Coronach, page 3
“Good.”
“Tierce again....”
“Lay them out if it suits. I can’t see them.”
“You are too kind, as always. And a sequence of five to the jack.”
“Not good.”
Mordaunt noted the score. Bancroft led.
“Do you believe in hell, Achill?”
“No.”
“I do. I think one pays for one’s sins eventually, one is called to account. Not in hell, not in hell fire. I think hell is here on earth and each man makes his own. I know what mine is. Sometimes I wonder how largely I figure in yours.”
There was a silence.
“Don’t do this, Aeneas.”
“I can’t help it. You can’t imagine the sick fancies I have when I am so much alone.”
The nine of diamonds lay on the table in the flickering light between them.
“Do you know what they call this card? The curse of Scotland.” A sound of boots in the street. The lamp was guttering. “I have had such strange dreams. Shall I share them with you?” He studied the cards. “For example, one night... I dreamed I had a son. And when I woke, I thought: I never shall. I shall come to the end of my life in emptiness. With a great... yearning emptiness in the heart.” Silence: he drew from it what he imagined. “I may be unnatural in most things, but I still have one or two instincts that may properly be called a man’s.”
“You could marry.”
“I don’t find that very amusing.”
“It wasn’t said to amuse you. I really do not see the—”
“Do you not? By the living Christ, do you not. Do you find my private life so entertaining? Am I such an object of ridicule?”
Mordaunt laid his cards down gently.
“Mordaunt.”
“Good night, sir.”
“Mordaunt. Stay.” He had reached the door. “Stay— stay. Will you make me abase myself still further? I ask you to stay, then. I implore you.”
“These attitudes are not necessary. Please spare yourself and me.”
“Christ, is that all they are to you? Attitudes? Well, I am sorry to trouble you with my affectations. My pain is an affectation, my loneliness is an affectation— I am ludicrous to you and so you give me your mockery and your contempt. Or your indifference. This is the first time in months you have spoken to me privately. Do you mean not to know me? Are you ashamed of me? Do you fear what I might say?”
The lamplight flickered over the pattern of the lace, the discarded cards on the table. The stump of the right wrist was visible now, the dressing discoloured with exudate.
“I have not pressed you. I have not singled you out. I have not favoured you. I have never shown my feelings— I have not spoken of them since— because you said―”
“I know what I said, and it holds true still. Do you understand?”
“Then why did you come here tonight?” He seemed to recall the sentry’s presence outside: when he spoke again his voice was quiet. “Was it pity?”
“It might have been. More for myself than for you.”
“Well, I shall take heart from that, your modicum of pity, because you’re a cold, bloody, impotent bastard, and pity is all you can give.”
Mordaunt opened the door, felt the rain on his face. The sentry remained immobile.
In the silence of his own quarters he swept the regimental papers to the floor and wrote the resignation of his commission, signed it, dated it, and meticulously noted the time.
He sat listening to the rain and the drums beating Tattoo. Eventually he unfolded the commission and left it lying open with the letter.
George the Second by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain King, Defender of the Faith, to Our Trusty and Well Beloved....
The past came. But it could not touch him, nor harm him. Nothing could harm him now.
He had been twenty-five when they met, four years a captain, newly come to the Twelfth regiment of foot and a stranger to most of his brother officers. The first time he saw them en masse was that morning on Blackheath Common, with the drums thundering and the fifes trilling “Lilliburlero” and the air blazing with regimental colours unhoused from oiled-silk casings. It was the twenty-seventh of April, 1742: there were transports moored in the Thames, and the army under the Earl of Stair was preparing to embark for Flanders.
He knew himself to be under observation, and eventually one of the field officers, handling a restive dark bay mare with obvious fondness, said, “Give you joy of your new company, Captain. I hope they fight as prettily as they parade.”
