Words of Command (Hervey 12) (Matthew Hervey) (3 page)

A few minutes later Hervey came into the hall booted and spurred, immaculate and assured in undress pelisse coat (a little shorter than its former prevalent length), with, in his hand, the peaked Prussian-style forage cap he had acquired in the Levant.

Cornet St Alban made the customary bow. ‘Good morning, Colonel.’

Hervey was momentarily, if only
very
momentarily, put off his stride. He had known perfectly well that the honour ‘Colonel’ must now come – the privilege of all ranks when addressing the commanding officer when off-parade – but it had been so long in the coming that its matter-of-factness now sounded peculiarly … well, as if he had been in command a good age.

Though of course it made no difference whether he’d been in command one day or one year: the concern of both the messes and the canteen was with the orders for tomorrow, and in this the orders of yesterday were of no account. A number of the regiment had served with him from the day he’d joined, and many more since; almost everyone knew something of his reputation – as they did of any officer (justly or not) – and that was well enough; but no one could have any true notion of what the new lieutenant-colonel would be in command. And in that sense it was no better than had he been an extract – a man from another regiment, bought in, as his predecessor had been, when capability, or more likely fortune, was wanting in the regimental list. Except, of course, that those who believed they had earlier gained approval in the eyes of Captain or Major Hervey might now expect to gain favour – no, not favour … reward.

‘Good morning,’ he replied, holding out his hand.

‘Cornet St Alban, Colonel,’ replied the representative of the 6th Light Dragoons, taking the hand, and with an easy smile; ‘I am picket officer next-for-duty.’

‘And when were you made next-for-duty?’ asked Hervey, with a frown suggesting suspicion.

‘Yesterday, Colonel.’

Hervey had thought as much. The adjutant evidently confided that the Honourable Edward St Alban would safely convoy the regimental equipages to Pall Mall and back (though a duty not beyond the newest joined officer, Hervey trusted), but if needs be would safely converse with the commanding officer; that is, might do so in terms that would not discompose him in the hour or so that it would take to travel the frosted road to Hounslow – which perhaps was not an undertaking to be commended to every cornet.

‘Drive with me in the chaise,’ he replied.

‘Thank you, Colonel. With your leave, I’ll have my groom run up the stirrups.’

Hervey nodded.

Johnson stepped forward with Hervey’s despatch-case.

Hervey pulled on his gloves and took it. ‘You’ll follow as far as the Berkeley Arms?’

‘Aye, sir – I mean,
Colonel
.’

He turned for the door, and then back to Johnson again. ‘One thing I would know. How in the dead of night did you find corporal’s stripes?’

Johnson had always been the most accomplished ‘progger’ in the Sixth, but chevrons – regimental-pattern chevrons …

‘Ah went to t’stables yonder,’ he replied, nodding Whitehall-wards.

‘Of course,’ said Hervey – the Light Horse stables at the Horse Guards, for the ‘War Office party’ that the Sixth furnished, the despatch orderlies who carried papers between the royal palaces. He would not ask if there were an NCO now unaccountably short of rank.

Instead he put on his cap and touched the peak to the statue of the Duke of York not long raised (and to which they had all subscribed), as custom already demanded he should, and took a final glance at Nash’s handsome work all about him. This club was indeed a fine place, a ‘refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble’, as the Psalmist said of the Almighty Himself. And so close to Hounslow. The pictures were as yet few, and portraits only of Lord Lynedoch, the founder (Hervey had been at hand that day at Corunna, when the ball had struck Sir John Moore from the saddle, whereupon he had dashed to Lynedoch’s help to bear him up – Colonel Thomas Graham, as then he had been). Yet this new place was surely more alive with the spirit of men nobly deserving the respect of their country than any other could claim: Lord Hill, tender and brave; Murray, Lowry Cole, FitzRoy Somerset, Combermere, Saltoun, Hardinge, Beresford – soldiers all who had won reputation in the cannon’s mouth; and from the sea, Nelson’s Hardy; and Lord Exmouth, Cockburn, Broke of the
Shannon
; and chief among them, not
primus inter pares
, but towering above all, the Iron Duke … What more fortune could favour a man than to be taking leave of such fellow members as these to take command of the 6th Light Dragoons (Princess Augusta’s Own)?

‘Thank you, Charles,’ he said to the head porter as the doors were pulled wide for him; ‘Thank you,’ he added, nodding to the rest.

