An Infamous Army (Alastair-Audley Tetralogy 4)

Upon her first setting out Judith had felt perfectly satisfied with her own appearance. She was wearing a round robe, under a velvet pelisse of Sardinian blue. A high-crowned bonnet, lined with silk and ornamented with a frilled border of lace, gloves of French kid, a sealskin muff, and half boots of jean, completed a very becoming toilet. Beside her sister-in-law, who had chosen to wear drab merino cloth over olive-brown muslin, she looked elegant indeed, but from the moment of Barbara’s descending the steps of the house in the Rue Ducale she felt herself to have been cast quite in the shade.

Barbara was wearing a habit of pale green, resembling the dress of a hussar. Her coat was ornamented with row upon row of frogs and braiding; silver epaulettes set off her shoulders; and silver braiding stretched half way up her arms. Under the habit, she wore a cambric shirt with a high-standing collar trimmed with lace; a cravat of worked muslin was tied round her throat; and there were narrow ruffles at her wrists. Set jauntily on her flaming head was a tall hat, like a shako, with a plume of feathers adding the final touch of audacity to a preposterous but undeniably striking costume.

Lady Taverner was shocked; Judith, who considered the dress too daring for propriety, yet could not suppress a slight feeling of envy. She could fancy herself in such a habit.

‘How can she? Such a quiz of a hat!’ whispered Lady Taverner.

However much she might agree with these sentiments, Judith had no notion of spoiling the day’s pleasure by letting her disapproval appear. She leaned out of the carriage to shake hands with Barbara, saying with the utmost amiability: ‘How delightfully you look! You put me quite out of conceit with myself.’

‘Yes, I’m setting a fashion,’ replied Barbara. ‘You will see: it will be the established mode in a month’s time.’

Lady Vidal, who had come out of the house with her husband, merely bowed to Judith from the top of the stone steps, but Vidal put himself to the trouble of coming up to the barouche to thank Judith for her kindness in joining the expedition. He said in a low voice: ‘Bab is a sad romp! One of these days her crotchets will be the ruin of her. But your presence makes everything as it should be! I shan’t conceal from you that I don’t above half like that fellow Lavisse.’

Not wishing to join in any animadversions on one who was for this day in some sort her host, Judith passed it off with a smile and a trivial remark. Her dislike of Lavisse was as great as Vidal’s, but she was forced to acknowledge the very gentlemanlike way in which he had received the news of the augmentation of his party. Not by as much as the flicker of an eyelid did he betray the mortification he must feel. His civility towards the ladies in the barouche was most flattering; he was all smiles and complaisance, prophesying fine weather, and displaying a proper solicitude for their comfort.

‘Don’t you wish you were coming, Gussie?’ Barbara called.

‘My dear Bab, you must know that of all insipidities I most detest a family party,’ returned Augusta.

Barbara bit her lip, glancing towards the barouche as though she saw it with new eyes. Suddenly impatient, she said: ‘Well, why do we wait? Let us, for God’s sake, start!’

The Count, who was giving some directions to Judith’s coachman, looked over his shoulder with a smile of perfect comprehension. ‘En avant, then!’ he said, reining his horse back to allow the barouche to pass. When it had moved forward with Peregrine riding close behind it, he fell in beside Barbara, and said with some amusement: ‘You repent already, and are asking yourself what you do in this galère.’

‘Oh, by God, I must have been mad!’ she said.

‘Little fool! I admire the guard set about you by your staff officer. It is most formidable!’

‘It was not his doing. The notion was Lady Worth’s, and I fell in with it.’

‘Impayable! Why, for example?’

She laughed. ‘Oh, to make you angry, of course!’

‘But I am not at all angry; I am entirely amused,’ he said.

They were making their way down the Rue de la Pépinière in the direction of the Namur Gate. Once outside the walls of the town, the road led through some neat suburbs to the Forest of Soignes, a huge beechwood stretching for some miles to the south of Brussels, and intersected by the main Charleroi Chaussée. The Forest was almost entirely composed of beech trees, their massive trunks rising up out of the ground with scarcely any underwood to hide their smooth, silvery outlines.

