Hervey 10 - Warrior (5 page)

'I believe it best if we send a cornet, Colonel.'

This was extreme counsel, he knew. Four dragoons, and as many women, had died at Hounslow since January alone, and the practice was that an officer took the ill news, and the lieutenant-colonel's condoling letter, to the family. But to Caithlin's people, in Ireland, beyond the Pale . . .

Lord Holderness smiled, however, if sadly. 'I am glad you are of that opinion, for it is mine too.'

'And one other thing, Colonel,' said Hervey, shifting his feet resolutely. 'Mrs Armstrong should have a regimental funeral. I believe she deserves no less, and that it would be of some consolation to Armstrong. The others, too – the dragoons and NCOs – would want it, I'm sure.'

Lord Holderness nodded: the fifth such funeral in a year – the inescapable business of soldiery.

Hervey now cleared his throat. 'There is, of course, the question of her religion. You would have no objection to . . . to being present at such a service?' He had no idea how his commanding officer had voted in the House of Peers on the various measures for Catholic emancipation; he had certainly not disclosed his views in the mess.

Lord Holderness raised his head, and looked at him frankly. 'I believe a man, or a woman for that matter, has a right to be buried according to the practices of his religion, and that his passing should be mourned with all due respect. I shall instruct that the regiment parades for church on the day, whether a man be Protestant or Catholic.'

Hervey smiled appreciatively. 'Thank you, Colonel.'

Lord Holderness now relaxed visibly. 'Do you happen to know where that church might be?' he asked, nodding his thanks to an orderly who brought in his coffee.

Hervey shook his head. 'I confess I have not yet the slightest idea. I suppose we are not able to have such a service in the parish church here – with a Catholic priest, I mean, not the parson. I think I must seek advice in London. I'll make a beginning at once.'

'And then there is the business of Armstrong. What's to do? He shall have to come back, don't you think – the children, and all?'

Hervey inclined his head. 'He would not expect to, I think. He would not expect to leave his post just to take up with his children. They're in good hands, after all.'

'But even so . . .'

Hervey thought a little more, and then began nodding his head, slowly. In the normal course of events – in war, India, or wherever – these things were misfortunes to be taken, if not quite in one's stride, then with fortitude, in the place they came. For what other way was there? But not now; not when the nation was at peace, when its army was made up of true volunteers. The Sixth did not treat its dragoons heartlessly; it never had. 'Patrician command and the fellowship of the horse': that was the way of the Sixth, was it not?

He breathed deep. 'I should need to replace him, Colonel. It would not serve with Quilter standing in. He's a sound enough serjeant, but he could not manage a troop.' (He would have been content to have Wainwright do duty, but Wainwright was too junior.)

'Then I'll instruct the adjutant to issue the necessary orders.'

Hervey's mind was already decided, however. 'With respect, Colonel, I should like to take Collins.'

Lord Holderness nodded. 'I have no objection. But why Collins?'

'As a rule, Colonel, I would not try to favour those I knew best, but Collins, I judge, would serve admirably, and since there is every prospect of trouble with the native tribes before our term at the Cape is up, I should want to be certain of my man.'

'That is reasonable.'

Lord Holderness was indeed a commanding officer whose instincts were reasonable as well as admirable. Hervey did not suppose there was a man in the Sixth who could have complaint against him. Did it matter much that in the exhilaration of manoeuvres, two months ago, a cold immersion in the Thames had induced a fit of epilepsy? (He, Hervey, and the regimental serjeantmajor had arranged things with the utmost discretion, so that few others knew of it.) There would always be someone to gather up the reins, so to speak.Was it not more important that the regiment was content, well found – as undoubtedly it was?

He laid down his coffee cup, and rose. 'Thank you, Colonel. And now if you will permit me, I will make haste to London.'

'Of course,' said Lord Holderness, rising also. He smiled a shade broader, and with a touch of wryness. 'How was Brighton?'

Hervey coloured a little. 'It was as ever Brighton is, Colonel.'

'I am glad to hear it!'

Hervey took his leave a fraction happier, even if his smile concealed its own measure of wryness. He spoke with the adjutant of the agreed arrangements and actions, and was then pleasantly surprised to find that Malet had ordered the regimental chariot to wait on his pleasure.

'Better than sending to Derryman's for a chaise, I think.'

'Indeed,' said Hervey, thankfully (better and a good deal cheaper – half a crown for the chariot man, Corporal Denny). 'I'll send word as soon as I have the day, and then you may arrange things for the parade itself.'

'Of course.'

As Hervey made to leave, Malet handed him a small bundle of letters. 'These were brought from the officers' house for you. There's one with the Horse Guards' stamp.'

'Indeed?' Hervey took them, trying not to show excessive interest (a letter from the commander-in-chief's headquarters could be no occasion for disquiet now that the inquiry into the events at Waltham Abbey was scotched).

'And our respects, of course, to Lady— to Mrs Hervey.'

'Thank you, Malet,' he replied, quietly, putting the letters into his pocket and nodding his goodbye.

Outside the orderly room, Private Johnson was waiting for him. 'Ah didn't think tha were back, sir, till next week.'

Hervey was impressed by the speed at which notice of his return travelled the barracks, though Johnson had always had an ear for comings and goings. 'There were matters to be about.'

'Mrs Armstrong, ay.'

'The most wretched business. Are you able to come with me to London?'

