Chapter 23
His return to his homeland began, for no good reason, with a chicken. Major Andrew Lennox got off the ship—the grandly-named Fried und Freiheit, a title that the wee tub would need several friends and a muckle o’ feedin’ to live up to—he’d come over from Germany on. Were it not for strict orders, he’d have had nothing whatever to do with one of the infernal contraptions ever again. He’d puked every roll and heave of his first voyage over the seas, heading out with the Mackay regiment, back then heading into the service of King Christian IV of Denmark. He’d pretty much resigned himself to settling in the Germanies, when his service was done, because the price of getting home was so damned steep.
And now he was back. True to form, he’d spewed all the way back as well. Or, rather, spewed the first day and just retched the rest of the time. Five days without more than a wee bit of dunsuppe to keep body and soul together. The Fried und Freiheit had come in on the flood tide to Leith just before dawn, and with the light coming up—and, more importantly, the porters—he’d gone ashore to grab a few stout lads to carry his baggage. There’d been a time he’d have hefted a sack of belongings and got on with it, but with a major’s commission now and a lieutenant-colonelcy likely on its way, it wouldn’t do to be seen carrying his own bags. Added to which, with the assorted plunder and rewards he’d gathered over the last few years—including a papal knighthood, and he’d better keep that quiet hereabouts—he had too much for one man anyway.
And here, off the ship, he stepped aside at the bottom of the gangplank to let the sailors bring his chests ashore after him, and was confronted with a chicken. Glaring at him. You, sir, are standing where I was about to scratch, her look was saying.
Standing. Swaying gently, it were better to say. Another reason to despise ships. They took the legs from under a man along with robbing the belly out of him. And now, he was being afforded disrespect by a blasted chicken. And, oh, the stink. Aboard ship, below decks in the wee cabin the ship’s carpenter had walled off for him with thin timber panels, there were the simple scents of the ship’s cooking, the hold full of assorted chemical goods—most, Lennox had noted with approval, bearing the mark of his good friend Tom Stone’s Lothlorien Farbenwerke—and the smell of hard-working sailors. Feet, armpits and farting below decks, mostly. Word had gotten around about sauerkraut being good for the scurvy—at a fraction the price of fresh fruit, which was already well known as a cure—so sailors were eating the stuff every day if they could get it. Some of them, with every meal. It was a mercy there were hatches to be opened.
Now he was ashore and realizing how much he’d been spoiled by the increasing cleanliness of the cities of the USE. The difference a year’s worth of sewer-digging and ferociously enforced hygiene could make was, it turned out, truly staggering when you didn’t have the benefit of it. Although there was probably no amount of sewer that could suppress the reek of whale-blubber being boiled down in the try-works over the river. Even so, while there was a first breath of autumn in the air, and the nights would soon start drawing in, the summer stench of a town that shat in its own streets was still present.
And still that chicken was glaring at him, to the evident amusement of the sailors who’d brought his chests ashore. “An impudent bird, Major,” one of them said, “best put in the pot as an example to others, hey?”
Lennox grinned at that, being as he was starving hungry of a sudden. The chicken, apparently getting the message, stalked away, contriving to give the impression that she had decided, on inspection, she didn’t want to scratch that spot anyway. And, as parting comment, made her own small contribution to the general filth of the wharf. He gave the sailors a few coppers each, thanked them for what might, for all he knew, have been a smooth and trouble-free voyage if he’d been able to enjoy it, and looked around. Sure enough, there were a few fellows—scruffy creatures, in obviously poor health, and damn did public sanitation make a difference, just spending a year without periodic doses of the shits put meat on a low-income city-dweller and brightened his eye no end—edging closer and trying to catch his eye in a meaningful manner. Not an easy nor pleasant means of making ends meet, but Lennox didn’t feel he could think the less of them for it. “You, you, you and you,” he said, “one end of each o’ these, and there’s a shillin’ apiece in it for you. I’ve tae find lodgings and a’ before I’m aboot my business.”
