Soldier of the Queen (33 page)

‘I believe you know General Wolseley, Coll,’ Canning said.

From the way Wolseley, who was standing with his back to them, turned as his name was mentioned, it was obvious the meeting had been prearranged. Wolseley stood eyeing him for a moment. He didn’t beat about the bush with pleasantries.

‘Heard of King Koffee, Colby?’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. Gold Coast, I believe.’

‘Actually, his name’s Kofi Karikari.’ Wolseley talked with the self-satisfaction of a professor addressing a pupil. ‘You’ll have read how he sent his Ashantis into the Protectorate to harry the Fantis, attack Elmina and worry the missionaries and the Europeans?’

‘It was in
The Times
, sir.’

Wolseley nodded. ‘The government’s decided it’s time he was knocked on the head. They’ve given me the job.’

Now we’re coming to it, Colby thought. He watched Wolseley carefully. He had an enormous capacity for work, he’d heard, and there was a peculiar buoyancy of mind that gave his undistinguished frame a strange vivacity. He was speaking now to Colby in a way that was surprisingly gracious.

‘A tricky job, sir,’ Colby ventured. ‘His capital’s over a hundred miles inland behind the Prah River and the climate’s only bearable from December to February.’

‘How do you know?’ The words were barked at him.

‘Looked it up, sir.’

‘Why?’

‘Matter of interest, sir.’

‘Hm!’ Wolseley was studying him keenly. ‘I think I can do it,’ he said. ‘I’ve been given civil as well as military authority. It’s a combination that appeals to me and I’ve decided on a new kind of campaign. I shall land at Gold Coast Castle at the beginning of October with a group of hand-picked officers and no troops. I shall raise units from the coastal natives, build a road inland to the Prah, then call in the three battalions of regulars I’ve been given. They’ll arrive in mid-December, and by the end of the month I shall be ready. I shall dash inland, holding my troops in camps which have already been prepared and fending off any Ashanti resistance along the road.’

‘I see, sir.’

‘I don’t persuade myself it’ll be easy because the road will be little more than a tunnel through the rain forest. At the end of January I shall blast the spirit out of King Koffee’s Army – probably at Amoaful – burn his capital and by the beginning of March be on my way back to England.’

‘It sounds a good way to do it, sir. Soundly conceived.’

‘And,’ Wolseley said, ‘it recommends itself to the government, because it’ll be quick and cheap and won’t tie up regular troops for long. It depends entirely on the specialists I’ve picked. Many of them are colleagues from the Red River. I want you to join me.’

Colby said nothing. Now he had it. On the mat.

‘I’ve got Evelyn Wood to drive the road inland,’ Wolseley continued. ‘And Redvers Buller for Intelligence. There’ll be little cavalry, but it will need to be handled by someone with imagination.’ He studied Colby’s face. ‘I don’t want elderly major-generals. I want
young
men. With the local rank of colonel. It’s something you can’t afford to turn down, I think, because it’ll be a successful campaign and there’ll be a great deal of kudos attached to it.’

He was quite right, of course. There was something about Wolseley Colby didn’t like. He suspected he was arrogant, self-satisfied and an intriguer, but there was no doubt he was skilful, highly intelligent and lucky.

‘I quite agree, sir,’ he said, smiling. ‘I
can’t
afford to turn it down.’

When he reached home, he wasn’t quite sure how to lay the news before Augusta. Having her husband snatched from her so soon after marriage wasn’t something he imagined she’d welcome. She’d settled down well to being a soldier’s wife and, even if she had no love for this chilly northern town and the rented house they occupied, she showed no signs of discontent.

She was in bed when he arrived, but as soon as he appeared, she turned up the lamp and sat up, wide awake.

She delighted him, whether she was running the house, organising some charity or up to the front with the local hunt as the hounds poured over a hedge with the field strung out across half a mile of grazing behind. Though he didn’t know it, she tried to model herself on him, determined to be as capable, as beautiful and as brave as he wished her to be. He decided for the umpteenth time that he was the luckiest man alive.

She was beaming at him. ‘You look so splendid in full dress, Mr Goff,’ she said. ‘I’m always so proud to see you.’

‘So’m I, ma’m, to see you.’

‘Especially in bed, I think.’

