Hervey 06 - Rumours Of War (17 page)

Colonel Norris’s notion of the concentration of effort was, indeed, curious, thought Hervey, but he saw no way of outflanking it at that moment – and no way, certainly, of reminding him that the duke had baited Masséna well forward and brought him all unknowing and ill-prepared on to the lines, thus greatly magnifying their effect. No one could ever again be taken by surprise there. And what was more, the duke had laid waste to the country for fifty miles, so that there was not a bean to be had in the fields. The French had starved and sickened before Torres Vedras, and then they had simply gone away, like whipped dogs. Was that what Norris was contemplating? Even if there was time (which there surely was not?) they could not devastate the country again, for every man they turned out of his home would at once become a Miguelista.

No, the plan as conceived in Norris’s mind could not serve. But for the time being he would have to remain silent.

Dinner was a muted affair, only Colonel Norris seeming to have appetite for speech, expounding at length on his plans to emulate the Duke of Wellington’s feat of arms. The majors held their peace. Even the engineers were persuaded that to survey only fixed defences was not prudent, but Norris in full flow was not to be contradicted. Mr Forbes, the chargé, said little. He was not a military man, neither did he appear to have any particular intelligence of the state of the country outside the capital, although he had certainly seen the formidable natural and man-made defences at Torres Vedras, Wellington’s great stratagem.

The party broke up a little before ten-thirty, leaving Hervey to hurry back to Reeves’s, where he changed into a plain coat, and then engaged a calash to take him to Lady Katherine Greville’s lodgings in the Rua dos Condes.

It was no very great distance, but the streets were narrow and the night dark. A dozen years ago he would scarcely have noticed; Warminster, the nearest place of any consequence to where he was raised, would have looked much the same, for the rate-payers there had no desire to light the way to the ale houses for the town roughs. But he had lived long in India, where lanterns and fires burned all night, tended by the chowkidars; and lately he had been an habitué of London, where gas – not even oil – lit the streets from dusk till dawn. In the summer, he recalled, Lisbon would be full of promenaders at this hour taking the cooler air, exchanging formal greetings, or else flirtations, with the females who occupied the ubiquitous balconies. But now the streets were deserted.

He arrived at Kat’s lodgings at a quarter to midnight. The house was shuttered, but there was a torch burning at the door. He paid the coachman and dismissed him, then pulled the bell handle. Almost at once there was the noise of bolts being drawn, and a lady’s maid whom Hervey recognized from Holland Park opened the door just wide enough to admit him.

‘Her ladyship is in the drawing room, sir,’ she said cautiously, even furtively.

The doors of the drawing room were half open. Hervey saw Kat standing by the fire, her back to him, looking in the mirror above the chimneypiece.

‘You come most carefully upon your hour, Matthew.’

Hervey could not recall being precise as to any hour in his note. ‘I came at once, Kat. As soon as I was able.’

She turned, and smiled. ‘I’m sure you did, Matthew. Are you not happy to see me?’

She wore a dress that flattered her, fairly too, and the candlelight played wonderfully with her eyes. Whatever his earlier misgivings, he returned her smile in full measure and took her in his arms.

‘Oh yes, Matthew; I perceive you are indeed happy to see me. How much more expressive is your body than your pen!’

He had not intended that his pen should be expressive. But that was earlier.

Later, as they lay in her bed, the moon lighting the room where candles and fire did not, Hervey’s former doubts returned. And he found he could not conceal them. ‘Kat, what have you told people you are about here?’

‘People, Matthew?’ She stretched her arms above her head.

Her breasts distracted him for an instant. ‘Your friends, acquaintances – you must have told them you were coming here. And . . . your husband.’

She let her hands drop noisily to the counterpane, palms down. ‘I tell them what I please! Why should they know anything of my affairs?’

Hervey lay on his side, looking at the mass of hair on Kat’s pillow. ‘Kat, I. . .’ But he could not complete his sentence.

‘What ails you, Matthew?’

