Kit (50 page)

‘Yes. He was a redhead, but that is as far as the resemblance goes. He took a musket ball at Luzzara. A peevish fellow and a coward; I cured him only for him to desert shortly afterward.’

Kit could not hear herself so described. ‘I escaped not through cowardice, but a certain knowledge that if I were stripped for the lash my sex would be revealed.’

The Elector waved away her interruption. ‘And this Walsh. He could not have been the accused, concealing her sex? She spoke of a false phallus; did you ever see such a thing in Walsh’s possession?’

‘Never. And, if I may add, I have never heard of such a thing in all my years as a doctor. Of necessity I saw Walsh without clothes, for I had to lay him open; and I can assure you,’ the pale eyes turned upon Kit again with undisguised malice, ‘he was made as all men are made.’

‘Then how do you account for the assertions made by the accused? That she was this man Walsh?’

‘Medically, I would say she is suffering from some hysterical episode – to which females are prone – leading to a delusion of the middle brain. In practical terms I would say that she happened upon Walsh somewhere on the road following his flight; befriended him, perhaps seduced him, learned his story, and now uses his identity to mitigate her crimes.’

Kit threw up her hands and laughed hopelessly, slapping her palms smartly back down on her knees.

The Elector turned to her, his iron-grey brows raised to join his wig. ‘Something amuses you?’

‘To be accused in my female persona of seducing myself as a male is singular indeed.’

‘I am much surprised at your mirth, for the situation in which you find yourself is calamitous. The good doctor does not know you. The captain did not know you. Can you produce any other officers that can vouch for you?’

She could not. The surgeon had confounded her at last. He himself could not take her life, but if the Empire condemned her, her blood would not fall upon his hands. Yes, Lambe had had his revenge – she had served it to him as surely as he had dined on her plate of pork.

The pig – the pork. ‘Taylor,’ she blurted. ‘Sergeant Taylor. He would know me. He hated me, but he would know me.’

The Elector sighed. ‘Then I suppose we must call him.’

‘Honoured Judge?’ Atticus Lambe spoke, diffidently. ‘If I may?’

‘Yes, Doctor Lambe?’

‘I regret to inform you that Sergeant Taylor of the Scots Greys is dead, by his own hand.’

‘I see.’

‘He lost an eye in a knife fight with Private Walsh, and later lost the use of his arm in a duel with the same miscreant. Such a man is no more use in a battle than a woman.’ Lambe flashed a pale glance at Kit. ‘Fighting was his life, and once he could do it no more he made an end. He broke into my store of laudanum, and drank his last draught.’

Kit glared at Lambe. ‘
Broke into your store of laudanum
,’ she said, low and scornful. ‘Indeed, for you were jealous of your precious drug. I’ll swear you locked it up good and tight. You would never let so much as a jorum go without purpose. I’ve no doubt that if Taylor took such a draught it was you who prescribed it to him, aye, and helped him drink it down.’

‘Be silent!’ said the Elector. ‘Such heinous accusations do nothing to aid you, but rather prove your guilt. Thank you, Doctor. We will trespass on your precious time no further.’

Lambe stalked from the room like a man in a hurry, but not before he could look to Ormonde in the onlookers and give a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.

‘And here we must make an end,’ said the Elector. ‘Kit Kavanagh, have you anything to say?’

She looked at Ormonde too. ‘I am guilty of mistaking a fiend for an angel, nothing more.’

‘Unhappily, this court cannot agree. I find you guilty of spying upon the commanders of the Grand Alliance on behalf of the Franco-Spanish command of the Two Crowns.’ The Elector flattened his hands upon the lectern, and pushed himself to a standing position. The gathered soldiers, as one, stood with him.

‘The court is adjourned, and will reconvene tomorrow for sentencing. Take the prisoner down.’

A priest came to hear her final confession. He introduced himself as Father Bonifacio, and was cheerful and sanguine about her impending death. He spoke of her hanging with palpable envy, his face shining with devotion, clearly piqued that she would beat him to paradise. ‘You are almost as high as heaven here,’ he said, in heavily accented English. ‘So not too far to go. And this abbey of San Michele was built by an archangel.’ He spoke the words with a beatific smile.

