A Dark and Distant Shore (92 page)

‘Then we will be married before witnesses first, and later we will be married properly in church! Say you will,
chérie!
Say you will!’

Lizzie’s face had cleared a little. ‘Would that be all right?’

He misunderstood her hesitation, and indeed, she would have been puzzled to put it into words, for she scarcely understood it herself. He exclaimed, ‘Is it that you think we will not be truly wed until our union will have been blessed by God? Then I swear to you that, like the troubadours of old, I will lay not so much as a finger on my Lady until that time!’ He carried her hand to his lips.

‘You had better start practising now,’ Lavinia recommended briskly, ‘because I hear somebody coming.’

Fortunately, the newcomer proved to be Mr John Gaunt, who settled himself comfortably in a chair, stretched his legs out before him, plunged his hands in his trousers pockets and, when all was revealed to him, considered it a splendid lark. ‘By God, yes!’ he exploded. ‘Bring Miss Lizzie to London right away, old fellow, though I warn you that you’ll probably find yourself cut out in no time at all. Not an artist in the whole metropolis who won’t want her for a model.’ He corrected himself. ‘Not one of the
new
school of artists, that’s to say.’

Guy was quick to show hackle, especially when he saw his beloved’s faint and perfectly beautiful blush, but Gaunt interrupted him. ‘Don’t want to spoil sport, old fellow, but isn’t there a little matter of religion? I thought all you French stuck to the Romish faith.’

There was silence. Then Juliana said, ‘Guy
can’t
be a Catholic. I know your parents were married in the kirk at Glenbraddan, Guy, because I remember Papa telling me that Luke – my dead half-brother, you know? – was a groomsman.’

Guy said carelessly, ‘Yes, but they were married again in Paris, according to Catholic rites. I believe that
Maman
chose not to reveal to her brother Edward that she had been accepted into the faith.’

Lavinia’s eyebrows were in her hair. ‘Good heavens! Don’t tell me
Aunt Georgy
goes to Mass and confession and all that? I don’t believe it!’

‘
Oh, Guy!’
Lizzie’s voice quavered. ‘Will I have to become a Catholic? I don’t think I could.’

‘But it is so beautiful! You will find it warms your spirit as this cold Scottish kirk could never do. Beauty, and light, and colour. You will be instructed in the faith, and learn to love it as I do, and then we will be married.’ What, he implied, could be simpler?

Lavinia, watching the pair of them, knew exactly how her grandmother would have felt if she had been present, which thank heavens she wasn’t. For that silly young man to have ignored the whole question of religion, when he must have known... And for Lizzie to sit there looking as if she would be consigned to eternal hellfire if she never again sat on a hard, freezing cold bench, and listened to an endless sermon, and raised her voice in a melancholy, metrical psalm. What an exasperating girl she was!

‘Don’t be silly, Lizzie,’ she said bracingly. ‘It’s the same God, after all, and the choice is between doing as Guy says – or never seeing him again!’ She sounded
just
like Vilia.

Lizzie’s soulful eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m not silly, even if grandmother says I am. She only says it because she doesn’t love me the least little bit. Sometimes when she looks at me, in that way she does, I think she hates me.’

‘Of course she doesn’t!’ Juliana intervened. ‘What an idiotic thing to say!’

Lizzie’s voice rose. ‘You see! You’re doing it, too!’ She burst into hysterical tears. ‘Take me away, Guy. Please take me away! I’ll join your church, I’ll do anything you like, but I don’t want to live without you!’

Taking a deep breath, Juliana said, ‘I have a confession to make. When I wrote to your papa, I told him you and Guy were in love. I thought it might prepare the ground for you. I hope you don’t mind.’

Lizzie raised her face from Guy’s magnificently damasked bosom; there was a dark patch where her tears had soaked into the silvery cloth. ‘
Oh, Juliana!
But grandmother says that he will feel just as she does about it. Oh, what if he is already on his way home to stop us!’

‘I shouldn’t think he will be,’ Juliana said after a moment. ‘He can’t just rush off and leave his work, and he must be awfully busy with all those battles.’ Her brow lightened. ‘And you know, I do think that if he was seriously against it, he would have written back right away. So perhaps he doesn’t mind.’

Lavinia said judiciously, ‘Of course we don’t know how long it takes for letters to arrive there. When did you write?’

