Free The Scarlet Thief by Paul Fraser Collard Page A

victory. His thoughts filled with the grandeur of battle in all its splendour.
    The first rays of daylight pierced the gloom of the attic room, illuminating thousands of specks of floating dust. It reached Sloames’s face, the thin beam lingering on the sallow cheeks and wasted features.
    A cloud passed over the sun, shutting off the warming light, and the gloom quickly refilled the spaces that had enjoyed the momentary glow.
    The shadow of the cloud passed over Sloames’s face and he died.

14 September 1854. Kalamata Bay, Crimean Peninsula
    For countless leagues, the rolling grasslands of the Crimean peninsula stretched as far as the eye could see. In places, a scattering of ancient barrows, mounds of earth that had been used as burial places in centuries long past, interrupted the undulating steppe. Elsewhere, the grass gave way to cultivation, the dark, fertile soil a rich foundation for the acres of vineyards and orchards that produced an abundant supply of grapes, pears, nectarines, apples and peaches. Pockets of snug dwellings nestled in the folds and creases of the plateau, scattered through the landscape as if the squat buildings had formed naturally, grown out of the fertile soil of the steppe.
    It was a place of calm and tranquillity, a land that stoically endured the wild weather and slept through the good. It had remained unchanged and undisturbed for centuries, far from the trials and tribulations at the heart of the Russian empire, distant, forgotten, and ignored.
    Then the invading armies arrived.
    They had landed the previous day at Kalamata Bay, twenty-five miles north of the Russian naval base at Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula. Even now, on the second day of the landing, the inauspiciously named Kalamata Bay was a frenzy of activity. The grey waters were crammed with ships and yet more sails filled the horizon. Large, powerful men-of-war, the leviathans of the fleet, sat immobile on the cramped margins of the bay, while smaller gigs and cutters swarmed around them. The new war steamers, with their shallower draught, came closer to shore before they, too, disgorged their own flotillas of small craft, their smokestacks belching out columns of dirty grey smoke towards the dreary sky.
    A thin spit of sand and shingle ran along the landward rim of the bay, separating the sea from a large, stagnant and foul-smelling salt lake. The newly landed men would have to march along its entire length before they could turn inland for the higher ground. The remote beach was normally deserted, even the local Tartar population finding little reason to visit. Now, two hundred and fifty ships were disgorging nearly sixty thousand British, French and Turkish soldiers on to it, a coalition of forces brought together to fight the might of the vast Russian army.
    The landing site had only been picked the previous day, an ill-omened indication of how indecisive the combined allied command structure was. Nonetheless, the generals’ staff had done their best to plan the landing in minute detail, producing eight pages of printed regulations that listed everything from the landing timetable to which flag each troop-carrying vessel should display. Now, the sheer scale of the operation was overwhelming all that planning and the beach was descending into chaos.
    Dozens upon dozens of sailors stood knee-deep in the surf, hauling in boats full of men and turning freshly emptied craft around to return to the transports for yet more troops. Newly landed soldiers gathered on the shingle in their thousands, among mountains of equipment. The officers watched in dismay as the military might of three countries was dumped in one bewildering heap on the sand.
    ‘Company! Form line!’
    The command would ordinarily have brought the company of redcoats sharply to attention. It should have sent the sixty-three men and three sergeants moving through well-practised drill.
    Should have, but did not.
    Two weeks on board ship had stiffened their