The Passage to India Read online

  About the Book

  1831. A year in which violent social unrest and discord are widespread …

  In England, the new government is facing protests against the attempts of the Tory-dominated House of Lords to thwart the passing of the Reform Bill.

  In India, relations are increasingly strained between the presidency of Madras and some of its neighbouring princely states.

  Having taken command of the action to restore order in Bristol after one of the bloodiest riots in his country’s history, Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Hervey finds himself pilloried by the Radical press and out of favour. But an old friend, Sir Eyre Somervile, offers him a career lifeline: a return to India in order to strengthen Britain’s military presence at the East India Company’s headquarters in Madras.

  And so Hervey and the Sixth are ordered to the state of Coorg, where the Rajah has broken his bond with the Company and the Crown. Called upon to crush this rebellion, Hervey wonders whether he and his men will get out of such a perilous campaign unscathed, and with their reputations restored.

  The Passage to India marks Allan Mallinson’s welcome return to fiction – and to his redoubtable hero, Matthew Hervey of the 6th Light Dragoons.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Map

  Part One: A Time of Peace

  I The Words of the Preacher

  II Reform

  III The Rash Fierce Blaze of Riot

  IV The Edge of the Sword

  V Good Order and Military Discipline

  VI Post Mortem

  VII The Barrack Round

  VIII The Tribunal

  IX The Verdict

  X Acts of Charity

  XI The Balance of the Mind

  XII The Course of Nature

  XIII Who Goes There?

  Part Two: A Time to Embrace

  XIV Coromandel!

  XV Words of Advice

  XVI The Break of Day

  XVII Deccani Wallahs

  XVIII Tigers of Mysore

  XIX Time Spent in Reconnaissance

  XX Forests of the Night

  Part Three: A Time of War

  XXI ‘To Your Duties’

  XXII In the Midst of Life

  XXIII Untoward Delays

  XXIV The Culminating Point

  XXV A Time to Mourn

  XXVI A Time to …

  Historical Afternote

  Matthew Hervey – Curriculum Vitae

  About the Author

  Also by Allan Mallinson

  Copyright

  The

  PASSAGE

  TO INDIA

  ALLAN MALLINSON

  Passage to India!

  Struggles of many a captain – tales of many a sailor dead!

  WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass

  PART ONE

  A TIME OF PEACE

  It is an old observation, that a time of peace is always a time of prodigies; for as our news-writers must adorn their papers with that which the critics call, ‘The Marvellous,’ they are forced in a dead calm of affairs, to ransack every element for proper amusements, and either astonish their readers from time to time with a strange and wonderful sight, or be content to lose their custom.

  JOSEPH ADDISON

  (with Thomas Steele, founder of The Spectator, 1711)

  I

  The Words of the Preacher

  The Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Salisbury, Wiltshire, Sunday before the Feast of All Saints, 30 October 1831

  ‘I TAKE AS my text, the Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter three: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”.’ Hervey settled a little lower into his pew. It was no church parade; there were no officers to whom he must give an impression of attentiveness, no serjeants to whom he must display an upright bearing; nor need he concern himself with what the regiment’s chaplain was saying – what its consequence to the listening dragoons (or what the thoughts of the unlistening ones). Besides, from long experience of the pulpit in Horningsham he was certain that no great tumult or misunderstanding was likely to ensue from his father’s homily. And the words of Ecclesiastes – ‘The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem’ – he knew by heart; and their poetry at least was ever easy to the ear.

  The Archdeacon of Salisbury, or Sarum as his father preferred, ever mindful of the time before the Reformation (that wretched word ‘Reform’ under another guise), looked up and over the lectern, the tallows in their glass sleeves lighting his face as well as his sermon book – a face of some age, now, but still one of distinction, and kindly – and glanced to left and right to the opposing choir stalls, where sat the major part of the congregation as well as the choristers and vicars choral; and, trusting to the abat-voix and the stones to magnify his words, began the roll call of every thing and purpose to which there was a season and a time.

  ‘A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted …’

  The first of the roll call had never given Hervey cause for contemplation, for the one was past, and the other was the prerogative of the Almighty. True, he himself might have been dead a dozen times and more – one dozen dozen – were it not for his own skill and address, but these he knew (in his better moments) to be a gift, a gift of the Almighty; and it was blasphemy to believe otherwise – as well as, perhaps, hubris.

  ‘A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up …’

  This, as a rule, did not disturb him either, for the one, literally speaking, was the soldier’s profession – the killing and the breaking down – and the other was the thing of the settled life. His father, he knew, would say that the Preacher spoke figuratively also; but it did not serve the soldier to contemplate too keenly the figurative, for in him it was – in the words of the Bard – action that was eloquence, the eyes more learnèd than the ears.

