Words of Command (Hervey 12) (Matthew Hervey) (32 page)

Ten yards, the beach gently shelving, water now up to the belly – and the bows lifting. In scrambled the coble’s scratch crew, ten of the liveliest – and Peto.

‘Haul me up, my lads! Let loose the ropes!’

‘Turn ’em about, Colonel!’ shouted Wakefield as the lines fell clear.

Hervey brought the leader round clear of the traces, the wheeler following with Wakefield still up, and quietly, then edged alongside the coble until he could lunge aboard – with much cursing as he caught his knee on the gunwale.

Wakefield was making to follow.

‘Get back, man! See to the horses!’

But he took no notice, sliding into the boat on his stomach. ‘Sorry, Colonel. If Sar’nt Acton were with you I could.’

Hervey gritted his teeth. He’d given an order – or thought he had – and Wakefield had ignored it. Yet how could he upbraid a man for claiming his duty lay with the harder course?

‘They’ll be right enough, Colonel. They’ll stand quiet.’

But Hervey was already distracting himself with an oar, trying to slide it into the rowlock.

‘Now, see here,’ Peto hailed. ‘There are life-preservers in the sternsheets.’

Landlubbers he may have called them, but more than one was looking handy. Out came the cork vests, and then, one by one, out went the oars.

Once he’d got the likeliest of his lads to fit the rudder – ‘I appoint you bos’n!’ – he settled in the sternsheets and took charge of the pulling. ‘Give way together!’ and then ‘Pick up the stroke!’ and ‘Cheerly now!’

Hervey shook his head and smiled to himself: truly his friend was in his element. They might be pulling for a man-o’-war rather than a Tyne barque.

Yet Blakeney harbour was no little place, no mouth-of-the-river and breakwater affair, but a good mile and a half of shallow bay bounded by a line of sandbanks. ‘The Frisians in miniature’, Peto had called them. At low water much of it became salt marsh, gouged its full length wide and lazily by the Glaven stream, and marked at its western limit (for the purposes of pilotage) by the Stiffkey, which met with the Glaven at the harbour entrance; that entrance, at least, which was passable to more than a smack.

The sea was nothing compared with what was running beyond the sandbank, but at its widest there was half a mile of water between bank and shore, and the swell was enough to persuade Peto to make straight into the wind for the sand’s lee, and then due west, hoping at the turn to have the wind in their favour.

It was hard pulling, a good while before they could do aught but keep the stroke – and a quarter of an hour’s hard labour (Hervey threw off the cork vest and his coat, so heavy was the work) until they found the slacker water.

Peto put the rudder to port. The coble answered west as handily as a jolly boat. ‘Pick up the stroke now!’

And it
was
a deal easier, oars now entering the water cleanly rather than battering against the swell. And the wind had veered just a point too, so it helped them make headway rather than hindered.

But it was a full twenty minutes still before they reached the harbour mouth, with the tide now on the ebb and a quickening current to work against the wind.

‘Keep the stroke!’

The Blakeney Greathead, stationed at the furthest end of the sandbank, near the lookout, and so ready to put into open water in minutes, was already coming off the wreck with a full lading – a dozen of the barque’s passengers, some women and children.

Peto stood up – heaven knew how, for Hervey didn’t – and began signalling with his arm. What intelligence, what orders, it conveyed was beyond his landsman-friend, but evidently not the coxswain of the Greathead, for Hervey saw the boat turning directly for them.

‘We’ll bring ours alongside and take off her trade,’ called Peto hoarsely, the wind now shrill rather than mere roar. ‘Blakeney men never turn back!’

It made sense, for the Greathead was an altogether bigger boat, with more freeboard; if there were others to take off from the barque it were better she do it, for beyond the bar the sea was tall, the breakers pounding the dunes like a siege battery, and the swell so heavy as to lose her from sight in the troughs.

Peto now brought the coble about to head into the stream, knowing that presently the current would be stronger than the wind, the tide running out fast, and ordered oars to pull just that bit lighter – just enough to hold her steady so the Greathead could come up on his starboard with the more sea room.

And indeed they held her very steady for a good few minutes, while the Greathead rose and plunged towards the less lively water of the harbour mouth, and then running in fast.

‘Starboard side, boat oars!’

It was lubberly, but it was done.

‘Steady now!’

And then the Greathead was coming alongside, larboard oars boated and hands ready with ropes to lash the two together.

‘A dozen more to take off, Sir Laughton – crew mainly,’ boomed the coxswain.

The boats locked fore and aft.

‘Good man, Dauncey! Let’s get these across sharp.’

Helping hands got the orphans of the storm into the coble, Peto and his bosun bidding them crouch low so as not to hinder the oars.

Hervey was too preoccupied with the unfamiliar contents of his hands to take in much (an oar was a deal more refractory than the nappiest trooper’s reins) but the face of rescued humanity was compelling – innocents plucked from the watery jaws of death …

But then he saw Peto on his feet once more (how, he couldn’t tell, for the motion of the boat was enough to upset the ablest-bodied), shouting orders, beckoning, pointing, just as he supposed at Navarino – master of men and the wooden world; magnificent! What privilege it was to call him
friend
…

The Greathead heaved suddenly and slammed against the coble.

Crack!

The starboard oar closest the stern for some reason trailed, snapped above the blade. The loom swung round with the kick of a mule and pitched its handler into Peto, who fell sideways, grabbing for the gunwale but missing as the boat lunged on the swell and pulled the coble with it. Over the side he went – and all in a split second.

Hervey was up in an instant, but Wakefield was first, diving without a thought or a glance. He went in after him, just ahead of one of the Blakeney men, leaping rather than diving, not trusting to his reach. His head went under, his heart seemed to stop; it was an age before he broke surface. And it was all he could do to stay there. There was nothing but the sea whichever way he looked – great walls of it. His boots were leaden.

And then a cork vest washed over the swell, and he grabbed it, and it was now just a bit easier to keep his head above water … but still he couldn’t see the coble – nothing but the great grey walls. Where was Peto? Where was Wakefield? If he couldn’t see which way to strike, would he be taken by the tide? Had he passed out with the sudden immersion, been minutes asleep? Had he – had
they
– been taken, swept out, beyond the bar, beyond sight?

The cold was already in his marrow. It was now assailing his head.

Would the end come this way – with not a soul to see?

But then, like the stage scrim suddenly lit and the players revealed, he bobbed over the swell. There ten yards away was the coble and the Greathead, still lashed, and hands leaning out to others. And he roared at himself to crawl through the water, which seemed to resist all his efforts, refusing him all progress, trying even to pull him below … until, without sensation of movement, without rhyme or reason, there were suddenly helping hands to grasp.

‘Peto? Peto?’ he gasped, not hearing his own words.

‘Hold hard, sir!’

He couldn’t hear. He couldn’t see. But he knew somehow he was saved – though the Greathead was gone back to the wreck and the coble was making fast for the landing before his senses were restored, and the dread that he alone was spared was so happily dismissed.

A good moon favoured them home from Blakeney. Hervey had thought it best to put up at the White Horse where the sodden party had taken refuge, not least for the recovery of Corporal Wakefield, by whose endeavour Peto was rescued; but with a change of clothes and half an hour before a good blaze that admirable NCO had insisted he was more than able to ride post – by no means an easy road too – and he brought the White Horse’s liveries to Houghton in a little over three hours without once using the whip. Even after reaching the house he would not quit till the grooms had rubbed down the geldings, thatched and rugged them up, given them hay, and then, half an hour later, when their breathing was regular once more and the sweating done, a warm mash. Only then would he take a hot bath – a thing so rare as to defy his memory of the last time, but which Hervey insisted on – and then a mutton pie the like of which he would say he had never known, and the best stout porter this side of Bow. And Hervey would tell Johnson (whose relief at seeing the overdue party was most marked) to procure somehow – anyhow – a third stripe for him, and to have it sewn on his tunic by morning.

And when he himself had at last gone to Peto’s parlour, close to eleven, where there was a spread to delight the better part of a troop, and warmed himself with the best burgundy that Lord Cholmondeley’s cellars could render, and sent away St Alban, who was even yet in dismay that his colonel had been in peril of his life and he had not been at hand to assist the gallant Wakefield, and listened patiently to Johnson’s strictures (‘A man who’s survived shot ’n’ shell and the edge of the sword, the point of the spear and all the diabolical creeping things and climates of foreign parts, and he risks his all on a Norfolk beach; the hero of actions too numerous to recall, and now at long last commanding His Majesty’s 6th Light Dragoons, and he puts to sea in a boat that a midshipman might command …’), he sank into a low armchair to contemplate the restorative properties of a good fire, and the thorough revitalization of his old friend.

Rebecca Codrington now came, woken, Hervey supposed, by the late return, and bidding them both not to rise went to her hero of Navarino (and now Blakeney), and showed him every tenderness. And while Hervey felt a moisture in his eyes –
such
compassion for his old friend she showed, and such a gladness he had in Peto’s transfiguration – he knew it also to be self-pitying. It was perverse to think thus, unworthy, unmanly, but in two days he’d seen more of contentment than he could rightly digest. Indeed, he unnerved himself by its contemplation. He must with all speed end this bitter-sweet stay, return to duty, immerse himself in its every detail whether of moment or not. Peto, he knew, would protest, as would Rebecca, but tomorrow he would start back for Hounslow.

The last time he’d come to Walden had been a year ago – a little more. It had been a cold coming then, too, on account of the weather, the snow lying deep – and of the reception. He’d arrived without notice (but then, why should he send notice to a wife?) and presented unpalatable news of a foreign posting (Lord Hill had offered him command of a battalion of his own regiment, in Gibraltar). Unpalatable, that is, to Kezia; for Hervey, in despair of getting command of his own regiment, which was under sentence of reduction, had been keen to accept what he saw as his best chance of advancement. And then he’d left hurriedly next morning after an express arrived saying his mission to the Levant was to begin sooner than expected. It was hardly the recipe for reunion – restitution, indeed, for Kezia had taken herself back to her people (and their marriage only the summer before). Perhaps it was not so unreasonable that she did so. He’d made no plans for their own establishment, so much depending on his prospects; and in any case he’d had to return to the Cape, to the temporary assignment with the Mounted Rifles. But he’d hoped there might be a beginning, not least for the sake of Georgiana. The honeymoon had not been as he’d wished; without question. The month and more that was customary had given way to but a few days – all that could be spared – and Kezia beset the while by sick headaches. The courtship had been too hurried, perhaps, and his motives uncertain. Widower marrying widow, each having a child – there was inevitably more than a touch of convenience in such a match. That he’d been powerfully attracted to her there was no doubt; whether she to him was altogether unclear. These matters, he understood, had a way of resolving themselves in the ‘mutual society’ (as the Prayer Book had it) that followed. But prospect of mutual society there had not been, and at their last meeting Kezia had been at pains for that state to continue. Yet for his part there’d been no choice but to take himself off; when first they’d married his place had been at the Cape, with his troop and the Rifles, and then again, last year, in the Levant; but in both cases he’d desired – expected – no more than
physical
separation (indeed, there’d been nothing to prevent Kezia’s coming with him to either place). There was no call in either sense – none that he could fathom – for the sudden distance between them. They had not, it was true, been conventionally affectionate lovers during their courtship, but things had happened quickly, and the place and circumstances had never been auspicious. And then although he’d not intended it, while in the Levant he’d somehow steeled his heart to the situation, if not entirely successfully, as of late the dark nights of the spirit testified. Seeing Peto in his pre-connubial bliss, however, had unexpectedly turned his mind to the cause of reconciliation. Indeed, to pass King’s Walden on his return to Hounslow without a call would have been an act of defiance that any Christian should denounce as sinful.