His next decision actually did surprise Morton. He did not pay another visit to the Otter in Spitalfields, as reason might have dictated. He was not yet ready to go there again. Instead, when he rose the next morning it seemed to him there was something else he wanted to know more badly. Something that had its seeds in the conversation with Arabella and Darley the night before.
He rented a handsome bay hack, and was on the road leading south into Sussex by seven.
It was a pleasant day for a ride, with high summer rapidly approaching, and billowing white clouds spotted motionless in the blue sky.
If not for the threat of war that hung over England like dense fog, Morton would have been almost lighthearted. But even among the country-folk he met as he went, there was a palpable anxiety, and when they learned he had come recently from London, they asked what news, and then looked like people bracing themselves for the worst.
Morton could say little. The news of the Prussian defeat had spread out into the surrounding countryside as quickly as a horse could speed.
It seemed to Morton that England was like the country people he encountered along the way, bracing itself for the worst. Bonaparte was like a phoenix-he rose up from the flames of war again and again. Morton wondered if an end could ever be made of him.
Once into Sussex, he began stopping. At every country tavern or inn he asked the same questions, and slowly but surely was pointed in the right direction.
The country-folk, he soon discovered, were intensely, possessively proud of their regiment. This came as rather a surprise to Morton, who had been all too familiar with the cynicism of the metropolis, and it began to become more clear to him how Britain had fought this long, terrible war with French ambition. Londoners had laughed about the common people telling their children that Bony would come and eat them, perhaps believing it themselves. Radicals and poets claimed the humble were being exploited for a struggle that was not their own. But in fact ordinary men and women seemed to have been filled with a fierce, unselfconscious patriotism, a determination to preserve the Britain they knew-that the sophisticates in the capital hardly imagined.
So there was no lack of willingness to talk about the Thirty-fifth. By the end of the day the Runner had been directed to the Queen's Head Inn in the town of Mayfield, where a certain veteran by the unlikely name of Sempronious Stretton was said to hold court on a nightly basis. Stretton had come back from Spain without one of his legs in '12 or perhaps '13, people said, but had been with the regiment for fully thirty years before that. If he couldn't answer Morton's questions, no one could.
By the time Morton reached the place, it was nightfall. He swung from the saddle he had kept for many hours and consigned his horse to a shuffling, apparently speechless ostler. Then, groaning a little in relief and stretching, he walked through into the back garden where the patrons were taking advantage of the warm summer evening to sit out on benches or upturned stumps, drinking their pots of cider and ale and drawing on pipes whose coals glowed and faded in the dusk. The dark shapes of the elms that surrounded the inn rose above them against a deepening azure sky in which the first stars were beginning to glitter.
For a good while Morton smoked and said nothing, enjoying the peacefulness of the garden, the palpable contentment of the place, and the slow rhythms of country speech that rose and fell in the soft evening air, as if time, too, had slowed, and hours such as this would drift on forever and there would never again be any need for fretfulness or impatience. But then finally, in one of the longer lulls, he murmured to his neighbour, asking if he knew Sempronious Stretton.
“Oh, aye, friend. There's he a-lighting his pipe; he of the peg leg.”
He indicated the man who sat near the center of the gathering. Stretton was a greying man of perhaps fifty, his cheeks stubbled, but his chin firm and his blue eyes bright. He had been speaking little, but Morton had already noticed that when he did speak there was immediate deference.
“Sergeant Stretton?” Morton took the opportunity to politely hail him. He had expected, with so strange and seemingly learned a name, that the man might be one of the occasional “gentlemen rankers” whom want or eccentricity had driven to enlist as private soldiers. But when he saw him, he knew that this after all was a man of England's old peasant stock.
“Aye, sir?”
“Am I told aright that you served a captain by the name of Richard Davenant?”
There was a silence, and Morton could feel the curious eyes of the whole gathering upon him while Stretton bent his head a little in what seemed to be deep contemplation. Then, slowly, the old soldier beckoned to Morton to come and join him. The man sitting nearest vacated his place unasked, and Morton made his way through to sit where he had been invited.
“Who art thou who asks?” wondered Sempronious Stretton quietly.
“Henry Morton. I have come from London and am a friend of the lady Davenant was to have wed.”
Stretton stared at him a moment, and though the gaze was not entirely unfriendly it was certainly suspicious.
“There are those up in London-town who have spread lies about my captain and fouled his fine name,” the old soldier said, his voice dark.
“I am not one of them. These rumours have been repeated so often that they have begun to acquire the lustre of truth. I would gladly gainsay them but I was not there, at Albuera. What can you tell me of Richard Davenant and his last hours, that I might tell his lady?”
