There were more shouts and then the shrill of a whistle. The time had run out.
Blackwood yelled, ‘
Charge!
’
Then he was running with all his might, seeing nothing but the hill, while he swerved in and out of broken rocks and the remains of some abandoned gun-pits.
Flashes darted through the snow and lit up the nearest faces and pounding feet. Faster, faster.
More shots swept through and past them, and Blackwood heard someone scream and fall.
The firing was increasing from the hill-side and more marines were vanishing in the snow, their cries lost in the din of enemy muskets.
Suddenly there was one great explosion which painted the hill-side livid red, and as Blackwood’s eyes throbbed to the
sudden glare there was another, even higher, near the redoubt, it had to be.
To the breathless marines it was like a signal, a chance of survival when moments before they had expected to die.
Blackwood slipped and almost fell as he bounded over a fallen tree, heard M’Crystal’s powerful voice controlling the charge, containing and driving his men like a shepherd with his sheep.
‘
Erin go bragh!
’
The cry was wild like the moment as the Liverpool-Irish marines, the curse of the colour-sergeant’s life, charged up the slope, the rest yelling meaningless words as the first group of Russian defenders broke from cover and tried to run for the redoubt. The snow swirled and danced as the figures rushed on, bayonets lunged and clashed, and as some of the Russians paused to fire several of the marines dropped dead or rolled away holding their wounds.
Blackwood saw a soldier running straight towards him, and knocked his musket aside with his sword. More were appearing from a hole in the ground, and he emptied the revolver into the tight group so that they fell back again and blocked the escape of the others.
A marine fell on to his face, and as Blackwood ran past he saw another hesitate and try to grope his way back through the wave of levelled bayonets.
Blackwood yelled, ‘Advance, damn you!’ He seized the marine by the belt and swung him round. ‘Get on!’
He realized it was one of the Rocke twins.
The marine shouted frantically, ‘It’s me brother, sir! He’s down!’
Blackwood forgot him as more shots hammered from the hill-top and the balls whined through the attackers.
A fire had broken out in the redoubt, probably caused by the last grenades. There had been just two explosions.
Blackwood saw a man crawling along the ground towards a discarded musket and slashed him across the shoulder before hurling himself up the last part of the slope. He clawed at
buried timber and sandbags and saw Lieutenant Frere, who had managed to reach the enemy rampart before him, wheel round and fall from sight as a musket exploded almost in his face.
It was a scene from hell. Some kind of magazine or store was well ablaze, and against the leaping flames he suddenly saw Harry. The snow was swirling around him, the flakes like droplets of blood in the glow, so that he appeared to be floating.
Beyond him, shining dully through the smoke and snow, was one of the big Russian guns. Harry swung his net slowly round his head and threw it, then as he turned to run he saw Blackwood and waved.
The explosion was deafening, and while the marines flung themselves down and gasped for air in a wave of intense heat, Blackwood heard the nearest gun crash over on to its side.
He got to his feet and groped for his sword.
‘
Open fire!
’
The marines dropped to their knees or remained standing while they fired for the first time since they had left their own lines.
Everything was made more confused by the din of exploding ammunition and the crack of rifles. Faces, wild with the fury of battle, loomed through the snow as the first daylight pushed the shadows aside.
Blackwood waved his sword.
‘
Again!
’
His cry seemed to hang in the air like something quite apart from him. He saw his sword clattering across the overturned cannon, felt the jarring pain of his body hitting the ground. Voices were muffled as if calling through a blanket, and he tried to get to his feet, to rally them, but his mind rebelled and he fell down again.
Then came the agony, and when he put his hand to his side he felt the wetness and something jagged in his fingers. Someone was crying in terrible pain and he wondered vaguely if it was his own voice he heard.
He saw Harry, his face only inches away as he leaned over him. There was snow on his ruffled hair and he needed to reassure him. He had seen tears on Harry’s cheeks, cutting through the grime of that last terrible explosion. But when he tried to raise his arm the pain smashed into him, like a white-hot axe driving into his body.
Beyond Harry there was cheering,
that
he could recognize. A bugle too.
Then just as suddenly there was nothing at all.
Philip Blackwood opened his eyes and kept them fixed on a point above his head. He had expected to see Harry, to tell him everything was all right, and the realization that there was nobody to see and total silence around him made him go stiff with terror.
I am dead.
When he tried to move he could feel nothing, and even the air around him seemed misty and warm, when it should have been touched with ice.
He saw a light spreading towards him, watched it fascinated as it played across the pattern of planks above him.
A face looked down and gave a slow nod. The man wore a white coat and there were little red dots on it. Blood.
The realization came through his drugged mind like a bullet.
‘Where am I?’ How strange he sounded.
The face said, ‘Base hospital.’ He nodded again. ‘Welcome back to the living, Captain.’
He turned away and another face appeared to swim towards him. It was surrounded by a white robe of some kind. He struggled. If he lost her now she would vanish completely.
She rested her hand on his shoulder, her fingers cool against his burning body.
She said, ‘I’m here, Philip. I’ll never lose you again.’
Blackwood allowed the darkness to close over him once more. Nothing else mattered. They were together.
PHILIP BLACKWOOD SAT
in an old wicker chair, his legs propped on a stool, and stared across the well-tended grass towards the gates of Hawks Hill. It was late afternoon, and he had been sitting here on the familiar stone-flagged terrace as if he was afraid to miss something. How quiet it was, the house and grounds could be empty. Only the far-off chorus of rooks and the sound of cattle in the nearby farm broke the stillness.
Here and there the trees were already tinged with red and gold. It was the start of autumn. It did not seem possible.