He grinned, unembarrassed. She made no bones about her enjoyment of making love.

‘I hope you didn’t drink too much,’ she said as he kissed her.

‘No.’ He felt as sober as a judge, and twice as sober because of the news he brought. He suspected it was shattering and couldn’t think of anything that could possibly be of greater moment to a young wife.

‘Dull dinner on the whole,’ he said. ‘Wolseley was there.’

‘Wolseley?’

‘Little feller with one eye and a face like a piece of stale bread. Met him first during your war. He had something to tell me.’

She studied him. ‘I have something to tell you, too,’ she said.

He hardly heard her, busy wondering how best to break the news. On their wedding night she had told him that, since she was a soldier’s wife, wherever he had to go, he must go without looking back. It had cost her a lot, he knew, but he also knew she wouldn’t break her promise. ‘He wants me to go to Africa,’ he blurted out.

She stared at him and he saw her face fall. ‘To Africa? What on earth for?’

He explained. ‘It’s this feller, Koffee,’ he said. ‘He’s got to be put in his place. They’ve given the job to Wolseley and he wants me to handle the horses.’

She was silent for a moment and he saw moisture in her eyes. ‘It’s only for a short while,’ he pointed out quickly. ‘He hopes to be away within the month and back by the end of April.’

She stared at him and suddenly the tears flowed.

‘It’s something I can’t afford to ignore,’ he argued. ‘And you promised never to stand in my way.’

‘I won’t,’ she sobbed.

‘Well, then! A matter of months, that’s all. It’s the best news I’ve heard for a long time, the best I shall hear this year, I expect.’

Her sobs grew stronger and he put his arms round her, wondering what in God’s name was wrong.

‘Yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘It’s the best news you’ll hear all right! It’s the only news you want to hear!
My
news is nothing in comparison!’

‘Well, it can’t be, can it? This could–’ he stopped dead. ‘Your news? What news do you have? Are your parents coming to visit you?’

She looked at him, her small face tense, a lock of hair falling over her nose so that his heart swelled with love for her. Fear and loneliness seized her and she pushed his hand away in a fury of anger then immediately relented and snatched it back, and instead began to beat his chest with her small fists.

‘No, you idiot,’ she wailed, spraying tears in all directions. ‘I’m going to have a baby!’

Robert Waldo Yorke Goff was born just as his father was being carried half-conscious, in a high fever and apparently dying, from a camp just south of Kumasi to the West African coast.

He had been hit by a bullet fashioned from a bent nail and fired at point-blank range into his back as he rode on a track through the jungle that was hung every few yards with decapitated bodies. When the surgeon’s probe had reached the region of his heart without finding the bullet, it had been decided it was time to stop. Given up for lost, he was pushed into a cart for the coast where another surgeon decided that a bullet fashioned from a bent nail might well not have gone where it could be expected to go and, by a little exploring managed to find it. Within a matter of days, Colby was on his feet, feeling not a great deal worse in health than he had felt throughout the whole humid, enervating campaign, and, about the time his new son – of whom he was as yet unaware – was first showing the facial muscle spasms that his delighted mother was convinced were smiles, he had decided he disliked the hospital – which was full of men dying from fever or the jagged wounds caused by crude native weapons – and had staggered from his bed. On a borrowed horse which itself was in a state of collapse, he rode through a night of torrential West African rain which turned the road into a muddy track, to rejoin his unit, and was present at the burning of King Koffee’s kraal at Umkasi.

Wolseley had been right. His detailed planning had brought success and, by the end of March Colby was on his way back to the coast, with the ‘Ashanti Ring’ – the narrow group of officers round Wolseley – already born, and the phrase ‘All Sir Garnet’ newly part of the English language.

Wolseley had surrounded himself by a remarkable group of young men – Pomeroy-Colley, Evelyn Wood, Redvers Buller, Baker Russell, George Morrow, Maurice, Butler, Brackenbury – and it had seemed at first a privilege to be one of them, because they were the possessors of ideas and proven courage. On second glance, however, Buller seemed sound only as far as his voice would carry; Colley was inclined to underestimate his enemies; Butler was too willing to champion an enemy’s point of view; and Morrow was a narrow staff theorist and a toady of very dubious ability. As the campaign advanced, it began to seem less and less of an honour and, from the way Wolseley was using them, Colby could see them, as they increased in rank and stature, splitting the army down the middle. No army could function with clever theorists alone and he suspected a few had even attached themselves to their brilliant chief for what they could get out of him and were not as sound as Wolseley thought.

