A Regimental Affair (27 page)

In single file, with Armstrong at Hervey’s side, and the riding officer at the other, they advanced at a brisk pace to close the halfmile. Hervey counted the paces, shorter slightly than he would have managed on firm ground, but three for every two yards nevertheless by his reckoning. After his fifth hundred they saw lights ahead, one well to the left – evidently on the contrabanders’ ship – the others almost directly to their front, dimmer and moving. How far ahead, it was not possible to tell.

‘They’ve begun to bring the stuff ashore,’ said the riding officer. ‘Their pickets will be posted, therefore. We’d better be ready.’

It struck Hervey at once: if the lights were visible from here, they must already be at the picket. ‘I think we should—’

Two blinding flashes and two reports made louder by the cliffs’ echo came an instant later. The riding officer fell back clutching his stomach.

‘Wick, Tansey,’ shouted Hervey. ‘See to Mr Poole. Remainder, extended line, at the double, advance!’

A shingle beach, at the double – this was a trial even for a rifleman. ‘Number from the left,
begin
!’ shouted Armstrong, his voice carrying as it always did. The dragoons numbered off breathlessly.

After two hundred yards they were struggling to keep in line, from the cliff bottom to the water’s edge, and beginning to blow as hard as their horses after a good canter. But they knew that if they didn’t get to the lights quickly they’d face more determined resistance.

Another hundred yards. Hervey could see Armstrong was with him on the left, and another dragoon close in on his right. There were more flashes and ear-splitting reports, point-blank. He levelled his carbine as he ran, and fired – once, twice, three times, all by instinct, for there was no target to see. Armstrong fired too, as did the dragoon on his other side.

Hervey could now make out figures by the lantern light at the water’s edge. A welter of fire came his way from front, flanks, above and behind – then screams, shouts, curses, oaths.

Hervey fired four rounds in rapid succession in an arc to his front, threw down the carbine and drew his sword. ‘From the left, number!’ he bellowed.

‘One, two . . . five, six . . . nine, ten,’ came the numbers. Then ‘Armstrong, sir!’

Four men down, but Armstrong still there – thank God. Another fusillade brought fresh screams from his left. ‘Lie down! Reload!’ Hervey shouted. But he knew that with momentum gone, and the cover of darkness, he would never get his men forward now, even were Armstrong to drive them. All he could do was hold his position and harry the French with fire as they withdrew, for they surely couldn’t continue the work with the threat of dragoons so close.

He was wrong. Just as the riding officer had said, these men would fight. In a few minutes more, fire opened again in their
direction, and there was movement too. ‘Keep up a steady return, Serjeant Armstrong. Let’s try to fool them we’re more than we are.’

‘From the left, count to five, fire!’ shouted Armstrong.

Hervey ran from man to man to reassure him with the hand. The furthest dragoon to the left was bleeding badly from his leg – Finch, the oldest sweat – but he was still reloading as if at musketry practice. Hervey called him by his nickname as he bound up the wound with a silk square. ‘Choky, don’t let those waves get to your powder. We can’t abandon this place now.’

The appeal was direct, and Finch knew it must be desperate. ‘I know, sir. But don’t leave me to them French if you ’as to pull back. I can limp, with an ’and.’

‘I promise,’ said Hervey gripping his shoulder. ‘But it’s as bad a scrape as ever I saw.’

The volleying to their front increased, and Hervey knew they must soon be overrun, for the French would have gauged their numbers from the puny return of fire.

‘Captain ’Ervey! Captain ’Ervey!’

Hervey swung round and saw Johnson and the horseholders – eight more carbines and sabres! ‘Rally here! Rally here!’ he shouted, standing and waving his sword. ‘Extended line.
Fire!
’

There was firing to his right, too, from atop the cliffs. They might just be able to hold their ground! Surely it must force the French to withdraw? But that wasn’t why they were there, just to hold a line on the beach. ‘Stand up Light Dragoons! Draw swords! Prepare to advance!
Advance!
’

How many were with him, Hervey couldn’t say. But he could hear Serjeant Armstrong shouting, ‘By the centre!’ How magnificently futile an order! Clever, though, for the dragoons would be trying to dress instead of worrying what lay ahead.

‘Double march!’ Hervey bellowed.

Then it was crunching of shingle, cursing, and blowing. And then a terrific explosion in front, the discharge high, grape whistling over their heads, the rush of it felt in the face, even.

‘Down!’ screamed Hervey. What in God’s name had they there? He pushed his shako back, and shouted again. ‘Serjeant Armstrong!’

Another explosion, just as loud, with grape feeling as if it were raking their backs.

Armstrong crawled to his side, swearing terribly. ‘Let’s give ’em a volley from ’ere in case they rush us.’

Hervey prayed they’d managed to reload. ‘Stay prone, Light Dragoons. One round, fire!’

It was a ragged volley, but he counted eight shots, perhaps more – enough, please God, to dissuade the French from charging.

‘They’ve swivel-guns in them boats – that’s what it is!’ Armstrong spat.

Hervey could see nothing, still. ‘Then we’ll be swept away if we press them any more.’

‘We’ve got to take one prisoner at least, sir! I can work along the cliff bottom and try and snatch one in the dark.’

‘I’ll come with you.’ Hervey shouted for Johnson.

‘No, sir. You’ve got to stay here, else these buggers’ll take fright. Just keep up a fire to distract them French. Here’s your carbine back. I’ll only need a pistol butt.’

Armstrong, the father-to-be, had lost nothing of his instinct for the charge. Hervey rued what the assignment had become – a desperate, confused contest, hand to hand. Would he always have such a man as Armstrong when it came to this?

