Kit (14 page)

But it was all over. Dragoons were dragging the monks into the courtyard, accounting for all bodies. Ross was stripping the cowls from the fallen monks. ‘No tonsure,’ he said.

‘French?’ asked Taylor briefly.

‘For certain,’ said Ross. ‘Blue coats.’

‘Then what happened to the monks?’ asked Kit. No one answered; no one needed to. The ravines were deep; there would have been no need to kill them first.

Only two of the Scots Greys had been killed, as well as poor Ingoldsby at the door. Ross took their names and personal effects, but had their bodies cast down the mountain after the monks. In death, all men were equal.

Taylor, his bell under his arm like a helm, was charged with building a fire. He started the flames with a handful of manuscripts, priceless, beautiful inscriptions, scripture turned to kindling. A cohort of dragoons followed him, with armfuls of scrolls and books. Sickened, she turned away.

Charged with the rest of the dragoons with searching the monastery for firewood, Kit, bloodied and disoriented, found herself alone in a little chapel. From exhaustion more than devotion, she sank to her knees.

Above the little altar was a fresco of a saint, holding up one hand, like St Barnabas holding back the tide; but it was a dragon not an ocean that shrunk under his hand. The creature’s smoky breath was subdued, not rising like a cloud but rolling to the ground like morning mist. Bluff, bearded and friendly of face, the saint was benignly plucking a naked child from the dragon’s mouth by the ankle. Other babes shrunk behind his robes, a queue of little figures, saved from the painted dragon. The scene took place in a deep green ravine with a blue river at the bottom, and in the jagged mountains above perched a little monastery with a tower and a bell. ‘St Columbano’ read the golden legend wreathed about the saint’s head.

Kit’s chapped lips parted. The miracle of the saint and the dragon had happened
here
. Not just on this peninsula, but in this very valley, and the monastery had been founded in the saint’s name. Why, then, she wondered, had that saint not saved the babe that she found in the thorn bush, in that very same green valley below? Had St Columbano been sleeping that day? Perhaps he’d been driven away by the French – maybe his spirit had left this place with the monks.

The fresco was not the only treasure in the place, for below the saint stood a chalice on the tabernacle. It was silver and round with a wide cup, and studded with jewels about the brim. It looked as she had always imagined the grail to look in the legends told to her by her father, by Maura. She reached out a finger and flicked the rim with her fingertip. To Kit, the cup sounded an ironic note. The grail was the end of a quest. Her quest to find Richard had barely begun.

‘Take it,’ said a voice behind her.

She spun, and Ross was in the doorway, Sergeant Taylor at his shoulder like a malign shadow.

‘Take it in your hands,’ Ross urged. ‘It’s yours.’

‘Christ, you can’t give him that!’ spluttered Taylor.

‘Booty,’ said Ross briefly. ‘Quite legitimate.’

‘But … his rank!’

‘Irrelevant,’ replied Ross. ‘We are all equal in rights of plunder. He found it. He keeps it. After all,’ he said pointedly, ‘you
found
that bell you carry.’ The captain’s voice hardened to command. ‘Fall the men in to the dormitories. We must make camp – we’ll reach Rovereto tomorrow.’

Alone again, Kit stood, back to the altar, clutching the chalice. She felt something rising in her throat that had been begging for expulsion since she had lifted Ingoldsby’s broken head. She vomited into the silver grail in a warm gush, then set the thing carefully down, lying down flat on her back on the floor, wiping her mouth, eyes streaming into her ears. She looked at the painted saint above her until her innards had settled, her rancid breath smoking like that of the subdued dragon. Her battle-addled brain could not make sense of the strangeness of the day, of her first battle. Ever since she had buttoned herself into her uniform, she had pictured a grand, sweeping, emerald-green battlefield, with immaculate ranks of soldiers and cavalry clad in chain mail and lined up precisely on the sward. They would to run towards each other at the sound of a trumpet as if in some medieval joust, fighting hand to hand with honour towards a clean bloodless outcome. Instead, her first battle had been a messy scrap bottled up in a stone jar, with musket shot ringing from the walls, monks who were not monks, and the loss of three of their number. Kit got slowly to her feet. She emptied the chalice from the window, through the smashed stained glass, and wiped it out with the tail of her coat. Then she set it back on the tabernacle, where it belonged, and went to join the others, averting her eyes from the burning pyre in the courtyard.

