‘It is not the knowledge I must bear, but the deeds,’ he said. ‘I have never spoken of them.’
‘Try it, sir. Only try it, and then let us see,’ she said.
‘I don’t know where to start.’ Rachel thought quickly; to ask him outright about Alice would get her nowhere.
‘Tell me how your leg was injured. Tell me of that battle,’ she suggested.
‘Battle? No, indeed. It was at B… Badajoz.’
His voice failed him, as if the word were too much; it was spoken in a hoarse whisper, raw and fearful. ‘It was no battle. It was a hell on earth, a heinous orgy of destruction and grief… No.’ He shook his head vehemently. ‘I cannot start there, for that is the end, not the beginning.’
‘Tell me of the beginning of the war, then. I was still young, at that time. My father didn’t encourage me to hear much about it, but I saw news of our victories on the side of the mail coach. They would decorate it with ribbons, too.’
‘You were still young? As was I, Mrs Weekes, as was I. I was that concerned with assembling my baggage, and with turning out my horse just so, that I’d given almost no thought to fighting. To why we were going; to what a war would be. I had not known what it would be. Jars of coral tooth powder and pomade, with silver lids – that’s what I spent my last few days trying to find. Isn’t that a perfect folly? That’s what I thought I needed. A jar of hair pomade with a silver lid.’ He shook his head incredulously.
‘You were a cavalry officer, then?’
‘Yes. Moths – that was the first thing. Do you believe in signs, Mrs Weekes? Portents, I mean?’ he said intently, leaning towards her with a gleam of desperation in his eyes, as if he could somehow change any of what had passed.
‘I…’ She had been about to deny it. ‘I should not; yet I see them, sometimes.’ The morning of my wedding, when that thrush sang its heart out, keeping its eye on me. Trying to warn me.
‘Enlightened thought calls them the product of a weak and superstitious mind. But perhaps we do not yet understand all there is to know about this world, and this life. I think such signs should be heeded.’ Jonathan nodded gravely. ‘The first sign I saw was the moths. I took a wound – you will laugh to hear how. Some fierce battles were fought, that first summer of 1808. We fought the French in Portugal, before we even crossed into Spain. We landed like conquering heroes and told the Portuguese people their time of oppression was over, even though we’d already lost men and horses in the surf, trying to land the boats… Before we even set foot on the peninsula, we lost men. But still we thought we were invincible. On the very first march, men fell out of line in the heat. I remember looking at the dust cloud above us and thinking we would all be smothered beneath it. The troops were green novices, weakened by the sea crossing. They’d joined up for a wage, or a meal, or for the glory the recruiters told them would be theirs; and I was as green a novice as any of them, for all I was an officer, and mounted upon a fine horse. My first wound… my first wound was a scorpion sting.’
Afterwards, he knew to shake out his boots before putting them on in the morning. The sting felt like a jab from a red-hot needle, in the arch of his left foot; he kicked the boot off and watched, revolted, as the half-crushed creature limped away. It was yellowish-brown, about the length of his thumb. He examined the wound but there wasn’t much to see at first – a small hole leaking clear fluid, around which the immediate area had gone white, the outer area a mottled red. The pain of the initial sting soon faded, to leave a low throbbing only. Jonathan rinsed his foot with cold water, then pulled on his boots and thought no more of it.
A battle was brewing; they were at the village of Vimiero, and the French were coming. His blood rose at the thought – he had yet to be tested in any real way against the enemy; he was excited and afraid; he was keen to know how he would prove himself as an officer. Within two days, however, Jonathan could think of little else but the pain in his foot. Had he been an infantry man, and not mounted on Suleiman, he would not have been able to march. He would have been left behind, his company command replaced. At the end of the second day he slept with his boots on. He was sure that if he ever got his left boot off, he would certainly never get it back on again. His head was pounding, he felt weak and dizzy. The foot with the sting was so hot he worried that it might set fire to his stocking. It felt huge, heavy, and very wrong. He kept the boot on for a second reason too – he didn’t want to look at his foot.