Brighton, next day

‘What the fornicating hell do you
mean
, Captain Hervey? A halftroop’s horses gone, Strickland’s troop’s uniforms in tatters, dragoons killed!’

Hervey bit his tongue hard. The preposterous sequence betrayed Lord Towcester’s priorities very plainly: the horses and uniforms touching on his pocket, the dragoons of no financial consequence to him. And the death of a revenue officer would not disturb his lordship’s thoughts in the slightest. Unless, that is, it might reflect on his own efficiency. But what was his commanding officer’s sincerity to Hervey, who stood before him with the blood of that officer and four dragoons on his hands?

‘And nothing to show for it –
nothing
! Smugglers escaped with not so much as a flesh wound,
and
with their contraband. So-called owlers disappeared into thin air with their wool –
if
there were any owlers in the first place!’

Hervey had begun to doubt this himself, though he resented intensely the sneer with which it was intimated, the words hissing from Lord Towcester’s slitted lips like steam from a kettle’s lid.

‘Your lordship, I have said that I acted as I saw best.’

‘Indeed, sir; indeed. You take things upon yourself too freely. It is your Indian ways again. My regiment is at Brighton to guard the Prince Regent. It is not here to chase about after miscreants and Frenchmen. You hanker after the French war, do you, sir? Then why do not you exchange into some Indian regiment and sate your lust for battle there!’

The lieutenant colonel’s tirade continued a full five minutes more. Throughout, Hervey remained rigidly at attention, his left hand holding his sabre scabbard, his shako under his right arm. Never –
ever
– had he been bareheaded on parade before. In all the times as a cornet and lieutenant that he had found himself answering for some indiscretion or misjudgement, he had never suffered the indignity of being ordered to remove his headdress. Truly it was an effective device for belittling a man – for humiliating him, indeed – for it took away his surety, his sense of being an entire soldier. Hervey listened to the acid stream of denunciation, self-pity and threat with a growing feeling of hopelessness. Nothing he had done before, and certainly nothing he might say, could mitigate his delinquency in the eyes of the Earl of Towcester. What power did a commanding officer of cavalry possess, for good or evil! It was a power that Hervey believed he would never now possess for himself, whatever the Earl of Sussex’s aspirations. How right Henrietta had been to urge caution on him, though last night’s events made that caution seem at once worthless.

‘Well, Captain Hervey,’ concluded Lord Towcester, waving a hand in airy dismissal. ‘There shall be an inquiry, and thereafter, I have no doubt, a court martial. And, if you are fortunate enough to escape a cashiering, I myself shall require you to resign your commission at once. And so you may as well begin now to find an Indian regiment with fewer scruples than it has officers. You will hand your sword to the adjutant and you will dismiss, sir.’

As bad as the lieutenant colonel’s invective had been, Hervey had not expected this last. His mouth fell open, and his fingers could hardly work to unfasten the swordbelt. When the surrender was done, he bowed, turned to his right, made himself count ‘two, three’ slowly so as not to be thought of as bolting, and marched from the room.

Outside he replaced his shako and pulled his gloves tight. He
saw – or thought he saw – the clerks and orderlies glance his way, to where his sword had hung. What was their regard of him now? Was he the cause of death of their fellow dragoons, or was he merely a curiosity – an officer, an Olympian, cut down, reduced, perhaps to a level below even their own? He walked from Edlin’s Gloucester Hotel – a headquarters improvised in the manner Lord Towcester considered fitting for the Prince Regent’s escort – not knowing whether he would turn right or left. It did not matter now, for he neither commanded a troop nor had leave to be about the regimental lines. He ought to confine himself to the mess by rights, but he did not suppose that even Lord Towcester would insist on this punctilio. All he could do was go to his own quarters, the little rented villa off North Street, and explain things as best he could to Henrietta when she returned from London that evening. And then he must trust to the due process of military law.

A hand grasped his forearm. ‘Come on, sir,’ said Serjeant Armstrong.

Hervey made no reply, content to follow.

He walked as if in a dream, past the Regent’s pavilion and on towards the maze of streets beyond. He saw faces, rich and poor alike, that seemed different from only a day before – the faces of men and women for whom the future might look bleak, but which was nevertheless a future without dishonour. And how he envied the poorest of them that.

‘Serjeant Armstrong,’ he sighed, as they turned into a street of alehouses, ‘I don’t think that drink—’

‘No, sir. Not one of these. Just gan on a wee bit farther.’

Hervey had come to find Armstrong’s Tyneside as reassuring as he used to think Serjeant Strange’s Suffolk, though more years must pass before ever he could trust to judgement as wise as Serjeant Strange’s.

Armstrong now stopped by a coffee house, and nodded to its inside.

‘Ay, it’ll do very well,’ said Hervey gratefully, just managing a smile.

It seemed an unusual sort of place for Armstrong, but once they were inside the connection was revealed. ‘Caithlin! Mrs Armstrong!’ Hervey had not seen her in a month and more. ‘What do you do here?’

‘She came from Hounslow last week,’ explained her husband. ‘We’ve a room upstairs in exchange.’

Hervey was suddenly agitated on account of her condition, but could not find the words even to congratulate her on it.

‘Take a seat, Captain Hervey,’ she said, with a smile that had lost nothing of its warmth, for all the incivilities she had abided these past months.

As Hervey and his serjeant settled at a table in the seclusion of a window bay, Caithlin Armstrong went to bring them coffee. It was a respectable enough occupation for a serjeant’s wife, for the habitués of this place were solid citizenry, but Hervey could not help thinking of all that learning put to naught. She had more knowledge than half the fashionables who promenaded about the Regent’s pavilion, yet it would remain closeted because of
its
origin and hers, for her learning was of the hedgerow schools, and her Latin of the Vulgate rather than the
Æneid
.