Nizams Daughters mh-2

by Allan Mallinson

  ‘Oh,’ replied Hervey, disappointed — not to say disconcerted — by the intelligence. ‘I had imagined their gunnery to be more expeditious than that.’

  ‘Then you are in error. It is not to be compared with Woolwich. Don’t mistake me, mind: the celerity with which those guns are served is magnificent. But it’s broadsides — volley fire.’

  ‘In a frigate less so, however?’

  ‘In a frigate less so, yes. But that was rare shooting this afternoon — very uncommon shooting indeed. You know that Captain Peto laid the gun himself?’

  Hervey did not.

  ‘Peto is that sort of captain.’

  ‘I am full of admiration. I had not supposed he took so great a risk firing on the gendarmerie. And that he should shoulder the responsibility so personally is, as you say, singular.’

  ‘Just so, Hervey. I doubt there is any bolder frigate captain in the navy. But let us to other matters: what brings you to Nisus?’

  Faced with his first occasion for subterfuge, Hervey all but foundered. ‘Well, er, yes… you may. You see, I am to go to India to study the employment of the lance with the native cavalry regiments. The Duke of Wellington intends raising lancer regiments and wishes to know how best they should be ordered and trained.’

  Locke seemed puzzled. ‘The cavalry leads a queerer life than the Johnnies, that’s for sure. It seems a deuced mazy way to find how to carry a spear!’

  Hervey smiled. ‘The duke is very particular about things.’ How easily came the deception now.

  ‘Well, we must get your mare aboard. Yon crane and hoist — see? A dozen marines is all it should take.’

  And, indeed, a dozen marines was all it took to hoist Jessye aboard. She lay in the sling with neither a swish of her tail nor a whicker (but looking, thought Hervey, distinctly sorry for herself) as she was first hoist aloft and then lowered into the waist. No more trouble than a gun barrel, said the boatswain. The sling’s fastenings loosed, she stepped into her box as if from the paddock, and was promptly rewarded with carrots by Johnson, his face now changed from one of anxiety to satisfaction. A promising beginning, said Hervey, though he knew it by no means certain she would survive the passage. Nevertheless, she had enough space to turn about freely and to lie at full stretch — which was more than the horses to and from the Peninsula had had. The stall was airy (it could hardly have been otherwise), yet there was enough shelter from rain and spray. Not too heavy seas to begin with — that was what he prayed for.

  ‘You are prone to seasickness, then, are you?’ asked Peto, though the tone was of indifference rather than sympathy.

  ‘Oh no, I manage quite well. It’s my mare I have a care for, since a horse has not the facility to vomit. They get the colic instead, and in the worst event they die.’

  Several hands had gathered about the stall, intrigued by the addition to Nisus’s complement. One of them held out something in his palm, but she only sniffed at it and snorted disapprovingly.

  ‘What’s tha givin ’er?’ demanded Johnson.

  ‘Only baccy,’ replied the hand.

  ‘Tha daft bugger!’ frowned Johnson. ‘An ’orse doesn’t chew t’bacca!’

  ‘Will’e ’ave a bit o’ salt-pork?’ asked another.

  ‘Saints alive,’ cursed Johnson, ‘tha’s as daft as ’im! An ’orse doesn’t ’ave meat! And “he’s” a she!’

  Peto, observing from the quarterdeck and by now much diverted, hailed his first lieutenant. ‘Mr Belben, I think the boatswain should be advised to instruct the crew that this important animal be given no titbits!’

  ‘Ay, ay, sir,’ replied Belben, with a long-suffering raise of the eyebrows.

  Later that evening, while Peto attended to his papers, Hervey went up to the quarterdeck to take the air. First he stopped at Jessye’s stall. The feverish chill, the long haul from Paris and the hoisting aloft would have put many a blood on its side, but Jessye stood square in her stall chewing hay with slow but regular rotation of the jaw, grinding out the goodness from the Timothy. He had nothing to trouble himself about.

  On the quarterdeck he found Henry Locke leaning on the taffrail and gazing out into the busy channel that was the estuary of the Seine. The light was failing fast, but a dozen vessels of various sizes could be observed under way, and as many more lay at anchor. The steady light from a lantern threw the lieutenant’s features into sharp relief, the hollow of his nose and the empty space that had once been his strong chin all too apparent in profile. Hervey shivered a little, and then hailed him.

