Off Ushant, in the afternoon, two days out
A fresh north-easterly was blowing down the Channel. Nisus was running with all but her royals set, and the wind, the groaning canvas and the creaking of timbers in every quarter of the ship tried the intimacy of conversation. Next to nothing now could be made of Ushant and the coast of Brittany. The heavy cloud made it difficult, at this distance, to tell even where the sky ended and the sea began, though a telescope might yet pick out the great lighthouse of L’Ouessant. The sea was becoming a forbidding grey. The waves were long, with white horses running, and the spray was persuading Hervey that his cloak would have been prudent. Great shearwaters skimmed the troughs with rapid wing-beats, rearing up over the wavetops in long glides and plunging from time to time in search of a finny bite. Soon they too would be leaving to winter in the warmer islands of the South Atlantic, not many miles distant from where Bonaparte himself would pass both his winters and summers. Hervey shivered, if only slightly.
Captain Peto had spoken hardly at all since leaving Le Havre. His lieutenants were, it seemed, men in whom he had every confidence, and his sailing-master had been long years with Nisus. He spent much of the day in his cabin surrounded by sheaves of Admiralty papers and charts, visited only by his clerk, content for the most part to observe the set of the sails from a quarter gallery. Once or twice in the morning, and then again in the afternoon and evening, he visited the quarterdeck for his solitary promenade, when, as was the custom, the whole of the windward half was instantly cleared for him. No-one ventured to address him without leave, and although this ritual aloofness seemed perfectly regular to the ship’s officers, Hervey felt keenly the loss of the earlier intimacy. Now, though, he and Locke had the quarterdeck to themselves, with only the officer of the watch, the quartermaster and two mates by the wheel.
‘I shouldn’t brood on matters were I you.’
‘Do you take your own counsel in this?’ smiled Hervey by return.
‘No,’ he laughed, ‘but that need not stop me. Is advice so great an insult to judgement?’
‘No, indeed it is not!’ laughed Hervey, thankful for Locke’s forthright cheer.
‘Then tell me more of your lady: that is your trial, is it not?’
How queer, thought Hervey, that he should feel disposed to speaking his heart to Locke. He knew him now only two days. And at Shrewsbury their situations had been so different they could scarcely be called old friends. But common years could root trust deeper than first supposed, and he was content enough to speak with a man who shared something singular. And besides, they had gone through the breach almost shoulder to shoulder. The gendarmerie was hardly Badajoz, but at the point of any assault the scale of the affair was merely theoretical. ‘Well, in truth, I should not have let my hopes rise so high,’ he admitted. ‘The odds against seeing her before we set sail could scarcely have been longer. I believe the captain might have been offended that I asked for one more day.’
Locke smiled. ‘Well, the captain isn’t known for his patience where women are concerned. But I shouldn’t let it trouble you.’
Hervey sighed. How he wished, now, that he had not thought of the interception stratagem, that he had trusted instead to the arrangements in Paris, where Henrietta might be told of things with due propriety, instead of harum-scarum along the coast with Corporal Collins. ‘No, I have fudged things. And I thought myself so clever!’
‘Tell me of her, in any case,’ pressed Locke.
‘I told you of her family,’ he began resolutely; ‘or, rather, of her guardian — for her people died when she was scarcely more than an infant. We have known each other since the day she came to Wiltshire, to Longleat. We shared a schoolroom together.’
‘Not solely the lady of fashion, then? Not someone courted to be an adornment to a man’s ambition?’
Hervey glanced cautiously at him. ‘She is not someone who owns to nothing but fashion. She has read widely and has many accomplishments.’
‘And she’s pretty, I’m sure.’ His tone suggested he was leading to some general proposition.
‘She is very pretty. I do not have her likeness with me, else I would show you.’
‘An officer should take care only to fall in love with a woman of beauty and a good fortune, for these are necessary in the advancement of his career, are they not?’
