your wounds are such you will not recover. Did you hear our soldiers cry “
Vive l’empereur
” and the noise of our drums? Could you hear those from the English lines?’

‘I’m in Spain,’ I reply. ‘The Emperor is not in Spain.’

‘He says, “Nor are you, my friend.”’

‘I take a while to digest this and then I say, “Would you be so kind as to kill this horse? It too can’t live and it causes me much discomfort in the meantime”.’

‘The Frenchman doesn’t hesitate. I can’t recall his wounds. He crawls to my side, one way or another, and in the most masterly way he puts his pistol to the head of the horse, careful to get a correct angle, and shoots it. It subsides on top of me, but at least it is still.

‘I say, “You’re truly my friend, but maybe you should have applied that bullet to me.”’

‘He is thoughtful, but then he says, ‘I doubt I could do it. I was actually keeping it for the plunderers, who will be with us shortly, and now I have no more powder.’

He starts to search the trappings of the horse for a powder horn and that’s the last I remember of him. Of course, he’s right, the looters come – Brunswickers, to the best of my belief. I don’t care to remember it. They want my clothes and the contents of my pockets. I am buffeted and shaken about, shaken without mercy. All soldiers loot. It’s their bounty. I should be more tolerant of it, but they are rough and think nothing of murder. That Frenchman died beside me, knifed and stripped. He would defend himself and that is certain death.

What do I regret? Not my uniform, had there been much of it to preserve, but the miniature of my mother and the letter. At that exact moment it was of little importance, however.

Mrs Arthur said, ‘Because you were going to die?’

Allington said, ‘
Half in love with easeful death
.’ He laughed. ‘That’s an understatement.’

Robert Conway leaned out of his bedroom window. He could see in the moonlight the party in the meadow, the maypole unattended, the ribbons discarded; the village people, his father’s parishioners, dancing, swaying, hopping, swinging the women with liberated shouts and stamping of feet. Somewhere out there, Jacky and James were doing as they pleased.

Robert looked for Captain Allington. It was too dark to see him but he supposed he would have done his duty and gone home.

The dark green uniform of the 95th lay folded on Robert’s bed. Suddenly he turned from the window, stripped off his clothes to his shirt and started to dress in the trousers and jacket. The legs of the trousers were too long; he had to fold them up. He fastened the round silver buttons with infinite care. The black velvet collar was high under his chin. He took the candle and moved to the mirror, shuffling a little in his stockinged feet and pushing back the cuffs of the sleeves. He placed the shako at a rakish angle on his head, but when he moved it tipped, absurdly, over his nose.

Suddenly he was angry with the uniform, that it didn’t fit him, and he was angry with Phil for giving it back to him but keeping the glass. The loss of the glass in its leather pouch would ever remind him of his mortification and disgrace. That, he supposed, was the intention, and without the spyglass, the uniform lost its magic.

Robert took the uniform off and put his own clothes back on. He then remembered the message Phil had given him.

It is not too late to mend his ways.

Robert slid the window higher and climbed onto the outer sill. Seizing the stems of the vine that grew against the wall, he manoeuvred himself to the ground. It was not difficult – he had done it before.

He crossed the rectory garden, giving a kick to the cricket stumps as he went, and entered the meadow. The May Day celebrations continued, but they were no longer for the benefit of the maypole and the children. The fiddler played on. A young man was kissing a girl in the dewsoaked grass.