Soul

A moment later a Russian soldier hurls himself into the trench. James wrestles him to the ground. There is nothing but this: the shapeless mass of enemy, urine, fear, the stench of the young soldier’s breath as they roll over and over. James’s face presses against the mud of the trench, dirt filling his nostrils as the soldier reaches for his neck; James kicks out with his feet, twisting his body and jabbing with his elbow. The youth falls back, spread-eagled for a second. Lifting his bayonet, James thrusts it into his enemy’s throat. For Stanley, he whispers, for Stanley. The Russian, lying there, his face draining to a ghostly pallor, looks up in amazement at the exact diamond of sky James had been staring at moments before. His helmet tips off and now James can see. Can see the sapphire eyes, the jutting Slavic cheekbones, the beardless chin and the terrible youth of him.

It was a wailing, the hollow moaning of a male banshee, that woke Lavinia. The grey of early dawn splattered across the insides of her closed eyelids as she buried her head further into the pillow, but the wailing continued. She climbed out of bed and, after pulling on her dressing gown, stumbled across the corridor to her husband’s bedroom.

The bed sheets were twisted around his thrashing body; his lips were pulled back over his teeth, his skin taut to the skull. His eyes were open, the pupils dilated, and darted from one invisible opponent to another as he fought the blankets.

‘James!’

His body stiffened; his eyes closed as he fell back onto the pillows. A second later he woke. ‘Again?’ he murmured.

Lavinia nodded. James stared at her, shivering as the sweat dried on his skin. He looked utterly exhausted. ‘Oh God.’

‘I wish I could help you.’

‘I do not need help!’

Wanting to hold him, but knowing he was unpredictable when his night fears possessed him, she stayed her hand.

‘It’s just the disease of an old soldier, that’s all. The dead stain our dreams, all of us who have fought and killed.’

Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, he felt blindly for the hypodermic syringe he had purchased from Ferguson’s a week ago at the recommendation of his doctor. The medic had promised that morphine injected into the muscle tissue would free the Colonel of his laudanum addiction. Bringing the needle down to his thigh, Huntington pushed the drug into his flesh. Loathing the sight of the thick spike breaking the skin, Lavinia looked away.

He lay back against the pillows and waited for the opiate to slither its caressing way through his body. It was like watching a cloud moving across the sun, Lavinia thought; the muscles in his face relaxing as the pain lifted like a veil.

Suddenly, she felt a dampness across the front of her nightdress—lactation. As if on cue a whimpering sounded from the adjoining room. Then the child began to scream.

‘Go to him if you must,’ James muttered without opening his eyes.

Slipping through the half-open door of the nursery, Lavinia felt in the dark for a candle. Her son’s small fists gripped the top of the wooden rails, his screaming face a scrunched rag. After lifting him out of the cot, she collapsed into an armchair and freed her breast from the neck of her nightdress. The child, who had his mother’s heavy mouth and pronounced chin and his father’s deep-set eyes, reached for the nipple greedily.

As he suckled, Lavinia stared drowsily at a small portrait of James and his mother, dimly illuminated by the candle. The grim-faced young woman, in a riding outfit and brandishing a crop, sat on a poised black stallion. Beside them, the infant James, in an identical riding coat, perched solidly on a small pony—a diminutive patriarch. Even at the age of five he bristled with territorial masculinity.

It had been painted for James’s father as a miniature to take with him when soldiering. Eduard Le Coneur had been a young naval officer—and an Huguenot refugee from the first wave of the French revolution. He had died prematurely after contracting rabies from a dog’s bite—an inglorious death which had embittered his young wife. The Viscountess had reverted to her maiden name and had never married again.

She displayed little affection for her son, other than a paranoia that, like his father, Death might claim him in the most unexpected places. It was an obsession that caused the young boy much mortification during his time at Eton, resulting in a bombardment of letters to the house master about the school’s sanitary conditions, the food, the dangers of the playing fields, and any other element that could bring about her child’s untimely demise.

Upon leaving Eton, determined to rid himself of his mother’s stifling protectiveness, James apprenticed himself to a distant cousin, a general in the army, who was happy to assist in the young man’s promotion. James began his military career at twenty, enthusiastically accepting the most dangerous posts across the Empire. Then at thirty, blessed with a generous annual income and a fashionable residence in Mayfair, he resigned from the army and, inspired by the example of Lt General Pitt Rivers, pursued a career as an anthropologist, joining expeditions into Australia, the Amazon and Africa. In the manner of the French philosopher Rousseau, he adopted the belief that primitive man was pristine, free of evil and sin—a hypothesis that was essentially optimistic, and one that Lavinia subscribed to.

The Crimean War broke out in 1853 and James, now forty-two, volunteered. After surviving malaria, smallpox and yellow fever, he had concluded that, thankfully, he had escaped his mother’s fatalism. Deeming himself blessed and therefore invincible, the intrepid Colonel began to test his theory by placing himself in increasingly dangerous situations, both on the battlefield and off. When his second officer and closest friend, Stanley Dickenson, was killed, his conjecture was confirmed. He had told Lavinia, Death had chosen to ignore him over and over. He had convinced her that it had been both a sobering and an invigorating notion but one that had shook him from his inherent lassitude. In civilian life, it propelled him into the opium dens of Shanghai, the brothels of Buenos Aires and, finally, to the shamans of the Amazon.

The child stopped suckling and fell instantly asleep at the breast. Lavinia closed her eyes, not wanting to wake Aidan. The diminishing world shrank to the scent of her son’s wispy hair and the sweetish smell of breast milk. She was woken from her doze by the click of the door.

‘It has to stop, Lavinia.’ James stood over them, swaying slightly, his face puffy from sleep. ‘The breast-feeding is unbecoming for a woman of your status. Besides, the child is old enough to be weaned.’

‘But it’s what all good mothers do.’

r /> ‘This is not Ireland and you are my wife!’

His raised voice woke the child who started grumbling. Shocked, Lavinia drew her son back to her breast. How dare he prevent her from raising her child the way she intended. Surely that was a mother’s prerogative. Can he care more for social mores than plain instinctive sense, she wondered.

‘I believe it to be better for the child,’ she began.

‘Lavinia, we will not debate this. I have made myself clear.’

Lavinia tried to control her fury. I refuse to poison my milk with anger, she thought. Her mind struggled impotently against her husband’s authority, before she decided she had little choice. She was expected to obey him.

The Colonel looked down at Aidan pushing blindly against Lavinia’s breast. He had been surprised at the magnitude of feeling he held for his son. Even now, at this early stage, he recognised traits in the child that he knew to be his own: Aidan’s impatience; his fascination for anything natural—animals, plants, the shape of his eyes and mouth, the long thick fingers and broad palms. These were all his.

Reaching out, he lifted the sleeping child to his chest. Immediately the boy’s hand curled around his father’s pyjama collar, making a tiny fist.