They met formally aboard the transport: he was Major the Honourable Aeneas Bancroft, younger son of the Earl of Lynton, and Mordaunt found in him a witty, generous companion of great charm. He was thirty-four, unmarried, and although physically frail a fearless and resolute commander held in high esteem by his men.
Despite the closeness of their friendship, Bancroft remained an enigma: he had no intimates, and it was said that his family did not receive him. But Mordaunt, in love with his own brother’s wife, adamantly private in all matters concerning their affair and increasingly fond of the elegant man who had befriended him, sensed some similar need for secrecy in Bancroft and never questioned him.
Other, more important matters began to oppress him: it was winter of ’42, then the new year came in; the army was quartered in Ghent, and Catherine’s letters arrived with a terrible regularity. He could not go to her; he could only read of her suffering as his brother progressed from verbal harassment of his adulterous wife to physical and sexual abuse. And then the letter came, not from her but from an unknown solicitor. Arthur was dead, of a cerebral haemorrhage following a duel in St. James’s. There was no other legitimate heir.
He was granted leave and went to London at once.
He was still in town on March twenty-third when Handel’s “Messiah” opened at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Catherine was ostensibly in mourning, and he knew he should not attend, but as a passionate admirer of Handel he went to the premiere engagement. To his surprise he met Bancroft in the foyer, and was touched by the warmth of his greeting. Bancroft had taken a box for the performance and would not hear of his going to the pit.
He hesitated only when he saw the bottle of claret and the glasses waiting.
“You were expecting some one.”
Bancroft smiled, but there was some curious reserve in it.
“Not at all. I merely hoped to meet a friend— and voilà. I knew you was in town, of course.”
“You had the advantage of me. When did you leave Ghent?”
“Shortly after you. I flung the Earl’s name about rather contemptibly.... Sometimes I find it advantageous to be Lynton’s son, although Lynton, I have no doubt, is sorry that I am.” Again the faint smile. “Enough of me. You look like death’s head on a mop-stick. Has it been very bad?”
Perhaps Bancroft sensed his bitterness: perhaps the talk of debts and lawsuits and the entail seemed vulgar to him.
“No matter. We shall enjoy ourselves tonight. There’ll be little enough time once we leave Ghent.”
“You foresee a long campaign, then.”
He saw the glint of an enamelled snuffbox, then Bancroft said, “No, you don’t take it, do you?” and withdrew it. “Yes, it’ll be hard lines. Oh, I know one suffers all the blood and misery as a matter of course, but the older I grow— I have such a fear of dying sometimes, far away from home.” There was a silence. “A pox on that. We’re here together, and Flanders is far away.”
“Not far enough.”
“Put it out of your mind.” The other boxes were occupied: the dark theatre was blazing with jewels. “What a glorious night!”
“You enjoy society, Aeneas.”
“I like a particular kind of life, and while I am here I indulge myself in it. It is not usually possible upon service.”
“Do you find Ghent so bereft of opportunity?”
The grey eyes measured him for a second.
“Ghent is the loneliest of cities for me. No one there gives a damn if I live or die.” Then, “Achill, let me say something, in all friendship. Your brother was known. And it will have been noted that you are here this evening, and that you wear no mourning.”
“There was no love lost between my brother and me. Why should I play the hypocrite?”
“The town sometimes requires hypocrisy.”
“The town can go to hell.”
“I said that once. In fact, I said it to my father. But I’ll tell you now, I learned a brutal hard lesson from it. So have a care.” He rested his hand briefly on Mordaunt’s. “Dear boy, don’t mistake me. You’ve come into a great estate and I give you joy of it with all my heart. You take no offense?”
“From you, never.”
“Good. Where are you stopping?”
“Albemarle Street, with my sister-in-law.” Then, “Do you find that indiscreet too, that I presently share a house with my brother’s widow?”
“Don’t mock me, Achill. I don’t like it.”
“I don’t mock you. I appreciate your concern. And it hardly matters in any case. I shall sell out as soon as I may.”