He hesitated. ‘Nothing ails me, Kat.’

‘Do I hazard your position here? You will not forget, will you, that your appointment is my doing?’

Hervey bridled. ‘
That
—’

But before he could say another word her lips subdued him.

When at length she took them from his, she was smiling. ‘If you must know, I am to winter in Madeira with my husband’s people. And it is perfectly reasonable that I should sail from here. In any case, Mrs Forbes and I have a slight acquaintance.’

Hervey sighed. Her story was plausible. He put a hand to her hair and ran his fingers through it. They renewed their embrace, this time without the urgency of the first. In an hour they fell asleep, Kat content and unmindful of the morning. Hervey was content too, but his head lay less easy, for reveille was at seven – and on the other side of the city.

CHAPTER NINE
FORTIFICATION

Evening, three days following, 10 October 1826

‘Major Cope’s compliments, sir, and would tha join ’im before dinner?’

Private Johnson put the last piece of coal on the fire. He had eked out the meagre supply all afternoon, determined to have a glow of some sort to welcome back his principal on so wet a day. At least it had stopped smoking.

Hervey was dressed and at his writing table. He had bathed as soon as he and the others had returned from Torres Vedras, intent on having his letters go by the steam packet leaving the following morning.

‘Did his man give any reason?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Very well. In a quarter of an hour.’

There was a letter addressed to Georgiana on the table, and another to his father. He took out a clean sheet of paper, and dipped his pen in the ink.

Reeves’s Hotel,
Lisbon
10th October 1826

My dear Howard,

You will forgive a hurried few lines, I think, for we are of a sudden quite busy. But I wished to tell you that we are safely come here, that our hosts are universally hospitable, and the country is much as I recall it from earlier times. My companions are agreeable and seem to know their business, but Colonel Norris is very trying. He has embraced a scheme of defence which relies solely on the lines of Torres Vedras and has conceived it for no better reason than the lines served the Duke of Wellington capitally well a decade and a half ago. He takes no account of the special circumstances of that time, nor the aptness of the scheme to those which obtain now. Neither does he calculate the cost of putting the defences into good repair. We spent the better part of yesterday and today riding the lines, and that together with the information the two engineers officers have from the Portuguese engineers, indicates the cost would be prodigious in both money and time. Neither does he take account of what will happen in those provinces which the Miguelistas will occupy to the east, for as you know the lines are but ten leagues at most from here. There is no question but that Lisbon must be secured, but the forces which the Miguelistas dispose are not so great as to require works so extensive as Torres Vedras to halt them. And even if they be reinforced with Spanish troops then it is not the case that they must carry all before them to these earthwork gates of Lisbon, for the country would afford a very capital defence close to the border, where there are strong fortresses – stronger even than those at T. Vedras. But do we not suppose that it would be the very presence of British arms in Portugal that would deflect Spain from any adventure, to such
extent that not a shot might be fired in anger by any red coat? That would indeed be felicitous, but is that not Mr Canning’s intention? Then by that reasoning the red coats must show themselves early rather than take refuge behind the mountains and forts of T. Vedras. But all this Norris is quite impervious to. He can think only of imitation. I do not know if there is anything you may do by way of alerting the authorities to the employment of any of our forces were they to be sent here . . .

Hervey put down his pen. He would have to finish later; Major Cope was waiting for him, and they were due at the residence in half an hour. He would have to add something by way of enjoining Lord John Howard to discretion, of course, without suggesting that so experienced a staff officer would otherwise act without it, though he recognized that in asking him to alert the authorities to the danger, he set a difficult task in this respect.

He was already looking forward to dinner with some apprehension. Kat had presented herself to the Forbeses, and secured an invitation, and he felt sure there would be some awkwardness occasioned by it since his relations with Colonel Norris were becoming distinctly strained. He fastened the bib of his tunic, picked up his cloak and forage cap, and went to the Rifles major’s rooms.

