The Misbegotten (49 page)

It was cold enough to freeze the blood in their veins. Each night the snow set with frost, turning hard and razor sharp. Men who had lost their boots in the sucking mud of the plains now walked barefoot, on feet gone black with frostbite, shapeless with swollen bruises. One man had worn his right through to the bone. He was kneeling in snow, looking down a rocky slope at the milling French not far below them, when Jonathan came up behind him. The smooth, grey knobs of his heel bones protruded through the lacerated soles of his feet. The sight gave Jonathan a dizzy feeling, as if he teetered on the lip of a precipice, and was about to fall. When the man saw him looking, he grinned at Jonathan.

‘A fair sight to frighten the Frenchies, eh, sir?’ he croaked, in a voice as broken as his body. ‘Don’t fret for me, sir; they pain me not at all.’ There was a dull, feverish light in his eyes, and Jonathan moved away without talking to the man, afraid of him because he was clearly dead but still marching; dead but not yet aware of it.

To begin with, the rearguard of the British force was harried constantly. Again and again they had to turn, draw up lines, and repel the French pursuit.
Make ready! Present! Fire!
Shouted out, over and over again. Jonathan heard the four words in his sleep, and woke with his hand curled around the hilt of a sabre he wasn’t holding, his arm aloft, ready to fall to the accompanying roar of musket fire. He led one short, vicious fight to hold a river crossing, after which the little stream was left crammed with corpses, both French and British. Jonathan surveyed the scene with his ears ringing from the guns; the burbling water sounded like music, like silver bells. There was smoke in his eyes and mouth; his throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow, and there was nothing in his canteen. He went to the water’s edge and knelt in the freezing mud, and scooped up water that was colder than ice, and red with blood. He drank it down nonetheless. It soothed his throat, and tasted of iron. On the far bank lay a young French soldier, still just a boy. He fed the red waters from a wound to his face – half of which was missing. But the boy lived for a little while longer; Jonathan met his eyes and found he couldn’t look away. He sat down in the filth and stayed with this dying lad, whose blood he had drunk with the water. There was no rancour in either of them; no anger or spite; no blame. Only a shared acceptance of what had been done, and could not be undone. When Captain Sutton hauled him to his feet Jonathan blinked, and saw that the boy was dead.

In the coming weeks death was always with them. There were injuries, old and new; there was starvation; there was illness and disease; there were skirmishes, and there was the all-consuming cold. Then death, as if bored, began to find new and creative ways to take them. There was a strange reaction to some supplies of salt fish and rum that finally reached them – when consumed in quantity it blasted through the men’s starving systems with devastating results. There was a swirling fog one day, so thick and white that the eye could not pick out what was ground and what was not. It hid the precipitous drop into a canyon, and more than one man stepped off the edge, all unawares. A pair of mules stumbled off as well, taking a cartload of wounded men with them. All were too weak to cry out as they fell – including the mules. Childbirth claimed one young girl, who remained seated in the snow in a crimson swathe of her own blood, cradling her baby as she waited to die. The child was born too soon; it moved weakly for only a minute or two before it died. Jonathan stopped beside the girl for a while. She sat mute and immobile, not struggling to rise; she looked very beautiful against the snowy ground, with her dark, dark hair and her silvery eyes. Jonathan stayed and waited with her, but he could think of nothing to say or do for her, and death seemed in no hurry to claim her. So he walked on, burrowing his face into his greatcoat.

The next time their path led them alongside a yawning nothingness, an empty drop in which the wind moaned and snow skirled, Jonathan saw a man step off the edge, quite deliberately. Horses collapsed underneath the men they carried and were butchered and eaten, if time on the march allowed. Dogs suffered the same fate. Otherwise, the men chewed the leather straps from their kit and uniforms for sustenance. By the middle of January 1809, as their path began to descend towards the fertile plains that would lead them to the sea, the retreat through the mountains had killed five thousand of them. Jonathan walked beside Suleiman with his arms around the horse’s neck. He was too weak to walk unaided, but Suleiman was lame in both his front legs, and winced at every step, and Jonathan could not bear to mount him, however much Captain Sutton urged him to. So he half walked and was half dragged by his horse, and when he tried to check Suleiman’s front feet to find out the problem, they were so hard-packed with ice he had no way of telling. The horse’s coat was matted and bedraggled; it clung to his stark bones, hard with mud and frost. Jonathan tried to murmur encouragement as they went, but after a while his words became nonsense, and his lips cracked and bled when he moved them, so he only thought what he wanted to say.
Keep going, my brave friend, for I will perish here without you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I brought you here, brave creature.