The man gazed at Morton a moment more, only the insects pulsing in the invisible fields beyond, the gathered men drawing on their pipes and watching. Then Stretton nodded, turning his gaze away.
“Captain Davenant commanded Third Company, First Battalion, for some two years. That was my company, and I did know him, I knew him well. He was a fine officer, the finest I ever served, and most every man he commanded would say just the same. He was a gentleman of true generosity and tested valour, who cared for the lives and comforts of his soldiers. He was the soldiers' friend, sir, and that was not to be said of every man who held a commission. He fought with honour in a dozen engagements in Portugal and in Spain, and he died at Albuera, in May of the year eleven.”
He finished speaking, and a deep quiet fell over the men in the inn yard. Here and there a red glow brightened as men had thoughtful recourse to their pipes.
When Morton felt it proper to break the silence, he asked: “Were you there that day, Sergeant Stretton?”
“I was there,” the man replied, still not looking at Morton.
“Did you see him fall?” Morton asked very softly. Sempronious Stretton took a long breath, then he began to speak again.
“The battle fought at Albuera was a very terrible battle, sir. We were under the command of General Beresford, who was a good soldier, but not so able a field general as the Duke of Wellington, who was in the north at that time. We were facing Marshal Soult, who was the best the French had in Spain. The weather was hot as a smith's forge, and the place where we fought was covered in tall grasses-so dry that the flame from the muzzles of our muskets set the grasses afire. Even as we engaged, the ground was burning, and men who fell were sometimes burned to death before they could be helped-or they died of the smoke, which was harsh and thick. It was here that Colborne's brigade was lost, and where Myers was killed and most of his fusileers destroyed while taking the center. It cost them all but fifteen hundred of their six thousand. We were on the right flank, and we lost close to half, and more than half our officers. All through that terrible afternoon Captain Davenant was calling for us to go forward, and we did go forward. Again and again he rallied us and called to the other captains to bring up their companies, even when matters seemed to be going very hard for us. I saw him, sir, before he died, but I did not see him fall. I was in the wing squad, second rank. I saw him go ahead into the smoke, he and all those with him, and be swallowed up in it.”
Silence again left Morton wondering if that was all Stretton had seen. After another long moment, he asked: “Were you amongst those who carried him back?”
“Nay, sir, I was not. I was in ranks all night. I heard later that he had fallen. Like so many others.”
“I am told, Mr. Stretton, that there was a captain and some other soldiers who carried him back to the dressing-post.”
“It may be so. I did not see it nor ever hear of it.”
With reluctance, Morton decided he must press the issue even further.
“The battalion surgeon, Bromley, claims that the men who carried Captain Davenant back said he was shot while fleeing the French.”
“He did not flee,” Stretton said firmly, more than a little menace in his voice. “He did not flee. I know men who were near him at the end-men I would trust with my life and whose word I would never question. They were there, and Captain Davenant was before them.”
Morton gazed quickly about the gathering. Men shuffled their feet and looked down at the earth. Some muttered to their fellows. But he was here to find the truth and he would not leave without it.
“But he received his wound in the back,” Morton said.
“What of it, sir?” Stretton said, his voice clearly angry now. “Many a man is shot while helping another, or turning back to call others forward. Some are shot by their own in the thick of battle, and there was no battle in which such a thing were more likely to happen. The smoke was thick as night at times, and men from both sides shot their own-more times than any would care to know.
“You may tell this man Bromley he'd best not come into Sussex, and repeat his lies here where men know better. And you may also tell Captain Davenant's lady that she should keep his memory bright. You may tell her, and you may tell all of those who have heard the lies, that Richard Davenant was as brave a man as I have ever known-and I have known many. That is all I have to say about it.”
Next morning Henry Morton rode back to London through the shining green and chestnut countryside with a lighter heart. Always he had gone forward, Captain Davenant, urging the men on. Fighting, calling to the other captains. Until…he had disappeared into the smoke.
No more was possible, but it was surely enough. Enough to tell Miss Hamilton, and enough for Morton himself. Some malice-and not an aimless malice-had determined to tarnish a good man's name. It might have needed only a few words spoken at the right time and into the right ears. Then the usual avidity with which people took up and spread such a story took over, and soon enough the damage was done. A thousand pities that London would never hear the simple eloquence of private soldier Stretton.
Why had Morton ridden so far to hear this? Because if Richard Davenant was being defamed, whoever was responsible was a man whose other activities Henry Morton wanted to look into further.
And who else might that be than the little dispenser of poisons, Dr. Robert Bromley?