Love and Hydrogen (13 page)

ALICIA AND EMMETT WITH THE 17
^TH
LANCERS AT BALACLAVA

Alicia and Emmett find themselves with the 17th Lancers at Balaclava. Emmett's a captain of one of the inner squadrons. He loves Alicia, has loved her since he met her in college. They have big decisions to make, things to work out, and they have no time for this. It's a gorgeous October day, crisp, blue, chilly, with the sun warming their backs. The entire Brigade has fanned out loosely around them in parade order, the only noise the light step of the horses' hooves on the soft grass, and the faint jingle of bits and accoutrements.

Alicia's mount takes a few mincing steps and then holds quietly steady. Its tail switches back and forth. She's waiting for the order Emmett holds in his hands. She's on a pearl charger, her back erect in the saddle, her scarlet-and-royal-blue tunic laced round and dazzlingly breasted with intricate gold braid, her furred pelisse lined with crimson silk, her brown hair swirling out from below her bearskin Hussar's cap, her thighs in tight cherry pants, gripping and controlling her mount.

Emmett has in his hand the fourth order of the day, for October 25th, 1854:
“Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to
the front—follow the enemy and try and prevent the enemy from
carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany.
French cavalry is on your left. Immediate.”

As an order, from where Emmett sits, it's alternately inchoate and nonsensical. What enemy? Follow where? There's no one in sight except the vast main force of Russians all the way down the end of the valley. But what difference does his bafflement make? What else in history does the Light Brigade do but charge?

And the order is almost beside the point. He can feel how much everyone around him is itching to
act.
They've been up since before dawn and they've been on and off their mounts like this for three and a half hours. They breakfasted on biscuits and hard-boiled eggs and water from their flasks. Earlier that morning from more or less this very spot, they watched the Heavy Brigade perform one of the great cavalry feats of all time, charging uphill—diagonally! through the ruins of a vineyard!—to break the
downhill
charge of a body of Russian cavalry four thousand strong. The Heavy Brigade—the Scots Greys, the Innskillings, and the 5th Dragoons, with the 4th Dragoons and the Royals in the second wave—had been able to muster less than five hundred troopers, after the morning's losses to dysentery and cholera.

After the Heavy Brigade's charge, the entire mass of Russian cavalry had broken and fled back over the Causeway Heights and down the North Valley to the east, passing, though some way off, right in front of the Light Brigade. Tactical situations like that— fleeting opportunities to turn breakthroughs into routs—were the reason units like the Light Brigade existed. The Brigade had remained, in its own eyes, shamefully inactive. It had been under orders not to move from its position, and its commanding officers had refused the initiative. Some of the men had wept. “My God, my God, what a chance we are losing!” the officer to Emmett's right had exclaimed, repeatedly slapping his leg with the flat of his sword.

Alicia's mount dawdles back and forth one horse's length in front of the center of the line. Her trumpeter waits half a horse length behind her and to her right. She looks over her shoulder at Emmett. Her expression radiates the kind of poise that improves the manners of children and calms the hopelessly upset.

The captain of the next squadron over catches his eye and gestures with his chin toward Alicia. Emmett glances at his horse's withers, his white leather gloves at rest over his pommel, and then catches the captain's drift: it's Emmett's order to deliver. He surveys the front row of Lancers. He admires the precision of the line of square-topped Lancer caps. The gilded chin-chains glitter like jewelry. Each cap is loosely leashed to a shoulder loop with a gold cord. The jackets are dark blue with a plain white Prussian collar and white piping. The pants are gray with double white stripes down the seam. The lances are nine feet long with swallow-tailed pennons, white over red, and are at rest in leather lance buckets attached to the stirrups. Each of the Lancers seems to be looking at him.

He claps his calves on his charger's flanks and it trots forward at an angle. Alicia's mount turns and backsteps to meet him. He's impressed with her horsemanship.

He extends the written order, arm straight from the shoulder. Her face is set off like a cameo by the chin-strapped severity of her Hussar's cap. Her eyes regard him with composure. The crimson cloth-bag atop her bearskin cap ruffles in the wind. She lifts the note from his grip.

