Castle Orchard (30 page)

‘Didn’t you want to be married?’ a little boy asked.

Jackson shook his head.

‘Not ever?’

‘I was married the once. Didn’t last. ’Twas like this. Corporal Smith ’ad a right useful sort o’ wife. There ain’t many wives in the Army, six to each company. Draw lots they do, for to get in the boats. T’others ’ave to starve or go on the parish. Well, I says to Mrs Smith, if ’er man goes – gets killed, like – I’ll ’ave ’er next. She’s willing an’ the corporal, ’e goes down in the next action – Salamanca it were – an’ I gets the chaplain to wed us. She needs to be wed to go on getting ’er rations, see. Can’t say if she fancied me otherwise, but good enough I s’pose. Anyway, didn’t last. She would go out after nicking an officer’s watch. Horse Artillery, ’e were. I remembers looking at him and thinking he were a bonny lad, though dead as a doornail.’

‘But he was English then?’ Robert asked, shocked. ‘You didn’t rob the English?’

‘Ain’t too fussy. If yer don’t nick off o’ them,’ t’others will. Anyways, I says to the missus, “Don’t yer go out there till the guns are quiet”.’

Jackson came to a halt. His pipe had gone out.

‘But what happened?’

‘What d’yer think? Bit o’ shrapnel got ’er. She an’ the young officer were laid down side by side, an’ blow me if I weren’t right off marryin’ after that. She ’ad blood on ’er ’ands. Yer peeked at the poor laddie an’ yer thought ’twas a pity ’e ain’t stayed at ’ome with ’is mammy. ’E wouldn’t never ’ave touched ’is cheek with a razor yet awhile. Brought up delicate, like, it makes yer wonder. I gives such a one me biscuit once. Dead on ’is feet, ’e were.’

The boys, open-mouthed, could not concede of Jackson giving away his biscuit, and Jackson himself, perhaps ashamed at confessing to such weakness, shook his stick at them with more than his usual vehemence, and they scampered away.

Robert took Phil by the arm and half dragged him, half cajoled him, outdoors. It was the end of the school day. They sat on the ivy-covered wall of the rectory garden.

Robert asked after Captain Allington and refused to believe Phil had no idea. Phil was, all the same, emboldened to repeat, ‘Captain Allington belongs to us, not you, but he doesn’t write any letters. He doesn’t care to.’

Robert gazed into space. He said, ‘He belongs to England. He is a soldier of the King. If you think he belongs to an ugly little fledgling like yourself, you’re much mistaken.’

This graphic description of Phil with his skinny little body and unruly quantity of hair upon a rather outsized head, did not much disturb him. It was better to be an ugly little fledgling than the French.

‘Captain Allington will come back and he will describe to us the Battle of Waterloo,’ Robert said. ‘Remember how he marked in the sand the Siege of Badejos. He will say, ‘Here was Hougoumont and here La Haye Sainte, here the squares of infantry, here the French cavalry. Do you think he would tell us all of this?’

‘No. He doesn’t talk much of battles.’

Phil kicked his heels against the wall. He examined his boots, still new. They were stout workaday boots, for had he not to come across the meadow in the mud? He looked at his legs, grown no heartier, and thought the new size of his feet did nothing for their dimensions, but it was of no matter. Was he not to have a fine leg for a boot?

He said to Robert, ‘Perhaps Captain Allington will never come back.’

At the beginning of March, a lad in breeches and boots and a striped waistcoat of blue and green, which denoted his employment with Lord Tregorn, appeared in the yard riding a blue roan pony. He greeted Dan with a familiar smile and took a note from his pocket. Dan studied it for a while before ushering the boy into the kitchen.

‘Come up from St Jude with the pony,’ the lad said to Annie and Cook.

‘Goodness me,’ Annie replied. ‘What pony?’

‘Captain Allington’s pony. He got it in Ireland and took it to France with him. It was his baggage pony. Been to Waterloo, Smokey Joe has, an’ seen the sights. Joe he’s called but we called him Smokey Joe ’cause of his colour an’ all the smoke he’s seen.’

‘The missus will want to see you.’

‘Don’t spec so. I gave Dan the message what the Captain drew for him. ’Tis a good pony. The captain left it for the little ’uns at St Jude to ride, but even Master Fred is now too big for Smokey Joe.’

Annie made the boy scrub his face and ushered him through the house to the drawing room. He looked about him with cheerful confidence.

Mrs Arthur was making another attempt to write to Louisa.