Kit said nothing. ‘The archangel Michael brought the materials up the mountain himself, on his great wings.’ He fussed in his robes, bringing out his Bible. ‘So, there’s a good chance that the angels may save you. All is not lost – if you make your confession and your peace with God the angels will carry you heavenward. Now.’ He sat opposite her. ‘I’m sure you have done some good, and your good deeds God knows already. Now is the time to speak of the evil you have done to others – think of it as balancing a ledger. We are speaking now of your debts to mankind.’ Dully, she raised her head at last; all she could think of in the debtors’ column was the death of Sergeant Taylor. She remembered that when she’d enlisted, right at the beginning of her journey, her recruiting officer had asked her, in lieu of training,
Have you two arms and two legs and two eyes in your head?
When she’d taken Taylor’s eye, albeit in self-defence, and lost him the use of his arm in their duel, she had condemned him to ruination and despair. It was, at that moment, the only thing for which she was truly sorry. She spoke of Taylor’s fate to the priest, who listened and nodded and pronounced the Benedicite over her with a profound air of disappointment. He’d hoped, she was sure, for more meaty sins.

When the priest had gone, leaving his Bible for her to read in her last hours, she was given a candle, and a fine cut of meat. She could not eat the meal. She leafed through the pages of the Bible and turned to the chapter of the babes. ‘
The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them; they will not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gate.
’ She read the verses over, remembering Ross saying them when they had buried the newborns in the valley – one of the episodes in their shared life that Ross did not, or would not, remember. He had denied her like St Peter.

She shut the book. God would not send his angels to save her. She had ignored him since she had left behind her mass-going Dublin days. He would not hear her now. Instead she prayed to God’s mother, conjuring Mary in her mind. She did not picture Her in her dimensional plaster incarnations, nor her flat portrayals on the church walls, thin as paper and haloed in gold. She prayed instead to the Madonna della Fortuna, carved of wood and cleft from a ship, as much a fraud as she was herself.

And so to conclude and to finish disputes …

‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

Kit watched her last sunrise from the window of her high tower. It was fitting that it should be the most beautiful she had ever seen. The craggy mountains were painted rose-gold, from peaks to valleys; the snows smoked on their peaks as if they were the fiery mountains of the south. The cultivated lands below, cross-hatched by the plough, and the wild lands with the tares, showed a thousand colours of earth like the patchwork of a quilt. No: the squares of a chessboard. Everywhere has a horizon, Ross had said. This was the last one she would see.

She wore her red hair loose, and it tumbled now to her shoulderblades. She wished she had a soldier coat, for as a soldier she could face what was to come – as a woman, she was not sure.

At the hour of nine they came for her and she hoped, as she descended following the bronze and black backs of the Imperial guards, that the Elector would be merciful – would commute her sentence to imprisonment or labour. But as she crossed the courtyard she saw the scaffold – three wooden steps up to a gibbet and a black looped noose swinging gently in the wind. The snow whirled about the rope, around and through the noose. The wind whipped her red hair about her face, the only colour in the place.

She entered the crypt and a hush descended on the press of redcoats that had gathered there. Billeted on the monastery, with little to do until they descended upon the Netherlands, they had gathered here every day as if this were the playhouse. But this drama was short – to Kit, now that her heartbeats were finite, everything happened so fast. The Elector entered, sat at his lectern, placed a black cap on his head and extinguished all hope.

‘Kit Kavanagh,’ said the Elector. ‘You are sentenced to death by hanging. You shall be taken from here to the courtyard of the Sacra San Michele above, where you will be executed in the eyes of the army and in the name of the Prince of Savoy. Have you anything to say?’

She had so much to say, but there seemed little point in any of it. There had been so many words spoken in this room and most of them falsehoods. That a house of God should play host to such lies after centuries of truths spoken under these vaults seemed, somehow, the greatest tragedy of all. So she raised her head, and spoke her own family motto to the court. ‘Truth relies on its own arms,’ she said. She looked at the blank, uncomprehending faces, searching among them for Ormonde; but like the Devil himself, he had vanished. So she would die here, in this infernal, holy place, far from home, with not one familiar face to turn away in sorrow as the rope snapped taut and the noose tightened. She closed her eyes in despair.