Since only guard duty would require leave of absence of any but his own officer, and since as an officer's groom he was excused such duty, Johnson was able to say 'yes' at once, albeit with a certain reluctance. He was unsure, as he had confided many months before, that Hervey's new bride would welcome his continuance. Hervey had assured him in the most decided fashion that there was no cause for even the slightest unease in that respect, but Johnson fancied he understood the way of new wives. Lady Henrietta Hervey – Mrs Hervey, as Johnson had always known her, being perennially unmindful of the correct usages – had welcomed him unreservedly. He would have done anything for her. He thought, still, that if he too had been at Serjeant-Major Armstrong's side that day in the white wastes of America, she might be alive yet, even though once many years ago when he had voiced the same, Hervey, though deeply touched, had told him most unequivocally that he would with certainty have perished by the axe or the arrow. Nevertheless, Lady Henrietta Hervey remained to Johnson's mind the apotheosis of wedded-womanhood. Lady Lankester – Mrs Matthew Hervey as now was – for all that she was the widow of a regimental hero, was not, to his mind, of the same water.

It was some time before Hervey thought to open his letters. Private Johnson had a good deal to say, and there was the question of how and where to begin on the 'arrangements'. It was the very devil that the regiment no longer had its own chaplain, and that the rector of the parish in which were the barracks, and the priest of the Hounslow mission, were both absentees. His first notion was to send word to his friend John Keble, who would surely know how to proceed, but time precluded it. He knew no clergyman, of any rank, in London. He certainly knew no Catholic. Yet there must be such counsel. A decade or so ago, before the Great Disturber was despatched to his final, fatal exile on St Helena, there had been priests and religious aplenty in London. True, they spoke in French – they were pensioners, indeed, of King George during their temporary exile – but that would have been no impediment. It was an age past, however: he must needs consult, now, with the English Mission.

How he disliked that word –
mission
– as if England were some heathen place, like the Americas of the conquistadores, or the Africa to which he would soon return. It was strange: in Portugal and Spain he had had no resentment of the Pope's religion. He had attended its services, at times even frequently. He liked the air of those churches, great and small, the sense of the living, independent of any actual human presence. In an English church, even in the one he loved the most, his father's in Horningsham, the sense was of something past, gone. In the Peninsula the Duke of Wellington had issued the most particular instructions to the army concerning the respect to be accorded the religion of His Majesty's allies. When the Blessèd Sacrament was carried in procession about the streets, an officer was to remove his headdress, and other ranks were to present arms. And it was strange how this order not only avoided offence to the allies, but also increased the esteem in which their religion was held.

Perhaps his memory played him false, though. He himself had called a good deal of it mummery, and worse, as had others of the Sixth. Yet it was not the same loathing – by no means the same – as that which they sometimes had of the Catholic church in England, where too often it had been the begetter of treachery. Or in Ireland, where contempt for the mean condition of the native population, the ignorance and indolence, was at once extended to their religion, which somehow seemed both the cause and the effect.

But then in Rome, whither his sister had taken him to interrupt the melancholy of Henrietta's death, he had found his way to the English seminary, where the rector himself had greeted him with a warmth that was at once welcoming and yet disturbing. On his knees in the Martyrs' Chapel, tears had welled up at the thought of what he had lost – and what his daughter had lost – and he had found something comforting in that place.

Yes, he would seek out the headquarters of the English Mission in London, and he would do it without hesitation or distaste. He would speak to its chief priest – the bishop, whatever was his style – and ask him how the Sixth might bury the wife of one of its most esteemed soldiers, with all the proper ceremony of her religion. And with all the proper ceremony of the regiment.

'What is that you said, Johnson?'

'Ah said, sir, t'serjeant-major were a good man.'

' "
Were
a good man"? He is still.'

'Ah know, but wi' Mrs Armstrong gone an' all . . .'

'I don't see . . .'

'Ah reckon it'll go bad wi'im.'

'Of course it will go badly with him. How . . .'How did Johnson think that Henrietta's death had gone with
him
?

Johnson could usually be relied on for the blithest of outlooks, but in this case it was not so much insensibility as the conviction that Hervey bore misfortune in some other way. 'Ah reckon 'e'll chuck it for them kinder of 'is. 'E were right soft on 'em.'

Hervey would have reminded his groom that he too had once 'chucked it' – had resigned his commission – except that that was not the material point (Johnson's prognosis somehow stirred guilt in him). 'Then we must pray that he does not. See to it that he does not, for his best place is in the regiment; the best place for his children, indeed.'

Johnson had no argument with that. He owned that his own long life to date – half and more of the allotted span – was on account of his wearing regimentals. Corunna, Talavera, Salamanca and many another Peninsula scrape, Waterloo, countless affairs in India: these were nothing compared with the vicissitudes he would have faced in his native county – the silted lungs, the broken back, the roof-falls, the fire-damp . . .

''E'd a'been a right good RSM.'

'Johnson, I don't think I make myself plain. Sar'nt-Major Armstrong's prospects are not diminished. He will return here on long leave of absence, and in due course he will return to his troop –
our
troop.'

'Bet 'e won't if 'e comes back from t'Cape. Them kinder of 'is—'

'He'll return, I tell you.'

'Who's gooin' to do 'is duty at t'Cape – Quilter?'

'
Serjeant
Quilter.'

Johnson huffed, not so decidedly as to require a rebuke, but sufficient to register his opinion.

But Hervey had no need to check the delinquency, not when he could pretend he had not heard, and it was not anyway to be Quilter. 'Sar'nt-Major Collins will do duty.'

Johnson sucked in air sharply. 'That'll go bad wi' t'sar'nt-major. Them's rivals an' all.'

'Rivals? Collins—' (he checked himself, crossly) '
Sar'nt-Major
Collins is his junior. If you're thinking which of them would replace the regimental sar'nt-major there would be no question but that it would be Armstro—
Sar'nt-Major
Armstrong.'

'That's not what they says in t'canteen.'