Kleist’s near wonderful event that day was that his wife Daisy and their child were in Arbell’s column, where they would now have to stay for at least three days. It wasn’t, though, altogether an amazing chance that she was there. Daisy had recently been dismissed as kitchen char to a merchant family for stealing vegetables – not one or two carrots and the odd potato, but sacks of the things. Once she’d left they discovered that her larceny extended to small but valuable items of jewellery. As a result the Hermandad came looking for Daisy and she realized it was time to be gone. The problem was that she had no useful skills – she was a useless charwoman – and she had a baby and no one was leaving Spanish Leeds; with the front line of the war moving ever westward they were only coming back. After several anxious days, unwilling to risk the Hermandads on the city gates, she had been forced to bribe the cook in Arbell’s train to take her on as a washerwoman for no pay. This at least got them out of the city and once she was out it made sense to stay with the protection of the column. There were entirely untrue rumours of Redeemer fifth columns. Fed up with hard work for no pay she had been planning to disappear from Arbell’s entourage in the middle of the night along with whatever was valuable she could lay her hands on, but the arrival of the New Model Army had put an end to that. It was now too dangerous to run for it. It might be thought inevitable that in a column of only two hundred-odd people, most of them soldiers, that a meeting with what she thought was her dead husband was bound to take place. But she made a point of staying out of sight (just in case) and even when she was obliged to come out of the washing wagon it was placed at the end of the line so that no one had to look at the more menial servants going about their manky tasks. Lay down your bet, then, for the great game always playing behind our backs – for Daisy a life of grim uncertainty, for Kleist a solitary death. Roll the dice, spin the wheel, shuffle the pack. Play.
Kleist had spent the first day riding at the front, quite comfortably numb, the weather warm, the constantly changing scenery a narcotic to his cancerous distress. Despair with its fifty shades of grey can give the soul wounded days like this. He only went back down the line once, when Arbell was finishing her evening meal. He missed Daisy clearing up the dirty plates by nearly two minutes.
The next day there was a shout to halt and he rode back down the line to see what was causing the delay – a broken spoke on an ancient wagon wheel. Daisy had been sent to bring up water to the nobs and she arrived just as Kleist, seeing he would just have to wait until the wheel was fixed, turned back to the front. She caught a brief but clear enough sight of him. But he had changed; he was gaunt where he had once been jaunty and vigorous in his own cool way. And of course he was long dead in the gullies and barancas of the Quantock Hills. How could he be this big kahuna on a horse with the power to make even the aristos shut up for once?
On the third and last day Arbell’s followers were told they could clear off. Kleist, after a bad night, went down the column to check that no one was hanging on to Arbell who might be a nuisance. She was attempting to take five of her entourage with her, including two men who were clearly used to handling themselves.
‘You can have two maids. That’ll be enough.’
‘And who’s to protect me?’
‘Oh, we’ll do that, Your Highness. You’re as safe as Memphis with us.’
‘You think that’s funny?’
‘Not really – but it’s hot and it’s the best I can do at the moment. Two maids.’
‘Three.’
‘How about one?’
To make the point that this was the end of the conversation he turned his horse away and stepped it down the line as if he wanted to check that his orders were being carried out. Daisy was about fifty feet away, sideways on and bending down to pick up their daughter, who kept trying to run away under the wheels of the turning wagons. This time he saw her face clearly enough, but a year can be a long time for someone her age and she had filled out, no longer a lanky girl but a young woman. Something in the way she moved stirred now unpleasant memories and had she laughed rather than just smiled to herself at the little girl’s desperate efforts to get free of her protective embrace he would have recognized the sound anywhere. And then she had the child firmly embedded on her hip as it reached out with pudgy hands to pull Daisy’s now much longer hair and she moved on past a covered wagon and out of sight. There was no numbness now but a terrible surge of loss and grief. He wanted to get away and spurred the horse back towards the front of the column and signalled the horsemaster to move the convoy on.
It was the moment of the final entry for Kleist into the black place where the doors are shut and the windows are barred. Except for one thing. As he rode ever farther away from the millions of joys he had so nearly stumbled upon, he could not entirely forget the image of the young woman which had given him such dreadful pain: the easy to dismiss familiarity of the way she moved. It made sense to get away from the cause of such agony. Going back to look at her would only make things worse.
But all the same he turned around. Then he stopped. It was foolish. Pointless. Ridiculous. He turned around again and rode away from the woman for several minutes, making it impossible to go back to wound himself further for no reason. Too far now. Then some pointless hope of something, of at least seeing an echo of everything he’d lost, made him turn again. He wanted to rush and not rush. But a certain composure returned to him, a sense that he was headed for a last, thin ghost of a reminder of her presence. You could not call it hope, because she was dead, but it was movement away from the black room. Impatient, he drove on, now he had made the decision, anxious to see it through. Look at her, get it out of your system and stop this idiocy. He raced past the end of his own column and then towards the meandering remainder of Arbell’s former followers. As he arrived they looked at him warily – what new thunder here? He ignored them and slowly began to search among the untidy line. Then he saw her just ahead. With hips that Daisy had never had, he almost said nothing – she was not even a distant simulacrum of the girl he’d lost. Something terrible collapsed in his heart. He turned the horse away at the pointlessness – but the horse, having been pulled about more than it thought fit, jibbed at another clumsy pull and snorted in irritation. Daisy looked round at the unexpected intensity of the sound, wary of harm to the little girl. Kleist stared at her. Still ignorant, she stared back, leery of the peculiar-looking young man, then alarmed as she saw his already pale face go white. He let out a dreadful cry as if he were dying.
Then it came to her. She drew in a breath as deep as if it had to last for the rest of her life. He was off his horse and tried to get to her so quickly he slipped and fell in the mud, then up and slipped again, utterly ridiculous. ‘Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!’ he shouted, then grabbed her and the child in a mad embrace. But she couldn’t speak, she could only stare. Watched by the astonished onlookers, they knelt in the mud, unable to weep, and simply groaned. The toddler found a new toy in playing with her father’s hair, casually accepting of the joyous agony wrapping her in its arms. ‘Honour!’ shouted the baby – although it could not have been what she really said, that was what it sounded like to the watching servants. ‘Honour! Honour!’