Le Havre, two days later
‘Captain Hervey, in my twelve years or more in one of His Majesty’s ships I have never heard the like!’
There was no reply.
‘Never before have I been asked to give passage to a horse!’
Still there was no reply.
Captain Laughton Peto, RN, struck the taffrail with his fist in a theatrical gesture of exasperation. ‘Confound it, sir, she is a frigate, not a packet!’
Captain Hervey smiled sheepishly. ‘Sir, you have aboard a goat and several chickens. And I hear that it is not uncommon to see a cow under the forecastle. To what do you object in equines?’
‘Damn your impudence, sir!’ roared Peto, striking the rail again. But he knew well enough that his protests were to no avail. The frigate Nisus had been placed at the disposal of the Duke of Wellington’s aide-de-camp — and that was that. ‘Mr Belben!’ he shouted.
The first lieutenant rushed aft and saluted. ‘Sir?’
‘Mr Belben, be so good as to find a berth for a cavalry charger,’ said the captain briskly.
‘Sir?’ replied the lieutenant, his youthful face contorted by incomprehension.
‘Do I have to repeat myself, Mr Belben?’ rasped Peto. ‘Do you not understand plain English?’ And, as his first lieutenant hurried away to contemplate his unprecedented orders, Peto turned back to this agent of the victor of Waterloo. ‘Come, Captain Hervey,’ he resumed cautiously; ‘I think we may better discuss this extraordinary commission of yours at my table.’
Matthew Hervey was, in outward appearance at least, a man transformed from that of a year ago. Then, he had been a lieutenant for but a month, following the deposit of the better part of his savings, and the prize-money accrued over six years’ campaign service, with the regimental agents. Into the premises of Messrs Greenwood, Cox & Hammersly of Craig’s Court in Westminster he had walked a cornet on his first occasion to visit the capital, and there he had signed an instrument for the purchase of a lieutenancy in the 6th Light Dragoons. He had signed another for the sale of his cornetcy to an officer in the Twentieth anxious to avoid service in India, whither that regiment was posted, and had put his signature to a further instrument for the assignment of arrears of pay, held by the agents, towards the difference in price — £350. Other regiments were cheaper (and a few were markedly more expensive), but Hervey would never consider the option of changing horses. He loved the Sixth as if it were his family — which, in all but the literal sense, it was. Its commanding officer, Lord George Irvine, had always shown him the greatest kindness. Its choleric major, Joseph Edmonds, a soldier who had known almost nothing but campaigning in his thirty years’ service, had encouraged him in every particular of the profession, and had exercised a protecting, paternal hand on many an occasion. Sir Edward Lankester, his troop leader — urbane, coolly, almost contemptuously, brave — had been his idol, like an older brother. His fellow cornets, and lieutenants too, who had filled the mess with laughter and good company in the darkest of times, had been his people as surely as were his blood family in Horningsham. And Hervey would add yet more to that family, for in it he counted, as did any officer worth his salt, the companionship of the ranks — the non-commissioned officers who put his orders into action, and the dragoons, the private men, whose life turned and occasionally depended on those orders, and whose daily routine was either miserable or tolerable depending on the aptness and humanity of the officers. The Sixth, however, were a family that had seen misfortune. Waterloo, though a battle gained, had been, in the duke’s own words, hardly better than a battle lost. True, the Sixth had suffered not half as much as the infantry, but shot, shell and lance had plucked some of the best from its bosom. Hervey may have been in two minds about his new appointment — this mission especially — but before Waterloo he could never have contemplated having a choice at all.
And so now he was Captain Hervey, with aiglets and the patronage of the duke himself, and no longer so impecunious that economy was for him strict necessity. Yet in one respect at least Matthew Hervey was unaltered: to frigate captains he was still in thrall. Captain Peto was, in any case, an officer to whom no ordinary mortal could be other than in thrall. Every reef and hitch, every furl and coil, even in the very extremities of the Nisus, was made in the expectation that his eye might at any time alight on the endeavour. And all was therefore perfection. What was more, however, he achieved this exemplary regimen without resort to flogging. Peto was, indeed, renowned as much for his implacable opposition to the practice as for his boldness in closing with a foe. He had once hanged a man for cowardice in the face of the enemy, but long before the Admiralty had put a stop to it he would not permit a bosun’s mate even to start a laggard.
Captain Laughton Peto was in age two years, possibly three, Hervey’s senior. He was the same height and build, though his back was a little longer, and his hair was dark, full and straight and looked as though it might once have been pulled into a queue. His manner was not easy to fathom — at times the utmost insouciance, and at others zest for the merest detail of his ship’s routine. He might talk discursively one minute, and then in the next his clipped quarterdeck speech would seem almost incomprehensible. Hervey wondered if he were married, for it would go hard with any wife to live with so contrary a man. When they had first met, at Chatham not a week ago, there had been something of an edge to their intercourse. Peto had not been well disposed to the notion of holding his frigate ready for the conveyance of a staff officer, even an aide-de-camp of the Duke of Wellington, and wished only to be about his passage to the Indies before the winds became any less favourable. When Hervey had gone aboard Nisus he had been presented with sealed orders marked, ‘To be opened only at sea’, and so it was off the North Foreland that he had learned that he was to report to the Duke of Wellington with all possible haste, and to request that the ship on no account leave for the Indies without word from Paris — to which Peto had replied, with no little irritation, that he was not in the habit of disobeying Admiralty orders, for those were his instructions too from their lordships. Yet neither man had anticipated that there was to be any congruence in their instructions. So here where the Seine, having flowed peaceably through Bonaparte’s erstwhile capital, became salty by the Channel — for mastery of which Englishmen like Peto had fought since Drake’s day — the captain of the Nisus found himself once more at the disposal of the captain of light dragoons.
Captain Peto’s quarters comprised a day cabin running to half the length of the stern windows, a dining space — the steerage — and two sleeping cabins, one of which, as on the short passage to France, he now gave up to Hervey. The principal cabins were well furnished. Comfortable chairs, as well as a large desk, occupied the day cabin, while a highly polished dining table of Cuban mahogany, and eight chairs, graced the steerage. There were even some pleasant-looking pictures on the bulkheads, including one or two small oils of indeterminate landscapes, and the table was laid with silver.
‘Take a seat, Hervey,’ said Peto, indicating a comfortable armchair; ‘one of my French Hepplewhites.’
Hervey assumed them to be booty, acquired in one of the many dashing engagements he knew Peto to have seen. ‘I presume they are—’
‘I began with ten, but clearing for action takes its toll.’ He said it almost with relish. ‘There are many who consider the Hepplewhite chair in the French taste to be the acme of English cabinetmaking: there is not a single straight line anywhere in it,’ he continued absently, waving an outstretched palm towards one of the objects of his admiration. ‘I bought them in Bond Street when last I was attending at the Admiralty.’
Bond Street? English cabinetmaking? Another fox’s paw he had nearly made of that!
‘You will take some Madeira with me, will you not?’ Hervey nodded approvingly.
‘A rather fine Sercial, I fancy — an eighty-three,’ continued Peto, pouring from a broad flat-bottomed decanter. ‘And a vintage, mind — not a solera.’
Hervey took a sip and agreed that it was indeed special. ‘It puts me in mind of some German wines, in both colour and taste,’ he said.
‘You are well acquainted with Rhenish, are you?’ enquired Peto, evidently impressed.
‘The wines of Alsace to be precise. I had a governess from there who first told me of Gewürztraminer, and then the King’s Germans gave me the taste for it.’
Peto nodded, favourably. ‘They say the Sercial derives originally from the Riesling grape, so there is an affinity with the region.’ He paused, his mind seeming momentarily to be elsewhere, before clearing his throat and returning to his original intention. ‘Captain Hervey, you had better, I think, give me some account of what you are about so that I can best order my ship’s affairs. Start, if you will, at the beginning, for I must know it all.’
Hervey waited first for Peto’s steward, a Suffolk man who had been almost twice as long at sea as his captain had been on earth, to finish laying the table, and then he began to explain, though not without some misgivings. ‘I am bound by confidentiality in this matter,’ he warned; ‘or, at least, by discretion.’
Peto looked at him indignantly. ‘You do not suppose that I, myself, am without discretion in such matters?’
‘No, indeed — forgive my incivility,’ he stammered. ‘In truth I am as yet uneasy with the circumspection required.’
