The Last Horseman
Authors: David Gilman
About
The Last Horseman
Dublin 1899. Lawyer Joseph Radcliffe and his black American comrade Benjamin Pierce were ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ in the Civil War and the Indian Wars; now Radcliffe defends the toughest cases in a troubled city. But in South Africa a war rages between the British and the Boers and, after an argument with his father, Joseph’s son Edward runs away to join the Irish forces there.
When Edward is captured and held as a spy, Radcliffe and Pierce – a black man in a white man’s war – set off to find him and bring him home. In the harsh South African terrain, the old soldiers find their survival skills tested to the hilt in this epic tale of heroism and treachery, love and loyalty.
For Suzy,
as always
And in memory of my friend James Ambrose Brown,
journalist, author and playwright
A war in South Africa would be one of the most serious wars that could possibly be waged... it would leave behind it the embers of a strife which, I believe, generations would hardly be long enough to extinguish.
Joseph Chamberlain,
British Colonial Secretary in 1896
England must not fall. It would mean an inundation of Russian and German political degradations... a sort of Middle-Age night and slavery which would last until Christ comes again... Even wrong
– and she is wrong – England must be upheld.
Mark Twain,
writing in 1900
About the Master of War series
An Invitation from the Publisher
DECEMBER 1899–JANUARY 1900
HAPTER
O
NE
It was a foul night to hang a man. The rain swept across the Irish Sea, throwing itself against the grey stone walls of Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison. Behind its unyielding façade two prison guards stood outside the condemned man’s cell. The number was imprinted on a small metal plaque: D1. It was barely a dozen shuffling steps from the cell across the passage and through the door to the execution chamber. Dermot McCann was twenty-seven years old. He was a thug and a killer, and refused to show these bastard guards his fear. The priest’s incantation barely entered his mind, the words pluming in the cold air of the prison’s walls as the guards fastened manacles on his wrists. His body stiffened, a moment of resistance, his arm muscles straining. One of the guards, the older man, one of the few who hadn’t cursed him for being a Fenian bastard, spoke quietly, his hand squeezing McCann’s shoulder. ‘Steady, lad. This isn’t the time.’
With barely a moment’s hesitation they had stepped through the cell door, across the landing, followed by the priest and the small entourage of officials required by law to witness his death. Voices echoed from some of the half-dozen men incarcerated in other cells.
‘You took more than they can take from you, Dermot!’
‘You’re a martyr to the cause, Dermot McCann!’
‘It’s an Englishman that’s hanging ya, my lad! No Irishman would do it!’
But in one of the cells a young man shivered with fear, knees hugged to his chest, back against the cold stone wall. Danny O’Hagan had yet to see his seventeenth birthday, and it would not be long before they moved him into D1. He had neither the courage nor the bravado to face such a cold-blooded death, and every shuffling scuff that echoed from the condemned man’s final steps squeezed his heart to near suffocation.
The door to the execution chamber closed behind McCann. Eyes wide, he gazed at the wooden platform, painted black, and the whitewashed stone walls. They called the place of execution the ‘hang house’ – a narrow covered yard where parallel beams ran along the underside of the roof into the gable walls. The hanging rope was attached to chains affixed to these beams. Below the scaffold, in the flickering half-light of the gas lamps, witnesses to his execution gazed up, eyes shadowed beneath their hat brims. They were all men, a mixture of police officers, lawyers and prison guards joined by other civilians who were there to witness his death. His escort had eased him, almost without him realizing it, to the noose that hung immobile in the dank air. A snare drum’s death roll echoed across the yard. He looked up in the direction of the sound, but it was just the rain beating on to the pitched glass roof.
His body trembled as the black-suited executioner stepped forward.
‘It’s the cold. Nothing more,’ McCann said.
There was one man among the witnesses who had already respectfully removed his hat, and who gazed directly at the condemned man. Joseph Radcliffe was a big man with a broken nose. His eyes always gleamed brightly, and his big hands were wrinkled and tough from years on the open plains. He wore his hair short and kept his face clean-shaven. McCann locked on to his eyes, desperately drawing courage from Radcliffe, who had defended him in court but who had failed to save his life.
McCann’s mind found a second of clarity, but the words that formed –
God bless Ireland!