‘This young lad has come all the way from Cornwall with a pony,’ Annie said.

Mrs Arthur turned in her chair. She said, ‘You mean he has come from St Jude?’

‘Yes, ma’am, if you please. Captain Allington sent the pony.’

‘Captain Allington, is he well?’ Mrs Arthur asked.

‘Why, I s’pose he must be, for he’s outdoors plenty. He goes out with the fishing boats like he did when he was a little lad, so they tell me. He’s mortal fond of the sea, the captain is. Anyway, he asks His Lordship can he spare me to take Smokey Joe up into Wiltshire. He gives me enough money for the tollgates and for to stay the nights and come home on the Mail coach. I’m to stop here one night and Cook will give me supper and make me up a piece for my lunch. Oh yes, and the pony is for Master Phil. It’s a good safe pony. I ain’t never been on the Mail before and I’d like to sit up on the box, but the coachmen are too grand for lads like me.’

‘Goodness, you have got a lot to say,’ Annie said. ‘Have you no message for my mistress?’

The boy paused and thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘Now ’twas something about birds – swallows, I think – but it didn’t seem so important as bringing up Smokey Joe, who is getting on a bit, but not too much so, and will be grand for the little boy who don’t weigh more than a puff o’ dust, the captain said, and what with my catching the coach, and Cook to make me a piece, and I ain’t to dally on the road, I can’t rightly remember the rest.’

‘Oh Annie, take him away,’ Mrs Arthur said. ‘Find him a place to sleep and give him a shilling to spend for himself.’

‘The master must be well,’ Annie said, beaming.

Mrs Arthur wrapped herself up in her cloak and walked round to the stable, Meg, beside her. Dan was rubbing the pony down. He touched his hat to her but continued to work, a twist of hay in his hand. She watched him for a while and stroked the pony’s neck.

Phil was beside himself at school. He said, over and over again, out loud, ‘I have a pony of my own. Captain Allington sent him me and I have written a letter to Cornwall to say thank you. His name is Smokey Joe and he was Captain Allington’s baggage pony when he went to war. Smokey Joe was at Waterloo.’

The boys crowded about him. None of the Conways had a pony of their own.

Robert said, ‘You are telling a fib. You are a liar.’

‘No, I’m not. Smokey Joe carried a kettle and a fishing rod, a water canteen, Captain Allington’s boat cloak, his rations, his shirts, his other uniform, his hairbrush, his mirror, his shaving brush, two books but we don’t know what they were . . .’

‘How do you know?’

‘Dan told me. And his neckcloths and a bottle of brandy.’

‘How does
he
know? Isn’t he deaf and dumb? He couldn’t have told you.’

Phil was disconcerted. ‘I don’t know how he knows, because he wasn’t there, but he does. He drew all those things on a piece of paper. I sat in the harness room and he drew Smokey Joe all over with baskets and packages.’ He thought about Dan, who had certainly smiled throughout.

‘You’re a little liar,’ Robert repeated.

When school was over Dan appeared with the pony, saddled and bridled, and waited by the rectory gates. It was a dank, raw evening. The boys ran out. They surrounded Smokey Joe, patting and stroking him and saying, ‘Isn’t he pretty’, and, ‘Isn’t he a little beauty’, and ‘Didn’t he go to war with Captain Allington?’ It was, for Robert, too much. Envy ate him up. It was nearly too much for Phil, for they all said, ‘Are you going to ride him?’ Phil was in a state of wild excitement to think how Smokey Joe was for him, but when he considered the reality of clambering up into the slippery saddle and clutching the reins, then his legs had never seemed so skinny nor his head so large, like Emmy’s doll, all hair and stuffing. He was rigid with fright. Smokey Joe was, he thought, bigger than fat old Domino, asleep in the field, who couldn’t be got to go anywhere. There was nothing sleepy about Smokey Joe, who had sharp pricked ears and looked all about him. He nuzzled and nibbled at the boys’ pockets, looking for titbits.

Someone said, ‘Bet you can’t ride him, Arthur. Bet he’s not really yours.’

To take a rush at what you feared the most having ever been Phil’s policy, he flung himself in the direction of the saddle. Dan, with some mysterious sleight of hand, flipped him up into it like the tossing of a coin. Was it luck or management Phil did not continue his flight and come down on the pony’s further side? Smokey Joe, used to worse affronts, paid no attention and Dan shoved Phil’s boots into the stirrups and gave him a thump in the small of the back to make him sit up straight. Phil was too terrified to do more than sit but he managed a quick, triumphant look in the direction of his schoolmates.

