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About the Author

Cressida Connolly is the author of After the Party, which was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and was a Waterstones Book of the Month, as well as three other books: The Rare and the Beautiful, My Former Heart and The Happiest Days, which won the MacMillan/PEN Award. Cressida is a reviewer and journalist who has written for Vogue, the Telegraph, the Guardian and numerous other publications. She lives in Worcestershire.

Dedication

To

Nicky Shulman

who thought of the magic bean

and to

Tom Phipps

with love

Part 1

1.

Spring 1855

After he had sat for a time with his dead brother, William Gale composed himself and took out his small silver pocket knife and with it began to cut. Close to the neck the hair was darkened with mud or blood or some mixture of the two, so William cut several pieces from around the crown, where the hair remained bright. It was soon done. He could have sworn that Algie’s body was yet warm, sure he discerned the heat of life through the thick stuff of his coat. But in the while he had attended his brother, the fingertips, the nose and cheeks had with stealth assumed the pallor of death, yellow and somewhat waxen, like a stale candle. As William cut, the head lolled suddenly forward, but William was able to keep possession of his fright at this and did not recoil.

He had seen before what death did. He was familiar, now, with the sudden weight of a human head, cradled in the crook of his own arm, as a man took his leave of this life. This was something he had never hoped to learn. These past months had brought terrible lessons, sights and sensations which could not be unknown, much less forgotten. There was little difference between the weight of a head and that of a 12-pound round shot, for all that one carried all the dreams, memories and most tightly cherished hopes of a man within itself, while the other brought only carnage.

William summoned the presence of mind to judge that their mother would require sufficient of his brother’s hair to mount in the glass behind a brooch, and perhaps extra for a locket. He considered too their sister, Caroline. She would be sure to wish to commemorate their brother in like fashion. Then there was Algernon’s fiancée, poor Emily Norris. Would their mother begrudge her a lock of Algie’s hair, as she had already begrudged her the boy’s love? Even as he cut he was sensible of the fact that there could not be more of that hair: what was needed must be now obtained, for there could never be a further supply of it.

There being no clean paper to hand, William took from his pocket the last letter he had had from his wife Alice – a missive which had not pleased him, though he kept it near – and folded the pieces of hair into it. It was a sad and curious thing to consider that those same locks which had shone around a young man’s living face only hours before would now sit encased in gold and glass upon the breasts of three women. Though its weight was negligible – little more than a dab of sealing wax – the sorrow it brought would ever more weigh heavy upon them.

His work finished, William lifted Algie’s head in both his hands and laid it back gently. With his thumbs he closed the green-blue eyes which would never more open upon a morning, nor look upon a day.

William Gale, at nine-and-twenty, had not been in the expectation of finding himself on the field – or, rather, the rocky hillside – of battle. Yet here he was, some two thousand miles distant from his home. His father, like his own father before him, had after the purchase of a commission been for a number of years a soldier; but the family estate and other interests had drawn each away from a full military life. William and Algernon’s father had nevertheless fought bravely in the Peninsular and in the action at Albuera, where an injury to his foot saw an end to his service. It was expected that his sons would also, in due course, serve the 23rd Regiment of Foot. But Britain had been at peace since Waterloo in 1815 and no one in the Gale family had expected William’s time in the uniform of the Welsh Fusiliers to be spent away from home.

If the truth be said, William was not a natural officer. Affable, accomplished, handsome, with a strong sense of justice, there was a streak of stubbornness and of pride woven deep within his nature. He had no desire to command men. Military strategy did not absorb him. Such appetite as he had for firearms or for blood was easily satisfied by the modest exertions of the partridge shooting season. He did not care very much for a life among soldiers, preferring his own bed and the comforts of home. He enjoyed also the civilian freedom to express whatever opinions he cared to form. But filial duty could not be lightly dismissed. To serve the Crown was an honour the Gales were proud to undertake. A commission was obtained. Thus it was that, two years later, he had found himself on board a ship bound for the Black Sea. A number of his fellows had sold out, rather than face the skirmishes which may have lain ahead. But this had seemed to William dishonourable. Algernon had joined only at the end of the last year. If William was not by inclination a soldier, Algernon was by temperament entirely unsuited to the martial life. He was dreamy, somewhat slow, with the sweet smile of a much younger fellow.

