Band of Angel (28 page)

“What on earth is going on?” called Miss Tidy.

“They have been chosen,” Miss Widdicombe called upstairs in a stricken voice. “They are going to war with Miss Nightingale, in four days’ time! My brother’s there you know.”

And now there was no escape. Lizzie, who was on duty, went off to turn down the beds and mix the medicines, but Catherine was kidnapped by the governesses, who entreated her to come upstairs and then bundled her into Miss Tidy’s room. She was still carrying the parcel that Lady Bracebridge had given her as she walked out the door, and they wanted to know what was inside it.

“It’s her uniform,” the governesses whispered to one another. They
were treating her with such deference it made her feel awkward. Miss Tidy took scissors from her manicure case and was about to snip the string when the bell rang for evening prayers. Miss Tidy, not normally a rebellious person, went to her door and locked it.

“They won’t miss us for a few moments”—she gave them a defiant look—“they’ve more or less forgotten us.”

The string was snipped. Catherine lifted a lump of gray wool out of its rain-soaked wrappings and the eager smiles died on everybody’s lips. When she shook it out, the dress, made from a dirty-looking tweed in a salt-and-pepper color, looked enormous. There was a short woolen cloak and a jacket in gray worsted, and folded inside the jacket a blue-checked apron and an ugly holland scarf with the words “Scutari” embroidered in red across the corner.

“Oh dear,” said Miss Widdicombe, as Catherine held the dress up against herself, “What a very odd garment . . .”

Catherine snatched it back. Now that their smiles had changed from admiration to pity, she felt painfully exposed.

“It’s not odd at all,” she said. “I shall feel very proud to wear it.”

But Miss W could not let it alone. “I don’t understand why it’s so horrid.” She picked up the dress again and gazed at it minutely, as if its lumpy seams and crude embroidery held some secret message for her. “I mean it’s not a thing of beauty.” She thought with a pang of Simon’s riding boots from Steiner’s, and the mess kit, encased in tissue paper and in a beautiful box. “Not like the Horse Guards’ feathers and plumes, or the Dragoons’ scarlet jackets and spurs and so forth, but why should it be? They’ve never made a uniform for women going to war before, and I am quite sure that your wish is to do God’s work, and in a way that does not draw attention to yourself. This will serve you very well,” she ended bravely.

“I shall get my needle out tonight,” thought Catherine, who was not listening, “and at least fit it at the sides, otherwise I shall look a fright.”

“Just think how anxious those men must feel.” Miss Widdicombe had resumed her shrewd look. “They’ve never in their lives worked side by side with women. Oh look! A note in the pocket.”

The letter, written on officially headed notepaper, said she should take a stock of underthings, four cotton nightcaps, one cotton
umbrella, and a carpetbag. No colored ribbons or flowers were allowed.

“I have only four days left,” Catherine told Miss Widdicombe in alarm, “how on earth can I get a message home in time?”

“A message via the stagecoach will be better,” said Miss W sensibly, “and you will be sure of getting it there, particularly if you mark it well. But don’t worry if it doesn’t, I have a bag you may have and a spare dress. Oh your poor mother and father, they will miss you.”

“And I have some coins that I am prepared to give you.” Miss Tidy was still in her defiant mood. “Four pounds, not a great deal, but it will keep you until you are paid. Don’t trouble to return it, I do not believe in loans, and you may take my traveling rug.” She pulled a rug knitted in blue and green squares from the washstand beside the bed. “It will be bitterly cold there.”

What good women they suddenly seemed to her. For one absurd moment she wished they could all come. The bell for prayers was ringing in the hall again, this time with a more shrill and impatient note.

“Now ladies,” said Miss Tidy, whom generosity had lent an air of sad majesty. “I think we are summoned to an even more important engagement.”

