The Guns of El Kebir (Simon Fonthill Series) Read online

  The Guns of El Kebir

  JOHN WILCOX

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  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 2007 John Wilcox

  The right of John Wilcox 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 2011

  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

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 8170 8

  This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Author’s Note

  Also by John Wilcox

  The Horns of the Buffalo

  The Road to Kandahar

  The Diamond Frontier

  Last Stand At Majuba Hill

  Masters of Battle

  Playing on the Green

  (Non-fiction)

  For Betty, again.

  Acknowledgements

  As always, I must offer my thanks to my agent, Jane Conway-Gordon, for her constant help and encouragement, and my editor at Headline, Sherise Hobbs, whose assiduous eye for detail and creative suggestions on plot improved the text greatly. As usual, I would have been lost without the ready assistance offered by the staff and the facilities at the London Library in guiding my journey back in time to the London and Egypt of 1882. The internet can only take a researcher so far on such a journey; a good library is essential in producing contemporary accounts that give a flavour and a feel for the period.

  My old friend David Goodenday, a former Justice of the Peace, offered sound advice on the procedure of a magistrates’ court, while pointing out that he was not quite old enough to have experienced it at first hand in 1882! At the London Press Office of the Egyptian Embassy, Miss Nashwa Hamid worked hard to help me gain permission to enter the military area that now includes the site of the el Kebir battle, and in Cairo Mr Ahmed Sharaf kindly opened further doors for me. I must also thank Mr Ehab Fahmy, of the Ismailia Press Centre, for escorting me to the battlefield itself. The site has slipped back now, quite unmarked, into the flat gravel of the northern desert and it would have been a frustrating journey without his cheerful company.

  My neighbour and good friend, Neil Pattenden, allowed me free run of his library, which included a vital contemporary account of the war, and, as ever, I owe love and gratitude to my wife, Betty, who helped me hugely with the research and, as always, accompanied me on my travels.

  For those who would like to read further on the subject of the Arabi ‘revolt’ and Wolseley’s invasion, the following books will be helpful. Some are undoubtedly out of print but the London Library and the British Library should be able to provide them.

  The War in Egypt and the Soudan by Thomas Archer, Blackie and Son, London, 1887

  Campaigns: Zulu 1879, Egypt 1882, Private Journal of G.C. Dawnay, Ken Trotman Ltd., 1989 (originally published 1887)

  War on the Nile by Michael Barthorp, Blandford Press, Dorset, 1989

  Cairo by S. Lane-Poole, J.S. Virtue & Co, London, 1892

  Lifting the Veil by Anthony Sattin, J.M. Dent, London, 1988

  Miss Brocklehurst on the Nile, Diary of a Victorian Traveller in Egypt by Marianne Brocklehurst, Millrace, Disley, Cheshire, 2004

  Egypt 1879 – 1883 by the Rt Hon. Sir Edward Malet, John Murray, London, 1909

  The Colonial Wars Source Book by Philip J. Haythornwaite, Arms and Armour, London, 1994

  Theatre of Operations in Egypt, 1882

  Chapter 1

  Brecon, the Welsh – English border, March 1882

  Simon Fonthill shrugged on his tweed jacket and strode down the stairs, adjusting his tie and smoothing back his hair as he went. For his mother, breakfast was almost as formal a meal as dinner and she insisted that everyone was properly dressed for it. Simon wished to avoid any further confrontation with Mrs Fonthill; there had been enough of these already since he and Jenkins had arrived at his parents’ home three months ago.

  ‘Morning, Mama,’ he greeted as he walked around the long table and kissed the cheek offered to him. ‘Father out already?’

  Mrs Fonthill dabbed her mouth with her napkin and turned to look behind her through the window at the late winter sky, already beginning to turn a bright blue as the early morning mist stole away. ‘He went out while it was still dark, silly man.’ She turned back to Simon. ‘There’s kedgeree under the tureen on the sideboard, but ring for Sarah if you want eggs. You know, Simon, I worry about your father. He’s getting no younger, and to go ditching in this piercingly cold weather is really most ill-advised.’ She directed a level gaze at her son. ‘Really, my dear, you could have offered to do whatever needs to be done in this ridiculous ditch.’

  Simon sighed but avoided her gaze as he loaded his plate. ‘Would have done, Mother, quite happily, if Papa had mentioned it. But you know he still keeps things rather close to his chest.’ He sat at the table, two places down from where his mother presided at the head. ‘Anyway, why isn’t Williams doing the ditching? That’s what he’s paid for, isn’t it?’

  Mrs Fonthill sniffed. ‘He’s sick. Estate workers are allowed to be sick, it seems, but not the Major.’ She paused for a moment and then spoke in a lower, even more disapproving tone. ‘Your man Jenkins has gone with him to help.’

