Page 49 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)

T he former soldier’s once-grand red jacket hung in tatters on his thin frame. His straight flaxen hair was long and unkempt, his young-old face gray with chronic ill health, his empty right pants leg knotted below the knee. But his eyes were bright with intelligence, and when he spoke, his accent was that of a gentleman.

“Why in the name of all that’s holy would you want to write an article about former soldiers and sailors?” he asked Hero when she explained to him her reason for conducting her current series of interviews.

“Because people need to know about the hardships our veterans are facing,” she said, looking up from writing Sgt. Alexander Watson on a new page in her notebook.

“You think they don’t know already? All they need do is look around.”

“Some people find it easy to close their eyes.”

He was sitting on a low stone wall bordering Artillery Place. Lying to the south of St. James’s Park, this was a humble part of London, filled with charity schools, almshouses, institutions such as Westminster Hospital and Emmanuel Hospital, and St. Margaret’s overcrowded churchyard. Its proximity to various Army barracks and armories—and the Bridewell—meant that it was also the haunt of a number of former soldiers.

“Nice luxury to have, I suppose,” he said, turning his head to stare off across the nearby irregularly shaped square to where an underfed man in the ragged green coat of a rifleman had his head bowed as he stood in earnest conversation with a quietly sobbing woman. The woman held a babe cradled in her arms; another child who looked to be perhaps five clutched at her mother’s shabby skirts.

Hero studied Sergeant Alexander Watson’s sun-darkened, half-averted face. “How old were you when you enlisted?”

“Sixteen,” he said, still watching the impoverished family. “As a lad I was always army mad, but when you’re the eighth of eight sons born to a Nottinghamshire vicar, there’s no way your father can afford to buy you a commission. He was planning to apprentice me to an apothecary, but that wasn’t the life I thought I wanted. So I ran off and enlisted. I had this idea that I’d be able to wrangle a commission somehow.” He huffed a soft, humorless laugh. “Obviously, that never happened.”

“Which regiment were you with?”

“The 59th Foot, 2nd battalion. We were with the lot that had the stuffing kicked out of us in Spain back in ’08 and ’09, then rotted our guts out in the Walcheren Campaign before being sent back to the Peninsula in 1812.”

“You went over the Pyrenees with Wellington?”

Watson grimaced as he shifted the stump of his right leg, then nodded. “We did. After that they sent us to Ireland, before quickly shipping us back to the Continent again—Belgium this time—when Boney decided to try for a rematch.”

“You were wounded at Waterloo?”

A ghost of a smile tightened the fan lines beside the man’s soft blue eyes. “Noooo,” he said, drawing out the vowel as he shifted his leg again. “The 59th didn’t make it to Waterloo in time. My leg got smashed on the way home. They loaded eight hundred of us on two transports—three hundred on the Seahorse and five hundred on the Lord Melville . Then they sailed us into a howling gale off the coast of Ireland.”

Hero felt her breath back up in her throat, for she knew where he was going with this. “Which ship were you on?”

“The Seahorse . They saved a little over a hundred from the Melville that night, but only twenty-four of us made it off the Seahorse . I was the only one out of my mess that made it. There was another transport went down in the same storm with a different regiment—I don’t recall which one. But altogether there were nearly a thousand British soldiers lost that night, and the French didn’t need to fire a shot.”

“Do you have a pension?”

Again that crinkling of the eyes that suggested a smile. “I do, yes, ma’am. I suppose it’s one of the advantages of having received a gentleman’s education—you know to get your letters of commendation, make sure your papers are in order, and how to lay your case before the worthy Commissioners of Chelsea Hospital. I get five pence a day, delivered quarterly.” He nodded to the ragged, barefoot little boy sweeping the nearby crossing for a stout, middle-aged woman in black bombazine and a feathered hat who stood waiting on the corner, her arms crossed at her ample bosom. “It’s more than he makes, I’ll grant you that. But a man could hardly support a wife and family on it, so it’s a good thing I don’t have either one, isn’t it?”

Five pence a day worked out to about seven pounds a year, which was less than a quarter of what Hero paid her housemaids—in addition to providing them with room and board.

“I was down in Chelsea for a while,” he was saying, “trying to help some of the other lads get their pensions out of the board. But it was so infuriating it started getting to me, so I thought it best I come away for a bit. There was this one lad I knew—no arm, coughing up blood—threw himself in the Thames when the Commissioners denied his pension. They told him pensions are only for good soldiers, and he’d been flogged once. The way they act, you’d think they wish the lot of us had just died over there rather than coming home to be a burden on the government. They say they can’t help us any more than what they do because the country’s so deeply in debt. Except why are we in debt? Because they spent hundreds of millions of pounds they didn’t have just to put old King Louis back on his throne!”

Watson nodded to the ragged family, now crossing the square toward the Blue Coat School. “You think they care who’s sitting on the throne of France? What they care about is finding work, and feeding their children, and keeping a roof over their heads, and maybe getting someone to teach their little ones how to read and write so they don’t grow up as ignorant and poor as their fathers and grandfathers before them. Seems to me that’s the kind of thing their government should be caring about, too.”