Then came the heat and fury of the battle at Vimiero, and Jonathan learned how he would prove himself in the fray – capable, outwardly calm, while inside his heart shuddered in outrage. When it ended the British were victorious, the French routed and in retreat, though there were heavy losses on both sides. Wellesley and several other senior officers wanted to pursue them, all the way to Lisbon. They were denied this by high command; the French were to be allowed to take their wounded and retreat unmolested. They were even, eventually, to have the use of English ships to leave Portugal, a decision for which the British commanders would be recalled to London to give account. On the strewn and smoking battlefield, French and British soldiers greeted one another as they searched the fallen for men they could save. They shared a few words, a laugh, a pinch of tobacco. Dazed and exhausted, Jonathan watched them with a growing sense of unreality; for if the men did not hate one another, how could they kill one another? Why would they? He was baffled by it; felt apart from the rest of them for being unable to understand. That was his first real taste of battle, and it left him numb, bewildered, and frightened.
When he dismounted from Suleiman at day’s end, Jonathan couldn’t even set his left foot down. Captain Sutton, his company second in command, noticed the way he grimaced and hovered the leg. He forced Major Alleyn to sit down on the crumbled remains of a village house, and when pulling at the boot caused him to scream in agony, Sutton cut it from his leg instead, using a short, sharp utility knife. The stink that emerged with the bloated foot caused them both to blench. Captain Sutton helped him to the field hospital, gave him brandy and then left to return to the men.
The surgeons worked in open-sided tents under big, yellow lamps. They worked right through the hot night, engaged in what was often a futile battle to save the gravely wounded men. Since his foot was not life-threatening, Jonathan sat to one side and waited his turn, watching in mounting horror. The surgeons sawed and they stitched; they dipped their hands inside men to pick out shrapnel; they fished for musket balls with long forceps; they plastered over belly wounds, no matter what damage had been done inside the man. When they ran out of plaster, they packed wounds with cotton rags and the shirts of dead men, and when they ran out of those they did not pack them at all, but left them open to the night sky and waited for the men to die. Which they did, crying piteously for God or their mothers until their voices left them. The night clamoured with the sounds of their agony. Jonathan sat, and he watched, and he waited. It took around twenty minutes to amputate a leg through the hip joint, he learned. Only a stick of wood kept that man from biting through his own tongue. There was nothing to relieve pain but watered-down rum, which the men vomited back up in their shock. The smell of blood and rum and bile was everywhere, impossible to escape – to breathe was to breathe it in. Sweat ran from the surgeons’ heads into the wounds they were trying to close.
It was near sunrise before Jonathan was seen to. He climbed onto a table upon which, moments before, he’d seen a man pass his last moments with blood and piss leaking from his shattered body. He felt the man’s fluids seeping through his own shirt and breeches. The surgeon took one look at his bloated foot and then glared at Jonathan with disgust dawning through the wooden exhaustion on his face. He looked disgusted that Jonathan should trouble him with so trivial a wound, and Jonathan was disgusted with himself as well. He was disgusted with the war, and the ways of men, and the whole world. He stared up as the surgeon cut away his stained stocking. Underneath, his foot was darkly purple, huge and stinking; a crusted layer of pus had dribbled from the scorpion sting and dried on his feverish skin. It smelled like foul meat and corruption. Calmly, the surgeon took up his bloody scalpel and sliced open the skin around the sting, so that all the poison and filth inside could run out. A splatter of rank and rotting blood, to join the unspeakable mess on the floor. Jonathan was too exhausted, too shocked at the pain to make a sound. He gazed up at the lamps, and that’s when he noticed the moths. Huge black moths, the biggest he’d ever seen – the size of the palm of his hand. They circled the lamps, drawn to the light, on wings as black as pitch and so velvet soft that they made no sound at all. In his near delirium, Jonathan saw them as the souls of the men who had died that night, trying to find a way back into the light, into life. He took them as a sign, a stark warning, that they were all dead men.