  ‘Good evening, Hervey,’ replied Locke without looking round. ‘Might one ever tire of such sights?’

  Hervey perceived the ambiguity in the question but could not be certain that it was intended. ‘I can see why some do not, though I am a landsman,’ he said. ‘Is this what drew you to the Marines?’

  ‘No, but it is one of the things that keeps me: Worcestershire is not notably a naval county. So, we’re all set fair for the Indies?’ He did not alter his gaze as he changed the subject.

  ‘Yes. Do you know India?’

  ‘Only from the telling of others. A place where a man might live like a prince on a lieutenant’s pay.’

  Hervey smiled. ‘So I hear. You have not been tempted, then?’

  Locke turned to him. His face, insofar as his disfigurement permitted any range of sentiment, bore an expression of melancholy. ‘I have only one desire, Hervey, and that’s to win back Locke-hall.’

  Hervey was intrigued. ‘Do you wish to speak of it?’ he enquired solicitously.

  ‘Gambling debts mostly.’

  Hervey sighed to himself — an old story. ‘You gambled away your inheritance?’

  Locke stood upright and looked at him with a frown: ‘No! It was gambled by my father in his dotage. I was to have a cornetcy in the Blues: every penny for it went on the tables.’

  ‘And that is why you went to sea?’

  ‘I tried my hand at one or two ventures, but I have no head for business and no stomach for a profession. Admiral Jervis was a cousin of my late mother’s, and it was on his recommendation that I received a commission.’

  ‘You said win back Locke-hall?’

  ‘Ay, with prize-money. But since a lieutenant of Marines ranks merely with a navy warrant officer for pay and prizes, we shall need to capture a treasure fleet!’

  ‘And we are at war with no-one.’

  ‘Ay, just so. Do you have a wife, Hervey?’

  He explained his circumstances, and now the hope — vain as it sounded in retelling — that Henrietta might at any moment appear with the gallant Corporal Collins.

  ‘She sounds to have capability,’ replied Locke. ‘Ward of the Marquess of Bath, d’ye say? Money, too. Well, let us hope this letter you say you wrote is sufficient. Many a woman would suppose herself proper jilted by a lover who runs off to the east. All her grand friends will have to be told… explanation after explanation.’

  ‘She might yet arrive, and—’

  ‘And you would ask the captain for another berth?’ smiled Locke.

  ‘No… I had not thought… that is—’

  He smiled again. ‘A wife isn’t something to pack in a marine’s dunnage. We fight light, as they say. And I dare say, too, they don’t stow so well on a bat-horse either!’

  Hervey frowned. ‘That is a cynic’s counsel indeed!’

  ‘I myself was married once,’ replied Locke, claiming thereby a right to the philosophy.

  Hervey studied him for a second or so, trying to gauge his earnestness, and then pressed him to the details.

  ‘She took one look at my face when I returned home and away she went. She hardly took much to living in lodgings in Portsmouth in any case.’

  Hervey expressed himself sorry.

  ‘I cannot say I blame her,’ sighed Locke, ‘but I thought I had married into stock made of sterner stuff. We had known each other since… well, since we shared a pew.’

  Hervey did not think it appropriate to reveal
that his attachment with Henrietta had an equal gestation. ‘And Locke-hall shall be without a mistress?’ he tried, curious as to the force which bound the man to his vision.

  ‘Never again should I marry, even were my wife to have us put asunder in law.’ And then he smiled: ‘But as lord of the manor there’d be lasses enough to keep me content. As long as the candle was blowed out!’

  Hervey smiled, perhaps less fully than he might.

  ‘Matthew Hervey, don’t you preach at me. You think on how life would be if your fair looks were rearranged by grapeshot or a sabre-cut. Even the whores in Portsmouth run when they see my face.’

  ‘What, all of them?’ he asked in disbelief.

  ‘Well, I’ve not tried all of them, to be sure. But one whore who’s too particular is a powerful insult to a man’s… manhood.’