‘A month ago.’

‘Oh, well, that should be enough.’ But she could see that Lizzie wasn’t convinced. It didn’t really matter. If they were going to run away, the sooner they did it the better. Lavinia had her own reasons for wishing to see Guy and his friends off the premises. She was most anxious to separate Mr Harvey from dear Uncle Theo.

She said, ‘Now, you must make plans. It seems to me that Guy and Mr Gaunt and Mr Harvey should leave the day after tomorrow, as Uncle Magnus wishes, and stop at Inverbeg or somewhere. Then Lizzie and Juliana and I can set out for a ride, and join you there.’

Juliana said in a small voice, ‘But when just the two of us come back, everyone will know what’s happened. And we’ll be blamed.’

Lavinia hadn’t thought of that, but she said,
‘Don’t
think up difficulties! We can work all that out later. And it will be perfectly unexceptionable. Mr Gaunt and Mr Harvey will be able to chaperon Guy and Lizzie for as long as necessary.’

It was by no means the end of the discussion, although Lavinia said very little from then on. Only when everything had been settled did she remark thoughtfully, ‘You know, I believe it would be unwise to let Mr Harvey know what we have planned. You can explain it all to him after you’ve left Kinveil.’ Everyone saw the force of this, except Lizzie. Impatiently, Lavinia said, ‘Well, you don’t want him telling Uncle Theo, do you! And it might be as well to take care that Sorley doesn’t find out, either.’

‘Oh, no!’ Lizzie gasped. ‘He’d be sure to tell grandmother.’

‘Well, he might not,’ said Lavinia fairly. ‘He doesn’t tell tales. But from something dear Uncle Theo said once – I can’t remember what it was – I have the impression that Sorley is more than capable of putting a stop to things on his own account, especially if they’re things he knows grandmother wouldn’t like. And it’s
much
better to be safe than sorry.’

The
Times-Graphic
had sent an illustrator out to join Gideon, although Gideon had warned them that the man would probably have to beg a ride over almost four hundred miles of the Black Sea to Constantinople in order to send his drawings off with any certainty of their arriving. And then one day at the beginning of November a message came up from the harbour at Balaclava; a man called Fred Tyler had just disembarked and was waiting for instructions. Gideon went down as soon as he could. There was only one man there who could possibly be Tyler, slung around with satchels and surrounded by baggage that included a number of large, flat packages. He went over to him.

‘Jesus bloody Christ!’ the man said, his eyes fixed on the water. ‘Is it all like this?’

Dimly visible under the surface were piles of arms and legs that had been amputated after the battle, the uniform sleeves and trousers still on them. There was a half-clad, headless corpse fouling the cable of the ship that had just docked. And every few minutes the bright green scum that coated the water was broken as a dead body, bloated and grotesque, was drifted upwards by some malevolent current, only to sink again or float sluggishly away. The air reeked of decay and cholera and sulphuretted hydrogen.

‘More or less,’ Gideon said. ‘And one doesn’t get used to it. I take it you’re the illustrator. Why not start with this!’

‘Jesus!’ the man said again.
‘Should
I?’

The very next day had come the battle of Inkerman, fierce and bloody beyond imagining. At one stage fewer than five thousand British and French troops were engaged against seventeen thousand Russians. But the allied forces won, and spent the next three days burying not only their own but four thousand Russian dead, Prince Mentschikoff having pointed out from the comfort of besieged Sebastopol that it was customary, as he understood it, for such work to be done by those left in possession of the battlefield. The whole countryside seemed to be covered with wounded, lying day and night on the wet ground, starving and screaming in agony and dying. The British hauled them up on to mules lent by the French, and took them to the hospital enclosures. If they didn’t die on the way, they usually died under the surgeon’s knife.

The healthy were in no better case. Icy winds now blew on the troops besieging Sebastopol, and there was no fuel. Every bush, every twig was consumed, not for warmth but to cook the dried peas and salt meat that was the men’s only food apart from ship’s biscuit. There was no tea, even, only green coffee beans that they had to roast and grind themselves, if they could. Without the two daily glasses of rum, life would have been insupportable. It seemed, at least, that things could only get better.