They stepped to it lively—he was, after all, offering rather more than a decent day’s pay—and he took a leisurely pace toward Edinburgh proper. Time enough to get a horse when he’d walked some of the wobble out of his legs, and had a meal inside him that wasn’t going to come up again. There’d be a better selection in Edinburgh anyway. He’d only been here the once before, but he recalled it as but a couple of miles from the town itself down to Leith. Last time he’d passed this way, it was to embark for Denmark as his first stage of a journey that led eventually to Grantville.
Away from the wharf the smell was a little more bearable—the Water o’ Leith drained Edinburgh, after all—and as he got into the open country between Leith and Edinburgh the smell dropped to virtually nothing. Ahead, Edinburgh castle on its mount was easily visible, with the northern portion of the Flodden Wall just visible to the left, on the one bit of the city’s northern approach that wasn’t guarded by the Nor’ Loch. Away to the left again, only visible at this distance over the hedges by its smudge of smoke, was the area around Holyrood, which was where he was headed. “Ony o’ youse,” he called back to the porters following him, “know o’ guid lodgings at Canongate?”
They none of them had the faintest notion, being Leith laborers who probably didn’t come up to the city proper very much. Lennox had the vague idea that the guards at the Flodden Wall, there mostly for the proper levying of tolls, would take note of anyone coming and going in the city proper, and he wanted to spend a night or two without the wall while he scouted a little.
Plus, it was where he was billeted—briefly, true—last time he was here. He stopped. Had it really been nine years? It had. He’d been marched aboard a ship at Leith. Not entirely willingly, but the Mackay recruiters had found him in the gaol at Berwick-upon-Tweed. They weren’t, according to their warrant, supposed to recruit out of Scotland, but Berwick was also not quite England, and the magistrates of that burgh had been only too happy to save the cost of feeding a lot of ruffians until assize-time when they could all be decently and lawfully hanged.
More than a few of the said ruffians hadn’t been entirely Scottish, when all was said and done, but since the attestation was signed by a magistrate who was pocketing the recruiting bounty, the Mackay regiment got a few lads from south of the border into the bargain.
Lennox took a slow turn to take in in the world around him, paying the puzzled looks of the porters no mind. He was the one paying, here, he could stop and woolgather as much as he damned well pleased. He’d gone from that—broken man, awaiting trial and more than likely hanging for cattle-thieving, driven there by catching the wrong end of a feud and getting the little he had burnt to the ground—to a major in the most powerful army in Europe, enough wealth to be comfortable in retirement, and likely a colonel soon into the bargain. No’ bad for a wee laddie frae Coldstream, aye?
The chances that there was anyone minding out for him returning were slim at best. They certainly didn’t have him under his right name at Berwick, for a start; he’d only started using that once he was asked to swear in to the regiment. He’d stand trial under a false name, and happy to, but hadn’t been about to swear an oath under one. A few months later and after the mayhem at Boyzenburg—and didn’t being outnumbered four companies to ten thousand concentrate a fellow on becoming a good soldier?—and he was a sergeant and looking for a light cavalry billet that suited his border nearly-a-reiver origins a little better than infantry grunt. Which, yes, he found and ended up, a few years later, sergeant to a wrong-side-of-the-blanket sprig o’ minor nobility. Very minor nobility, at that—Alex Mackay had told him, once, that the barony amounted to basically four hamlets, a half-dozen decent farms, a nice mansion, a drafty ruined castle of a kind that might last as much as two hours against modern weapons—modern before the Ring of Fire, that is—and three miles of excellent trout stream. A pleasant place for a boy to grow up, and a reasonable living for the family that owned the estate, but otherwise a completely tedious bit of East Lothian. Even the castle was dull; last used in the Rough Wooing of Henry VIII of England, the last time Alex had been home, he said, they’d been keeping livestock in the thing.
