The Street Philosopher (16 page)

Cracknell grinned as he shook Kitson off. ‘Is that what you were brooding over in there, whilst your she-lion mauled me so savagely? I salute your courage, my friend; these northern fillies have a flintiness about them that is rather frightening.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I think she got a taste though, don’t you? Something to chew on, at least. She seems the chewing type, does the widow.’

Kitson glared at him, still barely able to believe that he was being forced to battle against this person once more. ‘Where is this leading, Cracknell? What is this all-consuming interest in Charles Norton?’

The cigarette made Cracknell cough hard. ‘Ye Gods,’ he wheezed, ‘all these bloody questions, Thomas. I had no idea that you were so damned ignorant. All will be revealed in time, don’t you worry. Just be sure to visit the Exhibition as soon as you are able, and know this.’ He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and then said offhandedly, ‘Boyce is coming.’

‘
Boyce?
To Manchester?’

‘Yes, Thomas, to Manchester–to this thing, this Art Treasures Exhibition.’ Cracknell spoke slowly, as if addressing an idiot.

‘How–how did you discover this?’

‘Simply by using the investigative skills that have made me such an effective newspaperman–skills you would do well to recover.’ Cracknell drew again on his cigarette, his broad face puckering with malevolence. ‘You and I alone know the full extent of that man’s crimes. And we’re going to punish him. More than that, we’re going to bloody well
destroy him
. You’ll see.’

Kitson stared speechlessly at the luminous windows of
the Polygon, a profusion of disturbing scenarios playing out in his mind. Addresses were underway inside, the assembled guests suddenly shaking with laughter. He caught a glimpse of Jemima amidst the admiring crowd, standing behind her chortling father, her slender arms crossed with impatience.

The French windows opened, and a pair of footmen emerged. It was obvious who they sought; Kitson looked around, but saw only the moonlit garden. Cracknell had disappeared.

‘From the western end of the Causeway Heights, just north of
Balaclava, the true scale of the calamity is revealed. A skein of shattered
bodies is cast across the floor of the valley beyond, the men
and their horses intermingled in death, knocked to pieces by grape,
canister and shot. Patches of bright colour, the cherry red of a
Hussar’s
overalls, the golden yellow of a standard, or the blue of
a
Lancer’s
tunic, can be made out in amongst the dust and blood;
and tiny sparks of light ripple over the surface of the carnage, where
bridles, spurs, buttons and blades catch the setting sun.’

Kitson lowered his pocketbook and rubbed his aching eyes. He sat blankly for a few moments, then cleared his throat and tried to begin his next sentence. His mind kept stumbling, however, the words emerging in the wrong order or not at all. After six or seven attempts he gave up, and only just managed to prevent himself hurling his pencil down the hillside.

Cracknell came panting up the path from the low-walled redoubts further along the Heights, around which the earlier stages of the battle had been fought. His brow was shining with sweat. ‘Damn this country,’ he gasped, spitting out a bead of phlegm. ‘How vertiginous it is! Enough to bring a fellow’s heart to bursting point.’

He staggered over to where Kitson was sitting, complaining about various aspects of life on the peninsula. The view from the summit, however, was enough to silence even Richard Cracknell.

‘So there it is,’ he said eventually. ‘The Light Brigade is lost.’

Black-winged carrion birds were circling down towards the valley floor with the lazy ease of creatures who knew that a certain feed awaited them. There was a distant dash of musketry from the far side of the valley, on the Fedyukhin Hills, where the Russian Army had managed to gain a lasting foothold after the battle. They seemed to be firing on a British detail sent out to retrieve the last of the wounded, which had accidentally strayed into range.

Cracknell turned away, fumbling with a cigarette. ‘Hell’s teeth,’ he muttered, ‘they might as well have sent the poor bastards charging straight at the barricades of Sebastopol.’

He sat down heavily and asked to see what Kitson had. The junior correspondent handed over his pocketbook and lay back on the grass, gazing up at the evening sky, following wisps of cloud as they drifted out to sea. Kitson was immensely tired. It had been many nights since he had rested properly. He had always been a light sleeper, easily disturbed; and the noise of the Allied artillery bombardment, although over two miles distant from the small hut Cracknell had secured for them, was more than he could stand. This dull, constant fatigue was slowly leeching away his vigour, his eloquence, and his enthusiasm for his work.

Cracknell, Kitson realised, was pleased. ‘This is good, Thomas,’ he said approvingly. ‘Good indeed. You have a real feeling for the human tragedy of all this–for the plight of the men who are falling victim to our generals’ woeful ineptitude. The political and the strategic elements elude you almost completely, of course, but this is to be expected, given your background. You write through sorrow and sympathy rather than anger, a deficiency well supplied by my own commentaries.’ He tossed the pocketbook on to Kitson’s chest. ‘This, my friend, is why we are such an effective partnership.’