Indeed he was. He was also unsure of his capacity for such an assignment. He had been wholly — headily — flattered, as would any officer, when the Adjutant General had made the offer on the duke’s behalf of his becoming an ADC. But all his service had been with the Sixth, and though he knew the elements of staff practice he was by no means confident of his aptness for employment beyond regimental duty. But there was, immediately, the question of secrecy. He looked at Peto resolutely: ‘I see no good reason, sir, why I should not tell you all, for I shall be much in want of counsel these coming months. How long is our passage to Hindoostan?’
‘Four months at best; six at most.’
‘Oh,’ said Hervey, sounding a touch discouraged; ‘I had imagined half that time.’
Peto frowned again. ‘Captain Hervey, do you know anything of navigation — of sea currents and trade winds?’
Hervey confessed he did not.
‘I imagine you suppose we shall merely cruise south, round the Cape of Good Hope and then make directly for India?’
Hervey’s smile, and the inclination of his eyebrows, indicated that that was exactly what he had supposed.
‘Well, to begin with,’ sighed Peto, ‘we are making this passage at the least propitious time. To have full use of the south-west monsoon, which blows from October until April, we should have set out in the spring. Come,’ he said, rising and indicating the table on which there were spread several charts. ‘See here’ (he pointed with a pair of dividers): ‘we shall pass about ten leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands and continue westward, almost crossing the Atlantic to the coast of Brazil to get the south-east trades on the beam. Then, at about three degrees south of the Equator, we shall pick up the westerlies to bring us around the Cape. And in the Indian Ocean we shall need to stand well to the east of Madagascar to find what remains of the monsoon.’
Hervey apologized for his nescience as they returned to their chairs. But of greater moment was the disclosure of his assignment, for he was again seized by doubts as to what discretion he legitimately possessed in the matter. He had not been sworn to secrecy — quite — but in everything that had passed between Colonel Grant and the duke’s new aide-de-camp, there had been the very proper presumption of it. And yet Hervey knew too that he had been appointed to the staff principally because of what the duke himself had referred to as his ‘percipient exercise of judgement’ at Waterloo. He had neither experience nor training in work of a covert nature (though his present commission scarcely, to his mind, gave him the appellation spy). He would therefore have to trust his instincts, and these now told him that he could trust in Captain Laughton Peto — trust absolutely. ‘Then if we are to spend so long in each other’s company it is the very least I should do to apprise you fully of my business,’ he said, with a most conscious effort to avoid any further semblance of condescension. ‘I shall tell you each and every detail — though as yet they are few.’
The door opened and in came Flowerdew again. ‘Beg leave to bring a pudding, sir,’ he said, in a voice that called to mind Serjeant Strange’s mellow Suffolk vowels. Hervey shivered at the remembrance.
Peto eyed his steward gravely. ‘It is the Welsh venison pudding?’
‘Ay, Captain,’ replied Flowerdew, equally solemnly; ‘and there is a redcurrant jelly with it, and your cussy sauce.’
This news was received with evident satisfaction. Peto took both the greatest pride and the greatest pleasure in his table. It was, perhaps, unsurprising since he appeared to take the greatest pride in everything about his ship. Hervey knew enough about Admiralty to know that a ship in the hale condition that was the Nisus — with her fine fittings, new paint and gold leaf — was not found by chance: Peto would have had to go to endless pains to flatter the dockyard commissioner into providing that which was routinely denied to other, less persuasive, captains. Or else — and he suspected it was this latter — it was Peto’s own purse that had embellished his ship. As to his taking pleasure in his table, albeit somewhat self-consciously, Hervey was likewise not in the least surprised, for in his experience men exposed as a matter of course to great privation rarely persisted in a taste for frugality in times of plenty — and Peto had, more than once in his service, been reduced to a diet of biscuit and water.
When Flowerdew was gone the captain conducted his guest to the table and bade him resume his explanation.
‘It seems that the Duke of Wellington expects at any moment to be appointed governor-general in India,’ he confided.
Peto merely raised an eyebrow in disbelief — or in dismay.
‘He has been given to understand that Lord Moira will soon be dismissed,’ he continued, ‘since that gentleman apparently has little appetite for reversing the policies of Sir George Barlow — which, it is commonly supposed, were too feeble with the native princes. You will know, of course, that the duke’s own brother prosecuted a most vigorous policy before Sir George.’
Peto’s brow furrowed. ‘And yet, from all I read and hear, the Court of Directors do not appear to be developing any appetite for intervention. Quite the contrary, in fact.’
Hervey sighed briefly, but aptly conveying his own frustration with the limited intelligence imparted to him in Paris. ‘The Company, perhaps — yes. But I am to suppose that the government — the Board of Control, that is — takes the opposite view.’
‘And do you share these opinions?’ he asked, leaning across the table to replenish Hervey’s Sercial, a distinct challenge in the tone.
‘I confess for my own mind I know only what I read in the newspapers and the Edinburgh Review, and these are frequently contradictory accounts. I am the duke’s aide-de-camp and it matters only at this time that I understand perfectly what is in the duke’s mind,’ he answered resolutely.
‘And what is his need of you in Calcutta?’
‘I am to go in advance to India and to make certain appreciations of the situation.’ Hervey’s reply lacked just a measure of his former resolution.
Peto now had about him a decidedly disapproving air, though he said nothing.
‘I am sorry, Captain Peto, but you appear to object to this assignment,’ countered Hervey, puzzled.
‘The Honourable East India Company, sir,’ began Peto, ‘is neither honourable nor a company worth the name, for its monopoly has perverted trade. It is a body which maintains armies and retails tea.’
Hervey hesitated. ‘You speak as someone with a very singular grudge.’
‘My father might not have lost what little he had by way of stocks — his sole provision for the future — if, during the late blockade, the East Indies markets had been open.’
‘But the opening-up of trade — has not the Company’s monopoly of the eastern markets been repealed?’
‘The reform of the charter was only two years ago. It came too late to save my family’s interests.’
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ sighed Hervey, ‘for heaven knows the country has need of every enterprise now to repay its war debt. Your father — he is a merchant still?’
‘No, Captain Hervey, he was never a merchant: he had merely invested what little capital he possessed in an ill-starred joint-stock company.’
‘I fear that my father might have had the same story to tell had he not already purchased a modest annuity with his capital. Well, there is great need of enterprise nevertheless: the duke says we have spent eight hundred million fighting the French, when before the war it was scarce eighteen a year.’
‘Then there will be more slaughter in the east to pay for it. It will be the very devil of a business. That is why, I suppose, your principal is to go to India — to pay his way these past dozen years and more!’
Hervey frowned.
‘Do you know much of India, sir? I have made something of a study of that continent,’ Peto challenged.
‘I confess I know little, sir. I have with me a new history of the enterprise but I have yet to make more than a beginning with it.’
‘Well, I tell you that no good will come out of our enterprise there. I have read extensively of the trial of Warren Hastings, and of Mr Fox’s speeches in parliament on the East India Bill. What is our object in India, Captain Hervey? It is too ill-defined, I tell you. We shall be drawn ever greater into the wars that are endemic in that place, and our outlay will vastly exceed any receipts.’
‘So I may take it,’ smiled Hervey, ‘that you are not greatly enamoured of the activities of the Company?’
‘Hervey, mistake me not: we are a mercantile nation. But our business overseas is trade, not conquest. Read your book and then speak freely with my secretary, who was once a writer in Calcutta, and then we may talk of it with more felicity. And he may be able to teach you one or two words which might be of use — how to get a palanquin or a clean girl or some such. But come,’ he added, and with a lighter touch, ‘have some burgundy with that pudding.’
‘Thank you; it is an excellent pudding,’ replied Hervey, taking another large piece of dark meat on his fork. ‘Welsh venison, you say? I had not supposed anyone might be so particular in choosing their game.’ And he took a large gulp of wine.
Peto smiled — not triumphantly, for that would have been to overvalue his success, but certainly with a degree of satisfaction that alerted Hervey to another imminent revelation of his innocence of the ways of the ‘wooden world’. ‘My dear Hervey, know you not that prime eight-tooth mutton — wether mutton — fuddled and rubbed with allspice and claret, may be ate with as much satisfaction as the King’s own fallow deer?’
It was not as disconcerting a revelation as might be supposed, and Hervey professed himself most pleasantly surprised by the discovery. ‘Especially so since I come from a county with a great many more sheep than people. I have scarce dined so well, ever, as I have aboard your ship,’ he concluded.