Hero found her grip on her pencil tightening. He wasn’t the first veteran she’d heard voice such thoughts. The endless war against France might have dampened popular enthusiasm for the revolutionary philosophies of the eighteenth century, but it hadn’t extinguished them. And the increasing woes of the postwar years were giving the ideas of the Radicals a new impetus. It was one of the government’s greatest fears, she knew—that educated, reform-minded men like Alexander Watson would join up with the poor of the working class and give coherent, reasoned voice to their grievances.

She said, “Have you ever thought of getting into politics?”

He laughed and spread his arms wide. “And how would a man like me go about doing that?”

“Have you considered going back to Nottinghamshire?”

His arms fell to his sides as he drew a deep, shaky breath. “I did go back, actually—right after I first finished wrangling with the Chelsea Commissioners and passed the board. But…” His expression grew wistful. “Everything’s different up there now. It’s not the same place I left twelve years ago. So many people I once knew are dead, and the ones that are still alive…well, they’ve changed. I suppose the truth is, I’ve changed, too; I’m not the same person I used to be.” He turned his head to stare out over the square again, to where Hero’s coachman was watering his horses at a rustic pump. “It just won’t leave me, you know. The war, I mean. I’ll see a hedgerow and my heart’ll start pumping. I’ll think, Who’s hiding behind that? Or I’ll hear a loud bang and jump half out of my skin. People up there thought I was crazy—I know because I heard them whispering about me. So, after a couple of months, I left and came back down here again—well, to Chelsea. I’ll probably go back there in another day or two. Somebody’s got to help those lads. So many of them haven’t the faintest notion how things work or what they need to do.”

He was silent for a moment, watching a small, lithe man in an eye patch and the worn uniform of a hussar turn down Brewers Row. “This morning, when I was up by the barracks, I heard some officers complaining about how hard their lives are, trying to live on half pay. I’d like to see them try to get by on five pence a day—or nothing at all, which is what most veterans get. But do you know how much the government has given Wellington? The better part of three-quarters of a million pounds! Four hundred thousand pounds for being a duke, plus another two hundred thousand for I forget what. And then when Parliament voted to award eight hundred thousand pounds to the Peninsular War survivors, what do they do but turn around and give fifty thousand of that to Wellington, too. Know how much men like me got out of it? Somewhere between two and six pounds—if we were lucky. Just think how many starving veterans and their families the government could have helped with Wellington’s three-quarters of a million pounds. What man needs three-quarters of a million pounds? How could he even think about taking it, knowing how the rest of us are suffering? It’s like we were bleeding and dying just to make him and his lot rich. Who was it that said the comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor?”

“I believe that was Voltaire,” said Hero.

“So it was. Back before the Revolution, he tried to warn the French government about where letting their people starve was going to take them, but they didn’t listen to him, did they? All those years we spent fighting the French, I guess the one thing it did do was unify the people of this country, didn’t it? Enemies are good for that. But now the French king is back on his throne and it’s the people here who are starving.” He gave a faint, disgusted shake of his head. “You know what else Voltaire said? He said, ‘If this is the best of all possible worlds, then what must the others be like?’?”

Hero was surprised into letting out a choked laugh. “ Candide , right?”

He nodded. Then his smile faded away into something bleak. “Lately, I’ve been wondering, if I could go back in time to my sixteen-year-old self, would I do it all again? Become a soldier, I mean.”

“Do you think you would?”

“I don’t know. If I hadn’t joined the Army—if I’d stayed in Nottinghamshire and become an apothecary—I know I’d always have regretted it. I mean, I wouldn’t have had any idea what soldiering was really like, now, would I? I’d probably have imagined myself performing all sorts of grand heroics, getting showered with endless honors and all that nonsense. I wouldn’t know about the muddy graves that will forever haunt my dreams, or what it’s like to try to hold your friend’s guts in while he dies, or what a village smells like when every living thing in it—every single thing—has been killed by one of our artillery barrages. It must be a nice feeling, to be able to look back on your life in satisfaction and say, Yes, I made the right decisions. I like the way my life turned out; this is the life I wanted to live.” He paused. “But that wouldn’t have been me.”

“?‘All’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds,’?” Hero quoted softly.

And this time, he was the one who laughed.

It was when Hero was crossing the open, dusty square that she saw him again—the small, lithe man in the worn dark blue jacket and gray overalls of a hussar. He was coming back from Brewers Row, walking swiftly toward her. Except this time he wasn’t wearing an eye patch.

It might not mean anything, of course. The eye patch could be a ruse he donned for begging and removed when it wasn’t needed. The worthies of the Society for the Suppression of Vice were always accusing beggars of such subterfuges. It was a harmless enough deception. And yet Hero found herself hastening her step toward her carriage as her hand crept into the opening of her reticule to close around the handle of her small muff gun.

Then the man broke into a run.

She saw the gleam of the knife in his hand; saw the determined slant of his thin lips and her footman’s frightened face as he started toward her in alarm.

There was no time to draw the small brass-mounted pistol from her reticule. He was four feet away when she thumbed back the flintlock’s hammer and brought up the reticule to fire through the silk.

She saw dark red blood spurt from the hussar’s black neckcloth as the bullet tore through his throat. Saw him falter; saw his eyes widen with shock and fear. He was young, she realized with a stab of regret; surely no more than eighteen or twenty, with bright green eyes and sun-streaked fair hair and a thin, fading scar that curved around the side of his face. She saw his knees buckle, his body swaying.

Then his face tilted up toward the sky as his legs crumpled and his eyes rolled back in his head.