A Regimental Affair (12 page)

The major turned red.

The adjutant answered for him. ‘His lordship has ordered its removal.’

Hervey realized the danger too late, for the mess had long held a truce on the matter. Until the end of the Peninsula, Caroline had officially remained their colonel-in-chief (unofficially, they had been known as Princess Caroline’s Own), and there had remained an affection for her, especially among the quartermasters and serjeants, with many old hands able to recall her warm if sometimes indelicate manners during her visits. There had been many an opinion in Cork that the Regent had ill-used the princess.

‘She is grown monstrous fat, I hear,’ said Lord Towcester abruptly.

Hervey was taken aback, and evidently visibly, for Ezra Barrow shook his head at him, warning him to let it go.

‘What’s that, Barrow? You know otherwise do you?’ challenged Towcester, his face reddening and his eyes narrowing.

‘I know nothing of the princess, your lordship,’ replied Captain Barrow quickly. ‘Except that it would be a pity if Her Royal Highness were to tax her constitution as badly as does the Regent.’

The response did not please the commanding officer. ‘Do you say that the Prince Regent is obese, sir?’

Barrow remained more perfectly in control of matters than Hervey would have supposed possible. ‘
I
do not say so, your lordship. One more opinion would scarcely be of any point when there are so many already on the matter.’

The adjutant now joined the colloquy and piled the coals higher. ‘I hear tell she wore a gown so sheer in Naples last month it was as if she wore none at all!’

‘Scarcely an alluring sight,’ scoffed the colonel.

This was really most unbecoming, thought Hervey, and his fault, too, for mentioning the picture.

‘She seduced Murat there, y’know,’ continued the adjutant, blithely. ‘And now she’s living openly with a Mussulman of all things – the Dey of Algiers!’

There was an anxious silence.

Strickland broke it. ‘And she is happy, as the Dey is long!’

It was a mercy, for there was laughter all round. Indeed, so keen was it that the chaplain must have laughed had he been there.

It even seemed to restore Lord Towcester’s equilibrium. ‘Call for the port, someone,’ he said, taking a cigar from the box which the steward had brought. ‘Now’s as good a time as any to announce our good fortune. Gentlemen,’ he beamed, ‘this autumn we are to furnish the escorts at Brighton!’

There was a general hubbub, during which Ezra Barrow leaned across to Hervey and shook his head again. ‘Time for me to go, this news. I can’t afford the expense of that place. It ain’t soldiering.’ The Birmingham vowels were as strong as ever.

Hervey wasn’t so sure. There was nothing like ceremonial to fill a regiment with pride – except a famous victory. He thought it no bad thing at all that the Sixth be given this trial, for it would take effort indeed to be fit for the Regent’s eyes, as well as for those of the population of Brighton, doubtless become expert during the past decade. And what gentler way, too, to begin the married state than wintering by the English seaside? ‘Let’s take a walk after this is done,’ he said to Barrow.

But spirits were high about the table. ‘Where is the betting book?’ came a voice from the end.

A footman brought it to Captain Rose. ‘Very well. Cornet Finucane wagers Mr Seton Canning the sum of five guineas that the measurement from stifle to hock of Eclipse did not exceed twenty-four inches!’

The wager provoked intense discussion all round. ‘And who is to adjudicate?’ asked Captain Addy.

‘The hippogrammarian,’ declared Lord Towcester, blowing a great deal of smoke across the table. ‘One of his horse-butcher friends dissected the animal if I’m not mistaken.’

There was appreciative laughter.

Hervey felt himself back in the Sixth he knew – a place of raucous, even at times tasteless, good humour as well as of cultivation. There were always ups and downs. Better, then, to dwell only on the happy side. Perhaps things were more promising than he’d imagined.

It was past three before they were able to break away from the commanding officer’s court, and so Hervey and Barrow had to content themselves with a stroll around the manège yard instead of outside the walls. Barrow was the longest-serving of the Sixth’s mess after Joynson and Hervey. Coming from the Royals with Lord George Irvine after Corunna, he had never endeared himself to the regiment’s officers in the way that his patron had (being as short on ceremony as he was long in experience). Nevertheless he had been respected as a diligent and efficient adjutant. He was a man of the Midlands, the
industrial
Midlands, perhaps the only one in the regiment, and he had never quite seemed one of the Sixth before. But now, Hervey was more than happy to walk with him as a comrade-in-arms. After all, they had first borne the battle’s heat together, as well as the sun’s, at Salamanca almost five years before.

‘Things have changed, Hervey.’

‘The army never changes, so Joseph Edmonds used to say.’

‘I didn’t say the
army’s
changed.
Things
have. The regiment’s not the same.’

Hervey had little enough cause to be enamoured of the new commanding officer after the business in the orderly room, but he had no wish to become further depressed by Barrow’s spirits at the very time he was returning to all he loved best. ‘There are bound to be
some
differences with a new colonel. I have to say the regiment’s looking smarter than I’ve seen it in many a year.’

‘Oh, that I grant you. And I’d be the first to own we’d grown rag-arsed, even in Ireland. But it’s not the only thing. You don’t have efficiency solely through smartness.’

