Until the Colours Fade (41 page)

As Charles advanced on him, head thrust forward and eyes narrowed to slits, Tom gulped in deep breaths and clenched his fists. Crawford came on with slow remorseless steps; his coat had been ripped and was hanging loosely on his massive shoulders; spots of blood dotted his scarf. Tom landed only two ineffective punches before going down under a furious flurry of heavy blows, arms raised blindly to protect himself. As he sank to his knees, head lolling, another punch rocked him and he crashed back onto the stairs, and lay with limbs spread-eagled.

He was dimly aware of the taste of blood in his mouth and the distant sound of his laboured breathing. Charles’s face floated above him like a pale planet and then vanished.

When Tom regained consciousness, he was propped up at the foot of the stairs and Charles had gone. He listened to the faint hissing of the gas jet on the landing above and closed his eyes. His head was throbbing but not with the splitting pain he knew he would suffer later. Too dazed and weak to move he stayed where he was. Some half-remembered thought or idea troubled him … something to be done … something important; he knew that now … must go, must warn her … warn Helen. Helen. He clutched the banisters and raised himself only to fall back again, overcome by dizziness and nausea. He failed once more, and then, sobbing with frustration at his weakness, crawled towards the studio, where he lay prostrate and despairing on the dusty floor.

Tom paid the fly-man before reaching the gates of Hanley Park, having decided to finish his journey on foot. Once again he was looking up at the imposing wrought-iron gates, dominated by the massive central coat of arms and the heraldic griffins on the flanking piers. Only four months since that shimmering morning when he and Helen had driven out between them into the summer countryside. Now the leaves were falling and the air was damp and cold. Through a thick ground mist the elms in the park seemed to be floating rootless in a filmy silver sea. Tom fumbled with the heavy ring-handle and pushed the dew-moist metal bars, but even when he had withdrawn the lower bolts, the gates would not move. He was reluctant to bring out the gate-keeper to unlock them, in case the servant asked him his business, and on learning it, told him that he need proceed no further since her ladyship was away. Instead Tom clambered over the stone wall and dropped down onto the grass. A rabbit stared at him, hunched and frozen for a moment, before bounding away into a tangle of bushes. At its zenith above the mist, the sky was a pearly blue; later the sun would shine. Tom started in the
direction
of the house, and soon saw the indistinct white outline of the façade.

*

Tom had not been strong enough to leave his bed for two days after Charles’s visit, and on that second day, he had received a short cold letter from Helen. In it she had stated that Charles had found out about them, but would take no action against her if no further meetings took place. She had reluctantly promised to abide by this condition and had left London. Tom had been sure that the curtness of the note was no true reflection of Helen’s feelings. He had thought it probable that Charles had dictated it; but whether written under duress or not, Helen clearly intended to go through with her marriage. It was the end of their affair, and bitter and agonised though he had been, Tom had accepted it. From the beginning he had known the inevitable outcome; yet the manner of its coming had filled him with rebellious anger. He was haunted by the thought that she had known even while they had been at Barford and had not had the courage and honesty to
tell him. Now his only happy days with her seemed transformed into a fool’s paradise. She had owed him nothing except a single duty: to tell him in person when the moment of parting had come. But she had found it easier to accept Charles’s terms;
preferring
to embalm the memory of her happiness, than to risk clouding it with the tears and possible anger of a last meeting. If she had thought of him rather than herself, she would have warned him at once about Charles, and thus have prepared him for that gentleman’s sudden appearance. Perhaps as Magnus had suggested, she had merely used him; perhaps Magnus’s
picture
of her had been the true one. But when Tom thought of her, his resentment melted and he could not accept this. He still loved her, and feared he always might. Regardless of Charles’s threats, he would see Helen once more, and whatever the hurt, they would part knowing each other’s feelings and openly
acknowledging
their loss. She had started their intimacy and she should end it – in person.

Tom had thought initially that, in spite of her claim to have left London, she was still there. He had bribed the only
remaining
servant in the Belgravia house to show him every room, and only then had he been convinced that she had gone. Next he had written to her at Hanley Park in the hope that, if she were not there, his letter would be sent on to her. He had said that if he did not hear from her within two weeks he would come to Hanley Park to make inquiries about her. He had received no answer.

