Kit (10 page)

A stinging cuff around the head sent her ears ringing. Suddenly Sergeant Taylor was behind her. ‘Stop daydreaming and start polishing,’ he said. ‘You think I got nowhere to go? I want that barrel shining like a shit-barn door.’ Kit bit her tongue, and got her head down.

She had better luck the next day with swordplay; for though she was not the strongest of the company, she was quick and agile, and had had a good tutor in her father. As she practised with wooden swords and then sharpened weapons, her body recalled how to turn and parry and strike. Ross, leaning on his pikestaff to watch them, was more than usually testy that day, and there were betraying violet shadows beneath his eyes.
Too much merrymaking
, thought Kit sourly. Tired the captain may have been, but he certainly would not let his dragoons rest; he had them fighting on barrels and beams in the palace courtyard, from above and below, to become used, he said, to fighting on uneven terrain and mountainous inclines. The dragoons were also introduced to the partisan, a long pike with a tip of Spanish steel, and punctured the poor dummies over and again. Ross gave the dummies Spanish names, and as the dragoons made a mess of Felipe and Alfonso and Miguel, it seemed odd to Kit that having supped with the Spanish, Ross would now turn their own steel against them. The captain made them fight blindfold too, practising with plain staves until they were black and blue with blows, so that they might use all their senses in combat. ‘What you hear and feel is almost as important as what you see,’ Ross said. The dragoons learned the meaning of every call of the trumpet, every beat of the drum, every fire of the gun battery. ‘Listen to your own person too,’ urged Ross. ‘The pricking of your thumbs, the hairs rising on the neck – these are tools. Use them. If you feel that a blow is about to fall, the chances are it may.’

Ross made them learn their regimental motto by heart –
Nemo me impune lacessit
; No one cuts me with impunity. Kit did not understand the English any more than she did the Latin, but she learned the tag obediently. Ross would pace about them like an attorney, catechising them about their new regiment.

‘Who are we?’

‘The Scots Grey Dragoons.’

‘For whom do we fight?’

‘For queen and country.’

‘What is our role?’

‘Reconnaissance and security.’

‘And what is our motto?’

‘
Nemo me impune lacessit.
’

‘Very good. Again.’

Now and then, she would see at the windows and balconies of the palace shining characters who overlooked their manoeuvres. These, she supposed, must be the Spanish grandees, or even the family of the Doge himself, the Duke of Genova to whom the house belonged. As she rode about the courtyard in the strong autumn sunshine, she looked up through beads of stinging sweat and imagined what it would be like to be rich enough to call this place home.

Gazing through the glazed windows she would see the hanging brilliants of a chandelier, or the corner of a fresco depicting green and rolling hills. When she saw the ladies in their satins gathering on the delicate balconies, she imagined what it would be like to be a Spanish princess.
The King of Spain’s daughter
, she thought. Oh, to wear cooling satin, and cold dewdrop diamonds at your ears and throat and to waft your face with a fan, and if the day grew hot to retire inside into the costly shadows and drink iced sherbet. Yet she knew, given the choice, she would lay by the satin and unhook the diamonds, fold up the fan and set down the sherbet, for a chance to wear a red coat and find her husband again.

She was impatient to ride to the mountains, to find Richard before winter set in. Each day they were joined by more recruits, chosen ones pruned from the shiploads of soldiers arriving from England, from Scotland, from Ireland. At night they slept in the ruined palace, in conditions that became more and more cramped. Kit jostled for her bed space with the rest, learning that nothing ill came from standing her ground. She was glad of her silver prick, for there was only the covered bucket in the corner for their functions, emptied once a day, so she and all the others pissed in the gutters, as did all the citizens of Genova; white piss and black shit to match the pied streets. The dragoons seemed altogether a better class – as if being elevated by their horses lifted them to other heights. They cursed less and quarrelled less, and although there was still language enough to make her blush, she felt comfortable in the company of the dragoons by day.