There was a stir in the audience, and Bancroft’s voice was almost inaudible.
“I shall be so sorry to see you go. Ah... the King.”
They stood: around them the house rose as one. The royal box was seated, the house lights snuffed, and the first notes of the oratorio rang out into the smoky darkness.
At the interlude they finished the bottle, and a second was sent for.
“Why do you speak of selling out? Do you have some premonition?”
“Not premonition. Recognition. Too much time, too much grace— and Nemesis with folded wings, waiting for my soul.”
Bancroft was watching him with some quality he could only think of as stillness.
“Why?”
“My sins. Do you never think of that? ‘Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin....’ ” Wanting to speak of her now, finding it necessary to speak of her. “My soul. My sins. He knew.” Knowing he had already said too much, not knowing except by silence how to prevent himself from saying more. “And you know, don’t you? And, Christ, what a weapon he made of it. My commission, my annuity, my— God help me, my honour— he would have taken everything.”
“Lynton did the same to me. Penury and ostracism... too tender of the family name to leave me truly twisting in the wind, but nonetheless effective. He keeps me on a pittance, nothing more.”
“And of what mortal bloody sin were you guilty?”
“Proprio come te, mio caro. Un amore proibito. I loved where I should not have.”
“With— what consequence?”
“It broke me. I grieved in secret, and I suffered... and it broke me. And I have never been the same.”
There was a long silence, and then Mordaunt said, “Oh, God,” because everything was suddenly very clear. “Che cosa terribile per te.” And then, after a longer pause, struggling with guilt and grief and exhaustion and the alcohol with which he had countered them, “And I thought you were— cold. Ascetic or— asexual— or even— Christ— a virgin.”
Bancroft said gently, “You are very drunk, ain’t you, Achill?”
He protested, because of the perfect clarity of everything, and was silenced with a patient, “Hush, the interlude is over.” The house lights were being snuffed; the smoke drifted acridly from the pit. The performance recommenced.
He sobered somewhat during the course of it, and apologized. Bancroft shook his head dismissively, seeming intent only on the splendour of the oratorio.
“Messiah” ended. It would be attacked by the clergy and the London critics and withdrawn after three performances, but it had brought the King to his feet in the glorious Hallelujah chorus where he had remained until the finale, and it left Mordaunt strangely exhilarated and unwilling to conclude the evening. They went on to White’s, drinking and gambling heavily; it was three o’clock before they left. St. James’s was still thronged with people.
They returned to Bancroft’s townhouse. Mordaunt could not recall having accepted the invitation: it must have been spoken carelessly over cards. He found his lost reason for a moment, protesting the lateness of the hour, and allowed himself to be overruled. The spectre of war, of retribution, of mortality, was haunting him; he had felt it even in the crush and glitter of White’s. For all he knew, they would both die in Flanders: there would never be another night like this.
The house was one of eight, newly built. He was very drunk but he retained scattered impressions of its beauty and of the time he spent there, in a richly furnished room with a Turkish carpet on the floor, and of the footman in black livery who brought a bottle and waited while it was approved, and then withdrew. They were not disturbed again.
There was cognac, the silken Everett, and deep conversation, and then not enough of either. The wild exultation had ebbed and with fatigue came a crushing depression. He wanted only to be gone from this austerely beautiful house, where something he did not wish to acknowledge was making tentative efforts to be known.
He never remembered, never allowed himself to remember, the moment when the tenderness and affection became overtly sexual. He lost his head: things happened too quickly, things done and words spoken born of desire and revulsion that were anguished and irrevocable, and then his mind closed. He had no recollection of leaving the house, or returning to Albemarle Street.
He told Catherine. In the second week of April he married her by common license, an act of passion and of desperate fear. At the end of the week he took ship for Ostend.
The afternoon he arrived in Ghent Bancroft met him in the mess and congratulated him on his marriage, news of which had preceded him from some unknown source. Four other officers who were playing faro overheard and proposed a toast in which Bancroft joined, and then, unobtrusively, he took his leave. They did not speak again.