*

Tom paused a moment as the butler led him through the
ante-room
where Helen had sat for him. The two ivory chairs, the green and white marble mantelpiece and the painted ceiling reminded him vividly of the tense hours they had spent together in this room and made his heart ache for her. Already the butler had told him that she was away.

With the first shock of hearing that Tom had come, Catherine had immediately feared that Magnus had told him by whom he had been betrayed, but remembering her brother’s absolute denial of any intention to warn his friend, she had breathed more freely. She received him in the Red Drawing Room and was at once troubled by his haggard face and shocked to see dark bruises beneath one eye and across a cheek. Tom noticed the direction of her gaze.

‘Your brother called on me, Miss Crawford.’

‘For what reason?’

‘You know well enough, madam. You made your suspicions
clear even when I was staying here.’ He fixed her with burning eyes and came closer. ‘Where is she? Tell me, Catherine. I must know.’

‘She came a week ago to take Humphrey to Chatham. She will have sailed for Malta by now.’

She followed him as he moved blindly towards the door.

‘You must not go after her.’

‘In case your brother kills me?’ he shouted.

She shook her head and murmured:

‘They would be married before you reached Valetta.’

‘How do I believe you? Your brother told you to say this if I came here.’

Catherine left the room and returned some minutes later with a newspaper. She handed it to him folded back at the middle page; a paragraph was marked under
Service
Appointments.

Tom dropped the paper on a chair and remained staring at the floor; thinking that Helen would have known this at Barford; that in this too she had deceived him, as she had done over Charles’s knowledge. Even when they had read about the Sultan’s declaration of war on Russia, she had lied to him, saying that she did not think it likely that the British and French fleets would enter the Bosphorus and the Black Sea for several months. Yet the haste of her departure and Sir James’s desire to marry at once was clear proof of the destination of the fleet; and she would have known, and yet had said nothing; nothing. His anger passed and he was paralysed by a merciful numbness; a feeling of such emptiness and desolation that he felt no more pain; only a strange light-headedness as though he were drunk. He heard Catherine saying:

‘If there is anything I can do….’

He found himself staring at the portrait over the opposite door: Rembrandt’s
Head
of
a
Jew.

‘Do?’ he asked, confused.

‘Anything you might like me to say to her?’

He shrugged his shoulders and was silent a moment.

‘Tell her….’ He broke off and gazed again at the portrait and felt tears pricking under his lids. Rembrandt, the miller’s son, fashionable for a time, then bankrupt, and painting, in lieu of payment, the Jews who lent him money. Two hundred years ago, and he was remembered; and who was Rear-Admiral of the Red, Vice-Admiral of the White or Lord High Admiral then? ‘… tell her,’ he said pointing, ‘to hang that painting where it can be seen.’

*

Walking again through the misty park, Tom felt a dull
incomprehension.
He was sure that Helen’s sudden flight and marriage had been hurried on by the approaching war. While
he
had thought only of her, had she been so mesmerised by reading of the comings and goings of diplomats and ministers with their treaties, telegraphic messages and protocols that she had come to believe that such things demanded reverence rather than hatred and derision? If no exchanges had ever taken place between
Constantinople
, St Petersburg and London would the ordinary people of England and Russia have made up their minds
spontaneously
to attack one another? The answer was glaringly obvious; and yet nobody derided the ministers and officers, who claimed to be so concerned to prevent events which could never take place if they were to stop preparing for them. But prepare they would, and in due course the fighting would begin.

Sooner or later good-natured men would be leaving homes, some of them only miles from the gates of the silent park,
consenting
to part with parents, wives and children, and to embark for a distant country where they would try to kill people with whom they could have no possible quarrel. But they would go; they would march, denying common sense and conscience, as all men must who promise unquestioning obedience in the service of a cause they do not understand.

Did life mean so little to so many that they would connive in making shadows of themselves, consigning present passions to forgotten memories? Abandoning future hopes as though what they had once wished from life had already gone? No, he thought – for them the bands and flags, the hoarse shouts of command and the hope of glory. How easy for the disappointed lover to see the actions of others only in terms of his own despair. There would be as many reasons for fighting as for loving.

All through the summer, the eastern crisis had seemed remote and trivial in comparison with his love for Helen. But now he saw its true proportion. Whether brought about by folly or blindness,
the results would be real enough. Already his own life and Helen’s had been touched and diminished by its lengthening shadow; others would soon feel the same chill sense of their own insignificance.

