Kit (16 page)

Kit, heart beating wildly, had no idea where her words were coming from. She spoke to Taylor, to the cooper on the cart, to every man who thought they could take a woman’s most precious possession.

‘Superior in rank perhaps,’ she retorted, ‘but in no other regard. I might venture to say that the Duke of Marlborough had too good an opinion of you when he took his livery off your back and gave you the queen’s.’ Kit knew Taylor had been footman to Marlborough, for he never ceased to talk of it, and she could see this last stung him to the quick. Southcott and O’Connell, who had relieved themselves and were now standing easy in the doorway listening, sucked in their collective breath. Taylor’s face grew red as boiled ham. ‘By God, I’ll have you on jankers for the rest of your days,’ he spat. ‘Expect your arrest at dawn. These men are my witnesses,’ He swung his arm drunkenly towards Southcott and O’Connell, where they lolled in the doorway looking on.

Kit looked to them in appeal; they were not long friends, but had been through much together in a short time. Taylor was unpopular, pursuing his paltry feuds and exacting petty punishments, and the dragoons had a code of loyalty to each other. Kit had fought well at the monastery of San Columbano, she had run towards Ingoldsby when everyone else had run away, and she had bandaged Southcott’s hand with her own stock. She could only pray they remembered her good offices now. Southcott and O’Connell looked at each other and then at Taylor, wide eyed. ‘I didn’t see anything. Did you, Mr O’Connell?’

‘No, Mr Southcott, not a thing. Truly, the streets are very dark after the bright lights of the tavern.’

Taylor looked from one to the other. Southcott’s merry face was serious for once, and O’Connell, the towering Irishman, stood with arms folded across his massive chest. Taylor looked back at Kit, his bluster gone, his malice redoubled. ‘I’ll cool your courage soon enough, boy.’ Then he spat at Kit’s feet, and stumbled away down the little alley.

Kit slumped with relief. ‘
Thank
you,’ she said to her fellows, heartfelt.

‘He’ll be on your back now, Walsh,’ said Southcott, patting her shoulder.

‘And ours,’ said O’Connell.

‘When isn’t he?’ rejoined Southcott. ‘Come on, you great mountain; let us have another drink, and Walsh can pursue his amours in peace.’ He nodded to the shadows, where Kit could see the girl in white still cowering. Taking his fellow by the arm, Southcott turned O’Connell round and back through the door into the welcoming light.

Kit walked hesitantly to the girl in the shadows, hands held out before her to show that she was no threat. The girl had covered herself up as best she could, and now looked up at Kit with trusting eyes. Kit stooped to rescue the sorry lace cap where it lay in the gutter, but it was ruined and she let it be. She turned to the girl and performed a little pantomime of pointing and shrugging, saying slowly; ‘Where do you live?’

‘I understand you perfectly,’ said the girl in a pretty accent. ‘I am schooled in a little English, and your regiments have been in our region for years.’

‘Then tell me where you live and I can escort you home.’

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘You must not tell my father. If it becomes known that that man even laid his hands on me I would be forever tarnished.’

‘But you were entirely innocent in the case! I can explain the particulars …’

‘Explain what?’ said the girl with some heat. ‘That I was passing by a tavern late at night? That I stopped to speak to a soldier? Even such small sins are enough to damage my reputation. One day, I want to be well wed.’

Kit shook her head. ‘Very well. But let me at least escort you home. And for God’s sake take my jacket.’ Kit unbuttoned her coat and wrapped it like a cape about the girl’s naked shoulders.

She shrank from the heavy felt as if it burned. ‘What kind of figure will I cut in such a coat? I would look for all the world like a soldier’s doxy.’

Kit buttoned on her coat once more, and they walked through the little streets garlanded with flower boxes. It was hard to believe that Taylor’s brutal attack could have taken take place somewhere like this.

‘What is your name?’ Kit asked.

‘I am Bianca Castellano. And you?’

‘I am Christian Kavanagh. Kit.’

‘And you are not English, are you, Kit? You do not sound like the rest of them.’

‘I am Irish.’ There was pride in Kit’s reply. A thought struck her: if this girl could detect her accent, would she know whether other Irish had been billeted on the town? She postponed the question for a better season. They walked on until they reached a grand house; the best on the street, perhaps in the town. Candelabras lit the windows and a hurricane lamp burned in the doorway, swinging like a pendulum from left to right, scanning the street. ‘My father,’ said Bianca.

