Until the Colours Fade Read Free Page B

so easily routed by an incompetent force.
    ‘Do you know about the prisoners?’ he asked quietly.
    ‘Don’t need to. Rioters, strikers, looters – makes no difference. No magistrate transfers prisoners unless he expects trouble in a town.’
    Three more shots came from the lower ground to the right. Crawford compressed his lips and led Tom back to the ‘fly’.
    ‘God knows when they’ll get the road cleared,’ he sighed.
    Crawford had a peculiar effect on Tom: he was impressed by his decisiveness and air of authority, but chilled by his manner which he found aloof and cold. He could not fathom him at all; there was something enigmatic about him, an almost frightening quality. In the fitful light cast by the flames outside, Tom had noticed Crawford’s eyes: a deep blue-grey colour under dark lashes; eyes at times remote and dull, as if he were weary and bored, at others glinting with a sharpness that was disconcerting.
    The two men sitting side by side were very different in appearance : Strickland’s features being softer, less angular, his lips fuller, and his expressions and mannerisms gentler, more fleeting and less precise. Crawford’s skin was bronzed, Tom’s of an ivory pallor by contrast with his dark eyes and the black loose curls that framed his face. Crawford’s hair was cut severely short, not waved nor brushed forward in the new fashion. He looked, Tom thought, about thirty, roughly five years older than himself.
    Tom found the damp confined interior of the carriage oppressive with its smell of straw and musty leather. The silence worried him, and he was wondering whether he had been asked into the ‘fly’ solely because it offered a degree of cover from stray shots, when Crawford turned to him abruptly and extended a gloved hand.
    ‘My name’s Crawford. Magnus Crawford.’
    ‘Thomas Strickland.’
    ‘My people come from Trawden way. Yours?’
    How typical of his class, thought Tom, that he should have named the nearest village, when the house, Leaholme Hall, was one of the three largest in the neighbourhood.
    ‘My parents are dead. I come from London.’
    ‘You’re a friend of Braithwaite?’
    ‘His father’s sitting for me. I’m an artist.’
    Magnus pulled out a flat silver flask and tossed it to Tom.
    ‘Some brandy, Mr Strickland?’
    Tom refused, not knowing whether the offer had been made purely as a matter of form because Crawford wanted some himself , or whether he was really expected to accept. During the moment or two that he held the flask, he made out a few words of an inscription: ‘… Presented to Major Crawford … brother officers … garrison at Kandy … esteem and gratitude ….’ There was also a date, which he did not take in.
    Crawford frowned, evidently noticing the direction of Tom’s eyes and the slight hesitation before he returned the flask.
    ‘Ever been to Ceylon, Mr Strickland? Visitors usually enjoy the scenery. Excellent for pictures, I daresay.’
    Tom shook his head and felt his cheeks burning, at what he thought was a reproof. After all the man had offered him the thing.
    ‘Shouldn’t I have read it? I’d be pleased if people were grateful to me for anything.’
    ‘Wouldn’t that depend on what they were grateful for?’ asked Magnus with a trace of mockery. ‘I led two companies against a mob of ill-fed, badly armed natives, a riot really. The Government called it a rebellion. The ones who didn’t run away were tried and most of them shot. I carried out some of those sentences .’ He had said this with a harshness that did not conceal the pain the memory caused him. ‘I was not being mock-modest, Mr Strickland.’
    ‘Why on earth have you kept it, feeling as you do?’
    ‘In case I grow forgetful. You see I’m not going back. I’ve sold my commission.’
    Tom had a sudden recollection of something in the papers about a recent House of Commons Select Committee. The Governor of Ceylon had been recalled because of the evidence of two army