Hervey 11 - On His Majesty's Service (40 page)

But Hilal Pasha did not wait on his allotted time. At seven o’clock, two hours after sunrise, when the Russians’ offensive intentions were observable from the walls – if not their paucity of numbers – two envoys approached from the threatened gates to treat for more favourable terms. Hervey heard the supplication and expected Diebitsch to concede, in the customary manner of eastern bargaining, but instead he heard only the baldest refusal and the order for the assault columns to close to the advance siege-works.

His heart sank. He had seen blood enough – Russian
and
Turk.

But none had reckoned on what terms the
citizens
of Adrianople sought: before the envoys had even regained the walls, the gates were flung open and the people spilled out in a great mass, Turk, Christian and Jew alike, to tender submission, bring peace-offerings – wine, sweetmeats, fruit and bread, so that soon the
maidan
looked like a vast fairground. Then the troops themselves came out and threw down their muskets, abandoning the defence-works before any formalities of a treaty were concluded.

It was over; and Hervey could only ponder on whether, had it come to a fight, ‘Valens’ would have prevailed, or the Goth. ‘A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers’; Hervey felt uncommon relief, a surge like the racing tide. He was half-done with fighting.

That night they dined in the seraglio’s marbled hall off gold and silver-gilt, with the choicest food of the palace kitchens and the finest wines of the Christian cellars, and slept on soft divans to the sound of tinkling fountains in the courtyard-garden. It was paradise but for the recollection that in due time, perhaps sooner than later, they would have to rise from their cushions, and leave the sound of stillness, for the siege of sieges.

Next morning, Agar begged leave to explore the Selimiye, the mosque which one of the sons of Suleiman the Magnificent had built. Hervey was content to grant it – he would have gone himself were there not despatches to write – but with Corporal Acton accompanying, for Johnson had already set the other dragoons to ‘making and mending’. ‘And tomorrow, if there is no movement of the army, I should like to see the ground where Valens was undone.’

Fairbrother had already declared his intention to do nothing but sit in the shade of the seraglio’s courtyard, uncomprehending of all languages spoken about him and therefore able with perfect concentration to finish reading – strange as it seemed to Hervey –
Guy Mannering
, which had lodged several days unopened in his small pack, with a mark at the beginning of the second part.

‘What moved you to choose it?’ asked Hervey when they were alone, more disposed to humour him of late.

‘It was in that bundle I bought as a single lot at your bookseller’s. I wanted the Hazlitt, principally, and the others looked engaging.’

‘I confess I’ve not read it.’

‘You ought to. Mannering’s a colonel.’

‘I imagine it is Scotch?’

‘There, and Holland, and India.’

Hervey was taking his ease over yet more coffee. ‘You know, I read
Waverley
, for he’d caught the rebellion very well, said those who knew about it, but I confess I was not greatly drawn to Scotland. I can’t think but that its wildness is mean, or melancholy – though I wouldn’t mind seeing Culloden.’

Fairbrother picked another fig from the silver dish which one of the servants of the seraglio had brought. ‘Well, I must say that I’m intrigued by the place – at least as Scott portrays it.’ He smiled. ‘They have an abundance of laws, of which they seem inordinately proud, and lawyers enough to people the whole of Edinburgh, and yet nothing is settled but by the knife. I should rather like to see it. It makes the place of my birth seem tranquil by comparison.’

‘You’ve no desire for the peace of English country after all these months?’

‘In due season.’ He looked intent, suddenly. ‘Can we not see Scotland?’

Hervey shrugged. ‘I have no especial desire, but neither have I objection,’ he replied without looking up (he had begun renumbering the separate notes he had made in the course of the campaign). ‘We would need a full month to see anything of it. The roads are abominable, by all accounts – even the ones built by the excellent General Wade.’

‘“The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England”?’

‘Dr Johnson could be cutting, but no less apt for it.’

‘But all the same … Might we not, say, visit Drumossie Moor and advance our understanding of the military art?’

Hervey looked up at last to gauge how serious was his friend. ‘You would truly wish to see Scotland? The weather’s savage; you know full well you shiver as soon as the sun goes in.’

‘Then we could visit in the height of summer – the Highlands; when it is by all accounts very agreeable.’

‘That I must concede, for I have heard it said that so many millions of mosquitoes cannot all be wrong.’

Fairbrother laughed. ‘Let no one say you are deficient in humour.’

‘Does any?’

‘I confess I thought you thus when first we met at the Cape, but I have long thought it otherwise, that it is merely the mask of command.’

Hervey sighed, coming to a resolution. ‘My good friend, you have been the best of companions these twelve months and more. We shall go to Scotland on our return. Honours and appointments shall wait.’

Fairbrother eyed him gravely. ‘My dear Hervey, I shall not hold you to it, for I should never wish to have you do other than what you see as duty, but I shall, if circumstances permit, look forward to the expedition. That is all.’

And then, towards mid-morning, Hervey received intelligence that wholly changed his contemplation of the day. At Iskender with General Budberg’s brigade, which had previously been sent to intercept the flight of any Turk troops, and especially messengers, towards Constantinople, was the very man whom Princess Lieven had urged him to meet – Leutnant von Moltke. That in itself might not have impelled him to act (although, in truth, he had already decided that if the occasion arose he would do as she bid), but the principal news was that he was in the company of General von Müffling, an emissary to the Porte from the King of Prussia. Müffling had been Field Marshal Blücher’s
officier de liaison
with the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, and afterwards in Paris. Hervey had once been presented to him. It might prove valuable – yielding information of use, perhaps, to Lord Hill – if he were to go at once to Iskender, and before Müffling met with Diebitsch.

