Castle Orchard (24 page)

‘But I am unable to pay.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘You mean when I retrieve the jointure, I can pay?’

He shrugged but then he said, ‘Yes.’

Mrs Arthur said, ‘Sometimes, irrationally, I’m afraid.’

‘That the money isn’t there?’

‘Yes, but it must be there, because I certainly never have had it.’

‘Then it’s there. I’ll attend to it. You must give me a letter of authorisation. I shall take it to London, stating the whole case, which seems not much.’

Mrs Arthur wondered why he never went to London, unless it was the fox hunting that kept him, for surely London was his spiritual home, a man who had gone from the adventures of war to the excitements of the gaming tables. If he went to London, would he return in less than six months?

Her doubts being evident to him, Allington said, ‘Are you afraid to let me go? I am not Jonathan Arthur. The gambler and the soldier have much in common, one gambling with his livelihood and the other with his life, but rest assured I’ll return without jeopardising my fortune. Now, suppose by some mishap, you found yourself destitute, would you marry Mr Conway?’

Mrs Arthur said, ‘Why do you think it right to ask me such a thing?’

‘It is impudent of me. I ask it all the same. You needn’t answer.’

‘If I were destitute?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it is a very silly thing to ask, because I should have to marry him. However, if I were destitute, Mr Conway wouldn’t propose. Even now he is waiting to see the extent of my income.’

‘But he’s fond of you.’

‘Yes, but he’s not romantic.’

‘Why wouldn’t it break your heart to marry him?’

She answered him soberly. ‘It would weigh my spirit but not break my heart. I should endeavour to make him a good wife.’ Looking at Allington’s face, she saw by the very blankness of his expression that she had troubled him even more by what she had just said. Making an effort to smile, she added, ‘You now seem the innocent child, if you think things could be otherwise.’

‘Perhaps it is I that am romantic,’ he replied.

‘So should I much prefer to be romantic, but circumstances don’t always allow for it. I have children.’

The Conway boys, being free on a Sunday afternoon, adopted Castle Orchard as their playground. Having sought out Phil as an excuse for their trespass and with a vague boyish intent of amusing themselves at his expense, they wandered off to the vegetable garden.

They started, innocently enough, to play where there was a pit of sand, building a castle with the aid of some flowerpots and a seed tray.

‘Here is a castle in Spain,’ Robert said. ‘We will besiege it.’

‘What shall we do for soldiers?’ Frankie asked.

‘Gravel or stones. Phil, you can be the French. You must hold the castle and we will attack you and roll you down the hill.’

‘I’ll shoot you,’ Phil said.

‘You can’t shoot us all. You may shoot Jacky and James. They probably won’t notice it.’

Jacky and James set up wails of protest and fell to thumping each other.

So intent were they at building their castle, they did not notice the approach of Captain Allington.

‘These little pebbles are the French,’ Robert said.

Allington looked down on them. He said, ‘And what’s the name of the castle?’

The boys all jumped up. They stared respectfully at their feet.

‘Has it no name?’ Allington asked.

Robert, not usually short of an answer, said, thinking at random for a name gleaned from the confused but mesmerising accounts from the boot room, said, ‘Badejos, sir,’ but he added ‘perhaps’ in case it was not appropriate.

‘You pronounce it as an Englishman would if he saw it written down. You must turn the j into an h, and soften the s into a th sound.’

Robert repeated the word. He was torn between the indignity of being corrected and the excitement of Captain Allington’s speaking to him. He now said, ‘Badejos, sir,’ endeavouring to pronounce it correctly, casually, as if he had known how to do it all along.

‘It would take much alteration to turn it into the real thing,’ Allington said, ‘but I dare say that doesn’t spoil your game.’

‘Oh, it does.’ Robert seized the seed tray and the flowerpots. The twins burst into tears. ‘Show us how it was, sir, if you please.’

Allington sighed. ‘Flatten the ground,’ he said.

Robert and Stephen got on their knees and smoothed the sand flat. Eventually they got it to Allington’s satisfaction. He took his cane and made a wiggling line across the middle of it.