He twisted round in the chair and looked up at the house. It was still hard to accept that his father was dead. He should be at that window, waiting by his table to hear the latest news of the Royal Marines wherever they were in action.
As he moved in the chair he felt the tight pain in his side. They said it might never go. It was hardly surprising, he thought bitterly. The Russian shell splinter had destroyed one rib and had left a hole big enough to contain a man’s fist.
His father had died even as the ship full of Crimean wounded had dropped anchor in the Downs. In his sleep, his stepmother had told him. As he would have wished. She had kissed him lightly, her lips as cold as he had remembered them. Then she had left Hawks Hill for Paris to join her daughter. She had taken a last look around the house and had spoken with the servants. She showed no emotion or sense of loss. It almost seemed as if she had felt a prisoner here.
She had said gravely, ‘It’s yours now, Philip. It was what the colonel wanted.’ She had brushed aside his protests. ‘You
will be well cared for. Make your own life as you want it.’ Then she had gone.
Blackwood saw old Oates wandering through the copse towards his cottage. Completely lost. A survivor without any goal in sight. They should have died together. The old campaigners.
Blackwood felt a prick behind his eyes. Poor Oates, he had probably known his father better than any of them.
He recalled the moment after his stepmother had left the house. Oates had waited for Doctor Sturges and a military surgeon to complete their examination of his wound and had then carried the colonel’s sword into the room. He must have been guarding it. Saving it for the first Blackwood to return home.
That had been three months ago. After all the surgical treatment and pain, the uncertainty and those first steps along the hospital corridor with the aid of two sticks.
He glanced at the stick by his side, hating it, wondering what she would say when she saw him. If she came . . . He felt something like panic. In that one precious letter after their meeting in Balaclava she had told him that her husband had decided to end their marriage. He had been offered a highly important post in India where several military hospitals were to be built under his supervision. It was an amicable parting. There had been no love, and yet in some strange way each had needed the other at one moment in their lives.
I will never lose you, my darling, she had written. I shall love you and take care of you.
But that had been then. The war continued, casualties mounted. With pain Blackwood had read of the Marines’ exploits and what it had cost. Major Brabazon had lost an arm during that last mad charge on the redoubt. Colour-Sergeant M’Crystal, Corporal Jones, the willowy Second Lieutant Fitzclarence, even the hard man Frazier who had been killed by one of his own grenades. They and many others had fallen that day.
And weeks later, while he had been fighting against the
agony of his wound, others had followed. Like their Corps motto,
By Sea and By Land.
The tough campaigner Sergeant Quintin had died at the siege of Sebastopol, and the surviving Rocke twin had walked with fixed bayonet and had attacked a squad of Russians single-handed. Perhaps he had wanted to die after losing his brother. Blackwood wondered if Quintin ever discovered which was which before he too had been killed.
Harry had written him a strangely mature and subdued letter. It had been about Fynmore. With Brabazon in hospital, and most of his experienced officers dead or wounded, Fynmore had been forced to lead the final assault on a hill which overlooked the army’s lines.
Harry had written simply. It was the bravest thing I ever saw. Fynmore was terrified and his nerve had cracked long ago, before you captured the redoubt, probably as far back as Africa. But he loved the Corps more than life itself, and he led his men to victory and died doing it. To be so terrified and to do what he did was real courage.
Blackwood had heard since that Fynmore had been mentioned as one of the first recipients of the Queen’s new medal when it was eventually struck. Fynmore would have liked that.
He heard steps on the stones and saw Smithett crossing the terrace.
We shall be like my father and Oates
, he thought.
Smithett said, ‘Time to get inside, sir. There’s a nip in the air.’
In his sober black coat he looked every inch the perfect valet. He was that and far more. Sometimes, as Blackwood sat in the library for a last drink, Smithett would enter, gauge his mood and then bring out his endless tit-bits of memory. About so-and-so in the
Audacious
, or how they had rescued Private Doak from a brothel in Malta.
Blackwood watched the gates. Davern might not even have reached London. She had said in her letter that she would go first to Slade’s house. She might have changed her mind. He could not blame her.
‘Look, sir.’ Smithett took the blanket from Blackwood’s legs. ‘Me old gran used to say, “A watched pot never boils.” She’ll come, you see if she don’t.’
Blackwood smiled at him. Of course, he had almost forgotten Smithett’s close link with both of them. The hut by the river, the smell of death, the look in her eyes as she had fallen against him.
He stared at the copse, the darkening shadows which made the trees look solid and invulnerable. It was all his now, and yet he felt like an interloper, as if at any moment he would see his father striding through the grounds giving orders to Woodstock, the head gardener, as if he were addressing his sergeant-major.
He heard carriage wheels beyond the gates and sighed.
‘That bloody doctor again.’
Smithett folded the blanket over his arm, his mournful face giving the hint of a smile.
‘Oh, I dunno about that, sir. Now, up we get, nice an’ easy like.’ He watched Blackwood’s sudden anxiety. ‘She didn’t ferget us arter all, sir.’
Blackwood saw the fine carriage, the one with Slade’s crest on the door, sweeping up the drive. Behind him he could hear the housekeeper’s harsh voice as she held the servants at bay. Smithett must have spoken with her about this moment. Only he would have thought of it.
Blackwood took a step towards the drive and gasped as the pain shot through him.
Not now. Dear God, not now.
Smithett snapped, ‘Stick, sir!’ He thrust it into his hand. ‘She’s seen more wounded than we have, I s’pect.’
But the stick flew clattering down the steps as Davern alighted from the coach and ran to meet him.
Blackwood felt her arms around his neck and tasted her tears, or were they his own?
Smithett watched for a few seconds and then picked up the stick.
Best leave ’em, he thought. The captain would not need a prop any more.
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