Tom’s memories caused him such pain that he wondered whether even war could be worse than this disease of love, which drained all courage from his heart; the mind might be as empty as a burnt church or a wasted town. His happiness seemed already to be part of some long lost world, from which he had somehow strayed into a region belonging to others, where for him there would be no present and no future.

Ordered perfection – a long dining table with polished silver on a spotless cloth; gold braid glinting against dark blue full-dress uniforms by the light of candelabra; scarlet-coated marines with immaculately pipe-clayed belts and cross-straps serving wine. A pleasant room with white panelled walls; only the
sloping
stern windows at one end and the heavy cross-beams
overhead
suggesting that it was the wardroom of a line-of-battle ship. No swearing here on any night, no talking shop or
mentioning
the names of ladies, except wives or sisters, and tonight an added sense of constraint since Admiral Crawford was dining in the wardroom of his flagship as the guest of his officers.

Two miles from the fleet’s anchorage, a world away from white decks and polished wood and metal, lay the Crimean coast and the stinking and polluted inlet of Balaclava, choked with scores of British supply ships and transports, their masts and spars forming a dense floating forest, hemmed in by tall black cliffs. Six miles inland, forty thousand French and British troops were encamped on the heights south of the town of Sebastopol – Russia’s great dockyard arsenal and home port of her Black Sea Fleet. Behind the town’s massive defences an unknown number of defenders were waiting, while, somewhere to the north, lurked a Russian field army already defeated by the French and British armies at the battle of the Alma, but not destroyed. In the minds of many officers on the allied side was the bitter rankling certainty that their commanders, Lord Raglan and Marshal St Arnaud, should have marched on Sebastopol immediately after their victory at the Alma, instead of waiting to land siege
artillery
and to establish supply ports. By doing so, they had given the enemy time to complete a system of defensive earthworks and entrenchments more formidable than anything previously
encountered
by British artillery officers and engineers. These men were not alone in suspecting that the allied forces would now have to mount a siege lasting through the intense cold of a Russian winter with no better shelter than their flimsy tents.

This possibility was rarely far from Sir James Crawford’s thoughts, but during dinner, he had been preoccupied with other matters. Since hoisting his flag in
Retribution,
he had from time
to time been subjected to tactfully oblique questions about whether the new Lady Crawford might be induced to leave the British Embassy in Constantinople to visit the Crimea when Lord Stratford next came out. Helen’s youth he was sure would already have caused some ribald amusement; but when
Commander
Berners, the officer next to him at the after-end of the table, tentatively broached the subject of Lady Crawford’s plans, Sir James’s evasion had been good-humoured, although tonight this topic was particularly unwelcome.

In an hour’s time, Charles’s ship,
Scylla
, in company with two other vessels, would be steaming in under cover of darkness to attack the Russian shore batteries. On board, under Charles’s orders, would be four recently promoted midshipmen, among them Humphrey Grandison, Lord Goodchild. Sir James, who had himself devised the series of night attacks, of which tonight’s engagement was but a part, was very well aware of the high risks involved, in spite of his numerous precautions. The commanders of the attacking ships always knew their firing positions from bearings taken on a number of floating lights, unobtrusively laid down by a small paddle-sloop earlier in the day. None of the attacks ever took place on consecutive nights or at the same time. So that the flashes of continuous firing did not assist the enemy to calculate their range, ships were only permitted to fire
broadsides
. To prevent the illumination of one vessel’s broadside betraying the positions of the others, each ship was to attack singly, going in at spaced and irregular intervals. But effective engagement of stone forts had to be at dangerously close ranges, making it in part a matter of luck whether an individual ship were to be sunk, set on fire, or escape untouched. Surprise being crucial, the first vessel’s chances were better than those of the two ships following. Tonight the last ship, and therefore the one most likely to have her range found by the enemy, was H.M.S.
Scylla.
If the boy was hurt, Sir James did not suppose he would be much helped by explaining to Helen that an admiral could hardly be thought to be sending his own relatives into an attack in the least dangerous position. Whether conceding this or not, he knew that she would still reproach him for the rest of his life for having done so little to discourage Humphrey’s entry into the navy.