When they reached the low plains the milder air was like a lover’s kisses, soft on their faces and hands and in their lungs. There was winter grass for those horses and mules that had survived, but still nothing for the men. Starvation made them all a bit mad; it gave them a glint in their eyes like feral dogs. And Suleiman would not eat. He showed no interest at all in the brownish grass that was suddenly all around him; without the numbing ice in his feet he was in such pain that he trembled all over, all day long. It tore at Jonathan’s heart to see him suffer so. There was no reproach in the horse’s eyes, no blame, but there was also no fight, no spark. On a mild, damp day on which the men finally caught the tang of the sea, Suleiman’s shuffling walk halted, his knees buckled and he lay down. The men trudging behind them parted around the fallen horse without a pause or a thought.

Jonathan knelt beside his horse’s head. He tried to lift it onto his lap, but it was too heavy and his own arms were far too weak. For a while he was content to let the horse rest. He dribbled some water into Suleiman’s mouth, but it ran back out again. Only after an hour had passed, and Captain Sutton came to find him, did Jonathan begin to see the danger.

‘Major Alleyn, sir, we must move on. We’ll make camp on top of the next rise, if we can reach it by sundown,’ said the captain, rousing Jonathan with a hand on his shoulder. ‘Come, sir, we will find you another horse from the lines.’

‘What? I need no other horse. I have Suleiman,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘A valiant creature, indeed, Major Alleyn, but I fear he is spent. Come, let us end it for him the more swiftly, and be onwards.’

‘You will do no such thing!’ Jonathan struggled to his feet and staggered as a wave of woozy exhaustion swept over him. ‘He will make it. He is not spent. Come, Suleiman, up! Up, my brave boy! We are nearly at camp!’ He tugged on the reins, his voice growing louder and louder. He leaned with all his weight, but Suleiman did not even raise his head.

‘Sir—’

‘No! I will not hear of it! Up, Suleiman, up! Fetch me some brandy, Captain. That’s all he needs, a little brandy for strength!’

Captain Sutton fetched a tot of brandy in a tin cup and dutifully handed it over, though his eyes said that he knew a lost cause when he saw one. Frantically, Jonathan lifted Suleiman’s chin, peeled back his lips and dribbled the brandy onto his tongue. The horse’s gums were greyish white, and the brandy had no effect.

‘Come up, Suleiman! Up!’

‘Leave off him, man, the poor beast is done for,’ remarked another officer, walking past with the bandy-legged gait of a lifetime spent in the saddle. Frantically, Jonathan fetched his crop from behind the saddle and gave the horse a whack across the rump. It left a welt in his fur, but the muscles beneath the slack skin didn’t even twitch. Jonathan could hardly see for the tears burning his eyes. He had never hated himself more. With a gasped breath he hit Suleiman again.

‘You
must
get up!’ he shouted. With slow surrender, Suleiman blinked his uppermost eye. Jonathan dropped the crop and collapsed beside him, weeping uncontrollably. He smoothed the thin coat around the horse’s eyes and ears; a gentle stroking to make up for the blows he’d delivered. ‘I’m so sorry, my friend. I’m so sorry,’ he murmured, over and over again. He felt Captain Sutton’s hands on his shoulders, coaxing him away.

‘There’s nothing more to be done, sir. There’s nothing more you can do for him. Come away. Come away now.’ Jonathan rose unsteadily and allowed himself to be led away. ‘That’s right, sir. Best leave him now. No more to be done, and it upsets the men to see you so distraught. Best to leave him; I’ll make sure he’s taken care of.’ They’d gone only fifteen or twenty paces when a shot rang out, and Jonathan turned to see a man standing over his fallen friend with a smoking pistol in his hand.

‘I made it down the mountain only because of him. My friend. And see now how he is rewarded for all his strength and bravery.’ Jonathan loathed the tears on his face, and scrubbed at them angrily.

‘There never was a better horse, Major Alleyn. But there was nothing more to be done.’

