Kit (21 page)

‘My fucking eye! You’re finished, Walsh!’

Kit untethered the pig and turned to go. ‘As you said, no witnesses.’

And sup on thin gruel in the morning …

‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

Back at the camp, Kit handed the pig to Mr Morgan, a solid Welsh dragoon with a ready smile. He spotted her hand. ‘Buggering Christ, Walsh, you got too many fingers or something? Get away to see Lambe, before you bleed out.’

Kit looked down at the rag scrunched in her hand. It was red. ‘Give the pig to Hall,’ she said, ‘he’s a rare cook. Save some for me.’

Cradling her hand, she hurried to the white church and banged at the carved door with her elbow. Lambe came to the door.

‘What is the matter?’

She held out her hand to him. The gash was so deep it looked as if her finger was barely hanging on. The surgeon’s lip curled with scorn. ‘This is a shabby attempt.’

‘I do not understand you …’

‘Oh, I think I do. You were here this morning, asking to see my patient. You turn up again, not three hours later, with an injury that begs my attention. Is there no length to which you will not go to be in the company of Captain Ross?’

‘I assure you,’ protested Kit, ‘I had no such aim in coming here. My finger is all but severed.’

Atticus Lambe regarded her red hand for some moments while her finger throbbed. ‘Your little scheme has failed; I discharged Captain Ross at noon. And that being the case, you may come in.’

There was a dreadful smell in the church: excrement, blood and under it all the sweetish smell of incense. Someone moaned, incessantly, low voiced, behind canvas curtains. Wooden pews had been covered with tick mattresses and a soldier lay on each, bearing their wounds from Cremona. Each man lay under his own pool of light from the stained glass, the jewel colours masking the stains of their dressings; the red of blood, the brown of excrement, the yellow of pus.

Atticus Lambe picked up two chairs and set them beneath a broken window. Kit sat in the white light; Lambe sat opposite her and took her hand into his lap. Painfully, she uncurled the fingers – all had been cut when she clasped Taylor’s dagger but none as grievously as her littlest one.

She found it hard to look at the wound – the finger was cut to the quick and she could see white bone. Lambe took a fresh kerchief to clean the wound. ‘I just saw a sergeant with a pierced eye,’ he said, speaking to the cut. ‘What do you know about that?’

She winced. ‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Hmm. This is not a day of action, and yet two men have come to me injured and bleeding. What am I to suppose?’

‘I cannot tell you, sir.’

‘He will lose the sight in his eye.’

Kit swallowed. Taylor had always disliked her; now she would be his implacable enemy. ‘Will he be discharged from service?’

‘No.’ Lambe seemed pleased. ‘I have given him a patch. Men have fought with greater lacks than an eye. He had not much beauty to spoil, but his judgement of distance will be affected. So you may take solace in the fact that in battle he may well die all the faster.’

She met his gaze. He looked down at the cut again. ‘How did you come by this wound?’

Kit thought fast. ‘I drew my sword in haste, and my hand slipped.’

‘Ah. And lost your sword in the process, I see.’ He looked at the empty scabbard at her waist. ‘Your sergeant told me much the same story, except he contrived to put his eye out when drawing his dagger. I doubt our enemies have much to fear from you; you seem to be doing their job for them.’

He threw the stained kerchief into a basin. Beyond it she saw a collection of instruments: pliers, knives and even a little saw. ‘Well: your finger is all but severed and since you have been obliging enough to start the surgery for me, I should just nip the thing off.’

She looked him in the eye and raised her chin a fraction. ‘Very well. If it is beyond you to mend it, take it.’

Her gambit worked. ‘Of course I can stitch the thing. But a choice lies before you. I can take the finger, cauterise it and you will go on your way. Or I can save the finger, and you run the risk of infection and a higher amputation later. Which is it to be?’

‘I will keep the finger.’

‘Very well.’

She watched him closely, anything to distract herself from the terrible, probing pain. Anything that meant she did not have to watch the sewing needle, curved like a tooth. In the end, she could not bear it. ‘May I not have something for the pain?’

He looked at her as if he had beaten her at a hand of cards. ‘We have nothing to give you. Our supplies have diminished so much as to be kept for more
serious
cases. But you may pass out soon enough from the pain.’

