Chapter 10: Direct Action

He came home that evening footsore and a little hollow, and was honest enough with himself, on the walk, to admit that some of the hollowness was the house. He loved his wife. He loved the coming child past all reckoning. But there was no denying that a woman four months gone and well into the wanting-everything of it was a great deal of weather to come home to each night — the lists, the cravings, the small urgent crises of the nursery-to-be, the way the whole house now revolved around the state of her comfort hour by hour. He was tired. He would not have said it aloud for the world, and he was a little ashamed of it, and he buried it, as he buried most things, under the good smell coming up the hall.

But the house was warm and the dinner was ready and Vinda came and put her arms round him at the door and held on, and the tiredness went some way off.

“How was your day?” he said into her hair.

“Good.” She drew back, pleased with it. “Better than most. Kara did my back and my feet after the worst of the morning and I felt human again by noon — that girl’s hands, Merko, I don’t know how I managed before her. And then I had the three of them to a late lunch, Pell and the Harrold girl and Sera’s daughter, and you’ll never guess — Sera’s girl is throwing her own four-month evening a fortnight Tuesday, which is rich, considering what she said about ours not six weeks ago, but I shall go and be gracious and we shall all pretend.” She was bright with the gossip of it, and he let her run, because it cost him nothing and it pleased her and the running of it was half her joy. “And Kara found us a beautiful bit of beef off the Tannery Row butcher, the proper cut, not what they fob the kitchens off with — so sit, and eat it, and be glad.”

He sat, and ate it, and was glad.

“And you?” she said, when he’d eaten enough to be a person again. “You’ve that look. What’s the club been at?”

He was quiet a moment, turning his wine. “They’re not happy. We met at noon — Tarrin, Voss, the Sennels, the rest. You remember I told you we’d worked the spring campaign through, the eastern push, and they’d taken it up, argued it with me?” She nodded. “Well, it’s been handed down from on high, and the high command have thrown out the half of it that mattered. The supply lines especially — the part I’d worked hardest. They’re running it the old way, the proud way, the way that looks well on a map and gets men killed crossing ground that didn’t need crossing.” His jaw was tight. “And that’s what it’ll do, Vinda. It’ll cost lives. Ordinary men, ranker’s sons, dead over a stretch of bad valley because some marquess’s boy in a clean coat preferred the look of the bolder line. We told them. I told them. They should have listened.”

“That’s a hard thing,” Vinda said, and meant it; she had a real tenderness for him when his principles were up, because they were the best of him and she knew it. “You did right to say it.”

“For all the good.” He drank. “Voss said something, after the wine had gone round a few times. Half in jest. He said — well. He said a man might wonder what the King himself would think, if he knew his best officers had the right of it and were being overruled by men who’d never bled. Whether the King mightn’t thank a few good men for — taking a hand. Setting it right. Doing the thing the high command hadn’t the sense to.” He said it lightly, reporting a piece of mess-hall bravado, the way you’d report any wild thing said late over wine. “You know the sort of talk. Big talk. Aggrieved men talking big.”