‘Is it so very urgent?’ asked Fairbrother from deep in his book, and enjoying yet another perfectly ripe fig. ‘Can we not wait until evening? Besides, I shall understand nothing. Acton will be returned in an hour or so; he will bear your armour.’

Hervey shook his head. ‘I can’t wait on him. If we can intercept Müffling there’s a chance he might speak frankly with me.’

Fairbrother looked at his friend somewhat askance. But then, with the greatest show of reluctance, he laid aside
Guy Mannering
, carefully placed the remaining figs in his small pack, and buckled on his sword.

XIX

DIE BEIDEN FREUNDE

Later

The heat of the day was at its greatest, and the labourers of the field, if they had not fled towards Constantinople, had sought the shade. Hervey and Fairbrother saw no one in their ride to Iskender except the outlying pickets at the start and at the end. They rode at a walk and leisurely trot to spare the horses, so that what might have been covered at a gallop in half an hour took two.

General Budberg had planted his pennant atop the caravanserai on the old Justinian road, where Müffling and Moltke also lodged. Tents filled every quarter, and there were more in the pasture beyond, the bounty of a happy interception of Turk baggage bound for the capital. Budberg –
von
Budberg – was from an old Westphalian family; his father, Count Andrei, had been Tsar Alexander’s foreign minister but had resigned when Alexander signed the treaty of Tilsit (for none had mistrusted Bonaparte as much as he), and had died, vindicated but in despair, a week before Borodino. The general spoke German with the accent of Riga, the family’s seat, but clear enough, and he greeted Hervey with the warmth of three months’ shared campaigning.

Hervey explained that he was come to meet Moltke at the request of Princess Lieven (he saw no reason to conceal the fact; indeed, he believed it would speed the meeting), but that he understood General Müffling was also here, ‘And I would wish to pay compliments since I had the honour to attend on him at Waterloo.’

This latter was by no means untrue, but Hervey used the word –
bedienen
(attend) – at the extreme of its meaning to lay claim to an audience.

Budberg frowned and shrugged: he was entirely sympathetic, he explained, but Müffling was heavily dosed with laudanum, having contracted a fever in Constantinople which had very materially worsened since arriving here; ‘But Moltke you may see at your leisure, Colonel. His quarters are on the other side of the courtyard.’

Hervey thanked him.

And then after a pause, in which his look turned quizzical, the general asked, ‘What is this Moltke’s business? Does he disguise himself in a junior rank?’

Hervey shook his head. ‘I do not know the answer to either question, General, but they are exactly, I think, Princess Lieven’s questions too.’

‘Very well. I hope that you do not think me mistrustful; you have shown your loyalty again and again.’

Hervey smiled uncomfortably, and took his leave.

Outside, Fairbrother waited with his customary air of unconcern, though as ever it masked activity. ‘Why do you suppose Müffling is come so far from Constantinople, and so ill?’

‘How did you know he was ill?’ replied Hervey, sensing the portents of dramatic revelation.

‘His surgeon.’

‘He speaks English?’

‘French. He
is
French. Müffling engaged him in Paris when he was Tolly’s chief of staff.’

‘You mean
Blücher’s
chief of staff.’

‘No, Tolly’s. Müffling was at the Russian headquarters after the fall of Paris – the
first
fall. He got to know Diebitsch well.’

‘Indeed? Upon my word, Müffling coming to see an old colleague. That is ripe intelligence – though it doesn’t necessarily bode anything untoward. Well, I can hardly present my compliments to him when he’s prostrate, so I’ll go to see this Moltke instead. He is, by Budberg’s reckoning, scarcely much older than Agar.’

‘Then while you’re attending on boys, I shall take a tour of the camp, and then I shall find a pleasant tree and sit beneath it to finish my book.’

Hervey’s disappointment at finding Müffling
hors de combat
was lessened by his realizing that it might serve to his advantage, for why would an English colonel come to see a Prussian lieutenant? That he could say, in all candour, he had come to see the general would surely serve to disarm the object of the Lieven curiosity. Why a lieutenant should be such an object had puzzled him since first she had asked him to make contact, and he could only conclude, and not without sympathy, that it was Moltke’s very lack of seniority that made his mission intriguing. What special expertise did he possess; what connections? It was, indeed, fortunate that Müffling’s presence here provided him with the pretext for his call. Yet within a few moments of their meeting, Hervey concluded that the young Moltke was shrewd enough to take nothing at face value.

Leutnant von Moltke was a man of spare build, not very tall, his face thin but intelligent, almost hawk-like, and – Hervey supposed – a year or so short of thirty. He admitted his visitor to his room with the greatest civility rather than formality, and he did so in English – very fluent English. Indeed, Hervey found him charming. There was coffee and lemon sherbet, and a readiness to talk that was the very opposite of the taciturn Teutonic spy of his imagining. His coming into the King of Prussia’s service was by an unusual route, Moltke explained. He was born in the duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in the year that the young General Buonaparte (he pronounced it in the Italian way) crossed the Alps and won his first great victory at Marengo. His father was in the Danish service, and five years later settled in Holstein, but was soon impoverished by the burning of his country house by the French and the plunder of his town house in Lübeck. He had grown up therefore in straitened circumstances, and at the age of eleven had been sent to the cadet school in Copenhagen. In 1818 he was commissioned into the infantry, and through the influence of his father, who was by then a lieutenant-general, he became a page to the king. Three years later, however, and for reasons he did not disclose, but which Hervey thought he perfectly understood, he resolved to enter the Prussian service.