  Simon paused, his fork halfway to his mouth. ‘Oh, capital. Good for 352. I’ll go and find them and give them a hand as soon as I’ve finished breakfast.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Mrs Fonthill threw down her napkin. ‘Why on earth do you call the man by that ridiculous number. Doesn’t he have a name like decent Christian folk?’

  ‘Of course he does, Mother. It’s a Welsh thing. You will remember that when he was in a holding company at the regiment’s depot in the town, there were three other Jenkinses with the same initial, so they were all called by the last three of their army numbers to differentiate them and I suppose it has just stuck. Anyway, he hates his Christian name and prefers 352. Everybody calls him that.’

  His mother pursed her lips but remained silent, picking up her discarded copy of the Morning Post but covertly watching her son round the edge of the page as he ate. Mrs Fonthill, a handsome figure in her stiffly bodiced gown, the blue of it setting off her per
fectly coiffed white hair, was a woman of strong opinions and was noted in the county for her hatred of Mr Gladstone and of all things radical. She disliked the unconventional – and her son was unconventional. He continued to avoid eye contact as, head down, he tackled his kedgeree, so she was able to rest her gaze on him and contemplate his . . . his . . . what? His stubborn refusal to conform? His dislike of tradition. His cussed independence? His reluctance to take up a profession or – more acceptably – stay at home and help his father manage the estate? Was it the oxymoronic and seemingly quite unpredictable contradictions in behaviour? In a rural economy that relied on horses, he disliked riding. Born into a military family, he had willingly taken a commission in his father’s old regiment, but left the army early. There was that terrible business of the court martial for cowardice in Zululand, and yet he had been found not guilty and even commended for bravery in later campaigns in South Africa and Afghanistan. He had refused the chance to resume his commission, with guaranteed promotion, but still stayed working for the army as a scout in the field with Jenkins.

  Ah, Jenkins . . . ! The two seemed inseparable and it was unquestionably a close relationship. Mrs Fonthill sniffed. Much closer than master and servant should be. It was quite unhealthy. Of course, it was a manly friendship, born of serving together and of risking their lives together – Simon had said that Jenkins had saved his life many times. But it didn’t do to cross the divisions of class. It just didn’t do.

  She pushed her reading glasses down her nose the better to regard her son. He was really quite good-looking, she noted, particularly now that, at twenty-seven, he had filled out a little, and campaigning had even, it seemed, broadened his shoulders. It was his face, however, still brown from the African sun, that commanded attention. The cheekbones were high and the lips, unfashionably unframed by whiskers, were thin and sensitive, though the jaw was firm enough. The nose had sustained a blow that had clearly broken it at some stage – a Pathan’s musket barrel in the Hindu Kush, he had said, or something like that – and left it slightly hooked, giving him a predatory expression. The brown eyes, though, still retained that uncertainty of his youth, as though they were searching for something or someone.

  Simon looked up, caught his mother’s gaze and flushed a little. ‘If you’ll excuse me, Mama,’ he said, ‘I will go and change and see if I can go and do a bit of honest ditching. Where did you say they were?’

  ‘I think they’ve gone to the big field by Wellard’s Cross. Take my hunter if you wish, but be careful. The ground’s hard.’

  Another peck on the cheek and he was gone. She watched him leave and slowly shook her head. God had been merciful in finally allowing her to have a son – their only child – but why had He decided to test her maternal instincts with such an awkwardly unorthodox boy? She sighed and picked up the Morning Post to resume her anxious reading about the unrest in Egypt.

  Simon strode away from the house with a sense of relief. It was good to be out in the clean, crisp air – he had decided to walk rather than take his mother’s brute of a hunter – and he felt a sense of physical satisfaction as his boots crunched through the crust of frost to the grass beneath. Far away, he heard the plaintive note of a hunting horn. Ah, his father wouldn’t like that! It was distant, but near enough to set a protest of crows fluttering up from the twisted branches of a winter oak. A good day for hunting.

  His father’s estate was not large and it took only half an hour’s sharp walking to crest the hill above Wellard’s Cross. Down below he could see the figures of his father and Jenkins, bent beside the hedge as they shovelled away the detritus of winter to clear the ditch. Hedge and ditch care were important parts of estate management in this country, where the wind marched from the west throughout the year, driving the rain before it. Clear ditches were vital if good grazing land was not to be turned into bog and mud. The two men looked up, their breath rising like steam, as Simon approached.

  ‘Good morning, my boy,’ nodded the Major.

  ‘Afternoon, bach sir,’ said Jenkins. ‘’Ad a good lie-in, then?’ His voice carried the mellifluous inflection of the Welsh valleys.

