Patrick Mercer - To Do and Die

The young moon winked through the shutters. Glassdrumman, the warm, shabby, peeling Georgian hall that was the Morgan family's Cork home was deep in sleep. Mary Cade pulled her nightshift down to cover her bottom, wrapped an errant blanket about them both and moved herself a fraction on top of Tony Morgan, their passion spent. The chambermaid and the young officer had had their fill of one another and now was the time for talk.

‘Maude Hawtrey's lovely – she sits a horse so well, almost like a man. And it's obvious to anyone that you're getting on famously, so much in common, scriptures and the like.’ Mary held Morgan's face in both her hands, his dark-fair hair and whiskers tousled, her nose an inch from his, murmuring, smiling so that he'd have to search for the barbs.

‘Mary, please, why are you always like this afterwards?’

‘Mary, please.’ Even in a whisper she mimicked him well enough, catching the Englishness that he'd cultivated over the past couple of years. ‘And why are you always like this afterwards? You're all promises and passion with me here, but downstairs I'm nothing to you, am I – d'you think I'm some sort of eejit?’ In an instant the warmth and smile had disappeared. Her face was now serious, the honey had gone from her voice and she neglected that little gesture of sweeping a jet-black lock of hair from out of her eyes.

Without warning her sticky weight was off him. She slid from under the blanket and onto the woollen rug beside the bed, hands on her hips, a curling mane of hair down her back, chin and breasts petulantly thrust forward. Morgan recognized the signs and unconsciously pulled the covers up against the storm.

‘What happiness d'you think you'll get there, Lieutenant Mister-bloody-Morgan? Your Da will end up with some Prod stronghold and you'll be at his and the Hawtreys' beck and call for the rest of your days, like a wee puppy.’ Mary hissed her venom. He lunged and tried to grab her wrists. Occasionally she could be tamed, won round by kisses and enveloping arms but this time she wouldn't be turned. She left the dawn-lit room as swiftly as her pleasure had cooled.

Morgan winced as the bedroom door banged – did she want everyone to know? And she was wrong of course. Maude would never glance at Tony Morgan whilst he was soldiering; besides, a war could change his world. But whatever lay ahead with stringy Maude, the smell, warmth and sheer sparkle of Mary would stay with him. He groped to find his watch.

‘So, the young lion's awake and prepared to grace us with his presence at last.’ Billy Morgan, a widower at fifty-nine, grey curls hanging too long about the collar of his badly-starched shirt, his waistcoat unbuttoned and loose, greeted his son as he came into breakfast.

The big dining room was barely warm from the peat fire that the servants had started before any of the family were awake, lighting up the walls and heavily decorated ceiling where the grey March morning light hardly penetrated. Silver entrée dishes jostled for space on the sideboard, little spirit lamps flickering below them to keep the porridge, eggs, bacon and kidneys warm for the Morgans and their guest.

‘I am, father: good morning, Colonel, I hope you slept well?’

Tony had learnt not to encourage his father's heavy jokes, particularly when others were there; to do anything else would only spur him on. Now Billy's oldest friend, Colonel Dick Kemp, grinned across the table at him.

‘I slept as well as your father's lumpy mattress would allow: I've had better nights in a snake-filled storm ditch with jackals licking my balls; I only stay at Glassdrumman out of pity for the old boy.’ When Tony had come back for home leave a week ago, he'd found Kemp deeply ensconced there, staying for a full three months of his furlough from India where he commanded a battalion of Bengal infantry. The two officers, despite the gap in age and rank, had soon formed an easy bond in the face of Billy Morgan's wit that sent the banter crackling between the three of them.

‘Less of the “old boy”, Kemp. Just because I was a-soldiering before you'd thrown a leg across a drab, don't come the “Victor of Aliwal” with me!’ As a very young man, Billy Morgan had seen some gentle service in the West Cork Militia, patrolling the Atlantic coastline against the last vestiges of Napoleon's hordes whilst Kemp had just been starting on his career as an ensign of the Honourable East India Company. And that career had been a placid one until Kemp, if his accounts were to be believed, had beaten the Sikhs almost single-handed, smashing them as effectively as they had snapped one of his legs at the Battle of Aliwal eight years before.

Tony knew the signs by now. Kemp's sharp, black eyes were shining, he was full of piss and vinegar, keen for fun at any price, but if the two, older men started one of their verbal skirmishes now, there would be no end to it: distraction was the answer.

‘What have the papers to say today, Father?’ Tony asked as he sprinkled cinnamon and sugar over his porridge.

‘Well, those fools in London and Paris have finally declared war.’ Billy shook the paper out, the headlines bellowing the formal recognition of a war that had been underway for several months already.

‘Tell me something that surprises me, Father. Here, Keenan, look at this: at last we're at war.’ Private James Keenan, Tony's batman in the 95th whom he'd selected for the post as much for the fact that he was a fellow Corkman as for his competence, had brought more coffee for his master. When the Regiment was sent on leave before embarking for foreign service, Keenan had chosen to spend the time comfortably fed and watered by his master in Glass-drumman rather than with his own family scraping an existence from the soil just a dozen miles away in Clonakilty. Now he narrowed his eyes and laboured over the letters of the headline.

‘So, we're to have a fight, then, your honour. But where will it be?’ Keenan asked the question to which none of them knew the answer.

Six months before, the Russian Admiral Nachimov had sunk an ageing Turkish fleet at Sinopein the Black Sea; since then war had been an inevitability. The Turks had already been hard at it with the Russians, each pounding the other inconclusively: now the formal entry of the Allies meant that war could start in earnest, plunging Europe into her first serious conflict since Waterloo.

‘Good question, Keenan.’ They all deferred to Kemp for he knew the Russians well – or so he claimed. ‘We saw more than enough of the Russians' tricks up on the Frontier after that nonsense at Kabul in forty-two. They're crafty buggers an' John Turk will need all the help he can get if he's to throw them out of Moldavia and Wallachia. You'll be scampering up and down the Danube, I'd guess.’

The mention of two such exotic names stalled the discussion for a moment, adding to Kemp's stature, before Tony cut in, ‘You're probably right, Colonel, but everybody seemed to have a different view back in Weedon.’

The 95th were stationed at the newly-built barracks in Weedon in Northamptonshire. Just six weeks before the commanding officer had ordered a general parade and told them all that they were to start, ‘warlike preparations’.

‘All we've been told is that we're to be ready to go to, “The East” and there's been some craic over that, I can tell you. Kingsley, the adjutant– you remember him, Father, he transferred in from the Cape Mounted Rifles – says we'll go wherever the Turks want us, but Hume, the senior major, reckons that the French will want us to have a go at the Muscovites' fleet in Sevastopol up to the north, in the Crimea.’

‘The French,’ Billy Morgan said it as if he were clearing phlegm, ‘how in the name of God have we got involved with those rogues?’