Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘The rest of you are for the Levant front, as you’ve guessed,’ he said. ‘Right then: they’ll be putting you together with a couple of other camps, so as to make you
up to full strength, and some of them are behind schedule. They ain’t all such good recruits as you lot, right? You’ve done good.’ He was such an impersonal man, such a bluff and
solid soldier, that it was almost embarrassing to hear such sentiments from him.
‘What this means,’ he continued, ‘is that you’ve got some time. Maybe ten days, maybe less. Now, anyone as wants can stay here for free, no problem. You can even give
some tips to the next lot we’re getting in. Otherwise you can go home and wait for your call-up. Spend a few days with your families. We shouldn’t allow it really, but the major’s
put his stamp to it.’ His face went stern. ‘Don’t get ideas. Anyone who doesn’t turn up when you’re called will be a criminal, right off, and they’ll hang you
for treason when they catch you. Orders for the army come straight from the King. But, other than that, I’m sure you’ve got people you want to see.’ He surveyed them with such
strangled humanity that Emily wondered when he had last seen his own family, for from that same look she knew he had one, and that it had been a long time indeed.
‘Where will you go?’ Emily had a musket on an oily cloth spread over her knees, and was cleaning its mechanism industriously. There was only a handful of women in
the dormitory, since those destined for the Couchant front had already packed their bags and departed.
‘I reckon I’m staying here,’ Elise said. She lay stretched out on her bed in her shirtsleeves, with her uniform jacket draped over the bunk above. ‘Got nowhere else to
go, after all.’
‘I suppose not,’ Emily allowed, recalling Elise’s patchwork history.
‘You’ll be going back to . . . what was it? Grimble?’
‘Grammaine, yes. It’ll seem very strange to me, now.’
‘All those sisters of yours getting to see you in your uniform,’ Elise said.
‘Mmm.’
‘You’ll be the toast of the town. Lady Marshwic come back to say cheerio before going off to do her duty. They’ll be proud of you.’
‘Alice will make fun of my clothes, and Mary will cry,’ predicted Emily.
‘Still, they’ll be proud. If I had sisters I was on talking terms with, they’d be proud of me.’
Emily nodded slowly. ‘Elise?’
‘What?’
‘Come with me to Grammaine?’
She looked over to see the other girl sitting half up, staring at her.
‘Do what?’
‘Come stay at Grammaine, until we get our call-up. Why not?’
‘You’re serious?’
Emily nodded, watching a few expressions try to form on Elise’s face and fail.
‘That’s . . . I always wanted to live like gentry, even for just a few days . . . Hey, you don’t mean as a servant, do you? Because if that’s—’
‘I mean as a guest. As a friend,’ Emily said solemnly. ‘I mean, unless you want to stay here with the gunnery sergeant or something, of course.’
‘Demaine can live without me.’ Elise swung her legs round and perched on the edge of the bed, still looking a little stunned. ‘You really want . . . someone like me, staying
with your sisters and your . . . servants?’
‘What’s someone like you? You’re a soldier just like I am.’
‘Yes, sir, Miss Ensign.’
‘You know what I mean. Besides, you’ll annoy Alice beyond all measure, and that’ll be worth the train fare.’
*
As Emily and Elise marched towards the house, the look on Alice’s face battled between mockery and happiness for almost a minute as they came up the path. Then she went
flying back into the house calling, ‘Mary! Mary! Come and see!’
By the time they reached the house, everyone was at the door and waiting. The two uniformed women laid their packs down gratefully, with a clatter of muskets, and Emily embraced her sisters, one
after the other, and smiled around at the servants. Everyone seemed to be staring at her as if she was some long-lost relative, returned from foreign parts nigh unrecognizable. Even Mary, letting
Emily escape from her arms, looked her up and down as though needing confirmation that this was indeed her sister.
‘You’ve . . . changed, Emily,’ she said. ‘You look . . .’
‘Like a soldier?’ Emily completed for her.
But Mary shook her head. ‘I don’t know what,’ she said. ‘Look at you, though. You look . . . strong. Hard, somehow.’
‘You look as silly as that little Belchere minx,’ Alice pronounced. ‘But we forgive you. Did they really have to cut your hair?’