By the time dessert was served, Sir James had spoken very little to the officers seated next to him. Feeling a little guilty about this, he turned to Berners who was delicately peeling a banana with a silver fruit knife, and told him how he had first
tasted this particular fruit on the West African coast.

‘Of course in the thirties bananas were very rare. Couldn’t be bought for love or money in England. Hard to believe today.
Fifteen
years and now everybody’s eating them.’ Berners smiled politely while Sir James went on to describe the condition of ship’s biscuit on the same station. ‘Had to break it up on deck and mix in raw fish to tempt the weevils out. When we got fresh turtle from Ascension, we were damned glad of it, I can tell you.’

Sir James could see that Berners was finding it hard not to grin. He did not blame him. To dine sitting next to the second-
in-command
of the fleet and to learn nothing about the conduct of the war or anything at all except the food eaten on the West
African
Station twenty years before, would be distinctly unnerving. He was sure he saw relief on Berners’ face when the cloth was
removed
and glasses charged for the Loyal Toast. The president of the mess rose at the head of the table and brought down his silver mallet.

‘Mr Vice, the Queen,’ that officer said, addressing the
vice-president
at the opposite end of the table.

‘Gentlemen, the Queen,’ came the reply and then everybody, still seated, raised glasses to a general murmur of: ‘The Queen, God bless her.’

Ten minutes later, Sir James was on the poop staring through his glass at the dark silhouettes of three two-deckers and a
steam-tug
a mile further inshore. At four bells he was joined by his
flag-captain
, Captain Broughton, his signals officer and the officer of the watch. By now numerous glasses and telescopes on the three blacked-out vessels would be directed towards
Retribution
’s main-top for the appearance of the signal by lanterns: ‘Weigh and proceed.’ Sir James moved away to the port rail to be on his own. Two weeks before, the combined British and French
squadrons
had attacked Sebastopol’s sea defences by day and had inflicted little damage at a cost of over a hundred dead and three line-of-battle ships towed out of action on fire. Sir James had been certain that failure had been because his own
commander-in
-chief, Dundas, and the French Admirals Bruat and Hamelin had been too cautious to engage at decisive ranges. Since the
outnumbered
Russian fleet was most unlikely to leave harbour, the navy’s only remaining role was to destroy the sea forts. Sir James’s fervent hope was that these small-scale night attacks would prove to the other admirals what damage could be done to stone fortifications at ranges of less than half-a-mile. If they failed, he knew that there would be no more general bombardments
by day and the Russians would be left free to move guns from their sea defences to strengthen their land batteries facing the allied armies.

As anxious minutes passed and the time for the signal
approached
, Sir James grew increasingly apprehensive and often had to remind himself that actions like the one about to begin might be critical in shortening the war. If Charles and Humphrey were to die, they would not do so for an insignificant reason.

Gazing out across the smooth water towards the dark rugged cliffs of the Crimean coast, Sir James thought of a very different shore: the quiet water’s edge at a small resort on the Bosphorus – Therapia with its fountains and secluded gardens, its olive groves and vineyards, crowned by the dome and twin minarets of a tiny hillside mosque among cypresses and white flowering strawberry trees. There, before joining the fleet, he had spent several weeks with Helen: a time uninterrupted by anxiety and confusion. Warm hazy days: Helen, in a blue silk dress and broad-brimmed straw hat, sitting on cushions in the stern of a gilded caïque, trailing a hand in the water; Helen, bareheaded in the sun, sketching under the ivy-covered walls of the ruined
Genoese
castle near Buyukdere; at the Embassy at Pera, charming Lady Stratford and even making Lord Stratford laugh: a feat Sir James himself had never achieved.

Sir James shivered and pulled his coat round him. If any harm came to Humphrey, what would she say? What would she do? Fear hit him with a sudden wave of nausea; a feeling of
helplessness
worse than anything he had ever felt on his own account – far worse even than the chill anxiety he had suffered over the boy’s safety when there had been a bad outbreak of cholera in the fleet a month before. At times on the Bosphorus he had been troubled by Helen’s occasional depressions and her air of
remoteness
at such times. Dear God if anything happened to Humphrey … would she ever recover from it? Still five minutes till the signal, and
Scylla
would not reach her firing position for a further twenty after that. He moved away from the rail and called over the officer of the watch.