But by night the education Maria van Lommen had given her had birthed a new fear, and in her flea-bitten cot she curled in upon herself like a spiny urchin, both hands crammed between her legs, clasping her silver prick, ready for the touch of a hand or worse upon her rump. But she spent every night unmolested, and began, little by little, to trust; to learn names and make friends. She became acquainted with Southcott, a bearded fellow as merry as Falstaff; Hall, a blond, blue-eyed cherub as young as she; Book, who looked like a wrestler and had never, he claimed, read a word; and O’Connell, the big black Irishman who had played the fiddle on board
The Truth and Daylight
. She befriended, too, fellows by the name of Wareham, Swinney, Rolf, Noyes, Crook, Page and Dallenger. She passed the time of day with Kennedy, Lancaster and Farrant, and took a drink with Gibson, Laverack and Morgan, the one Welshman in their company. But one name she never learned was the Christian name of Captain Ross; he never owned it, nor did anyone seem to know it. He was Ross to all his men, or just ‘the captain’, and as all the men seemed to love and respect him, she kept her opinions to herself.

Instead she listened eagerly to those who had been in battle before, in the Low Countries, where the Hollanders lived, and listened fascinated to stories of boggy wetlands where the water lay in vast planes like dropped mirrors, and foot soldiers trekked from Schellenberg to Maastricht to Bruges without ever engaging with the enemy or knowing the comfort of dry feet. ‘My boots were waterlogged,’ said Southcott, ‘from one year’s end to the next.’

‘And what was the purpose of the campaign?’ asked Kit. ‘Who was fighting?’

But no one seemed to know, any more than they knew where they were going now, just that there was some great coil involving France and Spain, in which England had somehow become entangled. Kit was not alone in her ignorance.

Although the year was well into autumn and it was cold in the morning and at night, the sun shone relentlessly down upon the dragoons drilling in the courtyard of the Palazzo Reale for every day of their training, and by the end of each one Kit was sick of the sight of Captain Ross. She hated his constant instruction, his incessant cool corrections. He had them ride up and down the court until they ached. Kit’s tailbone pained her, her teeth rattled in her head from the rising trot and she boiled in her uniform like a kipper in a kettle. Her calloused fingers, wrapped about the reins for hours on end, seemed set into claws. The silver prick, which had once seemed so cool and comfortable against her skin, heated to a hot poker and, when in the saddle, dug into her from all sides. Her head ached from the blinding sun on the marble pavings and her mouth was as dry as a hay barn.

But despite all these discomforts Captain Ross was a stickler for a smart appearance; they rode all day in the burning sun, but sweat stains were unacceptable. They rode on a clay gravel, and yet dusty boots could not be seen. Every button must be polished, and as she spat on hers every night and worked them with a scrap of leather she imagined she was spitting at Ross, right in his handsome face. At night when she punched her flea-ridden tick mattress and bolster she pictured herself pummelling his lean body. She hated Ross,
hated
him. And once the lamps were blown, and she was alone with the dark and her thoughts, she was glad to hate him, for then she did not have to entertain her most disloyal and secret of thoughts: that he was the best-made man she had seen in her life. She screwed her eyes tight shut and tried to conjure up the green eyes and brown hair of Richard Walsh, instead of the black hair and blue eyes of Captain Ross.

The only man in the company – besides Ross – whom she really disliked was Sergeant Taylor, who had begun their acquaintance by cuffing her over a musket barrel, and seemed disinclined to make amends as the days marched on. Taylor was a brutal, broken-nosed man; fate had knocked him in at the edges like a cheap kettle. Everything about him was blunt – his features, his teeth, his manner. His repeated boast was that he was once the Duke of Marlborough’s footman – Kit could only think that the duke had promoted him, not upon his merits, but to get him out of his household. Taylor was a stickler, he never smiled, he cuffed the men about the head and face, and Kit became used to his blows if she rested her musket on the wrong shoulder or turned her mare’s head the wrong way. Taylor seemed to have chosen Kit as his particular target, perhaps because she was the youngest of the recruits. Or perhaps because, alone among the men, she shared the same striking red hair as Taylor; but where Kit was slim and lithe, Taylor was a barrel of a man, square and ugly in appearance and manner. Kit soon learned to avoid – as much as she could – his evil little eye.

