Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Rodric had not been fifteen, not then, although men from amongst Emily’s servants had been taken. Rodric had fretted and kicked his heels and daydreamed of muskets and uniforms for the
scant last months of his fourteenth year, while Emily had prayed for the end of the war.
And then Rodric had turned fifteen, and the sergeants had come again to find those boys whom time had delivered into their hands. And Emily had done all she could to prevent it, but she was just one woman, and the war was vast and fierce and it would not stop for her.
*
She was very young in her dream: barely more than a child. It was a false-waking dream, as it always was. She had started from sleep and looked around the bedroom she had shared
with Alice back then. A noise had woken her, but only her.
Memories banished from everyday life were keen and clear in this dream. She remembered the hard, bitter feel around the house that centred on their father. He had spent a long time struggling
with the world – born a gentleman with a grand old family name to support, and eaten away at by a succession of gnawing failures. Lost opportunities, lost respect, lost reputation, and the
family money dwindling, each doomed venture swallowing it like the sea, and giving nothing in return. He had gone from a kind and loving man to a source only of harsh words and silences. He was
desperate. Even so young, Emily had known that. She had understood that her father’s rivalry with just one man had brought him to a pass where he became almost a stranger to his own
family.
And now she crept from her bed, because there had been a noise, a strange noise, like a knock at the door at an hour too late for visitors. And she stole downstairs, bare feet on the chill
steps, listening for a repetition of the sound she had only heard as it startled her out of sleep. In all the house she was the only soul awake.
And there was a strange new smell, as she reached the foot of the stairs. It had been faint there, but her nose wrinkled at it. She followed it through the silent, cavernous rooms of the house
– so much grander in dreams than in reality – until she encountered the closed door of her father’s study.
And by then, her adult mind had caught up with where this dream was taking her, and some part of her was trying to hold her back.
Once was enough
, but the child in the dream did not
know what was about to come. Even though the weight of horror attached to that door was palpable, still her hand reached for the handle.
‘Father?’ she heard her own voice, and when the door swung open, that scent flooded her nostrils. It was a harsh, almost sweet smell, a burning smell, but nothing akin to woodsmoke
or tobacco. It branded itself in her mind even as it drifted in grey curls from the muzzle of the pistol still clutched in her father’s hand.
Seeing his face, she woke, and it was not the hole in his temple that jackknifed her up, sweating and shivering, but the final expression he had turned towards her and all the world. Fixed on
his face was an unutterable look of betrayal that he was at last brought to bay like this.
The dream had come upon her as the capstone to a confused turmoil of a night full of wild imaginings. She had been lying awake since long before Poldry ever knocked at the door
of her chamber, which came two hours before dawn.
‘Ma’am,’ he murmured. ‘It’s time, ma’am.’
‘I know.’ Her voice came out just as a croak, and she forced the words out louder before the old man had to repeat himself.
‘Shall I send Jenna in to dress you, ma’am?’ came the respectful voice from the other side of the door.
‘I’m sure she’ll be busy with Alice. I’ll manage, Poldry.’
As she heard him retreat down the corridor, she forced herself muscle by muscle to get out of bed. A year ago she would have had a girl dress her as a matter of course, but the war had no
patience with such excess. Most of the maidservants were working in the factories or the fields now, keeping warm the places of those absent men until they could come back. It was no great hardship
that Emily must dress herself.
She chose a sombre, plain outfit that seemed to suit the occasion, and contorted herself like a fairground acrobat to do up at least some of the hooks at the back. Sloppy, perhaps, but she would
have her cloak to wear against the pre-dawn chill, and it hid a multitude of sins.
Around and below her, Grammaine was coming alive. The old house – the Marshwic house for five generations – creaked as the fires began to warm it. She heard the feet of servants, the
clatter of the kitchen. It all seemed so normal.
She went to her window and stared at the shutters a long time before she threw them back. That cured her of any idea of normality. The moon was down by now but the sun had not even begun to
touch on the east, and the world outside her window was as dark as she had ever seen it. Across hills invisible in the blackness, she saw the sparkle of Chalcaster – the lamps and torches of
a scatter of early risers and late-nighters, nightwatchmen and thieves. In the unrelieved dark that surrounded it, she could have plucked it from its setting and worn it as a tiara.