Just then the great doors cracked open, banging back against the stone pillars, and an avenging angel rode through them on a horse of steel grey. The horse reared in a maelstrom of white snowflakes that had blown in from the courtyard. The archangel wore a cowled cloak, and she recognised the horse before the figure. It was Flint. Then the angel threw back his hood – it was Captain Ross, wearing the scarlet of the Scots Grey Dragoons.

Kit was dreaming, or dying, she was hanged already and swung from the noose, her breath stolen and her eyes changed. Ross slid from the horse and dropped the reins, and Flint trotted straight to Kit and laid her heavy head on her mistress’s shoulder, nuzzling her ears and mouthing at her bodice. Flint, whom she’d left on the battlefield, whom she’d meant to collect but was prevented by her arrest, had stayed faithful to the end.

‘I found her wandering outside the gates of Turin, when I ran from you like a coward the other day,’ said the captain. ‘Her presence confirmed to me what I already knew in my heart, that you were who you claimed to be.’

Kit stroked the mare’s nose. ‘
She
knows me.’

‘She has been the most faithful friend of all.’ Ross took her hands, drew her to her feet. ‘You are right to chastise me,’ he said, ‘for this dumb beast knew all along what I could not acknowledge. I knew the truth of what you said here; in some way I always knew you, even when we met at the ball: the same eyes, the same voice. I just could not believe that the man who was my brother could inhabit the person of the only woman to draw my eye since my wife.’ He raised one hand to her cheek. ‘I’d thought I could never feel again until I came to Genova and knocked you into the sea.’ He smiled. ‘Many nights along the road with you I stayed awake, worrying I’d caught Lambe’s complaint. You see, I’d fallen in love with Kit Walsh.’

She laid her hand over his, on her cheek. ‘But I am Kit Walsh.’ She smiled.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And, man or woman, I cannot be without you again.’ He gestured to the bench. ‘But even these shallow fools divined my affection. I knew I could not be the only witness to vouch for Kit Walsh. I needed to bring another testimonial.’

She raised her brows. ‘Flint?’

Ross smiled and shouted a command. Through the open portal, in formation, marched a regiment of foot. Kit looked closer; they were dragoons without mounts. Her hands flew to her mouth as she recognised each face: Southcott, Hall, Book, Wareham, Swinney, Rolf, Noyes, Crook, Page, Dallenger, Kennedy, Lancaster, Farrant, Gibson, Laverack and Morgan.

‘They would all come,’ said Ross, ‘and all of them have broken their charge. Once a dragoon, always a dragoon. I told them of the good offices you’d done, riding to save us. They are here to swear to your identity.’ He turned to the men. ‘Regiment, present to Sergeant Walsh.’

He raised his arm.

‘We swear.’ They shouted as one.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ The Elector rose to his feet. ‘Captain Ross, you are a wanted man; your testimony is unreliable. And furthermore, not one of these men who claim to know the accused is an officer, so the Imperial court cannot accept their testimony.’

‘Hold, Honoured Judge,’ said Ross, in the voice of command she remembered so well. ‘There is one who will yet be heard, one who is neither foot soldier nor cavalry.’

The Elector, apoplectic, glared at Flint. ‘Am I to hear the testimony of a
mare
? You shame these proceedings, Captain. Take that animal out of here. I will not hear you. The court does not recognise a horse.’

‘Perhaps the court will recognise
me
.’

There on the threshold, filling the doorway, stood the Duke of Marlborough. A hurrah went up, and Kit realised she had never once seen him when he was not accompanied by cheers – he spent his life with applause ringing in his ears. He wore a golden cloak over ermine and a half-armour of gold, and on a wig so white that the snowflakes did not show he wore a golden tricorn. He was magnificent.

He strode to the lectern, stripping off his gloves a finger at a time. He went straight to the bookman and slapped his hand on the Bible.

The Elector, utterly confounded, slipped his wig from his head in befuddlement, to reveal a shaven grey pelt. The clerk dropped his quill with an ugly splatter.

‘You may take down my testimony – Clerk, pick up your pen. Quills may do as much harm as swords. You may as well rend your other pages. Time for the truth.’ He winked at the gallery, preparing them for a jest. ‘From the horse’s mouth, what?’