The Misbegotten (36 page)

‘You were a cavalry officer, then?’

‘Yes. Moths – that was the first thing. Do you believe in signs, Mrs Weekes? Portents, I mean?’ he said intently, leaning towards her with a gleam of desperation in his eyes, as if he could somehow change any of what had passed.

‘I . . .’ She had been about to deny it. ‘I should not; yet I see them, sometimes.’
The morning of my wedding, when that thrush sang its heart out, keeping its eye on me. Trying to warn me.

‘Enlightened thought calls them the product of a weak and superstitious mind. But perhaps we do not yet understand all there is to know about this world, and this life. I think such signs should be heeded.’ Jonathan nodded gravely. ‘The first sign I saw was the moths. I took a wound – you will laugh to hear how. Some fierce battles were fought, that first summer of 1808. We fought the French in Portugal, before we even crossed into Spain. We landed like conquering heroes and told the Portuguese people their time of oppression was over, even though we’d already lost men and horses in the surf, trying to land the boats . . . Before we even set foot on the peninsula, we lost men. But still we thought we were invincible. On the very first march, men fell out of line in the heat. I remember looking at the dust cloud above us and thinking we would all be smothered beneath it. The troops were green novices, weakened by the sea crossing. They’d joined up for a wage, or a meal, or for the glory the recruiters told them would be theirs; and I was as green a novice as any of them, for all I was an officer, and mounted upon a fine horse. My first wound . . . my first wound was a scorpion sting.’

Afterwards, he knew to shake out his boots before putting them on in the morning. The sting felt like a jab from a red-hot needle, in the arch of his left foot; he kicked the boot off and watched, revolted, as the half-crushed creature limped away. It was yellowish-brown, about the length of his thumb. He examined the wound but there wasn’t much to see at first – a small hole leaking clear fluid, around which the immediate area had gone white, the outer area a mottled red. The pain of the initial sting soon faded, to leave a low throbbing only. Jonathan rinsed his foot with cold water, then pulled on his boots and thought no more of it.

A battle was brewing; they were at the village of Vimiero, and the French were coming. His blood rose at the thought – he had yet to be tested in any real way against the enemy; he was excited and afraid; he was keen to know how he would prove himself as an officer. Within two days, however, Jonathan could think of little else but the pain in his foot. Had he been an infantry man, and not mounted on Suleiman, he would not have been able to march. He would have been left behind, his company command replaced. At the end of the second day he slept with his boots on. He was sure that if he ever got his left boot off, he would certainly never get it back on again. His head was pounding, he felt weak and dizzy. The foot with the sting was so hot he worried that it might set fire to his stocking. It felt huge, heavy, and very wrong. He kept the boot on for a second reason too – he didn’t want to look at his foot.

Then came the heat and fury of the battle at Vimiero, and Jonathan learned how he would prove himself in the fray – capable, outwardly calm, while inside his heart shuddered in outrage. When it ended the British were victorious, the French routed and in retreat, though there were heavy losses on both sides. Wellesley and several other senior officers wanted to pursue them, all the way to Lisbon. They were denied this by high command; the French were to be allowed to take their wounded and retreat unmolested. They were even, eventually, to have the use of English ships to leave Portugal, a decision for which the British commanders would be recalled to London to give account. On the strewn and smoking battlefield, French and British soldiers greeted one another as they searched the fallen for men they could save. They shared a few words, a laugh, a pinch of tobacco. Dazed and exhausted, Jonathan watched them with a growing sense of unreality; for if the men did not hate one another, how could they kill one another? Why would they? He was baffled by it; felt apart from the rest of them for being unable to understand. That was his first real taste of battle, and it left him numb, bewildered, and frightened.

When he dismounted from Suleiman at day’s end, Jonathan couldn’t even set his left foot down. Captain Sutton, his company second in command, noticed the way he grimaced and hovered the leg. He forced Major Alleyn to sit down on the crumbled remains of a village house, and when pulling at the boot caused him to scream in agony, Sutton cut it from his leg instead, using a short, sharp utility knife. The stink that emerged with the bloated foot caused them both to blench. Captain Sutton helped him to the field hospital, gave him brandy and then left to return to the men.

