The Street Philosopher (21 page)

‘It is a terrible, terrible shame,’ the Russian was saying. ‘I am taken aback, Captain, really I am. Only two months ago this house was fit for the Tsar–almost too good for him, in fact! I do not blame you British. No, I blame the filthy Turks. The beasts have a natural bent towards wickedness and rapine. The stories told in Sebastopol of how they treat the women of countries they occupy curdle the blood. Quite why the noble forces of Britain and France have taken their side I will never,
never
understand.’

Wray’s lack of interest was plain. ‘Where is it, Gorkachov?’

‘Over here, Captain.’ The Russian walked across the room, stepping gingerly through the wreckage towards one of the reinforced doors. ‘This is it! One of the first modifications I made when I was appointed steward. The cellar below is impregnable, a place no thief can force his way into, reserved for the storage of the most valuable treasures during difficult times such as these.’

He drew off one of his long cavalry boots and shook three keys from it. The door, once unlocked, opened soundlessly, and all five men went through. Gorkachov’s amiable voice could be heard for some time as they descended deeper beneath the building, amplified by the stone walls.

‘What is this?’ Kitson whispered urgently. ‘What is going on?’

‘Boyce,’ Cracknell replied. ‘Has to be.’

There was no question of the
Courier
team taking this chance to depart. Even Styles had shrugged off some of
his morbidity and was watching the doorway with close interest. After a minute or so, one of the corporals and the Russian servant emerged, carrying a framed wooden panel between them. It was about four and a half feet by three; they set it down against the wall, facing outwards. The corporal then took his rifle from his shoulder and ushered the Russian back down to the cellar with evident distrust.

As they moved away from in front of the panel, a rectangle of lustrous, dazzling colour was revealed, shining warmly through the dullness of the kitchen. It was a painting, depicting a man standing beside a table. He was dressed in the purple toga of a senior Roman official, and was rubbing his hands over a wooden bowl. Clean-shaven and hard-featured, he had the composed face of a capable administrator. Water could be seen dripping down between his fingers: he was washing. In the background was a palace, rows of mighty Corinthian columns stretching off into the distance. A man clad in a long white robe was being led away through these columns by a squad of armoured soldiers. Holy light was breaking through the palace’s ceiling in golden shafts, bathing this prisoner as he was taken away.

Kitson registered the subject and style, and started; then he stared in complete astonishment. He had to get closer. Ignoring the protests of his senior, he left the barrels and crept over the kitchen’s dusty flagstones as stealthily as he could.

Despite the composure of the rest of the face, the eyes bore the very faintest suggestion of emotion; of a horrible, overwhelming, haunting guilt. Although so small and subtle, this touch was like a tiny spot of blood on a murderer’s shirt, sweeping away in an instant all his efforts to detach himself and claim innocence and, once noticed, transforming the picture completely.

‘Pilate washing his hands,’ he murmured under his breath, unable to stop a grin from breaking across his face.

There were noises from the cellar. Eyes still on the panel, he returned reluctantly to his comrades. ‘Styles,’ he asked immediately, ‘do you know of this work?’

‘I–I recognise the style, I think,’ the illustrator replied diffidently. ‘Is it not Raphael? His Roman manner?’

Recovering this old knowledge brought Styles a palpable relief, and for that moment the warping woes of the Crimean campaign seemed to fall away from him. All is not lost, Kitson thought; Robert Styles may still be saved.

‘Indeed–a Raffaelo Sanzio, here in the Crimea. This work is mentioned by Giorgio Vasari as being owned by Cosimo de Medici in 1568, but nothing has been heard of it since. It was thought to be destroyed. This is an incredible discovery–incredible! God only knows how it came to be in this place. Make a sketch, Robert, quickly.’

The illustrator fumbled with his equipment for a few seconds and then started to draw with eager haste.

‘They are stealing it for Boyce,’ said Cracknell quietly. ‘Just you watch.’

Wray’s party emerged from the cellar. This time the other corporal carried a strongbox with the servant. It was heavy; they set it down with a groan. Coin, guessed Cracknell, or gemstones.

‘Mallender, Lavery,’ said the Captain in his lisping drawl of a voice, addressing the corporals. ‘Get the cart into that hall upstairs. The less distance we have to move this lot, the better.’ They hesitated. ‘You can manage that, can’t you?’

‘Best I stay with you, Cap’n,’ answered one of them. ‘Can’t trust these Ruski bastards, sir. A month in the pickets ’as taught me that much.’

