A Marriage of Convenience (2 page)

Keeping the horse-gunners and his own troop with him, Clinton hastily conferred with Lambert before ordering him to have his men dismount and take up positions in subsections at the edge of the woods six hundred yards behind the buildings; from there, a few well directed volleys would thwart any attempted escape in that direction. Less than a mile to the right, across a rough tract of gorse and bracken, was a swollen river. In this area Clinton felt he could afford to be less vigilant. If driven down to the banks by mounted troops, the Irish would surely surrender there, rather than face the near certainty of being shot dead or wounded while swimming across. Having heard Clinton’s plan during their ride, Dick now conceded that the lie of the ground would be excellent for it if the vital first stage succeeded. Before riding off, he turned in the saddle.

‘Don’t forget, sir, my lot go in first if your bluff’s called.’

‘It won’t be.’

Lambert raised his hand in salute and rode off at speed. As soon as he had gone, Clinton sent his sergeant-major and two troopers crawling into the root-field to get within hailing distance of the farmhouse. The light was better now, and the men made what use they could of the slanting line of a low wall for cover. The
9-pounder
was already being unlimbered at a spot just in front of a spinney of straggling elders and blackthorn. From there, still partially hidden, it could be brought to bear on the large barn without endangering the farmhouse. While the gun was got ready, Clinton ordered his troop to form two lines and to draw sabres. Then he explained what he wanted of his subalterns. If the men inside the house did not surrender at once, but made a run for it towards the river, the front line, led by him, would ride through them and break any attempted stand; the second line were to take prisoners, only striking to kill those who fired on them. Since even disciplined infantry rarely turned to face cavalry at anything under company strength, he did not anticipate more than a few stray shots. Kneeing his horse round, Clinton watched the loaders ramming home the charge and inserting the shell. To the
instructions
of their lieutenant, the gunners turned the elevating screw and then inched the muzzle to the left. After a long stare down the line of sight, the young officer came over to Clinton and saluted.

‘Ready, sir,’ he said briskly, looking up at him with a badly disguised smirk. ‘Should wake them up a treat, sir.’

‘You won’t miss?’ asked Clinton with a touch of the familiar irony which marked the relations of cavalry officers with their counterparts in the Royal Horse Artillery.

‘Not unless it moves, sir.’

Clinton smiled.

‘Give the order then.’

A moment after the shouted command, the kneeling bombardier pulled the lanyard and the gun recoiled sharply. The shock waves from the report made Clinton’s horse curvet and whinny, but he quickly controlled him. As the smoke cleared, Clinton saw a gaping hole in the roof of the barn and a jagged rent in the upper part of the wall. He heard the lieutenant shout:

‘Stop the vent and sponge.’

In the silence that followed, Clinton raised his field-glass to see if he could catch any movement in the windows of the house, but there was none. Several seconds passed, and then, to the letter of his orders, the sergeant-major yelled from his advanced position in the root-field:

‘You’re surrounded. Come out and surrender, or we’ll blast you out.’

Clinton waited tensely. To his right the gunners were reloading; behind him he heard an occasional horse snort and the creak of saddlery; but no sound or sign came from the farmhouse. If the sight of what a single shell had done to the barn were insufficiently impressive, he was prepared to drop a couple more into the yard directly in front of the house before issuing a final ultimatum. If this intimidation failed, and the men stayed where they were, Clinton had no intention of carrying out his threat of massacre. Instead he would be obliged to storm the place; and with every vestige of surprise thrown away, he knew the process would be bloody on both sides. The danger had always been that the Fenians would be so well aware of the government’s longstanding reluctance to increase support for the rebels by making martyrs, that they would recognise the shots as a ruse to get them into the open. But Clinton had never given this sort of logical thought any chance against the instinctive terror struck in the hearts of recently awakened men by shells bursting within yards of their hiding place. His worst fear was that they had received advance warning; even a few minutes would have given them time to steel their nerves for holding out. He was agonisingly conscious that unless they had already panicked, every passing moment increased their chances of thinking rationally.

Without waiting any longer, Clinton gave the order for the next round to be fired. The shell exploded ten feet from the house and blew in the door and every visible window-frame. The brickwork was pitted and scarred in a wide arc. Clinton watched with a sinking heart as the dust slowly settled and still nothing happened. With a great effort of control, he called cheerfully to the artillery officer:

‘Perhaps they went out for a walk.’

