seemed unusual.
“I’d not expend any concern on Blegg’s account, if I were you,” Ruthven went on. “An illness a year or two ago left him somewhat diminished, but he is well enough in himself these days. And the gloves… an affectation, that is all. He has his little peculiarities, as do we all.”
With the door closed behind the police officer, John Ruthven stood for a few moments in his hallway, looking down at the silver snuff box in his hand, turning it slowly over and over. He grunted, and closed his fingers so tight about the box that his knuckles whitened. Anger put an arch into his tight lips. He spun on his expensively shod heel and strode down the hall.
Quire walked slowly along Melville Street, head down, dissatisfied. He disliked being lied to, having things kept from him, particularly by those who thought themselves his better. And though he could not say precisely how, or when, he had little doubt that he had been mocked, or deceived, or in some way gulled by the performance he had just witnessed.
He was, too, unsettled by the presence of the Frenchman Durand. It had called forth memories—seldom far from the surface, often in his dreams—that made his left arm ache, and his mood darken still further. He remembered, despite all his efforts to put it from his mind, Hougoumont.
Hougoumont
Nr Waterloo, Belgium, 1815
A rattle of shots greeted the dawn. It had rained heavily in the night, and they wanted to be sure that their powder had not been spoiled. Doubts dispelled, each man reloaded his gun and settled in to wait for the day’s bloody business to begin.
Adam Quire was twenty-five years old, and had known two things in his life: the farm in the Scottish Borders where he grew up, and war. A war that had been fought and won once already. Uncounted thousands had died on the battlefields of Europe to curb the imperial ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte, but now the Corsican who would be emperor was returned, escaped from his imprisonment and leading his doting soldiers into battle again. So the men who had thought their task done—and Quire had spent the better part of six years fighting his way through the Iberian peninsula to earn his small claim upon that victory—were summoned once more to give of their flesh and their blood. To make another offering to the ravenous martial gods of the age.
These times, on the cusp of battle, had always seemed distinctively strange to Adam Quire. The certainty that horrors were shortly to be released should have engendered fear, but he often felt a kind of morbid eagerness. An awful storm awaited, just over the horizon of the next minute or the next hour, and until it broke there was no way to see beyond it. The sooner it broke, therefore, the better.
Today, though, there was fear as well, settled deep into Quire’s bones. He was in the final year of his service in the Foot Guards, sated to the point of sickness with death. Tired, in the very depths of his spirit, of watching men die upon the whims of the great and the powerful, for reasons that seemed ever more unclear. He had thought himself done with it, but instead Napoleon had come back, and now there was no future to reach for, save this one day and its inevitable savageries.
He was not the only one possessed of dark premonitions. The red-jacketed soldier at his side was clumsily crossing himself.
“You’re no papist, Jamie,” Quire muttered. “Not last I heard. All that crossing’ll not serve you.”
“Who knows?” Jamie Boswell said indignantly. “I’ll take anything I can get today. It’s going to be a bad one. I can feel it in my bowels.”
“If you’re feeling it in there, that’s fear, not foresight. Don’t shit yourself, for Christ’s sake. There’ll be stink enough about here soon, without your adding to it.”
“Craigie’s at it already,” Jamie observed, nodding along the wall.
One of the men had broken away from his post and was squatting in a corner of the neat garden, his trousers round his ankles.
“Aye, well,” said Quire. “It takes everyone a wee bit different. You just think on keeping yourself alive, and making a few Frenchmen dead.”
Jamie Boswell was young, barely a year into his uniform. Quire liked him. He was soft, untarnished and straightforward, as Quire imagined he himself must have been when so freshly come to this cruel calling, though his memories of those first months were all but buried beneath the weight of what had happened since. As was the sense of any point or purpose to all the slaughter.
Quire looked out over the wall. The woods to the south, and the orchard to the east, were quiet. Beautiful, in fact. The trees were heavy with leaves, shifting slightly in the breeze like verdant clouds tethered to the ground. Here and there beneath the canopy of the woodland, Quire could see men moving. There were Hanoverians and Nassauers out there in the plantation, which pleased him considerably. They were decent soldiers, and more importantly they were between him and the French. Whatever pose he might strike for Jamie Boswell, Quire shared all the younger man’s instinctive trepidation. This day just begun had the feel of a bad one, without doubt.
As it turned out, the day meant to be a great deal worse than merely bad, but it was in no hurry to reveal the true extent of its horrors. The morning ground slowly and dully along, and nobody came to kill the men in the walled garden, or amongst the trees outside, or in the great complex of farm buildings.
It was a farm unlike anything Quire had known in Scotland: a manor—or
But the storm did break, in time, and it did so with fearful wrath. It began with thunder, of the cruel sort made by men and their machinery of war. The boom of cannon rolled across the fields, like waves crashing on an unseen shore. It quietened the garrison of Hougoumont, each man looking up and out by instinct, searching for the telltale pall of smoke, or the black blurs of cannonballs in flight. But they were not the target of the barrage; not yet.
The Foot Guards, Quire amongst them, had spent the evening before digging out loopholes in the walls of the garden with their bayonets, and constructing crude firing platforms behind them from whatever material they could strip from the houses and outbuildings. They stood there now, peering out through the holes punched in the wall, leaning over the top of it, listening to the dull, endless peals of cannon, and knew they would not have long to wait.
The real killing started in the woodlands to their south. They could not see it, but its signs were clear. The rattle of musket fire amongst the trees; smoke boiling up through the canopy; shouting, and screaming, and the beating of feet upon the soft earth.
“They’ll hold them,” Jamie breathed.
He was crouched down behind the wall, hugging his musket to him. His voice was unsteady, trembling with that fretful blend of hope and fear that Quire had heard in so many others over the years.
“Maybe,” Quire muttered.
He stared out towards the trees. He could imagine what it was like in there, how foul it would be. Fighting close, seeing the eyes of the man who meant to kill you. Bayonet work. Muskets wielded as bone-breaking clubs. Too much of the fighting he had done all across Portugal and Spain had been like that: chaotic, hand-to-hand, merciless. He excelled at it, the savage business of killing, but the burden of it, the misery of it, had only grown over time. A pity, that a man should be so good at something he loathed.