  ‘A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance …’

  Perhaps tears and laughter were figures of speech too, though he’d known both very literally. And in truth he had never been able to shed entirely the mourning band – thirteen, rising fourteen years that it was since Henrietta perished (and so cruel a death, in the white wastes of Canada – terrifying, lonely, and on his account). True, it had not made him continent – Lady Katherine Greville remained a standing rebuke in that regard (there was no expiation of sin in old General Greville’s being an absentee husband) – but did he let Henrietta’s memory haunt him to excess, such that from the outset, and without his knowing, it had somehow stood between him and the second Mrs Hervey? Might Kezia’s rejection of him, now, have just cause – rather than, as he supposed, arising from some deficiency in Kezia herself?

  A ‘time to dance’ … He smiled to himself again, if ruefully. Certainly he did not now dance with much grace. Indeed he danced very little these days. There had been a time, very briefly … But there he was again, harking back: Henrietta – why did he torment himself so?

  ‘A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing …’

  Casting away stones, then gathering them? This his father had always said was wanting understanding. There were those who held that it was to mar an enemy’s fields by casting stones upon them, as the Israelites had when they invaded Moab; but none could be sure. And the Preacher spoke not solely of conjugal embraces, but of parents embracing their children – as Jacob had his – and of one brother embracing another, as Esau had Jacob; and one friend another. Yet why should conjugal embrace be regulated by season?
There were some, he knew (or, at least, he fancied he knew), who lived each day in warm embrace; why had his own seasons been so short?

  ‘A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away …’

  He sighed irreverently. Nothing was permanent, or so it seemed. In truth it were better not to get, so as to be spared the struggle to keep, and the pain of losing. Should he chide himself for so mean a thought?

  ‘A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak …’

  He sighed again, this time almost audibly – and then checked himself: he might be in a plain coat, with none of his dragoons behind him, but it would not serve for the family of the Succentor, and Vicar of the Close, which were Archdeacon Hervey’s other preferments (how sudden these pluralities had come after so many years in that tumbledown parsonage at Horningsham), to appear in dissent. But this was indeed a time of rending. The country was in as divided a state of passion as any time he could recall. ‘Reform!’ – as if a single measure might right every ill of which its advocates complained. Reform had claimed already the best of men – the Duke of Wellington, no longer His Majesty’s first minister because he had set his face against it. Yes, the system as it presently stood was imperfect, but yet it served. Who knew what injury might be done in some Jacobin-like amendment? Just half a league from where they sat now was a bare hill, ‘the green mound’ as the Reformers contemptuously called it – Old Sarum. Once it had been the city itself – castle, cathedral and all, the place in which that great and terrible king Henry Plantagenet had kept prisoner his queen – Eleanor of Aquitaine – for having incited her sons to rebel against their father. Since Edward the Second’s time Old Sarum had returned two members to parliament. That it did so still when occupied by no other than sheep was, it was true, an anomaly; but no system could be raised to a state of perfection. That its two members were brothers who had made their fortune in India, come home and ‘bought’ the borough was an anomaly too; but ought a thing that had served the nation for four centuries now be cast aside by the demands of ‘progress’? If the country’s forefathers, who strove so manfully to make a parliament, chose to dispose the seats in this way, who now should gainsay them?

  He smiled to himself. He recalled how he had put that very question to Cornet St Alban – Lieutenant and Adjutant now, and the best of men – during their Norfolk sojourn two winters ago. The younger son of the Earl of Bicester had asked as they passed Castle Rising (which also, like Old Sarum, the Reformists called a ‘rotten borough’), ‘Truly, Colonel, how can it serve that green mounds return a member – two members indeed – and a place such as Birmingham none?’ And when Hervey had put his own question by way of reply, St Alban had countered very elegantly with ‘Colonel, are not members of parliament meant to be lawmakers, not antiquarians?’

  Few things had pleased Hervey more than the society of this newcome officer of light dragoons, though he supposed he would not have that pleasure for long. Officers with such connections and means were not much persuaded of the distinction of long service – unless the vainest, most empty-headed kind, like Brudenell in the Eighth, who’d bought his way from cornet to half-colonel in six years, and would doubtless have a regiment soon (without hearing a shot fired but at his own partridges).

  His eyelids were growing heavy though. He’d posted through the night, nodding a deal of the way but waking at every change of horses, then stopping on the old Roman road just beyond Figsbury Ring – yet another ‘green mound’, though one at least that did not return a member to parliament – to watch as the last-but-one sunrise of October revealed the great cathedral below, which was to his mind the finest building in all the world (and he had seen and wondered at the Taj Mahal); and on arriving in the Close he had scarce had time to shave and breakfast before he dutifully attended Morning Prayer – ‘Matins’, as his father mischievously preferred – and afterwards walked with him a little in the cloisters to promote the circulation, walked next with his mother to the college of matrons to dispense alms and counsel, and then in the water meadows with the old spaniel who’d outlived his former master in the canonry. Evening Prayer – ‘Evensong’, as the archdeacon also insisted – he would not as a rule have attended; once of a Sunday, these days, he found enough to be reminded of the eternity of damnation that followed from sin. And as the light faded in that glorious space, the nave and choir, he gave himself leave to close his eyes, for was it not said unto them ‘The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath’?

