The Ugliest House in the World Page 3

  Of course, Wilby had known the fart was coming, but it was much louder and more prolonged than he had anticipated, and the look of surprise on his face would have given him away even if Major Black, to his left, the port already extended, had not said, "Wilby!" in a sharp, shocked bellow.

  "Sorry, sir," Wilby said. His face burned as if he'd been sitting in front of the hearth at home, reading by the firelight. He risked one quick glance up and around the table. "Sorry, sirs." Chaplain Pierce was looking down into his lap, exactly as he did when saying grace, and Captain Ferguson's mustache was jumping slightly at the corners, like the whiskers of a cat that had just scented a bowl of cream. Lieutenant Chard, however, sat just as he appeared in his photographs, his huge pale face tipped back like a great slab rising above his thick dark beard.

  As for Bromhead, he looked only slightly puzzled. "What?" he said. "What is it?"

  Wilby, staring down at the crumbs of Stilton on his plate, groaned inwardly. Bromhead's famed deafness was going to be the end of him.

  He looked up under his brow as Bromhead's batman, who had just placed the fruit on the table, leaned forward and whispered all too audibly in his ear, "The lieutenant farted, sir."

  "Chard?" Bromhead asked. Behind his beard, the older lieutenant turned the color of claret. Bromhead himself wore only a thin mustache and sideburns, and Wilby thought he saw a flicker of a smile cross his face.

  The batman leaned in to him again. "Wilby," he whispered.

  "Ah," Bromhead said sadly. He stared at his glass. An uncomfortable silence fell over the mess table. Wilby's mortification was complete. And, perhaps because he wished himself dead, a small portion of his recent life flashed before his eyes.

  The lieutenant had been suffering from terrible flatulence all the way from Helpmakaar. At first he had thought it was something to do with his last meal (a deer shot, several times, by Major Black, which he could hardly have refused in any case), but as the column approached Rourke's Drift, his bowels seemed in as great an uproar as ever. Fortunately, the ride had been made at a canter and he'd been able to clench his mount between his legs and smother the worst farts against his saddle—although the horse had tossed her head at some of the more drawn-out ones—but as they came in sight of the mission station, the major spurred them into a trot and then a gallop so that their pennant snapped overhead like a whip. Legs braced in the stirrups, knees bent, his body canted forward over his mount's neck, the lieutenant had had no choice but to release a crackling stream of utterance.

  At first there was some undeniable relief in this, but as each dip and rise and tussock jarred loose further bursts, he was obliged to cry "Ya" and "Ho," as if encouraging his horse, to mask the worst outbreaks. He was grateful that over the drumming of hooves and the blare of the bugler who had hastily run out to welcome them to camp, no one seemed to notice, but the severity of the attack made him doubt that he had not soiled his breeches, and at the first opportunity he sought out the latrine to reassure himself.

  Having put his mind at rest, seen to his tentage, and placed his horse in the care of the groom he shared with the other junior officers, Wilby had taken himself off to the perimeter of the camp. Despite the newly built walls and the freshly dug graves—they were overgrown already, but their silhouettes clearly visible in the long pale grass—it was all familiar to him from the articles in the Army Gazette, and in his mind he traced the events of the famous defense that had been fought there not three months before.

  Fewer than a hundred able-bodied men, a single company plus those left behind at the mission hospital, had fought off a force of some five thousand Zulus—part of the same impi that had wiped out fifteen hundred men at Isandhlwana the previous day. They had held out for upwards of ten hours of continuous close fighting and inflicted almost five hundred casualties on the enemy. It was a glorious tale, and Wilby didn't need to look at the page from the Gazette that he kept in his tunic pocket to recall all the details. He had read and reread it so often on the ride out from Durban that it felt as fragile as an illuminated manuscript. "You'd think it was a love letter," the major had scoffed.

  He should be rejoicing to be here, standing on the ground of the most famous battle in the world, and yet he felt only the churning of his wretched stomach. Tomorrow they would ride out, the first patrol to visit the site of Isandhlwana since the massacre.