‘And the horses are better than I’ve ever seen them, too,’ added Hervey, still unwilling to share Barrow’s discouragement.

‘That I grant you.’

‘Well, what is it, then? The NCOs do their duty as before, do they not?’

Barrow furrowed his brow.

Hervey knew that an ex-adjutant was perforce a professional sceptic when it came to subordinates and the performance of their duty. ‘Do not tell me Mr Lincoln hasn’t things right in that direction!’

‘There’ve been some queer promotions,’ Barrow declared. ‘I’ve
always believed as long service should be rewarded, but only when accompanied by merit. Some of the troops are sorely ill-served in my view. At the last board, Mr Lincoln was not even allowed to sit in.’

Hervey recognized the integrity of the opinion. For the RSM not to have a say in promotions was strange indeed. ‘Why was that, d’ye think?’

Barrow shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

‘No notion at all?’

‘Well . . .’ Barrow sighed heavily. ‘I do have a notion, and that is that Lord Towcester does not see the necessity of leavening seniority with aptness, because . . . he has seen so little service himself.’

Corporal Collins had said as much as they stood beside Cornet Wymondham in the Skinner Street taproom. ‘What service
has
he seen, exactly?’

‘Well, to be certain, nothing these past ten years, for he’s had the Monmouth Yeomanry all that time.’

‘And before that?’

‘I know not. I heard say he’d been in Flanders with the Duke of York.’

‘Then,’ sighed Hervey, ‘we’ll have to pray that the residents of Brighton are not too hostile. And that you and I can make something of our troops in the way that Edward Lankester and the others did.’

‘Ay,’ nodded Barrow. ‘But by heaven it tests a man. And after everything the regiment’s been through these past ten years.’

Hervey sighed again. ‘It was easy to be loyal to a man like Lord George. I suppose the real test is being loyal to a man less agreeable. But a colonel is owed loyalty as of right.’

Barrow agreed. ‘Ay, he has to earn his respect – like all of us – but he’s due his loyalty. That I grant you, too.’

‘It really may not be so bad, you know,’ said Hervey, smiling, trying to rally his own spirits as much as Barrow’s. ‘It can never be easy for someone come from the yeomanry. It will take a little time. I dare say he’ll soon be satisfied once the regiment begins to answer.’

Barrow said nothing.

When Hervey returned to Horningsham at the end of the week, there were two letters waiting for him. The first was from the Reverend Mr Keble. It was a long, warm, thoughtful letter replying to his from London, expressing his earnest wish that they should meet again soon. Hervey was especially pleased to receive it for a number of reasons, not least of which was his (and Henrietta’s) wish that John Keble should jointly officiate at the wedding. Henrietta had formed a favourable impression of the Oxford man that day at the great henge, almost three years ago, when she had done all she thought proper to declare her own feelings for Hervey, though he had not yet revealed any for her. And now that things did not stand harmoniously between Horningsham and the close at Salisbury, it was improbable that the bishop could preside at the ceremony, in which case it would have to be Mrs Hervey’s brother-in-law, the Dean of Hereford, who would solemnize their vows. But though the dean was a fine man, he was no poet; it seemed best, therefore, if it were Mr Keble who gave the homily. So Keble’s expression of keenness to see him again was a welcome portent.

Another reason, and this had really only occurred to Hervey a month or so ago, was that John Keble was the only man with whom he spoke, in any more than the everyday way, who did not wear uniform. Of course there was Daniel Coates, but with Coates he was not truly intimate, for their respective ages made their connection ever one of master and pupil. And besides, though Coates had left the colours twenty years ago, Hervey could still not quite think of him as anything but one of General Tarleton’s dragoons – revere him, indeed, as Tarleton’s trumpeter.

But India, with its brief excursion to the world beyond the barracks and the battlefield, and the acquaintances of exotic opinion and taste, was now far behind him. He was again, as the Gospel had it, ‘a man under authority, and having soldiers under him’. The army was not a world so apart from the everyday as was John Keble’s kingdom of God. But apart it was – not because Hervey wished it to be, but because it had to be. How might a soldier face death if he were not made to act contrary to what the instincts of any mere mortal told him? John Keble was not only, therefore, a guide to matters spiritual; he might easily prove his best counsellor in things temporal.

The second letter troubled him deeply.

Lynn Regis
Norfolk
25 March 1817

Dear Captain Hervey
,

It was so very good of you to write. A grieving father is consoled by nothing so much as the thought that his son died doing his duty, as countless fathers’ sons have died in these troubled times
.

It was my younger son’s dearest wish, from when he was but a boy, to see service against the Great Disturber, and he fretted all the while at Eton, even as the army was assembling before Waterloo. And I confess to you that when I saw the casualty lists following that battle I gave thanks to the Almighty that He had spared my son from such a test. I do not dismay, though, as perhaps I might, that his death was at the hands of his fellow countrymen, for to do so might make in me a resentfulness that would be a canker. Neither do I need pain myself that there was any dereliction of duty on anyone’s part that, if it had been otherwise, might have rendered the outcome different, for Lord Towcester has written to me saying that my son’s squadron leader was the finest of officers and his serjeant the most experienced of men, so that nothing more might have been done to render him better support in that singular duty
.