Fortune to India

Tony Foot

Description

Jack Finch has always regarded himself as the boy from the poorer part of the village, lucky to have been the friend of James Fortune from 'the big house' and to have fought alongside him in the Crimea. But when James dies in combat, Jack has to return his effects back to his family: and that's where he falls in love with James's former fiancee, Lady Eleanor, and learns a secret that will change his life.Before he can pursue his heart's desire, Jack is sent with his regiment, the Rifle Brigade, to India to quell a sepoy munity. Cawnpore and Lucknow have fallen into rebel hands and Jack plays a cat-and-mouse game with the rebel leaders, disguising himself as an Indian and entering enemy territory at great risk to his life. Mutineers are not the only hazard: the intriguing and bejewelled Rani Laksmi Bai and her alluring maidservant represent a very different kind of threat. Will he ever see Eleanor again? In this gripping sequel to The Fortunes at War, Tony Foot vividly captures the sights and sounds of nineteenth-century India and the fighting life of a member of the Rifle Brigade.

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 09 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911105312
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Fortune to India
by Tony Foot




First published in 2018 by
Chaplin Books
5 Carlton Way
Gosport PO12 1LN
www.chaplinbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2018 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2018 Tony Foot
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of the reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in the contents.



Dedication
To Sue for her patience and support









Chapter One
The August midday sun was hot: my face was already burning and rivulets of sweat were trickling freely down my back. I had very mixed feelings regarding the task I was about to carry out and the heat made me wish I had never embarked on it at all.
Nevertheless, I jumped down from the brougham, waved away the driver I had hired in Winchester and marched boldly towards the large wrought-iron gates that stood black and unyielding in the summer sun. The padlocked gates were twice my height and each had a coat of arms picked out in gold. To the left was a smaller gate hinged to a brick pillar. From either side of the gates a wall taller than a man stretched as far as the eye could see.
A figure appeared, buttoning his waistcoat as he emerged from the gatekeeper’s lodge. I judged him to be an ex-navy man from the rolling gait that brought him towards me. I would discover many years later that he had indeed been a sailor and had taken part in the battle of Navarino Bay in October of ’27 when a combined British, French and Russian naval force had almost totally destroyed the Egyptian and Turkish fleets. Something to do with Greek independence, I recalled. I would also later reflect that this was all very strange: first of all the French are our enemies and the Russians are friends, then, in the Crimea, the French and Turks were on our side against the Russians. How confusing! This moved me to conclude that the governments who decide there needs to be a war should be the ones to fight it, instead of sending soldiers to be killed.
Behind the man at the gate I could see small faces at a window of the rather drab grey lodge. From nearby, perhaps from the fenced enclosure behind this sombre-looking dwelling - I took it to be a garden - came the urgent barking of a dog. A very large animal, I imagined it to be, from the deep and menacing tone that assailed my ears.
The gateman looked at me with suspicion at first while his eyes took time to focus, though all such creatures seem to resent those whose appearance interrupts their midday nap and requires them instead to attend the gates. I gazed back at him, ready to announce myself.
He unlocked the gate and bade me advance.
“They are expecting you,” he said, bowing slightly and pointing towards a large house some distance away.
His words, together with those I had read in the letter that had set me on my present quest, were still ringing in my head as I set off at rifleman’s pace down the tree-lined drive towards Broughton House. I walked on, my shiny, highly polished boots crunching on the gravel that ran like a sandy-orange river between neatly tended grassy banks on either side. I reached a point where the drive curved to the left and then went on to describe a semi-circle that brought it to the foot of a grand stone staircase. There, carriages would stop to allow society visitors to alight and to go on up and into the house. The drive then continued to complete the other half of the circle and bring it back to where I now stood. The drive then carried on its way back down to the gates and out to the open highway to Salisbury, Southampton or Winchester.
I stood there for a minute or two looking across at the ornamental garden and fountains that filled the space contained in that circle. I regarded with some envy the cool, splashing water disgorging from the mouths of some nymphs that might - on a less important and sombre occasion - tempt me to refresh my freely perspiring face.