Night had fallen, and the moon shone above them, promising a night frost. The tenth men had led the horses into the church for warmth and shelter, while in the dormitories the Scots Greys took the little truckle beds or the floor. But the dormer windows had been smashed by musket balls and the cold sneaked in. Fingers and toes froze, noses pinched, ears stung; impossible, unbearable to sleep like that. One by one the dragoons dragged their tick mattresses from the cots and crept to the courtyard, to settle down by the fire of priceless manuscripts. Kit curled up in the guilty heat with the rest, and watched the flames lick around the illuminated letters; the gilt shimmering and blackening, a perverse alchemy turning gold to ash.

And left them for dead in the morning …

‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

And the cold did return.

Overnight the first snows had come, and doused the fire to twisted blackened ash. It blanketed the courtyard, and the sleeping dragoons too. The Scots Greys woke in the white dawn, dead eyed and shivering, their uniforms heavy and freezing with snowfall. Miserable with discomfort, they mounted and began to ride again, ever upwards.

Kit discovered, on that climb, just how many kinds of snow there were. Flint’s hooves slipped on packed ice black and hard as iron, crunched into compact crystals of slush, or sank and floundered in insubstantial powder, finer than potato flour.

They climbed until all landmarks were a memory; Kit longed for the clustered villages and the churches with their alpine onion spires. Nature herself was unrecognisable; rocks and trees alike were white formless tumours on the mountainside. As a child she had learned to fear the dark, and the nameless terrors that lurked in the night-time farmyard when she was sent by her mother for a lump of peat or a pail of water. Now she knew that light was far more dreadful. Everywhere was such a blinding, dazzling white that it was painful; once the milky, cold sun was high in the sky she had to pull her tricorn over her streaming eyes. When the men stopped for a piss they would clasp themselves in two hands, practically urinating through their fingers lest the frost nipped at their most tender parts. Kit had a different problem – her silver prick, hot as a poker in the Genovese sun, now burned her flesh with cold, and her fingers, beneath the skirts of her coat, all but stuck to the frosted metal.

The dragoons rode for hours, hardly speaking, until they had left the monastery of St Columbano far behind. The sun was already high when Ross stopped and took a map from his coat, consulting the truculent Taylor on the whereabouts of the narrow mountain pass down to Rovereto. While the officers consulted, a dark head and a red one bobbing together over the fluttering paper, a shot snapped out, impossible to say from which direction. The company rode hard for a little coppice of white trees and shelter. Southcott had been shot clean through his hand. Safely in the undergrowth he showed Kit the wound in his palm, proud as the Christ. ‘C’n see the sun right through it,’ he said, as he held the hand high. Sure enough, Kit could see a prick of light through the hole. ‘It’s hardly bled at all,’ she said, comforting.

‘Too damn cold,’ said Southcott.

‘And a good thing too, for we’ve no surgeon with us,’ said Ross. ‘He awaits us at Rovereto, for we were not yet to engage. Walsh, tie it up.’

Kit tore the stock from her neck and bandaged the palm. Ross, who was the only one of the company issued with gloves, passed one of them to the injured man and Southcott put it on over the wound.

Ross and Taylor gathered together for another conference, and Kit was near enough to hear the whispered exchange. ‘The French are between us and the pass,’ Ross murmured to Taylor, beneath his breath. ‘There is nowhere to go but up. We must find another way to descend into Rovereto tomorrow, else face another fight.’

Taylor squinted at the lowering sun with his pale little eyes. ‘Might mean another night in the cold.’

Ross pursed his lips. ‘Then we collect firewood while it is still light. It is as it is.’

That night, round the pale and heatless flames, no songs were sung. O’Connell left his fiddle in his pack, lest it ended up on the fire. When the ashes were cold, the dragoons slept together like a litter of puppies, a tangle of limbs, wary of an exposed foot or hand that might be lost to the frost in the morning.

In the coldest part of the night Ross’s arm crept around Kit, and, half asleep, she nestled gratefully into his shoulder, burying her face in his dark fall of hair. Warm at last, she slept through the small hours as if she was in a feather bed.

