The True Soldier: Jack Lark 6 Read online

  Copyright © 2017 Paul Fraser Collard

  The right of Paul Fraser Collard to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2017

  All characters – other than the obvious historical figures – in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  Ebook conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 3905 1

  Jacket design and illustration © CollaborationJS

  Author photograph by Martin Collard

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  50 Victoria Embankment

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  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About Paul Fraser Collard

  About the Book

  Also by Paul Fraser Collard

  Dedication

  Praise

  Glossary

  Map – East USA (1861)

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  Paul’s love of military history started at an early age. A childhood spent watching films like Waterloo and Zulu whilst reading Sharpe, Flashman and the occasional Commando comic gave him a desire to know more of the men who fought in the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This fascination led to a motivation to write and his series of novels featuring the brutally courageous Victorian rogue and imposter Jack Lark burst into life in 2013. Since then Paul has continued to write, developing the Jack Lark series to great acclaim.

  To find out more about Paul and his novels visit www.paulfrasercollard.com or find him on Twitter @pfcollard

  ‘This ain’t the kind of war you are used to. It’s brother against brother, countryman against countryman’

  April, 1861. Jark Lark arrives in Boston as civil war storms across America.

  A hardened soldier, Jack has always gone where he was ordered to go – and killed the enemy he was ordered to kill. But when he becomes a sergeant for the Union Army, he realises that this conflict between North and South is different. Men are choosing to fight – and die – for a cause they believe in.

  The people of Boston think it will take just one, great battle. But, with years of experience, Jack knows better. This is the beginning of something that will tear a country apart – and force Jack to see what he is truly fighting for.

  By Paul Fraser Collard

  The Scarlet Thief

  The Maharajah’s General

  The Devil’s Assassin

  The Lone Warrior

  The Last Legionnaire

  The True Soldier

  Digital Short Stories

  Jack Lark: Rogue

  Jack Lark: Recruit

  Jack Lark: Redcoat

  The Jack Lark Library

  (short-story omnibus including prequel story, Rascal)

  To David Headley

  ‘Collard . . . evokes the horror of that era with great brio. Enthralling’ The Times

  ‘Brilliant’ Bernard Cornwell

  ‘An appealing and formidable hero’ Sunday Express magazine

  ‘I love a writer who wears his history lightly enough for the story he’s telling to blaze across the pages like this. Jack Lark is an unforgettable new hero’ Anthony Riches

  ‘Races along with the speed of a bullet fired from an Enfield rifle’ Historical Novel Society

  ‘This is the first book in years I have enjoyed that much that I had to go back and read it again immediately’ Parmenion Books

  ‘Collard is to be congratulated for producing a confident, rich and exciting novel that gave me all the ingredients I would want for a historical adventure of the highest order’ For Winter Nights

  ‘This is a fresh take on what could become a hackneyed subject, but in Fraser Collard’s hands is anything but’ Good Book Guide

  ‘This is what good historical fiction should do – take the dry dusty facts from history books and tell the story of the men and women who lived through them – and Collard does this admirably’ Our Books Reviews

  crib dwelling house for thieves and swindlers

  Finn MacCool Irish folk hero

  gombeen fool

  hooplehead idiot

  Johnny Reb Northern slang for a Confederate soldier

  know-nothings nickname for the right-wing American Party

  langer fool/bastard

  lobster British redcoat

  longshoreman docker

  mofussil country station or district away from the chief stations of the region, ‘up country’

  poke bag or small sack

  palmetto flag South Carolina state flag; a white palmetto tree on an indigo field with a white crescent in the upper left corner

  secession act of separating from a nation and becoming independent

  sechers Northern slang for someone from the South who supported secession

  shofulman coiner or passer of bad money

  trencherman person who eats heartily

  A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

  Lincoln’s House Divided Speech,

  Springfield, Illinois, 1
6 June 1858

  Boston, Tuesday 16 April 1861

  The Englishman strode down State Street. It had taken an age to get away from the wharf and the throng of longshoremen and officials who had gathered to welcome the latest swathe of immigrants come to Boston for a new life far away from their homelands. He walked away from the chaos with relief. The Plymouth Rock had been crowded, the demand for a berth to Boston far exceeding the carrying capacity of the steam packet, which had left Liverpool over a week before. The voyage had been miserable, his enforced incarceration with the horde made worse by the other cargo that had filled every nook and cranny of the vessel. For the Plymouth Rock had been carrying hope, a commodity the Englishman had left far behind on the blood-soaked battlefields of Europe and beyond.

