A Regimental Affair (18 page)

Hervey sighed. He had decided against telling her at the time because it seemed so ill-matched to the occasion; afterwards he had found the notion hard to share with her since it could only increase her anxiety for him, and nothing she might say could ameliorate his own misgivings.

‘Tell me, Matthew. It evidently disquiets you,’ she insisted.

He told her what Coates had said about his commanding officer.

She looked puzzled. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I think that I did not want to distress you – especially at that time.’

‘But Matthew, if something distresses you, then you must permit me to ease that distress. And I cannot do so unless you tell me all.’ She turned and looked at him direct. ‘There can be no secrets between us now.’

She had still the appearance of contentment, but her voice carried an insistence which left Hervey in no doubt that she intended them to be a couple in every sense, in duty and disappointment alike. Indeed, Henrietta intended taking her marriage vows with the utmost seriousness, even if she had already largely forgotten their actual words.

Hervey could only feel chastened, but then encouraged, for hers would be a brave course for a soldier’s wife at the best of times – and these were not the best of times. He smiled, stood in his stirrups, leaned out and kissed her. It said all there was to say, and in a manner which entirely delighted her.

Hounslow, three weeks later

‘I well see your dismay, gentlemen,’ said Major Joynson, ‘but we had expected nothing more than the usual administrative inspection. That is why there have been no field days.’

The troop captains were complaining of the lack of drill they had had, in the light of the major general’s wishes, just received, that next Thursday’s annual inspection should take the form of a survey of horses, clothing and equipment in the barracks, and then a day’s manoeuvres on Chobham Common.

All the captains but Hervey, that is, for he had not the slightest notion how handy his troop was in the field, nor for that matter how it and B Troop worked together as a squadron. He had been at its head only since Monday, and during that time he had been able to do nothing more than any captain did on taking over his troop, which was to see that everything for which he might be held accountable with his purse was as the regimental books said they should be. He had looked at the sixty or so horses with a most careful eye, and been more pleased than he could remember – a far cry, they, from the tits and screws, the weavers and windsuckers,
the quidders and crib-biters that had been their remounts by the end of the Peninsula. The private men, too, were bright-eyed, smart, and quick about things to the trumpet, and he was slowly getting the measure of the non-commissioned officers. His serjeant-major, Kendall, was a man he would not himself have chosen, but thought might just do, for he was spoken of well in his time with the quartermasters. Armstrong was first serjeant, and for that, at least, Hervey was grateful. But he was sad that Collins was no longer in the squadron, for he would have wished him for his covering-corporal again – though Collins was chasing his third stripe, so he would have had to find another coverman sooner or later anyway. At yesterday’s parade he had liked the look of an active young dragoon called Troughton, a Norfolk man with a good seat, light hand and supple wrist. Perhaps he would watch and see how he fared at the general’s drill. His trumpeter, Medwell, whose nickname in the troop was ‘Susan’ (and Hervey thought he could see why), was so flawless in his calls that Hervey supposed it would not be long before Susan was made colonel’s man. But for the time being, at least, he knew he could count on his orders being relayed exactly.

‘Does the colonel have any notion of what form the manoeuvres will take?’ asked Ezra Barrow, seeing that there was no point in grumbling any more.

Major Joynson said he did not, or, if he had, he had not vouch-safed it.

‘When is he back?’ asked D Troop’s captain.

‘I don’t know, for rights,’ said the major, growing more uncomfortable by the minute.

‘Perhaps we might address the problem ourselves,’ suggested Strickland, who seemed in better spirits than when Hervey had taken leave of him a month before.

They all nodded.

The major wasn’t sure, however. ‘I do not know his lordship’s wishes in such things.’

Hervey was baffled. It was a very fair presumption that any commanding officer would wish the best efforts to be made. He sighed to himself. This was going to be a deuced hard pull. For the moment, though, he held his peace.

Major Eustace Joynson had all but been on half-pay these past
eight years, with no more responsibility than organizing supply for the yeomanry of Kent when they were mobilized for invasion duty – which, since 1805, they had never been. He was a kind man by all accounts, he meant well, worked hard and was far from stupid. But he disliked upsets. When Hervey had first joined for duty as a cornet, the then Captain Joynson was called ‘Daddy’ by his troop, and was soon shed by the colonel when they reached the Peninsula. His return to regimental duty was therefore as unexpected as it was undesirable. With a martinet, at best, for a commanding officer, and a toady for an adjutant, the last thing they needed was a major who wouldn’t say boo to the proverbial goose.

Hervey sighed. Heavens, what a change there’d been. It was a matchless regiment that had crossed the Pyrenees that winter, the year before Waterloo: Lord George Irvine commanding, Joseph Edmonds the major, and Ezra Barrow (ay, for all his brusqueness) the adjutant. Now even Mr Lincoln was being elbowed aside, an RSM the like of which the army took thirty years in the forming and could never get enough of. Hervey thought he might easily despair of his own prospects of promotion if his fortunes depended on an orderly room like this – as indeed it did. He silently resolved that, when the time came, his own troop, at least, would have the bottom.

