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sleep. He ran his hand across his stubbled chin. That and perhaps a shave and a chance to lie with his new wife.
    He noticed that he was sweating heavily now. The day had crept up on them, and the noise from the valley seemed to amplify the heat. How much longer would they stand here? he thought. Taylor and his men had long since finished their song and silence again descended upon the ranks, letting the fears back in.
    Steel drew himself up and spoke in a clear voice, intending the men to hear him: ‘That was a fine piece of singing back there, Corporal Taylor. Would you mind very much if we should call upon your talents again ere long?’
    Taylor grinned. ‘At your disposal as always, Captain Steel, sir. Lifts the spirits, does a song. That’s what I always say, sir.’ And by way of an afterthought he added: ‘Can’t abide this waiting though, sir.’
    Slaughter glared at him. But Steel was not one, as were some officers, to chide petty impertinence, particularly at such a time as this and from one of his veterans such as Taylor. He nodded. ‘Nor I, Taylor. And you’re right about singing. We’ll hear from you again. But I dare say we’ll be at them soon. Don’t you worry.’
    The man next to Taylor in the company’s front rank, a normally dour Lowland Scot, like Steel himself, named John Mackay, spoke up: ‘And we’ll see ’em off today, sir, won’t we? Just like we did at Ramillies, eh boys?’
    ‘When you were still at your mother’s teat,’ muttered Slaughter.
    There was a short hurrah from the ranks which betrayed more about their boredom and fear than it said about their confidence. Like Ramillies, thought Steel. Perhaps it would be like Ramillies. Like Bleneim too, maybe. But Marlborough’s past triumphs seemed an age away now, as he stood on the bridge – almost another country after all that had happened to him since.
    Before then he had not known his wife, Henrietta. Lady Henrietta Vaughan, to give her her full title. And this was the name by which she would forever be known, it seemed. He himself found it hard to imagine her as ‘Lady Henrietta Steel’. Would he ever become used to it? For she was his wife of little less than a year, now safely billeted in Brussels. He had not wanted her to come out with him from England, but she had prevailed, saying that other wives did as much so why should she not follow her beloved captain?
    Captain Steel. Now that was a style he had no difficulty in adopting. His part in the taking of Ostend had been rewarded at Court with the confirmation of his brevet rank as a full captaincy, by no less a person than the Queen herself. He had been paraded through the streets of London as a hero of the campaign. His praises had been sung by balladeers from Covent Garden to Holborn and talked of by old campaigners in White’s, at Old Man’s coffee house and the late king’s new military hospital at Chelsea.
    He had wondered at the time what his brother’s reaction might have been had he but seen him in such pomp. His elder brother Charles, that was, who had always called him ‘Jack the good for nothing’, who had introduced him as ‘Jack my hapless brother who will come to naught’. To him Steel would forever be the failed lawyer’s clerk, a penniless soldier who had accepted the commission purchased by his mistress. What would he say now to Captain Steel, the hero of Ostend?
    For a moment too he thought of his younger brother, Alexander, a professed Jacobite whose ideals had split the family – what was left of it. Alexander, the baby of the three brothers, two years his junior, who had left home to join the exiled King James at his court outside Paris. Steel had not had news of him now for five years and wondered what might have become of him. Was he still alive? Had he fought for his king? In truth Steel half expected to encounter him on a battlefield in the uniform of the ‘Wild Geese’, those Irish regiments in French service who fought so well for a