messenger girl turned up at lunchtime yesterday, and I handed it over just like you said. Got a return message for you, as well.’
He pressed the sealed note into her hands, leaving her thinking numbly of what Mr Northway would think when he read what she had written: her last few words, last morning’s hurried work.
He will worry. The feeling it brought to her was strange, bittersweet. He would be worrying when, by the time he read the words, she would already have returned alive and safe. He would worry.
It felt good to think that there would be someone back home who would know the truth, and worry. She could not put the weight of that on her sisters, but Northway could bear it.
I am become as strange as he, she told herself.
‘Marshwic?’ Brocky queried dubiously.
She broke out of her reverie to collect replacements for all her missing kit, and was just bundling out of the hut when Tubal found her.
‘Em, got you! The colonel wants to see you right away.’
‘What?’ She grasped for calm as he bustled her away from the store.
‘No time for questions. Come on.’
‘Very well, Salander, that will do,’ Colonel Resnic said, with a dismissive gesture, almost the moment the two of them entered his headquarters. Tubal saluted smartly, then was gone before Emily had quite worked out what was going on. There was no clue on the colonel’s face as he gestured for her to sit across from him. The map of the swamps was still pinned to the table, though the coloured bricks had gone.
‘Sir, I don’t—’
‘Salander,’ the colonel mused, cutting her off. ‘Some sort of relation of yours? By marriage, obviously.’
‘Brother-in-law, sir.’
‘Must be hard for you, I suppose.’
‘I’m . . . not sure what you mean, sir.’ She watched impatiently as he signalled for Stapewood to light his pipe, and then took a few reflective puffs on it before continuing.
‘Well, you know. Decent chap and all, but the fellow’s a tradesman, and his family have hardly been in Lascanne three generations, I hear. Can’t be easy, taking his orders.’
Still utterly wrong-footed, with no sense of what was going on, Emily could only stammer, ‘I’ve . . . found him a very able officer, sir.’
‘Loyalty. Good show, Marshwic. First virtue of a soldier. Now look, heard a few stories, you know, about your actions yesterday. I’m sure you know what I mean.’
Her recollection of the previous day’s fighting was like a box of mirror shards cast across the floor: the rattle of muskets, the deep pools, Goss’s fall and Sharkey’s grin. ‘Sir,’ she said without inflection. It was a soldier’s trick Mallen had taught her.
‘Balance of opinion seems to be,’ the colonel continued, ‘you should have this.’
He passed to her, over the spread-out map, a cloth patch with a crown that perfectly matched the one already stitched on her sleeve.
‘Sir?’ She took it automatically, not quite understanding.
‘Keep up the good work, Sergeant,’ Resnic told her, rising to let her know the audience was over.
‘Your work, of course,’ she accused Tubal, when she met him outside.
‘I gave the recommendation to the colonel, yes. Sorry to bring you down, though, but it wasn’t just nepotism at work. While you were still missing, I had half a dozen soldiers come to me to report what you did – how you took over when Goss got his wound.’
Emily stared down at the little patch in her hand and shrugged. ‘It seems to me that anyone else would have done about the same, if you’d put them where I was.’
‘They didn’t, though. Your lucky break.’
‘Lucky?’
‘Maybe not. You’re filling Sergeant Shalmer’s boots, after all. He didn’t make it back.’
Her fingers closed about the patch. Bought with blood. ‘Does that mean we’re short of an ensign?’
‘You have someone in mind?’
‘Yes, it’s . . .’ In her mind was the young woman who had scouted for her, backed her and been her second in the assault, and to Emily’s horror she realized that she still knew her only as ‘not Stockton’. Eventually she had to describe the woman to Tubal, and then go and actually find her and point her out. The subject of their deliberations straightened awkwardly when she saw them coming, her boots half-shined before her. Her expression of unfocused guilt must have been the mirror of Emily’s before the colonel.
‘Caxton,’ Tubal named her effortlessly. ‘Congratulations, you’ve just had a pay rise – assuming we ever get paid.’
*
The days following the Big Push were oddly quiet. Mallen’s scouting parties pushed