– never reached his lips. The black hood was pulled down across his face, and the words swallowed as he gasped in fear. His panic ended a moment later. The lever was pulled. The trapdoor crashed open. And his final gasp of life went unheard beneath the clattering of the rain.
*
The Mountjoy Prison bell rang, signalling the successful completion of the execution.
*
At a first-floor window of a townhouse across the city, a frock-coated man stood looking out at the swirling storm. Broad-shouldered, thickset, hair sprinkled with grey above his dark forehead, Benjamin Pierce had known much hardship and trouble across two continents during his forty-nine years. He half turned as a lanky sixteen-year-old boy entered the room and walked across to stand before the radiant warmth of the fireplace.
‘Is my father not back yet?’ Edward Radcliffe asked.
Pierce fished the gold hunter watch from his waistcoat pocket, checked it and clicked the cover closed. ‘No. It’ll be a while.’ Pierce knew Radcliffe’s son felt the same unease as he did. When a man died at the end of a rope, the spectre of death shadowed Joseph Radcliffe. He would slip into the house quietly, retiring to his study for a brandy that Pierce would have waiting for his friend, along with a made-up fire to ease the chill of death from his bones. Delaying his homecoming allowed the ghosts to stay in the Mountjoy execution yard a little longer.
HAPTER
T
WO
The clear dawn brought a crisp bite to the air that now echoed with the bellowing roar of a regimental sergeant major. The Dublin garrison at Royal Barracks was the heart of the British Army in Ireland. A company of infantry marched to the cadence of the RSM’s commands. The rhythm of his voice was punctuated by the click of his brass-tipped pace stick, set to the exact marching stride demanded.
‘You-are-soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment of Foot! Not ladies of the night squeezing your arses to stop your drawers falling down! About turn! Lef’, lef’, lef’ right lef’. Thirty inches, ladies! Thirty inches per stride – if-you-please!’
The men were shadowed by their company sergeant as their punishment drill went on unabated. A less than satisfactory kit and weapons inspection had resulted in their having to face the fearsome RSM Herbert Thornton on the parade ground. His reputation was formidable, but, even worse, he was an Englishman. A good proportion of the regiment was made up of English, Welsh and Irish soldiers.
‘You’re going to South Africa to fight God-fearing Dutchmen in their own back yard and you will die like soldiers not the pox-ridden scum you are!’ Mr Thornton’s voice boomed.
In the heaving ranks a private soldier whispered to his mate. ‘Give me the pox any day, at least I’d have some pleasure gettin’ it.’
Nothing in God’s creation escaped the attention of a regimental sergeant major.
‘That man! Mulraney!’ The pace stick pointed unerringly at the marching mass of men. ‘Sergeant McCory!’
The company sergeant followed the direction indicated by the most feared man in the regiment. ‘Company! Halt!’ he commanded.
Hobnailed boots smashed into the ground. Mulraney stood rigid: sweat dripped from his nose, the rough cloth uniform chafed, and he wished to God he had never been tempted to take up the Queen’s shilling.
*
Inside the Dublin garrison stables, a soldier, stripped to his undershirt, had been watching the rigid discipline imposed on those outside. He turned away, hawked and spat into the steaming straw. Mulraney would never learn, the daft peasant. Sweet Jesus, who’d be idiotic enough to tug the corner of his mouth down and make any kind of utterance when the RSM took the parade? Thornton had a Friday-face on him that’d stop a tram in its tracks. And the man could see a fly twitch its arse at a thousand yards.
He forked away soiled straw from the horse’s stall. ‘I’m an infantryman, in an infantry regiment, and I’m here cleaning out your shit and piss,’ he said to the bay mare as he nudged her with his shoulder so he could clear the soggy mess. ‘The colonel gets to ride you and I get to follow in the ranks looking at your tail-swishing rump. Now, is there any justice in the world? Move yourself, girl, or there’s no apple for you t’day.’
The mare snickered and nuzzled his pocket.
Further back in the darkened area of another stall, Edward Radcliffe waited as a groom saddled a chestnut gelding for him. As the lad tightened the girth, Edward looked across the horse’s withers to his friend. Older by several years, Lawrence Baxter waited patiently for the horses to be readied.