The Street Philosopher (27 page)

Cracknell had no memory of this encounter. He could recollect the river and his little swim in it, and then Major Maynard leading the assault, but that was all. ‘Ah yes, of course. Cregg. Yes, of course, of course. It gratifies me to see that you are still in one piece, man. Veterans of both the early engagements and this accursed winter are becoming rare indeed.’

Cregg chuckled sourly, which brought on a cough. ‘Ha! Yes
sir, true enough, among the ranks at any rate. We’re what y’might call a dyin’ breed.’ He coughed some more. Cracknell noticed that his right hand was swaddled in a thick mitten, whereas the other hand was bare. ‘But then, can’t say I’ve ’scaped entirely, sir.’

Cregg drew off his mitten with a pained grimace to reveal a mangled mess bound together with filthy bandages. As far as Cracknell could tell, only two functional fingers remained. Haltingly, the soldier then told the story of how he came to be injured, of Boyce’s arrogant errors, and Maynard’s senseless death. Standing in the sharp morning air, Cracknell grew steadily more interested. He gave Cregg a cigarette and encouraged him to enlarge upon what he was saying. Was he not tempted, the correspondent asked, to make more of the wound, and get himself shipped home? It looked rather serious, after all–could he even fire a rifle?

Cregg, however, was quite adamant. He was going to remain in the Crimea come what may. At first, Cracknell thought that in this unlikely looking mongrel of a man, he might have found a hero amongst the common soldiery, a noble warrior to hold up for the admiration of all England in the pages of the
Courier
–a moving counterpoint to the incompetence of those who commanded him. But as Cregg talked on, it became very clear that this was no popular champion. There was something unsavoury about him, Cracknell decided, a touch of the cut-throat, perhaps, of the criminal. He was hardly fit to be paraded before the crowd. And his motive for remaining at the front was not patriotism, nor was it a desire for decisive victory over their foe, nor even a loyalty to his brothers in arms; at least, not to those who still breathed. Cregg wanted to stay in the Crimea so that he could get his revenge on his regimental commander.

When he spoke again of Inkerman, his voice a low, nasal snarl, he positively shook with loathing. ‘’E took us out there, and then ’e ’id behind a rock.’ E ’id himself away, nice and safe, and left it all to the Major–as bleedin’ usual. My mates was droppin’ all around, and there wasn’t nothing we could do. And then the Major…’ Cregg looked at the ground. ‘The… the Major was a decent cove.’

‘I knew him,’ declared Cracknell stoically, ‘He was decent indeed. Honourable.’

The soldier met his eye. ‘Aye,’ e was. I’ve never known ’is like. An’ ’e was put through ’ell, sawn up and who knows what else–all ’cause of that cunt in there.’ Cregg glared at the farmhouse door. ‘That
cunt
–all ’e does now is sit about on ’is arse, complainin’ about the lack of action. As if ’e’d know what to bleedin’ do if action came! Prob’ly just get a whole bunch more of us killed.’ E shouldn’t get the chance. And by the devil, even if it costs me neck,’ e won’t get the bleedin’ chance.’ He stopped talking, and sucked furiously on his cigarette.

Cracknell studied Cregg’s face, trying to work out if he would really take the action he threatened. It was a dull, angry red, the lower lip protruding, and trembling slightly. This man is in the grasp of all manner of powerful emotions, the correspondent thought, emotions which his confined, feeble mind cannot fully comprehend or manage. He talks of bold, savage deeds, but then many angry men talk of violent things that they dare not do. His assertions concerning Boyce’s behaviour on the battlefield, though, were all too easy to believe. Such behaviour was typical of the man–unlike the heroic yarn of headstrong courage that had been spun by certain of Boyce’s peers. Opponents this deserving, Cracknell thought with fierce, righteous purpose, are rare indeed. The correspondent took out his pocketbook, resolving that Cregg’s account would form an electrifying addition to a future report from the Tomahawk of the
Courier
.

A sergeant-major approached the house. Throwing away his cigarette, Cregg slunk back to his post, and responded sullenly to the questions and instructions directed at him. Cracknell, scribbling busily, moved around to the side of the house, in the direction of its small yard. Pausing alongside a window, he leant his back against the cold wall.

He had laid down two lengthy paragraphs when an oil lamp was set on a table just inside the dirty window. He could hear voices. It was Boyce, a servant, and a couple of his officers. Cracknell stopped writing and listened.

‘And this is really all that can be provided for us to breakfast upon?’ Boyce was saying irritably to the servant. ‘Bacon
with eggs and beans? What do you think I am, man, a Yankee cowpoke? Are there no lambs’ kidneys to be had on this entire peninsula?’

