A Call To Arms (28 page)

‘What did tha say it were called, sir?’

‘Sweeny. That’s what the Americans call it – at least, the ones we met in Michigan. Don’t you remember that admirable farrier in Detroit who treated the serjeant-major’s mare?’

Johnson did. ‘Well, I can’t wait to get my old girl out for a walk – that’s all I’ll say. T’vetinary’s seeing ’er this afternoon. I reckon ’e’ll pass ’er fit.’

‘Let’s hope so. But it was a very nasty fall.’

Nellie had fallen in a squall off Madagascar and evidently taken her whole weight on her shoulder, for the damage had been massive.

‘The veterinarian believes it may be something to do with the nerve in that part, rather than the tissue,’ said Hervey.

‘Is that why it’s come all right?’

‘He says that nerves can become snared, and just as suddenly they’re released.’

‘It’d be a real shame if they didn’t. She’s t’best trooper I’ve ’ad.’ Hervey did not doubt it. But this was India. ‘What’s wrong with the one you’re riding?’

Johnson looked surprised. ‘What,
this
? I’ve seen bigger pit ponies.’

‘She’s going forward nicely.’

‘Ay, but …’

‘Well, what else do you want?’

Johnson looked indignant. ‘Well, I’d like summat wi’ a bit of reach.’

‘That I grant you. But I’ll warrant that pony will carry you a
deal further in this country than your Irish mare. And I think I’d trade a hand or two for that.’

Johnson was doubtful.

‘The first remounts arrive this afternoon,’ continued Hervey, brushing a particularly large horsefly from Gilbert’s neck. ‘I shall look them over with Mr Sledge and choose thirty at once. The sooner those recruits are in the saddle as one body the better.’ He looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘I ought to stop calling them recruits, I suppose.’

Johnson agreed. ‘I wonder ’ow many dragoons ’as spent as long in t’ranks wi’out an ’orse afore!’

Hervey smiled. ‘You’re right. We must be the footiest dragoons in the line. But their musketry’s good, mind – being so long cooped up. You didn’t see Harkness bring down that goose at the Cape.’

‘ ’E’s all right, is ’Arkness, sir. Y’know French ’as taught ’im to read proper and write.’

‘Has he indeed? Harkness as well as Mole. Then French has doubly earned his pay.’

‘Y’know ’is father’s a parson, an’ all, sir?’

The short
a
in Johnson’s
father
still took Hervey by surprise from time to time. His ear for the peculiarities of Sheffield vowels – indeed, for the whole structure of the speech of those parts – was now finely attuned, but
father
always sounded peculiarly alien. Alien and rather cold, especially compared with the gentle
fayther
of Caithlin Armstrong’s Cork – and Private McCarthy’s, for that matter. ‘Yes, I do know, but he seemed disinclined to speak of his family when first I broached it, so I didn’t press him to details.’

‘Somewe’er in Wales, ’e said. An’ ’e said that folks there used to say them as were on t’parish were as poor as church mice, but not as poor as t’parson.’

Hervey could believe it. His own father’s living may have been a poor one, but by the standards of the Welsh dioceses he knew it to be comfortable. ‘Is French liked by the others?’

‘Oh ay, sir. ’E used to write letters for their sweet’earts, in ’Ounslow. An’ ’e’s a God-fearing man an’ all. Most o’ t’troop respects ’im for that. But mind, ’e wouldn’t ’ave ’owt to do with Corporal Sandbache when ’e came round.’ Johnson lashed out at another of the early horseflies they had attracted.

Hervey smiled at the thought of ‘Preacher’ Sandbache believing
he had a ready-made accomplice in French. Sandbache did little enough harm; that was the general opinion. And from time to time it was acknowledged that he did good. At least, the chaplain had no complaints that a Wesleyan was at work in the ranks, for the chaplain was by any reckoning a good man, and the first to acknowledge that his ministry beyond the church parade was largely ineffective. French was evidently a man to watch, then. Hervey had thought as much from the beginning. But favouring a dragoon who might be a gentleman’s son would hardly have been a kindness, especially in the confines of a transport. Better then that he had left him as he had, to earn the trust of his comrades, for once French had won it, Hervey could use his talents keenly.