‘I can move the cart alone, Cap’n,’ added the other. ‘Mall can stay.’

Cracknell bit his knuckle. Such misguided loyalty!

Wray sighed, seemingly unable to summon the energy to shout them down. ‘Very well, do what you will.’

So Corporal Lavery went back up, whilst Mallender stood guard at the foot of the staircase, out of Cracknell’s sight. The loquacious Russian, although clearly pained by thought of a vehicle being driven into the villa, soon recovered his spirits and began to talk about the painting Kitson was so impressed by. The Tsar’s father, it turned out, had bought it at the secret sale of a disgraced Austrian Count. It was said that the panel had been given to his family back in the
seventeenth century as payment for a nefarious act–an assassination, it was suspected.

Wray was sneering, his features becoming even more rodent-like as the thin lips drew back. ‘And your Tsar doesn’t mind you using this masterpiece to pay the Colonel for your escape to Paris?’

Aha, thought Cracknell; that’s why this Gorkachov’s being so bloody cooperative. There is a deal underway–a deal with Nathaniel Boyce.

The Russian smiled. ‘Nicholas and I are good friends. He would not want me to suffer in this war. Besides, he does not care overmuch for the painting. Very few people know he has it–not even his own children. The attitude of an emperor to his possessions—’

‘You knew about the attack, didn’t you, Gorkachov?’ interrupted Wray suddenly. ‘The attack, this morning. That’s why you made your escape when you did. To avoid a big fight.’

The Russian seemed unperturbed by the hostility in Wray’s voice. ‘Captain, how can you think such a thing? I merely wished to reach Paris for the winter. It is my favourite season in the city. To see the Tuileries frosted with snow is as enchanting as anything I can imagine. Society is alive as at no other time of year, and the distractions for a gentleman are both choice and illimitable.’

Wray let Gorkachov ramble on about Paris, about the balls, the fine restaurants and the charming ladies, for a short while. Then he took the revolver from his belt and lifted it so that the barrel was almost touching the Russian’s chest.

This brought the Parisian monologue to an immediate halt. ‘C-captain,’ the Russian stammered pleadingly, ‘I–I do not know what—’

Wray fired twice, felling Gorkachov so quickly that the eye could barely follow it. Without pause, in a single fluid movement, he turned the pistol on the servant, sending him spinning into a splintered crockery cabinet. The gunshots filled the kitchen completely, hitting the ears with a percussive clap and leaving them ringing shrilly.

A second later Corporal Mallender yelled, ‘Cap’n Wray, what are ye doing?’

Swivelling around, Wray closed an eye to aim. He daren’t, Cracknell thought disbelievingly; not one of Her Majesty’s soldiers. But then the Captain fired, and fired again. There was a clattering thump as a large uniformed body struck against the kitchen’s stone stairs.

The servant was still alive. Murmuring weakly in Russian, he was trying to crawl inside the cabinet he had fallen against. Wray fiddled with his pistol, cursing the mechanism; then he walked over to the cabinet and put his last bullet in the back of the man’s head.

A soldier’s boots sprinted across the room above them. Wray idly studied the painting as Lavery rushed down the kitchen stairs–and stopped abruptly when he saw Mallender’s body.

‘
Jimmy!
’ Lavery’s cry was hoarse with disbelief. ‘Oh no, pal, no, no…’

‘Turns out Gorkachov here had a pistol,’ Wray informed him coolly. ‘He got off a few shots, I’m afraid, before I could put him and his man down. Dashed bad luck.’

Cracknell looked at Kitson. His junior’s face was set in a hard scowl. The illustrator, however, had crossed his arms over his head as if under bombardment. So collected in the cave when he had silenced that Russian infantryman, he had now reverted to his usual ineffectual self.

Corporal Lavery, still on the stairs, had started to sob. ‘Ah, Jimmy… I served with ’im these fifteen years, Cap’n. An’ a better fellow never stepped.’

‘Stop that, Corporal,’ ordered Wray. ‘We have to get this upstairs, and then back to camp. Quickly.’

Lavery shambled mournfully into view and together the two men hefted the strongbox from the kitchen.

As soon as they were gone, Cracknell was on his feet and pacing around the wine butts. ‘Murder!’ he spat, his voice straining to express the extent of his outrage. ‘This is murder! Two defenceless men–and an
English soldier
!’