Ross worked hard to ensure that each man caught up with the lessons that had gone before, until they were a perfectly drilled troop numbering over a hundred. The muscles Kit had discovered aboard ship grew and hardened, and she was glad of the new, more generous coat. She had always been good with a sword, and now she was a decent shot and had learned the little ways of her gun – that it kicked like a mule, that the hammer always stuck after reload, that the shot veered to the left, that she must ram four times not three – and if she could remember all these things she might just stay alive. By the day they were ready to ride, she was ready to fight.

On the dawn of their seventh day Ross addressed them all in the courtyard. ‘No man of mine shall be ignorant of his orders,’ he declared. They were to ride to a place in the mountains called Rovereto, many leagues away, to join Captain Tichborne’s company of foot and the other English forces, and begin their campaign. Kit’s heart beat painfully beneath her blue facings. Richard was with Tichborne’s company.
Day seventy without you – I’m coming, my love.

Sun up and orders given, Ross instructed them to see the quartermaster for their rations. Kit staggered under the weight of the panniers she was given, stuffed with pemmican and biscuits and tobacco, and could barely lift them to drape them across the now obedient Flint’s neck. On the command the troop rode forth on the grey horses that gave the regiment its name.

I neither will take it from spalpeen or brat …

‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

Over the next days and weeks Kit snatched tantalising glances of the country she’d come to save. As she carved each notch on her musket stock,
seventy-two days without Richard, seventy-three
, she felt as if she had ridden right into that green and insubstantial fresco she had glimpsed on the palace wall. Here was some rural fantasy, which lived only in the mind of a long-dead painter, all lands and none.

She would hear distant bells and turn to see, over the tops of plane trees, the gilded domes of infidel cathedrals. Down a sunlit lane she would see the golden pediments of huge stone villas, and between two hills she would see the silvered slice of a many-towered monastery. She was always on the outside, and knew in her heart that some great beauty was being hidden from her. All these citadels seemed impossibly far away, like the places she’d heard about in Maura’s tales; Mag Mell or Tir nan Og. Kingdoms whose doors were closed to the common traveller, whose golden keys were to be sought for years or bartered for with all you had. And the peaks she could see on the horizon, rocky teeth that held, somewhere in their stony maw, Richard, trapped like Jonah, were the faraway mountains from the stories, mountains that couldn’t be reached however long you journeyed, always on the other side of forests stuffed full of enchantments, or boiling rivers that could not be forded but must be gone around.

It seemed that Captain Ross was acquainted with these rules of folklore, for the dragoons’ route was always circuitous, and their progress as discreet as a hundred horse could be. Cities and towns were avoided and Kit began to understand that they might not be welcome here in this country they had come to liberate. They were never billeted on any of the towns or hamlets, but camped in the countryside, in bosky dells or woodland caves. She would hear foreign names passed down from her commanders, as the days and nights strung together along their path, collecting a string of cities: Parma, Guastalla, Mantova. All seemed peaceful, green and tranquil, the sun always shone, there was no boom of cannon or cries of combat. Kit was reminded of the soldiers’ tales of trooping up and down the sodden Low Countries without ever engaging with the enemy. She found it hard to believe in the war, hard to be afraid.

She began to believe in the place called Mantova. The dragoons had been told that they could expect a bed that night for they would be welcomed through the gates, at last, of that great city, and indeed, they emerged from a dark and twisted forest to see a calm jade lake, with a distant palace set upon it like a diadem. But there was something amiss – black smoke rose from the towers in plumes. Captain Ross raised one gloved hand to halt them. ‘Back,’ he hissed, ‘back under tree cover.’ He wheeled his horse around; his mare reared and turned. ‘The French have beaten us here.’

There was nothing to do but wait for dark. The dragoons dismounted, tethered their horses and settled in the wildwood. There was to be no talking so many slept; but Kit sat, heart thudding, under twisted black branches as the light died and the mosquitoes came out to feast. What was happening in the city? Across the lake and by some trick of the water she could hear muffled cries, the crackle of a blaze and the screams of falling timber. From the blasted windows of the castle she could see fiery figures falling, to break the surface of the lake. Flint, who had become fond of her mistress, nibbled her shoulder consolingly, but Kit stared fixedly ahead. The French had forced entry to Mantova, had rammed and battered and blown the gates in.