The surgeons worked in open-sided tents under big, yellow lamps. They worked right through the hot night, engaged in what was often a futile battle to save the gravely wounded men. Since his foot was not life-threatening, Jonathan sat to one side and waited his turn, watching in mounting horror. The surgeons sawed and they stitched; they dipped their hands inside men to pick out shrapnel; they fished for musket balls with long forceps; they plastered over belly wounds, no matter what damage had been done inside the man. When they ran out of plaster, they packed wounds with cotton rags and the shirts of dead men, and when they ran out of those they did not pack them at all, but left them open to the night sky and waited for the men to die. Which they did, crying piteously for God or their mothers until their voices left them. The night clamoured with the sounds of their agony. Jonathan sat, and he watched, and he waited. It took around twenty minutes to amputate a leg through the hip joint, he learned. Only a stick of wood kept that man from biting through his own tongue. There was nothing to relieve pain but watered-down rum, which the men vomited back up in their shock. The smell of blood and rum and bile was everywhere, impossible to escape – to breathe was to breathe it in. Sweat ran from the surgeons’ heads into the wounds they were trying to close.

It was near sunrise before Jonathan was seen to. He climbed onto a table upon which, moments before, he’d seen a man pass his last moments with blood and piss leaking from his shattered body. He felt the man’s fluids seeping through his own shirt and breeches. The surgeon took one look at his bloated foot and then glared at Jonathan with disgust dawning through the wooden exhaustion on his face. He looked
disgusted
that Jonathan should trouble him with so trivial a wound, and Jonathan was disgusted with himself as well. He was disgusted with the war, and the ways of men, and the whole world. He stared up as the surgeon cut away his stained stocking. Underneath, his foot was darkly purple, huge and stinking; a crusted layer of pus had dribbled from the scorpion sting and dried on his feverish skin. It smelled like foul meat and corruption. Calmly, the surgeon took up his bloody scalpel and sliced open the skin around the sting, so that all the poison and filth inside could run out. A splatter of rank and rotting blood, to join the unspeakable mess on the floor. Jonathan was too exhausted, too shocked at the pain to make a sound. He gazed up at the lamps, and that’s when he noticed the moths. Huge black moths, the biggest he’d ever seen – the size of the palm of his hand. They circled the lamps, drawn to the light, on wings as black as pitch and so velvet soft that they made no sound at all. In his near delirium, Jonathan saw them as the souls of the men who had died that night, trying to find a way back into the light, into life. He took them as a sign, a stark warning, that they were all dead men.

‘I should have heeded that warning,’ Jonathan said to Rachel. ‘I should have fled. Better to have been called a coward outright, perhaps, than to have carried on, and been a part of what came later. To this day I cannot abide the smell of rum . . . The smell of it returns me there, to that night, and it’s like a nightmare I can’t wake up from.’ Jonathan’s face was colourless in the wan light of the day; beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. For a while Rachel feared he might faint, but he did not; he stayed hunched in his chair. Rachel swallowed, struggling for something to say.

‘I have heard it said that war changes a man; that he is forced to address his own true nature, his own essence, by the extremity of his situation . . .’

‘War changes a man, it is true. For the most part, it changes him from being a person to being meat. Meat and offal, to be left lying for flies and stray dogs to consume.’ He glanced up at her. ‘You flinch at this, Mrs Weekes? It is the truth, and you wanted to hear it.’

‘I know I did. And I do. The truth is important, for nothing festers like a falsehood, this much I know.’ She watched him as she said this, in case it would have some effect on him, but there was nothing. Only his dark, pained eyes in his pale face, and the sense of a vast tide of feeling pent up behind both, causing chaos there.

‘Some things are worse than falsehood, I think. Some falsehoods can be kind,’ he murmured.

‘You carry a great weight of experience inside you. A great weight of bad memory.’