Corporal Mallender was laid out awkwardly upon the staircase, an ugly red tear in his shoulder and another at the base of his neck. His rifle was still clenched in his hands, and there was an expression of innocent surprise on his face.

‘There, Thomas,
there
is a killing to effect the bloody mind! A killing without sense or the slightest bloody justification!’ Cracknell spun about. ‘Why the hell did he do it? The Russian was
giving him
the painting. The Corporal, poor bastard, was
watching out for him
!’

His subordinates had stood up, and were looking around the kitchen, at the painting and the fresh bodies, with stunned uncertainty. There were noises upstairs; a shout, then the wooden clank of cartwheels.

‘We have to leave,’ Cracknell told them, ‘this second. If Wray finds us we’ll be as dead as Corporal Mallender there. You’ve seen how much he enjoys that pistol of his.’

‘But what of the painting?’ Kitson said. ‘We cannot just allow Wray to take it!’

‘Don’t fret, Thomas–we will get them for this,’ Cracknell promised. ‘They won’t succeed, my friend. The painting will incriminate them, don’t you see? And there’s that soldier, Corporal Lavery–he’ll talk. We will damn well get them for this, I swear it. But right now, we have to go.’

Feeling more like a true leader than he had done all day, the senior correspondent hurried his team up into the villa and through the first doorway they came to. It took them into a small, circular antechamber with a single broken window. They knocked through the loose shards of glass and clambered out into the rain.

‘Are you quite finished?’ Major-General Sir William Codrington’s white sideburns seemed to glow against the reddening skin beneath them. His narrow, lipless mouth was pressed together into a hard line.

Kitson and Cracknell stood side by side in the hut that served as Codrington’s brigade headquarters. It was modestly furnished, with several maps of the region mounted on the walls, and smelled strongly of wood resin and boot polish. The Major-General himself sat behind a long trestle table strewn with papers. The
Courier
men were positioned at one end of this table; Boyce and Wray, in full dress uniform, stewed silently at the other.

Cracknell raised his chin, defiant in the face of Codrington’s obvious disbelief. ‘I believe that’s everything,’ he replied calmly. ‘Call forth Corporal Lavery and then search Boyce’s quarters for the painting. That will corroborate what we’ve told you.’

Codrington sat back heavily, crossing his arms. There was a long pause. He looked out of a window towards the battlefield, his craggy profile framed against the raw planks behind him. ‘You seriously expect me to believe,’ he said eventually, his gruff voice slowed by incredulity, ‘that a rare painting by some ancient Italian was here, in the Crimea–and that Colonel Boyce of the Paulton Rangers entered into a deal with a Russian nobleman to acquire it, which he then broke by having the man murdered.’

‘Yes, in order to cover the theft,’ Kitson interjected.
‘The painting is immensely rare, Major-General, its value beyond all reckoning. Most connoisseurs think it destroyed. It has no provenance, no history since the sixteenth century. Its only link with the Crimea, with the Tsar, was this Imperial steward. By murdering those who led him to the painting Colonel Boyce is free to make up any story about its acquisition that he likes. It is his word against that of whoever might challenge him.’

‘And also,’ Cracknell added, ‘he wouldn’t then have to arrange the Russian fellow’s passage out of the Crimea, and risk being caught aiding the enemy.’

A couple of the staff officers standing around the edges of the hut stirred uneasily. Whether their arguments were convincing anyone Kitson could not tell. They certainly weren’t making any progress with Major-General Codrington. Indeed, every word they uttered seemed to harden the commander of the Light Division’s first brigade yet further against them. It was becoming clear to Kitson that their case was an impossible one to make. Boyce and Wray had committed a crime so brazen and unlikely that it would not even be believed, let alone investigated. The army, also, had suffered a traumatic blow only two days previously. Kitson could well understand Codrington not wishing to probe the black corruption that existed amongst his regimental officers whilst the dead were still being pulled from the caves and crevices of Inkerman Ridge. Cracknell, in requesting this audience, had pushed them into a confrontation too quickly simply because he longed to have it.

The Major-General shook his head. ‘All of this is ridiculous, all of it. Your accusation regarding the corporal, though, is positively
despicable
.’

‘That is the word,’ agreed Cracknell emphatically. ‘Despicable it most certainly is. This Colonel sent his men away from a major defensive battle for his own material gain, and ordered them to kill–Russians, yes, but also any Englishman who stood in their path. Corporal Mallender’s only crime was to refuse to leave Captain Wray alone so that he could execute the steward and his servant. He saw them die, Sir William, and so had to die himself.’