  He pulled his black pork pie hat down lower and quickened his pace as he reached the end of State Street. The ground pitched beneath his boots, his gait uneven as he became reaccustomed to walking on land. The rain might have made the cobbles treacherous, but they still felt wonderfully secure after so long on board the lurching uncertainty of a packet making the Atlantic crossing.

  The smell of the place wrapped itself around him as he walked. The fresh, salt-laden air of the sea was replaced with the aroma of food and soot. Boston smelled of people. Not the rancid odour of too many souls kept together in a ship, but the earthy, meaty smell of life in a city.

  A crowd of loud, brash stevedores hurried past. A few glanced at the tall Englishman, who met their stares calmly and with no hint of fear. The hard men who toiled in the docks did not worry him. He had fought the Russians, the Persians and the Austrians, along with mutinous sepoys and the army of an Indian maharajah. He knew fear, but he would not feel it standing in the rain on a grey Boston street.

  The pause gave him the opportunity to look around and get his bearings. The sky was getting lighter, a brighter thumbprint behind the thick band of clouds indicating the chance of a change in the weather. But the sun would have to fight hard if it was to beat away the gloom, and as he waited, the rain grew heavier. Fine mist was replaced by a deluge, the water coming down in great sheets, bouncing high off the cobbles, the sound of the impact drowning out the noise of the city.

  The Englishman shivered, then pulled his greatcoat tighter around him, the thick wool getting heavier as it soaked up the rain. The coat was not his. He had liberated it from a friend’s pack, one of hundreds left unclaimed in the aftermath of the slaughter at Solferino. He doubted anyone in Boston would recognise that it had once been issued to a sergeant serving in the ranks of the French Foreign Legion. Yet that sergeant had been born in the city of Boston, and it was his death that had brought the Englishman to its shores.

  It had been a long journey. It had started in a Lombard village crammed full of the dead and the wounded. In the aftermath of battle, he had made a vow to deliver the bloodstained letters of a dying man. It was nearly two years since he had left the battered French army in northern Italy; two years that had seen him journey across Europe before finally returning to his home city of London. He had planned to stay there only long enough to settle a score from his past before buying a train ticket to Liverpool and boarding a ship bound for Boston.

  But fate had decided on a different plan. Her name had been Françoise du Breton, and she had been the wife of a French wine trader who spent much of his time travelling across Europe. The Englishman had lavished her with gifts whilst living the finest life London could provide. It had not ended well, and he had been left on the street with just enough money in his pocketbook to buy passage to Boston, and a sackful of regret at what might have been. His last English money had been exchanged on board the packet for dollars, the captain as deft as any shofulman at swindling his passengers with an outrageous rate of exchange.

  His heavy carpet bag contained all his possessions. Its sides were stained with salt and darkened with damp, and its handle strained with the weight of the weapon hidden deep inside. His worldly goods had been reduced to the rumpled clothing on his back and the garments stuffed into the bag. He had once been a maharajah’s general, living in a gilded palace and surrounded by beautiful objects. Now he was a near-penniless vagrant with a handful of dollars in his pocket and an unknown future waiting for him.

  He pulled the collar of the greatcoat tighter and pressed on. A wagon approached, its horses’ grey coats darkened almost to black by the rain. The Englishman caught the eye of the Negro teamster as he passed, then walked on, following the vague directions the ship’s master had given him. He had been told that he would be able to find the address he sought unaided, the new buildings on Beacon Hill an easy enough saunter from the wharf.

  The streets were busier as he approached the end of State Street. The locals, long used to the rain, hurried past, faces hidden behind collars and hat brims pulled low. A short, thickset fellow wrapped in a thick sou’wester knocked the Englishman’s shoulder as he went by, his boots kicking up a heavy spray. There was no apology for the contact, the Bostonian moving away without even a grunt. The Englishman ignored the rudeness, just as he ignored the rain, which was beginning to show signs of lessening, and pressed on, passing by what looked to be a great covered market opposite a grand building with a fine cupola topped with a copper grasshopper weathervane.