Kit straightened. ‘Leave this in my charge.’

A tall white figure held the lamp, a man who wore a nightcap like a candle snuffer and a nightgown down to his feet.

Kit doffed her tricorn. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I have the honour to restore your daughter to you. She stumbled in the street and became a little disarranged, but was not much hurt.’

The man lifted his lamp to look in Kit’s face. Beside her, Bianca was holding her breath. Kit kept her gaze straight and felt a gradual lessening of tension. At last the lamp was lowered, the nightcap nodded, and Bianca released her breath in a low rush. ‘I thank you, sir,’ said a gravelly, heavily accented voice, ‘for bringing my daughter home. I bid you goodnight.’

Bianca was bundled in the door, the lights were extinguished one by one, and Kit went back to the silk market. The Gasthof would be closed by now, and she was too tired for further excitement.

Out for recreation we went on a tramp …

‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

Nothing happened.

The one requirement placed upon the dragoons was that they collect their rations each day from the quartermaster at the silk market. They were paid and victualled properly for the first time; five farthings a day for tobacco, a pound of bread, a pint of wine, and clean bedstraw each night. Kit tried to smoke as she thought the habit would add to her male credentials, but found it unbearably bitter. The soldiers wanted for nothing but occupation; they kicked their heels about the little mountain town, and of course, there was little to do but drink.

Kit did not see Ross, as he was closeted with the captains at the castle above the town. Nor did she see Taylor, and for this she was grateful, for in the cold light of day she regretted the events of that first night – not her actions, but the words she had chosen, words that seemed calculated to inflame Taylor and make him her implacable enemy. Happily, Taylor was also kept busy with some business at the castle, business of which he boasted often but simultaneously insisted was deadly secret.

Orders were handed down from Tichborne’s ensign, and those orders were always the same, day after day. Wait. Just wait.
Eighty-three days without Richard. Eighty-four.
Kit, twitching with impatience, continued her search about the town, and heading off on goat tracks in the direction of Cremona, but each time returning by nightfall without reaching it. She had tried walking up the hill towards the imposing castle, but she had been turned back on the path by guards wearing a uniform she did not recognise.

Although Kit had friends among the dragoons, Southcott and O’Connell and the others were happy to pass the time in the taverns with their backgammon and tobacco. On the third day, a mizzling, freezing rain set in and Kit, sick of taverns and mountain walks, decided to visit Bianca Castellano and see how she did.

She ran splashing through the streets, the rain filling up her tricorn, till she came to the street where she’d left Bianca three nights past. She knocked on the door of the painted house, and a neat maid answered it.

Kit doffed her hat. ‘Signorina Castellano?’

The maid shook her tidy head. ‘
No soldato
.’

Kit frowned.

The maid said, brokenly, ‘No soldier. Lady say. Father say.’

A tall shadow loomed behind the little maid, and barked something at her. She stood aside and an imposing man filled the door. Wealth was powdered into his hair and embroidered into his waistcoat. Kit recognised the man she’d met three nights before, a more impressive figure without his nightcap and gown. He looked Kit up and down. ‘How may I help you?’ he said in accented English, with a courtesy that belied his hard tone.

Kit cleared her throat nervously. ‘Sir, forgive me. I am the dragoon who had the honour of assisting your daughter three nights past. I came to see how she does.’

‘She does very well,’ he said shortly. ‘I thank you now, as I did then, for your assistance. That should be enough.’

‘Is she … may I see her?’

The chilly features thawed slightly. The man stood aside and gave a short order to the maid, who led Kit into a little parlour.

The silken walls were hung with portraits; too many portraits of people with long expensive faces. The light was multiplied by faceted mirrors, and fine carpets softened her tread. There was so much to look at that Kit did not, at first, see anyone else in the room. But Bianca was there, a circle of embroidery on her lap, looking from an expensively glazed window on a peerless mountain vista smeared and spoiled by rain. She turned her lovely head and jumped up with a little cry.

‘I have been hoping you would come! I have been wanting to thank you.’