Every day Dan brought the pony to the rectory gates. After the first day he came mounted himself, with Smokey Joe on a string. For five days Phil’s ecstasy was combined with terror, but on the sixth day, no mishap occurring to him, he started to imbibe Dan’s instructions, for Dan could instruct very well by means of pointing and pushing. Phil started to pick up the reins, delicately, aware of Smokey Joe’s mouth with the bit against his soft lips. He had, from the start, light hands, but Dan could not tell him this, he could only grin and nod.

Phil could tell Dan nothing. He could never say he was cold, that it rained, that he had no wish to trot or canter or leap a small log in the wood. Dan was, in Phil’s eyes, obtuse, but Dan was far from it. He knew Captain Allington meant him to teach Phil to ride, and teach him he would. He taught him to put on the saddle and bridle, to groom the pony himself, feed it and clean out its feet.

Robert Conway was sick in himself. At breakfast he said to his father, who had watched the darkening of his countenance with increasing dismay and bewilderment, ‘I no longer wish to be a schoolboy.’

‘My dear child, at your age,’ and for a moment the rector had to think what age that might be, ‘at your age, one cannot dictate one’s life. Of course you must be a schoolboy until your education is complete.’

‘Send me to the Military Academy. I’m old enough.’

‘Having no connections, it would be injudicious. There might be some purpose in your entering the East India Company, had I the influence to get you well placed.’

‘When I’m sixteen I shall enter the Army as a volunteer. Someone will give me a recommendation and I should soon get a commission.’

‘Robert, this living isn’t rich. Without the income from the school, we would be very poor. How am I to provide you with the necessary means to live as an officer and a gentleman? Then, suppose you are wounded or retired and put on half-pay, your remittance would be meagre. I fear you look to Captain Allington as an example, but you must believe me when I say his position in life is not gained from an officer’s pension.’

‘He got Castle Orchard by gambling,’ Robert said, but sulkily. ‘I’m not a baby, I know things like that. I don’t care. He was wounded fighting for his country and that’s all that matters to me.’

‘I am sure his career as an officer was everything that is valiant and honourable. However, it’s not my intention you should be exposed to all the horrors of war at so young an age, let alone the fevers of a foreign clime. I believe Captain Allington’s current ill health to be a result of his campaigning days. Stephen is the least clever of my boys and, should he want it, he is the only one I should not discourage from a military career, could I get him started. I am hoping for your ordination. It is likely this very living here at Castle Orchard could be yours, for I remain on terms of perfect cordiality with my benefactor. It is possible all could be arranged.’

Robert skulked off to his own room. He thought of Phil and the pony, a pony, though only a baggage pony, which had heard the roar of the cannon and smelled the acrid smoke of the powder while it hung heavy on the hot June air, the smoke of how many muskets, how much artillery? He thought a hundred thousand, but he knew he didn’t really know. He then thought how blood smelled and how the ditches ran with it. The air was hot and heavy, smelling of blood and sweat and saltpetre; he nerved himself to think of it, half-exhilarated, half-frightened. He turned to his own treasures, soothed by their familiarity, though nonetheless precious to him: the green shako of the 95th Rifles with the folding-down flap at the front, the green cut feather plume and the cord in black; the three rows of silver buttons; the black lacing; the bugle-horn badge and, most significant of all, the small folding spyglass. Now he wished he had besides some article, even a single button or a thread of silver lace, from the uniform of a Light Dragoon.

In the meantime his father rose from the breakfast table. He wished Robert would not scowl so, but he supposed it was his age. This passion among the boys for anything military was an unfortunate trait, and he would have preferred that they spent less time in the boot room with Jackson.

Phil had time away from school over Easter. He spent much of it in the stables looking after or riding Smokey Joe, but one pony does not take so very much attention and even Phil had to concede when there was nothing more to be done.

The Conway boys, bored, came to watch him. Under their cold scrutiny he lost his competence, dropped things, muddled the buckles on the bridle and slopped the water bucket. Smokey Joe shifted unexpectedly and trod on his foot, but he put the headstall on and led him out to the field.

Stephen said, ‘Give us a ride.’

Phil wanted Smokey Joe entirely for himself, but he let them clamber up one after the other and then felt the better for allowing it. With the pony grazing, they wandered off together. It was many days since they had played.