He took a deep breath. A deep, law-abiding, settled man’s breath. Just a pity I’ve all yon political messages tae deliver. Still, get that over with, a little visiting, he could be back in the USE before the winter made the North Sea truly miserable. And, indeed, if he was to put down roots in the USEMC training establishment, he might look to finding a nice, well-found little piece of Germany for his remote descendants to reckon a dull spot. For now, though, to business.
Canongate, the neighborhood around the Palace at Holyrood, put him slightly in mind of Venice where he’d been the previous year, commanding the security detail at the embassy there. Both were towns that were trying desperately to keep up appearances after the wealth had gone away. Venice was less so these days, being as it had started handling huge amounts of the USE’s Mediterranean and Levant trade, along with some bits of manufacturing. Canongate, though, had never really recovered from the royal court leaving town thirty years previous; all of the sumptuary and services that the king and his hangers-on had paid for were now enriching the traders and artisans of London. Which meant there were some very nice buildings with some increasingly hard-up owners. The Mackay regiment recruiters had taken hearty advantage, billeting their catch, as far as they could, in vacant houses rented for as little as they could get away with in a market where landlords were undercutting each other to get business, any business. If one of them was taking in lodgers and making a decent fist of the business, Lennox would consider himself well found.
He took a fork in the road that would take him leftward toward Holyrood and Canongate. The last of Leith was behind him now, and it was just plain ordinary country smells hereabouts. The summer sun was starting to put a little warmth into the morning, not yet hot. A faint breeze was enough to keep the sweat of the toiling porters behind him, and he decided that task number one after the lodgings were settled and he’d got food in his belly was to find a livery and get a couple of decent nags, because if this wasn’t about to be an afternoon for a very pleasant ride, he’d no idea what would.
He turned out to need visit only half a dozen lodging-houses before he found one that suited, and even the most expensive was less than he’d been expecting to pay. The price of lodgings in Magdeburg was skewing what he regarded as normal; prices were going mad in the USE, although against that, so were wages.
The place was run by a redoubtable, but handsome, widow who insisted on Mrs. MacPherson with the Mrs. very clearly emphasized. Her husband had died at Breitenfeld, and Lennox could, from the description, vaguely recall the man: a fairly senior captain in Hepburn’s regiment before Colonel Hepburn himself was given command of Lennox’s own former Green regiment. He’d been a friend of one of the handful of Scots officers who’d taken service in the mostly Prussian Green, and so whenever the two regiments had been close enough together for visits, the fellow had been around from time to time.
What with the numbers of Scots volunteers who came over without the formality of joining a regiment first, there were plenty of odd little connections like that throughout the old army. Curious situations like a wildly oversized Scots cavalry troop drawing its pay through a Prussian infantry regiment happened all the time. Mackay himself had managed to get through most of his service without ever formally being in a cavalry regiment at all, a situation he’d enjoyed because a small attached troop tacked on to an infantry brigade or regiment for whatever purpose answered the current need was generally considered sufficiently led with a sergeant in charge.
And they had to find plenty of places to stick wee packets of Scots cavalry, as there weren’t enough of them to amount to a whole regiment by themselves of either heavy or light horse; the one Scots regiment of horse they had was Henderson’s Dragoons, not proper cavalrymen at all. And, of course, Henderson and Mackay senior loathed each other so Mackay junior had ended up part of the “other” category of troops and, purely by accident, ended up commanding half a regiment’s worth of light cavalry with a captain’s commission and charged with watching half of Thuringia for trouble. At that, it wasn’t even close to being the most irregular military management Lennox had seen. In a way, it was surprising that there were so many Scots in foreign service he didn’t know. He’d certainly got at least a rough idea of most of the officers. Although he’d had no idea MacPherson was married.
