A Close Run Thing Read online

  Jessope. Hervey smiled at the thought of him, and wondered what recovery he was making since his return to England, and when indeed he might see him again. Doubtless he was being fêted at this very instant by the ladies of St James’s. He smiled again as he recalled Jessope’s description of Nero: ‘unmanageable’. Yet in one sense it was exact enough, for in the hands of any but those which had been trained in the classical method he was wholly unresponsive, positively wilful. In Hochschule hands his manners were impeccable. He could cover ground better even than Corporal Collins’s gelding and had jumped four foot six, though he lacked Jessye’s endurance. There had been times as a boy, in the riding-hall at Wilton House, when Hervey would gladly have quit his lessons with the Austrian Reitlehrer and gone back to his simple hunting seat, but he had frequently thanked God that the option of doing so had never been his. No riding master had been able since to disabuse him of his conviction that to be master of both a classical and an English seat was a peerless asset.

  Jessye was his concern that evening, however, and they managed eventually to rug her up with blankets from the chaplain’s quarters – the priest had not been seen since their arrival – and make a mash of what seemed to be bran, which Johnson had discovered unattended somewhere. The quartermasters came in with two waggon-loads of good hay soon afterwards and, though it meant turning out the troopers again to replace the dusty stuff in the lines, the work was done quickly and Hervey was able to have the orderly trumpeter sound the mess call by six o’clock. A jaunty little tune, it put a skip into his spirits, if not into his step, as he left:

  An officer’s wife has puddings and pies,

  A serjeant’s wife has skilleee …

  But a soldier’s wife has nothing at all

  To fill her empty belleee … E, E, E

  Thank heaven there were no soldiers’ wives with them this time, nor any others for that matter. He knew their worth on campaign, for sure, but he knew their trouble, too; and the balance lay heavily, in his judgement, with the latter. In any event, all that might soon be behind them: no one at the stables parade had said as much, but there had been a distinct air of anticipation, a sensing that the end of their long ordeal, this seemingly unending war with Bonaparte, was near.

  But even these comparatively light duties were telling on him, and he was glad of the opportunity to get to his own mess. However, his hopes of any immediate rest were dashed as soon as he entered the noisy and smoke-filled refectory. Cries of ‘The child Samuel!’ greeted him, though he was at a loss to know why.

  ‘First book of Samuel,’ called Harding, the senior lieutenant, in mock despair. ‘“And the child Samuel grew on, and was in favour both with the Lord, and also with men”!’

  Hervey smiled as he tumbled to the reference. The intelligence of Lord Wellington’s pleasure had, it seemed, reached the mess before him, though he hardly expected that he was in favour with the stable details after calling them out a second time. A press of officers formed to shake his hand, and the steward, trying manfully to find some ingress, was jostled this way and that before being able to proffer a silver tray on which there was a letter for him.

  ‘It has been some time in reaching us, sir,’ he said apologetically, though the delay was none of his making.

  Hervey was pleased with the excuse to seek out a quiet corner, but as he did so the sight of the envelope at once discomfited him. Though he had never been given to too much introspection – nor, indeed, had there been any great opportunity for it during this campaign – there was something in the three short lines of the address which brought him up short, made him abruptly aware of just how much his life belonged to the Army. That would not ordinarily have discomposed him, for this was his life and he held no other to be more honourable, but the sudden notion that his soul might have been taken by the drum, too, disturbed him more. Perhaps it was the terseness of the address:

  Cornet M. P. Hervey,

  6th Lt. Dgns.,

  Spain

  Three lines – name, regiment, country – the very essence of his being in so short a space. And then another chill, a portent of the contents: he stared for some time before he could bring himself to open it, for the hand was unmistakable, though months had passed since any word from Wiltshire, and it was a hand conspicuously more restrained than he had seen before.

  Horningsham,

  17 January 1814

  Dearest Matthew,

  I am afraid that this letter bears the saddest news. Our John has died in Oxford on this 12th instant. According to Mr Heywood, his vicar, this hard winter we are enduring was taking its toll most cruelly on his parish and he was much about the poorest parts trying to bring relief. He became ill a fortnight ago and then succumbed to pneumonia.

  There were three more pages in his sister’s round script, but he could not read on. Though his expression must have reflected the news, and little to his mind could have been worse, he was able nevertheless to slip the letter into his tunic and escape without giving away his anguish. In the quiet of his cell he sat with his head in his hands for what seemed an age. The irony, that surrounded by death, as he had been these past six years, it was death at a distance which was finally to pierce him, only added to his grief.

  There was a knock at the door. ‘Not now, Johnson!’ he called. But it opened slowly, and there appeared, diffidently, the regiment’s veterinary officer.

  ‘Pardon my intruding so, Hervey, but I wished to have words concerning the chestnut in ‘C’ Troop.’ The voice was equally hesitant.

  Hervey would have wished for this at another time but he sensed he had little choice but to yield. ‘Well, yes, indeed, Selden. Come in, sit down,’ he said, indicating a sedile which Johnson had acquired during the day.

