Kit (52 page)

Kit smiled involuntarily, and heard herself thank the queen, but the pang she already felt spread through her core. Her overwhelming sadness, that there would never be a son to receive such a commission, was tinged with pity; pity for the great lady who stood before her, for it was well known that the queen had worn out her body with seventeen pregnancies and seventeen stillbirths. That Anne of England had the grace to make such an offer to another woman was truly touching and made Kit admire her very much.

The queen gestured to her footman to take her arm. She turned once, looking back as if her neck pained her. ‘Come and see me, Mistress Ross,’ she said. ‘Come and see me and tell me your histories.’

‘I will, Your Majesty,’ Kit promised.

‘You see,’ said the queen, low voiced, ‘I know a little about a woman in a man’s profession.’ She smiled wistfully, and hobbled from the room.

Outside, the sunshine on the Mall seemed dimmer than the gilt of the throne room. Ross, smiling proudly, touched the little gold figure at her throat. ‘He’s a dragoon!’ he said, just as she had thought. ‘So might our son be one day.’ He bowed from the waist and missed her frozen expression, then offered his arm. ‘Might a humble captain escort you, my Lady Companion of the Garter?’ She covered her cares with a smile and a curtsy. ‘Gladly,’ she said.

They walked home to Ross’s house in Charles Street by way of the park, enjoying the pleasant afternoon sunshine, and the children with their hoops on the paths and their boats on the lake, the gentlemen with their smart horses and their even smarter carriages, the calls of the birds and the piemen. Kit felt, all of a sudden, that she was now a part of those paintings she had seen in the palace – those scenes of pleasure gardens or pastoral fantasies where people were secondary to the landscape. Just dots, commoners. Kit was nothing now – she was a smear of paint in the larger scene, the canvas that was London.

Some fellows in regimentals saw the collar, recognised it, stared. She smiled and walked on, pleased and proud, feeling that perhaps she was not invisible after all. Their conversation turned, as it always did, to the past; and soon she and Ross were reminiscing about their campaigns with the Scots Greys. Where other newlyweds would discuss the future, and build their fantasies of what their lives together would hold, they did not; and nor did they, at that time, realise that anything was amiss.

At the barracks in Green Park, there was a great muster, and Kit and Ross stopped to watch. ‘Viscount Galway’s men, from the banners,’ said Ross. ‘Heading out to Spain as soon as they may. Almansa, in the east.’

Almansa
, thought Kit; it sounded so exotic, so exciting, like a clash of blades.

‘Galway fights to keep the Bourbons out of eastern Spain. Yet another battle front for the endless Wars of the Spanish Succession.’

Kit said nothing, but she remembered meeting Philip of Orléans in the Palazzo del Te in Mantova. The prince who chewed on a chicken leg under a fresco of grappling giants, offering her his priest to say mass for her dead husband. It seemed another world, and she’d been another person. She’d been at the centre of the conflict; now she was at the edge, looking on.

They could see the battalions gathering, the soldiers, the pioneers, the engineers, the sappers, the workmen; the cavalry horses lining up, rearing and skittering. The equipages of guns and cannons, their iron and brass noses glinting in the setting sun, squatting next to seige machines that stood tall like giraffes. Pyramids of cannonballs, boxes of shot in their wool wadding, glittering flints tied on strings like shark’s teeth. The fascines, the gabions, the tents, the palisades. All the accoutrements of Captain and Mistress Ross’s former life.

They watched, silent, smiling wistfully, their expressions oddly alike, until it was quite dark.

At home Kit took off her hat and rang for a dish of tea. But instead of taking her place by the fire, as she’d done every evening since she had become mistress of this smart townhouse, she stayed standing, touching her father’s sword where it hung over their mantel. The blade was warm from the fire, as if it had just been taken off, as if it still spent its days hanging next to a warm body. Then she took the heavy collar from her throat and placed it carefully in the box the palace had given her, with a blood-coloured velvet cushion. She arranged the gold knots and the medallions in a neat circle, and in the centre little St George, who looked so like a dragoon. Then she closed the lid on him.