‘Any activity ashore, Mr Gaussen? Nothing reported by the look-outs?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Very good, Mr Gaussen.’

Any sign of movement in the enemy batteries and Sir James knew he would be justified in calling off the action. He felt horribly
disappointed. He imagined Charles waiting on his
quarter
-deck surrounded by his ship’s officers and envied him. How much easier to go into action, than to stand and watch others do so, in the full knowledge that, if they met with disaster, he, as their admiral, would feel himself personally responsible.

*

Half-an-hour before the signal from the flagship was expected, the drum had summoned
Scylla
’s crew to quarters with the
additional
roll to clear for action. The major preparations had been made several hours before: internal bulkheads taken down, splinter netting set up, royal yards and top-gallant masts struck, and the lower yards slung securely in chains, to prevent them crashing down should chain-shot severely damage the standing rigging. Now only the finishing touches were needed, but these would be enough to occupy the men for at least a part of the remaining period of suspense.

While the hands were running up or down the deck-ladders to their respective stations, Humphrey and Colwell, a junior mate, followed the third Lieutenant, Mr Bowen, on his inspection of the airless orlop deck and ‘cable tiers’, below the waterline, checking that all was thoroughly cleared and adequately lit with battle lanterns; that the amputation tables were in place in the cockpit, and platforms and cots placed to receive the wounded. The surgeon and his assistant were getting out their instruments, watched by the loblolly boys – young seamen deputed to heave the maimed and screaming men onto the tables and hold them there until the chloroform took effect. Humphrey swallowed hard as his stomach churned.
Scylla
had not taken part in the general bombardment and the coming engagement would be his first experience of being under fire. Earlier in the day the mates and other midshipmen had placed jocular bets in the gunroom about who would be killed and he had been laughed at for not participating. His connection with the Captain had not made him popular, since, though Charles was respected, he was not much liked by the junior officers, having outlawed traditional gunroom punishments like
cobbing
– beating cadets and
midshipmen
with the flat of a scabbard – and reducing to seven
shillings
a week the amount members of the gunroom mess might spend on wines and spirits. There was however, as all admitted, a certain humour in Captain Crawford’s punishments; any
midshipman
seen with his hands in his pockets would instantly be sent to the tailor to have them sewn up; a man caught spitting
would have to do his work for that week with a spittoon tied round his neck. Humphrey’s pockets had already suffered, and it was generally conceded that Crawford showed his step-brother no favours of any sort, rarely inviting him to dine with him and never excusing him any duty. Humphrey had understood this public impartiality but was wounded that Charles had never spoken to him privately since they had sailed; and this, in spite of the fact that Sir James had often asked him to breakfast with him alone in his quarters. Humphrey’s unhappiness about Charles’s coldness was made worse by his admiration for him and his certainty that he was one of the most capable captains in the fleet.

Passing on from the cockpit, the low deck-beams and
supporting
pillars throbbed and vibrated more intensely with the slow pulse of the ship’s iron heart: her massive steam engines. Level with the boiler-room the heat from the fires made the
all-pervading
smell of oil and bilge-water seem thicker and more nauseating than ever. The fires had been alight for several hours, damped down so that steam could be raised at
command
. Bowen led the way up the fore-companion to the main gun-deck where final preparations were going ahead with a minimum of noise and without the usual trill of the boatswain’s mate’s whistle.

Large tubs of water were being filled from the pumps in case of fire, and Humphrey noticed that the deck had already been wetted and sanded to prevent men slipping in pools of blood. Dripping fire screens had been hung round the magazine hatchways and the armourer was going round making a final inspection of gun-locks. Powdermen were hard at work
bringing
up boxes of friction tubes and cartridges. The racks at the hatchways contained enough shot for ten rounds more than the expected four broadsides. All along the two-hundred-foot deck the gun crews were loading the gleaming ebony 32-pounders to the orders of their No. 1s; the elevation for six hundred yards being fixed with ‘marked coin’ or graduated wedges, inserted under the breech. Cartridges were placed in muzzles and forced home with two smart blows of the rammer; then shot and wads were rammed down firmly on top, and the cartridge pricked to check that it was properly bedded at the bottom of the bore.
Between
the guns were small stacks of shell boxes with their looped rope handles. The first two broadsides would be with shot, the second two with shell.