Kit nodded. Had Ross had to lie thus, awake, while Lambe dug the bullet from him? Or did an officer’s stripe buy a spoonful of laudanum?

So she sweated, bit her lips and watched Atticus Lambe. The grey eyes like water over pebbles, the black pinprick pupils that focused on her finger – the scroll of his ear, the ash-blond hair cut close into the neck. He was young – not more than five and twenty – and would have been handsome if he had not been so thin. His cheeks were hollow, his white wrists protruded some inches from his frock coat – he was too thin, too tall, too gangly; like a pale summer spider. His skin had a strange grey sheen to it; in fact he seemed all of one colour, for his teeth, skin, eyes, all were pearly grey, and his medical frock coat was of the same hue. He sweated with the effort, despite the icy mountain breeze whipping through the broken window. She knew that he saw only her finger – that she was not a human, but a challenge. He disliked her, she knew, but at this point he would have done anything to save this finger. As he worked, she found herself reluctantly admiring him. He had a prodigious skill.

At last she was stitched and bound and he unfolded his long body. He took off his pince-nez and pushed them into his breast pocket. ‘You’ll keep a good scar,’ he said, almost friendly. ‘But you’ll keep the finger too.’

She stretched out her aching arm, flexed the other fingers. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

He considered her. ‘Oh, I think you do.’ His gaze was an awl, probing her as closely as the needle had done; urging her to understand something. But before she could reply, the surgeon had turned away from her. ‘Take the bed in the Lady Chapel. The nurses will bring you gruel.’

‘I’m to
stay
?’

‘Yes. The first twelve hours are crucial for the incubation of any infection. By morning we’ll know if we need to take your hand.’ And he dismissed her with a wave.

Kit laid herself down on the little bed in the Lady Chapel as she’d been bidden. She looked at the frescoes curling about the white walls – more haloed saints. Exhausted by the events of the day, she slept, and the saints of the mountains watched her.

She was woken late in the evening. One of the nurses, a pimply boy sporting a butcher’s apron, brought her a dish of thin gruel. Her stomach growled, and she spooned it down, but she could not help but think of her pig, and his blood pudding, and his sides made of pork, and his legs made of ham, and his back made of bacon. She could almost smell him – she was
sure
she could smell him.

There was a murmuring at the door, and she could hear a voice – Mr Morgan, with his voice as up and down as the Welsh mountains from which he hailed, and that heavenly smell again. She heard her own name, then Lambe’s voice, curt and flat, but acquiescent. She strained to listen but the door closed, nothing happened, and she drifted again.

The next time she woke, she thought she dreamt, because she saw a little table set by her. A little silver candlestick stood sentinel, with a fine white candle burning. A crystal glass stood on the other side, brimming with rich red porter. On the table was set a shining pewter plate, not a battered army tin but round and true as the moon. It was piled with pork, done to a turn, with crispy crackling shining with fat and the plate swimming with rich gravy. Kit propped herself on her elbow, her hand throbbing anew, but she hardly felt the pain. She threw back the coverlet, and made to rise.

But at that moment Atticus Lambe entered the little room. He took his glasses from his nose, flipped his coat tails out behind him and sat down at the table. With his grey eyes fixed upon her, he took a good drink of his port, took up his knife and fork and tucked in to the pork. She watched as he sucked on the bones, chewed on the flesh and his grey teeth snapped the crackling. He ate every morsel on the plate, his eyes never leaving her, the pupils now huge and round. There was something obscene in the way he savoured the meat, and swilled his mouth with the wine. Then, finally, he crossed his cutlery, drained his porter, and left without a word, his grey eyes on her to the last. He left the detritus there, and the heavenly twin smells of meat and wine, to torture her dreams.

She lay back, as exhausted as if she’d fought him physically. She did not sleep again, but waited until the hospital was quiet, and even the groaning man had ceased his cries. The candle guttered and died and now only the saints’ gilded haloes could be seen as she rose in the silver moonlight and crept from her room. She would not spend another night in the power of Atticus Lambe.

And to drink the King’s health in the morning …

‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

No one wanted to miss the battle of Luzzara.