Cornet St Alban opened the door of the regimental chariot – with its ‘VI LD’ device newly re-emblazoned on the deep-blue gloss – and then climbed in after him. ‘Leave to proceed, Colonel?’

The carriage warmer had done its job; Hervey declined a blanket, sat back and said simply, ‘Very well.’

St Alban nodded to the serjeant standing to attention on the pavement, who barked something (unintelligible to the several bystanders as well as to Hervey), at which the two dragoons standing either side of the pair of trace-shaved Clevelands whipped off the rugs. The postilion – Wakefield, Hervey noticed, one of the riding-master’s best corporals – at once sprang into the saddle while the other bundled the rugs into the basket at rear before jumping onto the footboard between the springs; and at a quarter past nine they struck off down Pall Mall.

It was a Monday, not a dozen days shy of the new colonel’s thirty-ninth birthday – by no means a late age to come to command, especially when bloody wars and sickly seasons (the black-humoured toast of the ambitious officer) were not what they had once been. And Hervey fancied himself as sound in wind and limb as any – and more than most, indeed, for of late he had not had opportunity, even if he had had the inclination, for the sort of excesses of cellar or table that afflicted many a man in his thirties who found himself in command of a troop of cavalry in a home station. The late campaign in Bulgaria and Thrace had been a business of some heat. Yet nor had the exigencies of active service taken too high a toll: his hair was still his own, and without the little threads of silver, the ‘harbingers of seniority’; his eyes were clear and his face unlined save for here and there the faint trace of the battlefield, and no more weather-beaten than that of any man whose living was had out-of-doors. If he had been inclined to – if he had had the taste for – a sharper cut to his plain coat and a gayer knot in his cravat, he might even have been called a beau.

‘How does Hounslow go with you, Cornet St Alban?’

‘Very well, I believe, Colonel. There is perhaps too little opportunity for a field day, but I suppose that may be different when the squadrons are all of a piece once more.’

Hervey said nothing by reply, save for a non-committal ‘Mm’. The regiment was, to be sure, still not wholly put back together after the late reduction and then augmentation; that much the adjutant’s extensive report made clear. How quickly and completely that reconstitution would be made he would have no very clear notion until he had seen things for himself. But of one thing he was sure, that matters would be infinitely better expedited for Malet’s being adjutant. For some years now the Sixth had employed ‘regimental’ officers rather than those commissioned from the ranks, the more usual practice, and in Lieutenant Lord Thomas Malet (as lately he was become, his father having succeeded to a cousin’s marquessate), though he had but a fraction of the service normally accrued by a serjeant-major, Hervey knew they were possessed of the most diligent executive. Keeping Malet in that saddle would be his principal object as far as appointments were concerned.

‘How is Mr Jenkinson?’

‘Very well, I believe, Colonel,’ replied St Alban again, with just a note of puzzlement at the singling out of a cornet joined not long before he.

But Hervey was unwilling to reveal his purpose, even if the cornet’s reply gave him no answer. Jenkinson was the adopted son of the late Lord Liverpool, the former prime minister; that in itself was sufficient cause for enquiry. But Jenkinson had also been the particular friend of Cornet Agar, who had met his death at Hervey’s side. They had been friends at Oxford – Christ Church, the same staircase. The Agar-Ellises had been all civility when he had called and told them of the circumstances, the ambush, yet he felt unease still; some nagging question of
loco parentis
…

And so he said nothing, and then felt curiously disobliged to say more. The Honourable Edward St Alban was the younger son of the Earl of Bicester, whose family by long tradition held the colonelcy of the 8th Dragoon Guards: there might have been diverting conversation. For Cornet St Alban had more than just a pleasing air (and the adjutant’s approval); he had a singular mind and an elegant pen. Hervey had read an article of his in
The Spectator
, on the matter of Reform – the adjutant had sent him the pages along with all the other intelligence he could muster on the officers whom Hervey did not already know – and had been taken by its good sense and humanity. The war with France being long past, this was again a time when many a
bien pensant
supposed that it was the fool of the family who went into the army. And Hervey had known his share of fools – and knaves – but he was also of the opinion that ‘fool’ was a marque too easily applied. The common English schoolboy might not be scholarly, but he was usually very practical. If he did not care for the meanderings of
hic
,
haec
,
hoc
it was because they did not seem to lead anywhere that he wanted to go, and he was not docile. Yes, he, Hervey, had cared for
hic
,
haec
,
hoc
, having thought at one time he would take the cloth, like his father and (late) brother; but there’d been many a parson’s son at Shrewsbury who had not, who sat at the bottom of the remove until he left school – and his master dubbed him a fool. Yet put him in a regiment to take command of men and get a job done, the more dangerous the better …