‘This is the River Guadiana. On one side of it is the town of Badejos, with the castle in this corner, a hundred and thirty foot above the river. On the other side of the town, outside it, is the Fort Paradaleras. Across the river lies the Fort San Cristobal.’

The eyes of the six boys were riveted upon him. Even the twins watched every line he made with his cane, the defences and the town walls, jagged like the teeth of a dragon.

‘It is the spring of 1812. The town has a curtain wall twenty-five feet high and there are eight bastions, that is four-sided fortifications, higher than the walls. Here there is a fortified bridge over the river into the town. The town has a garrison of some four and a half thousand men and a hundred and forty guns. Along the western face the French have built three ravelins, which are triangular fortifications, sown with mines. To the north-east, here, the governor, a clever fellow, has dammed a little stream to make an impassable swamp. Here, to the south-east, is the Fort Picurina, which we capture first, but not without all sorts of difficulties. The approaches were flooded and a siege trench needed to be dug. It rained a lot. As the men dug the earth, it turned to mud and slopped back into the ditches. Much time was lost. Once, while the working parties were changing, the French sent out a sortie of one thousand five hundred infantry who attacked them, filled in much of the ditches and carried off the entrenching tools.

‘However, despite all, it was done. Now we can get close enough to pound the bastions with thirty heavy cannons, the object to make breaches in the walls, but while we make breaches in the walls the French, you may be sure, aren’t idle. Every night they take away the rubble from the breaches and dig trenches. They mine the approaches and lay down a
cheval de frise
, a plank chained to the ground to which are attached pieces of bayonet and swordblades, all razor sharp and sticking out as much as a yard. Behind that there’s a trench four feet deep and wide, and behind that, when it’s stormed, the enemy, eight men deep, the first two ranks to fire, the others to load for them. There’s an eight-foot slope to be scaled, on top of which are barrels of powder, fused and ready to roll down and explode.’

The boys gazed fixedly at the sand and then at Captain Allington. How childish seemed their games, how babyish their rampages through the wood, and behind Allington’s measured tones they could hear in their heads the confused and bloody utterances of Jackson in the boot room.

Robert said breathlessly, ‘And then, sir, what happened then?’

Allington again pointed his cane. ‘It is the sixth of April. At eight o’clock in the evening the Third Division, about three thousand men, advance and cross the stream. They have scaling ladders and are to climb the walls of the castle and attack the defenders of the breaches from the rear. They go in silence, but unfortunately not unobserved. Some wade the flooded river, others cross by a milldam, but subject to so much fire it is a wonder they manage to get under the castle walls to erect their ladders.

‘At about ten o’clock the Fourth and the Light Divisions attack the breaches here. They creep forward in silence, covered by a thick mist from the river. The Light Division go first with the Forlorn Hope. They’re the men who have volunteered to lead the assault. They carry sacks of straw to be dropped in the ditches to enable others to cross later.’ Allington pointed with his cane. ‘They are here, coming from the south-east, and here’s the Trinidad bastion they’re to attack. The men are curiously enthusiastic for the task, but it’s impossible. Remember the
chevaux de frise
, the flooded ditch, the mines, the powder barrels exploding amongst us, the canon, grape and musket, the soldiers cramped in the ditches, British and Portuguese, packed tight together unable to advance, even to move, for the quantity of dead and dying, and the whole place lit up by every sort or incendiary and fireball. From time to time we retreat, reassemble and advance, it is said up to forty times, officers and men flinging themselves forward, ever weaker, ever more desperate.

‘The French, amidst the din, taunt us from the walls: “Why don’t you come into Badejos?” But we can go no more. In a sudden hush we hear the town clock strike midnight. In the meantime, after much devastation and confusion, the Third Division succeed in scaling the walls of the castle.’ Allington pokes the cane at the sand. ‘In places the ladders were too short, for the walls were thirty foot high. The men had to climb on each other’s shoulders. Where the ladders were longer, the French tipped them backwards or bayoneted anyone getting to the top, and dropped barrels of powder and rocks. All the same, the escalade is achieved. The men tear down the French flag and run up a soldier’s red coat in its place, but they are barricaded within the castle walls. Now, look here on the north-west side, where we can see the bastion of St Vincent. General Leith, who has the Fifth Division, has orders to make a diversion to distract the French from the main attack, but he takes ladders and, as that clock strikes twelve, succeeds in escalading the walls, though they are well defended, and gains the ramparts. The French are driven back. The British blow their bugles, which are answered by those in the castle. At one o’clock the French garrison cross the River Guadiana and escape into the Fort Cristobal, which, you will remember, is here, on the other side of the river to the town – but they cannot, of course, hold it forever, and that’s the end.’

