Hervey 08 - Company Of Spears (31 page)

Hervey nodded. ‘And between the Fish and the Keiskama?’

The landdrost tilted his head.

Hervey wanted to be sure. ‘The cattle have been ranging into the unsettled territory?’

‘Some of the Dutch burghers, especially, found the temptation too great. They even began supplying the company at Fort Willshire.’

Major Hearne took back the reins. ‘In the early days the patrols from Willshire were effective in keeping the Xhosa out. And the burghers themselves are sturdy souls: they were more than capable of driving off a reiving party. But of late the incursions have been more determined.’

The landdrost, wiping his brow with a towelling swatch, reasserted his primacy. ‘There has been of late a troubling affair east of Graham’s-town; and Colonel, if you wish to be of assistance to the new lieutenant-governor, I believe you would do no better than take yourself there.’

Hervey looked at Major Hearne.

‘I concur,’ said the officer commanding the frontier.

Hervey glanced at Fairbrother, who shook his head just perceptibly, indicating he had nothing to ask.

‘Very well. You had better tell me of it. And I shall want to see beyond the Fish – see Fort Willshire and the country there. Perhaps we might set out tomorrow morning, to make Graham’s-town in the day.’

‘I will accompany you, of course, Colonel.’

‘That won’t be necessary, Major Hearne. Captain Fairbrother knows the country, and your detachments at Graham’s-town can give us what else we may need. You will have duties here, I know.’

The major looked relieved. ‘Thank you, Colonel. In truth, my wife is close to her time and—’

Hervey held up a hand. ‘Then I should positively refuse you permission to accompany me.’

‘Perhaps you will dine with us, Colonel? And the landdrost too.’

Hervey smiled politely. ‘That would be most welcome.’

‘And Captain Fairbrother, of course.’

Fairbrother looked faintly surprised. ‘Thank you … sir.’

XVII

BUSH CRAFT

Next day

The officer commanding the frontier provided the party with a dozen good country-breds, some with a fair bit of blood, all with a good measure of bone, and none with feathers. The biggest, by Hervey’s reckoning, stood fifteen hands two, the smallest a full hand less. They would not have done for a regiment at Brighton, but he knew at once they would serve here. They would have served in India, too, he felt certain, though requiring a little more corn perhaps than the Marwari with which the regiment had lately become so attached. These, he imagined, would be the look of the remounts for the Rifles once the rough-riders had finished with them – the quarters muscled through collected work rather than, as now, merely on the shoulders through galloping freely, and the coat flat and glossy rather than staring. Any of these Algoa troopers would carry him well, for they looked handy and no doubt possessed a good turn of speed over a quarter of a mile. Just the sort of horse to have under him in a sudden brush with Xhosa.

Twelve horses: a second saddle horse for each of them, and a bat-horse apiece too. Corporal Wainwright had at once begun making the arrangements.

An hour or so into the march, the morning fresh and the sun climbing, Private Johnson edged his mare up alongside Hervey’s.

‘Does this remind thee o’anywhere, Colonel ‘Ervey?’

Johnson had not spoken much to begin with on the march. Hervey suspected he had a sore head, for the Fifty-fifth’s canteen had been a hospitable place, and the bingo – ‘Cape Smoke’ – improbably cheap. But in truth Johnson had drunk no more brandy than he was capable of, which was not a great deal: he was, anyway, long past the soldier’s practice of drinking, camel-like, all that was available in order to sustain him through weeks of drought. Johnson, for all the appearance at times to the contrary, had a sense of occasion. And on those
contrary
occasions, Hervey had come to recognize that Johnson had invariably discerned something of the circumstances that he himself had not. What Johnson in his silence had been doing was allowing – consenting to – the growing attachment between Hervey and Fairbrother, for Johnson misliked (or liked) no man for his complexion. True, he thought Indians were detestable (except the ones he knew), Spaniards despicable (except all those brave
guerrilleros
), Portuguese shameless (except General de Braganza, the army and most of all Dona Isabella Delgado), and the Hottentots and Kaffirs – if that was what they were here at the Cape – beneath contempt (except that he had enjoyed the crack with several black faces in the canteen last night). But this Mr Fairbrother –
Captain
Fairbrother – as Hervey insisted on calling him, was not Indian, or Spanish or Portuguese or African: he was a gentleman; and that was all there was to be said of the matter.