Distantly, echoing from hill to hill, she heard the sound of the locomotive as it pulled away from the Chalcaster platform and began its long progress to Allsmere, thirty miles away. An owl took
up the call and carried it on soundless wings over the house.
There were lamps being lit in the rooms below now, and shutters being thrown back. The fire’s heat spilled out into a leaching fog that stole its warmth and light away at once. Emily was
abruptly aware of the chill seeping into her room, touching her skin through the dress.
I am not ready for this.
She did not want to go down and face what must happen but, if not her, then why would anyone else? She was about to turn away from the window when she saw, deep
in the night fog’s haze, a scatter of lamps approaching along the Chalcaster road. She strained her ears but heard no sound of horse or man. Still, who else could it be? They were coming at
last.
She closed the shutters carefully, as though prudence could put off the inevitable.
She paused with her hand on the door handle. The world with its cares and woes was waiting for her.
In the kitchen, Alice was scolding over how the maid had arranged her hair, a vexation welcome for its familiarity. There was the smell of the porridge oats over the fire, and
she heard the rough, throaty voice of the miller’s wife murmuring about money. The stout, callused woman was at the door as Emily descended, coin in her hand and three loaves on the table
drowning the cooking porridge with the scent of fresh bread.
‘Thank you!’ Emily called after her, but the woman was already bustling off into the night towards her cart and her other customers. It had been hard on her when her husband took the
Gold and Red, but like all of them she managed.
‘Will you look at what this clumsy girl has done with my hair!’ Alice demanded. She had their father’s golden locks, while both her sisters had their mother’s darkly
shining red, and she was altogether too aware of her striking looks. The war to Alice was merely an inconvenient rationing of suitors, as though the Parliament of Denland had set out purposefully
to keep her from making a decent match.
‘Alice, leave the poor girl alone,’ Emily said.
Alice scowled at her. ‘Well, just look at me.’ She eyed her sister speculatively. ‘Better than you, though. At least my gown suits the occasion.’
‘Red? It’s not very tasteful,’ Emily said.
Alice stuck her tongue out. ‘Well, I think it’s
patriotic
, thank you very much. I want to impress the soldiers. When are they coming, anyway? They’d better not be
late.’
‘They’re not coming because of you,’ Emily pointed out. ‘And they must be almost here. I saw their lights from upstairs. Cook, are you ready?’
‘I don’t know as I’ll ever be,’ replied their long-suffering cook, who did the work of three these days. ‘Which means, I s’pose, I’m ready as I’ll
get.’
‘Where’s Mary?’
Cook indicated the front door with a jerk of her head.
‘In this cold, with the
baby?
She must be touched in the head.’ Emily went to the door and opened it a crack, feeling the chill course past her ankles. Sure enough, the
eldest Marshwic sister was out by the stables, a tall, shrouded shape caught by the light cast from the house.
‘Mary come in at once. You’ll catch your death!’ Emily shouted to her. She saw a pale flash as Mary turned her face towards the house. Beyond her, the lanterns of the
approaching men were weaving hazily through the mist.
‘Mary come on. Neither waiting nor watching will help them come any sooner.’
Or later
, Emily added to herself.
If it would, we’d both be standing out
there.
She saw her sister turn and walk slowly back to the door, her face solemn. The baby clutched at her cloak with both tiny hands, its little red face screwed up against the cold.
Emily cast a glance about Grammaine’s spacious kitchen, seeing her whole life arrayed around it. Her sisters, Mary withdrawn and Alice fussing; Cook at the hearth and Jenna working at the
imagined slight to Alice’s hair. There was Poldry, too, coming down the stairs in his shabby coat that he would never change until it fell apart altogether; while outside, she knew that Grant
would be feeding a horse and getting it ready to travel.
Just one missing.
‘They’re at the gate, ma’am,’ said Poldry. He had stopped three steps from the bottom, his customary little pulpit from which he ordered the other servants. The station
gave him a curiously sombre look, like a minister conducting a funeral. Emily and Mary exchanged a look of shared strength.
