Kit (26 page)

She had stood impassive as Major Caradew had spoken her sentence; Kit would keep her rank, for in a time of war a sergeant could not be spared. She had been given a light enough sentence; she had expected a discharge, but instead she had been given two hundred lashes. She was to be flogged in the castle courtyard, and, as was her privilege as a sergeant, only in the presence of fellow officers, not the general company. In many ways she had been lucky – she would not lose her rank nor her commission, but she would lose her skin. Flogging was a horror, a flaying open of the back that left a man as skinned as a beef steer at a tannery. Flogging was the punishment everyone feared. She had heard horror stories along the road; a man whose back had been turned to scarlet ribbons which fluttered behind him like a pennant. Another flogged down to the spine so the white bone showed, a third who had had to sleep on his stomach for the rest of his life.

But Kit would rather shed her skin a thousand times than her jacket. More terrible to her in her sentence than the words ‘Two hundred lashes’ were the words ‘the prisoner is to be stripped to the waist’. Once they took off her coat, tore off her shirt and unbound her breasts, she was lost.

She had been close, so close, to finding Richard. ‘He’s here somewhere,’ Tichborne had said. And now, before she could complete the quest, she would be unmasked, and sent home.

Her flogging was to be in two days, and she knew that one of them had passed for she had been thrown two parcels of food by a cheery guard who would usefully shout ‘breakfast’ or ‘dinner’ as he threw them down. She contemplated trying to grab him, tying him up with her belt. She still had her sword, so she could dispatch him straight; but she was not the type to kill in cold blood. Besides, the castle housed Marlborough and Savoy too and would be guarded to the hilt.

After the second parcel the grille was opened and the rope ladder let down. ‘Christ,’ said a voice that set her heart beating. ‘Bring me some more lamps. And a bottle and a bird while you’re about it.’

She heard a faint protest from above, then the voice cut it short. ‘Do it.’

Ross set the lamp he held down on the little table, and Kit, blinking, saw her prison for the first time. There had been a Bible with her all this time, lying loose leaved and curled with damp on the table – a Bible and no light to read it by.

She felt great joy to see Ross, but was ashamed of her hovel, of the damp and the dark and the smell of piss and worse. The lamp was the only light, so his eyes were tawny like a hawk’s, his hair bronze and the reds and golds of his uniform leached to saffron and black. She studied this new Ross, guardedly; remembering the last time they’d spoken, his coldness, his anger. She wondered what he would say first – then she would know. He looked about him wryly. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘As lodgings go, it is not the
best
appointed I have seen.’

She smiled. He was not the angry martinet from the silk post, this was the Ross who had joked with her along the road. ‘Flint misses you,’ he said.

She smiled, to cover a pang. ‘And I her.’

‘Kit,’ he said, and the word sounded lovely in his mouth – at the silk post it had been all ‘Mr Walsh’. Ross sat forward, his face serious. ‘You will soon be mounted on Flint again, riding at my shoulder to Mantova. We’ll have some fine old times again, I assure you. The siege of Mantova will be a famous victory. Take your flogging like a man, and when it is over all will be as before.’ He sounded overly hearty, trying to cheer her.

She looked at him sadly. How little he knew.

Ross misinterpreted the silence. He sighed, and shook his head. ‘I have never wanted to disobey an order until this one. I wish I could take you out of this place, help you escape. But the army has been my life; and something in me will not allow it.’

‘I could give a name to it,’ she said, low voiced. ‘I would call it honour.’

He looked at his feet. ‘Whatever it is, it prevents me. I cannot let you escape.’

‘And I would not like you as well as I do if you did.’

He seemed taken aback, but bowed a little. ‘I have, however, commuted your sentence – you will now receive one hundred lashes, not two. Your punishment, however painful, will be a gesture only. I told Major Caradew there were mitigating circumstances.’

Her heart beat slowly and painfully. ‘What circumstances?’