Perhaps not all. The other officers whom Johnson had known did not talk much about books and such like. And it seemed to him that Hervey was enjoying it a very great deal. If Captain Hervey – or Major, or Colonel, or whatever it was today (he truly thought brevets more complicated than …) – if Captain Hervey needed one thing it was a good friend. And not a woman-friend (Johnson had his decided opinions on these) but another officer. There was Captain Peto, but he was always at sea, and there was Colonel Howard, but he was always in London; and since poor Major Strickland was killed there was no one in the Sixth with whom Hervey could talk on what it was that officers talked about – officers and
gentlemen
talked about.

Colonel Hervey sometimes talked to him, but he knew it could not be the same. And in Hounslow it had all so nearly come to an end. He did not think of the prospect of a prison hulk so much as the deprivation of that life that had come to mean everything to him: the Sixth and ‘his’ officer. People had always been good to him – or at least
fair.
And over the business of the coral … well, he had not expected to remain the commanding officer’s groom after that. Yet here he was, taken back like the son in the Bible who went off and ate with the pigs. What had he to complain about ever when such a man as Colonel Hervey was his officer? He had never known anything of the coral; he was only doing as he was told. But he supposed that wouldn’t have made any difference if Colonel Hervey – and Serjeant-major Armstrong and the others – hadn’t been there to help him.

Yes, he certainly approved of ‘Captain’ Fairbrother. He was the sort of friend that Colonel Hervey needed. Perhaps if he had had a friend in Hounslow … No, he must not think like that. But why else would his officer want to marry this Lady Lankester, someone he’d hardly ever met? It was none of his business, of course: what an officer chose to do was his own affair, and quite beyond the understanding of the rank and file. But he did not relish the idea of serving a new mistress. There would never be anybody like Mrs Hervey – not even Mrs Delgado (although she was the one he wanted most to see filling her shoes)…

Hervey concluded where Johnson was thinking of. ‘It puts me in mind of Salisbury Plain. On a fair day, that is.’

‘That’s what I reckoned, sir. Is it all like this? Ah thought there were jungle, an’ lions an’ things.’ Hervey turned to Fairbrother, with a rueful smile that invited a response to Johnson’s boundless question on the natural history of the Continent.

‘Well now, Private Johnson,’ began Fairbrother, endearing himself at once by the appellation of rank, however lowly. ‘Do you recall how many days you were sailing to the Cape?’

Johnson frowned. ‘Abaht fifty, I think it were, sir.’

‘About fifty; and perhaps some forty-five of those were spent traversing the coast of Africa, one way or another; perhaps a hundred and fifty miles in the day. You may therefore calculate the very great distance that is this continent from north to south. And in the space of those several thousands of miles, there is all manner of country – desert where a man would bake like bread in an oven, and be dried like a piece of leather for want of water. Then there is grassland, as here, where there are great herds of all manner of beasts – lion, elephant, antelope, camelopard, though here there are not so many, for the Xhosa and the Dutch have driven them out of the grazing lands to make room for their cattle. And in the middle of the continent, where the rain falls very heavy, and the growth is prodigious, there is jungle – the deepest forest you might ever see, with apes of every description living in the trees without ever placing a foot upon the ground.’

Johnson’s brow was screwed up very tight. ‘Don’t think ah’d like that, sir. Ah wouldn’t like being somewhere there were things over thi ‘ead.’

Fairbrother’s expression almost matched Johnson’s as he struggled to make sense of the pronunciation and vocabulary. ‘And things underfoot.’

‘Ooh ay, sir. When we were in India, or wherever it were – in t’jungle there – there were all sorts o’ things, an’ snakes as thick as thi leg.’

Hervey smiled to himself. Johnson was allowed his exaggeration – except that in Johnson’s imagination it was no exaggeration at all.

‘’As tha been in t’jungle then, sir?’

Fairbrother was increasingly charmed by Johnson’s candour (there had been occasions, when first he had joined the Royal African Corps, when he had been derided for his presumed jungle origins). ‘I have. But not, I imagine, as much as Colonel Hervey. And, of course, I have no knowledge of how similar are the forests of India to those of Africa.’