Henrietta had spent the day writing letters to those with whom she was on calling terms, to inform them of her new quarters. These were small but comfortable, in a terrace near the heath, with a coach house to the rear and a well-tended garden. She had been content, but now she was not at all pleased.

Hervey promised it was strict necessity. ‘I have to have the troop out for a night. None of them seems to remember when last they did anything in the dark, and with the major general threatening to put us all through some scheme or other instead of just a review next week, there’s really no time to be lost.’

‘You will not be gone more than a night? I don’t much care for this place on my own.’

He assured her he would be back by the time she was breakfasting. ‘Have you taken against the house?’

‘No, not the house,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘Then what?’

‘I just do not like our being parted so soon.’

‘My darling, you would not have me sit at home when I know that my troop is in need of turning out?’ He pulled the bell rope.

She shook her head. ‘I told you at Longleat, Matthew. When you go away, I have a presentiment of your not coming back.’

Their manservant was at the door. Hervey smiled at him. ‘That will be all for the evening, Hanks. I shall not be home tomorrow. Please be especially attentive to the shutters and locks.’

When Hanks had gone, Henrietta poured more tea. ‘How important is Private Johnson to your nocturnals?’

Hervey looked at her curiously. If only he could tell her of Johnson in the Pyrenees, on Waterloo eve, or the night in the forest at Jhansikote. ‘He is indispensable!’

She frowned again, and Hervey saw her intention. ‘You mean you would feel more secure were Johnson in the house?’

‘If he’s indispensable then it is of no matter.’

‘You think you might hold him hostage to my return?’

‘You would have no harsh choices to make if he were here! Although Jessye, of course, is some miles away.’ The smile was now fully returned, for Henrietta was pleased with her tease.

‘Then you shall have him,’ Hervey replied, teasing her in turn with the impression of giving it careful thought. ‘And he would certainly prefer it to beating about the heath, especially if this rain continues.’

‘But you said he was indispensable!’

‘Perhaps I should have said that I wouldn’t be without him when the time came.’

She furrowed her brow. ‘You are funny. You are so certain of things. I could never be afraid if you were at hand.’

‘You mistake me there, my love. I’m certain of just a very few things to do with soldiery – learned the hard way, I might add. But beyond that . . .’

‘Shall you tell me of them?’

That surprised him. ‘Tell you of soldiery?’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, I . . .’

‘You have
never
spoken of it!’

He had never spoken of it because it had never occurred to him to do so. It was one thing to like pretty uniforms and bands, quite
another to be interested in their purpose. It was true that many a fashionable female would try to get a view of a battle, safe on a hilltop, but he had never met any who wished to speak of war. What a month it had been, and what a change there came in things when lovers shared at last the secrets of the marriage bed. How differently they looked to each other, and others to them. How differently they spoke, and of what things (which sometimes the morning would blush to hear). And now Henrietta would have him speak of things so wholly beyond her comprehension that he feared she might loathe a part of what he did. But they daily became more intimate, whether by a look, a word or a caress, and so he must trust now in what she had said about there being no secrets.

They sat late into the night talking. He began with thoughts, and then, secure in her estimation as he had never been before, he told her at last of deeds. He told her all that had ever troubled him – or as much as she would permit, for once or twice she stopped him and said with great tenderness that she did not have to know any more. They retired well after midnight, after some of the candles had given out, but they slept little.

It rained all next day. Hervey and Barrow were together in A Troop office ruing the weather, while outside, some distance away at the guardroom, the orderly trumpeter was struggling with the semiquavers below the staff for afternoon defaulters. A knock at the office door covered his final C, which cracked as he overblew, trying to be heard above the torrents.

‘Come!’ called Hervey, hoping it might be Johnson with something hot. But it was only the squadron subalterns come to ask if the scheme were still to be had, at which Hervey looked at his fellow captain and smiled. ‘Nothing so bad, d’ye suppose, as that day in –’ He could have said any number of places in Spain, sluiced top to toe with water colder than ice, but instead he chose to include them all, ‘– before Waterloo.’

Barrow nodded, but could not quite forbear to humble the lieutenants and cornets by saying that neither would there be lance-points pricking at them through the rain. They left sheepishly, no doubt to repeat the admonitions when they in turn received the enquiry from their juniors. When they had gone, Barrow declared
that their concerns had been proper enough: the weather would take its toll of the men’s uniforms, and with the major general’s inspection so close it would mean more expense and trouble. In truth, Hervey had already been minded to abandon the scheme, but, on the other hand, so torrential a downpour – especially if it continued during the night – would test the squadron more than any general could. It would reveal what he must do in the short time before the inspection.

And so, in the middle of the following morning, they left the barracks, marched on parallel lines of advance to Chobham Common, throwing out scouts for five miles along the River Ash, finding fords and swimming points, and eventually occupied a vidette line on Oystershell Ridge at last light.

At midnight, Hervey and Barrow rode the line, finding varying degrees of vigilance, and at dawn they began a rearguard which took them back again to the river. There they picketed its bridges, ‘blowing’ them and retiring in the face of the ‘enemy’, and then galloped to seize them again. They proved their carbines soon after (the old hands largely with success, the young ones largely without), then Hervey and Barrow inspected every shoe, and were agreeably taken by the permanence of the farriery.