He stood. Outside the circle of light she could no longer see his face, but his voice echoed around the tower. ‘Kit. I am not proud of the way I spoke to you when last we met. I was …’ he searched for the words, ‘angry and disappointed.’ The words he found did not seem to be the ones he sought, but he went on. ‘I was troubled that my … that one of my men would act so; it seemed a deed without honour, and not like you. I believed you had more than a modicum of respect for the fairer sex. Furthermore, I sensed that some of our mutual experiences – I am thinking in particular of the valley of the foundlings – had furnished you with the knowledge that the coming of the army can bring particular hardships to women, hardships of which I felt sure you would not wish to be a part.’

She thought of baby Christiana. ‘You are right. I would never act so.’

‘I believe that now,’ said the voice. ‘I made enquiries among the men and learned two things.’ He paused in his pacing, at the edge of the light. ‘I discovered that you challenged Taylor, believing him to be of equal rank to yourself, and that he practised a deception upon you – no,’ he held a golden hand high in the dark, ‘not of an overt nature, but a deception of omission to conceal his promotion, which is a falsehood of its own kind. Moreover, I heard it said that you and he fought over an offence to the mother of your child. I questioned Southcott and Hall and they told me that they had seen you defend the same lady from Taylor’s attentions nine months ago in this very town. Further enquiry at the Gasthof provided me with the information that you challenged Taylor on behalf of the lady and her child. A red-headed child, Kit.’ He sat at the table with her once more, and clasped his hands before him. ‘The red hair of two men in my troop; yourself, and Sergeant Taylor.’

She said nothing, but looked at his hands. The fingers long and strong, the nails square and short, a faint silver line across the back of one hand. ‘I ask you now; is the child Sergeant Taylor’s?’

How she wanted to tell him then! But she had made a promise to Bianca; and could not now link her reputation with another man, and certainly not a man such as Taylor. She framed her answer carefully. ‘If someone asked a question of you, sir, taking into account all you said just now, and asked you for an answer that would compromise a lady and make an already vexing situation harder for her, what would you say?’

He thought for a moment. ‘I would probably say, Kit, that I can make free of my own business, but that honour prevents me from making free of a lady’s.’ He looked at her. ‘And so? Does the child belong to Sergeant Taylor?’

She met his eyes – a tiny candle burned in each. She said, in a voice heavy with meaning: ‘I can make free of my own business, sir, but honour prevents me from making free of a lady’s.’

He held her gaze for a moment and then nodded. ‘Then I owe you an apology. I should have trusted in your character – I should have trusted you. You have acted like a man of honour and I most heartily beg your pardon for suggesting otherwise.’

Her hands lay on the table so close to his; a paler colour of butter, with tapered nails and the heavy scar on her little finger. A woman’s hands – it seemed so clear to her – why could he not see? She moved her scarred little finger to touch his in forgiveness, when the grille in the door above slid open with a clang. ‘Captain, sir? Your vittles.’

Ross rose from his seat; a tray was passed down with a roasted chicken upon it, a jug and two clay cups. Ross set the tray before Kit and went back for the two lamps the jailer handed down. She turned her attention to the heavenly chicken and tore it limb from succulent limb. She ate without shame, for she’d had nothing worth eating since the night at the San Maurizio when Bianca had dumped Christiana in her lap.

Ross watched her indulgently. ‘Good?’

‘Marlborough himself must never have had so fine a bird,’ she said, through a full mouth.

‘You’ve made short work of him,’ he said, for the carcass sat before them, picked clean, standing jagged like a bone crown.

She tried a jest. ‘So will I look, come tomorrow,’

Ross’s smile dropped from his face too soon. He poured the contents of the jug into the clay goblets, and raised his cup to his lips. ‘A few bad moments, Kit, that will be all.’

She drank and the liquor kindled her throat and belly. She suddenly felt free with Ross – free to abandon their rank and speak as the brothers they had been. There would never be another time. She cocked an eyebrow. ‘You sure?’ she asked, very Dublin. He set down his cup. ‘Yes.’

He stood and unbuttoned his jacket, then in one fluid movement he pulled his shirt over his head and turned his back to her. ‘This is how sure I am.’

She stood too. ‘When?’ she said.

‘Many years ago – in Spain. I was a young ensign.’ He glanced over his bare shoulder. ‘You are wondering, I expect, what my crime can have been. Nothing quite so honourable as yours, I am afraid. It was instead the crime of a tired young puppy who had spent his pampered youth in feather beds. There, Kit; now you know the worst of me. I slept on my watch. And I have never done it since.’

