Hervey 07 - An Act Of Courage (36 page)

Beale-Browne was still in an agitated, whispering exchange with Daly.

‘
Well
, sir?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir. I have but one question. Mr Knight, is the universal opinion of your profession against firing of lampas?’

‘By no means.’

Beale-Browne cleared his throat apologetically again. ‘Might I press you to more?’

‘It was in my time a procedure taught at the London Veterinary College, but progressive opinion is against it.’

‘Then you would not dismiss Mr Daly’s opinion as being without foundation?’

‘No, but I would dismiss his skill as a veterinary practitioner as without foundation, and that is the material point.’

Beale-Browne had seen it coming. He had seen it coming before he rose, but Daly had insisted. He wondered, now, how to make a retreat without looking too bruised. It did not help that he was uncertain of the law, but he had one more line of enquiry. ‘Mr Knight, there is nothing in law, so far as I am aware, that prevents a farrier from attempting such a procedure. He regularly attends to the horse’s teeth, for instance?’

‘That is my understanding.’

Beale-Browne cleared his throat again. ‘Mr Knight, besides the many learnèd books by veterinary surgeons, you will know the work of Mr Francis Clater, in particular
Everyman his own Farrier
?’

‘Of course. In the main an admirable book.’

‘And in that book, in the part addressing the lampas, it says that the cure is generally performed by burning it out with a hot iron.’

‘Indeed it does. But it goes on to say that it requires care and a man of judgement to perform operations of that kind, and that in general farriers are too apt to take more out than is necessary.’

There was a murmur of appreciation in the ‘public seats’ for the evident depth of John Knight’s professional opinion.

‘But the law nevertheless does not prevent it?’

‘As I have said, Mr Beale-Browne, it is my understanding that the law does not, but that is not an end to it: by regimental standing order, no farrier is allowed to make any surgical intervention without the express approval of the veterinary officer.’

Beale-Browne was crestfallen, and becoming desperate. He fired one last round, even
sounding
hopeless. ‘And burning out the lampas is a surgical intervention?’

John Knight huffed. ‘If it ain’t medical then it’s surgical, and I’m damned if I can see how anyone could administer medicine with a cautery!’

The president cleared his throat very pointedly. Knight had overstepped the mark, but with provocation. ‘I think we have reached the end of this line of questioning, Mr Beale-Browne?’

Beale-Browne made a determined effort to hide his mortification. ‘Yes, sir.’

But he conceded too soon. The judge martial had a question. ‘Would that standing order be known to every officer?’

John Knight half shrugged his shoulders. ‘I cannot say. My business is the horses and the farriers.’

The judge martial turned to the man most likely to be able to answer.

‘No, Your Honour,’ said the adjutant. ‘There are general standing orders, which every officer and non-commissioned officer is required to be conversant with, and standing orders particular to certain duties or appointments. The order which the veterinary surgeon refers to would be a particular.’

‘Thank you, Mr Barrow,’ said the judge martial, in a manner suggesting that he ought not to have been the one to ask the question. He glanced at the president, and then back to Barrow again. ‘If Mr Beale-Browne has now finished, you may proceed.’

Barrow bowed. ‘Thank you, Mr Knight. Be pleased to dismiss.’

The court orderly brought the veterinary surgeon’s bicorn. Knight gathered up his sword, noisily, bowed rather than replacing the hat and saluting, and then left the court with the same single spur ringing with every other step.

The president raised his eyebrows in mild amusement. ‘And now, Mr Barrow?’

‘Mr President, at this time I would call Cornet Daly to give evidence.’

Hervey heard the urgent conferring again, but it went on longer, and sounded even more insistent.

‘Mr Beale-Browne!’ snapped the president.

Beale-Browne rose, hesitantly. ‘Mr President, sir, I . . . Mr Daly requests that he not be sworn.’

‘
What?
’ The president’s brow was deeply furrowed.

The judge martial looked up from his ledger. ‘Mr Beale-Browne, I have already explained: it has ever been the practice for evidence to be given upon oath in general courts martial.’

‘Yes, Your Honour, but Mr Daly maintains that it is unbecoming for an officer’s word to be doubted.’

The judge martial sighed, but with apparent sympathy. ‘Mr Beale-Browne, there are many who share that opinion, but the law is what it is, and it is that an officer give evidence upon oath.’

Beale-Browne leaned across the table to confer once more with Daly. Hervey was the only man in the court unable to see Daly’s head shaking furiously.

The president thumped the table with his fist. But it was Barrow who spoke. ‘Mr President, the prosecution is content not to call Cornet Daly, if the defending officer is of like mind.’

Lieutenant Beale-Browne looked like a drowning man who had been thrown a lifeline. ‘I should be content, sir.’

Barrow almost smiled. ‘Very well. Mr President and gentlemen, the prosecution’s case is concluded.’

The president looked bemused. ‘No further witnesses, Mr Barrow? No closing address?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Very well. Mr Beale-Browne, you are free to conclude.’

Beale-Browne rose again, wearily. ‘Mr President and gentlemen, er . . . Cornet Daly would wish to state that he believed he had every right and skill to attempt the burning out of the lampas, and that the death of his charger was the unfortunate but not uncommon outcome of any surgical intervention. He would state that he did not abuse Serjeant Treve, rather did he speak generally in the direct language of the horse lines, and that he had no intention of assaulting the serjeant at the time that he was struck by Cornet Hervey.’

The silence that followed was so pronounced that the judge martial looked up, curious, and then at the president. ‘Is that it, Mr Beale-Browne?’

‘I do believe it is, Your Honour.’

