The Street Philosopher Page 3

  Wray glanced at them with lordly boredom and then turned back to Davy. ‘This is the place, Lieutenant,’ he announced loudly in a high, lisping voice. ‘I am sure of it.’

  The Captain pulled open the manor house’s grand double doors and walked inside, with Davy following close behind. At this, the alarm of the Tartars in the yard became more vocal. Several stepped forward, as if to pursue the officers into the building. Seeing this, the sergeant-major faced the company and gave the order to present arms. The soldiers’ abrupt movements, and the synchronised raising of their long-barrelled rifles, successfully checked the stall-holders’ bravery–for the moment, at least.

  Styles was growing nervous. The atmosphere in the yard had become charged with violence; it was like being in a tavern seconds before a brawl. He looked quickly at Kitson, hoping for guidance. The correspondent, entirely calm, was moving the sloshing wineskin from one shoulder to the other so that he could take out his pocketbook. Styles suddenly perceived that this unkempt, sardonic fellow, for all his loaded pronouncements and enigmatic expressions, was the same Thomas Kitson whose laudable example had given him such encouragement. I must not quail, the illustrator thought; I must prove myself equal to that which I have taken on. He took a steadying breath and adjusted his hold on his drawing folder, which was growing slippery in his sweating palm.

  Several tense minutes passed. The sergeant-major brought his men back to attention whilst the Tartars grumbled amongst themselves. Affecting a new interest in the produce on the carts, Kitson moved slowly towards the open doors of the house, keeping his distance from the soldiers. Styles was attempting to follow suit when the shutters of one of the upper windows were suddenly thrown open. He caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Davy, looking back triumphantly into the dark room.

  ‘It would seem that they have found what they seek, Mr Styles,’ said Kitson quietly.

  A moment later, deep inside the manor house, there was a loud crash and the sound of boots rushing down a flight of stone stairs. Wray paced quickly through the double doors and over to his horse. He was holding an object in his arms, something weighty and awkward, half-wrapped in a length of sackcloth.

  Davy emerged directly after him; and behind the Lieutenant, attached to him in fact, came an elderly Tartar, who was gripping on to the gold braid on Davy’s shoulder and shouting angrily. This sight drew some disrespectful sniggers from the company of soldiers, which provoked the Lieutenant to turn furiously on his aged assailant and give him a hard shove. The Tartar reeled, losing his hold on the officer’s uniform, and fell heavily against the stone water trough. Davy then unbuckled his sword and, leaving the blade in the scabbard, he stood over the old peasant and began to beat him with it. The sword cracked against the Tartar’s skull and thumped across his back. Davy’s blemished face contorted with the effort. He showed no intention of stopping, even as the man at his feet began to bleed.

  An impulse to intervene came upon Styles with unexpected force. All but running across the yard, he tried to grasp Davy’s arm and restrain his next blow. Without even pausing to see who he was, the Lieutenant struck him full in the face with a balled fist. Styles staggered back and fell onto the cobblestones. The soldiers exploded into laughter.

  ‘Eyes front!’ yelled the sergeant-major, his face turning as crimson as his coatee. ‘Eyes front, damn you!’

  Dazed and acutely embarrassed, Styles propped himself up on an elbow and tenderly touched his face. His mouth was hot, the lip split open; he could taste blood on his teeth, and feel its warmth smeared across his chin. He looked around for his bag and drawing folder. Both were on the ground not far from where he lay. Then he saw Kitson, standing in the middle of the yard, addressing Captain Wray–who was by now mounted on his horse, ready to depart.

  ‘Good afternoon, Captain Wray,’ called the correspondent cheerfully. ‘A fine day, is it not?’

  ‘Well, if it isn’t the blasted bog-trotter’s lackey,’ drawled Wray, regarding Kitson coldly from up on his saddle. ‘What the devil are you doing out here?’

  Kitson smiled. ‘I might ask you the same question, Captain. I don’t recall hearing that the Light Division had been assigned any duties away from the camp. Could you enlighten me on this point? For the readership of the London Courier?’ He was holding his pocketbook ready, his pencil poised, as if in the very act of reporting.

  ‘None of your business, and none of your bloody readers’ business either!’ came Wray’s curt retort. He looked to his Lieutenant, who was still panting with exertion as he refastened his sword to his belt. ‘Get to your horse, Davy, we must be off.’