‘Just the weather for it, sir.’

Ten more seconds—an eternity to Clinton—and then a sight that brought a derisive cheer from the gun-crew: a white sheet was thrust out of a window by an unseen hand. Then very hesitantly some
half-dozen
men came out into the yard holding up their hands. Before Clinton had time to enjoy his relief, a rapid stutter of smallarms firing from Dick’s men on the fringes of the wood told him that the majority of the Fenians had preferred to try their luck at the back. Now the threat of having to storm the farm had been lifted from him, he felt only mildly disappointed not to have achieved a tidy surrender.

Detailing a corporal and three troopers to take charge of the men in the yard, Clinton turned to his trumpeter.

‘Advance in line.’

The man sounded the call; and as the front line moved forward, calls to trot and then to canter followed. With swords held at the carry, their sodden capes opening to reveal frogged braid and
gleaming
buttons, the line thundered down across the fields towards the rough ground between the farm and the river. Behind him, the even thudding of hoofs and the rapid but fresh breathing of the following horses exhilarated Clinton with a feeling not unlike leading the field in a hunt. Glancing over his shoulder briefly, he allowed himself the pleasure of admiring the line, his eye caught by the swaying plumes and red busby-bags. With none of the tension of a charge against a waiting enemy or moving cavalry, Clinton gave himself up to the beautifully smooth action of his stallion, feeling entirely at one with the animal, not holding him back as he quickened his pace before leaping a wall, nor urging him on over a wide ditch. The horse took these obstacles as if they did not exist and Clinton merely gave him the rein, anticipating his movements with instinctive ease.

A hundred yards ahead, he saw the fleeing men stumbling through the tall bracken, throwing away their weapons, blundering into gorse bushes; tripping, falling. A small group led the rest and seemed likely to reach the thick sedge and reeds beyond a line of willows at the water’s edge.

‘Right shoulders,’ he shouted to the trumpeter, wheeling to cut them off. Checking his horse a little as the ground grew rougher, he came up with the stragglers and tightened his grip on the hilt of his sabre. One man stopped, another flung himself out of the way.

‘Stand where you are,’ roared Clinton, catching glimpses of terrified faces as he flashed by. Between him and the willows was a bank of blackberry bushes; with a slight touch of his heels, he urged his horse over them. The stallion landed badly on a steep little slope. Almost before Clinton had righted himself in the saddle, he saw the blurred shape of a man crouching low in his path, a black thing held up apparently to the shoulder. Clinton crouched in the saddle and cut cleanly with his sword, carrying the full weight of the horse into the blow. The man spun away, falling with outstretched arms. In the fleeting glimpse Clinton caught of him, he saw a young lifeless face and the blackthorn stick he had mistaken for a gun, lying harmless in the grass. With a nauseous sensation in his stomach, he rode on, all his earlier elation spent.

He swore aloud as he saw that four Fenians had already reached the reeds well ahead of him and the dozen hussars close on his heels. His success had already gone sour; more deaths would ruin it completely. These men were not soldiers, and his pride, as well as his humanity, revolted against being obliged to treat them as if they were. Around him, troopers were dismounting and snatching their
carbines from the straps behind the saddle cantles. Clinton shouted to the Irish to stop and save their lives but now hussars were plunging into the reeds, forcing their quarry on. Two gave
themselves
up when they saw the speed of the current, two others, regardless of the repeated shouts to halt, launched themselves into the swirling tea-coloured water. A sergeant, acting on Clinton’s previous orders, told his men to fire, and one of the Fenians was hit in the first burst of shots. His companion by then had reached the far bank, and could have escaped into the thick overhanging undergrowth, but looking back, he hesitated and then dived in again, in a suicidal attempt to rescue his compatriot.