Hervey frowned as much as Locke smiled. ‘That is very ill! It is bad enough hearing the same from Captain Peto!’
Locke smiled even more broadly: ‘Hervey, these are new and opportune times, but the day a pair of pretty eyes and connection in society do not count in the advancement of a husband will be very long in its coming. Our system is different, but I have observed that officers who rise to the highest ranks always marry the right wife!’
Hervey laughed too, but overcame the temptation to tell him he was already beholden to Henrietta’s connections — for although it seemed now a trifling affair in Ireland that required her influence, it would be wrong to underestimate her capacity to persuade. Heavens, but how he wished she were with him! Or had seen her for a few moments before sailing, even. Had it been unreasonable to ask Peto for one more day? The captain’s reaction had said as much.
‘Will you give me a straight answer if I ask a straight question?’ said Locke, breaking the vocal silence.
‘That or none at all,’ replied Hervey briskly, pushing as far away as he could the unpleasant realization of his failure, and wiping another bit of spray from his eyes.
‘Are you entirely disposed to this enterprise?’
Hervey started. It seemed a damned impudent question. ‘What the—’
Locke grasped his quarrel at once: ‘I mean the India enterprise! I’ve no cause to question your matrimonial affairs, I assure you!’ and he clapped a hand on his shoulder.
Hervey sighed to himself. Here was what came of speaking about matters which properly remained interior. ‘It’s the first time I have been detached from my regiment,’ he conceded. ‘I had not imagined I would feel quite so… well, at sea.’
Locke drew his head back, and then both began laughing at the absurdity of the unintended play on words.
Private Johnson had been unable to perfect any better means of communicating with the quarterdeck than by standing at the foot of the companion ladder to await the passing of an officer or mate. He had been deterred from the obvious and direct method — ascending the ladder — on their first morning at sea, by the Marines sentry. The exchange had been forthright, soldierly and ultimately bruising, leaving Johnson with little taste for the ways of the wooden world, but nevertheless a healthy respect for its discipline. This morning he had prevailed upon a midshipman who looked not half his age to convey the message that Jessye was ready for her tonic — which he himself would have mixed and administered, except that, with no locker space, the bottles were kept in Hervey’s cabin.
Hervey’s mare was on the mend. She was already on that road in Paris, but the sea air was doing her a great power of good. That and the tonic — two pinches sulphate of iron, a half of powdered nux vomica, and two each of gentian and aniseed. It had been the regimental standby since Major Edmonds had been a cornet. Hervey sprinkled the mixture into some molasses syrup and then rolled half a dozen barleyfavours from the sticky paste. Much ado, they agreed, but the surest way to have her ingest.
‘Tha thinks she’ll be all right, Cap’n ’Ervey?’
‘Heavens, yes: I don’t think we need continue this tonic beyond a day or so more.’
‘I meant will she be all right cooped up in ’ere for six months?’
A month’s box-rest was the longest Hervey remembered seeing any horse confined. ‘There’s no reason why she can’t stay the course, as long as the ship remains afloat. If the sea gets too high we can brace her into a standing stall. The real worry is the wasting of that muscle,’ he sighed, indicating the rounded quarters, testament to many hours of careful schooling. ‘It will take all of six months to get it back. But she’ll have fewer ailments this winter — of that I’ll be bound. No damned stuffy stable, with every cough of a morning becoming three by evening.’
‘Isn’t she gooin’ to go barmy, though?’ Johnson had hung up a turnip on a length of string so that she might have something to amuse herself by, but she hardly paid it notice, so taken was she by the constant activity about the deck.
‘Well, there’s plenty to keep her interest, and she’s not having any corn to hot her up. And she has space enough to stretch.’
Johnson was not entirely convinced.
But then neither was Hervey. ‘If I spend an hour each day with her, brushing and strapping, and you likewise, then we might keep the muscle hard. Come on, I’ll lend you a hand to skip her out.’
