скачать книгу бесплатно
‘Il est mort, Claude.’ The woman gently coaxed the boy away.
The captain looked at Jack. ‘Did Tranville kill him?’
Jack shook his head. ‘I did not see.’
‘Deuce. What will happen to her now?’ The captain gazed back at the woman.
Shouts sounded nearby, and the captain straightened. ‘We must get them out of here.’ He gestured to the lieutenant. ‘Landon, take Tranville back to camp. Ensign, I’ll need your help.’
Lieutenant Landon looked aghast. ‘You do not intend to turn her in?’
‘Of course not,’ said the captain sharply. ‘I’m going to find her a safe place to stay. Maybe a church. Or somewhere.’ He glared at both his lieutenant and at Jack. ‘We say nothing of this. Agreed?’
‘He ought to hang for this,’ the lieutenant protested.
‘He’s the general’s son,’ the captain shot back. ‘If we report his crime, the general will have our necks, not his son’s.’ He tilted his head towards the woman. ‘He may even come after her and the boy.’ The captain looked down at Edwin, now quiet. ‘This bastard is so drunk he may not even know what he did.’
‘Drink is no excuse.’ After several seconds, the lieutenant nodded his head. ‘Very well. We say nothing.’
The captain turned to Jack. ‘Do I have your word, Ensign?’
‘You do, sir.’ Jack did not much relish either father or son knowing he’d been here.
Glass shattered nearby and the roof of a burning building collapsed, sending sparks high into the air.
‘We must hurry,’ the captain said, although he paused to extend his hand to Jack. ‘I am Captain Deane. That is Lieutenant Landon.’
Jack shook his hand. ‘Sir.’
Captain Deane turned to the woman and her son. ‘Is there a church nearby?’ His hand flew to his forehead. ‘Deuce. What is the French word?’ He tapped his brow.
‘Église?’
‘Non, no église, capitaine,’ the woman replied. ‘My…my maison—my house. Come.’ ‘You speak English, madame?’
‘Oui, un peu—a little.’
The lieutenant threw Edwin over his shoulder.
‘Take care,’ the captain said to him.
The lieutenant gave a curt nod, glanced around and trudged off in the same direction they had come.
The captain turned to Jack. ‘I want you to come with me.’ He looked over at the Frenchman’s body. ‘We will have to leave him here.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Come.’ The woman, with a despairing last glance towards her husband, put her arm around her son’s shoulder and gestured for them to follow her.
They made their way through the alley to a doorway facing a narrow street not far from where they had been.
‘My house,’ she whispered.
The door was ajar. The captain signalled them to stay while he entered. A few moments later he returned. ‘No one is here.’
Jack stepped inside. The place had been ransacked. Furniture was shattered, dishes broken, papers scattered everywhere. The house consisted only of a front room, a kitchen and a bedroom. He kicked debris aside to make room for them to walk. Captain Deane pulled what remained of a bed’s mattress into the front room, clearing a space for it in the corner. The woman came from the kitchen with cups of water for them. The boy stayed at her side, looking numb.
Jack drank thirstily.
‘Can you keep watch?’ the captain asked after drinking his fill. ‘I’ll sleep for an hour or so, then relieve you.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Jack replied. He might as well stand watch. He certainly could not sleep. Indeed, he wondered if he would ever sleep again.
They barricaded the door with some of the broken furniture, and Jack salvaged a chair whose seat and legs were still intact. He placed it at the window and sat.
The captain gestured for the woman and her son to sleep on the mattress. He sat on the floor, his back leaning against the wall.
Outside the sounds of carnage continued, but no one approached. Jack stared out on to a street that looked deceptively innocent and peaceful.
Perhaps by morning the carnage would be over, and Jack would be able to return to his camp. Perhaps his major and the others in their patrol would still be alive. Perhaps someone, before this war was over, would put a sword through Edwin Tranville’s heart for his part in this horror.
Jack reloaded his pistol and kept it at the ready. In the stillness, images flooded into his mind, over and over, flashing like torture, forcing him to relive the horror of this day.
His fingers itched to make the images stop, to capture them, imprison them, store them away so they would leave him alone.
The sky lightened as dawn arrived, but Jack still heard the drunken shouts, the musket shots, the screams. They were real. Even though it was day, the plundering continued.
Captain Deane woke and walked over to Jack, standing for a moment to listen.
‘By God, they are still at it.’ The captain rubbed his face. ‘Get some sleep, Ensign. We’ll wait. Maybe things will quieten down soon.’
Jack gave the captain his seat. He glanced at the corner of the room where the woman and boy lay. The boy was curled up in a ball and looked very young and vulnerable. The woman was awake.
