A Regimental Affair (22 page)

He was too nervous of discovery to be shocked. Whose breeches they were he simply could not imagine, and in truth he didn’t much care, for she filled them very handsomely.

‘Don’t pretend you disapprove. Didn’t the Queen of Scots ride like this?’

Hervey shook his head in half-despair.

‘I am very tired.’ She smiled.

‘I am not surprised!’

‘Where shall you lie down tonight?’

He shook his head again. He would dearly like to lie down this very instant, to put out the lantern and trust to Johnson’s vigilance. ‘I cannot lie down for a minute! The enemy could be close by us even now!’

‘Well,’ said Henrietta. ‘A cavalry bivouac is a chaster place than ever I have heard of. And very dull!’

‘Does anyone know you’re here? Who brought you?’

She gave a little laugh. ‘The regiment was so taken up with getting itself to Chobham I just followed them. No one seemed to notice me.’

How that could be so, he simply couldn’t conceive. ‘But how then did you find
me
?’

‘When we got to Egham there were a great many spectators. And all the regiment were telling them what they were about to do.’

Hervey shook his head. A dragoon loved to share his secrets.

‘And I heard one of the officers saying that he was off to give you a surprise.’

‘What did he mean, I wonder?’

‘I don’t know, but about twenty of them left soon afterwards and so I followed them hoping to see you.’

‘And then?’

‘Well, at length they just turned into an inn yard, and the officer said they were to stay there until night.’

‘Where was this?’ Hervey began to feel anxious again.

Henrietta look puzzled. ‘The Plough at Addlestone, I think it was. I rode on a little way, hoping to find you, but I became quite lost. And then an officer from another regiment happened by, and he seemed to know exactly where you were, and he brought me here.’

‘What was his name?’

‘He didn’t give it,’ she said blithely. ‘He had no idea who I was, and I thought it better not to say.’

Quickly he found Addlestone on his map. ‘Johnson!’

His groom opened the door gingerly. ‘Sir?’

‘Ask Mr St Oswald to come here at once.’

‘What is it, dearest?’ Henrietta seemed puzzled that her scanty report should have caused such alarm.

‘Addlestone is well outside the boundaries of the scheme. From there those dragoons will be able to slip behind my picket line, and they’ll avoid even the flank picket if they strike a little further south first. Who was the officer with the party that you followed?’

Henrietta didn’t know, for she had yet to meet them all.

‘What colour were the horses?’

She smiled. ‘Chestnuts, all.’

‘E Troop –
Strickland
.’ He nodded. ‘He will have drilled them keenly. It could be Sandys or Binney with them, the troop officers. Both are capable enough.’

The cornet came into the hut, squinting a little in the sudden, if dim, light. He saw Henrietta, and then looked at his troop leader curiously.

‘Not a word, St Oswald, not a word.’

‘No, sir, I . . . of course.’

‘I’ve just learned that about twenty men from E Troop, under Sandys or Binney, were lately assembled here,’ he pointed to Addlestone on the map, ‘which makes them very well placed to slip behind our line, if, indeed, they are not already doing so.’

Cornet St Oswald glanced at Henrietta again. His admiration for his captain grew daily. Whoever would think of sending his wife as an observing officer!

‘The flank pickets ought to pick them up, but if they ride south any further then they’ll be missed.’

St Oswald nodded. ‘Do you want me to go there?’

‘Yes. It looks to me as though their best move would be to come in on this road here, about half a mile behind where our line now is.’ He pointed out the lateral road which cut right across the area of the scheme. It was one of his own reporting lines – a line which would serve to get his pickets back in hand if they were pushed too badly before it.

The more Hervey studied the map, the more it occurred to him that the slackening of pressure all along his front was more than just fatigue. The regiment had checked just sufficiently forward for E Troop’s party to get in behind his own line without Colonel Freke Smyth’s staff suspecting they had come from outside the
boundaries, for he might be persuaded that they had found a gap in the picket line and slipped through. That was cunning, Hervey thought. No, on second thoughts it was devious; there was a difference. He looked at Henrietta. Thank God she had come that way. Armstrong had missed Strickland’s men, but then he could not have been expected to be everywhere at once.

‘Sir!’ called one of the dragoons outside, excitedly. ‘A rocket!’

Hervey dashed from the hut. The firework was just beginning to fall, but its smoke trail was clear enough. It came from the right flank, from almost exactly where he made the lateral road to be.

‘Armstrong! He’s there after all!’ cried Hervey, with a little note of triumph, and grabbing his cornet’s arm. ‘Thomas, take your half-dozen dragoons and make the biggest demonstration you can. Take my repeating carbine – you know how it works well enough. It will make your party sound twice the size. Let me get one of Major Jago’s men first, though. The affair will need an umpire!’

Cornet St Oswald was pleased no end with the plum.

Major Jago himself now appeared with his lantern. ‘What do you make of that rocket, Hervey?’ he enquired suspiciously. ‘It isn’t a Congreve, that’s for sure.’

‘No sir,’ admitted Hervey, noticing Henrietta concealing herself from Jago. ‘I bought it two weeks ago in London.’ And then he wondered why he was being so guarded. ‘It is the alarm signal from one of my videttes on the flank. I believe there is an incursion. I am sending Cornet St Oswald and six men to intercept it. Would you send one of your staff with them?’

‘I shall go myself. Come on, young man!’ Jago called to St Oswald.