Codrington glared at him, his round eyes black and furious. ‘I am a major-general, and will be addressed as such by you,’ he snapped. ‘We are in the camp of Her Majesty’s Army, not one of your grub-street taverns.’

‘My apologies,
Major-General
, but I—’

‘And my meaning, which you plainly comprehend but choose to ignore, is that you, sir,
you
are despicable for making such an accusation.’

Turning away from Cracknell in disgust, the Major-General addressed Wray. The Captain came to attention with such force that Codrington’s quill bounced in its inkpot. Trussed up in his dress uniform he looked like a little bantam cockerel, not the merciless murderer of the villa. He stated that there was no truth whatsoever to any of the newspapermen’s foul allegations. He had been fighting against the Russians that morning, from beginning to bitter end. Confirmation of his continual presence on the front line could have been provided by his immediate superior, Major James Maynard, had he not died in Colonel Boyce’s advance past the Sandbag Battery.

‘And what of these corporals–Mallender and…?’

‘Lavery, sir,’ Boyce said. His arm was in a sling, and he had a look of noble endurance on his face. ‘Both were killed in the advance.’

‘So Lavery was done in too, was he?’ sneered Cracknell. ‘You again, Wray, I suppose, covering your tracks?’

Kitson stared at the floor, wishing that Cracknell would keep quiet. Such combativeness would not help them; and sure enough, Codrington told him bluntly to hold his tongue or be thrown out into the mud.

‘They gave their lives for their Queen in the finest fashion,’ Boyce continued with stoic reserve. ‘I am appalled by this slander, quite frankly, but not altogether surprised by it. I have crossed swords with this paper’s senior correspondent before, and know him to be a liar and a cad of the lowest conceivable sort. The man bears a bitter grudge against the army, as any who have read a
London Courier
recently will know all too well. He seems to hold me in particular disdain–a source of no little pride, I must say.’

Someone to the rear of the hut chuckled. Was Boyce making an oblique allusion to the widespread rumours about Cracknell and his wife, Kitson wondered, and using them to his advantage, suggesting that here lay the motive for these allegations?

‘I saw the
Courier’
s coverage of the Alma,’ mused Codrington. ‘It was tendentious, certainly, and quite reckless in its criticism of Lord Raglan and our generals.’

‘I assure you that we hold no grudge against the army, Major-General,’ said Cracknell darkly, ‘only against those who would lead it to ruin through their incompetence.’

Codrington was not listening. He looked at Boyce. ‘You know nothing of this villa, I take it–or this painting?’

Boyce said that he did not.

‘Is there even anything there?’ Codrington asked his staff. ‘I see nothing on the maps.’

‘I rode out there at dawn, sir,’ said a major. ‘Found a burned-out ruin, nothing else.’

‘Very well.’ Codrington sat forward, resting his elbows on the table. Kitson knew then that it was over; his mind was made up. ‘This has gone quite far enough. I think we are seeing the hazards inherent in this recent fashion for letting untrained civilians embed themselves amongst the fighting men. Whether these two are crazed by drink, or their experiences of battle, or something else altogether I cannot say, but I absolutely will not allow them to repay the army’s misplaced hospitality with fantastical, abusive accusations against an officer who fought with such courage against the Russian attack.’ He pointed at the newspapermen, stressing his pronouncements with aggressive jabs of his finger. ‘If I hear that you have written a single word of this sorry business in that Whiggish rag of yours I will see you both expelled from the plateau. I have Lord Raglan’s ear, and I promise that you’ll be back in Constantinople so fast your heels won’t touch the bloody ground. It will go no further than this room. Is that clear?’

Cracknell bowed. ‘As glass, Major-General.’

An hour later, Cracknell and Kitson sat on the rocky outcrop from which they had watched the ill-fated advance of the 99th two days before. Cracknell was working, and grumbling
constantly as he wrote. ‘Like a damned gentleman’s club, all bloody watching out for each other like that. Blasted Codrington holds his rank only because of a dearth of other candidates. Old men and stop-gaps, that’s what the army’s reduced to, old men and bloody stop-gaps. And they dare to speak of Maynard! Poor, upright, honourable Maynard…’