‘So great I can never be rid of it, and it taints everything I have done or will ever do since. I can do no right, now; not after the wrongs I have done. After Badajoz . . . after Badajoz I did a kind thing. A good thing, I think, though many lies were woven around it. It was the last thing I did in that war, my last action in it, and with it I hoped somehow to begin to make amends. But I can’t think of it without thinking of everything else, of what compelled me to do it. Every single thing I have done since the war is tainted by the things I did during the war. Do you see?’ Suddenly, he clasped his head in his hands as if it hurt him. ‘I could give everything I owned to a poor man in the street, and it would not be generosity. It would be a symptom of my guilt, my disease.’

‘In war a man is compelled to fight, and to kill. It is duty, sir, not sin,’ Rachel ventured.

‘Compelled to kill, yes. To kill in battle, when under attack, or in the defence of others. Would that that was all I did, during those years.’

‘You mean to say you killed when you should not have? You killed . . . innocents?’ she whispered.

Jonathan’s eyes bored into hers, and when he spoke his voice was as cold and sharp as a blade.

‘I have seen and done things that would send you screaming from this room, Mrs Weekes.’ Rachel’s heart beat faster; nervous tension made it hard to breathe.

‘In war—’

‘On the march towards the Spanish border in the autumn of 1808, after we had allowed the French to leave the field, defeated and weakened, or so we thought, they fled before us, destroying everything in their path. All food, all water supplies, all shelter. We came to a village where every last soul had been put to the sword, for the crime of having us come to their aid. A young girl . . . a young girl, not more than fourteen or fifteen lay in the middle of the street. Her face was comely, even in death. She had been crushed beneath a vast stone that they’d placed on her chest so that she could neither breathe nor move as they ravaged her. Who knows how many times – the lower parts of her body were a ruin. Nearby lay the corpses of a man and woman, and of smaller children, three or four of them. Her parents and siblings, it seemed, who had been made to watch this most brutal spectacle before being slain themselves.’ He paused and swallowed convulsively, and Rachel fought to keep her horror from showing.

‘A while later, two or three miles from the village, we came upon a French infantryman who’d been left behind by his comrades. He was wounded in both legs – not severely, but he’d grown too weak to carry on. But he had a good deal of life left in him. He lived a good long while.’ Jonathan gazed at Rachel, and now his eyes were quite empty. ‘There was a man amongst our foot, an Irishman called McInerney. The raped maiden had borne a likeness to his daughter, he said. The wounded Frenchman lived long enough to plead for mercy as McInerney took off his skin, a strip at a time. A good many of us watched him, including myself; we did nothing to hinder him. But this bloody revenge did nothing to slake the men’s anger. If anything we grew angrier still. That beast part had awoken in each one of us, and every vile thing we did and saw from then on only made it stronger. That is what war does to men, Mrs Weekes. That is what it did to me.’

‘Enough!’ Rachel gasped. Her hands flew to cover her mouth. She’d been trying to show no reaction but this was too much, and the room was spinning. Jonathan gave her a pitying look.

‘Now you wish you hadn’t urged me to speak. I should apologise, because you had no idea what you were asking, but I cannot. I live with these things. This is what I know the world to be, and if you understand that, then you will understand why I want no part of it.’

There was a pause in which neither one of them spoke. Rachel struggled to compose herself.

‘Don’t cry, Mrs Weekes,’ Jonathan said quietly. He reached out as if to cover her hand with his, but she snatched it away and saw him retreat, turning in on himself again.

‘Forgive me . . . it is only that . . .’ She shook her head, helplessly.

‘It is only that I repel you now, more than when we first met, though my room stank of death that time – one of Starling’s little pranks – and I near killed you.’

‘No! It is only that . . . when the fight is to stay in command of oneself, the slightest kindness from another can . . . can be the ruin of composure. Is it not so?’ She blotted her eyes and looked up to find the ghost of a smile on Jonathan’s face.

‘And you wonder why I baulk from telling it all to you. You wonder why I baulk from that kindness,’ he said bitterly.

‘I’m quite all right, Mr Alleyn. Only unaccustomed to hearing . . . such things.’ She took a deep breath. Jonathan had sunk back in his chair and was gnawing at his lip again. ‘You need to rest. You need to sleep, sir,’ she said.

‘You have some measure, now, of what I see when I close my eyes,’ he replied.

‘Perhaps a tonic of some kind . . . a sleeping draught?’ Jonathan shook his head.