A Close Run Thing Read Free Page B

leaning forward on the rolled cloaks over the saddle arches, and a good number were smoking clay pipes. Corporal Collins found Edmonds not in his appointed position to the front of the regiment but as a serrefile to the left of the first squadron, doubtless attempting, but vainly, to conceal his frustration with the regiment’s enforced inactivity. Edmonds’s bad humour was exacerbated, too, by the worst toothache he had ever known. He had already taken two sizeable draughts of laudanum that morning, more than three times the quantity prescribed as efficacious by the regimental surgeon, and it would be many hours before he could expect to have the offending molar drawn by a tooth-operator. He certainly had no intention of risking the surgeon’s pelican after that hamfisted fool had dislocated one poor trooper’s jaw earlier in the week.
    Scarcely had Corporal Collins begun his report but Edmonds began to rage. ‘Damn it, all he had to do was sit on a hill and watch for a few Frenchmen fool enough to cross the canal! What in God’s name …?’
    The major’s facility with words extended also to those of the barrack room. Indeed, they frequently seemed his natural and preferred idiom.
    ‘No, sir, wait, that’s not all.’
    Edmonds’s notorious temper, and his present irritability, would have unnerved many an NCO, but Strange had picked his man well: the victor of the single combat with the French colonel would not be frighted by the major’s anger. Besides, the cannier NCOs (and Collins was one of the canniest) knew what lay beneath it. The corporal did what he had done many times before, since the days when he had been a young dragoon in the then Captain Edmonds’s troop: he affected blithe unawareness, and pressed his report with determination. The major listened to the account of the attack on the battery, and what followed, with mute but growing disbelief until another pang of excruciating pain made him explode again. ‘Why, for mercy’s sake, was he placed in arrest, then? What the devil is going on up there?’
    Corporal Collins judged it beyond the responsibilities of his rank to comment, though he could for certain have given a perceptive enough appreciation. Instead he sat silent: opinions about the staff would have to wait for the canteen. The major, taking a strong but not altogether effective grip of his anger, and biting hard into a lint wad soaked in oil of cloves, summoned ‘A’ Troop’s leader who, as one of the senior captains, was also the officer commanding Number 1 Squadron.
    ‘Captain Lankester, I may presume that you heard our corporal-galloper, and it will be no shave, I’ll warrant. A very pretty mess indeed! I wish you to send an officer at once to the flank picket to relieve Serjeant Strange.’
    Another spasm jerked him as if a musket ball had struck his jaw. ‘Corporal Collins, you stay here. Go and rejoin your troop!’ he barked.
    Joseph Edmonds reined about to face front again, and cursed audibly and even more foully than before. It was not the pain so much – he had endured worse under the surgeon’s knife during his service – but the way that all before him seemed to be unravelling, like a loose horse-bandage. He had not the slightest control over matters, and seemingly no influence. He began wishing Lord George Irvine were back; that damned
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’s bullet which had smashed the colonel’s shoulder at Croix d’Orade three days earlier had been about the worst-timed shot of the campaign! He was relishing this acting command right enough, albeit without even a brevet promotion to lieutenant-colonel (as he might have expected), but he knew General Slade despised him – a conclusion it was not difficult to come by, although Slade seemed to despise everybody, especially if they showed the remotest chance of doing something that might reflect his own inadequacy.
    ‘Laming will relieve Serjeant Strange, sir,’ Lankester informed him after dispatching his lieutenant to