The Last Horseman (11 page)

‘If they discover who betrayed them, they’ll be coming for you,’ Radcliffe said.

‘Ah... mebbe not. I made certain they got their information from a whore.’

‘They’ll kill her then.’

Kingsley shook his head. The flask was empty. ‘I warned her off, gave her money. There’s the stupidity of it. By saving her someone sooner or later might find out it was m’self. If they get to her. Thing is, Radcliffe, they’d kill the horse first to spite me.’ He stroked the horse’s face. ‘You spend a few days out here, get to know him, make sure he knows you. You’re a kindly rider, I know that.’

Kingsley turned away and made for the fresh air. ‘So – there it is. Go on with you, then. I’ve done all I can do for you and your son. You find him and you tell him about his mother.’

Radcliffe stopped mid stride.

‘I know what you did. Using her maiden name and all that,’ said Kingsley.

‘How long have you known about my wife?’

‘A while. And he must think his mother’s buried elsewhere,’ Kingsley added.

Radcliffe nodded.

‘How did you keep the lie going for so long?’

‘Edward was in boarding school. I couldn’t tell him what happened to her. A boy grows into a man and the stigma would never leave him. At every turn his life would be blighted.’

‘Jesus, Radcliffe, you’ve less faith in humanity, though I use the word lightly, than m’self.’

‘It served no purpose to tell him. She was as good as dead. Like you and your son. Circumstances dictate our actions. You do what you think is best at the time.’

Both men fell silent for a moment, the dim light a welcome camouflage disguising their regret.

‘Don’t worry, no one knows the truth. Only me. You tell him. He has a right,’ said Kingsley.

There was little more that could be said between the two men; anything further might lead them both into emotion they’d rather not express. Radcliffe extended his hand in gratitude and Kingsley took it.

‘You bring that boy home. We need our sons, Radcliffe... but this country needs them more.’

*

To the north of Dublin, through the country lanes, an imposing group of Victorian buildings rose up behind their cast-iron gates. These three- and four-storey buildings were not far from the Dublin Workhouse. Inside one of the wings, in a room that overlooked the walled gardens, Radcliffe stood at the doorway and gazed at the imposing room, twenty feet square, high-ceilinged and rich in furnishings. The large, richly patterned carpet was soft underfoot; heavy drapes defied the cold air that seeped through the sash windows. Bookshelves ran across one wall and the wingback chairs offered a place to sit, away from the draught, in front of the glowing coals. It was a room richer in its welcome than Radcliffe’s own house, and was meant for someone who needed such cosseting comfort. The landscape paintings on the wall suggested it might belong to a country gentleman and his family. But no dogs barked and raised themselves from the front of the fire, no tails wagged in welcome. Except for the crackling coals and whisper of gas lamps it was quiet. Above the roaring fire on the marble mantelpiece were photographs showing a young family. Parents and sons. A faded picture of Joseph and Eileen Radcliffe with two young boys.

There were two women in the room. One, the more matronly, had given up her fireside chair when Radcliffe entered. She had whispered a brief greeting, and retired to the other side of the room to afford Radcliffe privacy. The woman who sat in front of the fire was in her mid-forties, simply but elegantly dressed, her raven hair pulled back and gathered in a tidy bun held by a tortoiseshell hair comb. She lowered the book she was reading on to her lap as Radcliffe sat down in the vacated chair.

There was a sculptured beauty to the woman’s face that Radcliffe had always loved.

‘I’m going away. I won’t be able to see you for a while,’ he said gently, gazing into her eyes.

The woman smiled. ‘That’s all right. It has been very kind of you to visit me. Very thoughtful. Thank you,’ she said, the soft lilt of her voice as delicate as it always had been.

Radcliffe slowly reached out his hand, pausing before he reached hers. For a moment she looked at the open palm and the half-curled fingers waiting to embrace her own, then she reached out and laid her fingers into his hand, and looked at him expectantly.

‘Eileen... I’m going to find our son,’ he said.

A brief shadow of uncertainty crossed her face.

Radcliffe laid his other hand across hers, reassuringly. ‘Edward. I’m going to bring Edward home... and then I’ll tell him about you and hope he will forgive me.’