They were picking out her bed as the captain’s steward came up. Johnson had never found the job easier, for droppings and fouled straw went straight through the gunport, giving the following gulls the brief promise of a feast.
‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ said Flowerdew, knuckling his forehead, ‘captain’s compliments, and would you join him for dinner, at six, sir?’
‘Who’d be a bloody fart-catcher afloat!’ said Johnson when Flowerdew had gone.
‘Private Johnson, I never cease to be amazed by how ill you consider anyone in service. And yet you show no appetite for going back into the ranks of a troop yourself.’ Hervey was more puzzled than offended.
‘I’m ’appy to be of service, but not all this “by your leave” palaver. Like a lot of Susans they are! An’ tha knows I’m not frit by gooin’ back in t’ranks: it’s just that there’s too much frigging abaht — that’s what!’
One of the hands nearby was laughing.
‘For heaven’s sake, man, mind your language!’ appealed Hervey.
Johnson looked astonished. ‘Language? Tha should be on t’mess deck! It’s—’
‘Yes, very well — let’s not have all of it,’ Hervey protested, somehow wishing he had saved himself the trouble. ‘You know the captain’s strictures on profane or low words on deck.’
‘Suit thisen, Captain ’Ervey.’
Truly, it was not difficult at times to see why Johnson had been passed on from two lieutenants within the space of a couple of months. And why he had been the bane of the corporals in his troop. Yet it was his very irrepressibility that recommended him — that and the undisputed fact that he was a deuced fine groom. And then there was his resourcefulness. Never would Hervey forget that Waterloo dawn, rain still beating down, every dragoon skulking under his cloak until all but kicked from under by the picket. But not Johnson. He had spent the opportune hours progging, and managed to wake Hervey with a canteen of hot tea — the only officer in the Sixth, besides the major, to have that privilege. Sheffield vowels and brusquerie was hardly a great price to pay, whatever others thought.
Hervey dressed for the captain’s table with particular care that afternoon. He put on white cotton breeches, and court shoes instead of hussar boots, hoping, however, that the buckles might not look so obviously like the pinchbeck they were. He put on one of his fine lawn shirts, turning up the collar so that the points would project. Then he took out his best coat, finer cloth than his service tunic. How diligently Johnson had wrapped the buttons in paper to preserve their shine, he noted. Ten, top-to-bottom on each side of the bib front — he took care not to touch any as he hitchedto the tunic hooks. He fastened the belt and girdle, smiling again at how he and his fellow cornets had complained of the new pattern with its red hoops — the colour of the legionary infantry — which ‘vulgarized’ them. That and the new crossbelt with its deuced red stripe. And all because a new colonel — long gone — had wanted to be able to see instantly which were his officers. How trifling had been their concerns.
And so they both sat, with Peto likewise more formally attired than hitherto, sipping the presents with which Hervey had joined Nisus — all blue coats, gold lace and white breeches. The wind had fallen away in the early afternoon, and they were running very smoothly now through the water, the flatware on the table making not the slightest noise. At first, conversation was merely polite — the weather, Jessye’s sea legs, Hervey’s engagement with the language of the Mughal court. Not a word of the gendarmerie, however. A paltry affair, unworthy of mention? He simply could not judge.
Quite suddenly, Peto changed his tack. ‘Captain Hervey,’ he began, ‘you may think me overly curious, but I have observed you closely since our first meeting. This business of yours in India: it seems hardly patrician sport.’
Hervey’s frown said he was not sure of Peto’s meaning.
‘Officers who are well connected have little appetite for the Indies. They would rather do their soldiering in Brighton, would they not?’ replied Peto, with a note of the accusatory.
Hervey laughed. ‘I have no blue blood, sir — well, none to speak of, that is. Why did you presume otherwise?’
Peto looked surprised. ‘The Duke of Wellington, by my understanding, chooses his ADCs from the nobility. You are a Hervey, are you not?’