  Kitson, however, would not release him so easily. ‘And what is that you have there, Captain?’ he inquired. ‘Forgive me, but it looks rather interesting–valuable, even. Can I ask why you have removed it from this fine house?’

  Styles peered again at the object Wray now had balanced before him on his saddle. Some of the sackcloth had slipped away, revealing that it was a statuette of some kind, cast in terracotta, about a foot high. Wray and Davy had stolen it from the farmhouse; the elderly Tartar, its custodian, had been trying to stop them. The soldiers were looting.

  Wray stared at the horizon, refusing to answer. His horse paced impatiently beneath him, tossing its head.

  ‘Only,’ Kitson continued with fearless breeziness, ‘the readership of the Courier–for whom you evidently hold such an immense regard–would be quite fascinated to hear of any antiquities discovered in the Crimea by Her Majesty’s Army–of how they were saved for posterity by the forces of enlightenment, so selflessly snatching them from the darkness of barbarism.’

  A grin crept across Styles’ bloody face.

  Wray sighed irritably, seeing that he had been out-manoeuvred. ‘Oh, very well, you damned grubber. Here is your blasted antiquity.’

  The Captain unwrapped the statuette fully and held it out at arm’s length. It was of Saint Catherine, rendered in the flamboyant style of the Italian Baroque. The saint was posed dramatically atop her broken cartwheel, her russet limbs arranged as if she was about to launch herself heavenward. Even from the ground, Styles could see that it was a piece of some quality.

  And then Wray let it drop.

  The brittle sound of the Saint Catherine shattering on the cobbles echoed around the yard. It was followed by a string of hoarse exclamations from the elderly Tartar, who was trying unsuccessfully to rise from the ground; whether these strained noises were curses or lamentations Styles could not tell. With a self-satisfied smirk, Wray wheeled his horse around and commanded that the company be taken back out to the road. The sergeant-major snarled an order, turning the soldiers smartly towards the gate.

  Kitson put his pocketbook under his arm and clapped a round of slow, derisive applause. ‘Oh bravo, Captain Wray, bravo!’ he shouted. ‘Oh, well done, sir! You have surely triumphed! You bested me there, and no mistake!’

  Wray did not even look around. Moving ahead of the company, he spurred his horse and was gone. Davy leant over to spit at the correspondent’s feet, hissing a few vicious obscenities before riding after his Captain.

  As soon as the soldiers had left, the Tartars rushed to help the old man, sitting him on the side of the trough and mopping at a long cut on his brow. A stout woman, her hair bound under a black headscarf, rushed from the farmhouse and threw her arms around his neck, sobbing loudly. Davy’s victim would not be comforted, though; shaking off the woman and rising to his feet, he hobbled over to the remains of the Saint Catherine. Seeing that there was no hope of repair, he gave the shards a despairing kick, scattering them across the yard.

  ‘You see now what I was referring to earlier, Mr Styles.’ Kitson was standing over him, writing materials stuffed in one pocket, chicken legs poking out of the other. His precise state of mind, once again, was hard to divine; but he did not seem unamused by their encounter with the officers of the 99th. ‘Items like that statuette should rightfully be protected, stored well away from rapacious brutes like our C
aptain Wray.’ He offered the illustrator his hand and pulled him upright. ‘How is your lip?’

  ‘Sore enough. But I shall live.’ Styles regarded his comrade with intense admiration. ‘You–you did a fine thing there, Mr Kitson. You bore witness, sir–you stood in the path of wrongdoing.’

  Kitson shook his head. ‘You exaggerate, Mr Styles. I failed. The statuette was smashed, and these unfortunate people most foully abused.’ He turned towards the elderly Tartar, who was now clutching at his ribs and grimacing in pain. Immediately the weeping woman was beside him, embracing him protectively, her expression indicating that she viewed the Courier men as entirely complicit in Wray and Davy’s depredations.

  ‘But you at least gave them pause, sir,’ Styles insisted, ‘whereas I plunged in like a hot-headed booby and caused only laughter.’ A little ashamed, he wiped his bloody chin on his sleeve. ‘We will be reporting this incident, though, won’t we? Telling Mr Cracknell, at least?’