Here outside Sebastopol, William could not let himself recall the companion of his boyhood, their childish games on the long afternoons; how they had played together, raced together, fished together. He and his brother and sister full of fun at nursery tea, taking their buttered bread and sprinkling tiny amber crystals of demerara sugar upon it, purloined from the sugar-bowl, whenever their nurse was not looking. Algie’s small freckled limbs, as a child of seven or eight, splashing in the clear brown shallows of the stream. How his teeth had chattered, his lips paled, the first time he had fired a gun. That had been their father’s 20-bore, when they had set out to shoot pigeons in the fields one afternoon. Although Algie had not hit a bird, still the force of it, the noise, had shaken him. There came into William’s mind those times – oh the pity of it! – when he had remonstrated with Algie, found fault with him for being too slow, too timid, too fond of remaining indoors. Oftentimes the boy had preferred to sit on the window seat in the nursery with Caroline, drawing, than to come outside and play rough and tumble. William remembered the incline of Algernon’s head, as he had concentrated on his drawing book. The thought of his youthful seriousness was inexpressibly tender. Yet he must not think of these things.

He stood and stepped back, pausing to be sure that the eyes stayed shut. Here was another thing he had never thought to know: how to close the eyes of the dead. More dreadful still, that it was uncertain whether the lids would remain closed. He had seen before that if they were not weighted down, the lids could rise a little over the now clouded, unseeing eyes, like an ill-drawn blind across the darkening glass of a window. But William had no coins for the task and he had not the heart to find stones. Not the stones of this place of death.

Algie had missed the worst of the fighting, arriving as a reinforcement only in December, some four months earlier. He had not seen the clamour above the Alma River; nor, after the great battle at Inkerman Heights, the fallen as numerous as a whole hillside’s worth of sheep. He had not known the increase in weight of a bayonet as hour after hour of fighting progressed. Nor the force required for the blade to do its terrible work, piercing the coats of the Russians, then their ribs: it was butchery. Shot as thick as hail, all but invisible in the fog and smoke, until it found a man’s flesh.

Yet there had been beauty. Frequently at night William had watched the shells flying in their graceful curves and marvelled that destruction could wear so lovely a coat. Seeing a star, it was easy to take it for a shell also and to wonder that it moved so slowly across the blackness of the sky. In the vineyards by Alma, before the fighting began, finches and larks had congregated in flocks. There had been buntings, gold-crested wrens and yellowhammers. The song of linnets had hung in the soft air. The first sight of the little harbour at Balaklava had been delightful, scarcely two ships’ breadths at its entrance, with magnificent high cliffs along each side, higher than any he knew of on the English coast. It had put him in mind of Clovelly.

But a siege was unrelenting work and this was what Algernon had come out to. There was no verdure here at camp; only mile upon mile of mud. In the cold the trampled ground had frozen into hard deep ruts that caused men and horses to stumble. The privations, especially those endured by the men, had been very hard. Every day men were lost in the trenches from grape and shell, but more had fallen from exhaustion, starvation, ague, cholera. Algie had been much afraid, though he had tried to conceal it, even from William. Perhaps especially from William.

He felt tired. His limbs ached from lack of sleep. When presently he emerged from the trench where his brother’s body lay, a furore of sound met his ears. Yellow smoke filled the air. There was the smell of burnt sugar, like toffee apples, which hovered wherever black powder had been expelled from the guns. It struck him that all the noise – the cries and shouts of men, the sporadic report of guns, the boom of occasional cannon fire across the ridge – must have been just as loud within the hollow as it was without; yet he had been conscious of none of it. While he had been sitting with poor Algie there seemed to have been no sound at all.

It came to him that he must now write to his father. It grieved him that the news would reach them at home before his letter could, in the lists of the wounded and the dead published in The Times and the Illustrated London News. How terrible to thus discover their poor boy’s demise! And Lord Raglan’s next despatch would likely be printed sooner than the mail could carry his missive. How his mother would greet the news he could not bear to consider. At least he would be able to say in truth that his brother had died as the direct result of wounds, while fighting alongside his company. That Algernon’s last words had demonstrated a selflessness which would surely commend him to his Maker. Gale could say, too, that the boy had died under enemy fire. Algie had been about to go back to camp after a night in the trench when a stray shell burst some way in the air and one piece came down and struck him just below the left shoulder. There had been a great deal of blood, the wound too deep to staunch the flow of it. The fellow beside him told William that Algie had surely been insensible as to the severity of his injury, for he was reported to have said: ‘If there is anyone worse hit than me, he had better be taken first,’ the lad having seen that there was only one stretcher at hand. He was not heard to speak again. During all the time it took for someone to run back to camp and fetch his brother the bleeding had gone on. By the time William arrived at his brother it had stopped.