Peto seemed more than happy to leave weightier matters aside for the moment. ‘I have, I fancy, one of the best cooks in the fleet. He was in the service of the Duke of Northumberland until there was some… misunderstanding. My coxswain found him adrift in some alehouse on the Tyne. He has been with me over a year and seems content. But here, some more burgundy: what do you think of it?’
‘I think very much of it,’ he replied, feeling its warmth reach the extremities.
‘I am glad, for it is one of my best — a Romanée-Conti. So much so-called burgundy has been passed off during this war. Any old sugared red wine laced with brandy seems to take the name. And nauseous it is — frequently poisonous, too. Ever to be avoided, Hervey — ever.’ He took another large draught. ‘But I am careful of its taking: it is a very manly warmth that a Nuits-Saint-Georges brings — invigorating, whereas claret merely… enlivens.’
Hervey chuckled. ‘I am astonished that, with such good provender, you avoid any tendency to stoutness. I fear much for my own figure these coming months.’
They both laughed, vigorously.
‘But what of this commission of yours?’ demanded Peto, though his manner was now thoroughly congenial. ‘Why must you go in advance of the duke to India — before, indeed, his appointment has been made?’
Hervey was wondering how best he might explain, when the door opened again. The silence continued as Flowerdew cleared away the remains of the pudding, returning at once with an even larger tray, from which, with considerable ceremony, he placed on the table a greengage tart, an almond cheesecake, several custards and a bowl of figs. Hervey made more appreciative — and despairing — noises, and Peto again reached for the decanter of Madeira. But before he could remove the stopper — or Hervey begin his explanation of his early passage — there was a knock at the door.
‘Come!’ called Peto, as Hervey sliced large into the cheesecake.
The first lieutenant entered, his fresh face and fair curls making an even greater impression of youth than before. ‘I beg your pardon, sir: I had not thought you were dining. The carpenter is knocking up a stall for Captain Hervey’s horse in the waist. Might I ask him to approve the dimensions when it is convenient?’
Peto looked at Hervey.
‘If you will permit me, sir, I shall do so at once,’ he replied, rising (and none too steadily). ‘My groom should be here with her before the evening.’
The Marines sentry at the doorway presented arms as Peto emerged. Hervey took the opportunity to speak to the first lieutenant, whose acquaintance he had made only briefly during the crossing a week before, while Peto bantered with the sentry about some amiable business of the shore. ‘Mr Belben, we have not yet been able to exchange more than formalities. I hope I have not made impossible demands. No doubt it would have been better for me to seek passage for my horse on a ship of higher rate.’
‘Not at all sir: unusual demands, perhaps, but not impossible. Nor indeed would a first-rate have been any more commodious — quite the reverse, in fact.’ Hervey looked at Peto, puzzled by the notion that a frigate offered as much space as a ship-of-the-line. ‘That is so,’ the captain affirmed. ‘The biggest first-rate is two thousand and three-fifty tons, with a complement of nigh eight-fifty. She has less than three tons per man, whereas we are a thousand tons and two-fifty.’
‘It sounds as though I might have brought my second charger,’ tried Hervey, and he was pleasurably surprised to see Belben smile.
‘Captain Hervey, we are at your disposal,’ said Peto from behind, smiling equally. ‘However, in the event of our having to clear for action then I am very much afraid that your charger will go overboard!’
At this Hervey looked plainly ill, and said no more. Lieutenant Belben led them along the waist towards the forecastle and stopped between the third and fourth gunports on the larboard side. ‘I thought we might construct the stall here, sir, between numbers three and four guns,’ he said to the captain.
Hervey looked worried. ‘Between the guns, Mr Belben? But that will give about eight feet at most.’
The lieutenant looked puzzled. ‘I cannot very well move the guns, Captain Hervey. How much room does your horse need?’
‘She must have twelve feet square, with a good strong bar to shorten it into a standing stall if the sea gets too high.’
‘Twelve feet!’ said Belben with dismay; ‘I only get eight, sir!’
‘Yes, but you at least have freedom to exercise over the rest of the ship. My mare will be confined thus for six months.’
‘Mr Belben,’ said Peto, wishing to bring the issue to a resolution, ‘dismount number four gun and be ready to remount it if we clear for action. The crew can take turns to exercise on another.’
‘Ay, ay, Captain!’ replied the lieutenant. There was no dissent: he was not responsible for the captain’s decisions, only for implementing them.
‘And might some padding be fastened here?’ asked Hervey, touching the beam above. ‘Her head will be—’
‘Mr Belben, canvas and straw, if you please,’ sighed Peto. ‘We addle enough men’s brains with timber; let us not have a cavalry charger strike its head too.’
And with stabling thus arranged, Peto and Hervey returned to the cabin and the table — and began on the plum tart with renewed appetite. However, Hervey was still troubled by the captain’s warning of Jessye’s fate should they clear for action.
‘Do not distress yourself,’ replied Peto reassuringly as he took another slice of the greengage; ‘the most that could disturb us is a pirate or two, and we shall be standing too far to the west to encounter those who swarm from the Barbary Coast. And in any case, there is not a pirate afloat who — in his right mind — would tangle with a frigate!’
Hervey was now reassured.
‘So, as we were saying, what is the imperative behind your early despatch to the Indies?’ Peto was not to be deflected from any course, once set.
‘Well,’ sighed Hervey, ‘as you recall, the duke expects that the government will shortly replace Lord Moira and appoint him in his place to carry through the policies of his brother in the decade before. The duke is especially keen to know the condition of the forces of the state of Haidarabad, which he regards as crucial to any enterprise by the Company. I am therefore to make a tour of that place in order to be able to report to the duke immediately on his arrival in Calcutta.’
Peto’s brow furrowed again. ‘Do not mistake me, Hervey, but is there not an official of the Company’s in Haidarabad? Would he not be infinitely better placed to render such intelligence? I hazard a guess that at this moment you would be hard pressed to point to where is Haidarabad on a map!’
Hervey nodded and simply raised his eyebrows. The ancillary duty in Chintal was not something he intended to divulge, for it was in his judgement of little moment to the mission as a whole.
‘Doubtless the duke knows his business,’ tutted Peto, ‘but treating with Mussulmen is a risky enterprise at the best of times.’ He poured himself another glass of wine.
‘You have experience?’
‘Indeed I have — at both ends of the Mediterranean! But that is of no consequence. The material point is that the nizam’s religion is alien to the continent of Hindoostan. The importation of the Mughal invaders — and not so many centuries ago at that. As I understand, it does not go well with the native Hindoos, and there is ever a restiveness. You must be at great pains to avoid its worst effects, Hervey.’
He assured him that he had every intention of doing so.
‘But how shall you keep this enterprise secret?’ pressed the captain. ‘Do you intend dressing as a native or some such thing?’
Hervey smiled. ‘No! If news of the duke’s appointment precedes us — as well it might — I shall go about my business openly. If, however, there is no such news then I have letters from the duke requesting that Calcutta lend me every facility to make a study of the employment of the lance. The duke was much taken by the French lancers at Waterloo and wishes to equip some of our regiments of light dragoons so. And in India are some of the most proficient lancers — in Haidarabad especially.’
Peto looked sceptical. ‘You do not think that some might suppose it would have been easier to go to Brandenburg to see the Uhlans, or even to Warsaw?’
‘That is as maybe, though we are not on entirely the best of terms with the Prussians. However, I think mine a plausible enough mission — do not you?’
Peto took this to be rhetorical. ‘Here, have one of these sweet sisters of the vine; they are come from Turkey — the Locoum variety, very much better than the pressed ones.’
Hervey took a fig and again voiced his appreciation of the quality of the captain’s fare.
‘Well, I must tell you that it’s unlikely to remain thus in so long a voyage. It will be pocket soup and biscuit by the time we reach the Cape.’
Hervey replied that, for his own part, he was perfectly accustomed to any hardship in respect of rations, but his horse could not be expected to fare well on a long voyage without a proper regimen. ‘And I must ask your leave to go ashore soon, sir, to attend to it. I need to find hay and straw, and hard feed.’
Peto said he was happy to accompany him, ‘For there are things of which I have need, too.’
‘Shall you have to find extra provisions?’ asked Hervey without thinking.
The arched eyebrows told Hervey at once that he had somehow impugned Admiralty efficiency. ‘Captain Hervey, I have heard of the dilatorious condition of the army’s commissary department, but I would have you know that a frigate is provisioned so that she might sail without interruption for six months!’
‘Very well, then, Mr Ranson,’ said Peto once he had seated himself.