The campaign, the dreaded spring, ground on relentlessly, defeat after defeat, marked by illness, hunger and brutal weather. Mordaunt might have resigned his commission at any time, but he was held by a peculiar sense of responsibility to his men and to the regiment, and the chimera of his withdrawal obsessed him: the army was a monster both loved and hated, which fed upon his life, and his loyalty was the chain that held him to it. Catherine’s letters, when they reached him, ceased to speak of his homecoming.
Time became a bloody river bearing him from day to day. He wept for dead friends, then they became part of the river, were lost, forgotten, left behind. The faro players at Ghent died one by one, shot, mutilated, decapitated, eyeless, until it seemed the bloody ground must have them all. Dettingen was a victory, Fontenoy two years later in May of 1745 a defeat: to one who suffered in both actions it was difficult to know the difference. He bore the scars of Dettingen on wrist and thigh, gaping wounds stained with powder, sewn up by a drunken stranger in the smoke behind the lines: at Fontenoy a brigade of Irish Jacobites cut his company to pieces as he watched, deafened by mortar fire and half-blind with his own blood. He could not hear the men scream as they fell; he could only share the soundless nightmare of their deaths, and call to the living to retreat in good order in a voice he could no more hear than the dead who lay mangled at his feet.
Bancroft saw no action at Fontenoy. He had taken the lieutenant-colonelcy of a regiment which was never ordered out of Ghent, and when that regiment, the Fourth, the King’s Own, was one of the first to be dispatched to England in November to put down the Jacobite rebellion, he was more than willing to go. A majority fell vacant in the Fourth just before they were due to embark. He himself wrote to Mordaunt, urging him to bid for it.
The Jacobite army had reached England by that time. Driven only by his desire to see Catherine, Mordaunt purchased the commission.
He went home from Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the first time in four years. He found Evesham deserted except for his steward and a few of the staff: frightened by the rebels’ advance, Catherine had fled to London. He drank himself insensible, and left Durham with nothing more of her than a handkerchief to carry into the coming action, and a memory of her face which had long since ceased to be clear.
He rode north. The countryside was uneasy but quiet. The rebel army, failed by its French ally, met with apathy by English Jacobites and wracked with dissension, desertion and fear in its own ranks, had turned back at Derby. By Christmas Day it had retreated as far as Glasgow. During the last days of December, the royal troops under Lieutenant-General Henry Hawley began moving north from Newcastle. Mordaunt, riding with a baggage train for the Fourth, joined Bancroft’s officers in Edinburgh on the tenth of January in the new year of 1746.
Their meeting was coldly professional. They had not seen one another since Bancroft’s transfer nearly a year before, and the deterioration in his health was marked: he had been ill, and he despised the weather and the bleak Scottish capital. He did not have to endure it long: on the fifteenth of the month the army left it, marching in force to the relief of Stirling, besieged by the rebels. The evening of the sixteenth saw them encamped west of Falkirk where it was thought they might engage, near the slopes of a wooded hill skeletal with winter.
The Highlanders were sighted, but no alarm was given. The army under Hawley was oddly purposeless and disorganized, and Hawley himself was unconcerned. No commands were given that night, nor the next, raw morning when the enemy was seen to be moving south of the Torwood, the old forest near Falkirk hill, and forming into some order of battle. Hawley remained supremely confident that he would not be attacked. The army stood to arms at about eleven o’clock when the enemy was seen moving with the Pretender’s standards and colours flying, but stood down after a quarter of an hour. Hawley returned to Callendar House, where he had billeted himself upon the Jacobite Lady Kilmarnock, and demanded his dinner; the rest of the army foraged for a midday meal that would not be found. Shortly before one o’clock a local man hurried into the camp, shouting, “Gentlemen, what are you about? The Highlanders will soon be upon you!”