She reads it, her lips moving. They're painted a cool and delicate red. Her hair's thick and straight, sweeping to the base of her neck from under the cap and fanning out in the slight breeze. Her skin smells faintly of vanilla.

She turns to the east. The cloudless sky extends all the way down the valley. The valley is a grassy, undulating plain, five miles by two, a half mile north of the small town and harbor of Balaclava. The country is steppe, mostly bare and treeless. A mile or so back there was a small stream, with a bridge and a post house. The land ahead is as green and unmarked as a parade ground. The grass is firm and springy and smells slightly of thyme. The slope is gentle and downward. The place is absolutely made for a cavalry charge.

Ridges, busy with Russian infantry digging in and passing ammunition, extend like walls on both sides of the valley. Scrub growth lines a natural ditch along one side. It all leads like a sinister perspective drawing to the sprawl that fills the far end of the valley, every so often giving off glints of light: the main force of Russian infantry and cavalry, fronted by the Russian guns.

Alicia and Emmett have been married for four years. They have one boy, Oscar, who's three. Four days ago when Alicia was wrestling him into his onesie, she noticed lumps below his lymph nodes. She'd noticed them a few weeks earlier, and these were already bigger and more irregularly shaped. Their pediatrician hadn't returned their calls until after the long weekend, and then had heard her description and interrupted her to tell her to bring him in right away.

Emmett put in two years working with fabric at RISD before getting his Ph.D. in history. He told people he made Art Clothes. He got a lot of attention from his studio teachers for what they called his postcolonial pastiches but really all he was doing was collage-ing his favorite bits from Victorian costume. He left academia for jobs as a historical adviser and/or assistant costume designer for movies involving the nineteenth-century British Army. Every so often a director wanted the look of crimson jackets when the brigade wore blue, but for the most part he's handsomely paid to fly over to England and root around regimental mess and museum collections, and what could be better than that?

Alicia is pleasantly surprised by the movie money but otherwise finds that world of enthusiasts and curators and collectors and various other kinds of shut-ins to be both emasculated and childishly self-involved. Emmett finds her position hard to refute. On both sides of the Atlantic, archives teem with bachelors with bad teeth and embarrassed, furtive smiles who live with their moms. Every so often they leave their stuffy archives to hang around hobby shops, or, in bigger cities, Military Modeling shops, correcting each other on the year in which the Scots Greys changed the lining color of their sabretaches.

Emmett's got a monster break staring him in the face: the opportunity to be sole technical adviser for a seventy-million-dollar remake of
The Charge of the Light Brigade,
a payday in the high five figures. And it's not just the money. The Crimean campaign is what got him interested in the nineteenth-century British Army to begin with. This movie
cannot
be made without him; he'll hang himself from a showerhead if it is. But the people in Los Angeles are not going to delay his presentation; he's either on board this week or he's not. He's supposed to demonstrate what he knows, demonstrate that he'll be a pleasure to work with, and demonstrate, delicately, that he might have the occasional good
idea,
as well, all in his late-morning meeting and following lunch.

He really should be out there now, schmoozing. He
has
to be out there by Tuesday. Tomorrow, Monday, they hope to hear from the doctors about Oscar.

He and Alicia can consult by phone, Emmett has suggested. He can be back in New Jersey by Thursday morning. It's only a matter of dealing with the complications long-distance for a few days before being right back in person, ready to give his all to the crisis.

It was that way of putting it that may have exacerbated the problem.

One of the complications involves what Alicia calls his neck-deep wallowing in narcissism. A series of calm but humiliating talks on the subject at the kitchen table after Oscar's bedtime has sketched in the outlines of the problem. He almost always thinks about others only as they drift into view, while at the same time he pisses and moans about the way others lose track of him. About his own self-absorption he pretends to be as innocent as a horse. The inkling that others aren't spending their entire time thinking about his feelings rankles him.