‘Get them out. Don’t shoot,’ bellowed Clinton, scrambling from his horse and running to the bank. By the time three hussars had waded into the water, the Irishmen had been swept down to a bend where the river was waist-deep. Seconds later a floundering struggle ended with the sharp crack of a carbine fired from the shore. The rescuing Fenian staggered, seemed to freeze, and then fell face downward into the brown water. Before anyone moved to prevent it, he was washed downstream with the current. Shocked, and shaking with anger, Clinton strode towards the point from which the shot had come. He saw a uniformed figure enter the river lower down and strike out to reach the man who had just been hit. Clinton told a trooper to go and find out who this soldier was; then, slightly mollified by this disinterested act, he went on to try to discover why the shot had been fired. The sergeant responsible told him that the man had pulled out a knife and had tried to stab the soldiers ordered to arrest him. When this weapon was fished out of the muddy water, Clinton sighed and asked no further questions. The body of the Irishman who had been shot first had been dragged up onto the grass; Clinton had seen enough corpses to recognize the unmistakable attitude of death. The now certain fact that the other Fenian’s bravery had been futile from the beginning, added to Clinton’s desolation.

Returning to his horse, he was overtaken by the trooper he had sent to bring back the name of the soldier who had gone to the aid of the hapless Irishman.

‘Corporal Harris, sir.’

‘Did he get the man ashore?’

‘Yes, sir. Done for, he was … the Irish lad. Between the eyes, sir.’

The man had said this with pleasure and seemed surprised that Lord Ardmore did not commend the accuracy of the sergeant’s shot. Clinton stood a moment, as if thinking of something else, and then turned on his heel. Above the farm the low clouds were
breaking up and the sun began to come through, shimmering on the wet grass. Somewhere in the bracken the croak of a pheasant seemed to answer the faint cries of a wounded man.

An hour later, when the two troops were once more winding their way along the cut-up woodland track, with four dead Fenians roped to the gun-limber, and twice that number of wounded, moaning with every sliding tilt of the farm cart carrying them, Clinton looked ahead over his horse’s ears at the silent phalanx of prisoners trudging between the. double line of their mounted escort. Behind him, his men riding in columns of threes were laughing and joking with each other. Not one had been hurt and no horses lost.

‘Your trouble,’ murmed Dick, who was trotting next to Clinton, ‘is you’re too damned pig-headed to be satisfied with anything short of the impossible.’

‘It’s called optimism,’ replied Clinton, smiling in spite of
himself.

‘Try a bit of the other. Expect the worst, and anything else is a pleasant surprise.’

‘You’re no more a fatalist than I am.’

Dick shook his head as if in sorrow.

‘Expecting too much again. Just because I haven’t the sense to follow it myself, you brush aside my perfectly good advice.’ He paused as they reached the top of a rise. Ahead of them beyond the trees, the valley opened out into a wide blaze of dandelions and purpling heather. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ Lambert went on confidingly, ‘you’re one of the only two men I’ve ever met who doesn’t hold a quite different theory of life from the one he’s patently acting on.’

‘I wonder if I can guess who the other is.’

Lambert shrugged modestly.

‘Myself?’

‘For a cynic, you’re a good friend, Dick.’

Glancing in front, Clinton saw that the body of the man he had killed had slipped slightly on the limber, so that the gashed head hung down and lolled, knocking against the metal with each jolt of the wheels. A thin trickle of blood ran down from the forehead across the youth’s open eyes. Following the direction of Clinton’s gaze, Lambert touched his horse and rode up to the cornet immediately behind the gun-carriage. Clinton saw him point his whip at the corpses and heard him tell the cornet to cover them.

On their return to barracks, Clinton warmly congratulated all ranks on the efficiency with which they had carried out their duty.

*

That evening most of the officers of the 15th Hussars were uproariously drunk by the time they poured out of the mess dining room into the ante-room in their many-buttoned blue and gold mess jackets. Only the duty field officer and the orderly officer for the day were unable to celebrate their returning adjutant’s success. A cornet had just purchased his lieutenantship, so tradition obliged him to pay for yet more champagne. Another subaltern had parted company with his horse on parade the day before, so he too was ‘fined’ in the customary manner, and the mess servants were sent scurrying out for more bottles. Later, the junior officers would probably set about tent-pegging on each others’ backs and the smallest among them would end up in the horse troughs. Listening to their loud laughter and arrogant self-assertive voices, Clinton wished he had drunk enough to feel utterly detached. Had he ever been so puerile and absurd as these young men? Very likely he had; and only five years earlier. It would be a long time before he reached the age of sentimental recollection of youthful idiocy; at present his memories made him feel mildly uncomfortable. All that scorn and mockery and blind ignorance of human limitation.