  Hervey clapped his hand on Locke’s shoulder and smiled broadly. Even through the thick serge of the scarlet coat he could feel the brawn built of hours at exercise, the cutlass-swinging for which the Royals were renowned. Locke stood an inch in excess of six feet, taller than any man aboard — a powerful, if artless, fighter held in affection as well as respect by his marines. ‘I think you are as lucky in your ship as I am in my regiment,’ proclaimed Hervey.

  Locke returned the smile as broadly. ‘Yes, she’s a fine ship. And what service she’s seen! That night before Trafalgar — she and Euryalus did work to make the meanest heart proud.’

  ‘Indeed,’ nodded Hervey, ‘there can be few who do not know it. And what poetic fortune it was, too.’

  Locke seemed puzzled. ‘Poetic fortune?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hervey; ‘that it should be Nisus with Euryalus, of all ships.’

  ‘Hervey,’ replied Locke, now looking quite decidedly puzzled, ‘I do not have the slightest idea of what you speak.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Hervey, surprised, but anxious not to cause embarrassment, ‘were Nisus and Euryalus not Trojans, Trojan warriors?’

  ‘Well,’ said Locke, his brow obviously furrowed, though concealed under the roundhat; ‘Nisus was a Trojan warrior — that I know. But of his attachment with Euryalus I know not. What is the connection?’

  Hervey was relieved his remark seemed not to have caused his erstwhile idol to be abashed. ‘It’s just something I remember from those hours in the classroom at Shrewsbury,’ he said lightly. ‘Nisus and Euryalus were friends, the closest of friends — David and Jonathan, Pylades and Orestes.’

  Locke nodded his understanding.

  ‘Together one night they stole into the enemy’s camp and killed many as they lay sleeping. Euryalus was wounded, and Nisus rushed to save him, but both were slain.’

  Locke made no reply for the moment, and then sighed. ‘Well, had our Euryalus got into trouble that night, Nisus would not have been able to go to her aid: she could not afford to lose contact with the French. But I for one, in ordinary, own that the measure of a man is his steadfastness towards his comrades in battle.’

  Hervey seemed uneasy.

  ‘ “Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his friend,” it says somewhere in the Bible does it not?’ said Locke by way of explanation.

  ‘Yes, in St John. For his friends, indeed.’

  ‘But I’m very much taken with the Trojan legend. I did not know it.’

  Hervey smiled again, but his expression was still a little pained. ‘Would all Euryalus’s crew have acknowledged that Nisus’s captain did the right and proper thing — leaving her to her fate in order to stay on the tail of the French?’

  Locke gave a sort of half-shrug. ‘The usages of battle are well understood in the Royal Navy. Why do you ask?’

  Hervey asked because of Serjeant Strange, and for an instant he was tempted to tell Locke of it. But that was not his way, nor was this the time. ‘Oh, nothing — merely that I wished to have some notion of the way things are in the wooden world.’

  ‘They are different in the detail, for sure, but in the spirit I reckon not,’ said Locke. ‘You must learn of it. Mr Belben would, as a rule, take you round the ship, but I shall do it — to explain things with a landsman’s eye.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Hervey eagerly, flattered by

  Locke’s attention as if still the schoolboy.

  ‘But now you must excuse me: there’s the watch to set, and we shall have many hours to talk during the passage to the Indies. And I tell you, Matthew Hervey, I am right glad to have the opportunity. It is curious, is it not, how a couple of shared years at the same school make the intervening ones as nothing?’

  Hervey smiled, eased by Locke’s frankness and warmed by his congeniality. How fortunate he was, always, with his comrades-in-arms.

  He left the quarterdeck, returning the sentry’s salute with a touch to the brim of his hat, and strode purposefully to Jessye’s stall where he hoped to find practical business to occupy his mind for an hour or so before he turned in. But Jessye was lying down, eyes closed and breathing soundly. He crossed the deck and clambered onto one of the guns to sweep the quayside with his telescope in the dying light. But there was no sign of Collins. He snapped the glass closed, sighing, and stepped down. It was early still, but he was not yet at ease enough to go to the wardroom so instead he went to his cabin. There he undressed, threw some water over his face, cleaned his teeth with the expensive powder bought in Paris, and climbed into his swinging cot (with less difficulty than hitherto, he was relieved to find). He read the psalm appointed for the evening and then closed his eyes, leaving the safety light burning. He lay listening to the ship’s night-noises — the lapping of the waves, made audible by the open gunports either side of his cabin, and the creaking of timbers as the ship rolled ever so gently in the swell. The motion was seductive, and the manly burgundy invigorating. If only Henrietta had been beside him.