Uncertainty crossed her face again, and she turned her gaze to the flames, her hand slipping from his and returning to her lap, fingers twisting her wedding band. Radcliffe stood and was about to lean forward to kiss her forehead when he sensed her stiffen. He looked at his wife’s companion. The woman’s kindly face creased with a smile of pity as she shook her head.

The room’s double doors closed behind him; the woman locked them.

‘As you heard I’m going away,’ said Radcliffe. ‘I have made full provision for her ongoing care. Has anything changed?’ he added hopefully, but knowing it was a question that would never have a satisfactory answer.

‘She still does not know anything, she knows no one. She sits, she reads and she gazes out of the window at the gardens. She remembers nothing. Nothing. Grief destroyed her mind.’

Much of what Radcliffe earned came each month to this private wing in the place of sanctuary. He thanked the woman and made his way to the coachman who had brought him from the city. As they drove through the gates he turned and looked back, hoping his wife might have gone to the window to watch her visitor leave. There was no one there. Arching across the gates’ pillars the sign –
Richmond District Lunatic Asylum
–
seemed even starker than usual.

*

Over the next days a new impetus seized Radcliffe. There was much to do in a short time if he were to arrange the shipment of Kingsley’s horse and catch the next steamer to Cape Town. Pierce made all the arrangements while Radcliffe briefed other lawyers to take his upcoming cases.

Their brief respite of clear bright days was overtaken by stormy weather, thrashing rain, and it was on such an inclement day that Radcliffe returned home to find Mrs Lachlan clattering the kitchen pots more animatedly than usual as she dried and hung them in their places.

‘This house has an air of impending doom that no sane person should ignore, Mr Radcliffe. I hope prayers are said and confessions made. A good Catholic house should be on its knees three times a day, five on a Sunday.’

‘Not exactly the house, Mrs Lachlan, more perhaps the people in it,’ Radcliffe said gently in an attempt to soothe the woman’s obvious anxiety.

‘Mother of God, it’s not the time for cleverness with words, Mr Radcliffe. Your lad’s away in a heathen land and I pray strongly for his safe return but Mr Pierce needs a lesson or two in devout prayer himself. All that bangin’ and cursin’ at the top of the house and him thinking I don’t hear down in the kitchen. The attic is closer to heaven and blaspheming that close to the Lord will bring even more misfortune on us all. And another thing: what am I expected to do rattling around here on my own while you two gentlemen go off on this hare-brained adventure? And you’ll forgive me for saying this, Mr Radcliffe, but you’re both of an age when going off to war should not be a consideration. Old age has its limitations.’

She had not taken a breath as she berated him and punctuated her final exasperated comment with a bang of a pot on the kitchen table.

Radcliffe climbed the stairs to the attic.

Pierce was packing his travel bag, but old chests of clothes and boots had been turned out as he chose the most suitable. The look on Radcliffe’s face pre-empted the question. Pierce gave him a warning look in return.

‘You know the boy’s as close to me as my own kin, if it was I had any. Don’t tell me I ain’t going.’

Radcliffe said nothing for a moment and moved one of the buckets more squarely under one of the leaks from the roof. ‘I’ve arranged to have the roof fixed while I’m away. And I told them you’d be here to oversee the work.’

‘Then you can untell them, and have Mrs Lachlan stand over them. She’s a damn sight more difficult to please than me.’ Pierce eased down a bedroll and as he laid it out two US cavalry sabres, their curved blades snug in their scabbards, clattered to the floor.

Both men looked at the weapons neither had held for many years.

Radcliffe picked his sabre up from the floor and slid the curved blade halfway clear of its sleeve. ‘They’re calling this a white man’s war. Dammit, Ben, you’re gonna complicate things.’

Pierce hefted the weight of the weapon in his hands. ‘We people of colour have a tendency to do that,’ he said.

The drips of rain from the leaking roof dribbled down a rafter, forcing him to find another receptacle. Radcliffe handed him an old storage tin. ‘Neither side is arming the Africans and if you step off the boat you’re likely to start a whole new war of your own. You don’t know anything about the country,’ he said.

‘I’m taking it for granted that the sun shines,’ Pierce said hopefully.

