Patrick Mercer - To Do and Die

As they rounded the corner thirty seconds late, it was obvious that the groom, bride and the knot of guests were waiting for Himself to arrive. The men were all in uniform, scarlet and blue bisected by white belts, their shakoes set with flowers as the only civilian concession, and at their centre stood Mary. Morgan's stomach tightened at the sight of her. Again, she'd contrived to look entirely out of place beside the men yet totally relaxed with them. A light blue, narrow-waisted, satin dress printed with sprigs of flowers was complemented by the garland set in her hair and the posy that she carried. At her throat was a beaded necklace that could have passed for sapphires whilst her hands and wrists were covered in snowy-white buttoned gloves that Morgan knew to be the height of fashion. She could have strolled arm-in-arm with him in Phoenix Parkor, come to that, Hyde Park and been more than a credit.

Mary smiled at James Keenan. A handsome-enough man, his rough scarlet serge and his weather-reddened, calloused hands contrasted uneasily with his wife-to-be's elegance. He had asked Morgan if he might borrow some of his pomade for his hair and whiskers and applied it liberally. Now he stood on the church steps with his betrothed, his hair glistening in equal measure to the beam on his face.

‘Ah, sir, it's yourself, thank you for coming.’ Keenan, bareheaded, brought his heels together and stiffened whilst a dozen hands flew to the peaks of the shakoes around him. Mary executed a mocking little curtsey whilst she stared into his eyes from below her lashes. She said not a thing.

‘Keenan, I'm so pleased for you both,’ Morgan lied as he pulled off his glove and clasped the groom's hand. ‘May I kiss your future wife?’ Morgan saw how Mary bridled, but such a gesture was required.

‘Go on, Mr Morgan, sir, help yourself.’ For a split second Morgan wondered at Keenan's choice of words, but no, they were innocent enough.

One peach-like, gently powdered cheek was presented with a coolness that struck him like a slap. As his lips brushed against her he caught that same scent that haunted his bedclothes back in Glassdrumman.

‘You've made a wonderful choice of husband, Mary, but I don't know how my family will manage without you.’ None of the meaning was lost on Mary and Tony could almost feel the lash of the reply that such a comment would receive in other circumstances. She said not a thing.

The service was short and the hymns were few. Any lack of melody amongst the singers was disguised by the skill of the fiddlers and the shrieks of Lance-Corporal Healey's toddlers. The poor priest had to contend with their babble whilst the first note of every hymn set them howling.

‘Can't Mrs H tek the little sods out, sir?’ whispered Pegg to Morgan.

He made no reply, for the Irish audience would tolerate outrages from children that no English one would. Earlier, Morgan had had to suppress an oath when one of his glistening toe-caps had been scuffed by a rampaging Healey brat. His mother had paid not the slightest attention.

There could be no honeymoon. With the regiment preparing for war, the best that Private and Mrs Keenan could manage was a ceilidh in the other ranks' canteen. A handful of the wives and their husbands had set about the barn-like structure, weaving ivy and other greenery through some bunting, then setting up Union flags and an enormous, crêpe shamrock. A somewhat crumpled, slightly crookedly-painted banner read, ‘Good luck to you both’. Morgan remembered it from the last wedding party he'd attended there.

The group was pathetically small, clustered around the fire at one end of the hall. The priest came, grinned, downed two glasses of whiskey and fled, leaving Morgan as the only impediment to a wholesale onslaught on the liquor. But the group's temperance lasted about as long as it took for the priest to disappear from sight. As soon as his cassock had floated out, the fiddlers and Pegg started to play. Now tots of whiskey many times the size of that given to the divine were handed round.

It was clear to Morgan that the novelty of his presence would very soon wear off. Taking the first opportunity, he drained his whiskey and strode over to Mary, for it had to be done. ‘May I be the first man to dance with Mrs Keenan?’ He gave a little bow.

‘I'd be delighted, Lieutenant Morgan, sir.’ She stood and dropped him a much deeper curtsey than earlier, smiling and bobbing her ringlets most becomingly.

Morgan did his best at the reels and steps, never a natural dancer. The soldiers and women looked on indulgently, just pleased to see one of Themselves mixing with them. His clumsiness was at odds with Mary's easy grace, a grace that he remembered so well from an entirely different setting.

The dancing done, he pumped hands, slapped backs and left. His walk back to the Mess was the loneliest of his life.

‘Come on, Morgan, there's no point in loafing here.’

The days since the wedding had been frantic as last-minute preparations were made for departure and this was to be the regiment's last evening in Weedon, for tomorrow they were to leave for Portsmouth and embarkation for the mysterious ‘East’. So, Morgan had accepted Carmichael's invitation to join him at his rooms in Weedon to ‘raise Cain’.

Carmichael's idea of Cain-raising held little appeal to Morgan. He already spent more than enough time with the regiment's foremost scion and self-appointed rake and, besides, any quiet moment allowed his thoughts to drift back to Mary, of seeing her all the time yet knowing that she was beyond his reach. But Carmichael had chivvied and cajoled him in the Mess in front of the others. The invitation was issued only to him and whilst he knew that he would have to endure a battery of stings and innuendo, even that was better than being alone.

Meanwhile, Keenan had been in an almost indecent rush to get his master respectably into civilian clothes, out of barracks and off his hands. Normally, there would have been much smoothing of Morgan's beaver hat, the watch chain would have had to be fixed just so, and there would be a final rub of a duster over his boots before the young officer was fit to be seen in public. The married Keenan was a different, more perfunctory creature. Morgan found himself adjusting his own braces, fitting his own cuff-links and pulling his stock to just the right position whilst there was little of the barrack tittle-tattle that made such occasions so invaluable.

Now, instead of learning why Private Ghastly felt himself so aggrieved when Lance-Corporal Nasty told him off for kitchen fatigues (after all, they had been good mates when they were privates together, hadn't they?), there was little except a few scrappy questions about what Russ would look like and whether Turkish girls chewed tobacco. His soldier-servant seemed to be in a tearing hurry to get back to the barrack corner that had been screened off with an army blanket for the newly-weds. Morgan understood the urgency only too well.

Carmichael's rooms were a cliché. A bedroom, sitting room and bathroom looked from the first floor of a small hotel onto the cobbled main street of the town below. The wooden floor was awash with coloured woollen rugs whilst the furniture was old but studiedly comfortable. He'd had the walls redecorated in a fashionable lemon (as advised, Morgan recalled, by some London society piece) and on them hung a selection of hunting, boxing and naval prints. His greatest conceit, though, was a pastel nude that hung above his bed.

Morgan's already failing interest in Cain had dwindled to nothing by the time that he arrived. Carmichael's man had just been sent home and with a fire blazing and the gentle light of the oil lamps, Morgan hoped that the next few hours could be spent in an alcoholic cloud, forgetting his gloom and discussing the adventure that lay before them. He might learn Carmichael's secret of shining whenever the colonel or the adjutant were about – he might even learn to like the ambitious, arrogant bastard a little. But no, Cain was a creature of the streets. In high spirits, Carmichael stepped out, dandified in strapped trousers, a waistcoat of the darkest green, stock and pin and a coat cut fashionably long.