  Kitson smiled ruefully. ‘Mr Styles, your enthusiasm is refreshing indeed to a jaded soul such as myself. Questions do occur to me, I must admit. Who, for example, directed them to this house? They were certainly acting under another’s instructions.’

  ‘And what do you think, Mr Kitson?’

  To Styles’ dismay, Kitson simply shrugged. ‘What does it matter? No one cares, Mr Styles, as Mr Cracknell would be the first to tell you. There is nothing we can do. Far more is at stake out here than art, my friend. Between here and Sebastopol, the Russian Army is preparing to repel our forces with all their might. I think our generals can be forgiven for being rather more interested in that, don’t you?’

  Styles could hardly disagree. Feeling bruised and thoroughly defeated, he picked up his bag and folder, nodding dumbly when Kitson proposed that they head back to camp. As they walked from the yard, he noticed that his black velvet jacket was covered in pale dust. Its left elbow, also, had been scuffed bald against the cobbles.

  Kitson cast a sideways glance at the illustrator and brushed at his shoulder. ‘Ha! What a mess! We shall make a war correspondent of you yet, Mr Styles!’

  3

  The night sentries maintained that the mist out by the northern barricades was so dense that it was as if Almighty God had reached down from Heaven and rubbed out a bit of creation with His divine thumb. It was cold out there too, and quiet; a deathly graveyard hush after the ceaseless bustle of the camp. This was where the Russians would come from, it was reasoned, if they were to come at all. Every man who stood watch there half expected to see the enemy at any moment, arrayed in their thousands, marching towards him from out of that eerie grey void. Like some red-coated vision of the damned, they coughed, cursed, and scratched miserably at persistent rashes acquired in the whorehouses of Constantinople, staring always at the thirty yards of open ground between them and the edges of the mist.

  Yet on the third night, when someone did appear, for several long seconds they froze up altogether. This man was running fast, his cheeks flushed and his black hair awry, a cap of some kind clutched in his hand. Greatcoat flapping around his knees, he didn’t stop or slow down, or even look in their direction. He kept on going, swerving slightly to run roughly parallel to their line, his arms pumping back and forth, his boots pounding through the wet grass. This had to be a Russian spy, of which the sentries had been promised there was a whole devious legion, making a break for his own territory.

  The soldiers’ firing, when it began, was erratic at best. The spy was a difficult mark, moving quickly, and they hadn’t been ready for him. Every bullet went wide; some swore, as they lowered their miniés, that they could see a grin spreading across the villain’s face. Then a burly corporal pulled himself up to his full height and swung his rifle’s stock expertly against his shoulder. The end of the barrel fixed on the running man and followed him along for a few yards; then the shot rang out, the man stumbled, and was down. There was a cheer, and laughter, and several hearty slaps to the corporal’s broad back. The first kill of the campaign!

  The laughter faded abruptly as the man got up, his feet slipping in the dew, and set off again, at much the same pace as before. Some started to reload hurriedly, tearing at the paper cartridge packs with their teeth. Others started clambering over the barricades, attaching their bayonets, intending to give chase. It was suddenly clear that the spy was heading for a large thicket of wiry bushes a short way to the east. The soldiers shouted to each other, trying to head him off; but he was too fast.

  ‘Come on, you idle dogs!’ he cried as he went. ‘That the best you can do?’ And then he dived into the bushes, and was gone.

  ‘Raise the alarm!’ ordered an excited major, freshly arrived on the scene. ‘Full alert! At once! Back to the pickets!’

  The soldiers obeyed, and the alarm was raised; but those who had heard the escaping man’s taunt knew that if this really was an enemy spy they pursued, it was one with a distinctly Irish-sounding accent.

  After crashing through the undergrowth to the open ground on its other side, Cracknell turned to check that he wasn’t being pursued. Past the bushes, all that he saw was the billowing greyness of a thick sea fog, blowing in from the bay. The bastards are quick enough to fire from the safety of their barricades, he thought with a triumphant sneer; but giving chase, well, that is another matter entirely.