  ‘Hervey, the farrier-major has reported to me what transpired at evening stables.’ He began coughing badly, his face in a feverish sweat. Hervey gave him a cup of water.

  ‘You ought not to be out of your bed, Selden, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘That I know; it’s a damned potent attack this time, but I had to speak with you about my diagnosis. You examined the eye, I’m told?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I could barely see it, I confess. What did the pupil look like?’

  ‘Undiminished – a little dilated, if anything, I should say.’

  The veterinary officer sighed. ‘I should have got someone to look, but the eye was so far back in its socket …’

  Hervey nodded.

  ‘And I looked at my notebook and saw that the horse had had a previous attack of ophthalmia. If there is recurrence, then it signals progressive blindness, and there is no recourse but to the bullet – as you very well know. Thus I made the presumption of the specific condition. I have only seen two cases before, both in the Indies, but I do not understand how there could be a recurrence of the simple.’

  ‘I think you will find,’ said Hervey quietly, ‘that it was the other chestnut – J78 – that was the previous case. You have made the two as one.’

  The veterinary officer’s jaw fell. ‘Then, I must go at once and offer my papers to the major,’ he replied.

  ‘There is no need for that,’ insisted Hervey. ‘You were in no condition to be attending to them in the first instance. Here, take this brandy.’ And he poured a large measure from the bottle which Johnson had left by his bed. ‘None of us, I dare say, is in the best of sorts.’

  ‘But your judgement seems not to have been impaired by your own infirmity,’ said Selden, gesturing towards Hervey’s leg.

  ‘That is as may be, but I dare say I would not be so attentive now,’ he replied.

  ‘How so?’ asked Selden, at once puzzled but faintly encouraged by the reply.

  ‘Oh, it does not matter,’ said Hervey dismissively, realizing he had let on more than he intended.

  Selden had another fit of coughing, which required more brandy to subdue, and he mopped his brow with a large, ochreous silk square which matched almost exactly his feveris
h complexion. ‘Horse doctor that I may be, I am still able to recognize obvious symptoms of dispirits in humans.’

  Hervey sighed, but in truth he was glad to share his ill news, which Selden received attentively. ‘And your brother was, I would hazard, a fine sort of man, an active clergyman, no mere time-server,’ said the veterinary officer when Hervey had finished.

  ‘Of all the worthless creatures I have seen survive – no, prosper – these past six years, I cannot understand why a man so full of goodness as he should die.’

  ‘A cruel and troubling paradox,’ agreed Selden: ‘“The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us.”’

  ‘Indeed, and John would quote Deuteronomy just so, but it all seems remote and … conjectural now.’

  ‘I find it ever to be so, frankly. I confess that I cannot put any faith in the claims of the Church. What will you do? Are there any family obligations which now befall you?’

  ‘I have just accepted a lieutenancy and I do not know if I am in any position to do so. I simply do not know what are my duties at home. I shall write, of course, and apply for furlough as soon as the war ceases – they seem to think it is imminent. Until then …’

  ‘What other family do you have?’ asked the veterinary officer, coughing again but warming to the intimacy he was rarely afforded in the mess as a whole.

  ‘A sister, one year my senior – but I should of course first say my father and mother.’

  ‘They are all well?’ Selden interrupted.

  ‘Yes, I believe them to be. My parents are no longer young but they are both active and have always enjoyed good health. They are the very best of people: I have always felt their absence more keenly than might be supposed. And my sister – Elizabeth – she has spirits to equal anyone. I own to having been in her thrall since childhood!’

  ‘And, Hervey, is there any other in your affections?’

  So direct a question, and from a quarter he would least have expected, took him aback, and his disinclination to make any reply was plain. Selden was a kindly and cultured man, unusually gentlemanly for a veterinary surgeon, yet he generally remained aloof. His periodic bouts of fever racked him dreadfully, but although he had completed eighteen years’ service, and was entitled to retire on half-pay, he struggled on. He had been with the Sixth only since the start of the second campaign – and there was a whiff of sulphur in his history, said some – yet Hervey had always found him the most decent of company.

  ‘Forgive me, Hervey, but I have watched you with advantage these past three years. You have an uncommon facility for soldiering, and yet no preferment has come your way, and never will as long as money determines things.’ He began coughing again, so violently this time that Hervey thought he must choke. Another cup of brandy brought relief, however. ‘You must go east. Take up with John Company. They would value your aptitude – you would have a regiment in no time.’

  Hervey might have had a thousand objections but he chose simply to point out the circumstances of which he had just spoken: ‘I cannot even begin to think such a thing when matters at home are so indeterminate.’

  ‘Of course you cannot. But after you have settled these concerns … or is there perhaps someone else you must take account of?’

  ‘Not at all!’

  ‘Forgive me once more, but I had thought that young Laming’s sister …’

  Hervey blushed, and stammered slightly: ‘I … that is, how could you possibly have thought that? It is a year – more – since she came to Portugal, and then for a month only!’