Kitson gazed out at the scene below. It was a dull day, but clear; he could see the rocky hollows, steep spurs and thick undergrowth across which the soldiers had been made to fight. More than forty hours after the final repulsion of the attack, bodies were still being found. Parties of orderlies searched through the rocks, brushwood and tattered copses, their calls sounding back and forth across the ridge as if competing with one another. ‘
Six Ruskis–dead!
’ ‘
One of ours, Guardsman–dead!
’

Huge ditches had been dug at the edges of the battlefield, into which the stiff-limbed bodies were being tipped with little ceremony, most meeting this grim, undignified end stripped of everything but their greatcoats. This, they had learned, had been Maynard’s probable fate. He had been carried back three hundred yards to an improvised field hospital, where both of his legs had been removed. Kitson had seen this often enough already to know what it must have been like. Maynard hadn’t lasted more than a couple of hours after this operation. His mutilated body had lain out on the grass for the rest of the day; and then, as far as anyone seemed to know, had been buried in one of the first mass graves dug that evening.

‘A
grudge
!’ Cracknell was saying vehemently. ‘He’ll see what a bloody grudge is, Thomas, oh yes! I promised you that he would not get away with what he did in that villa, and I will bloody keep that promise.’ He drew a line under his latest paragraph. ‘Listen to this.

‘So it was a victory, reader, but like that of King
Pyrrhus
of old:
if we are cursed with another such victory, we will surely be undone.
A surprise attack of immense proportions engulfed the ridge. There
were rushes back and forth, as strategic points were lost, retaken
and lost again; there were terrible knots of hand-
to-
hand, and
blade-
to-
blade fighting; there was deep confusion as lines of
communication broke down in the dense fog. Yet rather than rely
on caution and care in these treacherous conditions, many of our
commanders became intoxicated by an almost suicidal pride. Much
is being said of their courage; but what use is courage without the
good sense to make it count for something?

‘Some of these incidents are already famous. Sir George
Cathcart
,
for example, threw his life away for a second of questionable glory,
disobeying his orders and being shot from his saddle into the arms
of his aide-
de-
camp. Others survived their folly, managing to transfer
the penalty on to those unlucky enough to be under their command.
Prominent among such figures is Colonel Nathaniel Boyce of the
99th Foot (Paulton Rangers). Hungry for renown after a disappointing
Alma, the good Colonel cast aside all notions of tactics
or prudence and plunged ahead in a foolish advance that proved fatal
for many dozens of the stout-hearted redcoats who followed him. One
man’s arrogance led directly to—’

Kitson kicked at a rock as Cracknell talked on. He found that he was no longer engaged by the senior correspondent’s denunciations. The
Pilate
was lost; Boyce and Wray had escaped all consequences. It all suddenly seemed rather pointless. ‘I cannot find Styles, Cracknell,’ he interrupted. ‘He has not come to the hut since the day of the battle.’

Cracknell snorted, gesturing towards the Sandbag Battery. ‘He’ll be out there, won’t he, with his bodies. A deluge of inspiration for him, I should think.’

‘He needs to leave the Crimea. He has become unbalanced, Cracknell. The boy-soldier in the cave, everything else we witnessed that day–it is too much for him to bear.’

Seeming to appreciate that Kitson would not be deterred this time, Cracknell set down his notebook and lit a cigarette. ‘So you’ve said. Shouldn’t think O’Farrell will like it. He had high hopes for the lad, as you well know.’

‘Surely it’s clear by now that they won’t be met.’

The senior correspondent sighed, picking a shred of loose tobacco from his lip. ‘Very well. When we’ve finished our report of this battle, I’ll write our editor a letter explaining the situation, which I’ll see wired back from Varna at the same time. That’s the best I can offer.’

Kitson nodded; taking the hint about the report, he reached
for his pocketbook, and then sat staring uselessly at a blank page. He had not written anything since the battle. There was something in him that prevented it, a profound discontent that utterly paralysed his intellect.

There were some shouts from the slope, near its base. Remarkably, a group of injured infantrymen had been found alive in a remote gully. Kitson lifted Cracknell’s field telescope; the white-faced soldiers were being lifted over the rocks with evident difficulty. One of them was howling with astonished agony, waving the blackened remains of his arm around as if the wound had just that moment been inflicted. They had lain undiscovered for all this time, he realised, simply because there weren’t enough orderlies to come to their aid any sooner.

‘I am going to help,’ Kitson stated, rising to his feet.

The senior correspondent nodded absently, blew out some smoke and turned over a page. Kitson started down towards the battlefield, leaving Cracknell of the
Courier
perched alone on the outcrop, absorbed in his work.