Band of Angel (51 page)

When she’d asked him whether the allies could possibly win, he’d said, in his opinion, no—the big hope was that the allies would rise up one more time and storm Sebastopol, but they had a snowball’s chance in hell of that working.

“You’re not listening to me, Catherine, are you?” he’d said at last. “I can see it in your eyes.”

“Sam,” she’d said, “you have been such a good friend to all of us. I could never thank you—”

“Look.” His face went scarlet with the effort of getting through. “If you’re running away from that horse’s arse Cavendish, it won’t work you know. He could just as easily be on the next ship, and then you’ll be with him and have none of your friends around you.”

But her heart’s needle had turned, she was past the point of taking advice: not from Sam, not even from Miss Nightingale.

Later that night, when the ship had left the harbor and was sailing through the Black Sea, she went out on deck again and saw the vastness and coldness of the sky around her and felt almost unbearably keyed up and excited, as though she were about to sit one of the greatest tests of her life. And this time there was no indecision. She was going—and now that she was going, she felt as though love had filled her with its own energy and daring, and she had to believe that Deio might be there, too. And if he was there, how much better it was to go to him, to suffer if she had to, cleanly and honestly, than to stay in the half-world of not knowing and regret.

Deio was calling out but no one could hear him. There were miles and miles of dark plain around him. He was trying to run but his legs were working badly and the sucking mud meant he could only waddle. It felt like a bad dream, the worst dream ever. He was stumbling around in the dark making the sounds that usually fetched the horses in, but they were gone, and he was treading on faces in the mud, tripping over uprooted trees, watching a man flounder like a rabbit inside a tarpaulin collapsed on his head.

The snow had stopped but the wind was full in his face.
“Coooom onnnn cooome on inn.”
That cry was usually followed by thundering hooves, but tonight it sounded like mouse squeaks. He bawled their names out until his throat ached. When his lungs gave out, he sat on a stone, hanging his head in despair. Ahead of him, he could just about make out the faint hog’s back of the Woronzoff road and the hills behind. He pictured the horses, their eyes bulging with terror galloping. A terrified horse had no plan but escape, and in the hours since they’d gone, they could be anywhere: down the hill toward Balaclava, across the plain, huddling for safety in the north or south valleys. He tried to think straight but his mind was careering about as fast as theirs were.

Wading through the mud he felt a new sensation: a total dislike of himself. He was a fool. He had broken all his own rules in order to show off and have a change of scene, and maybe a girl who he hadn’t wanted anyway, and now all his precious beasts were racing around in the dark.

While he walked, his father seemed to appear beside him, jeering and furious. He’d been at Waterloo he knew about paying attention.

Now Deio felt the wisdom of the obsessive checking, the angry warnings, the way Lewis would listen to his animals, eyes bulging with apprehension, to what seemed like nothing. Behind closed doors, he and Rob used to fall around laughing, imitating him.

He was climbing up a narrow gorge, water poured out of it, crimped and black, under a moon half covered by wreaths of cloud. When the ground was level again, he put a cheroot in his mouth and tried four times to light it, but the matches and the cheroots were damp. Nothing was going to work for him tonight, and with the clouds now almost covering the moon, it would soon be impossible to see.
“Coooom oooonnn, coooooooon!”
his voice had almost gone. For a few moments, out there on his own he swore and shouted and pleaded like a madman.

When he reached the camp three hours later, he was soaked again. While he’d been gone, Arkwright and some of the other men had made a pretty good job of putting the shelter up again with a length of tarpaulin and the skeletons.

Exhausted, he put his arms around Arkwright, who was crying again and saying he was sorry. He told him to stop being a silly bugger, it was not his fault. And mostly he meant it. Everything was changing, and would change again, and more than ever now he needed them to stay.

Arkwright helped him take off his mud-caked boots. When he took off his breeches water ran out of them and he thought of his mother’s kitchen: the smell of stew coming from the range, the pulley above it where they dried wet clothes. Then he lay down on the floor, next to Chalk who was asleep. Halfway through the night Chalk, who stank of wet clothes and the bad-egg smell of powder from his musket, whimpered and put his arm around him. Deio didn’t move or mind. He was so far down that, for the first time ever, he understood those fellows who simply lay down in the mud to die.

* * *

Gosford appeared under the flap of the tarpaulin the next morning, shaken and pale and offering to help. He could not bring himself to apologize, but he had at least dropped his air of elegant boredom, which was lucky because Deio’s inclination was to strangle him with his bare hands.

He told them that the hurricane had blocked parts of the road to Balaclava, which meant that supplies and equipment couldn’t get through. He cursed their lack of mules and ordinary pack animals, especially when the shores of Asia Minor were teeming with these animals. “But it’s no good wringing one’s hand now,” he said. “What we desperately need is your horses back.”

Deio looked at him warily. What he did with his own horses was his affair.

“Lend me Troy and we’ll ride around the plains together,” Gosford added. “You’ll get more access with an officer present.”