After months of waiting, of missteps and manoeuvres, they were to meet their enemy face to face. Men rose from their hospital beds in the little white church, boys joined the Imperial forces from the streets armed with pitchforks and their Sunday coats dyed red. Marlborough had told them that the streets were paved with gold and booty. Kit did not care for booty, but knew that she was near the end of her personal quest. Every company, including Tichborne’s, was to be at Luzzara. This time there would be no mistakes. There was no clandestine strategy; this was out and out battle in the open, just as Kit had always imagined it. Here, she would find Richard and fight side by side with Ross.

He was now fully recovered and they seemed back on their old footing, but they had shared that moment at the aqueduct and it had made them brothers in arms. They rode together; they camped together by the fire. Joy and optimism returned, O’Connell got out his fiddle again and played the old favourites: ‘The Humours of Castlefin’, ‘John Dwyer’s Jig’, ‘The Maids of Mitchelstown’. Kit kept her song inside – there was only one ballad for her, and there was to be no singing except that once, by the aqueduct, half in, half out of the freezing water, and then only to save a life. She was glad, so glad, that Ross had lived, that their friendship had survived. The only difference was Atticus Lambe, trundling sullenly behind on his medical cart like some Grim Reaper. Whenever his grey eyes fell upon Kit she felt chilled. She vowed never to get sick and need his ministrations again.

Kit had never seen so many souls gathered in one place as she saw on the battlefield of Luzzara. This was a plain between the River Po and Lake Garda – a true battlefield, a vast open space; granted, it was pitted with ditches and channels, and low fences and high bushes, but it was an interrupted plain where the Alliance forces and the armies of the Two Crowns faced each other, lined neatly, leagues apart.

Kit waited on the hill with the Scots Grey Dragoons. She clasped her reins with her tender right hand – still bandaged but better – and narrowed her eyes across the plain. A ribbon of blue wreathed the slope opposite, punctured by spears and colours with standards. Immediately before her was the martial figure of the Duke of Marlborough; in his helmet and his armour and his silken cape and his Order of the Garter, blue as the sky. But she turned her eyes from him to look along the ranked redcoats, stretching as far as the eye could see, left and right. She could not see Richard. In fact, she had not seen nor heard of him since Cremona, and she was beginning to wonder whether she had imagined him. But she had to believe he was here, was one of those red skittles on the hill. She lowered her musket from her shoulder, took out her case knife and made one last notch on the stock. Two hundred and eighty-five days without Richard. Today she would find him.

There was a long, tense silence – the horses shifted and tossed their heads, the partisans wavered in their lines, the muskets shimmered as they were brought to the shoulder. In that moment, sitting high above the battlefield on Flint’s back, she was a girl again, back in her cotton gown at the top of Killcommadan Hill, the sun warm on her back. She was ready, poised in the moment when she’d tipped forward, hung between balance and motion, just before she started to run. Then the cacophony; the trumpets sounded the attack and the drummers began their battery, the cannon rolled forth. Flint pricked her ears, ready too. And Kit spurred her on.

It was one of the most perfect moments of her life. The wind rushed by her ears, blurring the sounds of battle; her eyes streamed. She drew her father’s sword, and it shone above her in the sun. The sounds of thousands of feet and hooves on the field was like nothing Kit had ever heard – clods split and spun from the earth – soil was in her mouth, gunpowder in her nose. She was invincible. She gave an incoherent battle cry as she hurtled down the hill towards the enemy, slashing with her sword the French cavalier who rode straight at her. He fell from his horse at last and she found another, then another, crazed with battle, drunk with it. The French foot soldiers were under Flint’s feet; she cut them down where they stood. The world had collapsed to red and blue; red were spared, blue she put down. Then, out of the corner of her eye, through the chaos, she saw a man in a red coat fighting like a Catherine wheel, his sword at full length, turning like a dervish.

Richard.

She put up her sword and slid from the saddle. Somebody shouted. She ran through the ranks. Now she could see him clearly; his brown curls fell over his face just as they used to. She was so close now – close enough to see those green eyes she’d almost forgotten. Her mouth opened to scream his name. Then there was a flash, a cloud of bitter smoke and she was punched backwards though the air, lifted from her feet. There was a nameless, awful pain at her hip. Then blackness.