  ‘Oh, I thought I saw something. Perhaps, then, it was more on her side? And the young Portuguese lady, what was her name …? Delgado, was it not?’

  Hervey was even more astonished, for Selden’s observation these past three years had indeed been active. Frances Laming had enchanted him with her pretty smiles, but Isabella Delgado had positively tortured him with her dark beauty. ‘No, Selden, there is no one. I had once a passion for the girl with whom I shared a schoolroom, though since that was a full ten years ago, and I dared not own it to her, I hardly think it need be taken account of now!’ But a smile overcame him at the thought.

  A trumpet-call signalled that watch-setting was imminent, and Veterinary-Surgeon Selden took his leave, with much violent coughing, to allow Hervey to ready himself for that parade. It had been an extraordinary, if agreeable, meeting; but now that he was alone all his earlier disquiet returned, and with interest, for Selden had stirred up so much. The second call, however, began to reclaim him for the regulated world that was his daily existence, and as he fastened on his sword-belt he found once more that he could bury his uncertainties in the minutiae of his soldier’s routine. He almost spoke it aloud – ‘hitch up the scabbard, free the sabretache, set the shako square, draw on the gloves’. In the short term, at least, it never failed. So much so that, by the time he reached the picket, where he would take longer than any of the dragoons would have thought possible in determining their fitness for the night watch, his only thought was how sharp he would find their sabres.

  II

  CRUEL PUNISHMENT

  13 April, 4 a.m.

  ‘BONEY’S BEAT! BONEY’s beat!’

  Hervey woke with a start and sprang from his bed, but he almost fainted with the first step, so nauseous was the pain, and he fell against the wall, retching. The candle flickered in the sudden disturbance of still air, and he had to grope for his sword-belt in the half-darkness. Outside his cell it was no brighter, for the lantern in the corridor had dimmed to little more than a glow, but he could just make out the figures of the orderly corporal and Trumpeter Pye approaching.

  ‘It’s over! Boney’s habdicated.’

  This time he heard the words – and was speechless.

  ‘It’s right enough, sir,’ continued Corporal Taylor as other officers began appearing, likewise roused by the commotion. ‘Boney’s finished. I ’eard Major Edmonds telling the sarn’t-major only ten minutes ago; but before that, even, a staff dragoon from headquarters was by and told me the intelligence had come from Paris last evening.’

  The news, which they had awaited so keenly, and for so long, somehow lacked the inspiration that he presumed great news must have. It seemed unfitting that it should be hawked along the corridors of a cloistered billet by a corporal at this ungodliest of hours. He had imagined some ceremony or other would be attached to its heralding.

  Next there appeared the adjutant, fully dressed, and at first Hervey supposed that this portended the ceremony he had anticipated, yet Barrow had so much an expression of the everyday that he again began to doubt the corporal’s information.

  ‘First parade at seven, details as usual, gentlemen,’ announced the adjutant. ‘Officers to assemble in the mess at eight. Sound reveille, Pye!’

  Barrow was as ever spare with his words and did not wait for questions, marching briskly off towards the orderly room, spurs ringing on the flagstones. Hervey was angered. He was picket officer, and yet the adjutant had confided nothing to him. He may have been a mere cornet, but – confound it – Barrow would have been forthcoming enough if there had been an alarm.

  When the echo of Trumpeter Pye’s long reveille had died away – the first time the extended rather than the short call had been used since winter quarters – there came the gentler sound of a bell, and Hervey saw at the furthest end of the cloisters several nuns making for the chapel. The bell struck every second, and with so insistent a ring that he found his annoyance diminishing with each stroke. He wandered into the courtyard. It was too dark to make out the time by his watch, as dark as it had been at midnight when he had trudged the streets of the defeated city to do his rounds of the outlying picket. There had been no moon, and the streets had been as black as pitch, for the lamplighters had fled, and the occupants of the houses had shuttered and boarded their windows so that it was impossible to know whether they were lit inside or had been abandoned. How different it had been at
Vitoria. There had been no question then of not knowing what lay behind the shutters, for they had all been prised off and the property sacked, Spanish property. Yet here, a French city, where the fighting had been immeasurably more bloody than at Vitoria, the provost-marshal’s men were patrolling the streets as if it had been Westminster. The Marquess of Wellington had ordered that there was to be no looting, and no looting there was – on pain of death by an English musket. Not that Hervey disapproved of such an order. He loathed the larceny where it exceeded what might reasonably be counted as foraging, but he hated most the bestiality to which men would sink in the process. Never did he imagine, on entering the king’s service, that one day it would be his duty to shoot a man wearing the same uniform – or, rather, the same king’s uniform – as he had done after Badajoz. The vision of that Connaught private, crazed with drink, taking the ball from Hervey’s pistol full in the chest yet still setting about him with murderous strength, would long remain. Yet the terror in the dying eyes of the young Spanish girl whom the man had violated, and the blood from her slashed throat, would more than mitigate any guilt, or even regret, that he might feel.