The crew of the captain’s gig pulled with a good rhythm, seen to by a midshipman who looked not very much older than Hervey when first he had left Horningsham for Shrewsbury. Nisus lay three cables from the quay. Peto kept his eyes fixed ahead and said not a word during the seven minutes which it took for Ranson to pilot the gig through the slack water. As it neared the quayside steps, Peto rose before the midshipman had ordered ‘easy-oars’, and then stepped confidently to the landing stage even as the gig ran alongside with oars just raised. He was almost at the top of the steps before Hervey dared trust himself to alight from the now motionless boat. Hervey thanked the midshipman, who looked startled by it, and raced up the steps to regain Peto’s side, pausing at the top to replace his spurs which, as was the custom, he had removed aboard ship.
‘From your parts, young Ranson,’ said Peto as Hervey caught him up; ‘Somerset. A pity he’s unlikely to see a fleet action ever. But it can’t be helped. He cut his teeth in the 1812 affair: blew off a Yankee’s head with his pistol, right in front of me, though the damned thing broke his wrist! And he club-hauled a prize lugger from a lee shore off Madeira. A little too inclined to drop his head and escape the bit, as you would say, but he’ll do.’
Oh, such a man would do all right, thought Hervey. Some officers needed driving with long, rowelled spurs; most with the touch of the whip; very few needed the curb. And it did not do to judge from a man’s aspect which were the proper aids. Ranson, for one, looked no more like a plunger than did his father’s first curate. Peto’s matter-of-factness intrigued him, though. Studied, perhaps? He had not seen the like except perhaps in Adjutant Barrow. And with Barrow it was more a device to compensate for having risen from the ranks. With Peto he could only suppose it a self-imposed distance, a necessity for command in otherwise close and familiar quarters. It seemed he might be in for a somewhat oppressive six months, the hospitality of the table notwithstanding.
Hervey changed step to walk in time with his senior, spurs ringing on the cobbles while Peto’s heel struck the ground in the less emphatic way that was the sailor’s. It was a sound that always gave him a certain prideful satisfaction. ‘I saw a corn merchant on the way here, a little further along this street,’ he tried.
‘Space is pressing in a frigate, Captain Hervey — even in peacetime. I do not wish it too filled with oats,’ replied Peto peremptorily.
‘No, indeed not,’ said Hervey, taken aback somewhat. ‘I have calculated very precisely how much she — my charger — shall need for a six-month passage.’
‘She? Captain Hervey — a mare!’
Hervey sighed to himself. This was to be heavy going. ‘Yes, a mare, but not a chestnut, you will be pleased to know.’
‘Captain Hervey,’ frowned Peto, ‘any mare, with any number of legs, is much the same to me: I have little use for them.’
He chose to ignore the proposition. ‘I trust that mine will be no trouble, sir.’
‘I trust not, too,’ replied Peto, still looking straight ahead. ‘Just so long as you do not fill the orlop with oats.’
‘I shall give her no oats whatever,’ replied Hervey, sounding surprised, ‘otherwise she will likely as not suffer setfast.’
Peto turned his head and eyed him quizzically. ‘I can keep a horse between myself and the ground tolerably well, Captain Hervey, but beyond that I make no claim.’
‘Setfast is sometimes called Monday-morning sickness, which describes the symptoms aptly. The horse shows great stiffness; in extreme cases unable to move.’
‘Why Monday morning?’
‘It generally follows from inactivity after vigorous exercise — a day’s rest on Sunday after a Saturday’s hunting is common. There can be muscle damage, which is evident if the blood becomes azotous — discoloration of the urine, I mean. And then the kidneys may fail. Mares seem especially prone.’
‘Captain Hervey, my surgeon would be intrigued to hear of such a systemic catastrophe resulting from a day’s rest, for he is a great advocate of them!’
‘I make no claim to know anything of human physic, sir,’ countered Hervey, not immediately catching the attempt at humour.
‘No,’ smiled Peto at last, ‘I am sure you do not. I am, however, impressed that your veterinary knowledge goes beyond that of many of the run-of-the-mill officers I have met.’
Hervey said nothing.
‘So, your horse—’ he continued.
‘Jessye is her name, sir.’
‘So, Jessye — a fine thoroughbred no doubt — how shall she maintain condition during the passage?’
‘She is not a thoroughbred. Indeed, were she to be one I would as soon see a caged beast aboard. No, she has some good Welsh Mountain in her, and she is, therefore, just sufficiently tractable for the adventure. I shall give her hay ad libitum to reduce the risk of colic or her gut twisting. No doubt we shall have to pay over the odds — it’s not a good time to be buying old hay, and I dare not risk new to begin with. But if we can find good Timothy it should keep her in modest fettle. I shall feed her some barley each day — say, three pounds — and a pound of bran with chop to keep her interested.’ He took out a notebook and opened it to consult his earlier calculations. ‘We shall need, therefore, two hundredweight-sacks of bran and five more of barley, and forty hundredweight of hay.’
‘Great heavens, Captain Hervey! I haven’t the—’
‘I have resolved on deep-littering her, you will be pleased to hear, and so I shall need only the same again of straw. Barley straw unless we can find no other, for she has a partiality to eating it, and wheat straw can blow her up something dreadful.’
Peto halted and turned full towards him. ‘Captain Hervey,’ he said, portentously; ‘I am full of admiration for the attention you lavish on your mare — by your own accounts, a female of not especial breeding. Is that affection returned, do you suppose?’
Hervey wondered where this line of questioning was leading. ‘I do suppose — yes.’
Peto nodded. ‘I had imagined thus. See, therefore,Captain Hervey, the distraction that affection demands,’ he sighed, his head shaking pityingly.
As they neared the head of the great avenue leading from the quay to the Paris highroad, where stood the gendarmerie building as the street turned ninety degrees to the right, they came on a large but silent gathering. Curious as to its purpose, they joined the rear of the crowd, but the onlookers soon recognized the import of their uniforms and shifted to one side, affording them a clear view of the object of interest.
‘Well,’ said Peto after some moments’ consideration; ‘I own that this is the closest I have come to General Bonaparte’s Grande Armée. What a sight they are!’
What a sight indeed, thought Hervey. The last he had seen of officers of the Garde was on the field of Waterloo, in the final moments of the battle when he had led the Sixth up the slopes which had been French ground all day, and on to the inn called La Belle Alliance, far in advance of any others of the Duke of Wellington’s army. What a moment that had been. What a heady mix of joy and sorrow, of anger and pity. ‘Yes,’ he replied; ‘officers of the Imperial Guard — grenadiers and chasseurs à pied, les vieux des vieux.’
They were as he had seen them at Waterloo — the white breeches and top boots, the white facings of the blue coat, with its long tails and bullion epaulettes. Above all the ‘bearskin’, the plateless fur cap with its red-tipped green plume. He had watched hundreds upon hundreds of them advance on the duke’s line in perfect order, and thought that all before must surely be swept away — until the duke’s own Guards, who had lain concealed in the corn to the very last moment, sprang up and opened a withering fire, sending the French columns reeling back down the slopes.
‘They are formidable-looking, even in defeat,’ acknowledged Peto. ‘I can well understand, now, how an army with such as these men might gain so much — might march to Moscow and back, and fight every mile of the way.’
Yes — formidable, thought Hervey. And yet, without their swords they had perhaps lost something of their menace. ‘I had not supposed I should ever be so close again myself,’ he conceded.
‘Lion is at anchor waiting to take them to join Bonaparte at St Helena. I spoke with her captain yesterday. He’s hoping to meet the man himself there.’
There were thirty of them, perhaps more — Hervey could not see all — and they stood, arms folded, in the middle of the wide street. Some were smoking clay pipes, and all had the appearance of sublime indifference to their fate. In the sky above, swallows circled and dived, soon themselves to be southbound. The French were eyeing them too, envious perhaps of the freedom to pick their own moment. The escort, two dozen men of the 104th (North Derbyshire) Regiment, and evidently weary of the task, stood easy in a circle about them, bayonets fixed but muskets at the order. The captain, a tall, languid man, perhaps a year or so older than Hervey, but no more, on noticing the two officers touched his peak in salute and raised his eyebrows as if in search of sympathy for his role as gaoler. He gained none from Hervey, though, who was affronted, indeed, by the want of collection in the escort. The men looked tired and insensible, a picture neither of vigilance nor good order. Never would the Sixth have paraded themselves thus in front of a French crowd, let alone before their captives! There was a price to aiglets, he told himself: duty required that he say something. He began pushing his way to the front.