His situation is to be distinguished from vanity, the two of them agree. He has no problems with vanity—someone who looks the way he does couldn't afford to—but Alicia has been dismayed in the recent months with how smoothly and relentlessly he's been able to relate everything that happens to others back to himself.

Oscar's a three-year-old,
their
three-year-old, who may be in a dire situation. Alicia is beside herself with worry. She really needs Emmett to demonstrate certain kinds of support right now, which Emmett seems incapable of demonstrating. When she tells him this, he flashes on Lord Cardigan's admonition to one of his subordinates in command of the second line, right before the Charge: “I expect your best support—mind, your best support.” His subordinate, irritated at the implication, is reported to have loudly replied, “You shall have it, my lord.”

The Light Brigade thing isn't the only project around, Alicia reminds him. There's also that other thing. By “that other thing,” she means the planned remake of
Khartoum,
with Adam Sandler as Gordon.

There's some other kind of tang in the air, as well, a fresh, laundered smell. This is all a terrible mistake, but a glorious one. Of course the attack is intended for the eminently stormable Causeway Heights, where the Russians have carried, at the point of the bayonet, some redoubts and captured the British twelve-pound guns. But the Light Brigade can see only the massed army at the end of the valley, and the order is fatally vague. It's as if a dachshund, turned loose to sic a kitten that it didn't know was nearby, decided instead to go after what it
could
see: a bear flanked by wolves. Emmett trots along behind his wife and her trumpeter as she arranges the Brigade for its advance. The First Line will consist of the 13th Light Dragoons on the right and Emmett's 17th Lancers on the left. The 11th Hussars, brilliant as parakeets, are to be pulled back four hundred yards to form the Support Line. The Reserve, four hundred yards behind the 11th, is to be handled by the 8th Hussars and the 4th Light Dragoons.

She waits quietly in her saddle, her back to the enemy, while the troop officers dress and redress the lines to her instructions.

“There's not a lot I can do once we get the doctor's word, anyway,” Emmett remarks, beside her. “We may not even have immediate decisions to make.”

“It's not just about Oscar,” Alicia tells him. She's drawn her saber and has it at Slope Swords, at rest against her shoulder, the regulation position when at the halt. “It's not even just about Oscar and me. It's about being able to focus on something other than what you want.”

The trumpeter looks away, not wishing to eavesdrop. The front of his cap features a gilt plate with the Queen's arms over the regimental badge of a skull and crossbones, with OR GLORY inscribed beneath. His bugle is slung forward and his trumpet slung behind him.

“Do you know how much this means to me?” Emmett asks. He feels as though he hasn't made that clear. “It's not like I do this all the time.”

“It
is
like you do this all the time,” Alicia answers. She's weeping. She wipes her cheek and then examines the fingertips of her leather gloves.

The troop officers signal each regiment's readiness. Alicia brings her mount around, Emmett following. This entire week neither of them has been backing down, snapping miserably at each other while Oscar peered up at them from below. In the middle of the night he's been waking up with night terrors, the nightlight no help. The idiots commanding the Light Brigade were afterward compared to two pairs of scissors that went snip snip snip without doing each other any harm while chopping to pieces the poor devils between them. Alicia raises her sword. The trumpeter sounds the advance, repeating the four notes twice.

The lines step forward, accelerating smoothly into a trot. Ahead they flush the occasional hare. For a hundred yards there's only the quick thump of hooves on turf and the shake of equipment. From the ridges on their flanks there's complete silence, ominous and ceremonial. The Russians peering down at them are serenely puzzled as to what they could possibly be doing.

At first they cover the same ground they would have had the attack been on the Causeway Heights. The Russian battalions on the Heights form infantry squares, bristling hedgehogs of rifles enfilading outward, to prepare for the charge.

But the Brigade continues down the valley, trotting by in profile and in range.

It proceeds a few hundred yards unscathed, the Russians still at a loss. The trooper to Emmett's left has his eyes tightly closed but otherwise is sitting erect. Then from the north, the fire starts, and then from the south. The silence evaporates and the roar is total. Riders go down on all sides, spinning into each other, mounts slipping to their bellies.