He hated being dependent on him more than ever, but he had no choice. Arkwright helped them tack up and put the empty halters in their saddlebags, and they rode out together through the camp. Darkness and snow had protected Deio on the night before, but this morning, in the weak winter sunlight, they saw what the hurricane had done. Every tent in the regiment, except for about five, was down, or lay in the mud at a crazy angle, and the ground between them was covered in dead horses and dead men, scattered randomly among all the other pointless objects: broken carts and shakos, harnesses, cooking pots, huts. A couple of troop horses with tattooed numbers on their shoulders were cantering about aimlessly, one with the remains of a tent’s guy rope hanging from its mane.

The animals tried, pathetically, to join them, and although Deio was seething with impatience to find his own, he caught them and led them back to Arkwright and told him to give them some hay. Gosford said they would return them later to their owners and he would personally make it plain that Deio had rescued rather than stolen them.

Fuck you
thought Deio, but then Gosford surprised him by saying he would never forgive himself if the horses were lost. He had given Deio bad advice and he was sorry.

Then Gosford told him what, amazingly for such a boastful man, hadn’t been mentioned before: that he’d been one of the seven hundred horsemen in the Light Brigade Charge. His regiment, the 13th Hussars, had started out with one hundred and eight horses and come home with thirty-seven. These numbers flew about Deio’s heads like bats. He couldn’t talk. He was like an animal now, listening, desperate, his eyes trained like pistols on the far hills.

Gosford talked on. He told Deio that he’d had to pay a fortune for his own horse and equipment to come out to the Crimea, and that it had been the worst decision of his life.

“Lend me your eyeglass.” Deio would have to shut him up somehow. Gosford gave it to him and he tilted it toward the hills, seeing nothing but grass and mud and sky, but Gosford was unstoppable. He wanted to tell him about the wonderful horse he’d brought out, his color, his little ways.

“He trusted me, you see. His name was Verdi. I’d helped to back him as a boy, and he was naturally brave.”

Shut up, shut up, you bastard.

“Very light in the hand. It’s a gift to have a horse like that to teach you things.”

Gosford was telling him about how Verdi died.

“Up there, near the Causeway Heights.”

Deio didn’t even bother to follow his companion’s eyes up to the hills, but he was half listening. A group of Russian troopers on reconnaissance had jumped on them, and Verdi had staggered and sat down. One of them had blown the back legs off him. Gosford had sat for hours, covered in blood, beside his dead horse and then walked home with the saddle on his head. He still hadn’t dared tell his father. Deio shot him a brief look, but said nothing. A great blankness had settled over him.

“I won’t leave you till we’ve found them,” Gosford said suddenly.

He kept to his word. They searched all day, crisscrossing the wide plain and scrambling up hills and across gushing streams, until they were black with mud and both speechless with exhaustion. From
time to time Troy and Moonshine gave piercing neighs, stopped, and listened with heartbreaking intensity for a reply.

They were on their way home when Deio saw the shape of two horses near a patch of scrubby trees and thought he was so far gone he was hallucinating. Then Troy stopped and gave a sound like a bellow of pain.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Deio flung himself off Moonshine and ran toward them. “Thank God.”

They were so covered in mud they looked like prehistoric creatures, but it was Bessie and Jewel. He could tell Bessie from the long lugubrious head, the shape of her ears. A couple of vultures rose in the sky. He waded knee deep in mud toward her. “Bessie! Bessie! Bessie! My girl.” He had his face against hers now and she was butting his hand and splattering him in mud and ravenously wolfing down the barley he held out in his hands. The other horse, Jewel, started clacking her teeth to show how helpless she was. The birds had already picked at a flap of raw flesh on her neck. He wiped her face and stood with her for a while absorbing her shock.

“How in the hell are we going to get her out?” shouted Gosford.

“Like this.” Deio ran to his saddlebag, got a length of rope, and tied it around the croup, the very top of Moonshine’s tail.

“It’s the strongest part of their body,” he told Gosford. He tied the other end to Jewel’s tail and with an enormous sucking sound pulled her out of the bog backwards.

“Oh capital! Great stuff! Never seen that before!” Gosford clenched his fists and flung them in the air. They looked at each other for the first time without looking away.

Riding home with Gosford, and the two muddy horses following behind, he almost felt optimistic, but then Gosford volunteered it would be a miracle if they found all the others.

“Someone will find them and eat them, or sell them on the black market.”

“Is it that bad?’ Deio said angrily.

“It is,” said Gosford. “I’m sorry.”

Then he spelled out in detail what he had not liked to say earlier. There had never been a campaign like the Crimea for any of them: the rain, the mud, the complete lack of organization. The harbor
was now choked with ships, and with winter approaching and no new supplies, all of them should expect the worst.

“What is the worst?” asked Deio.

“Don’t ask,” answered Gosford, “but consider your options well. I could probably get you a commission in the Thirteenth. Fellows are selling theirs and resigning all over the shop.”

“What would I do?”

“Mostly intelligence gathering, riding out to the piquets; you could be part of the reconnaissance patrols.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Deio playing for time, “is if we know the Russians are in Sebastopol, why we don’t just attack them?”

“It’s too late. Three weeks ago it might have worked, now we don’t have enough men or enough food.”

Deio looked at Gosford again.

“Is the situation this bad at Scutari?”

“Not yet, but it will be.”

He could hear a kind of ringing in his ears.

Gosford said he should talk to Lieutenant-Colonel Hanbury of the 13th. If he liked, they could go and see him tomorrow.