A Marriage of Convenience Read Free Page A

a few stray shots. Kneeing his horse round, Clinton watched the loaders ramming home the charge and inserting the shell. To the instructions of their lieutenant, the gunners turned the elevating screw and then inched the muzzle to the left. After a long stare down the line of sight, the young officer came over to Clinton and saluted.
    ‘Ready, sir,’ he said briskly, looking up at him with a badly disguised smirk. ‘Should wake them up a treat, sir.’
    ‘You won’t miss?’ asked Clinton with a touch of the familiar irony which marked the relations of cavalry officers with their counterparts in the Royal Horse Artillery.
    ‘Not unless it moves, sir.’
    Clinton smiled.
    ‘Give the order then.’
    A moment after the shouted command, the kneeling bombardier pulled the lanyard and the gun recoiled sharply. The shock waves from the report made Clinton’s horse curvet and whinny, but he quickly controlled him. As the smoke cleared, Clinton saw a gaping hole in the roof of the barn and a jagged rent in the upper part of the wall. He heard the lieutenant shout:
    ‘Stop the vent and sponge.’
    In the silence that followed, Clinton raised his field-glass to see if he could catch any movement in the windows of the house, but there was none. Several seconds passed, and then, to the letter of his orders, the sergeant-major yelled from his advanced position in the root-field:
    ‘You’re surrounded. Come out and surrender, or we’ll blast you out.’
    Clinton waited tensely. To his right the gunners were reloading; behind him he heard an occasional horse snort and the creak of saddlery; but no sound or sign came from the farmhouse. If the sight of what a single shell had done to the barn were insufficiently impressive, he was prepared to drop a couple more into the yard directly in front of the house before issuing a final ultimatum. If this intimidation failed, and the men stayed where they were, Clinton had no intention of carrying out his threat of massacre. Instead he would be obliged to storm the place; and with every vestige of surprise thrown away, he knew the process would be bloody on both sides. The danger had always been that the Fenians would be so well aware of the government’s longstanding reluctance to increase support for the rebels by making martyrs, that they would recognise the shots as a ruse to get them into the open. But Clinton had never given this sort of logical thought any chance against the instinctive terror struck in the hearts of recently awakened men by shells bursting within yards of their hiding place. His worst fear was that they had received advance warning; even a few minutes would have given them time to steel their nerves for holding out. He was agonisingly conscious that unless they had already panicked, every passing moment increased their chances of thinking rationally.
    Without waiting any longer, Clinton gave the order for the next round to be fired. The shell exploded ten feet from the house and blew in the door and every visible window-frame. The brickwork was pitted and scarred in a wide arc. Clinton watched with a sinking heart as the dust slowly settled and still nothing happened. With a great effort of control, he called cheerfully to the artillery officer:
    ‘Perhaps they went out for a walk.’
    ‘Just the weather for it, sir.’
    Ten more seconds—an eternity to Clinton—and then a sight that brought a derisive cheer from the gun-crew: a white sheet was thrust out of a window by an unseen hand. Then very hesitantly some half-dozen men came out into the yard holding up their hands. Before Clinton had time to enjoy his relief, a rapid stutter of smallarms firing from Dick’s men on the fringes of the wood told him that the majority of the Fenians had preferred to try their luck at the back. Now the threat of having to storm the farm had been lifted from him, he felt only mildly disappointed not to have achieved a tidy surrender.
    Detailing a corporal and three troopers