What to do now, though? Go to the left until I came to the kitchens and the servants’ entrance, or walk confidently up the steps?
That hesitation was allowing me too much time to think. I was beginning to feel just like I did when facing the enemy: that eyes were watching me. Though thankfully, no bullets would be smashing into me as I stood before Broughton House. In the Crimea not too many months ago, that had been more than a strong possibility.
Straightening up and brushing real or imagined dust from my very best uniform with its large gold crowns on the sleeves and with medals from my recent service glinting in the summer sun, I moved purposefully towards the staircase leading to a heavy-looking pair of doors. I gripped a large acorn-shaped bell-push and leant on it. I could hear nothing, no response. I pushed it again. I smiled to myself, recalling that when faced with such a grand house in the very recent campaign, my usual method of entry had been to kick it down, then charge in with rifle and sword, along with a score of riflemen behind me.
A butler suddenly appeared, making a great show of opening one of the doors. He had that look which all butlers have in my very limited experience, the sort of facial expression that indicated that one or the other of us, probably me, had stepped in something unpleasant.
“Sergeant-Major Finch, sir, you are expected. Please follow me,” he said, in the melancholic tone that also seemed to be the preserve of that class of servant.
What did puzzle me, though, was how exactly everybody seemed to be expecting me. It had only been on this very day, on a whim, that I had decided to come to this house and fulfil an obligation that I felt I owed the writer of that letter.
The butler led me across the entrance hall, my boots echoing on the wooden floor, then up a highly polished flight of stairs.
As we climbed, rows of eyes seemed to stare back at me from the portraits on the walls, several centuries of Broughton ancestors imprisoned for all time in their gilt frames.
We stopped at a plain cream-coloured door. My guide knocked surprisingly delicately for such a burly-framed man. He opened the door, bowed gravely and ushered me in, closing the door behind me.
I stood there, uncertain what to do next. My soldier’s natural habitat is the hills and forests of Her Majesty’s enemies and not the withdrawing room of the rich and titled.
Towards the other end of the room was a figure I knew slightly. Lady Eleanor was clad in a blue dress worn slightly off the shoulders, the neckline dipped to reveal two milk-white mounds. My acquaintance with her was not through any social intercourse. She was of this house, after all, while I was from the wrong end of a local village. I knew her to be a little older than me. My earlier awareness of her was seeing her arrive at Durford Hall when I was about fourteen and she about seventeen. She had looked just as breathtaking as she did now, in a sparkling white dress, her dark hair piled high on her head and glittering with precious stones. She had been accompanied by James Fortune of the Rifle Brigade, a Lieutenant as he had been then. As they went into the Hall for the evening’s entertainment, my duties were to help the Hall’s grooms escort coachmen and their now-empty carriages to the stables. I had - as one of the footmen was pleased to point out - been doubly blessed, in the first place by being able to look on my elders and betters, and in the second by being paid a few pennies for the privilege. What more could a poor country boy ask?
Now here was I standing in very different circumstances in the presence of this beauty.
To Lady Eleanor’s left was a silver-framed photograph of James Fortune in his Captain’s uniform and on the wall behind, a painting of the same man. I knew him much better than Lady Eleanor because not only had I served with him, I had dragged him - badly wounded - back to our lines overlooking Sevastopol. Then I noticed next to the photograph of James was a book, quarter-bound in blue leather with its title picked out in gold leaf: ‘Jane Eyre’ by Currer Bell. I had seen a review of this book in a newspaper discarded by one of our officers. It had been written by a woman, but in order to get it published she had not used her own name, Charlotte Bronte. The book had raised many hackles in the way it had questioned how women were supposed to behave in the middle of our nineteenth century, a modern age that had fuelled the Great Exhibition but which was backward-looking in its treatment of women. Not that women, in my experience as a humble village boy and latterly a soldier, were the only people treated unequally. Judging by her reading, Lady Eleanor might prove to be a modern, forward-looking woman.
I was both pleased and a little surprised to find her alone, unchaperoned, in the room. On the other hand, most of the women of my acquaintance during the last few years were hardly the sort to require the addition of such a companion.
“Please sit here,” she said, motioning me to a large chair opposite her own. “We have been expecting you but were not quite sure exactly when. How are you, Sergeant-Major Finch? Oh, may I call you Jack? James wrote often about you and always referred to you as ‘good old Jack’. He wrote to me about some of your advent