There was a knock on the door, and Emily knew that nobody else would open it. The task was left to her.
And there they were as she opened the door to them. Behind them, horses steamed and stamped in the cold and dark and, when the glow of the lanterns from the kitchen fell across them, it was as
though they had not seen warmth or light for a long time. Here were a dozen serious-faced men on the move before the sun was, with pack-straps cinching their cloaks, and their crested helms tipped
back. In that light, with only the night behind them, they could have been of any age, or from any time. They were soldiers only, with everything else stripped from them.
But closer study of each face in turn showed her many things. She saw eyes that were wide, a lip that trembled, pale faces, and all of them so young. Had any of them used a razor more than once?
Had they sweethearts, these lads, or had the woman that kissed each goodbye been a mother, watching her son recede into the darkness?
In the lead was an older man, squat and unshaven in stark contrast to his charges. She recognized his face from two weeks before, preaching to these same young faces in Chalcaster Square.
‘Miss?’ he said. ‘All ready, miss? We need to be going.’
‘Won’t you come in for just a few minutes, Sergeant Pallwide? We’ve some porridge warmed up, and some bread, and you and your men have a long way to go. I’m sure a second
breakfast won’t keep the uniforms from fitting.’ It was a well-rehearsed speech, and her smile no less.
A few more minutes
was all it meant.
Just a few more
minutes.
The sergeant’s face split wide in a grin. ‘Well, that’s mighty kind of you, Miss Marshwic. Mighty kind. That’s the sort of kindness that puts fight in a soldier’s
belly when he needs reminding of what he’s fighting for. Hear that, lads? You’ll remember this place when you’ve a Denlander in front of you.’
He was first into the kitchen with a jaunty step and a too familiar nod at Alice, but he was too old and too plain for her, with his stubble and his lines. She was already looking beyond him at
his recruits.
Emily could name about half of them: field labourers and farmers’ sons, the second children of tradesmen, lads whose hands had been trained and apprenticed for peacetime. They looked
awkward and clumsy in their uniforms, gangling and unfinished, fruit picked before its time. They filed in, half grateful and half embarrassed. None had seen the inside of a fine old house like
Grammaine, unless while running errands or making deliveries. They murmured ‘Miss Marshwic’ to her and ‘Miss Marshwic’, more warmly, to the preening Alice, and ‘Mrs
Salander’ to Mary. They bobbed their heads in automatic respect and stood in the kitchen as though they had no idea what they were doing there.
And how true that is.
‘Come . . . come along, Cook.’ Emily felt her voice quiver as she spoke, suddenly on public display. ‘We mustn’t keep Sergeant Pallwide or
his men waiting.’
They were not men, of course; would not be for two years or more. Cook began serving them with bowls of porridge, thick slices of buttered bread, mugs of hot broth. The sergeant gave her a
smile.
‘Mind if I light up, now we’ve settled, miss?’ he asked.
It would have been churlish to refuse, and so she watched him take out a well-used clay pipe and stoke it with weed one-handed. She wondered if that was a skill he had learned with a gun in his
other hand. Soon the sweet, fragrant scent was shouldering the aroma of the bread and porridge out. Emily caught Mary’s look, and knew that her sister was remembering the last time anyone had
smoked inside Grammaine, while their father still lived.
There was a footstep above her, at the top of the stairs, and Poldry moved down into the crowded kitchen to allow room. Emily caught her breath as her brother Rodric came down the stairs, one
careful step at a time.
How handsome he looks
, was her first thought. He wore the uniform well, better than any of them: standing tall and straight in that red jacket, the brass buttons shining like the gold
braid at his cuffs. His knee boots were polished to any sergeant’s satisfaction and he carried his gleaming helm in the crook of his arm, as if to balance the brass powder flask on the other
side.
He looks like a general or a prince.
Emily stepped back, and back further as Rodric descended, as though his neat brightness would scorch her. There was a set, determined look to his
face. He had worn the same serious expression when he was learning his algebra or Classics. It was the look of someone taking care to avoid making mistakes.