‘It’s deuced cold. Have some of that punch,’ said Cope as Hervey entered, standing in front of the fire and indicating an earthenware jug on a side table. ‘I don’t recall it so cold the last time.’

‘Perhaps we were more active,’ said Hervey, helping himself liberally. ‘I felt myself more useful, that’s to be sure.’

‘Indeed. The very reason I believe we should speak.’

‘Oh?’

‘Look, Hervey, you and I know this plan of Norris’s is half baked. Griffith and Mostyn know too, but they’re engineers; they’re bound to get on with surveying those deuced lines. We have got to get ourselves engaged on something other than fortification.’

‘Believe me, I’ve been of that conclusion for days,’ said Hervey, his eyebrows raised in a gesture of disdain. ‘It is easier said than done, though. Norris flatly refuses, as well you know. I’ve contemplated speaking with Forbes, but how do you think he might help? He’s not even true master of his own embassy.’

‘I heard Beresford was to come,’ said Cope, confidentially.

‘Beresford?’ Hervey was surprised. ‘I doubt that will be universally welcome. I have it that he’s regarded with great jealousy by many of the senior officers here.’

‘May be,’ said Cope, throwing the remains of a small cigar into the fire. ‘But there’d be none of this nonsense about fortification if he were to take command again.’

That was certainly true, thought Hervey. But Marshal Beresford, who had reorganized the Portuguese army from top to bottom in Wellington’s time, and who spoke the language well, had no reputation for tact. ‘So you think we should do some preliminary work on Lord Beresford’s behalf?’

‘I do. And I believe we should take the opportunity this evening to alert Forbes to it. He is a sensible man. He may already have wind of it indeed.’

Hervey sighed. ‘What a merry party we shall be.’

They walked to the Forbeses. The Rua do Sacramento was but a short distance, and with two torch-bearers it was an easy enough business. The residence itself, a large
palácio
with a classical white façade, was lit as it had been on their first evening, with candles in every window, so that Hervey supposed the chargé held a levee too, which notion did not in the least please him. In the event, however, the evening was a lively and pleasing affair. There was no levee; it appeared that the chargé honoured a general from the Negócios Estrangeiros e Guerra. Indeed, the reception lifted Hervey’s spirits; in part, he imagined, because the room sparkled with mirrored light in a way he had not seen since Calcutta, and because, too, a harpsichordist entertained those who would move within earshot. He even managed to slip from the room to examine the portraits of the King and the Duke of Wellington in the antechamber, studio copies by Sir Thomas Lawrence, very fine. By the time they sat to dine, his mood had entirely altered, although he had not been able to exchange more than a dozen words with Kat, and all of them in company.

In fact, Kat had been making the party aware of her regard for him. She did it without the least suggestion of impropriety, and with the single-minded intention of increasing her protégé’s standing in the company. She intended approaching the chargé d’affaires on the subject of a more extensive reconnaissance, to be undertaken by an officer whom the Duke of Wellington himself evidently held in high esteem. At table, too, she sparkled as if she had been at Apsley House itself, having a word for everything and everybody in a manner that quite possessed the general, dazzled the engineer majors, quickened Major Cope noticeably, and delighted her hostess and Mr Forbes. Even Colonel Norris, Kat noted, sitting opposite and slightly to one side, was charmed. So charmed indeed, that after dinner she considered changing her stratagem.

Hervey had no idea that Kat had any particular object in dining with the Forbeses other than as prelude to a night they would spend together in the Rua dos Condes. But pillow talk with Kat was not the same as it had been with his bibi; she did not consider herself a mere receptory of confidences. Kat’s instinct and pleasure was to use her influence, and to exploit any honest weakness to increase it. When Hervey had told her, three afternoons before, of his frustration with Colonel Norris’s intentions, she had perfectly naturally resolved to help as best she could, for not only did she wish to press her beau’s case for its own sake (she did not consider for a moment that he might be in the wrong, for that was not her concern), she was especially anxious to be useful, being sensible still of his uncertainty in her being in Lisbon at all.