‘Matthew!’ whispered Henrietta when he had gone. ‘That was the officer who brought me here when I lost my way.’

Hervey groaned. Major Jago, he suspected, was not a man to miss much. ‘The question now, my love, is how we are going to take you back again.’

That question presented much less of a problem than he expected, for soon after Cornet St Oswald’s successful affair on the flank, Major Jago received word from Colonel Freke Smyth that the scheme was at an end, and that all of the regiment was to assemble at first light on the green at Addlestone so that the condition of the horses might be assessed by the veterinary surgeons
and farriers of the Blues. Hervey had no doubts that the regiment would be adjudged exemplary in this, but he was surprised that the officers received a separate order to assemble at the Plough Inn, for it had been the invariable practice for them to attend at any such parade. But General Browning wished to breakfast with them, and that was that. Hervey was therefore able to ride with Henrietta as far as the crossroads short of the village, from where Johnson would escort her back to Hounslow.

Hervey felt a deep glow of satisfaction, as did his subalterns. After the order to ‘cease fire’, Major Jago had told him that not once had his picket line been penetrated by so much as a single scout, and that the affair on the flank had been the sharpest piece of work he had seen in many a year. He had not asked about Henrietta, but something in his remark about unorthodox tactics hinted that her identity and her part in things had not gone unnoticed. But it was Hervey’s ploy with Serjeant Armstrong – and, indeed, with Armstrong’s own conduct – that brought Jago’s especial praise. Armstrong’s orders had been to remain covert unless it were absolutely necessary to do otherwise. The rocket had been a desperate, and expensive, expedient to warn of the incursion. Now that the whole world knew of the wheeze, Hervey couldn’t very well keep his stratagem secret. He would surely have to admit that he had set his serjeant to follow the regiment from the outset. He began to fear that Jago’s praise was double-edged.

His fear soon proved not to be groundless. Lord Towcester was beside himself with rage when he learned of the rocket, and that it had been fired from
behind
the outflanking party (poor Strickland was mortified later to discover how his troop had been the cause). Neither did it help when General Browning complimented Hervey in front of the other officers on ‘his sharp action to counter the penetration’ (at least he made no mention that the penetration was the result of someone’s disregarding his instructions).

As soon as breakfast was finished and the major general and his staff were gone, Lord Towcester made to leave, and without a word. His adjutant, however, marched up to Hervey and addressed him sharply. ‘Captain Hervey, his lordship is very severely displeased that you should have sought throughout the inspection to thwart his ambition.’ He did not wait for a reply, turning on his heel instead and striding out after the commanding officer.

Hervey was speechless.

‘You too?’ said Strickland. ‘I had the foulest tongue-lashing of my life as we came here. “I should have known better than to trust to a damned papist”, was what Lord Towcester said to me. The man’s a mountebank!’

Hervey sighed. The Catholic relief measures had still a way to run, evidently. ‘I wonder how much a mountebank may do before he is called to account. I fear we’re in for a very hard ride indeed.’

Hounslow Barracks, 27 July

It was a black day indeed for the Sixth. Only the regimental serjeant-major and the two senior troop serjeant-majors had been serving when last there had been its like – and that had been in Flanders, when Pitt had been prime minister and Wellington had been but a lieutenant colonel. That campaign, two decades past, had been a wretched affair indeed, perhaps the depths to which the incompetence of the Horse Guards could reduce an army, and the basest to which human nature without discipline could descend. In such circumstances, it was widely believed that condign punishment was all that held a regiment from becoming a rabble. But here in Hounslow, a posting town little bigger than a village, the question of whether the flogging of a dragoon was necessary to maintain good order and military discipline was on the lips of every man in the regiment.

Lord Towcester had not the slightest doubt, however. Private Hopwood had struck an officer, and he had done so in front of his troop, entirely unprovoked. His reason for the assault was both cynical and at the same time naive. ‘His lordship is therefore
determined to make such an example of the man that it will arrest any tendency to the striking of officers,’ said Adjutant Dauntsey, in reply to Hervey’s intercession on the man’s behalf.

‘But there has
been
no tendency to the striking of officers. Indeed, there has not been a single case in my entire time with the regiment,’ Hervey pointed out.

‘And a flogging shall ensure that the regiment’s record is restored. You do know, Captain Hervey, that his lordship might have imposed a penalty of death?’

Hervey knew it perfectly well. Striking a superior officer, along with mutiny, desertion, plundering, burglary with violence, giving false alarms, sodomy, carnally abusing children, ravishing women, and riotously beginning to demolish a house, could bring a man before a firing squad or the hangman. And yet the details of the offence were so bizarre as to trouble the sternest of disciplinarians. ‘I should like one final attempt to persuade his lordship to further clemency,’ said Hervey, careful to make acknowledgement of the concession so far.

‘I shall convey your request to his lordship, Captain Hervey. Is there anything else?’

‘No, there is nothing else,’ Hervey replied. In his heart he knew that Lord Towcester was not for turning, but that could not bar his trying.

It soon became clear, too, that Major Joynson wanted no confrontation with the lieutenant colonel. The major sat in his office surrounded by ledgers and sheaves of paper, and evidently regarded the question of Hopwood’s punishment as a distraction to his work. ‘Hervey, there hasn’t been a flogging in years – that, I grant you – but then, there hasn’t been a case of violent insubordination either.’