But he spoke not another word. Keep counsel, he told himself; a little distance would serve. And in this the chaise came to his aid, gathering speed at last as the Bath turnpike, the old Great West road, beyond Kensington Palace opened to allow a jogging trot, and with it the growl of the wheels where the snow was now frozen road stone. Within the hour he would be united with his command. This was no time for diversion therefore: he ought properly to be recollecting; savouring; resolving … and perhaps saying a prayer or two.

In all the years that Matthew Hervey had held the King’s commission – from Moore’s ill-starred campaign to the siege of Bhurtpore, and even of late at Hounslow – the succession to the lieutenant-colonelcy of the Sixth had as often as not been irregular. That is, the circumstances of an officer’s assuming command had permitted little or no ceremony, or even intercourse between the outgoing and incoming half-colonels, being frequently a posthumous affair – and once, at least, an infamous one. Hervey’s first patriarch, the unyielding but steadfast Lyndon Reynell, had blown his brains out at Corunna in some sort of derangement induced by Sir John Moore’s order to despatch every one of the regiment’s several hundred horses. His successor, the admirable Lord George Irvine, had been plucked from the Sixth before Waterloo to wet-nurse the young Prince of Orange-Nassau in his titular command of a corps, his place taken instead by the senior major, Hervey’s former troop leader and fatherly counsellor Joseph Edmonds, who to the regiment’s universal dismay then succumbed to shot from Bonaparte’s grand battery. The Sixth had then come under the orders of Captain Sir Edward Lankester, but he too had fallen, so that Hervey himself, as yet a cornet, had brought them out of action that evening. And then, on the return of the regiment to England and the promotion of Lord George Irvine to general rank (and subsequently to the colonelcy of the regiment) there had followed the grim tenure of Lord Towcester, an ‘extract’, a man from another regiment, whom the cornets had dubbed ‘Macbeth’ on account of ‘Those he commands move only in command, nothing in love’. And in the end his title, like Macbeth’s, had hung ‘loose about him, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief’, his tenure foreshortened by dismissal on the orders of the commander-in-chief himself, the Duke of York, though not before ‘the Scottish colonel’, as most every man had begun to call him, had wrought a deal of unhappiness.

All that had been set right however when the Horse Guards (the seat of the commander-in-chief) handed command to the late Sir Edward Lankester’s younger brother, Ivo, who had inherited also the baronetcy. But poor Sir Ivo was to be the second Lankester to die at the head of the Sixth – seven years later, at the storming of Bhurtpore, and besides leaving a grieving regiment (he was admired by all ranks, as his brother had been, especially after so unusually long a term in command) he had left a young widow – with child – whom Hervey had taken as his wife two years later.

The Sixth had then returned to England under command of the avuncular (old-womanish, said some) Eustace Joynson, who as regimental major had succeeded to the lieutenant-colonelcy on active service ‘by death’, as the royal warrant allowed. However, Joynson, beset by daily trials on the distaff side (and by sick headaches), had soon sold out to the estimable Earl of Holderness, the safest hands that ever held the reins of a commanding officer’s charger – safe, that is, insofar as the regiment had never been in peril of the enemy, and therefore his occasional seizures of no moment. Lieutenant-Colonel the Lord Holderness, brought in from the 4th Dragoon Guards, was so favourably connected both with the court and with the Horse Guards that nothing disturbed the routine of the Cavalry Barracks, Hounslow, where the 6th Light Dragoons (formerly ‘Princess Caroline’s Own’, and now ‘Princess Augusta’s Own’) enjoyed the status of well-to-do country cousins of the regiments of the Household. And then after a decent lapse of time – two years and six months – Lord Hol’ness had taken the next effortless step in his amiable stroll through military life and become a major general; not, it was true, in a very active command (in any command at all worthy of the name), but in a position to which both the government and the King were very pleased to appoint him, whose duties would not detain him at office too much, so that he might lend lustre to the court, as already did his countess as one of Princess Adelaide’s ladies-in-waiting.