Jack surveyed the room and started picking up the sheets of paper scattered about the floor. He examined them. Some sides were blank.
‘Do you need these?’ he asked the woman, holding up a fist full of paper.
‘Non.’ She turned away.
Some of the sheets appeared to contain correspondence, perhaps from loved ones at home. Jack felt mildly guilty for taking them, but his notebook was stored safely in his kit back at his regiment’s encampment and he’d not realised how badly he would need paper.
He found a wide piece of board and carried it to a spot of light from another window. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he placed the board on his lap and fished in his pockets for his wooden graphite pencil. Jack placed one of the sheets of paper on the board, and heaved a heavy breath.
He started to draw.
The images trapped in his brain flowed from his fingers to the tip of his pencil on to the paper. He could not get them out fast enough. He filled one, two, three sheets and still he was not done. He needed to draw them all.
Only then, after he’d captured every image, would he be free of them. Only then could he dare to rest. Only then could he sleep.
Chapter One
London—June 1814
It was like walking in a dream.
All around him, history paintings, landscapes, allegories, portraits hung one next to the other like puzzle pieces until every space, floor to ceiling, was covered.
Jack wandered through the exhibition room of the Royal Academy of Art, gazing at the incredible variety, the skill, the beauty of the works. He could not believe he was here.
His regiment had been called back to England a year ago. Napoleon had abdicated, and the army had no immediate need for his services. Jack, like most of the young officers who’d lived through the war, had risen in rank. He’d been promoted to lieutenant, which gave him a bit more money when he went on half-pay. This gave him the opportunity to do what he yearned to do, needed to do. To draw. To paint. To create beauty and forget death and destruction.
Jack had gone directly to Bath, to the home of his mother and sister, the town where his mentor, Sir Cecil Harper, also lived. Sir Cecil had fostered Jack’s need to draw ever since he’d been a boy and he became Jack’s tutor again. Somehow the war had not robbed Jack of the ability to paint. At Sir Cecil’s insistence, he submitted his paintings to the Royal Academy for its summer exhibition. Miraculously the Royal Academy accepted two of them.
They now hung here on the walls of Somerset House, home of the Royal Academy, next to the likes of Lawrence and Fuseli and Turner, in a room crowded with spectators who had not yet left the city for the summer.
Crowds disquieted Jack. The rumble of voices sounded in his ears like distant cannonade and set off memories that threatened to propel him back into the nightmare of war.
A gentleman brushed against him, and Jack almost swung at him. Luckily the man took no notice. Jack unclenched his fist, but the rumble grew louder and the sensation of cannons, more vivid. His heart beat faster and it seemed as if the room grew darker. This had happened before, a harbinger of a vision. Soon he would be back in battle again, complete with sounds and smells and fears.
Jack closed his eyes and held very still, hoping no one could tell the battle that waged inside. When he opened his eyes again, he gazed up at his sister’s portrait, hung high and difficult to see, as befitted his status as a nobody. The painting grounded him. He was in London, at Somerset House, amid beauty. He smiled gratefully at her image.
‘Which painting pleases you so?’ a low and musical voice asked.
At Jack’s elbow stood a young woman, breathtakingly lovely, looking precisely as if she had emerged from one of the canvases. For a brief moment he wondered if she too was a trick his mind was playing on him. Her skin was like silk of the palest rose, beautifully contrasted by her rich auburn hair. Her lips, deep and dusky pink, shimmered as if she’d that moment moistened them with her tongue. Large, sparkling eyes, the green of lush meadows and fringed with long mink-brown lashes, met his gaze with a fleeting expression of sympathy.
‘Do say it is the one of the young lady.’ She pointed to his sister’s portrait.
Tearing his eyes away from her for a moment, he glanced back at the painting of his sister. ‘Do you like that one?’ he managed to respond.
‘I do, indeed.’ Her eyes narrowed in consideration. ‘She is so fresh and lovely. The rendering is most life-like, but that is not the whole of it, I think—’ she paused, moistening her lips, and more than Jack’s artistic sensibilities came alive with the gesture ‘—it is most lovingly painted.’
‘Lovingly painted?’ Jack glanced back again at the canvas, but just for a second, because he could not bear to wrest his eyes from her.
‘Yes.’ She spoke as if conversing with a man to whom she had not been introduced was the most natural thing in the world, as if she were the calm in this room where Jack had just battled old demons. ‘The young lady’s expression. Her posture. It all bespeaks to emotion, her eagerness to see what the future holds for her and the fondness the artist has for her. It makes her even more beautiful. The painting is quite remarkable indeed.’
Jack could not help but flush with pride.
