Band of Angel (52 page)

Catherine had waved good-bye to Barnsie and Sam and the rest of them until her arm ached, then stayed on deck until the ship had left the harbor and was well on its way. The ship had begun to roll and tilt almost as soon as they reached the Black Sea. High winds were expected and sailors were tying down any portable furniture. At last she went down to the cabin she’d been allocated to share with two nurses, two nuns, and Nancy Porter, the wife of the ship’s carpenter.

There was barely an inch between the bunks and the cabin was tiny—no more than fourteen feet by twenty. Sister Clara had her eyes closed, her darned stockinged feet hanging over the edge of the bunk, her face already a pale gray. “I’m not asleep dear, I’m seasick,” she said in a soft voice as Catherine walked in. “I’m afraid I am a very poor sailor. I shall probably be up all night.”

“Oh, we’ll look forward to that,” said Porter, the brisk little woman who slept in the bunk below. She smiled at Catherine, who was having to brace herself against the walls, and carried on writing a letter, quite oblivious to the rough weather. “I’m writing to my mother,” she told Catherine. “I’m telling her we’ll be in Balaclava about the middle of February—that would be about it, wouldn’t it?” she said after a few scratchings.

Catherine tried to hide a note of panic in her voice. “That long? I was told a week, ten days at the most. I even hoped we might be there before Christmas.”

Porter pushed back her hair and snorted. “This is my fourth trip to Balaclava with my husband,” she said with some grandeur, “and I
don’t think they’ve ever told us the truth about it once. At this time of year, there are always storms in the Black Sea, and the harbor at Balaclava isn’t a proper harbor—more like an inland lake—and usually jammed to the eyeballs with ships. When you do get there it’s normal to be stuck there a week or more.”

Hearing this, she’d experienced such a terrible, seething impatience that she had to go up and stand on the deck, where she’d stayed for close to an hour, soaked and desperate and clinging to the rails while the sea bucked and rolled around her in a wilderness of waves. Down below, she could hear glass shattering and the sound of heavy objects skidding across a wooden floor. At the very bottom of the ship there were three hundred men stuffed in the hold, in quarters that Porter had said were designed for farm animals. How much longer could they all hold out?

She looked down at the waves again, gleaming coils of copper and green, roaring and groaning. She and Deio used to rush into the sea with their wooden swords, frightened and excited by the Water Horse. Advancing, retreating, screaming, they’d prance through the waves. He liked them, they said; he wouldn’t kill them.

But tonight she couldn’t even bear to think about Deio, it was too frightening; everything was at stake now, and the idea of an early death for both of them was appalling. But later, when the wind had died down and the night was immense and starry, she went down to the stuffy cabin again, put on her nightgown, brushed her hair, and, on the borderlines of sleep where everything was allowed, he came to her. He flopped beside her on the grass; he took her face between his hands and smiled at her; such a smile, it seemed to come flaming up from deep within him. She ran her fingers through his hair, she kissed him—a kiss that started at her toes and worked its way up to a blaze of happiness in her head.

And while she slept, black waves sped past the portholes and the dangerous world outside carried on with its business.

Beneath her Nancy Porter, who was missing her carpenter husband, rubbed herself until she groaned, and above her, in a cabin near the poop, the captain of the ship, Captain Gambon—a frail man in his early sixties who’d spent eleven of the worst months of his life ferrying the wounded across the Black Sea—drank
another glass of whiskey and prayed to every god he could think of to get him home to Bournemouth before he did something drastic to himself. Down in the hold, those men who weren’t too seasick, drank. They knew what they were going back to.

Splash! Splash! Splash! Splash! Only four days out, but everybody recognized the sound now, as each morning the night’s catch of dead bodies was dropped over the side along with the night soil, the old food, and the rubbish. They were three hundred miles short of Balaclava and twenty-seven men had gone over the side already.

On the fifteenth of December there was a freak storm. The wind howled like an animal, the water sped, inky and vicious, past their porthole and a huge wave, which struck at about a quarter past three in the morning, flung them all from their bunks.

“Don’t let me die here, God” was her first thought. She was lying on the floor, her cheek burning and bruised against Porter’s buttoned boots. “Let me see him one more time.” Waking and sleeping she felt him all the time now, like a quickening in her blood.

The storm died away as quickly as it had got up, but Nancy Porter, who got all the gossip from her husband, told her later that Captain Gambon, befuddled by sleep, made a poor decision: by cutting away the ship’s masts, they lost two sheet anchors and could only ride on a stream anchor.

At five-thirty that morning, the ship limped ashore in the Bulgarian harbor of Varna, where a local shipwright estimated it would take three or four days to repair. The news, although bad, could have been worse, but Gambon had lost all sense of proportion. When he heard this, he took a bottle of rum, went down to his cabin, changed into his nightshirt and cap, and drank himself into a stupor.

By Christmas Eve, they were six miles from Balaclava—they could see the distant blur of hills and the masts of ships taking shape.

During their waiting days, Sister Clara, a Sellonite nun who had been sent to Scutari to recover from a bout of typhus, was given
permission to hold a concert on Christmas Eve. On the day before the concert, she dispatched Catherine throughout the ship to borrow as many lanterns as she could.

In the end, so many people wanted to come that it was decided to have it on deck. As the light faded, a trail of lights, ghostly in the mist, was lit and the temperature fell. The men who were playing had to hold their fingers under their armpits, or get their friends to rub them because it was so cold outside. By seven o’clock, the band, looking poor and ragged in their scraps of uniforms and oddly assorted clothes, stood attentive and proud against a backdrop of dazzling stars waiting for a signal from Sister Clara, who stood on a wooden crate with the moon behind her.