They went downstairs to the refectory, where it was dark outside the windows and the leaves of the laurel tree rattled against the panes. Without Mrs. Clark and Miss Nightingale, the room already felt deserted. Catherine took her place at the long narrow table among the women, who seemed to nestle around her tonight. They bowed their heads over the scratch meal of bread and cheese and cold potato and said, “For these and all thy gifts may the Lord make us truly thankful.” As darkness deepened, she prayed to God to make her brave about Deio and to help her one day understand all the confusion in her head about him. She asked to be kept safe and to have the courage to write the letters she had to write on the morrow. She must see Mr. Holdsworth, too, although she was sure he would support her. Then one of the governesses gave a little cough. They were waiting for her to stop praying so that they could begin eating.

Deio Jones knew enough about wild things to know that, if you wanted to catch them, the best thing was to turn your back on them and act unconcerned, and then they might, just might, come to you. So he wasn’t all that surprised when the boy had run up to him with her letter. He’d been sitting on a wooden fence, watching his horses, and ripped the letter open with his heart pounding. She said she wanted to meet him that week with some important news.

He felt a spurt of triumph, a feeling of pride salvaged—in the end he’d known she’d come running. And he was glad, so glad that the sky and the horse had spun after reading her letter, and he’d had to get down from the fence. The truth was that he could have wept with relief to find she was safe—the sense that somehow he was responsible for her had never left him. There was so much news to tell her, too; so much had changed and he hated the thought of leaving the country without letting her know.

A week after she’d left for the governesses’ home, and with his father’s blessing, he’d taken out a three-months lease on a five-acre smallholding two miles northeast of Barnet. It was part of a livery stables that had gone broke, so there were twelve reasonable, though shabby, boxes for the horses, plus, and this was a great bonus, some gallops up the road that belonged to a racehorse trainer called Boy Robertson. Deio had fenced the three acres of scrubby grass at his own expense because he liked his horses to be turned out every day, to have the chance to live like horses; then he’d tidied up the grass, sorted out the pump and water containers, and with one hundred
and twenty pounds left over from the last drove, had set himself up in business as a purveyor of high-class horses to the cavalry. After his first meeting with the quartermaster from the Royal Dragoons, he’d gone up to meet him at the Pimlico Barracks.

He’d been introduced as a decent horseman and, after a good meal, told again how desperate they were in the Crimea for remounts. Hundreds of horses had been shipped out from Ireland, but they were running low, and there’d even been talk of a commission, without the usual strings attached, if he could help. Most men, Dixon said, had to pay for their uniforms, and their horses, and their mess bills, but they were prepared to make exceptional conditions for exceptional times. He’d declined the offer: some of the men he’d seen lounging around the barracks in their furs and fluff, talking in that silly affected way—“I say old thing that’s a veddy veddy fine hoss”—struck him as the most awful asses, not his type at all, but he had formed a plan for going as a free agent to the Crimea and selling his own horses there. Dixon had as good as said there was nothing to stop him doing it, and if Deio, wink wink, wanted a partner, he, Deio, knew where to look. Dixon would need “only a small donation, mind,” but it might help oil a few wheels. Deio hadn’t batted an eyelid—this kind of thing went on all the time in the droving world.

He moved into a nice little cottage on the edge of his fields. He’d crammed the kitchen with saddles and bridles, wormers, leather punches, drench. A woman came in every day to cook and clean for him. In between, he’d been roaming around on Moonshine. The nervous young gray he’d ridden across Wales was a different horse now: fit, muscled, confident, cocky, a real eye-catcher. Together they’d appeared at local livery yards and stables, taken tea with local farmers, made casual inquiries at ale houses, and now he had his work cut out for him, with fifteen cracking good sorts that he was fittening, fattening, and training. Too many really, but he’d hired a couple of the lads who worked part-time at the racing stables and who were better than average riders, and he kept them busy.

