In his cabin, curtain drawn, Lacroix repacked his bags, put them out of the way, and laid the fiddle case on the cot-bed. He took out the fiddle and tilted it in the light of the lamp. There were grey finger smudges on the varnish and these, he decided, belonged to the lieutenant. He wiped the wood with a square of green velvet from the case. The back of the fiddle was sycamore, the grain of the wood like ribbed sand under clear water. He polished until there were no more traces of the lieutenant, then settled the instrument back in its case and took up the pistol.

The fiddle, full of air, had floated in his hands; the pistol was all heft and drag, a dead weight. He raised it, lowered it. With its brass heel it was as much a club as a gun and would, swung hard, fell a man just as surely as a ball would. He squinted into the barrel, felt in it with his fingers, then placed the gun on the blanket and took up the gunsmith’s parcel. The parcel had a slit in it through which the lieutenant or one of his men had peeped at the contents. They were lucky they struck no sparks or the day would have ended very differently for them. He drew the string, picked open the knots, smoothed down the paper. As he did so he caught a whiff of powder. His face stiffened, his fingers were still. Then he set to work making cartridges.

He had watched practised men knock up as many as five inside a minute. He was not as quick, nor had there been any need of it. A cavalry officer’s principal weapon was his sword. In the case of light cavalry, a sabre, the Le Marchant model, with its leather grip and iron knuckle bow. The pistol, in an action, you might fire once and reload once. It was not like standing in an infantry line firing and reloading until your face was black. In Spain he had discharged the gun perhaps half a dozen times. The first—the only occasion he might actually have hit someone—was after they charged the chasseurs through the snow and morning mist the week before Christmas. After that, two or three shots at enemy patrols to make them wary. The last time was in the mountains, a long way north, a rabbit or hare at thirty yards it would have taken a miracle to hit. There was no miracle.