‘So distantly am I related that the Earl of Bristol would not know of my being on this earth!’ he smiled. ‘Indeed, those Herveys pronounce the name as if it were spelled with an a.’
‘Oh.’ Peto now seemed disappointed. ‘So neither are you descended, in any direct sense, from Admiral Augustus Hervey?’
‘I am afraid that I am not descended in any sense whatever,’ he smiled again.
‘Then by what influence did you become aide-decamp to so great a man?’
‘You have a decidedly low opinion of the way the army conducts its business, Captain Peto!’
‘I know what I know, sir!’
‘Well, the duke chose me — that is all there is of it.’ He hoped that it would put off further interrogation on the subject, but it did not.
‘Fiddlesticks, Captain Hervey! There’s a great deal more of it — of that I’ll be bound. I have observed an officer with a true instinct for his profession — if as such it may be dignified — and one with an uncommon eye for a horse in respects other than its bloodlines. I’m pleased the duke recognizes your aptitude, but I’m sceptical.’
‘I surmise that you are sceptical by nature, sir,’ replied Hervey, still smiling.
‘Like the philosopher, Captain Hervey, I deny nothing but I question everything.’
‘In what do you place your faith, then?’
‘I always strive to gain the weather gage and the first broadside!’ Peto said it with such relish that it made Hervey blink. ‘But I am forgetting myself: I have a very passable Bual that I think we may enjoy before our dinner.’ Champagne was evidently not the captain’s ultimate pleasure. He opened a locker and took out a bottle of Madeira from an inclined rack made to keep them fast in the heaviest of seas. He drew the cork deftly and poured two glasses. ‘It will not need tasting: Blandy has never failed me. My first captain had barrels of the stuff as ballast. Two or three times across the Atlantic and the Equator and it was very finely matured indeed.’
‘You buy direct from the island?’
‘Captain Hervey, Madeira has been my second home these past three years, for that was my station during the American war. And, I might say, it was the place of some fortune, for we took a frigate and two merchantmen in a year.’
‘That would mean prize-money, then?’ Hervey was gaining his ease.
‘Do not think ill of it, sir: the greater part goes to the officers, but then so does the enemy’s shot!’
Hervey assured him he meant no disrespect. ‘You have bought a handsome estate somewhere, no doubt?’ he added.
‘Not at all. It is invested in Berry Brothers in St James’s Street: a good wine, sir, will have a better return than bricks and mortar.’
‘You do not have a wife?’
‘Captain Hervey, I have scarce spent seven successive nights ashore since leaving Norfolk to be a captain’s servant, and I should scarcely wish to spend any more with a wife!’
Hervey laughed. ‘Well I, too, am not well acquainted with soft pillows. The army has not been idle these past years.’
‘Bah!’ said Peto; ‘I have followed events with the closest attention, and it seems to me that if your Duke of Wellington had shown a little more address you would have been over the Pyrenees two years before. And he was humbugged at Waterloo, I hear.’
‘Oh come, sir!’ spluttered Hervey, but still with a broad smile. ‘You can have but an imperfect conception of the difficulties the duke faced at Waterloo. He had few battalions which had seen service — most of those were in America. And his allied regiments were — at best — untried. It is astonishing that he did as he did.’
They had moved to the steerage and a very handsome table of salt-pork collops, a veal pie and crabs dressed with olive oil. Peto poured him burgundy again. Here was no less generous or attentive a host than poor d’Arcey Jessope himself, thought Hervey — though that delightful Coldstream dandy, killed stone dead by a tirailleur’s bullet at Waterloo, had been almost self-mocking in the fare he offered. Captain Laughton Peto would have been mortified by any want of gravity. For him the table was a serious affair, comparable, it seemed, with the very business of seamanship itself.
Peto was keen, however, to press his censure. ‘But the duke’s attachment to purchase, Captain Hervey, and his favouring of fellow nobles, his promoting their sons: is that conducive to efficiency?’
