Longbourn (35 page)

James fumbled the crust into her hands; he held up his own and stepped back, shaking his head. “No. No.”

He turned and strode away, leaving her there, bread clutched tight in dirty fingers, not knowing what to do. When he glanced back from the corner of the alleyway, he saw her crouching by the little boy; she had broken the crust in half, and was watching the little one gum at the hard stuff while she chewed her own.

He walked away, guilty and ill-at-ease. It would delay an end, perhaps. He was not even certain that was to the good.

He saw Pye there, walking the cloisters of San Tirso. His distinctive laugh, a dark coat flitting through the shadows.

He saw Pye lifting something bone-thin and tiny up against a wall, and fumbling with his britches buttons.

He saw Pye sauntering along with a ration pack, a flock of children following him, silent and wide-eyed.

James clenched and unclenched his fists. To witness this, and do nothing: it was a stain on him.

Hunger made his sleep thin and ragged: famine figures clutched at him, their cracked lips sucked at his. He woke shivering; there were crows circling above.

Two nights before Christmas, the order came to move off. The night was raw. There was snow threatening, but no frost, so that all was bitter cold and wet as they struck camp and harnessed the horses to the gun carriage.

The horses were in their traces, the guns under canvas to keep off the sleet, and Sergeant Pye had not turned up. James was dispatched to find him; he knew where to look. Round the back of San Tirso, he came upon him in a sidestreet, his cock in his hand, trying to piss. Pye looked up, feverish and pained. He saw James, and tucked his prick away.

“Had a bit of bad luck there,” he said.

“Sir.”

“You won’t say a word, eh, Jimmy-boy.” He pulled at his britches, easing the fabric away from a sore.

“Sir.”

He tugged his coat straight. “Well?”

“We’re under marching orders, sir.”

“Well, hop to it, then. Get a bloody move on.”

The troops stumbled away from Sahagún in the spitting snow. Feet blistered and chilblained, they picked their way along to find the French, and fight them. The roads deep in slush, rutted and slithery, they had gone maybe three shivering impossible miles, when a dispatch rider sped along the creeping column, spattering mud, flying like the devil himself. James lifted his head, wiped his eyes, wondered for a moment, and then just trudged on. Half a mile later, the order tumbled back along the line: turn about. A massive movement of French troops had been spotted to the south. Napoleon was coming, and was moving to outflank them. Now they had to run.

They could not run. Not with a nine-pounder and horses thin as famine. They dragged themselves along.

They were to march now for La Coruña; the entire force was racing for the sea. The town was still in British hands and readily defensible; they would hole up there until the Navy could evacuate them all. This was not a defeat! Just as you swung back an arm to throw a punch, so an army must draw away, the better to strike again. They would sail for home, and they would regroup, and then they’d be back; they’d show that little Corsican cunt, Pye went on, his venom building, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth, stirring the other men to something almost like warmth, so that their eyes grew less dull, and their shoulders a little less slumped, and they began to recall what it was to be soldiers, and Englishmen, and hold their heads up high. But all James could think was to be back in England. Hedgerows full of birds and berries. Milk. A mild sun. An old fellow who’d nod to you in passing. Who did not expect you to beat him to a bloody mess, steal his dinner, rape his wife, and burn his house down around his ears.

Passing through a village at the tail-end of the company, in the dark fifteenth hour of a thirty-six-hour march, James tripped over something soft and solid. He landed, hands and knees, across it. His fingers were in mud, his shins wet; the road was sodden, and stank of wine and blood, and small things scuttled away in the darkness. He gagged: it was a body; he knew from the smell—blood, urine, and a trace of
sweetness—and it was so slight it must be a child. He staggered back to his feet. He shambled on.

Up at the forward pair of horses, he took hold of a bridle, and laid a palm on a velvet neck. He whispered Spanish nonsense, and he kept on marching, one hand on the reassuring endurance of the horse. James’s shoes were sodden tatters, his gaiters rags. His legs were weak, and his stomach sick with famine.

And he was afraid. This was true fear now, not just a battle’s fleeting consciousness of mortality. This was a constant hum that built and grew until nothing else could be thought of, not at all.

When, in the dawn chill, a halt was called, they were out in open cold, the sky pale with high thin cloud. Smoke trailed from low tumbledown buildings half a mile or so from the side of the road. James unhitched the forward pair from the gun carriage, and led them towards the dwelling. He was thinking simply: shelter, fodder, sleep. And then, as soon as he surfaced, he’d be up and off again. The fear was too sharp to let him rest for long.

The horses stumbled across the rutted field, their heads hanging low. When James heaved open the slumped door, a handful of redcoats looked up from their smoking fire; a couple of them reached for their Brown Besses.

“Gunner,” he said, to explain the blue.

Then they slumped, seeing he was one of theirs. One of them waved him in.

“C’mon, then, if you’re coming. Join the party.”

The place was a shell; the roof was half collapsed. It was a barn, or stable, divided into precarious, worm-holed stalls; there was a little wispy old hay; he led the horses to it, and they lifted mouthfuls and slowly chewed.

The redcoats had built a fire of timber they had scavenged from the building: bits of rafter and board and a fallen roof beam were heaped on the bare flags. The old wood burnt smartly.

“It’s perishing.”

James slumped down and watched the flickering flames. Fear faded to a murmur: the men talked, but he could not follow what they were saying, could not care enough to try, could not even speak, not any more. He leaned back, feet to the fire. He blinked.

When he woke up, the redcoats were gone. So were the horses. When he stumbled out into the daylight, the column was gone too.