‘General state of things is pretty wretched, sir, to be fair,’ muttered someone in response.

Boyce sighed, as if he were the most put-upon fellow in all the Crimea. ‘Very well, bacon with eggs and beans it is. Upon my honour, that it should come to this.’

Soon, the smell of frying bacon suffused the farmhouse, seeping through the window frame and up Cracknell’s nostrils. His stomach began to growl so loudly that he moved a few feet along the wall for fear that the noise might give him away. He thought of Cregg, standing guard outside the front door, forced to endure the same torturous odour with nothing to look forward to but an ounce or two of hard biscuit and a piece of salted pork from an animal butchered before the campaign had even begun.

Cracknell reread the paragraph he had been writing. Its level of severity suddenly seemed desperately inadequate. He drew a line under it and began again, his features slowly lighting with a grin of acerbic glee. Just wait until the bastard reads this, he thought. It’ll put him right off his blasted bacon.

The breakfasting officers started to talk about Balaclava, Boyce declaring that he was riding down to the port that afternoon. There were some civilians arriving, he claimed, old friends of his brother’s whom he was keen to see. An officer–Major Pierce, poor Maynard’s unworthy replacement–offered to accompany him. Boyce refused rather curtly, and promptly assigned Pierce a tedious regimental task that would keep him occupied for the rest of the day.

Cracknell realised that he had overheard something significant; Boyce, he could tell, was lying through his teeth. He stopped writing. Balaclava, he thought–now there’s an idea.

Mr Kitson’s skin was white as a fish-belly, and dreadfully clammy to the touch. Ever so gently, Annabel lifted him up on to his side, revealing a back sticky with congealing blood. There were two wounds, both to the upper abdomen, neither now bleeding with any persistence, praise God; but it was quite plain that he needed proper medical attention as soon as it could be secured for him.

She turned, looking for Madeleine. They had been walking along the Worontzov road, heading for the camps, when they had passed a French mule-train, bearing the night’s sick and injured down to the harbour. This was hardly an uncommon sight, yet something had made Annabel stop; and then she saw them, Mr Kitson and Mr Styles, lashed to one of the wooden litters at the very rear of the column. She had raced over without explanation, and was now unsure if her companion had managed to keep track of her.

There she was, though, those slender shoulders hunched against the cold, making her way unhurriedly along the line. A large proportion of those on the litters were insensible. The rest moaned and shrieked with every bump on the road; some, delirious, let out burbles of maniacal laughter. Their clothes, such as they were, were blotched with blood, bile and excrement. The mules, smelling the blood and sensing the suffering, were braying in distress.

Madeleine was angling her head so that the rim of her bonnet blocked all but the road beneath her boots. Arriving
at Annabel’s side, her face wore an expression of confused, slightly petulant distaste. Then she noticed the men tied to the litter–the unconscious, pallid Mr Kitson, and his dishevelled colleague next to him, who clutched at a poorly bandaged thigh with his eyes squeezed shut, squirming around as if in the throes of a terrible dream. She gasped with shock, raising her hands to her face.

‘Are–are they alone?’ she demanded, staring frantically at the adjacent litters. Annabel looked back at her uncomprehendingly. ‘Are they alone, Annabel? Tell me! Is Mr Cracknell here with them? Have you seen him?’

Now Annabel understood only too well. She frowned. ‘No, dear, he’s not here. Do not think of him–I’m sure he’s perfectly fine, that one.’ Standing up, she put a placatory hand upon Madeleine’s arm. ‘We must go back down to Balaclava with Mr Kitson, Madeleine. Otherwise…’ Annabel looked around at the other men in the column. ‘Otherwise I fear he will certainly perish along the way. Pass me the canteen, will you?’

Madeleine didn’t hear her. ‘No–I must find Richard. I must!’ There was panic in her voice.

Annabel tightened her grip on her friend. ‘Madeleine, you are coming with me to Balaclava,’ she said strictly. ‘You know that you can’t simply wander off around the camps on your own. Please listen to me, my dear. You have not the first clue where that man might be.’ Inwardly, Annabel cursed the smirking face, the swaggering confidence, the very blasted boots of Richard Cracknell.

As tears filmed Madeleine’s eyes, Annabel moved forward and embraced her with firm tenderness. ‘Listen to me, child. He is well. You must trust me on this. These men are not. We must help them if we can. We must do the Lord’s will.’

Madeleine rested her head on her friend’s shoulder, rubbing at her eyes. ‘The Lord’s will, yes,’ she murmured. ‘The Lord’s will.’