He was too late, though. In an instant a dozen of the French officers rushed the sentries furthest from where he stood. The others formed line with their hands raised above their heads in submission, confusing the disengaged half-circle of infantrymen from rushing to the aid of their comrades. It was done in seconds. The sentries had not even time to bring their bayonets to the port before they were assailed with the greatest ferocity by the French, fists and boots flailing. Those on the edge seemed dumbstruck. Had they rushed in at once from the flanks it would have been over quickly. Two of them fired their muskets in the air, but then the weapons, discharged and harmless, were wrenched at once from their hands. Hervey and Peto drew their swords and rushed at the fray, but the crowd had doubled in size and women and children arrested their progress so effectively — whether by design or not — that by the time they had pushed through to the other side the captive officers had wholly overpowered their guards. They began withdrawing along the street towards the prefecture in model fashion, half of them doubling a dozen yards and then levelling the muskets while the others doubled further to take up the same covering position. The North Derbyshires’ officer recovered himself and shouldered his way through the crowd with the remainder of the escort, ordering his men to give the French a volley. The report was deafening, and smoke filled the street, making it difficult to see its effect. The French did not fire back, however: Hervey supposed it because the street was full of civilians. ‘Reload!’ shouted the captain. As the smoke cleared, the Derbyshires furiously ramming home new charges, the effect of the first volley was revealed: a dozen or more bodies lay not thirty paces up the street, and only a handful in uniform.
Hervey was as appalled by the recklessness of the volley as he had been by the escort’s bearing. Why had they not charged first with the bayonet? He called to the captain, but the man did not hear, having now decided, it seemed, to follow with steel after failing to lead with it. Hervey rushed forward but a French leg was put in his way and he fell sprawling atop one of the sentries lying senseless from a butt-stroke. A ragged volley of musketry came from windows on both sides of the street fifty yards ahead, knocking down redcoats like skittles at a fair. It would have struck down Hervey, too, for some of it flew his way, striking the walls of the house where he lay, making little puffs of red brick-dust, the lead balls flattening and falling to the ground — where iron shot would have ricocheted. He turned his head to look for Peto, relieved to see him crouching safe in a doorway. The remnants of the escort fell back along the street, the half-dozen or so remaining on their feet trying to pull their wounded comrades with them — though several were beyond help. At least as many were left for dead. Another volley came, felling two more. Hervey sprang up and rushed to one of them, lifting him across his shoulder and taking up his musket in his free hand. Peto did the same as another welter of musket balls assailed them. One struck the silver pouch of Hervey’s crossbelt, and with such force that he was knocked clean to the ground. Peto, having dropped his man in a doorway, dashed to him, but he was already on his hands and knees retching with the pain and gasping for the air that had been knocked out of him. And still the firing continued as Peto half-pulled him to the safety of the side street where the ragged remains of the infantry were rallying, then ran back to the wounded corporal whom Hervey had been carrying, dragging him too to safety.
The crossbelt pouch was so twisted that the gilt ‘GR’ was no longer recognizable. The ball was embedded in the silver cover, but it had been the hardened leather of the pouch itself that had stopped it. Where precisely on his back the pouch had been when the ball struck Hervey could not tell, for the ache there was too general. But had it sat as it usually did, when he walked or rode erect, the pouch would have rested directly on his spine. Here, likely enough, was the closest that death had kissed him in seven years’ campaigning — and the first time in his life that England was truly at peace with France!
‘You fell so hard I was sure you were shot through,’ gasped Peto, still out of breath.
‘It felt so,’ he muttered as he glanced across to where the Derbyshires’ officer lay dead. They had to do something — and quickly. Peto was indisputably his senior, but the responsibility was surely his. There were now a dozen or so infantrymen crowding his corner of the side street, including their serjeant, whose earlier lack of address was still manifest in a look of stupefaction. ‘Serjeant,’ said Hervey, shouting almost and shaking the man’s arm, ‘where is the rest of your company?’
The NCO continued to stare straight across the main street, as if relief might come from that direction at any second. Hervey shook him again, but could get no answer. He looked at the others, who looked back at him like so many sheep. Yet these were men who, not two months before, had stood their ground at Waterloo against Bonaparte’s finest. Only one of them was showing any activity: he lay prone, squinting round the corner whence the firing had come. Hervey shook the man’s leg: ‘What do you see?’
The soldier, who had taken off his shako so that as little as possible should betray his surveillance, did not move. ‘They ’ave just picked the cartridge bags off ’em, sor. An’ by the way, sor, them French is in the gendarmry building now. They’ll ’ave powder and shot aplenty there.’
Hervey recognized the soft vowels of Cork. For an instant his mind was filled with his tribulations there. Then he noticed the stitching holes on the arm of the man’s jacket: evidently the sleeve had borne two chevrons lately. He came back to the present. ‘Where’s the rest of your company, Corporal? Where is the garrison?’
‘The company’s at ’Arfleur, sor. There’s a review or some such. And it’s “Private” now.’
Harfleur was ten miles away: he had ridden through it that very morning. ‘How many marines do you have on your ship, Captain Peto?’ he asked, turning to see Peto deftly applying a tourniquet above the shattered knee of a private little older than a boy.
Peto looked surprised. ‘Thirty-eight, the same number as she has guns — and a lieutenant. Are you asking me to—’
‘With only these men here all we can do is watch the gendarmerie: we can’t assault it,’ he replied, shaking his head to emphasize their powerlessness.
‘Would it not be better to recall the garrison? What about the town major?’
‘If we don’t act swiftly then we run the risk of every Bonapartiste in Le Havre throwing in his hand with them. The whole town might be taken!’
Peto thought it unlikely, but recognized the possibility — and therefore the necessity. ‘Very well, Captain Hervey,’ he replied grimly, ‘you shall have my marines,’ and he turned to make his way back to the quayside.
But he had no need, for his gig’s midshipman had come up. ‘I heard the firing, sir, and feared there might be trouble.’
Hervey smiled to himself. Right place, right time — he’ll do!
Peto, his hat removed in the heat of the afternoon (though he had kept it square during the action), simply raised his eyebrows, and even managed to look irritated by the blood on his white breeches. ‘Yes, yes, Mr Ranson, it is nothing. Be so good as to signal to Nisus and request Mr Locke to bring his men ashore — sharply if you please.’ The midshipman doubled away with the greatest enthusiasm, and Peto turned to Hervey, raising his eyebrows again. ‘His first time within earshot of French fire,’ he drawled; ‘it’s as well to behave with as much indifference as possible.’
Hervey was minded of Edward Lankester, though nothing of that patrician’s manner was at all studied. Even the way Lankester had ridden the length of the Sixth’s line in the closing hour at Waterloo, risking every tirailleur’s parting shot, was — he was sure — born of the most natural impulse. However, Peto’s bearing, studied or not, was as cool as ever he had seen. Did its impulse really matter?
But now he saw an even greater service that Nisus might render, for as he lay prone, snatching the odd glance up and down the street (and grateful he was too that he wore his second coat, for the cobbles had sharp edges), he tumbled at last to it — the apt line of fire. ‘Captain Peto, do you see your ship yonder?’ he called excitedly.
Peto, without thinking, looked back towards the roads where Nisus lay at anchor, and then quickly back at Hervey again, irritated. ‘Of course I see her, Captain Hervey; to what do your powers of observation lead?’
‘The gendarmerie is at the end of the street. It stands in direct line from her.’
Peto looked astonished. ‘You surely do not wish me to undertake a shore bombardment?’ he gasped.
‘Not a bombardment — a shot across their bow. Except it must needs be a shot into their bow.’
Peto looked even more astonished.
Hervey failed to understand.
‘Captain Hervey, how far is the gendarmerie from us?’
‘Sixty or seventy yards I should say,’ he replied.
‘And a further hundred or so to the quay. And by my reckoning Nisus stands three cables out — a total of seven hundred and fifty yards. Eight hundred perhaps.’
Hervey was yet more puzzled. ‘That is not an extreme range, sir?’
Peto raised his eyebrows a third time in as many minutes. ‘It is not an extreme range, sir, but the parabola is such that—’
‘Oh yes, Captain, I know the intricacy well,’ he interrupted, but somehow managing not to contrive offence. ‘If you aimed low, however, the ricochet could be to our advantage.’
Peto said nothing. Indeed, he looked aghast. And then he appeared to be contemplating the proposition. Slowly he warmed to it. ‘There is no guarantee of line, mind you. The shot is not tight in the barrel as with a rifle. It might fly wide.’