‘What do you think of McCarthy?’

Johnson did not reply at once. It was not that he ever paused to think how best to express something – he spoke entirely as he found – rather that he had no perfect opinion of McCarthy. ‘’ E keeps ’imself to ’imself. T’others’ve been biding their time wi’ ’im, I think. But I’ll tell thee this, sir: I can’t see as ’e’ll ever be ’appy on an ’orse.’

Hervey was all too fearful of this latter. But McCarthy had his talents, for sure. If he could not learn to ride then there were other places he could serve – though it was sabres the troop had need of most. ‘The Sisken business was a miserable affair. The first time in the regiment.’

Johnson screwed up his face. ‘ ’E pissed ’imself that often everybody wondered if ’e knew where t’ ’eads
were
!’

‘Johnson!’ But Hervey knew it was little use protesting, even mildly, at the soldier’s black humour. It was, in any case, equally the soldier’s strength when times were bad. But whatever had driven Private Sisken to hang himself in the ship’s heads, it was a poor thing that a dragoon – even one only partially trained – should reach such a state of mind without his fellows or his superiors knowing it. Armstrong, for all his rough tongue, had felt the unstated rebuke as keenly as had Hervey.

But why Sisken had made a crude noose of hemp for himself, when drowning was the easier and surer way, had been the question on everyone’s lips. A watery grave was anyway what the man got the following day, the chaplain commending himself to the dragoons by ignoring the statutes against Christian
committal of those who had taken their own lives. Indeed, the chaplain preached as perhaps he had never done before, calling upon the assembled company to ‘give thanks to Almighty God that he has given us, his unworthy children, the strength to endure where his servant Jeremiah Sisken had insufficient’. So that next day, for the first time, he was received below decks with some regard rather than with mere toleration.

‘I should like you to come with me to look at the remounts,’ said Hervey, suddenly determined to change the conversation. ‘You can ask Mr Seton Canning’s groom to stand evening stables for you.’ Johnson saw no cause to object. He trusted Lingard better than any man in the Sixth to stand his duty with the chargers. ‘Where will they be?’

‘The adjutant says they’ll be corralled somewhere out here.’ Hervey scanned the plain around him, shading his eyes against the low eastern sun as he turned. To north and west the country was empty but for the odd scrubby tree. The earth was baked and fruitless, for there were no cuts from the Hooghly here by which a ryot could irrigate a little patch for his maize and beans, and no grass that even a goat might subsist on. East of them lay the military lines and the Chitpore road, which ran north from the Company’s city to the ‘official’ native quarter, with its temples and the prominent houses of grand Bengali merchants. They were whitepainted like those of the Company sahibs, and a curious mix of styles – Mahommedan chiefly, the inheritance of the Moghuls, and Grecian, the influence of the Portuguese. ‘But I’m dammed if I can see a solitary fence post,’ said Hervey, lowering his telescope.

‘Which way are they coming?’

Hervey pointed. ‘Lucknow. There’s a veterinarian who’s set up stud farms all over the Company’s territory. Apparently Lucknow is his best.’

‘Would that be Mr Moorcroft?’

Hervey was impressed. ‘Yes. How had you heard of him?’

‘One o’ t’sutlers used to work for ’im. ’E said that ’e used to keep goin’ off into t’’ills an’ comin’ back wi’ ’orses. An’ ev’ry time they got smaller.’

‘What do you mean, “every time”?’

‘Ev’ry time, ’e came back wi’ smaller ’orses.’ Johnson sounded disapproving.

‘You don’t think he might have been prescient in his breeding policy, then?’ said Hervey, trying to suppress a smile at his groom’s absolute determination in the matter of size.

Johnson merely shrugged.

By late in the afternoon, the part of the plain where they had stood that very morning was transformed into a sight reminiscent of many a horse fair in England.

‘Not exactly as I had imagined,’ sighed the commanding officer, casting his eyes left and right dispiritedly. ‘I’m not sure that any of them are up to weight.’