Kit tried her best – her very best – to fold herself into the society in London. The coffee house, the play, the Vauxhall pleasure gardens. Thanks to the Duke of Ormonde she had all the knowledge of manners and music and social niceties that the beautiful wife of a handsome young officer could require. She and Ross were a popular couple, invited everywhere. Her celebrity and her story made them universally welcome, and in the recounting of her histories, with fond interjections from Ross, she was able to spend most of her evenings back on the field of battle with him. It was at those evenings in their mutual reminiscence, and the nights in their hot sweet bed, and the days riding Flint and Phantom through Hyde Park, that they were happiest. (The truth was that even riding in Rotten Row was too sedate for them, and the thrusting young couple garnered many a disapproving glance as they galloped across the turf at an indecent speed, and even jumped the manicured hedges of yew and myrtle.)

The rest of society’s pleasures left Kit cold. Once she saw Lucio Mezzanotte performing at the Covent Garden; as she listened to him in the honeyed dark, his voice transported her back to the Palazzo Borromeo on Lake Maggiore. She could see, from her seat in the circle, that he still wore the Prince Rupert’s drop about his neck. He was still a lapdog on a leash. She looked about the gilded theatre for his master, but could not see him. Perhaps Ormonde kept to the shadows, as he always had. The duke had not the power to fright her now; not when she had so powerful a protector as the queen herself.

The couple took pleasure trips that spring, to ease the relentless social round. They went to Dublin to visit Aunt Maura, and found the redoubtable lady running Kavanagh’s as she always had – a little whiter of hair, a little more crooked of back, but still strong. She was delighted to see her Kit safe and sound, nodded sagely when she heard of Richard’s fate, and, against Kit’s expectations, became fast friends with Ross. Kit realised that, charmingly, Ross was treating her aunt as he might one of his fellow officers – he had decided, apparently, that running an alehouse was not unlike running a regiment. ‘You chose well this time, girl,’ said Maura, as she bade her niece goodbye. ‘That look you always had in your eye, he has it too.’ Maura stoutly refused their help. ‘I wouldn’t give the bar back to you now, Kit, if you fought me for it,’ she said. ‘I swear it is the only thing keeping me alive.’ They said their farewells under the swinging Kavanagh’s sign, with its motto
Virtus Ipsa Suis Firmissima
emblazoned under the lion and crescents. Truth relies on its own arms. Kit left with a barrel of stout and a link of Dublin sausage in exchange for a promise to visit as often as she might.

Their visit to Ross’s Scottish estate was less successful – it rained relentlessly and in the cold grey manor the white-haired Lord of Ross and his lady looked down at Kit, long noses pinched with cold, sorrowing inwardly that their beloved son had married some army hoyden, with neither name nor property. Ross, in respect of his lady, cut the visit short.

At home once more, Kit renewed her intention to be the perfect wife and content herself. She spent her first afternoon back in London baking pies, something she had not done since Kavanagh’s, and was pleased with the result. She laid the pies on a pitching board outside the door to cool for Ross’s dinner, but soon heard a commotion. She opened the door to find several young fellows taking the pies in their hands and kicking the board to the gutter. Without hesitation she took up a stick from the woodpile and chased them into the street, just as she was, with sleeves upturned and floury hands. She caught all three of them in the alley, and laid about them, young as they were, handling the stick like a sword. When they’d scattered, crying for their mothers, she marched back to the house, trying, without thinking, to sheathe the stick at her side. Recollecting herself, trying to slow her breathing and her heart, she thrust the stick back in the woodpile. She glanced at her father’s sword where it hung above the mantel, sidewards and shamefaced, as if she was not worthy to look directly at it.

At another time she went to purchase one of the new-style hoop petticoats from the tailor’s. She had resolved to follow fashion and dress in the manner befitting a captain’s wife; although in truth she found nothing duller than her fittings at the tailor’s and could summon no interest in the accoutrements of women. Walking home from the tailor’s by Knaves Acre, she happened to walk through a narrow alley, and a fellow coming the other way accidently bumped her, by reason of her voluminous petticoat, and shoved her against the wall. Winded and shocked, she immediately gave the fellow an uppercut that felled him to the ground. She landed on him, knee to chest. It was easy – she was much the stronger, and had the advantage of surprise; he could never have expected such an adversary dressed as she was. She let him up, only to knock him down again, thrashing him with such force that the fellow begged to be clear of her. Breathing hard, she stood as he took to his heels, looking after him without seeing. Shaking, and white, and tingling in every muscle, she hurried guiltily home. She was horrified at her actions, and even more at the sensations she had felt. She had not felt so alive since she returned from the theatre of war. She sat herself on her fireside chair and tried to master her feelings with some lavender water; but soon she was up again, and pacing, and could not be still.