“Tierce again....”
“Lay them out if it suits. I can’t see them.”
“You are too kind, as always. And a sequence of five to the jack.”
“Not good.”
Mordaunt noted the score. Bancroft led.
“Do you believe in hell, Achill?”
“No.”
“I do. I think one pays for one’s sins eventually, one is called to account. Not in hell, not in hell fire. I think hell is here on earth and each man makes his own. I know what mine is. Sometimes I wonder how largely I figure in yours.”
There was a silence.
“Don’t do this, Aeneas.”
“I can’t help it. You can’t imagine the sick fancies I have when I am so much alone.”
The nine of diamonds lay on the table in the flickering light between them.
“Do you know what they call this card? The curse of Scotland.” A sound of boots in the street. The lamp was guttering. “I have had such strange dreams. Shall I share them with you?” He studied the cards. “For example, one night... I dreamed I had a son. And when I woke, I thought: I never shall. I shall come to the end of my life in emptiness. With a great... yearning emptiness in the heart.” Silence: he drew from it what he imagined. “I may be unnatural in most things, but I still have one or two instincts that may properly be called a man’s.”
“You could marry.”
“I don’t find that very amusing.”
“It wasn’t said to amuse you. I really do not see the—”
“Do you not? By the living Christ, do you not. Do you find my private life so entertaining? Am I such an object of ridicule?”
Mordaunt laid his cards down gently.
“Mordaunt.”
“Good night, sir.”
“Mordaunt. Stay.” He had reached the door. “Stay— stay. Will you make me abase myself still further? I ask you to stay, then. I implore you.”
“These attitudes are not necessary. Please spare yourself and me.”
“Christ, is that all they are to you? Attitudes? Well, I am sorry to trouble you with my affectations. My pain is an affectation, my loneliness is an affectation— I am ludicrous to you and so you give me your mockery and your contempt. Or your indifference. This is the first time in months you have spoken to me privately. Do you mean not to know me? Are you ashamed of me? Do you fear what I might say?”
The lamplight flickered over the pattern of the lace, the discarded cards on the table. The stump of the right wrist was visible now, the dressing discoloured with exudate.
“I have not pressed you. I have not singled you out. I have not favoured you. I have never shown my feelings— I have not spoken of them since— because you said―”
“I know what I said, and it holds true still. Do you understand?”
“Then why did you come here tonight?” He seemed to recall the sentry’s presence outside: when he spoke again his voice was quiet. “Was it pity?”
“It might have been. More for myself than for you.”
“Well, I shall take heart from that, your modicum of pity, because you’re a cold, bloody, impotent bastard, and pity is all you can give.”
Mordaunt opened the door, felt the rain on his face. The sentry remained immobile.
In the silence of his own quarters he swept the regimental papers to the floor and wrote the resignation of his commission, signed it, dated it, and meticulously noted the time.
He sat listening to the rain and the drums beating Tattoo. Eventually he unfolded the commission and left it lying open with the letter.
George the Second by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain King, Defender of the Faith, to Our Trusty and Well Beloved....
The past came. But it could not touch him, nor harm him. Nothing could harm him now.
He had been twenty-five when they met, four years a captain, newly come to the Twelfth regiment of foot and a stranger to most of his brother officers. The first time he saw them en masse was that morning on Blackheath Common, with the drums thundering and the fifes trilling “Lilliburlero” and the air blazing with regimental colours unhoused from oiled-silk casings. It was the twenty-seventh of April, 1742: there were transports moored in the Thames, and the army under the Earl of Stair was preparing to embark for Flanders.
He knew himself to be under observation, and eventually one of the field officers, handling a restive dark bay mare with obvious fondness, said, “Give you joy of your new company, Captain. I hope they fight as prettily as they parade.”