Fear now was a creature; it slithered around him, covered his face and got in amongst his hair and he could not breathe and he could not think, and he just stared across the wide poor land, and along the empty road, then spun to look back off the way they’d come from.

He was alone.

Why had the other men not woken him?

That was a thought.

Because they stole the horses
.

That was another thought.

It was a faint reassurance, that these thoughts still came.

He shivered, rubbing at his arms.

He looked up at the high pale sun. Midafternoon.

But was it the same day, or was it the next?

Alone now, he found the road paralysing. It sliced across the open land, the fields stubbled or bare with winter; he felt as exposed as a louse on a shaven scalp.

The company’s progress was easy to mark, and so to follow: the frost-scuffed tracks, lost bootsoles, a broken-axled wagon, dung, patches of yellow piss on the snow. He could not bring himself to walk the road itself, so he followed alongside it, on the far side of the ditch, stumbling over rocks and tearing through scrub. He kept glancing over his shoulder, scanning the horizon behind him, his neck prickling.

In the evening, he came upon a fallen horse; packs of flesh had already been stripped from the haunches. He hacked off a strip of flesh himself and chewed on it as he went; it was dry and crusted with blood and deeply satisfying.

He walked on as the light faded, and it grew dark; he stumbled through the shadows. He was nothing again: animate mud, crawling along the surface of the land. He would slither back to the company. He would be safe there, in the mire. Safe as far as La Coruña, where the Navy would come to dig them out and cart them off, like night-soil from an outhouse.

He met the first stragglers the following day; they formed themselves out of the dust-haze and the distance: a roadside shrine, two men sitting at its foot. The painted wooden Madonna had had her eyes gouged out, and the leaves and berries around her bare toes were frostbitten and stark. A spring bubbled below, forming a basin in the stone; clean water welled there like in a boiling pan and a faint steam rose from it. The soldiers had drunk, and were resting; they looked uncommonly clean; one was still wiping his neck with a dampened kerchief. James stumbled up to them.

“English!” he said, waving.

The men looked at each other. One nodded. They didn’t say a word.

“Thank God I’ve found you!”

He fell to his knees at the little pool, and cupped his hand and drank. He tasted the sulphurous warm water and the sweat and filth of his own hand. Chin dripping, he unknotted his own neckerchief to wipe the wet and dirt away.

“Are we far behind the main body here?”

The two men looked at each other.

“I was lost, I was left behind. I’ve been racing to catch up for—days—” He shook his head, defeated by the stretch of undifferentiated time.

One of them laughed; it had no mirth in it.

“What? What’s happened?”

The soldier shook his head.

“Are the French come? Are we defeated? Is it a rout?”

Then one spoke. He was Welsh, and his accent so strong that for a moment James was not sure of what he was telling him, and it was only after the words were over, and the men were already scrambling to their feet and picking up their knapsacks, and heading away, that James quite realized what had been said.

“We are doing our very best, my friend, to lose ourselves for good.”

He came upon the tail-end of the Army three days later, on the edge of a small market town. The relief was so great it was as though his pack had lifted off his shoulders and he was going to rise up into the sky like
a kite. The noise, the voices, the familiar chaos and stink: it disgusted him, and it felt safe.

A hundred yards into the rank mess of the Army, he found an officer, saluted and made himself known. The officer nodded, gestured him along, sending him to a big house on the main square, all fancy stonework and balconies, commandeered for the officers’ accommodation.

He gave his name and rank to the clerk there. In the dim anteroom, the young man scanned through his lists, frowning; he had a boil on his neck. After a moment, he got up from his desk, opened the door and stepped out into the lobby. When he came back, it was with two armed guards.

“There he is. Do your work.”

The guards took hold of James’s arms, and twisted them up behind his back. James tried to shrug them off.

“I don’t— Why?”

“You are a deserter.”

“No—”

“Your sergeant reported you.”

“If I was, why would I come back?”

The clerk shrugged. “Deserters do. They find out what it’s like. They come back.”

James, his hands clamped in manacles, was dragged down into a cellar, which smelt of wine and mice and was lit by a narrow grille high up in the wall. Someone threw a blanket at him; he shuffled it around his shoulders, sank down against the cold stone, and closed his eyes. Fear loosened its teeth and slithered away and coiled up in a corner. They could not keep him locked up for long; with the retreat in full flood they simply could not manage it. They would have to haul him out to explain himself, and all would come clear, and he would not hesitate to point the finger. Those soldiers who had let him sleep on, while the Army moved off, who’d stolen his horses—it was a long shot that they would ever be found; indeed, they might well have deserted themselves, and taken the horses to ride rather than eat. But the thing was—and this was a thing of clear certainty and faith for him—it was all just a mistake: he had not deserted, and he would not be punished for something that he had not done.

The hours crept by; the light from the grille slid across the wall. He dozed, head drooping, and dreamed of the farm. Of meadow grass and cool skies and wild strawberries. Of the gentleman who had ruffled his curls, and said that he was as fine a chap as he had seen, and asked if he was happy.

James, waking now to clarity, felt homesick for a home that he had never really had. If he lived through this, through the retreat and any skirmishes that they might fall into on the way, if he made it as far as La Coruña and the sea, if he took ship for England—if he could just survive this disaster, and all the disasters yet to come in his eleven remaining years of service—he would one day return to Hertfordshire. It was something to promise himself, waiting for him at the end of everything: the paradise to come. If the old man was still alive, James would find him: Mr. Bennet, who had, all those years ago, cared enough to ask whether James was happy. Mr. Bennet was a good man, an important man, the most important in that village near Meryton; and if Mr. Bennet would have him, James would be his man.