As Meat Loves Salt. Maria McCann

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СКАЧАТЬ I took the flask, swallowed about half, and handed it back.

      He waved his hand. ‘Drink more,’ and he stayed close as if to say, I don’t go until you do.

      I sat up and looked about me for the other man I had heard, but he was gone. On both sides of the road, pressed around small fires, were soldiers wrapped in garments that had once been bright red but now were faded to yellow or filthied to brown, except where patches had escaped the mud and smoke of battle. At one fire nearby a boy sat watching us. He smiled and waved to my new-found friend.

      ‘We got some water down you earlier. Drink anyway. I’ll fetch you some victual.’ Ferris sprang up and walked off, stopping to speak with the lad I had noticed and clap him on the shoulder before passing behind a group of men and out of my sight. Pale blue smoke blew across me, smelling of home, and a thin rain, like spit between the teeth, chilled my neck. I could see now the cropped hair of the young boys round the fires. Some of them, and most of the older men, still wore theirs long. I put my hand up to my head; someone had cut my hair close to the scalp. There it lay on the grass, a knot of wet black vipers.

      ‘Feel better?’ He was back, squatting easily by my side.

      ‘Did you do this?’

      Ferris glanced at the dead man’s locks on the grass. ‘No.’ He held something out to me, but I could not take my eyes away from what had once been myself, and was also Izzy and Zeb.

      ‘Here,’ he pulled my hand away from my shorn skull, ‘best eat without looking.’ It was bread and cheese, the bread hard as your heels and the cheese popping with mites, but I grabbed at it.

      ‘Not too fast if you haven’t eaten lately, you’ll hurt yourself,’ said Ferris. ‘Easy, easy!’ He snatched the cheese from me.

      ‘Why are you feeding me?’

      ‘Call it your ration. You’re in the New Model Army.’

      ‘You mistake. I am—’

      ‘We lack men. What, going to lie down and die are you?’ He laughed.

      ‘But I’m weak, unwell. I’ve been starving.’

      ‘Starving!’ The grey eyes mocked me. ‘Granted you’re somewhat hungry. We see it all the time. And that suit of clothes! We thought we’d found us a deserter, a Cavalier officer. Until you spoke.’

      ‘I said nothing to them.’

      ‘O yes. While I was bringing you round. And struggled. We stood on your coat to keep you down.’ He offered me the bread and cheese again. ‘Some of the lads thought we’d caught up with Rupert of the Rhine.’

      ‘He’s a devil,’ I mumbled into the tough crust.

      ‘So they said, and they were about to take a short way with you, but I told them, Prince Rupert’s not a man you’d find lying in the road. What is your name?’

      ‘I – well, I have a mind now to be Rupert.’

      ‘Aye, who wouldn’t be! Roast goose for him, no bread and cheese.’

      ‘Were you told to enlist me?’

      ‘No. I am squeamish – would not leave a man to die of thirst on the highway – so I came to see if you were well enough to enlist. You’re well enough now,’ and as I made to protest, ‘now.’ He jerked his hand towards one of the fires. ‘Yonder’s your corporal – he’ll teach you your drill.’

      I considered. ‘Is it all bread and cheese?’

      ‘Not always that good! But there’s beef sometimes, and eight pence a day – when they pay it.’

      He got up and put out his hand to me, but my hipbones, dry as the ones in Ezekiel, grated as I struggled upright, so that my weight pulled him down; laughing, he was forced to leave go.

      While I was lying in the road the day had passed into evening, and I was glad Ferris walked before me as it was hard to discern either form or order in the groups of soldiers lying round the fires. He stopped in front of a man whose hair was so dirty it might have been of any colour, and was soiled with more than mud: as I looked closer I saw brownish blood all down the right side of his face, cracked where the sweat had oozed up under it.

      ‘Prince Rupert come to serve under you, Sir,’ said Ferris. I bowed awkwardly. The men around laughed.

      ‘And what might be his real name?’ asked this gentleman, whose voice was pinched with pain.

      ‘If I may, Sir,’ I put in before Ferris could spoil my game, ‘I will take the name Rupert, since it seems I am known by it already.’

      He waved his hand as if to say, what was that to him?

      I was put down in the Officer’s book as Rupert Cane – the first name that came to mind – and ten shillings given into my hand.

      ‘That’s your entertainment money,’ said Ferris, who was come with me.

      ‘Entertainment?’

      ‘Money on your first coming in. Keep tight hold, you won’t see that much again.’

      I was handed a red coat, two shirts, breeches, and hose; also a leather snapsack and a cap with dried blood on it, as if peeled from the head of a corpse.

      ‘I can’t get this coat on,’ I said, holding it up.

      The man shrugged. ‘Nothing I can do there. One yard of cloth, that’s the regulation.’

      ‘Suppose you gave him two, and we got a tailor to run them together,’ suggested Ferris.

      The fellow was willing enough. I thanked him from my heart and Ferris took up the coats, saying he knew a man would undertake the work for a shilling.

      As we walked across the camp I felt the food warming me and longed for more. To take my mind off it, I asked Ferris what would happen the next day.

      ‘We will see to your coat…and you’ll be drilled in the pike,’ he added.

      ‘You are surely not a pikeman!’ I said, without thinking.

      He stopped and gave me a hard look. ‘I have outlived many pikemen.’

      ‘I did not mean—’ but my voice faltered, for I had meant it. There was a pike over the fireplace of the great hall at Beaurepair, and all the men had lifted it at one time or another. Ferris was of too slender a make to carry such a weapon. It might be, I thought, that he had some little thing to do, far from the van of the fighting. But carrying a pike was better than lying a corpse by the roadside, and for this I owed him thanks. I smiled on him and he at once returned the smile.

      ‘If you would know,’ he said, ‘I was a musketeer. But a man that knew me in London thought I might be more use elsewhere.’

      ‘Where – why?’

      ‘I am not bad at the mathematics, and some of his best were just then dead. So now I help with artillery,’ he said as we seated ourselves at a fire. ‘Really СКАЧАТЬ