That night, Jonathan sat in his tent at his folding field desk, quill pen poised over a piece of blank paper. He’d been trying to write a letter to Alice, the first one in weeks, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could write. To tell her anything was to invite her into the hell in which he found himself. To tell her anything was to tell her what he had become, and risk her loving him no longer. He was a man who watched newborn babies die in the snow; a man who drank the blood of dead comrades. He was a man who feared battle; a man without valour, who reviled the passionate violence that his country needed from him. He was a man who had left Suleiman lying on a grassy plain to die – that beautiful, powerful creature she had called
magnificent
, in the water meadow at Bathampton the summer before. He was a man who wanted to go home, and see nothing more of war, ever again.

Christmas had come and gone. Bathampton and everything in it seemed to belong to another world completely; a world in which things as sweet and pointless as Christmas could exist. The page stayed empty as the minutes crept past, and when Captain Sutton came in Jonathan was glad of the interruption. The captain carried a plate, and on it was a thick steak of roasted meat and a slice of bread; the smell of it made Jonathan’s stomach twist in painful anticipation. But the captain didn’t speak as he put the plate in front of Jonathan. He opened his mouth as if to, but then he said nothing, and would not meet Jonathan’s eye. So Jonathan suddenly knew exactly where this meat had come from, and he stared at it with perfect horror. He was relieved when Captain Sutton left again at once, and didn’t stay to watch him eat it. To watch him eat of his own horse. But eat he did, though it was with the sure knowledge that he would never be himself, would never be as he had been before, ever again.

‘We reached Corunna the next day. That was how close Suleiman came to finishing the march. But part of me is glad he didn’t make it – the lame horses . . . the lame and the weak were shot instead of being allowed to take up valuable space and supplies on the journey home. He would have been shot even if he had finished the journey. This is how men repay their loyal servants and companions.’ Jonathan fell silent, and in the wake of his words the air felt colder, and harder to breathe.

‘And you wrote to Alice from there. That day that you reached Corunna, you wrote to her and told her of your shame.’ Starling’s voice was small and weak in the aftermath of his brutal speech.

‘Yes. I wrote to her there. I dreamed of her. I thought of her as a man dying of thirst thinks of water. She was the only thing that drove me to survive.’

‘And then she wrote to you in Brighton, and told you that you must for ever part.’

‘They landed the boats at night, so that the people of England would not see our frightful condition. So that they would not be out in the streets to smell the stink of death and defeat on us,’ Jonathan murmured.

‘And you came at once to Bathampton. And you killed her,’ Starling intoned.

‘No!’

‘But how do you know? You came at once, and I saw how deranged you were. You say you can’t remember clearly from that time, that you have dark spaces from those days when she vanished, so how do you know?
How do you know you didn’t?
’ Starling’s voice had risen to a shout but Jonathan didn’t flinch. He stared up at her, wide-eyed.

‘Because I would have cut my own heart out of my body first,’ he said.

‘You are
sure
of that? As sure as she loved you?’ Starling trembled as she fixed her eyes on his, and did not look away. Jonathan’s face was naked, somehow; without wine or opium he was wide open to her scrutiny, and though he said nothing Starling saw doubt in his eyes – unmistakable, rising like flames to consume him.

I know when my mother lies.
Josephine Alleyn was sitting in the parlour when Rachel was ushered in. Jonathan’s mother had no book in her hands, and no embroidery. Nothing to occupy her as she waited. A gilt clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly, and Rachel noticed that the canary’s gilded cage was empty. She decided not to ask what had become of the bird. Something about the older woman’s absolute stillness made her uneasy. Her blue eyes were clear and steady, and younger than her years, but Rachel could read nothing in them beyond an unusual intensity. No candles had been lit, and the wan light of day leached the colours from the room. The robin’s-egg blue silk divan; the cerise drapes at the windows; the greens and golds of the carpet. All were rendered greyer, weaker.
My mother lies.
Rachel tried to smile as she came to stand in front of Mrs Alleyn, but the older woman did not ask her to sit.

‘You walked out with my son, I believe, on your last visit.’ She spoke without tone, without any particular emotion. Again, Rachel felt some warning.
It’s only because of what Jonathan said, and he speaks from years of bitterness.