With the permission of one of the French drivers, the women climbed up on to the two closest mules, joining the column as it advanced through a bleak, brutal landscape. The gullies between the colourless hills were choked with
the decaying corpses of horses and oxen. Heavy clouds had smothered the early morning sun, and a putrid smell hung all about. Vultures cawed hideously to one another, their black and white wings beating at the still air. Even the accursed Cain, Annabel thought, would scarce deserve banishment to such a blighted territory. It seemed that few animals could easily survive there but those who sustained themselves on the flesh of the dead. There was no hay to be had anywhere; no one appeared to have considered what their horses would eat during that winter. Off to the east, Annabel could see two near-spectral creatures, looking truly apocalyptic in their emaciation, straining to drag a stout mortar along a ridge. That both lacked manes and tails, having had them chewed away by their starving fellows, only added to their ghastly, otherworldly appearance. She thanked God for the sturdy, omnivorous constitution of the mule she was riding, and gave the beast’s rough, grimy hide a clapping pat.

As if in mockery of her gratitude, a few minutes later a mule towards the head of the column let out a scream as one of its hooves twisted in the frozen ruts of the track, breaking the leg. Two drivers held it down, intending to wait until the rest of the party had passed before ending the animal’s pain. The men on its litter, knowing that they would be left with the dead mule, at the mercy of vultures and wild dogs, begged those trudging by them for help. None were able or willing to supply it. Annabel hardened herself, knowing she could not go to them, blocking her ears to their imprecations.

After the shot had rung out and the drivers returned to the column, she looked around at Mr Kitson. Her mind teemed with awful questions. Was choosing to save him above those poor wretches abandoned back there, or indeed above any number of others, somehow an offence to God? Was it the result of soulless, practical reasoning, bred by war and the constant presence of death? Was her ability to make such choices, such judgements, an indication of a grievous sinfulness at the very core of her being? She had no answers; but no regrets either.

Annabel kept up with the
Courier
. She had watched its once-welcome tendency to be controversial steadily develop into a determined, deliberate stirring up of scandal and outrage, regardless of verity and of benefit to no one but those who profited from its sale. How much, she often wished to ask those involved in its production, had actually changed since its programme of wild exposures had begun? How many lives had been saved? This, she felt, was something that Mr Kitson had realised too; and he had relinquished his duties to the
Courier
, to the irresponsible Mr Cracknell, in order to assuage the torments of his fellow man. This made him worthy of preservation, and she was prepared to answer to the Heavenly Father Himself for her decision to stay with him.

Mr Styles, however, was quite another matter. Had he not been injured and requiring assistance, she might well have thought twice about exposing Madeleine to his company again. Mr Kitson, she decided, was correct–this fellow should be sent home, and held somewhere secure until his fevered mind had repaired itself. He seemed to be lapsing into a delirium, muttering on and on about how Mr Kitson was to blame for his wound, with as much bitterness as if his colleague had fired the shot himself. Then, after gazing dumbly for a while at Madeleine, who tried to put as much distance between them as possible, he began to insist that he was perfectly all right, that he wished to get up off the litter and head over to the front lines, to see how the siege was faring that day. This was all said loudly and pointedly, as if intended to impress, but all it earned him was some less than polite requests from the occupants of other litters to keep his noise down.

At last, after several painful hours, they rounded a spur to see the whitewashed walls and terracotta slates of Balaclava. The town itself was little more than a few hundred humble fishing cottages clustered together in the shelter of a narrow inlet. Crowning the hills around it were the weather-worn remains of an ancient fortress long ago abandoned to ruin, its architects and purpose forgotten. Dozens of tall ships stood in the confines of the harbour like great
gothic cathedrals of wood, iron and brass, their masts shooting up like spires, their cannon leering from the high decks like long rows of gargoyles. These shining giants of the British Navy were so large and so numerous that in places they all but covered the waters of the inlet. Indeed, some of them appeared to stand not in the sea but upon the land itself, entirely dwarfing the tight huddle of huts and shacks that fringed the quayside. The massive ships shared something of the silent serenity of the ancient cathedrals as well as their scale. They were nearly empty of life or movement; few had their gangplanks down, and traffic on these was sparse.

Balaclava, in contrast, seemed abuzz with activity. Crowds filled the main thoroughfares. Caravans of travellers struggled in from the surrounding landscape at a constant rate. And on the outskirts, teams of surveyors were taking measurements and making estimates for the planned railway line up to the camps. Construction was set to begin in early February. It would, everyone agreed, transform the war.

This view of the town, as Annabel well knew, was a cruel illusion. As one approached, it seemed a place of sanity, of cleanliness and plenty, of refuge after the madness of the front. It seemed, in short, like civilisation: the supply base where food, clothing and all manner of useful items could be bought, where pipes could be lit, stories exchanged, and rest deservedly taken.