The maid settled herself discreetly in the corner, pulled out some lace tatting from her pocket and began to work with great concentration on a little snowy cap.

Kit was the cheapest thing in the room, in her coarse woollens and brassy buttons and faded lace. She sat as she had seen Ross sit – even in nature, even on a fallen stump, he sat with one foot forward and one crooked to the knee with his forearm resting upon it, easy and elegant.

‘I have been walking abroad with my maid to find you,’ announced Bianca.

A recklessness had replaced the timidity with which she had crept home at Kit’s side.

‘That I would not advise,’ replied Kit. ‘And I am not surprised at your lack of success, for I think it reasonable to say that any place the regiment might be, a respectable woman would not.’

‘So my father says. But I wanted to find you.’

Kit frowned. ‘Your maid,’ she lowered her voice, glancing at the servant in the corner, ‘she said no soldiers.’

‘Yes.’ Bianca looked down at her abandoned embroidery. ‘My father is inclined to protect me.’

‘Of course. But it was the maid told me: “
Lady say.
”’

There was a silence. Bianca looked down at her lap. ‘There
is
one particular red coat I wish to keep from my door.’

Kit breathed out. ‘Sergeant Taylor.’

‘Yes. He has been … visiting. He offers me marriage.’

Kit sat forward, all her attempts at elegance abandoned, her hands clasped before her on her knees. ‘You mean … he has been paying his addresses to you? After how he treated you three nights past?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you cannot tell your father—’

‘Oh, my father would kill him,’ Bianca interrupted, sharp as a knife. ‘My father was a butcher. He acts the fine gentleman, but we are trade. Everything you see in this room has been bought, not inherited.’ She stood and wandered the room as if taking an inventory. ‘These portraits are not of my blood. This chandelier is newly shipped from Venice, these mirrors too, for two beef steers. These silk drapes come from Bergamo, swapped for six sides of mutton, carpets from Turkey exchanged for forty hams. My English lessons were salaried in sausage. It is all paid for with flesh and blood, for we have no lineage. Our family tree is populated by pigs and cows and sheep.’

She sat down again. ‘My father grew up with knives. He grew up as a peasant, slitting pigs on the hillside. He has forty butchers working for him day and night; but he would do Sergeant Taylor himself. He’d be split and trussed in a quarter of the bells.’ There was relish in Bianca’s voice; the butcher’s daughter.

‘And you
don’t
want that?’

‘Oh, I do. I would love to see his blood run for what he did to me. But his disgrace goes hand in hand with mine. My father cannot know what passed between us in the alley.’

‘Is that why he caused your maid to sit with us?’

‘Concetta? She is here for me.
I
ask for her to be with me always. My reputation must be beyond reproach.’

Kit sat back, tingling. When she wed Richard, she’d been an heiress too; but Maura’s easily quashed objections had been nothing to the rules that governed this Trentino miss. The Castellanos were trying to build a bloodline from nothing, from this one piece of luck in their heritage, this freakishly beautiful girl. Their line was not even so established as Kit’s; the Kavanaghs could boast the earls of Leinster in their family, but Bianca’s father was a cut-throat turned count. ‘So, you could not be a soldier’s wife.’

‘It is not in my stars, for my father will arrange something to my family’s greater advantage. He would never settle for a sergeant, but an officer of very high rank would not settle for me.’ She looked up coquettishly with her strange and beautiful purple eyes.

There was a short intense silence that Kit could not quite define. Then Bianca spoke again. ‘And you? What do you wish for?’

Kit considered for a moment. It was so much of her habit to dissemble that the truth came hard. ‘I am looking for someone.’

‘Who?’

Habit returned. ‘My brother.’

‘He is here also?’

‘Yes. I have followed him all the way from Ireland. He had a month’s start on me. But the company has divided all over this region; my brother may be anywhere. It seems a hopeless quest at present.’

A door opened somewhere along the passage. With a glance at her maid, Bianca said hurriedly, ‘My father comes. But visit me again tomorrow; in the morning he is from home at his bloody business.’

Kit stood. ‘For what purpose?’

‘My father supplies the army with their rations of meat. Your regiment will be marching on his blood pudding, his white sausage, his
capriolo
. He knows where all the men are placed, for he feeds them all. He comes!’