The Chevau-Légers de la Garde only recruited young men of good family and comfortable means. That the Earl of Branter’s youngest son was of good stock went without saying. As for his means here in France … the Comtesse de Boufflers had looked after all of that for some time now.
James had come a long way from that impromptu flight across the Nor’ Loch and voyage aboard the Hilde to Holland. He had been lucky; any reasonable man would agree. Because how easily it could have gone the other way and ended on a gibbet. Gratitude should have been the appropriate response, as any reasonable man would also have agreed. But James Lindsay, now a little older, couldn’t help but wonder whether there might have been other, other ways. Ways that, if he’d taken them, wouldn’t have left him feeling like a pretty songbird in a cage, twittering for his supper.
Today he was on a royal parade ground, exercising with soldiers from another country’s army. His company’s mounted kettledrummers beat the time, and the bugle calls pierced the morning air with military urgency as the immaculate lines of mounted red soldiery wheeled and cantered, presenting sabres in one single flash of steel, and sheathing them again before peeling off into lesser units, and joining again, with balletic precision, to the beat of hooves and the cascade of tinkling bridles.
He couldn’t help but wonder how else he might have spent this day if things had transpired differently.
It drove his thoughts back to the time he’d spent with Professor Pfuffenkipper in Leiden. That old man in his tasselled smoking cap, puffing away beside his huge black metal range, pulling at the crepe skin of his sunken cheeks as they discussed Hobbes and Spinoza and the nature of knowledge, and of course, Hutcheson. Pfuffenkipper had wanted to know everything about Hutcheson.
‘You could stay, you know, young man,’ he’d once said to James. ‘You have a fine mind. Pursue your studies here, at one of the finest seats of learning in the world.’
‘I have not the money, sir,’ James had been forced to reply. ‘Nor any means of getting it.’
When what he’d meant was that he was intent on joining his brother in Madrid; on donning one of those distinguished white uniforms he remembered so well from Glenshiel, and becoming like those dashing Irishmen. The Wild Geese, they called themselves. He liked that.
‘Nonsense, young man,’ the old scholar had pressed him. ‘Where is your Scotch enterprise I’m sick of hearing about? The lectures are public. A little teaching, a little scrivening, the guilders will soon pile up to keep body and soul together while you learn. Enough anyway, to have your work reviewed, and to sit for examination.’
But James had kept on heading south – although it hadn’t taken long for events to force his first re-evaluation of that decision. Three nights in a cell in the citadel in Lille had done that. Pfuffenkipper’s letters of introduction to leading figures in Paris had been in Latin, a language the lumpen officer of the city’s watch not only could not read and did not recognise, even though he was a Catholic. He was convinced it was Hapsburg code and that James was a spy. Matters hadn’t been helped when it turned out James’ French was also useless, since the idiot only spoke the local Picardy patois, which James found gibberish. He was only released after a local curate, dispatched to hear his confession, confirmed that James’ letters were legitimate. The entire episode rammed home to the young man how parlous his situation was in these foreign lands. That, and how difficult it was to rid oneself of infestations contracted in gaols.
The drills always ended in a mock charge. It never failed to exhilarate; the bugle sound to canter eclipsing the sudden shush! of steel as 200 sabres were drawn from their scabbards; the kettledrummers wheeling away from the line; him, the cornet of the colours, reining back to let main body move past, dropping back to the second line and then the sound of the charge itself. The sense of being in the belly of this great thundering mass of horses and men; the pounding hooves, the reverberating earth and the peal of the bugle notes, the imagining oneself in battle.
Everything was there, except the sound of shot, the heady reek of powder and the cries of the wounded. He could remember those too, from Glenshiel.
And through the trees, to remind him where he was, sat the palace where Louis XV lived. Louis XV whom he never saw, despite being one of his majesty’s guards.
It had surprised him at first, how many of his countrymen had preceded him into the French army – the most elite company of the Garde du Corps, the king’s personal bodyguard, was named ‘the Scottish Company’, after all. It had been founded, he was assured, in 1440 – but was nearly entirely made up of French noblemen, these days. The Scots now tended to congregate in the lesser regiments. It had only been the comtesse’s money and influence that had got James into the ranks of the Chevau-Légers de la Garde.
James was under no illusions that he fitted in.
His fellow officers were all cut from the same cloth. Wealthy younger sons in need of a profession to keep them out of mischief, although mischief they often found. They had practically no daily responsibilities to the troopers they commanded, nor did they seem to take any interest in their mounts. It appeared that NCOs attended to all the daily grind of discipline, and servants saw to the horses. Presenting themselves in a requisite state of elegance, whenever summoned, seemed all the duty required of these officers. For the remainder of their time they hunted, or frittered away hours at gaming-tables, or whored and drank.
James discovered he had a