She came to at dawn a little apart from the pile, cold again, innards twisting with a nameless shame. In those half-lands between sleep and waking she had dreamed of sleeping in Ross’s arms. As she woke she plucked a hair from her mouth. It slid between her teeth, oddly intimate, twined about her tongue. She held it before her face, threaded with diamonds of saliva. It was long and dark; his hair. It was as if they had kissed.

The others were yawning and stretching, counting their fingers and toes. No one made comment – no one thought it strange that they had all slept so close – it was life and death, it was necessity. It was the army. But her cheeks burned with cold and shame. The captain too seemed busy himself, making plans for their descent, and she thought he avoided her gaze.

They rode on, trying to forget what had passed in the night. But much later, as they rode down the pass, Ross said, out of the blue, ‘You said something, last night, and aroused my … curiosity.’

Her pulse in her ears, Kit stared at her chapped hands, clasping Flint’s reins. This was it – she was unmasked. In his arms she had whispered something that had given her away.

‘That is,’ he said hurriedly, ‘my
intellectual
curiosity. Forgive me: what is
Virtus Ipsa Suis Firmissima
?’

Kit looked at him, relieved but jolted. She had never heard the words spoken aloud before, yet they transported her instantly home.
Virtus Ipsa Suis Firmissima
: the Latin tag inscribed below the family arms on the sign of Kavanagh’s Inn ‘It is a motto, a family motto.’

Ross looked at her, his eyes very blue. ‘You uttered it in your sleep.’ She dropped her eyes.

‘Do you know what it means?’

‘No. I never learned.’ It was true. No one in the alehouse could read Latin, and the meaning, if it was ever known, had been long forgotten.

‘It means “Truth relies on its own arms”. A good raison for a soldier.’ And then he rode on ahead.

Kit, breathing out a smoky breath of relief, fixed her eyes on the view – far away a blue smear of a lake sat in a green valley. And beyond that, over the seas somewhere, a little alehouse where a sign swung in an autumn breeze, the benign cousin of this keen icy wind. A sign that said ‘Truth relies on its own arms’. She was glad to know the meaning of her motto, but now the homesickness clasped her heart, colder than the ice mountain. She wanted Richard. She wanted to go home.

But Richard and home were farther away than ever. They marched another day through the white alpine desert, searching hopelessly for the pass, hardly knowing which way was up, which down. Maps were now irrelevant, for the snow had erased all borders. Ross did not know any better than they where, fathoms below their frozen feet, those broken cartographer’s lines demarcated Savoy from the Empire. They rode on, wasting the rest of the hours of daylight, and by sunset found themselves back in the coppice where they had looked at Southcott’s hand. They made camp as best they could. ‘Picket the horses to the trees so they stay on their feet,’ Ross commanded. ‘For if they lie down they’ll freeze.’

His chin was still high, his tones still commanding, but Kit heard a new timbre in them, like the metallic clamour of the bell of the monastery, calling for help. He was lost. His happy youthful confidence, his surefootedness, his unquestioning aura of being born to command, had carried them all forth on this fool’s errand – they had followed him in a circle, all day, and now they were at the mercy of the mountain for another killing night. His confidence had got them lost, and the very thing that drew her to him, drew them all to him, and made them follow him unquestioningly through fire and ice and this valley of death, had doomed them to freeze. Too heartily, around their meagre fire, Ross told them of a unit called the Salvatores. ‘Eugene of Savoy has instituted a troop of outriders who patrol the mountains looking for approaching regiments and assessing whether they be friend or foe. They will find us and guide us to the muster. Be of good cheer.’ She could see him trying to believe it, determined to believe it, as if his confidence and his will alone could conjure an outrider from the drifting smoke.

In her frozen-headed fantasy Kit imagined Richard being just such a one, dressed not in uniform but in the robes of St Columbano, riding to them cheery cheeked and warm of blood, folding her frozen hands in his warm ones, embracing her in the circle of his arms.

Huddled around the pale flames, the dragoons all said the same thing to each other, like a catechism. Kit saw, with a mixture of pride and despair, that they still relied upon Ross; the captain’s word was their gospel.

‘The Salvatores.’

‘Yes, the Salvatores.’

‘They will see the fire.’

‘They will come tonight.’