‘Duncan Weekes lies next to his son. Sickness and poverty have taken him.’ As Rachel spoke, guilty tears crowded her vision.
‘And for him you do mourn. Poor creature,’ Jonathan murmured.
‘He was a good man, beneath his weaknesses and sins. A poor creature indeed.’
‘Then,’ said Jonathan, pausing to think, ‘then there is nothing to be done. I will see my mother no more. That will have to be punishment enough for her.’
‘She waits outside. She haunts your door like a sentry.’
‘I will not see her.’
‘What she did… what she did, she did to protect you.’
‘And to protect herself. To hide her sins. You cannot ask me to forgive her.’
‘I ask nothing. I only say… I only say that to have family is a blessing, and one not to be sloughed off without due thought.’
‘A mixed blessing at best, Mrs Weekes. And this day mine feels more like a curse. You have a deeply forgiving nature, Mrs Weekes, this I have come to learn. But you should not forgive indiscriminately. People must pay for their crimes.’
‘Indeed.’ Rachel studied him for a moment. ‘You have paid for yours, Mr Alleyn. I have met Cassandra Sutton.’
Jonathan shut his eyes for a moment, and looked ill.
‘Starling… Starling said as much,’ he said. ‘But you cannot forgive me. You do not know what I did.’
‘I know the outcome! A live, healthy child-’
‘The child of a murdered woman! A child robbed of her mother.’
‘Cassandra Sutton has a mother, and a father. No – you must listen. She has a mother and father who love her very much. She is bright, and sweet, well cared for. She has been robbed of nothing. Her current happiness is all your doing, and you should be proud.’
‘Proud?’ Jonathan laughed then, a taut and empty sound. ‘There is nothing from that time, from that war, of which I can be proud.’
‘I know how you came to rescue Cassandra. Captain Sutton said-’
‘Captain Sutton does not know. Captain Sutton was not there, in that church. What occurred was between the child’s mother, and me. And you cannot forgive me, because you cannot know.’
‘Then… tell me, Mr Alleyn. Tell me.’ Jonathan stared at her, and for a while she thought he would not speak. He must. This is the only way. She suddenly knew that this was the final step in a long and wearing climb; that by taking this last step, the path would go easier from there on. Let it be so. She sat down in the chair at his bedside and leaned forward, reaching for his hand. ‘You must tell me about Badajoz,’ she said.
‘Badajoz.’ The air left Jonathan’s chest, streaming out like surrender. He shut his eyes again, and then he spoke.
He spoke of the three years of war after his return from Bathampton, leaden-hearted because Alice had gone. Three years in which he lived by rote, and fought with silent, grim distraction. After the flight from Corunna the French had flooded back in to retake Portugal, but in April 1809 Sir Arthur Wellesley returned to Lisbon to take command, and the French were driven back towards the Spanish border once more. Jonathan and his fellow officers struggled to keep order in the ranks; the men were restless, and disobedient. After battle they turned thuggish and cruel. Jonathan noticed the empty look in their eyes and knew he had it too; the selfsame brutishness. Wellesley called the men scum, and rabble. He hanged them for plundering, but it did no good. Jonathan was popular with the rank and file of his company; he understood their anger and their fear, the way they were losing themselves. He did not reprimand them for acting like animals, when the war required them to be animals.
And yet the heart of him looked on, and recoiled in horror from the bloodshed and the pain and the wanton destruction. At Talavera, after they’d pursued the French through a burnt and ruined landscape into Spain, he was with the light dragoons as they charged headlong into a hidden ditch. He was catapulted from his horse as it fell, and heard the crunch as the beast’s two forelegs snapped. He had not named the animal – he hadn’t named any of his horses since Suleiman – but still its screams cut through his battle fog like knives. He didn’t blink as he put his pistol to the horse’s head and pulled the trigger. The British and Portuguese were outnumbered by almost two to one at Talavera, but they won what would be proclaimed as a glorious victory on the sides of mail coaches at home. The battlefield was almost four miles long, and two miles deep. Towards the end of it a grass fire started, racing across the parched ground and burning many of the wounded alive. Scores of those that did not burn died of thirst instead, under the merciless Spanish sun. Jonathan searched through fields of crack-mouthed, black-tongued corpses to find Captain Sutton, who’d been knocked insensible by a clod of earth thrown up by artillery fire. Jonathan took him into the shade of a cork tree, and sat with him there until his wits returned. A wounded French rifleman dragged himself over to share the shade; he shared his water and his tobacco tin with Jonathan as well, and made remarks about the heat and the search for food, as they sat with their eyes stinging with the smoke of their burning comrades.
After that great battle, Wellesley was made Lord Wellington. French troops arrived in Spain in ever increasing numbers, but Spanish guerrillas and Portuguese partisans were everywhere, slitting the throats of sentries and harrying smaller troop movements. Back and forth the advantage went; an ebb and flow of men across the Spanish border like the sea around a mid-tide mark. By the end of the year the men were more afraid for their next meal than they were of battle. The looting and pillaging continued, as did the hangings. As the autumn grew old, starvation circled them like carrion crows. Jonathan punched new holes in his belt with the tip of his sabre when it would no longer fasten tight around his shrinking middle. The two warring sides sent out foraging parties to look for food. These men met frequently, and greeted each other courteously, sharing tips and insights into the terrain, into water supplies and edible plants. Jonathan wondered what would happen if they all, on both sides, just declared peace and refused to fight any more. The thought was so bittersweet that Captain Sutton found him crying like a child one day, sitting cross-legged on the muddy ground with autumn rain soaking him.
‘Up, and be doing, Major Alleyn,’ the captain told him kindly. ‘You’re that sodden, the men might think that you weep. It will do them no good to think it.’ He put an arm around Jonathan’s bony ribs and half carried him out of sight of the men, who were carousing – dancing to a fiddle and pipe with a kind of desperate levity. It was the tenth of October, 1810; King George III’s birthday in the fiftieth year of his reign. They’d butchered a donkey that the retreating French had hamstrung and left to die. Jonathan ate the roasted meat alone in his tent, and thought of Alice, and of Suleiman.
At the battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, in spring the following year, a truce had to be called at the end of the day so that both sides could clear the bodies from the ruined village. There were so many that the narrow streets were near impassable. Jonathan stepped on an outflung hand by mistake, looked down and saw that it was tiny, no bigger than a woman’s or a child’s. The arm it belonged to, and the rest of the body, was buried beneath others, five or six deep, so he never had to see who had owned the hand – the delicate finger bones he’d ground beneath his boot heel.
They moved on to Badajoz, a fortified town in a strategically important location near the Portuguese border. Betrayed by its own governor, Badajoz had fallen into French hands, and been heavily garrisoned. The allies laid siege, digging in as winter approached. There was heavy, relentless rain. Jonathan had seen wounded soldiers burn to death after battle, now he saw them drown in waterlogged mud. The men, hard-bitten and proven, grew idle and restless over that winter of 1811. They occupied themselves with scorpion baiting, cock fighting and horse racing; with picking the fleas out of their clothes and bedding and hair; with whoring and wrestling and hunting for game; with watching friends sicken and die from festering wounds and outbreaks of a plague-like sickness.