He woke each morning at five and went through the dew-soaked grass to the wooden shelter where Moonshine stuck her head out
and nickered for him. She butted his hand with her head, demanding her hugs before breakfast, and then Cariad, now confident and jealous, sank her head in his hands. Always a groan somewhere inside him as the horse leaned against him and looked at him steadily through her thick lashes. He wanted Catherine to see the muscle he’d built on her and how beautiful she was now.

After he’d mixed the morning feeds, the boys arrived from the racing stables. They’d tack up, and riding one and leading one, go up into the hills. They worked the horses in rotation: sometimes he took them to the racetrack and gave them long steady gallops; at other times he made them supple by working them on a circle in the middle of a field. He taught them the verbal commands he’d heard at the barracks: “Charge. To line. Wheel back.” He’d toughened them mentally, too, bit by bit, first by building their confidence and then, gradually, changing creatures whose natural state was startle and flight into disciplined servants who could cope with fires, loud bangs, sudden movements, and flag-waving.

If he hadn’t been missing her, he would have been perfectly happy; this was what he loved doing best and what most fulfilled him. The pure sensuous joy, a sculptor’s joy, of putting muscles on a horse, seeing a weedy neck develop topline, watching a stiff mover become a fluid athlete. There were constant frustrations, but the joy was in releasing these animals, finding their strengths and their weaknesses. Each horse was so different, the puzzle was never-ending, and it never bored him.

At home with his brothers, and with Lewis, there were a thousand interruptions, constant advice; here, he worked on his own instincts, open and listening, watching, and waiting. In only six short weeks, he’d transformed three rejects from the racetracks, seven part-breds from the sales, and five thoroughbreds from a local squire who’d gone broke into well-mannered, useful horses with a sense of pride in themselves.

At nights he’d smoke and watch them, rolling or drinking or standing in the fields, and feel a wave of anxiety about them. They were innocent. Within a matter of weeks they’d be tossing around in some ship, or in a camp somewhere in the Crimea. Some would have owners who rode well and respected them; some would love
them as much as they loved their wives. For others, it would be the start of a nightmare.

He worried about Cariad. He’d decided she must go, too, it was almost a test he’d set himself. She was talented, but she was sensitive, the kind of horse that, if you bullied her, closed herself down and made herself vulnerable and only half alive and half smart. With Catherine, on the drove, she’d grown so confident she was now the boss mare of the herd. Her defenses had come down, and now when he approached her she was sweet as butter, and while he held her conker-colored head, she’d close her eyes in bliss. He’d rub her head and softly pull each ear, and sometimes she let out a deep sigh. But now he knew he must change his thoughts.

Every week, he sent a letter to the shipping agent in Portsmouth, asking when there would be places for him and his horses on the boat going east. And every time he made this inquiry something inside him blazed with surprise, he was going to war, and that felt good. A new world with new thoughts.

When she’d left him on the drove he’d felt as bad as he’d ever felt in his life, and it took him a long time to get over it, and the reason why he longed for new thoughts was that the old ones still kept bobbing up like a fish that refuses to die. Yesterday, for instance, he’d gone to a farm near Windsor to look at a few animals and seen this six-year-old gelding called Troy. He was almost jet-black and would need smartening up. His matted tail hung almost to the ground, but he had the presence of a seventeen-hand stallion, and huge violet and black eyes and suddenly—it had flashed into his mind before he could do anything about it—he’d pictured her hopping on, and crouched down low, and galloping in that reckless way she had, and then saying, “Oh Deio, he’s beautiful.” His whole body had blossomed with happiness in that moment and he’d felt the kind of shared joy you might feel when you had a baby, something secret and strong and sacred.

He was counting out the notes into the farmer’s hand when a boy rushed out of the house, flung his arms around the horse’s neck, and asked where he was taking him to. He was noncommittal. Some people lit up like candles when you told them their horses would soon be warriors; this boy, you only had to look at him, would be
devastated. With a boy like that the bond with their horse was too deep to properly understand. And she’d be upset about Cariad, too, he knew it, which was why the mare was his test: it was his horse, his life. She’d lost the right to say where she went.