Hervey was silent. It was not his place to give a lesson in gunnery to a frigate captain, though he knew that, at a thousand yards, the shot could not be too far out of line if the gun were laid dead-centre on its target.
‘Very well, Captain Hervey, though heaven knows what shall be our fate if this is misdirected. I dare say a court martial awaits us both.’
‘Quite so, sir,’ smiled Hervey, taking another look round the corner.
Peto said he would go back to Nisus himself. ‘I suppose you are capable of the business ashore — mounted or dismounted. But I need to see that gun is laid truly.’
Hervey asked if he would leave his midshipman. ‘I shall need an officer with the cordon around the gendarmerie.’
Peto approved. ‘And shall we agree to fire on the place at a given time?’ he asked absently, brushing brick-dust from his seacoat.
‘I should prefer a signal,’ replied Hervey. ‘Something always seems to make a given time too early or too late as it approaches. Shall we say three powder flashes from this corner?’
‘Very well,’ said Peto, ‘three powder flashes it is. I shall make “Affirmative” when ready.’
‘And if the first shot is insufficient,’ added Hervey, ‘we shall await another; then you will see us rush the building.’
A quarter of an hour later Lieutenant Locke and thirty marines (even Peto would not leave his ship entirely without marines) came doubling along the side street to where Hervey and the midshipman were observing — the one with his telescope trained on Nisus for the ready signal, the other still prone and peering round the corner at the gendarmerie. The marines looked eager, bayonets already fixed, sweat running down their faces. There was no time for introductions or other pleasantries. Hervey quickly explained his intention, the lieutenant lying prone beside him to peer round the corner at their objective. ‘There’s no place for skirmishing. When the ball makes a breach we must rush it at once!’
Ranson’s telescope awaited the red flag with white cross that would signal his ship’s readiness. Suddenly he started. ‘Nisus makes “Affirmative”, sir!’ he called excitedly. ‘She is ready!’
‘Very well, then, Mr Ranson, please take charge of the watch I have sent to the rear of the gendarmerie. There are a dozen private men there, but I fear their serjeant is unsteady.’
The midshipman looked disappointed. He wanted to draw his sword and join the storming party. But a sharp look from Hervey sped him away to join the dozen infantrymen who were all that stood between the gendarmerie and its reinforcement. Hervey had retained the Cork man, however. His job was to make four powder flashes — three for the signal and one as reserve, for powder was never as reliable as supposed, even on a hot day, with not a drop of moisture in the air. However, before he signalled the frigate there was one more thing Hervey felt obliged to do. Taking a white silk square from the pocket of his coat, he tied it to the soldier’s bayonet. ‘Are you ready, Corporal McCarthy?’ he asked, not needing to explain for what.
‘Yes, sor,’ said the man resolutely. ‘I shall get an NCO’s funeral, then?’
‘I shall see to it myself,’ smiled Hervey, cheered not for the first time by an Irishman’s black humour. ‘Come then,’ and he marched boldly to the middle of the street with McCarthy by his side.
Musket at the high port so that the trucial white would be plain to all, the erstwhile corporal laughed as they advanced on the gendarmerie building. ‘Jasus, sor, but I hope them French is still willing to go by the rules!’
‘Officers of the Garde?’ replied Hervey reassuringly. ‘I should think honour is everything to them. We need have no fear.’
At that very moment a musket exploded not a dozen yards to their front, the ball flying a foot or so above their heads.
‘You was saying, sor?’
Before he could make reply a voice from within the gendarmerie commanded them to halt and state their business. Hervey looked about until one of the shutters opened further to reveal the moustaches of a colonel of the chasseurs à pied, a man with so great an air of indifference that he began wondering what they might know which he did not. In his best French, and with proper deference for rank, he explained that there could be no escape. ‘You have fought with great honour on the field of battle. I myself saw the gallant conduct of the Garde at the late battle in Belgium. And today you have fought with determination. But further resistance will be to no avail: the guns of one of His Majesty’s ships are at this very moment laid on you. I call upon you to lay down your arms.’
The shutter opened full, and the colonel called out one word. ‘Merde!’
‘What’s that he says, sor?’ asked McCarthy, who had stood patiently but uncomprehendingly throughout Hervey’s peroration.
‘He does not wish to lay down his arms,’ he replied, bruised. ‘Come.’
They turned about and marched back with the same composure as they had advanced, the ringing of Hervey’s spurs on the cobbles seeming twice as loud, for all else was silence.
‘What was their answer?’ asked Lieutenant Locke.
Hervey, his pride not a little damaged, felt the need of paraphrase. ‘La Garde meurt mais ne se rend pas! Like Cambronne at Waterloo,’ he sighed. ‘Well, so shall it be if they insist. Are the flares ready, McCarthy?’ he called, seeing him light a portfire.
‘Yessor!’
Hervey drew in his breath and drew out his sabre. He could not remember the last time he had gone into action dismounted. He thought it wise to pull off his spurs. Then glancing once about to see his storming party were ready, he gave McCarthy the word. ‘Fire them!’
Private McCarthy put the portfire to the powder trails, and seconds later three flashes, one after another, told Nisus it was time.
Hervey hardly expected delay, for there was no swell for which to compensate in laying the gun, but even he was surprised by the frigate’s response. In an instant one of her eighteen-pounders belched a long tongue of flame, the report reaching them almost at once in the still air. But they saw the shot approaching even before hearing the discharge. It first flew higher than he expected, but then its falling trajectory became apparent, and it crashed into the very doors of the gendarmerie building — so accurate a piece of gunnery that for a second Hervey was speechless.
‘Charge!’
Up! Forward! Boots pounding on cobbles — slipping, sliding. It seemed so slow! As bad as plough, almost. But they made the breach before the French rallied — hardly a shot from any quarter. The double doors were no more, the jambs pulled in with the force of the roundshot. Hervey was through first, a fraction ahead of the big lieutenant of Marines. Inside was all dust and wreckage — more than expected, and a sight he hoped never to see again after Waterloo: broken bodies of fine French officers. Marines rushed past him to the rooms beyond, almost knocking him down. This was their business: close-quarter fighting, confined. And they were eager for it. Not for them long lines and squares, wheeling, fronting and volleying like the infantry. They held their muskets close instead of at high port, ready to thrust with the bayonet or swing the butt up to groin, gut or chin. Brute strength — brutal — brutish. They worked in pairs, with no commands, with the utmost violence, and without check. Forward, forward, forward — momentum was everything to Marines!
There was nothing for Hervey to do. He had led them in. He was a hindrance now. He turned for the breach, but a blow like a prizefighter’s knocked him flat on his back. The Waterloo stars and the dancing lights were back, and the blackness rolled in as a cloud. Like a wounded animal, writhing in hopeless rage, he blindly slashed this way and that with his sabre. It made no contact.
‘Are ye all right, sor?’
Sometimes a voice was as welcome for its tone as what it brought. ‘Yes,’ groaned Hervey; ‘I’m all right, thank you,’ cursing inaudibly in language fouler than even Joseph Edmonds might have been tempted to.
Private McCarthy helped him to his feet and out through the breach. ‘Have a care here, sor,’ he warned as they ducked the lintel — the same that Hervey had run full tilt into.
Outside, his wits were restored soon enough. The shako had taken some of the force, and spared him an open wound, but his pride bore a bruise much worse than his forehead. Then it was all shouting again — Allez! Allez! — and those officers who had not taken Cambronne’s words literally were bustled out at the point of steel.
Later, the town major and the mayor expressed fulsome gratitude, the mayor assuring them that Le Havre wanted no truck with what remained of Bonaparte’s ambition. ‘Do not be too dismayed at the 104th, Captain Hervey,’ said the major; ‘they are not a bad regiment. I stood close to them at Hougoumont, but they lost a good many of their best officers and NCOs there.’
Hervey did not doubt it, and felt meanly for having condemned them so roundly. The Line battalions had, after all, borne the brunt of Bonaparte’s onslaught all that day in June. Waterloo had changed things. He knew himself to be changed. The army was now divided into two distinct parts: those who had been there, and those who wished they had been. And to those who had been there, the world would never be the same again; for they each knew they had escaped death by the chance of the fall of shot or the line of a musket ball, and were determined either to enjoy their deliverance to the fullest or to learn why fortune had favoured them above other men.
* * *
Hervey returned to the Nisus at six o’clock with three carts in tow. On the first were two one-hundredweight sacks of bran and five more of barley. On the second, a much bigger waggon, was the best part of two tons of hay, and on the third the same of straw. Nisus had come alongside one of the wharves, and her crew, under the eagle eyes of her marines, now made light work of stowing the forage. They showed a pleasure in doing so, even, with more than one nod of respect sent Hervey’s way, for the assault on the gendarmerie had been retailed through the ship.
