The Street Philosopher. Matthew Plampin

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      ‘Come on, you idle dogs!’ he cried as he went. ‘That the best you can do?’ And then he dived into the bushes, and was gone.

      ‘Raise the alarm!’ ordered an excited major, freshly arrived on the scene. ‘Full alert! At once! Back to the pickets!’

      The soldiers obeyed, and the alarm was raised; but those who had heard the escaping man’s taunt knew that if this really was an enemy spy they pursued, it was one with a distinctly Irish-sounding accent.

      After crashing through the undergrowth to the open ground on its other side, Cracknell turned to check that he wasn’t being pursued. Past the bushes, all that he saw was the billowing greyness of a thick sea fog, blowing in from the bay. The bastards are quick enough to fire from the safety of their barricades, he thought with a triumphant sneer; but giving chase, well, that is another matter entirely.

      Panting from the effort of his dash for safety, Cracknell pushed his cap back on his head, and mopped his brow with a stained twist of handkerchief. Somewhere inside him, he knew that it had been mad folly to try to creep back into camp from the north. But he felt not even the faintest tremor of guilt for the tumult he had caused. The sensation of the bullets slicing through the air so close to him, tugging at his clothes even, had been monstrously exhilarating. And now, off in the distance, the bugles were sounding a piercing reveille across the shadowy fields. Torches were being lit, and a multitude of soldiers were stumbling from the lines of white, conical tents, buttoning up jackets and readying rifles with anxious haste. That it was all in his honour made Cracknell’s chest swell with a perverse pride. He drew a battered silver hip-flask from his coat pocket, raising it towards the agitated camp before taking a long swig. Then he carried on his way at a considerably reduced pace, one hand pressed against a stabbing stitch in his side.

      The Courier tent was pitched at the very edge of the camp, close to a shallow, brackish pond. As he approached it, Cracknell dropped to his haunches, keeping to the shadows. Kitson stood in the light of an oil lamp, the triangles of his shoulder-blades clearly visible through his frock-coat. His junior was talking about the alarm–about how there’d been one the night before that had amounted to nothing, and how such scares were to be expected, given the situation. Cracknell took another gulp from his flask, chuckling softly. Our Mr Kitson’s becoming quite the weathered field operative, he thought. What change can be wrought by expert guidance and a few months’ privation!

      He turned his attention to the focus of Kitson’s little lecture–the illustrator. The boy was nodding along, plainly determined to put a brave face on the possibility of an enemy attack. And yes, Cracknell admitted grudgingly, he was handsome, as Maddy had said, in a bland sort of way; but Christ, so callow! Was O’Farrell deliberately trying to make his life as hard as possible? First an art correspondent, of all bloody things, now a youth so fresh-faced he looked as if he’d just been released from double Latin!

      A large wineskin was passed between them. Cracknell stayed still for a moment or two, listening. Their conversation suggested that a rapport of sorts had been established. So much the better, reflected their senior. It will ease my burden if they’re watching out for one another. Just as long as they don’t forget who’s in charge.

      Then the illustrator happened to glance up–straight into Cracknell’s eyes. He began stammering and pointing. Before Kitson could look around, Cracknell propelled himself forward, charging into the lamplight towards his reporting partner. He was the heavier man by some distance. They collided, tumbling together into the dirt.

      Kitson fought to disentangle himself. The illustrator stood to one side, fists clenched, petrified by uncertainty and incomprehension. Cracknell, now lying on his back, shook with laughter.

      ‘Mr Cracknell!’ Kitson exclaimed breathlessly as he climbed to his feet. ‘What in God’s name—’

      Cracknell lit a cigar, holding a match to its tip and sucking with relish. ‘Just testing your reflexes, Thomas!’ His accent, usually mild, had been thickened by drink. ‘Have to keep you on your toes, my lad! How will you face the Bear if you can’t manage the more good-natured assaults of your leader? Eh?’ He chortled throatily around his cigar, puffing out small jets of smoke.

      Kitson, rubbing at a twisted elbow, did not look convinced. ‘I suppose, then, that I am expected to thank you for the service?’

      With a final loud laugh, the senior correspondent hauled himself up, removed his cigar and took another healthy swallow from his flask. As he smacked his tingling lips, he realised that the young illustrator was staring at him in a manner he did not wholly appreciate. Cracknell smoothed down his wild black beard and made a brusque introduction. Then he noticed a small, dark discolouration at the side of the boy’s mouth.

      ‘Is that a bruise I see there, sir?’ he asked with gruff, slightly menacing good humour.

      The illustrator glanced at Kitson. ‘It is, Mr Cracknell. A lieutenant saw fit to strike out at me after–’

      ‘A lieutenant?’ Cracknell grinned. ‘You work damned fast, my friend! Why, it took me weeks to be struck in the face by an officer, yet you have achieved it in a matter of hours! A fellow after our own hearts, eh, Thomas?’

      Kitson nodded in dry agreement.

      ‘To be perfectly frank with you, though,’ Cracknell went on, inserting the cigar back between his teeth, ‘I don’t quite see the point of your presence here, myself. The Courier’s foreign correspondence is about words, mine and Kitson’s–the combined efforts of Britannia’s two greatest descriptive minds. We are not the Illustrated London News. We do not, in my view at least, need anything as crude as images to convey our experiences.’ He tapped off an inch of ash. ‘But I have been overruled by my editor. Here you are, Smiles, here you bloody well are, and we shall make the best of it, by God!’

      The illustrator looked confused, uncertain whether he had just been endorsed or denounced. ‘I–I thank you, Mr Cracknell. Excuse me though, sir, the name is Styles–S, T, Y—’

      Cracknell waved Styles quiet with a meaty, indifferent hand. ‘There is much fodder in this place, is there not, for your work? Grand panorama and so forth?’ Styles lifted up a leather-bound folder, opening his mouth to speak, but Cracknell did not require an answer. ‘You join us late, of course, but that is no loss. The most memorable scenes Varna had to offer were of hundreds of soldiers, felled by cholera long before they could see battle, being buried in ditches–and somehow I don’t think this was quite what that hopeless old muff O’Farrell envisaged when he signed you up.’

      The senior correspondent retrieved the wineskin, dropped when he had tackled Kitson, and hefted its sloshing weight. He smiled approvingly; they had made a good inroad into its contents. If there was a man of spirit and courage who was impervious to the robust charms of liquor, Richard Cracknell had certainly never met him.

      ‘No, young Smiles, this is where the real drama will be staged,’ he went on, ‘here in the Crimea. This peninsula, y’see, has a rich strategic value. It is the promontory from which the Russian Bear exerts its baleful influence over the Black Sea. Thirty miles in that direction,’ he pointed off into the night, ‘lies the mighty fortress-port of Sebastopol; and over yonder,’ he swung his arm in an expansive arc, ‘across the waves, is poor Turkey, Europe’s helpless invalid, ailing and weak–and bound to the British Lion by sacred bonds of honour.’ Cracknell’s excitement was mounting. ‘The Bear has been swiping at this feeble bird of late, snapping at it hungrily–so we will go to Sebastopol and we will knock it down. We have let this Bear grow too hale and hearty, Mr Smiles, and altogether too large, СКАЧАТЬ