  He stared off in the direction they would take in the morning. The ferry across the drift was moored about two hundred yards away, and on the far bank the track ran beside the river for a half-mile or so and then cut away over a low rise and out of sight. Wilby found himself thinking of the Derbyshire countryside near his home ... and fishing—up to his thighs in the dark cool water, feeling the pull of the current but dry inside his thick leather waders. He supposed the sight of the river must have brought it to mind.

  It was Ferguson who found him out there. He saw the captain running toward him, his red tunic among the waving grass, shouting his news.

  "Wils, we are invited to dine with Bromhead and Chard. You, myself, the major, and Pierce."

  "Truly?" Wilby caught his friend's arm, and Ferguson stooped for a moment to catch his breath. Then he shook himself free and took a step back, squared his shoulders and held up his hand as if reading from a card.

  "Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard request the pleasure of Major Black and his staff's company for dinner in their mess at eight o'clock."

  Of course, it was a little unusual for two lieutenants to invite a major to dinner, but by then Bromhead and Chard were expected to be made majors themselves—not to mention the Victoria Crosses everyone was predicting—and the breach of etiquette seemed altogether forgivable to Wilby. A dinner with Gonville Bromhead and Merriot Chard was simply the most sought-after invitation in the whole of Natal in the spring of 1889.

  "Good Lord, Fergie," he said. "Why, I must change."

  He had spent the next hour in his suspenders and undershirt, polishing the buttons of his tunic, slipping a small brass plate behind them to protect the fabric and then working the polish into the raised regimental crests and burnishing them to a glow. Next he worked on his boots, smearing long streaks of bootblack up and down, working them into the hide with a swift circular motion and then bringing the leather to a shine with a stiff brush. He thought hard about the thin beard and mustache he had begun to grow three weeks before and with a sigh pulled out his razor. Ferguson, waxing his own mustache, paused and watched him in silence, but Wilby refused to meet his eye. His mustache would never be as good as the captain's anyway. Fergie's handlebar was justly famous in the regiment, said to be wide enough for troopers riding behind him to see both ends. Wilby knew that wasn't quite true. The captain had made him check, with Wilby standing behind him trying to make out both waxed tips. In the end they had had to call in the chaplain, and standing shoulder to shoulder, about five feet behind Ferguson, Wilby and Pierce had each been able to see a tip of mustache on either side.

  Wilby lathered the soap in his shaving mug and applied it with the badger-hair brush his father had given him before he'd come out on campaign. The razor was dull and he had to pause to strop it, but he managed to shave without drawing blood.

  Finally, he extracted his second set of epaulets and his best collar from the tissue paper he kept them in and had Ferguson fix them in place. The fragrant smell of hair oil filled their tent as they each in turn vigorously applied a brush to the other's tunic. Without a decent mirror, they paused and scrutinized each other carefully, then bowed deeply—Wilby from the waist, Ferguson taking a step back and dropping his arm in a flourish.

  The meal had gone well at first. The major had introduced him to first Chard and then Bromhead and he'd looked them both in the eyes (Chard's gray, Bromhead's brown) and shaken hands firmly. In between, he had made to clasp his hands behind his back and been sure to rub them on his tunic to ensure they were dry. "How do you do, sir?" he had said to each in turn.

  "Very well," Chard had said in his gruff way.

  "Splendid," Bromhead had told him a little too loudly. The story of Bromhead's deafness—that he would almost certainly have been pensioned off if his older brother had not been on Chelmsford's staff—was well known among the junior officers. It was said that he had only been given B company of the 2nd/24th because it was composed almost entirely of Welshmen and it was thought that his deafness wouldn't be so noticeable or important to men who spoke English with such an impenetrable accent. There was even a joke that Bromhead's company had only received its posting at Rourke's Drift because the lieutenant thought the general had been offering him more pork rib at the mess table. "Rather," he was reputed to have said. "Very tasty."

  Some of the officers still made fun of Bromhead, but Wilby put it down to simple jealousy. For his own part, he thought it more, not less, heroic that Bromhead had overcome his disability. He had a theory that amid all the noise of battle a deaf man might have an advantage, might come to win the respect of men hoarse from shouting and deafened by the report of their arms.