  Simon ignored the sarcasm but grinned at the pair. At five feet nine inches, his father was of a similar height to his son, but with a much stouter build. He wore his greying hair unfashionably long and his face, too, was free of beard or moustache. His resemblance to Simon was not marked, except for the wide-set brown eyes, which seemed to carry a similar look of doubt and caution.

  Jenkins, on the other hand, standing shovel in hand, his feet wide apart and perfectly balanced in the ditch, had the bearing of a cheerful labourer. He measured no more than five feet four inches, but he seemed almost as wide as he was tall, so broad were his chest and shoulders. His face was tanned like Simon’s but his eyes were as button black as his short, spiky hair and the great moustache that seemed to curve from ear to ear. Perspiration poured down his face to mingle with the hairs that poked above his collarless shirt.

  Major Fonthill nodded towards him. ‘I thought a bit of digging might help to rid him of the beer he consumes at the Black Dog,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘But I must say, he works damned hard and he’s cheerful with it.’

  Jenkins had the grace to look crestfallen at the mention of the pub. Simon had long ago discovered that the Welshman had many talents, some of them surprisingly arcane. Brave as a bull, he was a superb horseman, a crack shot and possessed a happy disposition that remained undiminished by danger. Incongruously, he also had a sensitive nose for champagne and fine wine. Yet his predilection for beer and public houses was a weakness that often led him into trouble, for too much ale could turn the cheerful Jenkins into an irascible fighting machine. Twice since their return Simon had had to intervene with the local constabulary to rescue the Welshman from an overnight cell after a set-to at the bar of the Dog.

  ‘I’m ’appy to lend the Major an ’and,’ said Jenkins, gazing at his shovel, then, looking up directly at Simon, ‘Can’t stand doin’ nothin’, look you.’

  Simon frowned and nodded. Neither of them quite fitted into the ordered, almost smug routine of the red-brick house on the Borders. After sharing in the horrors of the defeat of the British by the Boers at Majuba Hill in the recent Transvaal War, Simon, at least, had been glad to return to his family home for a while, to readjust and decide what next to do. And Jenkins, of course, had come too. But the disapproval of the Welshman shown by Mrs Fonthill – particularly after his pugnacious behaviour in the village pub – and Simon’s growing restlessness had introduced a feeling of general unease into the house. Simon sucked in his breath. He couldn’t stand doin’ nothin’ either. But what to do? Where to go?

  The hiatus was broken by the hunting horn again, a little nearer now. Simon instinctively looked at his father. The Major had concluded some years ago that hunting was cruel and had given up riding to hounds. More to the point, he had banned the local hunt from crossing his land.

  Major Fonthill shook his head at the unspoken question. ‘They know better than to come on to my estate,’ he said. ‘They won’t follow on to my land. Now,’ he handed his shovel to Simon, ‘I would be grateful if the gallant army scout would spell me with this damned thing for a while.’ He picked up a pitchfork. ‘I’ll pile up this bracken, and if we don’t get snow or more rain, Williams can come and burn it when he recovers.’

  The three men bent to and worked in happy companionship for a while, the silence broken only by Jenkins’s tuneless whistling – the little man was the only Welshman Simon knew who couldn’t carry a tune. The horn, however, was heard again and it was clear that the hunt was approaching. Above the baying of the hounds, they could now hear the thud of hooves, although no horsemen could yet be seen through the thick hawthorn hedge.

  ‘Dammit all,’ cried the Major. ‘The fox is heading this way. Why on earth couldn’t they have headed him off after they’d raised him? They know I won’t have them on my land.’

  As though on cue, a fox
sped like a greyhound through a hole in the hedge less than six feet away from them. Ears laid back and brush in an elegant but terrified line parallel to the earth, it gave them an expressionless glance, then turned sharply to the right and raced away, alongside the hedge up the hill towards a group of trees.

  Within seconds, the pack of hounds hit the hole in the hedge and struggled to get through, wedging themselves together in the effort, for the hedge itself was too high for them to leap and too thick to penetrate except by the route taken by the fox. Immediately, the Major leapt to the gap and thrust his shovel across it, denying exit to the lead hound, who was halfway through and who immediately let out a howl of frustration. Within moments, the huntsmen arrived. The leader could not rein in in time and was forced to take the hedge at full tilt, as did the second horse. The rest, as they arrived at the formidable obstacle, milled about on its other side.

  The leading horseman, a large man wearing mudsplashed pink and riding a magnificent bay, had cleared the hedge well, and now he skilfully wheeled his mount around as the second rider, taking the jump less ably, nearly pitched over his horse’s head. The two rode up to George Fonthill, who was now firmly wedging his shovel across the gap.