After he’d got the room sorted, and a meal down him while the two youngsters Mrs. MacPherson employed put his things away for him, he took a moment to rest. And wasn’t it peculiar that he could be away to the wars for nearly ten years and here he was back not five minutes and everything was making him go all sentimental over it? Mostly it had been riding up and down, doing next to nothing, with bits of bloody terror mixed in. Boizenburg, Oldenburgh Pass, Ekernforde, Stralsund—where he’d first met MacPherson, now he thought about it—and all manner of minor set-tos in between as the light horse fought their own private wars between the armies. After that, rear area service, two years of being a glorified constable with a pack of border ruffians under him, attached to one regiment after another and galloping about the German countryside for an assortment of reasons that must have made sense to some officer or other.
When it came to the sentimental memories, of course, it probably didn’t help that he’d come straight back to the port he’d left from and immediately found lodgings with the widow of someone he’d known over there. He’d not been at Breitenfeld to know how the poor fellow fell, but it was something he could probably find out, which would likely be a kindness to the widow.
There were some veterans back already, with wounds or just resigned when the Scots regiments got paid off prior to being recruited wholesale in to the USE army. Less trouble, certainly, than waiting for months of desertion to reduce those regiments to nothing while putting up with the trouble arising from the Scots being mixed in all over. There were always some people who weren’t happy about something, and rather than take the USE bounty, they’d gone away home or to other service they liked better.
A few of those who’d come home were, to the best of his knowledge, here in the Lothians, so he’d be able to ask and perhaps get some news for the widow. Who’d given him his luncheon “tae welcome him hame” and offered directions to a good stable. For now he’d assume her kindly disposition was down to him having given her three months’ rent in advance—it was the amount of cash he’d brought for a month’s lodging. If not, well, he’d make a decision about that when he had to and not before.
That afternoon, buying a horse when it was purely for his own use and enjoyment was a thorough pleasure. When Sharon Nichols, as was like to be married to the bampot Spanish bugger she’d met in Venice, had been about that town with Magda Stone arranging the commerce, she’d made jokes about shopping that Lennox hadn’t understood at first. He’d asked, and she’d explained, and he’d realized he’d been doing the same thing since the day he was old enough to judge and haggle for horseflesh. And, well, if he’d been planning to get out for a ride the day, he’d missed it. There were plenty of stables with horses to sell or rent without venturing up the hill into Edinburgh proper, and a surprising number of good nags for sale. Of course things would be better here than on the Continent, where the horses had been picked over again and again for the armies that were slaughtering, or just plain working to death, everything they could lay their hands on that ate hay and farted. Finding a decent nag outside the private stud of a nobleman was a sore trial.
Here, though, there were plenty of good ordinary animals to be had, and a fair selection of Hackneys and Hackney crosses brought up from England. There were plenty of Galloway ponies as well, and some bloody good examples of the breed—and of course as a borderer, Andrew Lennox was not going to pass up a good Galloway if he could afford one; he’d grown up with and riding Fell ponies with the occasional Hobby, but he’d wanted a Galloway. There weren’t that many of them to be had, when all was said and done, and every other bugger wanted one so the prices were always out of his reach.
Not. Any. More. A lot of shopping around—grinning the while as he wondered what the stablemen would think if they’d had to put up with a smart and strong-minded black lady shopping at their establishments—and he found what he was looking for and had more than an idea of how he was going to make a little money out of the thing. Of course, his grin when he’d seen the beasts was probably ten shillings on the price of every single one, but he’d settled in for a good haggle.
He’d ended up with two bought cash down and earnest money on another eight. For, it had to be said, nags that were only mostly Galloways. The black of them said there was a lot of Fell pony in there as well—no matter, that was a hard breed—and the oldest of the string was a hair over fourteen hands so there was probably something like a Hackney in there as well.
But, if Lennox was even half the judge of horseflesh he thought himself, they had every possibility of making the beginnings of a bloody good stud. So, for the next trip, he needed to find a banker and cash the letter of credit he’d brought. Without saying “cash it,” of course. Associating with up-timers had ruined the way he talked.