“Gentlemen, officers, members of the crew, ladies,” announced Sister Clara, “we present for you, a ceremony of carols.”

During rehearsals, she’d been strict with them all about singing out. She’d told them that all truly bad choirs had one thing in common—
they were feeble
—and that they must have the courage to make great big mistakes. Big mistakes, she said, were always correctable, but what couldn’t be corrected was
“mmmnnewww”
—Sister Clara’s mewings had made the men laugh.

But tonight was their night, and gray-faced in the moonlight, exhausted and half starved, they sang as if nothing bad had ever happened to any of them, or ever would. They sang of silent nights and crackling fires, and merry gentlemen and figgy puddings. And they were good. One had to leave because of diarrhea, but the rest stayed and sang their hearts out.

After the interval Thomas Clancy, a regimental musician with the 8th Hussars, whose band had been wiped out by the war, played on a borrowed Russian trumpet (his own, his most precious possession, had been trampled on in a cavalry charge). As the clear notes of “Hark the Herald Angels” peeled out into the night, Clancy’s eyes were tightly shut as if in pain. He was himself again and playing like an angel.

The nurses sighed as they listened and one or two of the men wept. The singing ship, the beautiful night, the sense that sorrow could be put off for a little while longer, filled them all with a longing for happier days, for peace.

When the last note sounded, it was hard to see the hopeful smiles on the faces of the men as their ship bore on. There was a storm of applause, playful shouts of bravo, and calls for an encore from Clancy. A good thing had happened, everybody felt it.

Perhaps in the end it was too much for Clancy to bear. The day after the concert—again the story was relayed by Nancy Porter—the quartermaster asked for the Russian trumpet back. They showed Clancy the docket he had signed which said that he understood it was only on loan. And some time in the early morning, Clancy, who did not know how to ask for things for himself, went downstairs and tried to hang himself from the rail of the stairs leading to the poop deck. A midshipman coming back from his night watch found him just in time, white and sweating, with the rope around his neck. Under other circumstances, Captain Gambon, still in a state of high agitation about not getting home for Christmas, might have flogged him to set an example, but in the end, he let the matter drop. Bigger things had overtaken them; and as the light grew, and the
Melbourne
sailed on, the cry went up that they had arrived in Balaclava.

It was New Year’s Eve, and Deio was in a dugout some seven and a half miles northeast of Balaclava, with Arkwright, Chalk, a gawky young trooper called Pennyworth, and Isaacs, a pale Yorkshireman with yellow eyes whose smell was almost unbearable.

They’d seen each other every day for weeks now, and though none of them would have said the words, they were now a gang, a herd who would, if necessary, fight and die for each other. Deio was their leader, although no one had actually said that either.

They were sitting in a circle around a sullen fire made of tree roots and some planks saved from the original horse shelter. The sixth member of the group was another skeleton from Arkwright’s seemingly inexhaustible supply. A candle had been found and put inside the skull, lighting up for a moment its eye sockets and temples and ear holes before the wind put it out again.

It was all so bad by now: the daily rations of moldy and wet food, the mud, the heaps of wounded men, the hospital tents. Deio’s horses had started to gnaw at each other’s tails and manes to get something in their bellies.

He had five left now—Moonshine and Troy, Bessie, Jewel, and Midnight, who’d been found in the next camp. They stood for hours under the dripping tarpaulin, listless and depressed. None of the others had miraculously reappeared (how daft it seemed now to have thought they would). He missed them all, but it was the thought of Cariad that really undid him. She was the kind of horse whose nerves, even at the best of times, ate into her stamina; now
he pictured her bewildered and starving, or smashed against a rock or with a broken leg, or found and roasted by hungry men. Many of the normal human decencies had been temporarily suspended. For the first time in his life he drank to forget and felt his mind learning to drift and slip its moorings. His usual state of alertness was too painful.

“
For auld lang syne my deara . . . for auld lang syne,
” he bellowed. “
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness . . . yet, for the sake of auld lang syne
.”

“It’s all a’feared and gone.”
Pennyworth was singing another song, too drunk to remember the words. After a while the wind got up and the clash of tunes got on Deio’s nerves. When he went back to check on the horses he saw a figure standing in the shadows near the corral. He was wearing a fur hat and filthy mess kit and was clearly a little drunk.

“Happy New Year,” said Gosford warily, “and sorry, sorry, sorry, I’ve been so slow to get back to you about the other business.”

“What other business?”

“Come on!” Gosford was offended and a little truculent. “We talked about it the other day. It’s a great honor you know.”

“What’s an honor?” Deio was swaying himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about man.”

“A commission,” Gosford’s pouty little mouth was whispering now, “with the Thirteenth. Very urgent situation, say yes and by tomorrow you’ll be out of this shit hole and a member of the cavalry. I can’t ever remember it happening like this before.”

“What’s the rush?” Deio looked at Gosford and lit a cheroot. “What’s happened?”

Gosford grabbed him by the arm. “Don’t play games—you don’t understand—it’s bad now but going to get much, much worse. The harbor is jammed, nothing can move, and when your forage runs out you will die here.”

Deio threw his cheroot away and ground it under his boot. From the corner of his eye he could see his horses watching him; they were sensitive to changes in human voices. Gosford was squawking with fear.

Deio sighed and looked around him. At the hopeless mud, and at his dwindling stock of hay.

“How do I get this
commission
?” He felt he was being tricked into something and that he wouldn’t be able to resist.

“You won’t regret it,” said Gosford relieved. “There is no more exciting life, I promise you that. I’ll take you to meet the CO in the morning.”

Deio looked at him suspiciously.

“What do you want from this, Gosford?”

“Nothing but the loan of a horse—you’ll understand better tomorrow. Are you a decent shot?”