Soldier of the Queen (6 page)

With a married sister? He didn’t believe her.

She was melting in his arms, her eyes half-closed, her lips apart, her face flushed and pink. Her dress had ridden up so that he could see what seemed to be yards of plump leg encased in white stocking. He could even see the red garters with which she held them in place, tied neatly just above her knees. Her bodice was open to the waist now, with all the ribbons that secured her underslip unfastened, and he realised she wasn’t wearing stays.

By God, he thought, she’d come prepared! She’d planned it all!

Her breasts, white and pink-tipped, were soft beneath his hand. There were pale blue veins in the marble whiteness of them and, over the sound of the stream and the hum of the bees, she was making little passionate mewing noises in his car. Far from fending him off now she was even helping him, her breath coming in swift little pants, and he seemed to be knee-deep in discarded linen.

‘No one will disturb us here,’ she whispered. ‘Take me, Colby, take me!’

She had thrown aside all the coy pretence. For a second his senses shouted ‘No’, then a flame of desire shot through him that threatened to scorch his soul, and a towering wave thundered over him as his arms closed round her.

Staring at Georgy’s letter which he held open inside the
Morning Post
, Colby was hardly aware of the headlines beyond it.

She had always been in the habit of sending him notes and usually they were gushing, but now there was a new tartness in her words that he’d never noticed before, a new firmness that allowed no leeway and no room for manoeuvre or excuse.
‘The wedding could easily be held before the autumn, as you well know
,’ she wrote.
‘Certainly, too long must not elapse. No one must ever know how wicked we have been and you cannot possibly turn from the girl you have wronged
.’

He stared at the prim round writing, his eyes blank and defeated. She had been talking and writing about marriage for days now, making no bones about what was in her mind and, with Colby always stubbornly dodging the issue, here she was again, with another bloody note, sharper in tone and finally putting the ultimatum squarely on the mat before him.

Wronged! Considering it had been her idea, she was stretching it a bit.

‘You all right, boy?’

As his father spoke, Colby jumped and hastily stuffed the letter away. Major-General Goff was old now but he was as straight as a ramrod, even when he was seated. It had been his grandfather, Joshua Pellew Goff, who had raised the 19th in 1760 after Eyre Coote had smashed the French at the Battle of Wandewash. Returning home with the despatches, he had been granted two thousand acres in Yorkshire, the sum of five hundred pounds and the charter to raise a regiment of light dragoons.

The room was dark and contained prints of officers in ceremonial dress; pictures and statuettes of horses; mounted spurs; a sabre; and a rake, poker and shovel made out of French cavalry swords collected on the field of Waterloo, which were often used to demonstrate weapon drill. The old man studied his son.

‘Look worried,’ he observed. ‘How do you feel these days? Quite recovered? No problems? No colic, strangles or thrush?’ Having rattled off a string of questions to which he clearly expected no replies, the general shifted in his chair and shook the folds out of his
Times
. ‘Better get your hair cut next time you go to see the doctor, by the way,’ he added. ‘It’s almost down to your hocks.’

Settling himself more comfortably, he absorbed himself in his reading again, satisfied his son was on the mend. Colby watched him overtly across the top of his own paper, black despair in his mind. No, Father, he thought gloomily, no problems! Not one! Only Georgina Markham trying to rush me into marriage!

Her surrender had been complete but there had been little in it of the grand passion he had expected. She had been unresisting and had seemed no prize at all, letting him work his will on her without apparently joining in, laying in the grass, her clothes undone, her breasts out of her bodice like superb fruits, and wearing the same triumphant expression Joan of Arc must have worn as she went to her death.

She had spent what had seemed hours titivating herself afterwards, and he had to go backwards and forwards to the stream to fetch water in his hat to cool her flushed face before she would even make an attempt to move. He was still recovering from the shock of disappointment. After all those years of waiting, planning and scheming, he had expected crashing cymbals and there hadn’t been even the tiniest tinkling bell.