The judge martial laid down his pen. ‘Well, upon my word, I never came across anything so contrary. Mr President, I beg an adjournment in order to consult with myself on the matter before us.’

The president looked relieved. ‘Very well. The court stands adjourned. All shall remain within the environs.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

LONG SHADOWS

Badajoz, 29 December 1826

It was so cold that a hoar-frost whitened the hangings of Hervey’s bedchamber. He lay still, listening for a sound that might tell him someone was come with news, welcome or otherwise. Since wine with Dr Sanchez the day before, hourly he had expected him to return with either a letter from Elvas telling him that his release was arranged, or else a summons to attend the tribunal. He had slept little, partly on account of the cold, but in larger part because his mind had wandered, back and forward, over a decade and more, from one misjudgement to another, every excess and indiscretion. They oppressed him, and yet none of them, in his imagining, compared with what was to come. How could it be that he had not learned his lesson until now, and that it should come to so low a point? He had learned the easy things well enough – the business of his profession, the drills and such like – but all else, when he contemplated it from the perspective of his present condition, appeared as nothing so much as failure.

He had lost a wife. It was ten years ago, but her memory – and the cause of her death – was ever with him, if routinely shut out. It had been his fault that Henrietta had died. Others might be blamed, but it had been his actions that had brought it about. He could not escape the fact (and he had never tried). He had a daughter, for whom he barely made provision beyond the material. How might he ever be father-hero to her when he did not see her from one year to the next? He slept with another man’s wife – or rather, he
had
slept (and how much did he wish she were by his side now?). When the tribunal here had finished with him, and the court martial in Whitehall, he might yet be named in the high court by a cuckolded husband. He would never be able to show his face to his family again. How could he even decently face the day?

He had been apprehensive that first time, the court martial at Badajoz, but not truly fearful, as now. It was not that his memory failed him (he was certain), rather that to be arraigned as a cornet was one thing, and quite another to be tried as brevet-major, Companion of the Most Honourable Military Order of the Bath. The irony in how things had turned out could not escape him. No doubt the one-time Cornet Daly would this day be hunting freely from his rackety estate in Galway, a careless, bibulous local hero, who regaled his fellow squireens with stories of slaying the French. Doubtless, too, he wrecked a good horse every season, and thought nothing of it beyond the cost of replacement. For what was an animal’s distress compared with his pleasure?

Why was it that some men had no sense of shame, no
true
sense, while others could be eternally burdened by it? Daly’s face when the court martial had pronounced without withdrawing – how could it not have registered abject shame? Hervey could see it still, the brazen scorn at the judge martial’s plain words: ‘A man of violent temper wielding a cautery is no little threat. I direct that the case against Cornet Hervey be dismissed.’ Then, when the court reassembled half an hour after withdrawing to consider its verdict on the remaining charges, Daly had marched in for all the world as if he were come to buy a horse at Tattersalls. And when the president read the words, ‘To Charge One, Guilty! To Charge Two, Guilty!’, there remained about him a defiant air, as if the proceedings, the regiment, the entire army, did not ultimately matter, for he, Frederick Keevil Daly of Kilconnell, would jaunt on. Even when the president announced punishment, ‘that he be dismissed the service’, his only thought – his question to the court, indeed – had been whether he might recover the value of his commission.

Now, at such a distance, and for an indulgent moment, Hervey might admire the man, for where had his own unbending principles landed him? But in truth he was resolved that if he escaped his present predicament, and if he escaped a court martial, and the attention of Sir Peregrine Greville, he would amend his ways. He would amend his ways so thoroughly, so root and branch, that there could be no possibility of finding himself in a contingency such as this again. Nor, indeed, would there be any neglect of the Commandments or the proper regulation of family.

It was a very remote prospect, however, his ‘deliverance’. That, he acknowledged. But the very thought of amendment lifted his spirits, as if, indeed, he were at some meeting of Methodists. He smiled, and thought of his sister. And then he chided himself again: had Elizabeth ever been wrong in her estimation of things? Had she ever had other than a right judgement? He had laughed at her for her evangelical principles, but they had never let her into deep water. Elizabeth would show him the way; he could trust in that.

He picked up his Prayer Book and opened it again at the collect for the previous day, for it had anticipated his new-found resolve:
Mortify and kill all vices in us, and so strengthen us by thy grace, that by the innocency of our lives, and constancy of our faith, even unto death, we may glorify thy holy Name
.

If only Joshua could be so apt! In these last, empty days, he had read Joshua closer than ever, almost as if the book might reveal his means of escape. A great soldier was Joshua, a cunning soldier, a soldier who overcame as much on his own side as on that of the enemy. But he knew no Rahab in Badajoz to let him down from the walls, no spies to find such a person within the city.

Dr Sanchez came at noon. He did so full of apology for his absence, for his failure to keep his promise of an early return. ‘It has been a difficult time, Major Hervey, difficult for me to explain. I beg you would forgive me and trust that it was not through choice that I did not come earlier.’

It did not matter to Hervey what had prevented the physician’s visiting, for whatever he had imagined were the possibilities in their recent intimacy, he had begun to conclude that Sanchez was not a man for turning: no honourable man could hazard his family by such a thing, and the physician was nothing if not an honourable man. ‘It has been an idle time, I confess, sir.’

Sanchez glanced at the open bible on the table. His face softened as he drew up a chair and sat down. ‘Joshua, Major Hervey?’

‘Joshua, yes. A great soldier.’

Sanchez unbuttoned his coat, despite the chill which the new-laid fire had not been able to dispel. ‘Do you believe, Major Hervey, that Joshua’s trumpets alone brought down the walls of Jericho?’

Hervey was intrigued. He thought to answer obliquely. ‘With God, all things are possible?’