Their account of the battle of the Alma and its aftermath had been published mere days after the event, thanks to the wonder of the electric telegraph. Filled with both copious praise for the fighting men and severe criticism of Lord Raglan
and his generals, it had been a major success for the
Courier
, completely selling out the issue that had carried it. Telegrams had arrived from O’Farrell relating its impact, and the fierce debate it had provoked–and urging them to keep up the good work. Already, however, there had been signs of how this prominence might have adverse effects. Shortly after publication, the Captain whose vessel conveyed their reports to the telegraph office at Varna had stated that he was no longer prepared to associate with them. Cracknell had found this encouraging, strangely enough, and a new messenger had been secured that same morning; but for Kitson at least, a worrying precedent had been set.

The senior correspondent now started to read out his own work. It was predictably blunt and confrontational, littered with speculation, fearlessly assigning blame to those in command. There was a delight in Cracknell’s voice, a deep pleasure in his own polemical savagery that was utterly incongruous with his subject. Kitson closed his eyes.

‘A crime was done today, dear reader,’
the report concluded stridently
, ‘a great and terrible crime against all the codes and
usages of war. Our foe, the men of Tsar Nicholas, took a great chance,
rushing out of Sebastopol in massive numbers, cunningly skirting
the Allied camps on the plateau to strike at Balaclava, the port
supplying their
besiegers
. They were thwarted, but only after a great
many valiant lives had been squandered due to the wretched stupidity
of a villainous, cold-hearted cadre of aristocratic buffoons. Our Light
Cavalry, among the finest in the world, was left unused at the Alma,
when it could have made a real difference; and has now been
destroyed needlessly at Balaclava. This reprehensible waste seems
the result of a spat between noblemen, between the famous enemies
(and, we might add, brothers-
in-
law)
Lucan
and Cardigan. The
latter, who supposedly led the charge, was interestingly among the
very first back to safety; and whilst so many of his men lay bleeding
in the dust, the Earl was enjoying a bath on his yacht in Balaclava
harbour, with the prospect of a fine dinner before him. Such is the
calibre of leadership in the Crimea!’

His recitation complete, Cracknell launched directly into a passionate tirade about the wider strategic failings of the campaign–about how Raglan had made yet another error
in listening to his engineers rather than his generals and bringing up the artillery for a bombardment instead of mounting an immediate attack.

‘Now they pound away at earthworks with cannon, achieving nothing and allowing Russians to come at us as they have done here. And still,
still
they talk so lightly of Sebastopol falling in a matter of weeks!’ He got to his feet and gazed out at the gruesome panorama before them. ‘Honestly, I cannot believe that I supported this war at its outset. I shiver with embarrassment, Thomas, at the praise I heaped on this wrong-headed enterprise. I honestly thought that they had a proper plan of action–that they
had
to have one.’ He shook his head, exhaling cigarette smoke. ‘But they do not, my friend; they most definitely do not.’

After a few seconds’ further contemplation, the senior correspondent let out an exclamation and pointed down at the redoubts. Kitson sat up. Turkish troops were removing the bodies of their slain comrades from the crude defensive structures, piling them up outside the walls like rolls of tattered, bloody cloth.

‘Our Turkish allies,’ Kitson said. ‘I hear that they suffered heavy casualties resisting the Russian advance, before the British forces had turned out. Their sacrifice is worthy of mention, Mr Cracknell, do you not think?’

‘Codswallop,’ proclaimed Cracknell forcefully. ‘The heathen dogs let two forts fall. Their cowardice damn near cost us the day. But I wasn’t looking at them.’ He tapped Kitson’s arm, and then pointed again. ‘Highlanders, man. Sir Colin Campbell and his ADC.’

The two officers from the Highland Brigade, in their kilts of dark green tartan and their black feather bonnets, weren’t difficult to locate. They stood to one side of the redoubt, in conversation with an upright, bearded civilian in a long blue frock-coat, a peaked cap and highly polished riding boots.

‘Russell of the
Times
,’ Cracknell growled. ‘My great rival. Ingratiating himself as usual. The slimy toad–I’ll bet he saw everything.’ The
Courier
team, delayed by the unexplained absence of their senior, had arrived in the valley some time after the final shot had been fired, and had been obliged to
rely on eye-witnesses for their information on the battle itself. ‘Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll go down there, have a jaw with Billy Russell and those two bonnie Scotsmen, and see what more I can learn about the action. You stay here and brush up what we’ve got so far.’

Kitson jotted a note in his pocketbook. ‘What of Styles?’ he asked wearily. ‘It has been some time since he left for the valley floor.’