They met formally aboard the transport: he was Major the Honourable Aeneas Bancroft, younger son of the Earl of Lynton, and Mordaunt found in him a witty, generous companion of great charm. He was thirty-four, unmarried, and although physically frail a fearless and resolute commander held in high esteem by his men.
Despite the closeness of their friendship, Bancroft remained an enigma: he had no intimates, and it was said that his family did not receive him. But Mordaunt, in love with his own brother’s wife, adamantly private in all matters concerning their affair and increasingly fond of the elegant man who had befriended him, sensed some similar need for secrecy in Bancroft and never questioned him.
Other, more important matters began to oppress him: it was winter of ’42, then the new year came in; the army was quartered in Ghent, and Catherine’s letters arrived with a terrible regularity. He could not go to her; he could only read of her suffering as his brother progressed from verbal harassment of his adulterous wife to physical and sexual abuse. And then the letter came, not from her but from an unknown solicitor. Arthur was dead, of a cerebral haemorrhage following a duel in St. James’s. There was no other legitimate heir.
He was granted leave and went to London at once.
He was still in town on March twenty-third when Handel’s “Messiah” opened at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Catherine was ostensibly in mourning, and he knew he should not attend, but as a passionate admirer of Handel he went to the premiere engagement. To his surprise he met Bancroft in the foyer, and was touched by the warmth of his greeting. Bancroft had taken a box for the performance and would not hear of his going to the pit.
He hesitated only when he saw the bottle of claret and the glasses waiting.
“You were expecting some one.”
Bancroft smiled, but there was some curious reserve in it.
“Not at all. I merely hoped to meet a friend— and voilà. I knew you was in town, of course.”
“You had the advantage of me. When did you leave Ghent?”
“Shortly after you. I flung the Earl’s name about rather contemptibly.... Sometimes I find it advantageous to be Lynton’s son, although Lynton, I have no doubt, is sorry that I am.” Again the faint smile. “Enough of me. You look like death’s head on a mop-stick. Has it been very bad?”
Perhaps Bancroft sensed his bitterness: perhaps the talk of debts and lawsuits and the entail seemed vulgar to him.
“No matter. We shall enjoy ourselves tonight. There’ll be little enough time once we leave Ghent.”
“You foresee a long campaign, then.”
He saw the glint of an enamelled snuffbox, then Bancroft said, “No, you don’t take it, do you?” and withdrew it. “Yes, it’ll be hard lines. Oh, I know one suffers all the blood and misery as a matter of course, but the older I grow— I have such a fear of dying sometimes, far away from home.” There was a silence. “A pox on that. We’re here together, and Flanders is far away.”
“Not far enough.”
“Put it out of your mind.” The other boxes were occupied: the dark theatre was blazing with jewels. “What a glorious night!”
“You enjoy society, Aeneas.”
“I like a particular kind of life, and while I am here I indulge myself in it. It is not usually possible upon service.”
“Do you find Ghent so bereft of opportunity?”
The grey eyes measured him for a second.
“Ghent is the loneliest of cities for me. No one there gives a damn if I live or die.” Then, “Achill, let me say something, in all friendship. Your brother was known. And it will have been noted that you are here this evening, and that you wear no mourning.”
“There was no love lost between my brother and me. Why should I play the hypocrite?”
“The town sometimes requires hypocrisy.”
“The town can go to hell.”
“I said that once. In fact, I said it to my father. But I’ll tell you now, I learned a brutal hard lesson from it. So have a care.” He rested his hand briefly on Mordaunt’s. “Dear boy, don’t mistake me. You’ve come into a great estate and I give you joy of it with all my heart. You take no offense?”
“From you, never.”
“Good. Where are you stopping?”
“Albemarle Street, with my sister-in-law.” Then, “Do you find that indiscreet too, that I presently share a house with my brother’s widow?”
“Don’t mock me, Achill. I don’t like it.”
“I don’t mock you. I appreciate your concern. And it hardly matters in any case. I shall sell out as soon as I may.”