Some days later a new uniform arrived for Ross along with a letter from the High Command. Ross pocketed the letter without a word, but Kit knew what it would say. She took the heavy bundle of red cloth upstairs and cut the string with the paring knife she kept, out of habit, in her shoe.

She did not call for the valet but laid the clothes out herself in Ross’s wardrobe. The crisp shirt and stock, the jacket with the snowy white facings, the tricorn and the cap badge of the dragoons, and the coat – oh, the red coat – with the bright buttons. She laid it all out, and even stood the boots up before the wardrobe ready to step into. She stroked the fabric of the coat, feeling the familiar nap under her hand. She stood back and looked at the uniform for a long, long time. Then she shut the door.

That night, over their night-cup, she asked Ross directly.

‘When?’ she said.

He did not dissemble; or ask her, in mock confusion, what she meant. He cradled her cheek with his hand and looked at her with a pitying gaze she could not stomach. ‘Soon,’ he said.

That night, she could not sleep. She rose silently from the bed, and pressed her lips to the warm curve of Ross’s back – just to be sure he slept. She lit the lamp and tiptoed to his dressing room. Then, slowly and methodically, she put on the uniform.

Her fingers remembered what to do – they buckled the buckles, buttoned the buttons and tied the ties without thinking. The coat and boots were too big, the hat fell over her eyes, but when she pushed the mass of her hair into the brim it sat as it always had. She lifted the lamp and looked at herself in the glass. There she was. It was Kit.

The door creaked behind her and she spun about, guiltily. Ross stood there, naked to the waist, his hair rumpled, his blue eyes hardly open. Then his gaze snapped wide. She read there a gladness, a recognition, as if he greeted an old and dear friend. ‘Kit!’ Then the gaze dropped. ‘What are you doing?’

She could not reply, but took off the tricorn, and loosened the stock at her throat. She laid the things in the drawers again, carefully and deliberately. One sudden movement would shatter the fragile tension between them, like a Prince Rupert’s drop, and then everything would be in smithereens. But Ross spoke. ‘You miss it, don’t you?’

She turned, defensive. ‘I’ll tell you that if you’ll tell me another. Do you miss
him
?’

Ross pushed his hands through his bed-rumpled hair. ‘I do not understand you. Miss whom?’

‘Aye, you understand,’ she said, without heat, but with sadness. ‘Kit.’

He looked back at her with an inscrutable expression, part love, part pain, part she knew not what. He did not reply but turned and left the room, just as he’d left the abbey courtroom when faced with a revelation he could not countenance. Frozen to the spot, she heard, a few moments later, the front door bang.

Kit, wide awake on her pillow, heard him come home much later; but he did not return to their bed. It was the first night they’d spent apart since they’d wed.

Ross’s commission papers arrived the very next day. And now she knew. He was going and she would lose him, and she would face life in this alien city, going alone to the coffee house and the play, while he fought on the fields of Spain, perhaps to fall in the mud for the last time, with no friend or lover to run to him, and turn his body over, and close his eyes.

She would not be a coward this time – she would ask him, straight out. He opened the papers and she saw him smile a smile of pure joy. Her heart sank. It was no good his pretending – he could not wait to be abroad, and from her side. On horseback, in battle, that was where he lived.

‘Dearest,’ she said, ‘tell me what is in the letter.’

‘You may read it yourself,’ he said, cock-a-hoop; and passed the paper to her.

By the Order of Henry de Massue, 2nd Marquis of Galway, and in the name of her Majesty the Queen, Captain Ross is hereby given commission to report to the barracks at Hyde Park to recommence his active service as Captain of the Royal Scots Grey Dragoons at dawn on the fifth day of April in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and seven.

Furthermore, it is Her Majesty’s personal request that Mistress Kit Ross, quondam Sergeant of the Royal Scots Grey Dragoons, shall also report at that time, and shall be employed by the regiment as a Sutler, to be present in the lines for any and all such manoeuvres which shall be required of the division. She is to be equipped with the same arms and accoutrements of her fellows, for the Queen is well aware that there may be occasion for Mistress Ross to defend herself in the field, and Her Majesty would by all means prevent harm befalling such a well-beloved subject.