Hervey sighed to himself again. What was he meant to do — defend the inexplicable, though it worked nonetheless? ‘I think,’ he began tentatively, ‘that the duke has always been in want of men in whose capability he could place confidence. It is the Horse Guards who appoint officers to command, and sometimes these appointments are inapt. I myself have served a brigadier who was both a coward and an incompetent. The duke ensures that at least his own staff are of his mind. But he’s by no means closed to the appointment of men who have recommended themselves by service.’ He paused briefly to sip his wine and crack open a claw, and he wondered to what Peto’s questioning might be tending. He thought it prudent to rehearse the duke’s opinions a little more fully. ‘And as to purchase, it has its iniquities but yet its recommendations: I think it well to have officers with a stake in the country when the army is the means of maintaining public order — and might indeed be the means of overthrowing the government.’
‘And yet the nation may entrust its wooden walls to officers with no such stake, only patriotic sentiments!’ countered Peto, unimpressed.
‘Does the navy not have its patronage too?’ asked Hervey, hoping the doubt sown might allow them to pass on to other things.
‘Not for the advancement of knaves and imbeciles, that’s for sure. Do you know our system?’
Hervey indicated that he knew it but imperfectly.
‘I was taken on as a captain’s servant at fourteen — or “volunteer” as we were by then more properly known.’
‘And how was that arranged?’ Hervey interrupted.
Peto smiled. ‘By Lord Nelson’s recommendation to Captain Blackwood, but…’
‘So influence has its place in the navy, too?’ smiled Hervey by return.
‘There must be a start somehow, Captain Hervey. All that Lord Nelson did, though, was to recommend me as from an honest family, that I was clean-limbed and eager! From volunteer, advancement is on merit alone. I was a midshipman the following year — 1805 — though in truth I had not spent the regulation four years at sea. But yellow-jack had carried off three of our mids. I passed for lieutenant at nineteen — the earliest I could do so — and was appointed to a first-rate almost at once…’
‘But again, Captain Peto,’ Hervey pressed, ‘there must be more midshipmen who pass for promotion than there are vacancies for lieutenants? How are appointments thus made?’
‘Some by favour, to be sure; but no captain would appoint an officer in whom he could not have confidence.’
‘How did you obtain your appointment?’
‘By Captain Blackwood’s recommendation. I was one of his signalling midshipmen on Euryalus at Trafalgar. But as I was saying, I was first lieutenant on Amphion at Lissa, and from that action got my command the following year. And do not forget that promotion is ever open to those of ability on the lower deck: both Cook and Benbow served before the mast.’
‘Trafalgar was hot work for you?’ asked Hervey (he intended, firmly, to deflect the conversation from purchase).
‘Not for Euryalus: we had done our work during the night, keeping contact with the French and signalling to the fleet, to let Nelson bring them to battle at daylight on terms of advantage.’
‘So you saw little of the action?’ Hervey asked, with a note of disappointment.
‘On the contrary,’ smiled Peto, ‘we saw everything. We were in the thick of things throughout.’
‘Then how might you not describe it as hot work?’ said Hervey, surprised.
‘Because in a fleet action a first-rate does not fire on a frigate unless fired upon first.’
Hervey looked puzzled.
‘Captain Hervey, do you have any conception of the firepower of a first-rate compared with that of a frigate?’
‘Well,’ began Hervey awkwardly, ‘evidently I have failed to grasp the magnitude of the difference.’
‘Just so; a first-rate has three times the guns, and her lower-deck battery has thirty-two-pounders — almost twice the weight of mine. At the Nile, there was a French frigate that opened fire on the Goliath — who was but a seventy-four. Goliath fired back, and with a single broadside dismasted her and shattered her hull so that she sank at once.’ Peto took a sip of Madeira with intense satisfaction at the thought. ‘No, from a line-of-battle ship a frigate must stand away, and she may invariably do so with ease and honour both. At Trafalgar Euryalus repeated the flagship’s signals and so on — first for Nelson, and then for Collingwood — and we helped several ships which were otherwise disabled: we towed off Royal Sovereign — she was dismasted. But we had no damage ourselves.’