There was a stir in the audience, and Bancroft’s voice was almost inaudible.
“I shall be so sorry to see you go. Ah... the King.”
They stood: around them the house rose as one. The royal box was seated, the house lights snuffed, and the first notes of the oratorio rang out into the smoky darkness.
At the interlude they finished the bottle, and a second was sent for.
“Why do you speak of selling out? Do you have some premonition?”
“Not premonition. Recognition. Too much time, too much grace— and Nemesis with folded wings, waiting for my soul.”
Bancroft was watching him with some quality he could only think of as stillness.
“Why?”
“My sins. Do you never think of that? ‘Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin....’ ” Wanting to speak of her now, finding it necessary to speak of her. “My soul. My sins. He knew.” Knowing he had already said too much, not knowing except by silence how to prevent himself from saying more. “And you know, don’t you? And, Christ, what a weapon he made of it. My commission, my annuity, my— God help me, my honour— he would have taken everything.”
“Lynton did the same to me. Penury and ostracism... too tender of the family name to leave me truly twisting in the wind, but nonetheless effective. He keeps me on a pittance, nothing more.”
“And of what mortal bloody sin were you guilty?”
“Proprio come te, mio caro. Un amore proibito. I loved where I should not have.”
“With— what consequence?”
“It broke me. I grieved in secret, and I suffered... and it broke me. And I have never been the same.”
There was a long silence, and then Mordaunt said, “Oh, God,” because everything was suddenly very clear. “Che cosa terribile per te.” And then, after a longer pause, struggling with guilt and grief and exhaustion and the alcohol with which he had countered them, “And I thought you were— cold. Ascetic or— asexual— or even— Christ— a virgin.”
Bancroft said gently, “You are very drunk, ain’t you, Achill?”
He protested, because of the perfect clarity of everything, and was silenced with a patient, “Hush, the interlude is over.” The house lights were being snuffed; the smoke drifted acridly from the pit. The performance recommenced.
He sobered somewhat during the course of it, and apologized. Bancroft shook his head dismissively, seeming intent only on the splendour of the oratorio.
“Messiah” ended. It would be attacked by the clergy and the London critics and withdrawn after three performances, but it had brought the King to his feet in the glorious Hallelujah chorus where he had remained until the finale, and it left Mordaunt strangely exhilarated and unwilling to conclude the evening. They went on to White’s, drinking and gambling heavily; it was three o’clock before they left. St. James’s was still thronged with people.
They returned to Bancroft’s townhouse. Mordaunt could not recall having accepted the invitation: it must have been spoken carelessly over cards. He found his lost reason for a moment, protesting the lateness of the hour, and allowed himself to be overruled. The spectre of war, of retribution, of mortality, was haunting him; he had felt it even in the crush and glitter of White’s. For all he knew, they would both die in Flanders: there would never be another night like this.
The house was one of eight, newly built. He was very drunk but he retained scattered impressions of its beauty and of the time he spent there, in a richly furnished room with a Turkish carpet on the floor, and of the footman in black livery who brought a bottle and waited while it was approved, and then withdrew. They were not disturbed again.
There was cognac, the silken Everett, and deep conversation, and then not enough of either. The wild exultation had ebbed and with fatigue came a crushing depression. He wanted only to be gone from this austerely beautiful house, where something he did not wish to acknowledge was making tentative efforts to be known.
He never remembered, never allowed himself to remember, the moment when the tenderness and affection became overtly sexual. He lost his head: things happened too quickly, things done and words spoken born of desire and revulsion that were anguished and irrevocable, and then his mind closed. He had no recollection of leaving the house, or returning to Albemarle Street.
He told Catherine. In the second week of April he married her by common license, an act of passion and of desperate fear. At the end of the week he took ship for Ostend.
The afternoon he arrived in Ghent Bancroft met him in the mess and congratulated him on his marriage, news of which had preceded him from some unknown source. Four other officers who were playing faro overheard and proposed a toast in which Bancroft joined, and then, unobtrusively, he took his leave. They did not speak again.