FEBRUARY
–MARCH 1900

Young, bareheaded, his khaki uniform bloodstained, the British officer crawled through the low dry grass, his .45 Webley revolver dragged along behind him by its lanyard. He was dying, but valiantly attempted to reach his horse, which grazed nonchalantly twenty yards away.

As each movement sent agonizing pain through his body, a sense of confused wonderment struck him: he marvelled at how a perfect blue sky embraced the majestic beauty of the mountains. It was a breath-taking amphitheatre of the gods, now tinged with the blood light of the setting sun. The gods must be watching him die, he thought.

The might of the British Army had engaged in what they hoped would be a short imperial war against a citizen army consisting mostly of farmers, clerks from the city and miners from the gold- and diamond fields. The Afrikaners were Dutch-speaking farmers, Boers who often operated in small, self-reliant groups. They were expert riders and marksmen who struck hard and fast and they called themselves by a name the world had not heard before: commandos.

The nineteen-year-old British officer carried not only the burden of his wounds but that of being the son of an aristocratic family. Surrender was not an option; the Dutchies would shoot him anyway. They had no means to care for a wounded enemy. All this young man from the gentle landscape of the English countryside could do was uphold the honour of his regiment and his family. That he should die well had been ingrained in him since he was a boy. But he wept from the pain of his efforts and the knowledge that he would be dead before the final rays of the sun speared the mountain peaks.

It was not only the gods who watched him crawl away from the ambush site. Behind him a ragged group of men wearing homespun clothes, felt hats and bandoliers picked their way across the killing ground where a dozen or more khaki-clad soldiers lay scattered in the grass. The fifty-strong commando ransacked the ambushed supply wagon. One of the men, older than the others, had fought the British in their first war twenty years earlier. With his tobacco-stained beard and his limp from an old wound he looked as if he should be sitting on a rocking chair on the stoep of his dirt-poor farm, gazing out across his beloved land. Piet Van Heerden, Oom Piet, might have been the oldest man in the commando but those who rode with him knew the sixty-three-year-old was a crack shot and horseman. And his age tempered the sense of injustice that had been inflicted on him and his kind. His was a stoic understanding that this war would be vicious and bloody and that independence was the prize. He was glad, though, for the younger men who rode with him. They were mostly from the northern city of Johannesburg and the goldfields, men who had escaped the poverty of Europe to seek out their fortune. These men of the Foreign Brigade were there to fight the cartel of bankers and industrialists who craved the mineral wealth that lay beneath the African soil. It was a war of defiance.

At first these ragged-arsed volunteers had made fun of Oom Piet’s guttural speech but the Afrikaners in the group had tolerated their jibes, and the men soon realized that they were all moulded from the same clay, labouring men from peasant stock who only wanted freedom from what they saw to be tyranny.

Oom Piet called out to his twelve-year-old grandson, whose father had died in one of the first engagements two months ago: ‘Boy, take their boots and jackets. We’ll be needing them.’ The old man’s years meant his seniority gave him honorary command of the group of horsemen, but the commando was actually led by Liam Maguire, an Irishman, chosen by common consent for his strength and intelligence, who had outfought the British since the war began. A man who had fled from Ireland to the Transvaal goldfields, who could think of no better way to strike back at his imperial enemy than to join forces with the Boers. He stayed in the saddle as the others pulled sacks from the wagon. Maguire’s brother, Corin, five years younger than Maguire’s twenty-seven, called out, ‘Liam! There’s salt! Flour! And sugar! Sacks of the stuff.’

‘Take only what you can carry on the pack mules. Burn the rest,’ Maguire instructed the men. His eyes had not strayed from the grass and the wounded man fifty yards away who was close to reaching his horse. He muttered to himself: ‘Don’t be a brave officer gentleman now, my lad...’

The young lieutenant had reached his mount and grabbed the stirrup to haul himself upright. Half-blinded by the pain he fumbled for his revolver at the end of its lanyard. Maguire eased the Mauser rifle into both hands and watched as the soldier’s pistol wavered. The booming shots made everybody duck and seek cover, but the lieutenant’s shots went wild, a desperate and futile act of defiance. Maguire hadn’t moved. He calmed the horse and then, without haste, raised the rifle and shot the young officer dead. His body slammed back into the horse and then tumbled into the dirt. The gods’ cruel laughter echoed and faded across the mountains.