When it had fallen to him to write other such letters to the families of his special friends, his pen had faltered. ‘We are all in great affliction at the present time, Death having snatched from us one whom we all loved. We struggle to conceive how the sad news of such a loss will be met at home, by those whom poor so-and-so held in the dearest regard … Your son, from the day he joined the 23rd, proved himself to be a credit to us, and a most determined soldier. I have every reason to believe that he is now in that place where you would not wish to have him back from.’

But how to lessen the great blow to a father or a widow when a man had died not from gallantry, not among the flash of bayonets and the terrible glory of battle, but from cold or sickness, lying groaning like a beast in his own ordure? This was how his dear friend Lockwood had met his end. The cholera. He had known that his time was coming: he handed his pocket watch to Gale. It had been his last wish that William should visit his widow and the two little daughters he was to leave behind, to offer them some crumb of comfort. It was a meeting William did not anticipate with any gladness, for how could he in honesty convey the facts of Lockwood’s death in such a way as to ameliorate their loss? They would ask questions and how was he to answer so as to preserve the honour of his friend? The press were heartless, listing the cause of death next to a fellow’s name: debris, dysentery, diarrhoea. Did the men who compiled these cruel lists never consider the mothers, the sisters, the wives whose dreadful shock and sorrow were by their cruel enumeration made so much the heavier? If their men were to be taken from them, would it not be kinder to allow them to cherish the hope that each had died a hero? Small wonder the press were not popular here.

Algie had done his best, but his brother knew that he had not shown dauntless intrepidity. His face had often had the look of fright upon it. The sight of blood had always alarmed him, from his boyhood. When at home as a lad of eleven or twelve he had cut his hand while whittling he had cried out: ‘Don’t let me see!’ and shut his eyes, holding out his arm for their nurse to attend. The boy had come as one of some two hundred and thirty reinforcements, many of them too young to be of much use. They were not hardy. One officer had joined straight from his lessons at Winchester School, having asked leave of his headmaster. More than forty of their number were dead of cholera before Christmas.

There were times when Gale wondered how noble a cause this Crimean affair could truly be said to be. Many times. He had not been alone in the view, which he had formed while camped at Varna, that the Turks were a horrid set of people to fight for: in the early days, many had averred that they would gladly go over to the Russians and help them against this wretched nation, if that were only the policy of England. In any case, their masters at home seemed to be bitterly inept. The Commissariat was almost criminally inefficient. Supplies were utterly inadequate, if they came at all. During the long months of the winter, watching men die from sickness, fatally weakened by the lack of food or warmth or shelter; seeing horses eating each other’s tails in the cold for lack of forage, he had privately questioned whether this was a campaign worth the fighting. It was a question which was not resolved by hearing some of the younger men call out for their mothers in the hours before death, with nothing to help them.

William had seen sights no civilized man should witness. He had seen men’s bodies hanging from the branches of trees, like broken umbrellas. In the height of battle men and horses had fallen in swathes, like grass before a scythe. The numbers seemed impossible. After Alma he had seen a wounded Russian, offered an easeful sip of brandy from an Englishman’s flask, reward his helper with the blade of a bayonet. And it had been sickening to a man’s soul to witness the women who appeared like vultures after each battle, shears in their hands, harvesting gold braid and buttons from the bodies of the still unburied fallen with no more pity than if they were shearing sheep. Down by the harbour, now, those same women sold snuffboxes carved from the bones of the dead horses.

And how were they rewarded for their courage, those who lived on to fight again? It was reported in the journals at home that the men were often drunk, but William knew that they were very much more often hungry, and cold besides. Illustrations in Punch or the Illustrated London News showed men in fur caps and great sealskin coats standing before little wooden huts, warming their hands by merry braziers. In truth there was often no wood to get up for building shelters, nor even for a fire to heat a pot: the men lived on biscuit, the officers on ham. When there was a fire, there were not enough mess-tins to go round, for most of the men had thrown their camp-kettles away on the march after the battle of the Alma River, supposing more would be sent out. They slept on, or more generally in, the wet ground, some – like Gale – in bell tents, others in holes in the ground, lined with sailcloth. Men’s toes came off from frostbite; even their very feet. When at last came hay and oats for the horses, vegetables and provisions for the men, all lay rotting in the mud close to the harbour: the mules to fetch up stores were all dead, the ways impassable from constant freezing rain. A consignment of much-needed boots were all in too small a size to fit the men. Accordingly, no man nor officer was ever buried with his boots on, their seniors looking away while the men removed the boots from the dead. The Government sent out not the tea which all desired, but coffee: unroasted beans which they had no fire to make good. The pallid beans could no more be made into a reviving drink than could the soil they stood on.

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