Peto shook his hand as he came aboard but allowed himself few words on the affair. Hervey expressed himself much taken by the skill and speed with which the carpenters had erected a most solid-looking stable for Jessye — with a roof that would carry rainwater over the side, and the gunport allowing for good circulation of air — adding that he had not imagined they would have it done so quickly. But Peto had resumed his former peremptory manner. ‘Great gods, Captain Hervey!’ he spluttered. ‘My carpenters are not country cabinetmakers: their business is with battle damage!’ And a short time later his sensibilities were even more severely assaulted by the arrival of Private Johnson and a travelling horsebox, for when the cochers let down the ramped door to the rear, and Johnson led out Jessye, her lack of blood was at once apparent. Neither was she on her toes — and her ears were flat. Indeed, the effects of her fortnight’s chill were all too evident, so that the contrast between what was expected to emerge from the box and what in reality did was all the more pronounced.
And to compound the affront to Peto’s notions of good and handsome order, Hervey’s groom now hailed Nisus’s quarterdeck, only just remembering to touch his shako peak: ‘Bloody ’ell, Mr ’Ervey! What was all that firin’?’
Peto looked askance. ‘Does he address you, sir — aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington?!’
Hervey shifted uneasily at the rail, making awful comparison in his mind with the captain’s steward. ‘Yes,’ he replied simply, ‘we have been together some time.’
‘Most singular indeed!’ concluded Peto, shaking his head as he turned for the other side of the deck.
Hervey glanced back to the quayside. So unmilitary a sight, indeed, was Johnson, and so unprepossessing did Jessye look, that he could find no reply.
He was blowing into her nose and pulling her ears as the marines’ commanding officer approached. ‘I took you for a dandy,’ the lieutenant laughed; ‘your horse tells me you are not!’
Hervey had not cared for the look of the lieutenant on the crossing to France, though he had seen him only at a distance, and his impression had not changed when he had come doubling along the street with his marines. His face — knocked-about and horribly scarred — was that of a pug rather than an officer. But how he could fight! He had gone at the breach with as much vigour — and even more strength — than Serjeant Armstrong would have. And his smile was not the sneer Hervey had first thought, but a warm, almost familiar one. ‘I will wager she could beat anything you have seen over two miles!’ smiled Hervey back.
‘I don’t doubt it for a minute. Why else would the Duke of Wellington’s aide-de-camp have such a hack?’
He was about to try another riposte when the lieutenant laughed out loud. ‘You have scarce changed a jot since Shrewsbury, Matthew Hervey!’
He stared back blankly.
‘No, you do not recognize me! You were once my doul, but I was bonnier then. A Yankee frigate did for me — grape sweeping across the forecastle just as we boarded her. Lucky to keep my sight. Locke — Henry Locke, of Locke-hall in the county of Worcester.’
Hervey remembered — indeed he did. But a boy whose looks were the envy of his house at Shrewsbury. ‘My God,’ he started, before checking himself. ‘I mean… no, I should not have recognized you. But how very pleased I am to make your acquaintance again. What are you doing in His Majesty’s Marines?’
‘I might ask you the same manner of question. And I believe the answer to both is that we have been fighting the King’s enemies.’
‘Just so,’ laughed Hervey, ‘just so.’ He recalled him well enough now — a kindly senior to serve for a term, but no favourite of the masters’ common room, for sure. ‘I hardly saw you when first I came aboard at Chatham.’
‘No, I was ashore at musketry. We joined by cutter once she was under way.’
‘Ah,’ said Hervey, now comprehending; ‘I was being most handsomely entertained at your captain’s table by that time.’
‘No matter. But that was a famous action this afternoon. Are you recovered of your blow?’ he smiled.
‘Yes, thank you,’ he coughed (mortification was perhaps too strong a word for his condition).
‘The cannonade was your idea, I hazard?’
‘Yes, it seemed best,’ he replied lightly, relieved to be let off the subject of his collision with the lintel. But the affair of the gendarmerie could hardly be counted a great stratagem.
Locke’s expression indicated otherwise. ‘You are deuced lucky Nisus is a frigate: even a seventy-four would not have done.’
Hervey was puzzled. ‘How so?’
‘Hah! You should see those first-and second-rates at gunnery: they simply lay alongside the enemy and blast away — broadside after broadside. There’s no science in it: there’s hardly need. “Engage the enemy more closely”: that’s what an affair of big ships amounts to.’
‘Oh,’ replied Hervey, disappointed — not to say disconcerted — by the intelligence. ‘I had imagined their gunnery to be more expeditious than that.’
‘Then you are in error. It is not to be compared with Woolwich. Don’t mistake me, mind: the celerity with which those guns are served is magnificent. But it’s broadsides — volley fire.’
‘In a frigate less so, however?’
‘In a frigate less so, yes. But that was rare shooting this afternoon — very uncommon shooting indeed. You know that Captain Peto laid the gun himself?’
Hervey did not.
‘Peto is that sort of captain.’
‘I am full of admiration. I had not supposed he took so great a risk firing on the gendarmerie. And that he should shoulder the responsibility so personally is, as you say, singular.’
‘Just so, Hervey. I doubt there is any bolder frigate captain in the navy. But let us to other matters: what brings you to Nisus?’
Faced with his first occasion for subterfuge, Hervey all but foundered. ‘Well, er, yes… you may. You see, I am to go to India to study the employment of the lance with the native cavalry regiments. The Duke of Wellington intends raising lancer regiments and wishes to know how best they should be ordered and trained.’
Locke seemed puzzled. ‘The cavalry leads a queerer life than the Johnnies, that’s for sure. It seems a deuced mazy way to find how to carry a spear!’
Hervey smiled. ‘The duke is very particular about things.’ How easily came the deception now.
‘Well, we must get your mare aboard. Yon crane and hoist — see? A dozen marines is all it should take.’
And, indeed, a dozen marines was all it took to hoist Jessye aboard. She lay in the sling with neither a swish of her tail nor a whicker (but looking, thought Hervey, distinctly sorry for herself) as she was first hoist aloft and then lowered into the waist. No more trouble than a gun barrel, said the boatswain. The sling’s fastenings loosed, she stepped into her box as if from the paddock, and was promptly rewarded with carrots by Johnson, his face now changed from one of anxiety to satisfaction. A promising beginning, said Hervey, though he knew it by no means certain she would survive the passage. Nevertheless, she had enough space to turn about freely and to lie at full stretch — which was more than the horses to and from the Peninsula had had. The stall was airy (it could hardly have been otherwise), yet there was enough shelter from rain and spray. Not too heavy seas to begin with — that was what he prayed for.
‘You are prone to seasickness, then, are you?’ asked Peto, though the tone was of indifference rather than sympathy.
‘Oh no, I manage quite well. It’s my mare I have a care for, since a horse has not the facility to vomit. They get the colic instead, and in the worst event they die.’
Several hands had gathered about the stall, intrigued by the addition to Nisus’s complement. One of them held out something in his palm, but she only sniffed at it and snorted disapprovingly.
‘What’s tha givin ’er?’ demanded Johnson.
‘Only baccy,’ replied the hand.
‘Tha daft bugger!’ frowned Johnson. ‘An ’orse doesn’t chew t’bacca!’
‘Will’e ’ave a bit o’ salt-pork?’ asked another.
‘Saints alive,’ cursed Johnson, ‘tha’s as daft as ’im! An ’orse doesn’t ’ave meat! And “he’s” a she!’
Peto, observing from the quarterdeck and by now much diverted, hailed his first lieutenant. ‘Mr Belben, I think the boatswain should be advised to instruct the crew that this important animal be given no titbits!’
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ replied Belben, with a long-suffering raise of the eyebrows.
Later that evening, while Peto attended to his papers, Hervey went up to the quarterdeck to take the air. First he stopped at Jessye’s stall. The feverish chill, the long haul from Paris and the hoisting aloft would have put many a blood on its side, but Jessye stood square in her stall chewing hay with slow but regular rotation of the jaw, grinding out the goodness from the Timothy. He had nothing to trouble himself about.
On the quarterdeck he found Henry Locke leaning on the taffrail and gazing out into the busy channel that was the estuary of the Seine. The light was failing fast, but a dozen vessels of various sizes could be observed under way, and as many more lay at anchor. The steady light from a lantern threw the lieutenant’s features into sharp relief, the hollow of his nose and the empty space that had once been his strong chin all too apparent in profile. Hervey shivered a little, and then hailed him.