Perhaps it was the bullet in the back that brought it forcibly home, because it was thanks to bad dispositions and over-confidence on the part of George Morrow that he had been where he was, and the dislike he had already begun to feel for Morrow was actively increased when he dodged the responsibility and laid the blame on Colby.

Left behind to tidy up the affair, when he arrived home, his son was three months old and Augusta had long since got over her disappointment at his disappearance. Because of her size it had not been an easy birth but her mother had appeared from Virginia and, with the aid of Harriet, by the time Colby arrived home, yellow with fever, she was completely recovered.

By this time the regiment had moved to Brighton, and Augusta had proved her intelligence and drive by acquiring a home near the sea which, she claimed, was ideal for the health of her new son and her weakened husband. With the aid of Grace la Dell, she had packed all their belongings into trunks and boxes, negotiated the rental and managed the move with all the aplomb of the manager who ran the Goff estates.

She still sometimes wondered where she belonged, however, because even now she wasn’t always sure that she belonged to the 19th. She had made a point, however, of visiting the wives of all the men in Colby’s squadron, something that wasn’t always easy because they sometimes seemed to consider it condescension and many of them lived in grisly lodgings about the town. But there were always children to make a common denominator, though she was terrified of the rough-rider sergeant’s wife, an enormous woman who was said to have belaboured fleeing Turkish soldiers at Balaclava and had fired a rifle against the mutineers in India when the 19th’s camp had been attacked on the way to Lucknow. As it happened, it was this very thing which enabled her to break the ice, because Augusta’s grandmother had done the same thing against the Indians in New Mexico.

She had also made a point of meeting the wives of the officers, though this wasn’t so easy as they were more scattered. Brosy’s Grace was always there, however; as well as Claude Cosgro’s Georgina, ever anxious, it seemed, to cast doubts on Colby’s fidelity; and his younger brother’s new wife, the same age as Augusta, and the daughter of a viscount.

She already knew more about the army than she realised: why the Scots Greys were called the Birdcatchers, why the 17th wore skull and crossed bones, why the Gloucester Regiment wore a cap badge both back and front, and the Royal Welsh a black flash under their collar and down their back. She learned to recognise the men of Colby’s squadron and not fall over when the recruiting sergeant, bedizened with a sash of office and hung with red, white and blue streamers like a prize-winning horse at a May Day parade, threw her a quivering salute; and fled whenever she could to Grace la Dell who managed to make her laugh and reassure her.

Her anger at Colby’s departure was quite overcome by her joy at his return. ‘Women are such frauds,’ she admitted. ‘They make such a show of being capable and strong, but it only requires a man to put his arms round them to make them go all soft and dependent. How long might I expect you to remain at home this time?’ she asked.

Colby shrugged. ‘The 19th are due for overseas,’ he admitted. ‘And Wolseley’s promised we shall go.’

‘Who’s Wolseley to say?’

‘The biggest man in the army at the moment. I suspect his success will go to his head, because he’s as obsequious to the aristocracy as he’s rude to civilians.’ Colby smiled. ‘There’s a great deal of fighting goes on in the army, Gussie, and it’s not all against the Queen’s enemies. I’m to go to staff college.’

She looked startled. ‘When we’ve just settled down here?’

He shrugged. ‘Camberley’s quite civilised and you get nowhere without it. The army’s growing up and a career officer needs more these days than courage and the ability to conform to the contemporary concept of a gentleman.’

‘Which you have,’ Augusta said proudly. ‘You command from personality. You’re stern without harshness. Your demands are high but never more than you’re willing to give yourself. You also have enthusiasm and a rigidity of principle, and I would say you’re one of that small band of leaders for whom men would cheerfully go anywhere.’

He gazed at her with a mixture of pride and affection. He hadn’t really known what love was when he’d married. But if love were believing in someone, if it were missing them when they weren’t there, if it were what had frightened him when he’d thought in West Africa that he was going to die without seeing her again, then, by God, he loved her.