The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [16]
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 château as the officers insisted upon calling it—known as Hougoumont, with barns and sheds and workers’ houses all laid out around two yards. And the great walled garden in which Quire and his fellows grew increasingly restive as uneventful hour followed uneventful hour. They warmed themselves about fires, and shared meagre rations of bread, and spoke little. A pall of unreality, an inexpressible feeling of the world being adrift in a formless void between consequential moments, settled over them.
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