But then the hurricane struck. Tents were torn up and whirled off, never to be seen again. Stones flew through the air, ripping and smashing and tearing anything or anyone in their path. Heavy wagons were thrown down and swept along the ground, dragging the oxen with them as if they were kittens. Hospital marquees collapsed on the sick and dying. There was scarcely a ship in Balaclava harbour that didn’t go down, and among them the supply fleet that had just arrived. Everything the army had been waiting for – hundreds of tons of gunpowder, millions of cartridges, forty thousand desperately needed greatcoats, thousands of pairs of boots for men whose footwear was already paper thin, and stores whose value was to be reckoned in terms of lives, not money.

In the weeks that followed there was hail and rain and snow, and more rain, and sleet, and more rain. Transport animals died or became too weak to work; the men’s rations were curtailed; the camps outside Sebastopol were vast sheets of mud, and the trenches knee deep in it. There were few tents now, few men who were not reduced to rags, none who could remember what it was to be warm and dry and well fed. Night after night, the men died at their posts from cold and exhaustion. Those who didn’t began to suffer from typhus, respiratory diseases, dysentery, frostbite, boils and ulcers, and there wasn’t a man in the army who didn’t have diarrhoea.

By the end of the month, Gideon had discovered that Fred Tyler was not only an extremely good artist, but a kindly, reliable fellow who could be left to watch events at Sebastopol while Gideon himself did what he had been trying to do for some time, and paid a visit to the base hospital at Scutari. It meant at least two weeks away, and two crossings of the Black Sea in vile weather, but he needed to confirm the reports he had heard. A lady called Miss Nightingale had arrived three weeks earlier with a party of forty women nurses. The army authorities didn’t seem to want her much, and the doctors certainly didn’t, but the men, it seemed, were already counting her among the angels. Gideon, sick and shivering, thought Scutari couldn’t be worse than here.

He struggled down to Balaclava to find the town in chaos. Ships would arrive without notice, and no one knew what was in them. Sometimes they were sent all the way back to Constantinople, only to be turned round and sent back again. No one knew how many ships there were, or where they could refuel. The sick and wounded were being crammed into ordinary transports dignified by the name of ‘hospital ship’; Gideon heard of one that, fitted out to receive 250 men, set sail with nearer fifteen hundred, men with amputations, men with cholera, packed close together, so that when the ship rolled, they rolled on top of one another. He sailed on one that wasn’t quite as bad as that, but nearly.

Gideon had thought that, by now, he was physically inured to any sight, that it was only his mind that recoiled. But Scutari was indescribable. The wards were packed, and all the corridors were lined with men lying on the unwashed, rotting floors, crawling with vermin. There were no pillows and no blankets. The men propped their heads on their boots, and wrapped themselves in their own filthy greatcoats, stiff with blood and mud and excrement. The doctors were working for twenty-four hours at a stretch, but there were still men who had lain ten days in the hospital before a doctor reached them. More than a thousand of the patients were suffering from acute diarrhoea but in the whole hospital there were only twenty chamber-pots with, in each ward, a huge wooden tub, usually but not always emptied once a day. The smell was worse even than the smell outside Sebastopol, where it was compounded of gunsmoke and urine and the putrefying corpses of animals and men, sweet and cloying and unmistakable.

Within hours, Gideon had forgotten why he was supposed to be there. He had a saucepan thrust into his hands and was told brusquely to go down to the pier and dispense its contents to the wounded in a newly arrived transport. Afterwards, he was sent to the corridors with his note pads to take down messages from the dying; within minutes his papers were crawling with lice. Next day he found himself assisting at an amputation, supporting the shoulders of a man whose leg was being removed; the operating table was only three feet long. He hadn’t slept in the interim, and he didn’t know when he was going to.

He stayed at Scutari for two weeks instead of the two days he had intended, for more and more sick were arriving every day, hundreds of them, and he didn’t know how to leave when he was able to do something, however little. He knew, now, that Miss Nightingale was an angel, but an angel of steel. He could think of only two women who could have done what she was doing – Vilia, and Selina. Or perhaps not even them, for Vilia was too fastidious, and Selina too self-centred.

Fred Tyler welcomed him back to Sebastopol in December without remarking on his haggard face, over-lean body, or obvious exhaustion. All he said was, ‘I hope you brought some supplies with you from Constantinople, like champagne and caviar? What – only brandy and tinned ham? They’ll do. There are some letters here for you; I’d have sent them on if I’d known you were going to be away for so long.’