Threescore horses stood tethered in running lines, a tail swishing here and there at the odd persistent fly, but otherwise motionless. They were tired from the march, and from the sun which, though low now in the west, had not lost quite all of its formidable strength. The syces had brought them south from Jessor in five days – eighty miles of flat, lush country, at least to begin with, but with two sizeable rivers and a dozen smaller ones to cross. Had the horses been copers’ stock, the syces would have rested them another day to let them pick up sufficiently to win the buyer’s eye, but these animals were the progeny of the Company’s stud department. They were for issue, not for sale.

‘They appear tractable, at least, Colonel,’ suggested Hervey.

Colonel Lankester nodded, and then smiled. ‘But Hugh Rose won’t like it much. Especially not when you’ve had first pick.’

That Captain Hugh Rose had come with his troop to India had been a surprise to many, for it had been assumed he would exchange with some impecunious officer in another regiment and pay the difference (the price of his troop had plummeted as soon as the Sixth had been warned for the posting). But Rose had regained his appetite for the field in Canada, and now wanted to see the east – for a year or so at least, he said. Leaving his bays behind had not been easy, however. Though D with its chestnuts had been unquestionably the prettiest on parade, A Troop had been the more striking, especially when coats were shining with sweat. And there was nothing that Hugh Rose had liked better than to trot them past at a review and hear the admiration of the onlookers, especially if they were female. He had, after all, put no small sum of his own into his troop’s horses.

Well, sighed Hervey to himself, the leader of A Troop was not going to enjoy that acclamation with
these
for remounts. ‘I think I will leave him the biggest, though, Colonel. From what I observed before, the smaller breeds are the better doers here.’

‘And that is what I have heard, too,’ said Lankester, sounding hopeful. ‘But as the Company expects us to make an impression, I am rather perplexed.’

Hervey did not respond. Big men on big horses might impress the country powers at a durbar, but that might not be enough. Instead he turned his attention to a dozen or more little Marwaris at the end of the line, a mixed bag of colours, none of them standing much above fourteen hands. ‘Pit ponies,’ Johnson was no doubt thinking. ‘I’ve seen these before, Colonel. They’re very tough.’

Colonel Lankester looked at them curiously. ‘What extraordinary ears!’

The Marwaris’ ears were turned in so much that when they were pricked they almost touched, giving the appearance of horns. ‘I don’t know why it is so,’ replied Hervey. ‘There’s a lot of Arab in them, but that can hardly be the cause.’

‘What is your opinion, Mr Sledge?’

The veterinary surgeon stepped forward, still minded to speak only when spoken to, even with so agreeable a commanding officer as Sir Ivo Lankester. ‘I know nothing of their ears, Colonel, but I would not be inclined to regard it as an unsoundness. I would be more troubled by what I am given to understand is their tendency to sickle hocks, and their reputation for uncertain temper.’

Hervey was as impressed as the commanding officer by Sledge’s research.

‘But sickle hocks you can recognize easily enough, can you not?’ Sir Ivo suggested.

‘Oh, indeed, Colonel. Anyone may. And if I were buying for myself I should not take such a case: the risk is not worth it. But a fault of conformation is not necessarily an unsoundness.’

Sledge was of the new stamp. Whereas Veterinary-Surgeon Selden, the Sixth’s sulphur-tinged veteran of the Peninsula, had turned to the fledgling science from a Guy’s Hospital dissecting room, David Sledge, a son of the manse, was a product of the new Veterinary College in Camden Town. Why he had eschewed a
lucrative civil practice in England for the indignities of one in the service was unclear, for his prospects, even under a colonel like Lankester, could not have been greatly appealing. Although he was classed as a cornet for the first ten years of his service, he was on a par with that rank only for the purpose of allotting quarters. And it would be a full twenty years before he could be classed as a captain. For the time being, however, Mr Sledge was an active and diligent veterinarian, and had won an unusual degree of respect among both officers and the ranks alike.

The commanding officer turned to Hervey. ‘Am I to take it, then, that you would have these as first preference, subject to Sledge’s approval?’

‘Yes, Colonel. There seem to be a score or so of them. The rest I should have to search the lines for, but there look to be some promising types.’

The commanding officer now turned full round to Private Johnson. ‘And what is your opinion?’