She looked at his gilded back in the light. It was broad and finely muscled and smooth. No, not smooth – there were scars there, laid across it like tiger stripes. She looked closer, reached out.

Now with his back turned she had the courage to touch him – the cold pads of her fingers stroked his warm flesh, so softly she thought he must not feel it. She gently traced the silvery lines, the map of his past pain.

He flinched a little.

‘They don’t still hurt?’

‘Not a whit,’ but his voice sounded jolted; by the memory, or her touch?

‘Did it hurt then?’

‘The whip stung a little.’

He was trying to spare her but there was no need – she did not ask for herself, for she knew the lash would never touch her; she would be taken in hand as soon as the ensign stripped her. She asked for
him
, she wanted to know what
he
had been through.

He pulled his shirt back on, almost trapping her hand in the linen; she pulled it away, as if stung. He called for the jailer brusquely, as if he did not trust himself. She felt sure, then, that he did love her, that he had always loved her; as boy or woman, it did not matter. She wished she could frame some farewell, that she could take leave of him properly, thank him even. But such declarations would make no sense to him – he fully expected to have Sergeant Walsh back in his dragoons directly after the flogging.

‘I will see you tomorrow,’ he said in farewell, and met her eyes at the last. ‘Everything will be as it was.’

But she knew that it would not.

Kit’s surroundings were much improved by Ross’s visit. She wondered just how much he had paid the jailer, for she was allowed to keep the candle with two tallow wicks to spare, she had a venison mess for her dinner and a pot of porter instead of small beer.

She tried to read the Bible, to look for some comforting homilies, but she happened upon the passage that Ross had read as a eulogy to the dead children in the valley of the foundlings. ‘
The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them; they will not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gate.
’ She shut the book and put it under her head as a pillow to keep her head from the damp floor. As she drifted to miserable sleep she realised she had never even learned Captain Ross’s given name.

In the dead of the night she was awakened by the grille of the door sliding back with the familiar clang. She raised her head. The candle end still burned. She blinked awake. ‘What’s amiss?’ she called to the jailer, her voice a crow’s croak after the wine.

‘Visitor,’ he said. ‘You are popular tonight.’

Kit’s heart speeded – he’d come back! Now she could say, at last, what she’d meant to say. Her delight lasted no more than a moment. ‘Woman this time. I suppose you’ll want more lamps again,’ said the jailer grudgingly, with the resentment of one who’d never been handsome enough for his courting to benefit from illumination. Bianca Castellano climbed down the rope. Kit hurried to help her. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

‘Nor should you. I told you not to challenge Taylor.’

‘It needed doing. Where is Christiana?’

‘With Marta, the innkeeper’s wife at the Gasthof. She is kind. She has taken to Christiana – she lost six of her own. And Andrea, her husband, has given me employment at the inn.’

‘Mary and Joseph,’ exclaimed Kit, ‘he doesn’t let you serve those jackals, does he?’

‘Marta won’t let them near me.’

Kit smiled. ‘Don’t let Andrea take all of your money.’

‘I’ve hidden it.’

‘Good girl. Bianca …’ Could she tell Bianca that by tomorrow she would be packed off to Ireland, and that was if she was lucky? She did not know what punishments awaited a woman who had made a fool of the English Army, of the great Marlborough himself. She might spend all her days in a cell like this one. So she held her tongue and studied her visitor.

Bianca looked better, and fuller in the face, and had something of her old spirit. She was in a new gown, much mended, but clean. Her hair was brushed and neatly braided. But she had an air of excitement and agitation, and looked about her as if hunted. ‘What is it?’ asked Kit. ‘Not Taylor?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘He has not been near me. I hear he’s lost the use of his arm, though, so he cannot for the moment fight.’
Nor pin me down
again
was the unspoken line.

‘Then what?’

‘It’s just …’ She fixed Kit with her great eyes. ‘I have found your brother. I have found Richard Walsh.’

Kit’s world somersaulted. Joy and fear gripped her innards; the physical sickness of something she’d been longing for coming to pass. She stared at Bianca, for some moments hardly breathing, hardly moving. Then she breathed out all the air that was in her lungs. Time to shed her skin.