‘It’s a soldier thing,’ Emily told her. ‘This is Soldier-at-Arms Elise Hally. I’ve invited her to stay until we receive our call-up papers.’ And then she
named them all for Elise, although she could see that her companion recognized them already from Emily’s reminiscences.
‘They made you an ensign,’ Mary commented wonderingly, fingering the gold crown that Emily had stitched to her jacket sleeve herself. ‘Tubal will still outrank you,
then.’ Emily recalled that lieutenantship which Tubal had purchased at such a high cost, which had been the cause of so many arguments before he had left for the front. Mary had mellowed to
it since. It would put him out of the worst of it, she had decided.
Emily looked from her sisters to Elise, who was beaming happily at all and sundry. Even as they went into the kitchen, where Cook was hurriedly heating up a pot of soup for them, she was aware
of an odd distancing: between herself and her sisters; between her and the house. She and Elise stood shoulder to shoulder, and she felt almost as much a stranger to this place as was the girl she
had brought as her guest. In the back of her mind was the roar of muskets on the target range, the bark of Bowler’s orders issued on the marching square, the gossip of the dormitory and the
rumour of war. Coming back to Grammaine was like visiting a place only dimly remembered, some peacetime paradise from that unimaginably distant time before the fighting had started.
She sat at the kitchen table and listened to Elise describe Gravenfield for Alice. Conversation moved briskly on to the merits of Sergeant Demaine, and Elise came close to convincing Alice that
she should have gone off to arms instead of Emily, if only to flaunt herself before male company. Emily noticed that Demaine’s most visible attribute never entered the conversation.
‘You’re all right there, ma’am?’ It was Grant’s soft voice. She looked up at the big old man standing in the kitchen doorway, and smiled.
‘It’s just . . .’ she started.
‘I know how it is, ma’am. Ensign, I should say. I remember just how it was.’
‘I feel so different. I feel like a soldier, Grant. Will this ever go away?’
‘When you’re done soldiering, maybe it will, mostly. Still, after you come back from the fighting, you’ll never hear a gun go off quite the same, ma’am, or a shout or a
sudden noise. Been twenty years for me, and still I sometimes wake, when the horses do, and reach for that old matchlock they gave me.’
*
To Emily’s surprise, Elise and Alice became instant bosom companions. The soldier-girl loved to gossip and somehow she managed to absorb society trivialities with an
endless appetite. No matter how stale each morsel was for Alice herself, in Elise she had a perpetually eager audience, and the goings-on at Gravenfield were all intriguingly shocking, in return.
The two of them spent hours in each other’s company, both at Grammaine and in Chalcaster.
Emily herself had intended to spend her time chiefly with Mary, because she knew her days at Grammaine would be few, and she must make the most of them. But somehow she could never sit alongside
Mary as she used to, never just read or work on her long-idle embroidery. There was a restlessness in her now that constantly called her to action. She had got out of the habit of being a lady of
leisure, and could not recapture it. Instead, most days found her riding, with Grant or alone, across the grounds of Grammaine and the neighbouring land. She rode in her uniform most times, and
with her sabre at her side, which she had been given as ensign. She met no bandits – nothing more villainous than a twelve-year-old child poaching pigeons – and she almost wished she
had. She assured herself that a confrontation with the Ghyer would go differently now. She would never be so foolish or so helpless again. But the Ghyer was consigned to history, and she would not
have the chance to show him she was now her father’s daughter.
Mr Northway called for her once, or so Poldry told her. She did not regret being out. She could not say now what her reaction would be should she see him again. There was a glowing coal still
within her that spoke of Rodric, poor Rodric, who had been so pale and brave in his own new uniform.
When she was out on horseback, she could forget her dead brother, her dead father, the tangled future of the Levant front. She could lose herself in the wind, the pounding of the hooves, the
simple fact of riding.
Little Francis was bigger than before. He was teething, too, and making his discomfort known to all and sundry. Emily took her turn in holding him, swaying him from side to side to lull him. As
he slept, she watched him for an hour or more at a time, listening to the sounds of the house around her: Cook in the kitchen, Jenna scrubbing the floors, Mary humming to herself in another
room.
These are the things I am fighting for.