  After so long at sea, the crowd waiting at the wharf had been daunting. There were too many people, creating too much noise. Keen to avoid another crowd, he turned into a side street, thinking to bypass the busier streets altogether. At the next corner, and with the rain reduced to little more than a drizzle, he paused, dropping the heavy carpet bag to the ground and taking a moment to shake off the worst of the rain. Only when drier did he dig deep into a pocket and pull out the thick sheaf of letters that he had taken from the hand of the dying man.

  The pages were crumpled and the string that bound them together was frayed. The text on the uppermost letter, written in pencil in a fine, sloping hand, was faded and part covered by a series of black stains. As the Englishman studied it, his thumbnail picked at the marks, scraping away some of the old blood. It did little to improve their appearance.

  A lady of middling years bustled past. She was moving quickly, her dry cape an indication that she had waited for the rain to pass before stepping out. The Englishman saw her gaze wander over him, the rapid appraisal made in less than a second and without her losing a step. The contact was fleeting, but it lasted long enough for him to see her eyes widen just a fraction. It was a common enough reaction. The Englishman was no longer a young man. He was past his thirtieth year, and his lean, clean-shaven face bore a thick scar across the left cheek. The woman would have seen it, just as she would surely have seen the anger that simmered in his hard grey eyes. Some women were put off by the combination, but he knew that to a few he was still handsome, his steely expression and the blemish to his face only adding to his appeal.

  He did not linger. He lifted his pork pie hat and ran his fingers through his close-cropped hair before picking up the carpet bag and moving on. For the next hour he wandered the streets of Boston, working his way past the great common and up the sloping streets where he had been told he would find the address that was just about legible on the bloodstained letters.

  A watery sun was out by the time he realised he was thoroughly lost. It did little to shift the chill from the air. The Englishman found himself in a series of narrower streets, where the buildings pressed close together. Twice he had asked a passer-by for directions, and twice he had been answered with little more than a glare. On the third occasion he addressed a Negro woman carrying a bundle of sheets. She took one look at him before scuttling away without so much as a word.

  He heard the sound of singing. Three men were walking along with arms interlinked so that they blocked nearly the entire width of the street. It did not take a great deal of experience to know that they had been drinking. It was still early in the evening, but the trio ap
peared to be three sheets to the wind already, the hour clearly no barrier to their excess.

  The Englishman looked them over quickly, the appraisal immediate and instinctive. He did not think much to them. They were dressed in matching long dark-blue tunics with trousers of a lighter shade. None of the three were fine physical specimens and all bore the pinched, pale faces of men long used to life in the city.

  If he hoped to let them pass without comment, he was to be disappointed.

  ‘You looking at me?’ The tallest of the three men spoke with a strong Irish accent. He was a long-faced, dark-haired man whose thin beard barely obscured skin covered with a thousand pockmarks.

  ‘Excuse me.’ The Englishman offered the apology with little sincerity.

  ‘You’re fecking English!’ The reaction was immediate and it was loud.

  ‘And you’re a drunk.’

  The three men came to a halt. It took a moment for the tallest to extricate himself from his fellows’ arms. The Englishman stood and waited for him patiently. The Irishman paused, then slowly looked him up and down before his eyes focused on his face and took in the amused expression.

  ‘You think this is funny?’

  ‘A little.’

  The Irishman was sobering up fast. He blinked, then took a step closer. ‘You want me to give you something to laugh about, you slave-loving English maggot?’

  The Englishman smelled the sour stink of whisky on the other man’s breath. He was given no time to find a reply.

  ‘You heard the news, maggot?’ The Irishman was forced to lift his chin so he could look the taller man in the eye.

  ‘You care to tell me?’

  ‘You don’t know?’ the Irishman sneered. ‘Where’ve you been? Hiding in the dark, bothering little boys?’

  ‘I just landed.’ The Englishman’s tone did not alter.

  ‘And you never heard that those Southern langers have attacked Fort Sumter, I suppose?’

  The Englishman raised an eyebrow at what he supposed was momentous news. He did not understand the reference to the fort, but there had been talk aplenty in the London papers of the growing conflict brewing in the United States, a country that appeared to no longer be so united. He had been aware that he was travelling to a place on the brink of civil war. The threat had not bothered him. It was not his fight.