Johnson was not inclined to think the differences very great; he had disliked the forests of India, and he had no doubt that he would dislike those of Africa just as much. ‘So there isn’t any jungles ‘ere, then, sir – in t’Cape, I mean?’

‘No, there is no jungle. There is forest, quite dense, but we are not near enough to the Equator to make it so … fearsome. We may see elephant – I think we
shall
see elephant – and leopard; or rather we shall
hear
leopard, in the night. And the going will become thick with scrub near the rivers… ‘

Although he gave the impression otherwise, Johnson was not greatly exercised by the topography, or fauna, of the Eastern Cape. It was merely that the place did in truth resemble Salisbury Plain so much, which he had grown almost as fond of as Hervey had been during their sojourns in Wiltshire. He was intrigued by how quickly the country here might change, and into what. At the edge of the Wiltshire plain there were fields of corn or cattle; what was at the edge of this plain?

Fairbrother truly did like Johnson. Hervey could see it. And yet Hervey could only wonder what would have been his new friend’s reaction had he seen the
real
Johnson, the man undiminished by the business of the coral smuggling. Johnson had lost a measure of his cheeriness, his unbounded – at times almost senseless – optimism. At first Hervey had enjoyed the respite, for Johnson’s chirpy certainty he at times found decidedly wearing; but after a while he had come to feel it like the loss of an old, if irascible, relative, the loss infinitely greater than the respite. This presage, first-swallow-like, of Johnson’s return to a state of (respectful) familiarity was therefore much to be welcomed. The leaving of Hounslow – of England – had in the end been so precipitate, what with endless duty calls as well as family, and then the requirements of his betrothal, that he had not been able to give his groom-orderly more than passing attention. He had been rather thankful of it in fact, for anger, exasperation and disappointment had been mixed in powerful measure, and it was as well there had been no opportunity to delve into it. Now it was meet to restore their former relations.

* * *

At Graham’s Town, a settlement of few stone buildings but to Hervey’s mind a busy, optimistic sort of place nevertheless, they found the detachment commander was laid low by an attack of dysentery. His lieutenant was new, so it was the landdrost who received them and told them of the ‘Clay Pits Trouble’, as already it was becoming known on the frontier. Hervey listened to the landdrost carefully, glancing periodically at Fairbrother for any sign of dispute, but seeing none. The landdrost was an old Cape hand, who had seen service with both the Cape Regiment and then the Albany Levy. He took the view that General Donkin – and Lord Charles Somerset – had made admirable plans, but that in reality the life of the frontier was not to be regulated as if it were a place subject to the usual laws of property and the border itself a mere party wall. The affair of the clay pits, he observed, was but one example of the ‘untidiness’ of the frontier and the difficulties in applying the ‘Donkin doctrine’ to the letter.

The clay pits, explained the landdrost, were about five leagues due east, an easy enough three-hour ride – two with fresh horses at a gallop. And the Fish River was two and a half leagues beyond. The pits were firmly within the colony itself therefore, not the unsettled, patrolled tract. The clay had been used for generations by the Xhosa for dyeing blankets and to paint themselves. The trouble was, he told them, the clay pits were on the farm of one John Brown, who had come east with the first 1820 settler parties. Brown complained that of late he had lost a hundred and sixty cattle and a dozen horses, and that the occasional patrols from Graham’s Town, or Fort Willshire in the unsettled tract, were no protection. The soldiers, he claimed – Hottentot troops – merely hid in ambush, shot at the Xhosa as they approached the pits and then cut off the ears of those they had killed as proof of their zeal and prowess. This, suggested the landdrost, accounted for growing Xhosa enmity. The trouble was, other settlers in the area were trading with the clay-seekers: cattle, ivory, hides and gum in exchange for beads, buttons, wire and trinkets. And since the settlers’ cattle was for the most part unbranded, it was not difficult to imagine the temptation for the Xhosa. One of the settlers had been killed not many months ago when a patrol had appeared unexpectedly and the Xhosa thought they had been betrayed. It was therefore no longer merely a matter of petty lawbreaking but of murder, and – though he was guarded in his expression of it – the landdrost evidently felt that the military were not cooperating as fully as they might in his investigations.