Judith had often ridden in this direction, but this was her first visit to the Forest in springtime. She was enchanted with it, and even Lady Taverner, whose spirits were always low during the first

months of pregnancy, was moved to exclaim at the grandeur of the scene. Sir Peregrine, in spite of already having got his uppers splashed by the mud of the unpaved portion of the road, seemed pleased also, though he would not allow the vista to be comparable to an English scene.

For the first mile or two the party remained together, Barbara and Lavisse riding at a little distance behind the barouche, but from time to time pressing forward to exchange remarks with its occupants. Shortly after the Forest had been entered, however, Barbara announced herself to be tired of riding tamely along the road. She waved her whip in a rather naughty gesture of farewell, and set her horse scrambling up the bank of the wood. The Count lingered only to assure Judith of the impossibility of her coachman’s missing the way, saluted, and followed Barbara.

‘I do think her the most unaccountable creature!’ exclaimed Lady Taverner. ‘It is very uncivil of her to make off like that, besides being so indiscreet!’

Judith, herself disappointed in this fresh evidence of flightiness in Barbara, endeavoured to give her sister-in-law’s thoughts another direction.

It was inconceivable to Lady Taverner that any female who was betrothed to one gentleman could desire a tête-à-tête with another, and for some time she continued to marvel at Barbara’s conduct. Judith did not attend very closely to her remarks; she was lost in her own reflections. She could appreciate the cause of Barbara’s perversity, but although she might sympathise with that wildness of disposition which made convention abhorrent to Barbara, she could not but be sorry for it. She was more than ever convinced that this spoiled, fashionable beauty would make Colonel Audley a wretched wife. Her imagination dwelled pitifully upon his future, which must of necessity be a stormy affair, made up of whims and tantrums and debts; and she could not forbear to contrast this melancholy prospect with the less exciting but infinitely more comfortable life he would enjoy if he would but change Barbara for Lucy.

She was roused from these musings by hearing Peregrine announce a village to have come into view. She looked up; the trees flanking the road dwindled ahead in perspective to the village of Waterloo. A round building, standing on the edge of the Forest, half bathed in sunlight, presented a picture charming enough to make her long for her sketchbook and water colours.

They had by this time covered some nine and a half miles, and were glad to be leaving the shade of the Forest. In a few minutes the village was reached, and Lady Taverner was exclaiming at the size and style of the church, a strange edifice with a domed roof, standing on one side of the chaussée. Opposite, among a huddle of brick and stone-built cottages, was a small inn, with a painted signboard bearing the legend, Jean de Nivelles. There was little to detain sightseers, and after pausing for a short while to look at the church, they drove on, up a gentle acclivity leading to the village of Mont St Jean, three miles farther on.

Here the chaussée diverged, one fork continuing over the brow of a hill, and crossing, a little over half a mile beyond Mont St Jean, an unpaved hollow road running from Wavre to Braine l’Alleud, towards Charleroi; and the other running in a south-westerly direction towards Nivelles. The Nivelles road, which the coachman had been instructed to follow, was straight and uninteresting, bordered by straggling hedges, and proceeding over undulating ground until it descended presently between high banks into a ravine extending from the village of Merbe Braine to Hougoumont.

The Château was situated to the south of the hollow road from Wavre, which here, having taken a turn to the south-west, crossed the Nivelles chaussée; and to the east of the chaussée, from which it was approached by an avenue of fine elm trees. The Count’s directions had been exact; the coachman turned into the avenue without hesitation; and the carriage bowled along under the spreading branches, and soon passed through the northern gateway of the Châeau. The travellers found themselves in a paved courtyard, surrounded by a motley collection of buildings.

The Château was one of the many such residences to be found in the Netherlands, a semi-fortified house, half manor, half farm. The Château itself, built of stone and brick, was a pretty house, with shuttered windows; there was a small chapel at the southern end of the courtyard; and opposite the Château, on the western side, were some picturesque barns. A gardener’s cottage and a cowshed made up the rest of the buildings, which were all clustered together in a friendly fashion, and bathed, at this moment, in pale spring sunlight.