He had been more than glad to leave and had snapped at Ackroyd who had been waiting at the front door of the Markharm house with the horses, spinning a yarn to Annie Oldham, one of the housemaids. For a few days he had felt uncertain and ill-tempered. There had even been an honest feeling of guilt because he’d been brought up to be decent and reasonably moral, and writers had it that what had happened to Georgina was a fate worse than death. That she hadn’t suffered overmuch, however, had soon become clear and as time had elapsed it had appeared that he hadn’t put her in the family way either. The only fly in the ointment was her growing possessiveness. Instead of him chasing Georgina, it was now the other way round.

He frowned. Dammit, if a girl came at you with her undergarments at the slope, what could a man do but oblige? A cavalryman was supposed to have an eye for opportunity.

He was still surprised that anyone as devoted to overheated rooms as Georgy should want a horse-smelly type like himself, but she had clearly had it all planned and he realised now it had all been part of a campaign. He looked again at the letter she had sent, opening it furtively once more inside the newspaper. Her words seemed to burn in his brain. Marriage meant ‘love, honour and obey’ and ‘till death do us part’, and at twenty-five, with the whole world before him, it seemed a dreadful prospect.

He supposed he would have to marry some time. His father would begin to imagine there was something odd about him if he didn’t, and the old man was a stickler for the line continuing because there had been Goffs at Braxby probably since Adam. But Georgy! The idea of lying alongside that flaccid white body every night, while she expected him to do his duty as a husband, listening to her conversation, drinking her everlasting cups of tea – a flat-footed dismounted drink if ever there were one – seemed like a distant view of Hell.

Yet he couldn’t see any way out of it. If he tried to back off, she’d have her father round like a shot, demanding, accusing, talking of the honour of the regiment. And his own father, stiff with pride and rigid with integrity, would back him up. The prospect was terrifying.

He became aware of his father speaking again. ‘Following this business in America, boy?’

He hurriedly got his thoughts into line and dressed by the right. A quick glance at the paper put him in order, because
The Times
and the
Morning Post
were full of the war in the States. And a damn funny affair it was, too! Civil war was strange enough in any event, but this one seemed to be conducted in a manner based on a cross between the viciousness of a blood feud and the class consciousness of a vicarage tea party. While men were killing each other between the two capitals, in New York vacant stores had been opened as recruiting booths, and pullers-in from the social register or the nearest political office had appeared on the sidewalks to encourage enlistment – on the under-standing, of course, that when the regiment was raised, they would be its officers. Everybody had wanted to be in the war. And still did. Even Brosy la Dell.

‘My cousin’s with the
Morning Advertiser
,’ he had written the previous day from Dover where he was energetically pursuing the daughter of a naval captain, ‘and I suggested that, since Billy Russell of
The Times
seems to be making a botch of things over there, they might be glad to have me go over to write it all up for them. He replied that they could certainly do with
someone
, as the chap they sent out last year has just got himself shot by accident, but that, since I couldn’t even write a bill for a load of coal, I’m not the man they want.’

Brosy’s letter showed all his old undimmed cheerfulness. Like Colby he had advanced in rank not by purchase but by the simple process of stepping into dead men’s shoes, and also like Colby, seemed to have the same skill at survival.

Colby was aware of his father still waiting for his answer. ‘Yes, Father,’ he said. ‘I’ve been following it. Who do you think’ll win?’

‘South.’ The old man had no doubt. ‘The South’s got the cavalry. They were the horse-owners, and horse-owners are good horse-masters. I can’t imagine horse-masters coming from New York where they only use horses to pull carriages, can you?’

‘All the same, Father, they haven’t yet got Kentucky and Missouri to secede, Arkansas and Tennessee are now in Northern hands, and they’re already beginning to encircle the South.’ Colby gestured with his paper and, as he did so, the thing hit him like a blow in the face. Good God, he thought, it’s the answer to everything!

‘How long do you think it’ll go on, Father?’ he asked.

‘Two or three more years.’