‘Good evening, Hervey,’ replied Locke without looking round. ‘Might one ever tire of such sights?’
Hervey perceived the ambiguity in the question but could not be certain that it was intended. ‘I can see why some do not, though I am a landsman,’ he said. ‘Is this what drew you to the Marines?’
‘No, but it is one of the things that keeps me: Worcestershire is not notably a naval county. So, we’re all set fair for the Indies?’ He did not alter his gaze as he changed the subject.
‘Yes. Do you know India?’
‘Only from the telling of others. A place where a man might live like a prince on a lieutenant’s pay.’
Hervey smiled. ‘So I hear. You have not been tempted, then?’
Locke turned to him. His face, insofar as his disfigurement permitted any range of sentiment, bore an expression of melancholy. ‘I have only one desire, Hervey, and that’s to win back Locke-hall.’
Hervey was intrigued. ‘Do you wish to speak of it?’ he enquired solicitously.
‘Gambling debts mostly.’
Hervey sighed to himself — an old story. ‘You gambled away your inheritance?’
Locke stood upright and looked at him with a frown: ‘No! It was gambled by my father in his dotage. I was to have a cornetcy in the Blues: every penny for it went on the tables.’
‘And that is why you went to sea?’
‘I tried my hand at one or two ventures, but I have no head for business and no stomach for a profession. Admiral Jervis was a cousin of my late mother’s, and it was on his recommendation that I received a commission.’
‘You said win back Locke-hall?’
‘Ay, with prize-money. But since a lieutenant of Marines ranks merely with a navy warrant officer for pay and prizes, we shall need to capture a treasure fleet!’
‘And we are at war with no-one.’
‘Ay, just so. Do you have a wife, Hervey?’
He explained his circumstances, and now the hope — vain as it sounded in retelling — that Henrietta might at any moment appear with the gallant Corporal Collins.
‘She sounds to have capability,’ replied Locke. ‘Ward of the Marquess of Bath, d’ye say? Money, too. Well, let us hope this letter you say you wrote is sufficient. Many a woman would suppose herself proper jilted by a lover who runs off to the east. All her grand friends will have to be told… explanation after explanation.’
‘She might yet arrive, and—’
‘And you would ask the captain for another berth?’ smiled Locke.
‘No… I had not thought… that is—’
He smiled again. ‘A wife isn’t something to pack in a marine’s dunnage. We fight light, as they say. And I dare say, too, they don’t stow so well on a bat-horse either!’
Hervey frowned. ‘That is a cynic’s counsel indeed!’
‘I myself was married once,’ replied Locke, claiming thereby a right to the philosophy.
Hervey studied him for a second or so, trying to gauge his earnestness, and then pressed him to the details.
‘She took one look at my face when I returned home and away she went. She hardly took much to living in lodgings in Portsmouth in any case.’
Hervey expressed himself sorry.
‘I cannot say I blame her,’ sighed Locke, ‘but I thought I had married into stock made of sterner stuff. We had known each other since… well, since we shared a pew.’
Hervey did not think it appropriate to reveal that his attachment with Henrietta had an equal gestation. ‘And Locke-hall shall be without a mistress?’ he tried, curious as to the force which bound the man to his vision.
‘Never again should I marry, even were my wife to have us put asunder in law.’ And then he smiled: ‘But as lord of the manor there’d be lasses enough to keep me content. As long as the candle was blowed out!’
Hervey smiled, perhaps less fully than he might.
‘Matthew Hervey, don’t you preach at me. You think on how life would be if your fair looks were rearranged by grapeshot or a sabre-cut. Even the whores in Portsmouth run when they see my face.’
‘What, all of them?’ he asked in disbelief.
‘Well, I’ve not tried all of them, to be sure. But one whore who’s too particular is a powerful insult to a man’s… manhood.’
Hervey clapped his hand on Locke’s shoulder and smiled broadly. Even through the thick serge of the scarlet coat he could feel the brawn built of hours at exercise, the cutlass-swinging for which the Royals were renowned. Locke stood an inch in excess of six feet, taller than any man aboard — a powerful, if artless, fighter held in affection as well as respect by his marines. ‘I think you are as lucky in your ship as I am in my regiment,’ proclaimed Hervey.
Locke returned the smile as broadly. ‘Yes, she’s a fine ship. And what service she’s seen! That night before Trafalgar — she and Euryalus did work to make the meanest heart proud.’
‘Indeed,’ nodded Hervey, ‘there can be few who do not know it. And what poetic fortune it was, too.’
Locke seemed puzzled. ‘Poetic fortune?’
‘Yes,’ said Hervey; ‘that it should be Nisus with Euryalus, of all ships.’
‘Hervey,’ replied Locke, now looking quite decidedly puzzled, ‘I do not have the slightest idea of what you speak.’
‘Oh,’ said Hervey, surprised, but anxious not to cause embarrassment, ‘were Nisus and Euryalus not Trojans, Trojan warriors?’
‘Well,’ said Locke, his brow obviously furrowed, though concealed under the roundhat; ‘Nisus was a Trojan warrior — that I know. But of his attachment with Euryalus I know not. What is the connection?’
Hervey was relieved his remark seemed not to have caused his erstwhile idol to be abashed. ‘It’s just something I remember from those hours in the classroom at Shrewsbury,’ he said lightly. ‘Nisus and Euryalus were friends, the closest of friends — David and Jonathan, Pylades and Orestes.’
Locke nodded his understanding.
‘Together one night they stole into the enemy’s camp and killed many as they lay sleeping. Euryalus was wounded, and Nisus rushed to save him, but both were slain.’
Locke made no reply for the moment, and then sighed. ‘Well, had our Euryalus got into trouble that night, Nisus would not have been able to go to her aid: she could not afford to lose contact with the French. But I for one, in ordinary, own that the measure of a man is his steadfastness towards his comrades in battle.’
Hervey seemed uneasy.
‘ “Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his friend,” it says somewhere in the Bible does it not?’ said Locke by way of explanation.
‘Yes, in St John. For his friends, indeed.’
‘But I’m very much taken with the Trojan legend. I did not know it.’
Hervey smiled again, but his expression was still a little pained. ‘Would all Euryalus’s crew have acknowledged that Nisus’s captain did the right and proper thing — leaving her to her fate in order to stay on the tail of the French?’
Locke gave a sort of half-shrug. ‘The usages of battle are well understood in the Royal Navy. Why do you ask?’
Hervey asked because of Serjeant Strange, and for an instant he was tempted to tell Locke of it. But that was not his way, nor was this the time. ‘Oh, nothing — merely that I wished to have some notion of the way things are in the wooden world.’
‘They are different in the detail, for sure, but in the spirit I reckon not,’ said Locke. ‘You must learn of it. Mr Belben would, as a rule, take you round the ship, but I shall do it — to explain things with a landsman’s eye.’
‘Thank you,’ said Hervey eagerly, flattered by
Locke’s attention as if still the schoolboy.
‘But now you must excuse me: there’s the watch to set, and we shall have many hours to talk during the passage to the Indies. And I tell you, Matthew Hervey, I am right glad to have the opportunity. It is curious, is it not, how a couple of shared years at the same school make the intervening ones as nothing?’
Hervey smiled, eased by Locke’s frankness and warmed by his congeniality. How fortunate he was, always, with his comrades-in-arms.
He left the quarterdeck, returning the sentry’s salute with a touch to the brim of his hat, and strode purposefully to Jessye’s stall where he hoped to find practical business to occupy his mind for an hour or so before he turned in. But Jessye was lying down, eyes closed and breathing soundly. He crossed the deck and clambered onto one of the guns to sweep the quayside with his telescope in the dying light. But there was no sign of Collins. He snapped the glass closed, sighing, and stepped down. It was early still, but he was not yet at ease enough to go to the wardroom so instead he went to his cabin. There he undressed, threw some water over his face, cleaned his teeth with the expensive powder bought in Paris, and climbed into his swinging cot (with less difficulty than hitherto, he was relieved to find). He read the psalm appointed for the evening and then closed his eyes, leaving the safety light burning. He lay listening to the ship’s night-noises — the lapping of the waves, made audible by the open gunports either side of his cabin, and the creaking of timbers as the ship rolled ever so gently in the swell. The motion was seductive, and the manly burgundy invigorating. If only Henrietta had been beside him.