  Panting from the effort of his dash for safety, Cracknell pushed his cap back on his head, and mopped his brow with a stained twist of handkerchief. Somewhere inside him, he knew that it had been mad folly to try to creep back into camp from the north. But he felt not even the faintest tremor of guilt for the tumult he had caused. The sensation of the bullets slicing through the air so close to him, tugging at his clothes even, had been monstrously exhilarating. And now, off in the distance, the bugles were sounding a piercing reveille across the shadowy fields. Torches were being lit, and a multitude of soldiers were stumbling from the lines of white, conical tents, buttoning up jackets and readying rifles with anxious haste. That it was all in his honour made Cracknell’s chest swell with a perverse pride. He drew a battered silver hip-flask from his coat pocket, raising it towards the agitated camp before taking a long swig. Then he carried on his way at a considerably reduced pace, one hand pressed against a stabbing stitch in his side.

  The Courier tent was pitched at the very edge of the camp, close to a shallow, brackish pond. As he approached it, Cracknell dropped to his haunches, keeping to the shadows. Kitson stood in the light of an oil lamp, the triangles of his shoulder-blades clearly visible through his frock-coat. His junior was talking about the alarm–about how there’d been one the night before that had amounted to nothing, and how such scares were to be expected, given the situation. Cracknell took another gulp from his flask, chuckling softly. Our Mr Kitson’s becoming quite the weathered field operative, he thought. What change can be wrought by expert guidance and a few months’ privation!

  He turned his attention to the focus of Kitson’s little lecture–the illustrator. The boy was nodding along, plainly determined to put a brave face on the possibility of an enemy attack. And yes, Cracknell admitted grudgingly, he was handsome, as Maddy had said, in a bland sort of way; but Christ, so callow! Was O’Farrell deliberately trying to make his life as hard as possible? First an art correspondent, of all bloody things, now a youth so fresh-faced he looked as if he’d just been released from double Latin!

  A large wineskin was passed between them. Cracknell stayed still for a moment or two, listening. Their conversation suggested that a rapport of sorts had been established. So much the better, reflected their senior. It will ease my burden if they’re watching out for one another. Just as long as they don’t forget who’s in charge.

  Then the illustrator happened to glance up–straight into Cracknell’s eyes. He began stammering and pointing. Before Kitson could look around, Cracknell propelled himself forward, charging into the lamplight towards his reporting partner. He was the heavier man by some distance. They collided, tumbli
ng together into the dirt.

  Kitson fought to disentangle himself. The illustrator stood to one side, fists clenched, petrified by uncertainty and incomprehension. Cracknell, now lying on his back, shook with laughter.

  ‘Mr Cracknell!’ Kitson exclaimed breathlessly as he climbed to his feet. ‘What in God’s name—’

  Cracknell lit a cigar, holding a match to its tip and sucking with relish. ‘Just testing your reflexes, Thomas!’ His accent, usually mild, had been thickened by drink. ‘Have to keep you on your toes, my lad! How will you face the Bear if you can’t manage the more good-natured assaults of your leader? Eh?’ He chortled throatily around his cigar, puffing out small jets of smoke.

  Kitson, rubbing at a twisted elbow, did not look convinced. ‘I suppose, then, that I am expected to thank you for the service?’

  With a final loud laugh, the senior correspondent hauled himself up, removed his cigar and took another healthy swallow from his flask. As he smacked his tingling lips, he realised that the young illustrator was staring at him in a manner he did not wholly appreciate. Cracknell smoothed down his wild black beard and made a brusque introduction. Then he noticed a small, dark discolouration at the side of the boy’s mouth.

  ‘Is that a bruise I see there, sir?’ he asked with gruff, slightly menacing good humour.

  The illustrator glanced at Kitson. ‘It is, Mr Cracknell. A lieutenant saw fit to strike out at me after–’

  ‘A lieutenant?’ Cracknell grinned. ‘You work damned fast, my friend! Why, it took me weeks to be struck in the face by an officer, yet you have achieved it in a matter of hours! A fellow after our own hearts, eh, Thomas?’

  Kitson nodded in dry agreement.

  ‘To be perfectly frank with you, though,’ Cracknell went on, inserting the cigar back between his teeth, ‘I don’t quite see the point of your presence here, myself. The Courier’s foreign correspondence is about words, mine and Kitson’s–the combined efforts of Britannia’s two greatest descriptive minds. We are not the Illustrated London News. We do not, in my view at least, need anything as crude as images to convey our experiences.’ He tapped off an inch of ash. ‘But I have been overruled by my editor. Here you are, Smiles, here you bloody well are, and we shall make the best of it, by God!’