‘I did not know of the convention,’ admitted Hervey, taking another long draught of Peto’s excellent burgundy. ‘But I can see its purpose, now. It is very gallant: tirez les premiers!’
‘Gallant? I tell you I would have none of it were I Admiralty. A frigate is an instrument of war as much as is a first-rate. Fighting chivalrously is always at someone’s expense — and usually those who are least able to afford it! All this tirez les premiers is so much cant. Fontenoy it began at, did it not? “We do not fire first, gentlemen: we are the English Guards!” ’ Peto made a loud huffing sound.
Hervey thought there had been something pragmatic in the Guards’ invitation but could not recall the particulars, and, in any case, it was Trafalgar he wished to discuss, not Fontenoy. It was not every day a man might hear of it from so close an observer. And so they sat well into the night, Hervey pressing him to every detail of the battle, with more burgundy and Madeira than he had ever drunk at one sitting. When at last he rose, unsteadily, to retire to his quarters, he put a final question to his host. ‘How came it about that Lord Nelson was able to recommend you to Captain Blackwood in the first instance? Are you from a naval family, sir?’
‘No, I am not,’ replied Peto with a smile. ‘Not, that is, in the literal sense. Lord Nelson’s father had the living at Burnham Thorpe, and my father was once his curate. At the time of my going to sea he had the neighbouring parish.’
‘Then,’ smiled Hervey, ‘we have something in common.’
They began comparing their relative ecclesiastical fortunes, but since the tithes were either impropriate to the patron or modest, the comparison was brief.
‘So we each must seek for our prosperity in uniform,’ concluded Peto, dabbing with a napkin at the Madeira which had found its way to his waistcoat.
‘Just so,’ smiled Hervey, ‘and at a time when there is peace on earth!’
‘Ah,’ said Peto, shaking his head optimistically, ‘but there is little goodwill towards men!’
Next day
The wind had backed, and a moderate westerly was making the air chill. Hervey had on the thinnest cheesecloth shirt, yet he was sweating. Half an hour’s brushing followed by another’s strapping would maintain his own hale condition as surely as it would Jessye’s. And he had just been struggling to remove her shoes too, for they served no purpose standing on deep straw. He looked up to see Peto eyeing his labours intently. Feeling the need to say something, for he knew the business must gravely offend the captain’s sensibilities, he thought he might express his gratitude once more. ‘I do very much appreciate what a trial this is, sir,’ he began.
Peto surprised him by his reply, however. ‘Captain Hervey, I should not have risked the regularity of my ship had I thought your horse posed any danger,’ he smiled. ‘On the contrary, a horse has a most civilizing effect. The hands feel better for seeing her. I would be chary of that, perhaps, were there not peace on earth, but I see no cause now for keeping the crew quite as tight as the bowstring they have been hitherto.’
He seemed in excessively good spirits this morning. Hervey smiled with some relief.
‘We see eye to eye, I think, on many matters. When you are quite finished with your day’s exertions join me, if you please, on the quarterdeck. I wish to apprise you of something.’
Hervey put on his cloak before leaving the shelter of the waist. Sail was stretching fuller in the freshening westerly, and spray was now visiting the deck. No land was visible, even by telescope, and seabirds were fewer by the hour. Peto was wrapped likewise in a cloak and stood alone at the stern rail, legs braced a little apart, a hand fastened on one of the shrouds. Hervey walked as close to the rail as he could without actually placing a hand on it, the ship’s motion sufficiently pronounced now to make him a shade insecure. Peto smiled as he reached the stern. ‘Worry not: in six months you’ll be rushing to the tops like an old hand!’