Colby was sitting bolt-upright now, his brain racing. In two or three years Georgina would surely have decided it wasn’t worth waiting and turned to someone else. ‘That’s what I felt, Father,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And here I am excused duty until I’m recovered. Where better for my health than Virginia, where they’re fighting? Warm, dry and no malaria. Good place to get over an illness. I could write for the newspapers. Everybody’s at it these days.’

The general thought for a moment. ‘How about your career?’ he asked.

Colby beamed. ‘Won’t suffer, Father. Could even open the way to a staff appointment. I think I’ll take the train to London tomorrow and go and see the
Morning Advertiser.
’

‘Lying in the shadow underneath the trees,

Goodness, how delicious, eating goober peas!’

Riding slowly down the dusty Maryland road, one leg cocked over the horn of his saddle, Colby sang softly to himself. Just behind, with a mule in tow carrying their luggage, Ackroyd looked up.

‘What’s goober peas?’ he asked.

‘Dunno.’ Colby smiled. ‘Just a song I heard. Eggs laid by a goober bird, or something, I dare say.’

Ackroyd nodded and, as he lapsed into a satisfied silence, Colby went on singing, well content with the way things had turned out.

It had not taken him long to get the measure of the
Morning Advertiser
. They were very much uncommitted and anxious to avoid personal views of the war because Russell of
The Times
had got himself into trouble with a speech at a St Patrick’s day dinner that had not only been repudiated by his editor but had also made things difficult for himself in the States.

‘Avoid opinions,’ Colby had been told. ‘Avoid anything controversial.’

‘What do you want?’ he had asked cheerfully. ‘Sermons or recipes? Or shall I send you a hymn?’

They had landed in New York where, as befitted a man holding the Queen’s commission, Colby had stayed in the best hotel he could find. It had a perpendicular railway called an elevator going through each storey and was full of politicians and salesmen masquerading as soldiers. But, where he had expected to see an embattled city, there had seemed instead to be more of an emotional fervour than a desire to get to the front. The women dressed their children in outlandish costumes as soldiers, the politicians were still playing at politics, and the negroes, despite the avowed declaration that they were equal, were feared and hated, something that showed very plainly when riots broke out over the introduction of conscription and most of the victims proved to be black.

The real contact with the war started at Washington. With its cobblestones and iron wheels, its hoop skirts, livery stables, taverns and high stoops, Washington was more Southern than Northern in character and its charm had been enhanced by the gentle widow of a Northern cavalry colonel who had taken a fancy to Colby and allowed him to use her home as his own.

In the last weeks, however, the war seemed to have changed. The Northern army had been moulded only slowly after many humiliations at the hands of a much smaller, worse-supplied force, and seemed even now to be composed of volunteers, conscripts and bounty jumpers whose quality varied from splendid to awful. The businessmen and politicians who had been the original officers and leaders had disappeared, however, and there was now a dangerously aggressive mood in the air, so that the sort of officer who abandoned his regiment when the weather was bad had gone.

And since the great battle at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania that summer, it was becoming clear that the power of the Confederacy, once so virile and strong, was at last in decline. Its losses had been enormous and while the North’s had also, the North could accept them, and people who before had gone about their business dourly, feeling that whatever they did the South did better, were now holding their heads up as though they could at last see the light at the end of a long dark tunnel. The North was scenting victory and was pushing hard to win it. Things were being tightened up. The gentlemanliness was disappearing from the war and paroles to captives were no longer permitted, because the one thing the South needed was men.

‘There’s a smell of victory in the air,’ Colby said out loud.

Dozing in the saddle in the late autumn sunshine, Ackroyd lifted his head. He obviously hadn’t the same sense of smell, though, bought out of the army to accompany Colby as his general factotum, he had shown a remarkable ability for getting away the newsletters Colby wrote, able to find a telegraph that was working when no one else could and managing to bypass delays to get the reports to New York. It had been Ackroyd who had discovered they could use ordinary mails, with the occasional expedient of the mail steamer at Boston or New York, and Ackroyd who learned that certain items could be speeded up by use of the telegraph to Nova Scotia, from where, if their arrival coincided with the departure of a fast steamer, they took only seven days to London instead of fourteen.