  But now came the most tumultuous of the Preacher’s seasons, ‘A time to love, and a time to hate’, in which he thought his father’s voice wonderfully conveyed first the sadness of the opposing passions, before, with a dramatic effect that he’d not formerly witnessed, the Venerable Thomas Hervey pronounced the concluding ‘a time of war, and a time of peace’.

  War: his (Matthew Hervey’s) profession, one way or another, and pretty much all he knew. He’d been born into it. When he was but a babe in arms, the French had cut off the head of their king and broken down their neighbours’ fences, setting alight all Europe and beyond, so that it smouldered still. As a boy he’d known the peril of invasion right enough, riding the Plain eager to see the beacons that stood ready to rouse the nation to arms. As a youth at Shrewsbury, all ink-fingered, he’d cheered when the tide turned against the would-be invader, when Nelson’s ‘wooden walls’ had emptied the camp at Boulogne of the presumptuously named ‘Armée d’Angleterre’. And then, as Britain found a lodgement at last on the continent, to become Bonaparte’s ‘Spanish ulcer’, he had himself put on the King’s coat, which he had with one brief interval worn ever since. Indeed, he had bloodied his sword with such regularity that he could think of it as nothing. It was as well that war was so terrible, otherwise he would grow too fond of it. But there was no avoiding war; it sought out the timid and the unprepared. It could be postponed only to the advantage of others.

  Yet all was now determinedly peace, and soldiers in peace were like chimneys in summer. What therefore was his profession now?

  * * *

  IT WOULD BE a good night for glaziers. For carpenters and joiners too; likewise plumbers and bricklayers. For locksmiths, cabinetmakers, and any sort of handyman who could knock up a cot, a bench or a board. For drapers, upholsterers and sellers of china – even for wine merchants (that is, if their cellars had survived the tumult). Indeed, for any artisan or tradesman capable of securing or restoring the fabric, fittings or furnishings of the objects – civic and private alike – of the mob’s destructive vigour.

  But especially glaziers. No protest seized upon the attention of parliament, press, and public so much as the breaking of windows. In April, Apsley House, the residence of the duke himself, had been the mark for the London mob. Its illustrious owner had been too well accustomed to the fall of shot on the battlefield to care a rush for the fall of stones upon his floor (in regard of his own safety at least), but for reasons of public order – and no doubt, too, to damn their eyes – at the first lull of riot he had got himself iron shutters on every window, proof even against bullet and ball (whence he became to the more insolent of the press, ‘the Iron Duke’).

  And for why? Because the mobile vulgus, the ‘mob’, bayed for ‘The bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill.’

  A Bill to amend the representation of the people in England and Wales.

  ‘Reform.’

  And in Bristol now there was many an Apsley House (Nottingham had faced the same but a fortnight before, the castle burned to a shell). The country felt tinder-dry, and whether or not fires began could turn randomly on the popularity or otherwise of a single man at the critical point of combustion. In the case of Bristol, that man was Sir Charles Wetherell, recorder of the city and member for Boroughbridge in the County of York, a seat which ‘The Bill’ would have seen extinguished; and thereby Sir Charles was an implacable opponent of Reform. Two days ago he had proceeded to the great port t
o open the assizes, in spite of warnings that his appearance would provoke disturbances. These warnings he had simply reported to Lord Melbourne, the home secretary, stating his intention to carry out his duty in the ordinary way, ‘whatever risk to mine own person’, and leaving the government to take precautions to protect the public peace. Indeed, it was almost with defiance that he entered the city – not privily but with a display of pomp befitting, to his mind, a judge of assize. The warnings were at once proved well founded; his carriage was received with yells, hootings, and stones, so that there was a considerable call on the constables to escort him to the Guildhall to open the commission of peace. Here he loudly threatened to commit to prison any person who could be pointed out to him as contributing to the disturbance, which though in law was proper, in prudence was lacking, not least because there was not the means to effect any arrest. Indeed, it was not so much a spark to the tinder, but a drenching of fuel to the flame of popular fury. By the time he reached the Mansion House, the mob had routed the constables and were attacking the building, so that he was only able to escape, and in disguise, by clambering over the roofs of neighbouring tenements. The mayor, himself a reformer (though little that served in trying to quell the tumult), remained in the Mansion House. Whether the mob knew it or not, they began now to tear up the iron palisades to use as levers against the brickwork of the adjoining walls to furnish themselves with missiles to hurl at every window, while others forced the entrance and brought in straw to set the place ablaze. Only the sudden appearance of the cavalry saved the situation.

  The mayor’s victory was short-lived, however. That Sunday morning, the last of October, the mob returned. Without firearms or other means of defence, all that his party could do now was follow the example of Sir Charles Wetherell by making their way out of the top of the house and hiding behind the parapets, then crawling along the roofs till they reached the Customs House, clambering in by a fortuitously open window, and quietly descending into a back street to make their way to the Guildhall.