He’d painted Nancy’s portrait primarily to lure commissions from prospective clients, but it had also given him the opportunity to become reacquainted with the sister who’d been a child when he’d kissed her goodbye before departing for the Peninsula. Nancy was eighteen now and had blossomed into a beauty as fresh and lovely as her portrait had been described. The painting’s exquisite admirer looked to be no more than one or two years older than Nancy. If Jack painted her, however, he’d show a woman who knew precisely what she desired in life.
She laughed. ‘I ought not to expect a gentleman to understand emotion.’ She gazed back at the painting. ‘Except the artist. He captures it perfectly.’
He smiled inwardly. If she only knew how often emotion was his enemy, skirmishing with him even in this room.
Again her green eyes sought his. ‘Did you know the artist has another painting here?’ She took his arm. ‘Come. I will show you. You will be surprised.’
She led him to another corner of the room where, among all the great artists, she had discovered his other work.
‘See?’ She pointed to the painting of a British soldier raising the flag at Badajoz. ‘The one above the landscape. Of the soldier. Look at the emotions of relief and victory and fatigue on the soldier’s face.’ She opened her catalogue and scanned the pages. ‘Victory at Badajoz, it is called, and the artist is Jack Vernon.’ Her gaze returned to the painting. ‘What is so fascinating to me is that Vernon also hints at the amount of suffering the man must have endured to reach this place. Is that not marvellous?
‘You like this one, too, then?’ Jack could not have felt more gratified had the President of the Academy, Benjamin West himself, made the comment.
‘I do.’ She nodded emphatically.
He’d painted Victory at Badajoz to show that fleeting moment when it felt as if the siege of Badajoz had been worth what it cost. She had seen precisely what he’d wanted to convey.
Jack turned to her. ‘Do you know so much of soldiering?’
She laughed again. ‘Nothing at all, I assure you. But this is exactly how I would imagine such a moment to feel.’ She took his arm again. ‘Let me show you another.’
She led him to a painting the catalogue listed as The Surrender of Pamplona. Wellington, who only this month had become Duke of Wellington, was shown in Roman garb and on horseback accepting the surrender of the Spanish city of Pamplona, depicted in the painting as a female figure. The painting was stunningly composed and evocative of classical Roman friezes. Its technique was flawless.
‘You like this one, as well?’ he asked her. ‘It is well done. Very well done.’
She gave it a dismissive gesture. ‘It is ridiculous, Wellington in Roman robes!’
He smiled in amusement. ‘It is allegorical.’
She sent him a withering look. ‘I know it is allegorical, but do you not think it ridiculous to depict such an event as if it occurred in ancient Rome?’ Her gaze swung back to the painting. ‘Look at it. I do not dispute that it is well done, but it pales in comparison to the other painting of victory, does it not? Where is the emotion in this one?’
He examined the painting again, as she had demanded, but could not resist continuing the debate. ‘Is it not unfair to compare the two when the aim of each is so different? One is an allegory and the other a history painting.’
She made a frustrated sound and shook her head in dismay. ‘You do not understand me. I am saying that this artist takes all the meaning, all the emotion, away by making this painting an allegory. A victory in war must be an emotional event, can you not agree? The painting of Badajoz shows that. I much prefer to see how it really was.’
How it really was? If only she knew to what extent he had idealised that moment in Badajoz. He’d not shown the stone of the fortress slick with blood, nor the mutilated bodies, nor the agony of the dying.
He glanced back at his painting. He’d not deliberately set about depicting the emotion of victory in the painting of it. He’d meant only to show he could do more than paint portraits. With the war over, he supposed there might be some interest in military art. If someone wished him to paint a scene from a battle, he would do it, even if he must hide how it really was.
Jack glanced back at his painting and again at the allegory. Some emotion, indeed, had crept into his painting, emotion absent from the other.
He turned his gaze upon the woman. ‘I do see your point.’
She grinned in triumph. ‘Excellent.’
‘I cede to your expertise on the subject of art.’ He bowed.
‘Expertise? Nonsense. I know even less of art than of soldiering.’ Her eyes sparkled with mischief. ‘But that does not prevent me from expressing my opinion, does it?’
Jack was suddenly eager to identify himself to her, to let her know he was the artist she so admired. ‘Allow me to make myself known to you—’
‘Ariana!’ At that moment an older woman, also quite beautiful, rushed up to her. ‘I have been searching the rooms for you. There is someone you must meet.’
The young woman gave Jack an apologetic look as her companion pulled on her arm. ‘We must hurry.’
Jack bowed and the young woman made a hurried curtsy before being pulled away.
Ariana. Jack repeated the name in his mind, a name as lovely and unusual as its bearer.
Ariana.