  At dinner, Wilby had waited until the major and Ferguson had each made some remark or other, nodded at each response, and echoed the chaplain's compliments on the food. Only then, as the batman passed the gravy boat among them, did he ask a question of his own.

  "How does it feel?" he said. "I mean, how does it feel to be heroes?"

  Bromhead looked at him closely for a moment, but it was Chard who answered.

  "Well," he began. He stroked his beard, and it made an audible rasping sound. "I would have to say, principally, the sensation is one of relief. Relief to be alive after all—not like the poor devils you'll see tomorrow—but also relief to have learned some truth about myself. To have found I am possessed of—for want of a better word—co
urage."

  "I say," murmured Ferguson. He grinned at Wilby.

  What a blowhard, Bromhead thought. It pained him that Chard's name and his own should be so inextricably linked. Bromhead and Chard. Chard and Bromhead. He felt like a blasted vaudevillian.

  "It's an ambition fulfilled," Chard went on, ignoring the interruption. "Since I was a little chap I remember wondering—as who has not?—if I were a brave fellow. Cowardice, funk—more than any imagined beast or goblin, that was my great terror. And now I have my answer." He paused and looked around the table slowly, and this time it was harder for Wilby to hold his gaze. "If the chaplain will be so good as to forgive me, I rather fancy it is as if I have stood before Saint Peter himself, not knowing if I were a bally sinner or no, and dashed me if he hasn't found my name there among the elect."

  The chaplain smiled and bobbed his head complacently. Wilby and Ferguson glanced at each other again, their eyes bright but not quite meeting in their excitement.

  "Heavens!" said Bromhead, clearing his throat. "For my part, being a hero is nothing so like how I fancy a beautiful young debutante must feel." There was a puzzled round of laughter, but Wilby saw Chard press his lips together—a white line behind his dark beard—and kept his own features still. "You've seen them at balls, gentlemen, there are one or two each season, those girls who aren't quite sure but then discover all of a sudden quite how delightful they are. Oh, I don't know. Perhaps their mamas had told them so, but they'd not believed them. After all, that's what mamas are for. They'd not known whether to listen to their doting fathers and all those old loyal servants, surely too ugly to know what was beautiful or not anymore. And then, in one evening, confound it, they know. And all around them, suddenly, why who but our own good selves, gentlemen—suitors all."

  Wilby could see Ferguson smile, and he knew he was thinking of Ethel, his betrothed. He had seen such women as Bromhead described, but his own smile was more rueful. (He remembered one long conversation with a certain Miss Fanshaw, who had cheerfully told him that she had sent no less than five white feathers to men she knew at the time of the Crimea—"And you know," she had told him earnestly, "not one of them returned home alive.") The major he knew would be thinking of his wife, home in Bath, and the chaplain, he supposed, of God. He saw Chard, bored, study his reflection in the silverware.

  "Anyway," the major said. "Put us out of our misery. Let's hear the details of this famous defense of yours, eh? Give us the story from the horse's mouth, so to speak."

  "Oh, well." Bromhead opened his hands. "It was fairly fierce, I suppose. The outcome was in doubt for some hours." He faltered, and Wilby, who had been leaning forward eagerly, sat back and saw the others look disappointed. This was, after all, what they had come for.

  Chard, however, stepped in. He was an officer of engineers and he believed in telling a tale correctly.

  He told them about the hours of hand-to-hand combat, of the bayonets that the men called lungers, and of the assegais of the Zulus. How the men's guns had become so hot from firing that they cooked off rounds as soon as they were loaded, causing the men to miss; so hot that the soft brass shell casings melted in the breeches and had to be dug out with a knife before the whole futile process could begin again. He told them about men climbing up on the wall they'd built of biscuit boxes and mealie bags and lunging down into the darkness; of the black hands reaching up to grab the barrels and the shrieks of pain when they touched the hot glowing metal—shrieks that were oddly louder than the soft grunts men gave as a bayonet or assegai found its mark. He told them about the sound of bullets clattering into the biscuit boxes at the base of the wall and rustling in the mealie bags nearer the top, so that you knew the Zulus were getting their range. He described men overpowered, dragged from the walls, surrounded by warriors. How the Zulus knocked them down and ripped open their tunics, and the popping sound of buttons flying loose. "That would be the last sound a lot of our chaps heard," he said. With their tunics open, the Zulus would disembowel them, opening men from balls to breastbone with one swift strike.