The campaign, the dreaded spring, ground on relentlessly, defeat after defeat, marked by illness, hunger and brutal weather. Mordaunt might have resigned his commission at any time, but he was held by a peculiar sense of responsibility to his men and to the regiment, and the chimera of his withdrawal obsessed him: the army was a monster both loved and hated, which fed upon his life, and his loyalty was the chain that held him to it. Catherine’s letters, when they reached him, ceased to speak of his homecoming.
Time became a bloody river bearing him from day to day. He wept for dead friends, then they became part of the river, were lost, forgotten, left behind. The faro players at Ghent died one by one, shot, mutilated, decapitated, eyeless, until it seemed the bloody ground must have them all. Dettingen was a victory, Fontenoy two years later in May of 1745 a defeat: to one who suffered in both actions it was difficult to know the difference. He bore the scars of Dettingen on wrist and thigh, gaping wounds stained with powder, sewn up by a drunken stranger in the smoke behind the lines: at Fontenoy a brigade of Irish Jacobites cut his company to pieces as he watched, deafened by mortar fire and half-blind with his own blood. He could not hear the men scream as they fell; he could only share the soundless nightmare of their deaths, and call to the living to retreat in good order in a voice he could no more hear than the dead who lay mangled at his feet.
Bancroft saw no action at Fontenoy. He had taken the lieutenant-colonelcy of a regiment which was never ordered out of Ghent, and when that regiment, the Fourth, the King’s Own, was one of the first to be dispatched to England in November to put down the Jacobite rebellion, he was more than willing to go. A majority fell vacant in the Fourth just before they were due to embark. He himself wrote to Mordaunt, urging him to bid for it.
The Jacobite army had reached England by that time. Driven only by his desire to see Catherine, Mordaunt purchased the commission.
He went home from Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the first time in four years. He found Evesham deserted except for his steward and a few of the staff: frightened by the rebels’ advance, Catherine had fled to London. He drank himself insensible, and left Durham with nothing more of her than a handkerchief to carry into the coming action, and a memory of her face which had long since ceased to be clear.
He rode north. The countryside was uneasy but quiet. The rebel army, failed by its French ally, met with apathy by English Jacobites and wracked with dissension, desertion and fear in its own ranks, had turned back at Derby. By Christmas Day it had retreated as far as Glasgow. During the last days of December, the royal troops under Lieutenant-General Henry Hawley began moving north from Newcastle. Mordaunt, riding with a baggage train for the Fourth, joined Bancroft’s officers in Edinburgh on the tenth of January in the new year of 1746.
Their meeting was coldly professional. They had not seen one another since Bancroft’s transfer nearly a year before, and the deterioration in his health was marked: he had been ill, and he despised the weather and the bleak Scottish capital. He did not have to endure it long: on the fifteenth of the month the army left it, marching in force to the relief of Stirling, besieged by the rebels. The evening of the sixteenth saw them encamped west of Falkirk where it was thought they might engage, near the slopes of a wooded hill skeletal with winter.
The Highlanders were sighted, but no alarm was given. The army under Hawley was oddly purposeless and disorganized, and Hawley himself was unconcerned. No commands were given that night, nor the next, raw morning when the enemy was seen to be moving south of the Torwood, the old forest near Falkirk hill, and forming into some order of battle. Hawley remained supremely confident that he would not be attacked. The army stood to arms at about eleven o’clock when the enemy was seen moving with the Pretender’s standards and colours flying, but stood down after a quarter of an hour. Hawley returned to Callendar House, where he had billeted himself upon the Jacobite Lady Kilmarnock, and demanded his dinner; the rest of the army foraged for a midday meal that would not be found. Shortly before one o’clock a local man hurried into the camp, shouting, “Gentlemen, what are you about? The Highlanders will soon be upon you!”
