Don Gutteridge - Vital Secrets

They rode a little ways along the track before they rounded a bend and the road behind them vanished. The quartermaster took the pipe out of his mouth and picked up the conversation. “I knew your uncle Frederick, as it happens. I’ve known him for most of my adult life.”

Frederick Edwards was the brother of Marc’s adoptive father, Jabez Edwards.

“Ah, I see,” Marc said with a rush of feeling he could not quite control. “You and Uncle Frederick fought together, then?”

“We did indeed,” Jenkin said, knocking the ashes out of his pipe against the pommel of his saddle. He sat back, loosened his grip on the reins, and let the bay find its own trotting pace.

“Where did you meet?”

“At Sandhurst. We were both striplings, really, not yet twenty, but puffed up with the arrogance of youth and spoiling for a chance to unseat General Bonaparte.”

“You didn’t have to wait long,” Marc said with a meaningful sigh. “Those were momentous days for an army officer.”

“Don’t get me started on that story. Once I get going in that direction, only a cannonball can stop me.”

After an hour’s stop at the inn of Perry’s Corners to feed, water, and rest the horses and to refresh themselves with what the quartermaster called a “traveller’s toddy,” the duo set out again. For a long while neither spoke. Jenkin returned to the pleasures of his pipe, and Marc let the vast silence of woods and sky settle serenely where it wished.

“Lieutenant Fred Edwards, your uncle Frederick, and I fought side by side for eight years in Spain,” Jenkin said, as if their earlier exchange had not been interrupted. “We crossed the Pyrenees and walked all the way across France to the gates of Paris. We helped bring the Corsican bastard to his knees.”

“It was Uncle Frederick’s stories that encouraged me to withdraw from the Inns of Court, give up the law, and join the army,” Marc said. “It never occurred to me then that Britain might not have any more wars to fight or tyrants to depose.”

“There will always be wars somewhere, lad. Of that you can be sure. And I’m not certain one should wish too hard to have them visit us again. Your uncle Fred may have left a few of the less glorious particulars out of his fireside tales.”

“It’s true, I must admit, sir, that I did wish for some modest insurrection to break out when I first arrived here, with just enough skirmishing for me to prove myself to myself and to my country.”

“From what I hear at the garrison, you’ve gone some ways in that direction already.”

Marc made no reply to the compliment. After a while he asked, “Did you know Uncle Jabez?”

“We met, yes. He spoke of you as his son.”

Marc smiled. “I call him uncle, to everyone’s confusion, because that is the term of endearment I used for him before he adopted me when I was five.”

“I know. I met your real parents once. Fine people they were.”

“Thank you, sir. I myself have only the vaguest recollection of them, a few memories of my father as he took me about the estate, and of course my mother knitting in front of a huge stone hearth. But the feeling of once having been loved and cared for has never left me.”

“You were the only child that Thomas and Margaret Evans ever had.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Cholera is a terrible form of the plague,” Marc said, alluding to the disease that had felled his parents within days during the summer of 1815. But he was thinking now of young Aaron McCrae, Beth’s brother, struck down by typhoid fever, yet another of the recurring pestilences sent by God, it was said, to keep His people humble and in their proper place.

“Did you meet me, then?” Marc asked, that odd possibility having just occurred to him.

Jenkin laughed and said, “My word, no. You were not yet born. I came down to the estate with your uncle Fred sometime before ought-six, it must have been, because it was in September of that year that we were ordered to Devon to defend our sovereign soil against invasion by the French. From that day until we reached Paris in 1814, we were soldiers and little else.”

“You didn’t fight at Waterloo with Uncle Frederick?”

“No. That was the only battle we didn’t stand side by side. I was wounded near Paris, nothing serious-until gangrene threatened to set in. The surgeons cut out half of my left buttock, and I was ordered home, standing at attention all the way!”

“But you remained in the army?”

“By then it was the only life I knew. I was thirty-some years old and looked fifty. But I took up a less hazardous line of duty, thanks to Sir John Colborne, as quartermaster of the 24th, a post I’ve occupied with some satisfaction now for over twenty years, at home and abroad.” And here he rubbed a gloved hand across his ample paunch.

“I think it was about ought-five when Uncle Jabez gave up his law practice in London and returned to manage the estate his father had left him.”

“And you were not yet a gleam in your father’s eye.”

“So it was likely that summer that you came down to Kent with Uncle Frederick.”

“Most likely. What I do remember clearly is that we were treated like royalty by Jabez. I think he missed the bachelor parties and goings-on in London, and we were gay company, as I recall. Your neighbour, Sir Haughty Trelawney, condescended to invite us to a county fête where Fred and I got regally pissed and made inappropriate advances towards a pair of ageing debutantes.”

“I’ve always suspected Uncle Frederick liked the ladies.”

“They weren’t all ladies,” Jenkin roared. Then, in a more serious tone, he added, “But don’t get me wrong, lad. Once Captain Edwards met Delores that year in Paris, he never looked twice at another woman.”

“Which is why he’s stayed in France all these years.”

“Indeed.”

“He came over for wonderful extended visits about every second year. But I’ve never met my cousins, nor my aunt Delores.”

“Nor your other aunt, of course,” Jenkin said casually, then stopped abruptly.

Marc’s horse, an all-purpose mare borrowed from the garrison stables, stumbled on a rut and lurched against the quartermaster’s gelding before righting herself. Marc reached out and put a hand momentarily on Jenkin’s pack. “It’s all right, sir. I know about Uncle Jabez’s younger sister.”

Marc was relieved to see the smile return to Jenkin’s face, where it was a near-permanent feature. Whatever horrors lay locked behind it-and there must have been many during his service in the long, mad Peninsular War-they did nothing to diminish its affable glow.

“I met dear, sweet Mary that same summer,” Jenkin said, more warmly than sadly. “She couldn’t have been much more than fifteen. A regular sprite, she was, a lively woodland nymph, racing over the hills between your place and the great Trelawney estate like a leggy colt just out of the chute. All blond tresses and freckles.” Jenkin squeezed his eyes shut with a slight wince of both cheeks. “I can see her limber and wholesome, as if she were here before me at this very moment.”

Marc did not interrupt the major’s reverie for several minutes. Then he said, “She died before I was born, or so I was led to believe. Uncle Jabez would never tell me much about her, even when I grew old enough to be more than curious about a young woman who might well have been a surrogate mother to me, as Jabez was my father. All I’ve ever known for certain is that she went up to school in London and died there suddenly and tragically.”

“Would you like to know more, lad?”

“You know what really happened?”

Jenkin nodded.

Marc said, “Please. Tell me about Aunt Mary.”