  "I swear I'll never be able to see another button pop loose from a shirt without thinking of it," Chard said. He took a sip of wine. "Of course, you'll see a good deal of that handiwork tomorrow, I'll warrant."

  That was when Wilby began to feel his flatulence return, and his discomfort grew even when Bromhead broke in and explained that the Zulus believed that opening a man's chest was the only way to set his spirit free from his dead body.

  "Really, it's an act of mercy as they see it," he said. "I hope so, at least. There was one poor chap of mine, a Private Williams. Bit of a no-account, but a decent sort. I saw him get fairly dragged over the wall before I caught hold his leg. This was quite in the thick of it. There were so many Zulus trying to rush us from all sides, they were like water swirling round a rock in a stream. Quite a ghastly tug of war I had for him with them. Every time they had him to their side he'd give one of those little grunts Chard was talking about, but then I'd pull like mad, and when I had him more to me he'd look up and say in a cheery way, 'Much obliged, sir.' In the end, they began to swarm over the walls all about us and I had to let him go to draw my pistol. I told him I was sorry—I fancied he'd be in a bad panic, you know— but he just said, 'Not at all, sir,' and 'Thank you kindly, sir.'"

  Bromhead paused.

  "I was going to write to his people. Say how sorry I was I couldn't save him. But dashed if he didn't join up under a false name. A lot of the Welshmen do, it seems. For a long time I thought they were all just called Evans and Williams and Jones and what-have-you, but it turns out that those are just the most obvious false names for them to choose. His blamed leg—you know, I can't get it out of my mind, how remarkably warm it was."

  He sat back, and the batman took the opportunity to step forward with the port. Bromhead watched in silence as the glasses filled with redness.

  Wilby had managed a few quiet expulsions, but then came the surprising and ruinous fart.

  The silence around the table seemed to go on for hours— Wilby could hear the pickets calling out their challenge to the final patrols of the evening. Finally Bromhead looked over and said genially, "Preserved potatoes." He shook his head. "Make you fart like a confounded horse."

  He waved his man forward with the cigars, and as they passed around he leaned in toward the table and looked around at them all.

  "Reminds me of a story," he said, cutting the end of his cigar. "I haven't thought of it in years, mind you—about a bally Latin class, of all things." He ran the end of the cigar around his tongue and raised his chin for the batman to light him. "Hardly the story you expected to hear, but I'll beg your indulgence." He took a mighty puff and began.

  "Well, we had this old tyrant of a master—Marlow, his name was—of the habit of making us work at our books in silence every other afternoon. Any noise and he would beat you with a steel ruler that he carried from his days in the navy. Now that was fear. I swear it was rumored among us—a rumor spread no doubt by older lads to put a fright on us—that boys had lost fingers, chopped clean off at the knuckle by that ruler.

  "I must have been upwards of twelve or so. I can't recall quite the circumstances, but I'd bent over from my desk to retrieve a pen I'd dropped—or more likely some blighter had thrown—on the floor. We were always trying to get some other poor bugger to make a sound and bring down the tyrant's wrath upon his head, but anyhow, as I say, I'd bent over to pick up my pen—I was in the middle of translating 'Horatio on the Bridge' or some such rot—and what do you know but I farted. Quite surprised myself. Quite taken aback, I was. Not that it was an especially, you know, loud one. More of a pop really. Or a squeak. Hang me if that's not it either. Let's just say somewhere between a pop and a squeak. Hardly a decent fart at all—if the truth be told, it's rather astonishing I can remember it so well. No matter. Whatever the precise sound of the expulsion, in that room with everyone trying to be still it was like a bally pistol shot, like the crack of a whip.