She had stepped out of this place – stepping backwards as one might from a painting, to better appreciate it. Perhaps Grant was right and
she would never truly re-enter it, never quite get past the picture frame again, but it would be worth it. She would go to war to save Grammaine from the ravages of Denland; to save the future for
Francis; to save the past for her family. Love of her country was a great storm that bellowed and fell silent, but this love of home was a breeze that blew steady and forever.
So the days passed, one by one. She sat up in the evening along with Elise and a couple of glasses of wine, and they talked about other recruits and what they might be doing, how the Couchant
front was advancing. Elise would tell her what she had seen in Chalcaster: the fashions, the people, the observations Alice had made. It was all so new to her, another world entirely, or perhaps
the same world seen through a different lens. She wore clothes that were Mary’s cast-offs, the fashions and cuts all wholly strange to her, and she delighted in them. Yet Emily had not found
any comfort in her own wardrobe. Instead, now she wore breeches, shirt and jerkin from Rodric’s room – and if Mary was shocked, she said nothing.
*
And of course the day came, the seventh or so, when it seemed that the call would not come, the papers would never arrive. Perhaps the army of the King could win this war
without Emily Marshwic or Elise Hally. And, on that day, Emily went downstairs to find Penny Belchere in the kitchen with a solemn look on her that did not suit her at all, and in her hand two
letters marked with the King’s seal.
‘Tomorrow, first thing,’ Emily announced, when she had read hers. Elise’s was still unopened in her hand, for the girl was no great reader. ‘They want us to report to
Chalcaster station tomorrow, five in the morning. The train will take us to Locke, wherever that is.’ Even as she said it, the map unfurled in her mind’s eye. Locke, mustering point of
the Levant front, last port of call for civilization, before the swamps began.
‘Hell,’ said Elise quietly. ‘I wish I’d been clever enough to run away.’
Emily gave her a long look. ‘You still can. I won’t say.’
Elise grinned at her. ‘That’s mighty generous, Ensign Marshwic. Any chance the offer’ll still be open after the fighting’s started?’ She clapped Emily on the
shoulder: a familiar mannish gesture. ‘It’s a strange thing, you know? Now it’s come, now we’re off, I don’t care. It’s been great to visit here, to meet your
family and all that, but I’m going home now. Tell me you don’t feel the same, just a little.’
‘I know what you mean.’
By this time, the news had spread. Emily could hear Mary’s feet on the stairs. She turned to Penny Belchere and saluted as smartly as she could. ‘Thank you, Soldier Belchere.
You’ve done your duty.’
Penny saluted back just as seriously. ‘Thank you, Ensign. Permission to go on my way?’
‘Granted.’
Elise leant in the doorway, watching the messenger mount up and canter off, while Emily turned to her sisters. The opened letter in her hand told them all they needed to know.
*
The pack’s weight was a familiar burden, even a comforting one. She and Elise had walked all the way from Chalcaster with these. They were a soldier’s life contained
in a single bag: clothes, utensils, tools, weapons, everything the King’s largesse supplied for new recruits to his army. Emily had made sure every last thing was there, and checked that the
action of the musket still moved freely.
Downstairs, Mary and Cook were preparing a cold spread. Emily already had a letter from her sister in her jacket pocket, exhorting Tubal to write more frequently. She wondered whether she
herself would write, and how often.
‘Ma’am?’ The voice, in this room, was unfamiliar. It was Grant, of course, and, when she saw him in the doorway of her bedroom, Emily realized that to her knowledge he had
never been above stairs before.
‘What is it, Grant?’ she asked.
‘Well, ma’am, maybe it isn’t my business to say it, but I reckon there’s something you should take with you.’
As she frowned at him, he moved awkwardly into the room and she saw he was holding a flat, black-wood case with brass corners. A familiar case, for all that she had avoided the sight of it for
many years. It had re-entered her life at the same time as the Ghyer had, and she had hoped never to see it again. Her father’s pistol case, of course. Within it nestled the exit he had
chosen when his life became too harsh for him to handle.
‘I can’t,’ she said shortly, but Grant was resolute.
‘You shouldn’t turn it down just because of what it’s done. It’s just a thing, ma’am. Just a weapon. It’s a good one, though, better than any the
army’ll give you. I reckon you might need this – need the extra. It’s a good piece, all right. Think about it, ma’am.’