Allington came to a halt and there was silence.

Phil and Robert were remembering Jackson, down in the dark of the boot room: ‘The whole place lit up what with yer rockets and that, yer legs, arms, heads, bodies jumbled up and drowned, chest high, shrieking, the noise was something awful and when yer tried to get ups a ladder or down it, ’tis got the dead hanging off of it upside down, and the muskets going and the cannon, the whole place lit like yer could read yer name if yer ’ad to.’

‘So that was the end,’ Robert repeated, dazed. ‘It was a great victory. Is that not so, sir?’

‘The town was taken, that being the object of the exercise.’

‘But wasn’t everybody dead?’ Frankie asked.

‘Very many. More than nine hundred of the British troops from the Fourth and Light Divisions and over five hundred each from the Third and Fifth.’

Frankie thought he no longer wanted to go to war.

Robert said, ‘And they put the French garrison to the sword.’

‘They did no such thing, but the troops plundered the town,’ Allington replied.

Robert and Phil still gazed at the patch of sand, and they both saw the piles of corpses and the wicked spikes of the
chevaux de frise
, the ladders and the trenches. The groans of the wounded sounded in their ears and the eyes of the dead looked back at them. They glanced into the face of Captain Allington and thought he saw and heard as they did but he said, ‘It’s the duty of a good soldier to put aside the horrors of war. To dwell on such things is neither useful nor sensible, for it achieves nothing and puts nothing right. It doesn’t mean you must never show mercy or compassion. Guard your honour and you will do as you should.’

Robert allowed unpleasantness to fade and thought of honour and glory. Phil dwelled on the men who drowned in the ditches, the water filling their lungs. He closed his eyes tightly. He remembered something else Jackson had said. He had given a man water from his canteen but, ‘it weren’t no use for it trickled straight out the hole in his belly.’ Phil, hugging his knees, thought, If I were a soldier I would be brave – it would make me brave.

It appeared as though Allington was about to walk away from them. Robert, engulfed by the blindest, maddest hero worship, gasped out, ‘But, sir, in all this,’ gesticulating at the sand, which still bore the marks of Allington’s cane, ‘where were you? Perhaps you weren’t there.’

If Captain Allington had not been there, he thought, he could kill himself at the disappointment.

‘I was at that time seconded to the Portuguese Brigade of the Fourth Division,’ and Allington again pointed out on his map of sand the exact position of the breaches. ‘I was, therefore, in the last attempt to gain entrance, here. By keeping up such a continuous assault on the breaches, the enemy were drawn away from fully defending their walls from the Third and Fifth, so, though a failure, it served its purpose.’

He walked away from them. The twins squabbled and rolled in the sand. The map of Badejos disappeared beneath their struggles. Robert cuffed them both, but it was too late and everything was spoiled.

Pride was making up a cloak for Mrs Arthur out of a grey duffel.

‘Master said you needed a cloak. The cloth was ordered and there it is.’

‘But Pride, I didn’t ask for one.’

Pride was disappointed. ‘Don’t you need it then?’

‘Why, yes I do.’ Mrs Arthur went to the table and absently picked up a reel of thread. She couldn’t say to Pride: ‘But I ought to pay for it. I can’t accept presents from Captain Allington.’ She then thought, But my whole life and that of my children is, at this minute, a gift from Captain Allington.

Pride, watching her, read her expression perfectly well. He said, ‘It’s easiest just to do what he wants.’

‘Are you quite sure he meant it for me?’ Mrs Arthur had a letter from her stepmother in her pocket.

‘There isn’t nobody else he would have had it done for, that’s for certain.’

Mrs Arthur was less certain. She went away to the drawing room and reread Mrs Templeton’s letter. It said: