Words of Command (Hervey 12) (Matthew Hervey) (9 page)

‘Plough Monday come and gone these two weeks and not a clod yet turned,’ said Hervey, apparently still intent on generalism.

‘Is that an affront to religion or to good husbandry?’ asked Fairbrother, keen to test his own wit in such temperatures, but also genuinely uncertain of his friend’s meaning.

Hervey looked at him a little warily. ‘You’ll recall our conversation last evening – a poor harvest, winter early and hard? The price of corn?’

Fairbrother had been expecting something suitably theological on the blessing of the plough, and he lapsed into silence, disappointed.

Hervey left him to his thoughts for a while; then, thinking there might be something amiss, asked, ‘Is all well with you?’

He sat up straight in the saddle. ‘But of course. I was merely contemplating.’

‘What exactly?’

‘I was contemplating the situation of the yeomanry, what were its prospects and all.’

‘I had rather you become a regular.’

‘I
am
a regular.’

‘Of a colonial corps. And you are on half pay.’

‘And there I choose to stay, despite your most flattering entreaties. I was interested merely in the
situation
of the yeomanry, and how it comes about that a regular troop of cavalry must be abroad in the country at the first sign of trouble.’

Hervey nodded. ‘Mr Malet!’

He did not have to turn his head or raise his voice much above the usual, for the snow deadened the horses’ footfall. Only creaking leather and the occasional jingle of bit and spur broke the silence. They were marching ‘at ease’, not ‘easy’, and no speaking therefore permitted in the ranks.

The adjutant closed up. ‘Colonel?’

‘Do you recall exactly what was the fate of the Berkshire yeomanry?’

‘Very exactly, Colonel; I have a cousin who served with them – there were two regiments, the first raised in the west of the county, and the second in the east. Neither had been called out in aid of the civil power in more than ten years, which was the criterion for deciding which should be disbanded, and so the first was stood down two years ago to the month – I myself attended their last parade – and the second followed in April. I attended theirs too as it was on Upper Club.’

Fairbrother detected another obstacle to his complete understanding of the world. ‘May I?’

‘What?’ said Hervey.

‘Upper Club?’

‘A playing field at Eton,’ explained Malet. ‘There was a grand dinner afterwards, once they’d handed their arms to the Ordnance, and then they all rode home as if from market. A right jolly affair.’

‘I should have thought it a rather unhappy occasion,’ replied Fairbrother.

‘The disbanding, yes,’ said Hervey; ‘but a yeoman likes a good party. And in truth, they were a tagrag and bobtail affair, as I recall.’

Fairbrother frowned, though swathed as he was there was no telling. There was a little of him that bridled still at the English regular’s disdain of occasional soldiers. Many a time it had only been the Jamaica Militia standing against the threat of Bonaparte when the regular garrison was prostrated by yellow fever. ‘Was it ever considered, do you know, that the mere existence of the yeomanry was a preventive to disorder? That the fact of their not being called out was testament to that?’

Hervey smiled ruefully. ‘One of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers once said that soldiers in peace are as chimneys in summer – I don’t recall who. It is only for the certainty of winter’s coming that they are not stopped up.’

‘And the King’s peace – is it supposed that it maintains itself?’

‘It is, I grant you, an imperfect simile.’

‘Only the dead have seen the end of war?’

Hervey sighed. When last he’d heard that, Cornet Agar was refuting the attribution: ‘I have searched Plato in vain,’ he had said at table; and Hervey recalled how a wager was entered in the book, that ‘Mr Treneer is not able to provide chapter and verse re said quotation in any work of Plato within a year and a day, wager to be a case of claret (6 doz bots)’.

How he missed Agar’s youthful exuberance.

Yet there was no custom to determine the status of the wager if one of the parties died before its settlement. He wondered how it would proceed therefore, though it was a very little matter and not at all his concern. There were, though, still certain exequies to be performed, if not now his business then certainly of some moment to him. Agar had been buried near where he fell, at Adrianople, but, like Shelley, his heart had been brought away –
Cor Cordium
– to be presented to his people, and they had yet to say how they wished to honour it. The ivory casket he had had made bore an inscription, at Fairbrother’s suggestion, from
The Tempest
– Ariel’s song (which, he said, was that of Shelley’s grave – his ashes – in Rome): ‘Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange’.

Agar’s death could not be helped. It had come as much by his boyish impetuosity as by his – Hervey’s – own failure to see the ambuscade. He himself was almost killed; and Fairbrother he had taken for dead. Yet by rights Agar should never have been there – should never have been with him in the Levant. His company had been a delight, but at heart he was no soldier. Perhaps it was what his brother – and more so his brother’s wife – had understood when they asked Hervey for his special protection. But Agar had been determined to go. There were antiquities he wished to see – the whole country of the Bulgars indeed, and the wonders of Thrace and Constantinople …

‘Hervey?’

‘Yes –
quite
; as I was saying – soldiers in peace, chimneys in summer. Just so.’

The adjutant sensed it was the moment to fall back his three lengths, but Hervey stayed him (it wouldn’t do to appear preoccupied on his first parade). ‘The going here on looks fair. We’ll hazard a trot.’

He shortened the rein and eased the gelding into the most collected of trots, gradually allowing more as he felt the footing secure, and began rising. ‘Horses are to be led in-hand for one half of one hour at the commencement of a route-march’ said the Sixth’s standing orders, but since they had already come from the barracks he was content to take things a little quicker, not least because they marched in light order, with neither carbines nor spare shoes.

He could never quite comprehend why it was that snow sometimes balled within the hoof, so that it was perilous to venture at more than an ambling pace, while at other times it fell away from the frog like sand. Doubtless some mechanical or man of science could explain, but he himself could see no pattern to it, and therefore reason, in spite of at least twenty winters with ample opportunity to observe. But on this occasion at least the snow was obliging, and the trot therefore good and steady.

Half of one hour, the going peculiarly silent and all talking ceased, only the jingle of bits and curb chains and here and there a horse snorting, with all attention on the road ahead, the fresh fall furrowed by the wheels of the odd coach and carrier, and roiled by its ironshod teams – four miles, give or take a furlong or two, well clear of the Heath, over the Colne in its icy trickle, and the castle at Windsor now in distant view, and soon would be the chapel at Eton. They had seen so little traffic that it might have been early of a Sunday morning – just the Oxford stage, inbound, with eight sorry-looking outside passengers, the driver daring little more than a jogging sort of walk with so much weight up, and halting as the dragoons came past, raising his whip in salute, and one or two of the heartier sorts behind him their hats (a rum lot of hats, too, thought Hervey).

But then as they came back to a walk, half a mile on, the cold air very clear, there was the distant but unmistakable figure of a dragoon, the horse’s movement steady, the rider erect.

Malet pressed forward again. ‘Corporal Beevor, Colonel. He rode for B Troop at first light.’

‘Well, he cannot have reached Maidenhead and returned in that space of time … unless he set off at midnight.’

‘No, Colonel, I can vouch for his leaving at six.’

The dragoon closed at the briskest of trots, slowing only a few lengths short, then reining to one side and saluting (Hervey did not know Beevor, save by reputation – a coming man, by all accounts, his father a quartermaster in the Carabiniers).

‘Good morning, Colonel. Corporal Beevor, adjutant’s detail, reporting. Colonel.’

Strictly, by custom and probably regulation too, as adjutant’s detail he ought to have reported to Malet rather than to him, but Hervey approved of the NCO’s common sense – admired his self-assurance – and returned his salute without checking the stride. ‘Proceed, Corporal Beevor.’

The dragoon brought his horse alongside. ‘Colonel, while riding for Maidenhead to alert B Troop to your inspection I encountered them at ten minutes before eight o’clock on the road east of the town. I informed Captain Worsley of your intentions, Colonel, and he instructed me to present his compliments and inform you that the troop is to conduct a field day in the great park at Windsor and expressed the wish that you would approve, and inspect them instead at their evolutions, Colonel.’

Hervey’s first instinct was to suspect some ploy – that having been prior-warned of the visit, Worsley had figured it better to have the troop in the field rather than in billets, and had turned them out before dawn in order to have them under tight regulation in the park by the time he himself arrived. ‘What time did you set out this morning?’

‘Six, by the guardhouse clock, Colonel.’

Hervey turned to Malet. ‘And no other left for Maidenhead before that hour?’

‘None that I know of, Colonel. I gave the order to the sar’nt-major a little before watch-setting.’

Well, thought Hervey, there was no profit in pursuing the line. Besides, it had not been his intention to take Worsley by surprise – on the contrary, which was why he had told Malet to send word. And, indeed, the great park at Windsor was a deal less far to ride. It would all work to advantage, whether a ploy or not.

‘The troop’s going to post a vidette at Queen Anne’s Gate, Colonel, so as to lead us to them,’ said Beevor.

‘Admirable. You may fall in, Corporal Beevor.’

Beevor saluted, reined round and fell in behind the serjeant-major, who eyed him with the suspicion habitually reserved for the thruster, while the adjutant fell back his appointed three lengths again.

Hervey turned to Fairbrother with a look of satisfaction. ‘What a fine thing it is that an NCO may speak directly to his commanding officer so, with such address and confidence of his report. None of your red-coat stiffness.’

Fairbrother could not but agree. It was a fine thing indeed to be with a regiment of cavalry. He himself had worn a red coat – with the Jamaica Militia, and then the Royal Africans, who, he maintained, were little more than a penal battalion – before he had put on the nobler green of the Cape Mounted Rifles. A red coat was a fine thing to give a man a martial air, but a corporal in a red coat spoke only to his serjeant, and he in turn to his lieutenant – and so on until betimes the word reached the colonel by when its import or force might be lost. If he, Fairbrother, were ever to leave the half-pay list it would be to join a regiment in blue (or green) – except, of course, that according to his friend, the Duke of Clarence would put all of the army into red the moment ‘Last Post’ was sounded for the King.

‘How much further is the great park?’

‘Well, yonder’s the castle – so five miles, perhaps.’ Hervey sounded surprised. ‘Don’t you recall our practising war in these parts: it was but two years ago?’

It was in fact the better part of three, and much water had flowed under the bridge at Dorney since, the scene of his triumph over the Grenadiers in the great mock battle – which in no small part had been thanks to his friend’s address.

Beneath his swaddling Fairbrother looked rueful. ‘I do, though chiefly that it seemed to take place at night and that it was a great deal warmer.’

Hervey smiled. How diverting mock war could be, the outcome determined by umpires, like a game of cricket. It was, of course, better than no battle at all, but the bullet and the sabre were the real arbiters of war – and artillery, he had to admit – and they judged without partiality, favour or affection. He wondered what scheme Worsley had devised for his troop. He hoped not simply the evolutions in the drill book.

‘Fortitude, Fairbrother. Another half an hour or so and we’ll see what B Troop does to keep warm. It’s hard weather, I grant you, though I must tell you we had it far harder in Spain.’

‘Twenty years ago, Hervey – twenty years, the blood thicker in youth, able to stand all privations!’

Hervey smiled the more. ‘I would have you know that I am in no degree less hardy than in those days.’

Fairbrother made no reply, for he believed his friend truly thought so. And he supposed it only right that he should think so, however improbable. He knew for himself his own falling away (though in fact he remained remarkably supple). Perhaps he merely let indolence blind him to what sheer effort and self-belief could work … No, not indolence; he would apply to the French –
ennui
. For that was his real state of mind at the Cape, before his friend had arrived to reinvigorate him.

Well, invigorated he was now – if temporarily enervated by the cold – and he must not fail to display that vigour before his friend and his friend’s dragoons.

‘I cannot doubt it,’ he said, beginning even as he did so to believe it true.

And he related a story of one of the slaves on his father’s plantation who, on his fortieth birthday or thereabout (for these things could never be precisely determined) had cut more cane than any man half his age, that his body seemed perfectly adapted to the task, that to cut the same measure of cane his machete swung only twice for the younger men’s three times.

And Hervey reminded his friend that he himself was not yet forty, but that he took note, saying he had long believed that drill – discipline, practice, ‘training’ (as some now called it) – was everything. And Fairbrother was then moved to recall other tales from the plantation, some distinctly improbable thought Hervey (and when challenged, Fairbrother agreed, while asserting that plantation stories were not always the literal truth but rather representations of it, and therefore not without merit), until a quarter of an hour had passed and they began rising to the trot again.