Hervey looked unconvinced, and then not a little anxious as it occurred to him that Peto might have summoned him to begin this very practice.
The captain’s preoccupations were otherwise, however. ‘Since you are evidently an officer of singular attachment to your profession, I judge that you might be an availing interlocutor in the art of war.’
Hervey had no idea of what he alluded to. ‘You flatter me greatly, sir—’
‘Yes, yes, yes — but do I suppose correctly that you have an eye for more than a horse?’
He smiled. It seemed that the duke, at least, believed so. ‘Try me, sir,’ he replied.
‘Certain notions of warfare, acquired these past six years, I am minded to commit to the page.’
Hervey wiped the stinging salt spray from his eyes and pulled his shako lower. ‘Notions particular to war at sea?’
Peto thought a moment before replying. ‘At first I should have considered them so, but I am no longer sure, for it seems to me that the general precepts ought equally to apply on land. What do you know of the affair at Lissa?’
Hervey now had his legs braced twice as wide as Peto’s, and a tighter grip on a shroud line. ‘I know that an English squadron defeated a French one twice its strength.’
‘Just so, Hervey, just so.’ Peto’s voice was beginning to rise against the wind. ‘Four of the French’s were forty-gun frigates, too — though to say French is not entirely true, for one was Venetian, and another couple of thirty-twos as well. A damned fine fight they put up, though!’
Hervey made respectful noises.
Peto now revealed he was writing a memento. ‘I gave a public lecture on Lissa — at Gresham’s College in the City. A publisher approached me thereafter.’
His evident pride in both was endearing. Hervey nodded in appreciation.
‘I intend, in a supplementary chapter, to draw lessons from the action, developing a more general theory,’ he added.
Hervey asked if he would be challenging any Admiralty document thereby.
‘There are the Standing Instructions, yes. And these are added to by fleet instructions. Lord Howe’s are still the basis for our fighting.’
‘And these are deficient?’
Peto looked rather irritated. ‘They don’t want for quality! I wish merely to develop a general design for captains of frigates — and it’s only of frigates I speak, for the future is with them.’
‘And the import of Lissa?’
Peto looked happier again. ‘In the Royal Navy it is a precept, by which an officer is taught, that navigation precedes gunnery.’
Spray was now beginning to reach high, yet Peto was not inclined to move. Hervey pulled up his collar and further inclined his ear towards him.
‘Captain Hoste prevailed at Lissa because he handled Amphion superbly, not because her gunnery was superior — though it was. He placed his ship where her fire might be to greatest advantage, and he drove the French onto the shore. That is working a frigate, Hervey!’
Despite the distraction of having to keep his balance, Hervey saw how it must be so (indeed, he wished they were a little closer to the shore themselves). In any case, there could be no doubting the captain’s aptness for such a treatise, for Peto had walked the quarterdeck with Hoste, who had himself walked the deck with Nelson.
‘And I tell you this,’ he continued, now so fired by his subject that his voice had risen well above the wind, ‘there is wonderful pleasure to be had cruising, but it’s nothing to manoeuvring to advantage in shallow waters. The Nile was, to my mind, the most famous of victories!’
Hervey would not have gainsaid that.
‘Do you recall Bonaparte’s lament? “Wherever you find a fathom of water, there you will find the British!” Oh yes, Hervey, believe me: it’s shallow waters that truly test a captain.’
‘I shall remember it,’ he replied, smiling. ‘A fathom only, you say?’
‘It is all that I should need,’ Peto asserted. ‘Come below and I’ll read you my account of it.’
Even in the cold and the spray — and the effort to stay on his feet — Hervey could see the vigour in Peto’s thinking. And if he could pass just a little of his time at sea in discourse such as this he might well increase his own fitness for command, for it was evident that in the handling of a frigate and a troop of cavalry there was more than a little similitude. As to this being any more than a theoretical fitness, however, he could only confide, for everywhere, they agreed — even in India — there was peace on earth.