  III. FIGHTING INSTRUCTIONS

  Off Ushant, in the afternoon, two days out

  A fresh north-easterly was blowing down the Channel. Nisus was running with all but her royals set, and the wind, the groaning canvas and the creaking of timbers in every quarter of the ship tried the intimacy of conversation. Next to nothing now could be made of Ushant and the coast of Brittany. The heavy cloud made it difficult, at this distance, to tell even where the sky ended and the sea began, though a telescope might yet pick out the great lighthouse of L’Ouessant. The sea was becoming a forbidding grey. The waves were long, with white horses running, and the spray was persuading Hervey that his cloak would have been prudent. Great shearwaters skimmed the troughs with rapid wing-beats, rearing up over the wavetops in long glides and plunging from time to time in search of a finny bite. Soon they too would be leaving to winter in the warmer islands of the South Atlantic, not many miles distant from where Bonaparte himself would pass both his winters and summers. Hervey shivered, if only slightly.

  Captain Peto had spoken hardly at all since leaving Le Havre. His lieutenants were, it seemed, men in whom he had every confidence, and his sailing-master had been long years with Nisus. He spent much of the day in his cabin surrounded by sheaves of Admiralty papers and charts, visited only by his clerk, content for the most part to observe the set of the sails from a quarter gallery. Once or twice in the morning, and then again in the afternoon and evening, he visited the quarterdeck for his solitary promenade, when, as was the custom, the whole of the windward half was instantly cleared for him. No-one ventured to address him without leave, and although this ritual aloofness seemed perfectly regular to the ship’s officers, Hervey felt keenly the loss of the earlier intimacy. Now, though, he and Locke had the quarterdeck to themselves, with only the officer of the watch, the quartermaster and two mates by the wheel.

  ‘I shouldn’t brood on matters were I you.’

  ‘Do you take your own counsel in this?’ smiled Hervey by return.

  ‘No,’ he laughed, ‘but that need not stop me. Is advice so great an insult to judgement?’

  ‘No, indeed it is not!’ laughed Hervey, thankful for Locke
’s forthright cheer.

  ‘Then tell me more of your lady: that is your trial, is it not?’

  How queer, thought Hervey, that he should feel disposed to speaking his heart to Locke. He knew him now only two days. And at Shrewsbury their situations had been so different they could scarcely be called old friends. But common years could root trust deeper than first supposed, and he was content enough to speak with a man who shared something singular. And besides, they had gone through the breach almost shoulder to shoulder. The gendarmerie was hardly Badajoz, but at the point of any assault the scale of the affair was merely theoretical. ‘Well, in truth, I should not have let my hopes rise so high,’ he admitted. ‘The odds against seeing her before we set sail could scarcely have been longer. I believe the captain might have been offended that I asked for one more day.’

  Locke smiled. ‘Well, the captain isn’t known for his patience where women are concerned. But I shouldn’t let it trouble you.’

  Hervey sighed. How he wished, now, that he had not thought of the interception stratagem, that he had trusted instead to the arrangements in Paris, where Henrietta might be told of things with due propriety, instead of harum-scarum along the coast with Corporal Collins. ‘No, I have fudged things. And I thought myself so clever!’

  ‘Tell me of her, in any case,’ pressed Locke.

  ‘I told you of her family,’ he began resolutely; ‘or, rather, of her guardian — for her people died when she was scarcely more than an infant. We have known each other since the day she came to Wiltshire, to Longleat. We shared a schoolroom together.’

  ‘Not solely the lady of fashion, then? Not someone courted to be an adornment to a man’s ambition?’

  Hervey glanced cautiously at him. ‘She is not someone who owns to nothing but fashion. She has read widely and has many accomplishments.’

  ‘And she’s pretty, I’m sure.’ His tone suggested he was leading to some general proposition.