But those expecting relief from hardship and death received a nasty surprise as they drew closer. The wretched merchants of the town, they quickly found, were not decent local people peddling their wares for honest prices, but opportunistic usurers from the surrounding lands–and Annabel’s worst enemies, with whom she frequently did bloody battle. These fiends, entirely indifferent to the suffering of their fellow man, were prepared to sell goods of the very lowest quality for the very highest sums; and they had pitched their stalls, quite happily, in the midst of a plague.

Balaclava was the place where the disease-riddled Turkish Army sent its men to die. From the hills, where all looked so well, one could not see the ankle-deep effluence that ran through those crowded lanes, the scenes of desperate anguish
that were being played out inside every dilapidated house and shed, and the rows of dead laid out in the streets once these scenes had reached their inevitable, unvarying conclusions. Every patch of waste ground had become a place of burial. Faces and limbs poked out accusingly from the fresh earth of shallow graves. Unspeakable smells wafted between the half-collapsed buildings, whilst the wailings of bereaved wives competed with the rapacious cries of the sutlers and hawkers.

The mule train forged steadily through all of this in the direction of the docks. Here, in the shadow of the majestic vessels that filled the bay, the chipped, uneven stones of the harbour were almost covered by messy stacks of bales and crates. A profusion of bold stamps, brands and labels indicated that they contained official supplies for the British expeditionary force, shipped out at the expense of Her Majesty’s Government of Great Britain, for immediate distribution. Yet they had plainly been standing there for days, exposed to the snow, sleet and rain, devoid of any means of transportation and destined to rot where they had been left.

Annabel was used to such waste. Like the scenes they had just ridden past so calmly, it no longer provoked her. Climbing off the mule, she looked to her companion. Madeleine appeared distracted still, thinking no doubt of the undeserving Mr Cracknell. Mr Styles, also, had renewed his attentions towards her, and was trying to catch her eye with his usual doomed persistence. The sooner this is over, thought Annabel as she knelt to check on Mr Kitson, the better for us all.

A surgeon and a harbour official, both close to exhaustion but working hard to maintain their respective professional demeanours, approached the wounded men lain out on the cold stone. Before any treatment could be given, however, a heated argument began, the official waving a sheaf of forms in the physician’s face. After wiping Mr Kitson’s brow with the edge of her cloak, Annabel turned towards the bay. Amidst the merchantmen and gunboats floated a number of weather-beaten hospital ships–the means by which the wounded
were conveyed to Scutari. Conditions on board these ships, she had heard, were truly wretched. It was said that a quarter of their patients died before they even left port. Annabel felt an absolute, crippling impotence. She could do nothing more for Mr Kitson. She had wanted to save him, yet had merely delivered him to a fate that was uncertain at best.

With a start, she realised that Madeleine was gone. The foolish girl had slipped back into the squalor of Balaclava. A young woman alone in this town was in serious danger; the heathen mussulman, as Annabel had been told on many occasions, had no respect whatsoever for the unveiled female. She stood, and was about to charge off down the nearest alley when the surgeon arrived at her side.

He looked at Styles and Kitson. ‘Civilians,’ he said in a tone of mild surprise, making a note on a form. ‘What are they doing here?’

Without thinking, as she hurried away to begin her search, Annabel told him, ‘They are from the
London Courier
magazine.’

At the edge of the harbour, she turned back briefly to take a last look at Mr Kitson, lying unconscious on the stones. The surgeon was unravelling his bloody coat to examine his injuries. Breathing a steadying sigh, she dismissed her fears and quietly intoned a dependable passage from the Psalms.
‘Turn from evil and do good; then you will dwell in the land forever.
For the Lord loves the just, and will not forsake his faithful ones
.’

‘Heavens,’ exclaimed the surgeon. ‘Godwin! Have a look at this!’

Another surgeon came over, pacing along the line of ailing redcoats. ‘Dear God,’ he murmured. ‘Thomas Kitson. I sent him up to the plateau last night, to fetch an engineer. We wondered what had become of the poor fellow. Must’ve fallen prey to a sniper down in the trenches.’

‘Well, this wound is serious indeed. Broken ribs, a punctured lung …’

They looked at each other. Both knew that they weren’t permitted to send civilian casualties to the General Hospital outside town. There was only one option.

‘Excuse me, sirs–Doctor Godwin, Doctor Harris–might I be of some help?’

The surgeons turned towards the speaker, a mulatto woman of about fifty years of age, clad rather flamboyantly in a feathered hat, a thick green shawl and a striped dress. She was a good six inches shorter than the two men, but her brown eyes were fixed on them with sharp inquisitiveness.