‘What? Oh yes–don’t want him collapsing again, do we, with neither of us around to prop him up!’ Cracknell chuckled wickedly. ‘Very well–you find the boy then. I want you to keep up your watch on Mr Styles for me, Thomas. The lad’s is a little soft in the head, I think. He’ll need some careful supervision during the trials to come, you mark my words.’

Kitson watched as the senior correspondent trotted off towards the redoubt, shouting a robust ‘hallo’ to Russell and the Highlanders. That he could make such avuncular pronouncements with every appearance of sincerity was remarkable. In the month since the clash at the Alma, his treatment of Styles had been consistently, characteristically merciless, both with regards to the events of that day and the enduring issue of Madeleine Boyce. It was this unrelenting mockery, Kitson suspected, that was driving Styles to seek more and more time alone.

Cracknell reached the
Times
’ correspondent and his companions, who greeted him with obvious reluctance. Kitson turned and headed down into the valley. He followed a narrow, winding footpath, cut deep into the grass by centuries of passage by Tartar shepherds. The hills around him were smooth and treeless, and dotted with pale rocks. In the distance, beyond the wide plateau that held the main Allied camps, the location of Sebastopol and its fortifications was marked by a few winding trails of grey smoke. To the left, off between two steep green spurs, was the dark ribbon of the sea.

Slowly, the slope began to level out, and Kitson passed through a large, abandoned vineyard. It was yet another corner of the fecund peninsula rendered barren by the invasion, yellow dust caking the withered, trampled vines.
As he picked his way towards the valley floor, the arid furrows became littered with the detritus of a recent battle. A beaten-in dragoon’s helmet told him that this was where Brigadier-General Scarlett’s Heavy Brigade had repelled the Russian cavalry, just after the struggle for the redoubts. Scraps of uniform from both armies had been sown into the vineyard by hundreds of stamping hooves, and sabre-shards winked like flints in the crumbling earth. Pushing aside a screen of ragged, browning leaves, Kitson saw a hand, severed just below the wrist, lying on the ground before him. White as soap, it was frozen in a loose pointing gesture, with a silver wedding band on the ring finger. Averting his gaze, he hurried on.

Styles was sitting atop a boulder in plain sight, as close to the battlefield as was safe. He was hunched over his paper, hard at work in the soft evening light, a battered cap of uncertain provenance pushed back on his head. Without speaking, Kitson approached, and peered over to see Styles’ subject. The drawing in his lap depicted one of the many dead chargers laid out on the bed of the valley. This horse had been gutted by a cannonball, its entrails entirely gone, the carcass lying darkly hollow like an empty shell.

Kitson sighed, leaning up against the boulder and crossing his arms. This grisly scene was becoming typical of Styles’ productions. Only one of his drawings, in fact, depicting the battlefield of the Alma, had so far been engraved for the
Courier
; since that day, the illustrator had been exposing himself to the most distressing sights that the war had to offer, dwelling upon them at unhealthy length. The resulting images were nightmarish, and completely unusable.

‘Do you really imagine that the
Courier
will run that?’ Kitson asked. Despite his best efforts, he could not keep the impatience from his voice.

Styles stopped drawing. He did not reply.

‘I realise what you are attempting,’ Kitson went on, ‘truly I do. And as ever, your great skill is evident. But you must realise that no magazine in England would print such an image.’

The illustrator turned towards him sharply. ‘I am only
doing what we came out here for, Kitson,’ he snapped. ‘To see war for what it is. Or have you forgotten?’

I have lost his confidence, Kitson thought. For some reason, he considers us to be adversaries. How had this happened? He uncrossed his arms and put his hands in his pockets, feeling suddenly ashamed, wondering how he could repair the damage that had plainly been done.

Styles stared out at the valley. ‘Do you know what happened yet?’

Kitson brushed a fat autumnal fly from the shoulder of his jacket, trying as he did so to keep his eyes off the slaughter. The light breeze carried over a revolting, fleshy stench, already tainted with putrefaction. Over at the foot of the Causeway Heights, privates from the Highland Brigade were burying fallen hussars. Still clad in their magnificent uniforms, the bodies were being swung into deep pits, their brocaded sleeves flapping behind them as they plummeted to their graves.

‘As far as we can deduce,’ he said quietly, ‘Cardigan’s men were supposed to charge the contested redoubts up on the Heights, but went head-on for the Russian artillery instead. God only knows why.’

‘So it was a mistake. Not even an ordinary defeat. All this death for the sake of a–a
blunder
.’ Styles’ voice grew bitterly angry. ‘They will try to disguise what happened here, you know. They will try to dress it up in the garb of heroism–make it acceptable, admirable even. I must stand against this in my work, Kitson, do you not see? I must show the
truth
.’

‘I do understand that, Styles, believe me, but—’

‘Then keep to your business,’ he interrupted, ‘and allow me to keep to mine.’