He cursed beneath his breath. No, there was a way round every regulation: that much he had learned, and should have learned a dozen years before. He would write at once to his friend John Howard at the Horse Guards; and, of course, he would press his case in person.
‘Elizabeth, I fear I shall have to return to Hounslow rather sooner than I had expected.’
His sister looked puzzled. ‘But you said you would be able to spend a little time with us.’
Hervey looked preoccupied. ‘Yes … indeed. I’m sorry. But something has most unquestionably come up.’
V
STABLEMATES
Hounslow, afternoon, 18 March
Hervey reached the cavalry barracks just as watch setting began. He had forgotten that today it would be at three o’clock since there was a levee at Windsor and every other dragoon was required for duty there. For all but the commanding officer the gates would remain shut until the inspections were complete and the guard posted, any who had business in or out of the barracks seeing to it that they were clear of the guardhouse by the orderly trumpeter’s ‘parade for picket’, otherwise suffering the delay. It had been a long drive, but if he had remembered the advanced time of guard mounting he would have adjusted their speed over the last mile or so. He would exercise his privilege now of interrupting the sacred proceedings.
‘Commanding officer!’ shouted Corporal Denny from the leader of the regimental chariot, not allowing the horses to halt and thereby acknowledge that the commanding officer of the 6th Light Dragoons, even an acting one, could be impeded at his own gates.
The sentry scuttled through the postern like a rat started by a terrier. Seconds later the big iron-clad doors swung open, dragoons heaving with all their strength.
‘Details, atte-e-enshun!’ bellowed the corporal for the inlying picket (the detailed men were not actually designated ‘picket’ until the picket officer had finished his inspection).
With scarcely checked speed, the chariot rolled through the gateway arch. Hervey acknowledged the salutes, the gate sentry with his carbine at the ‘present’, the picket officer, a mint-new cornet from his own squadron, and the orderly serjeant-major saluting with the hand, and the rest standing rigidly to attention.
Corporal Denny reined up outside regimental headquarters. The orderly dragoon, who had doubled from the guardhouse, pulled down the chariot’s folding step, and opened the door. It had been six days since Hervey had left for Horningsham (the bout of remittent fever had detained him two days longer than he had intended) and he wanted to see District Orders and the adjutant’s occurrence book before appearing at mess.
There was no one in the orderly room, but in his office were several letters. Three were in hands he recognized: Lord George Irvine’s, Kat’s, and that of his old friend Captain (sometime Commodore) Sir Laughton Peto. He hesitated before opening his colonel’s, for likely it contained the reply to his express asking leave to purchase the lieutenant-colonelcy. Not that he entertained the slightest doubt as to Lord George’s support. Nevertheless he laid it aside for the moment to deal instead with the four unrecognized hands. These, however, turned out to be matters of no great account, which could wait for the morning. Next he opened Kat’s. Before he had left for Wiltshire he had sent her a brief note saying he would be gone some days, but expected to return within the week.
Holland-park
13th March
My dearest Matthew,I too am sorry at your news and trust that you will have a speedy and a happy return. As I told you these two nights past, I go to my sister’s in Hertfordshire today until Sunday next, and beg that you will join me there for as long as may be, for I believe I shall soon thereafter go to Athleague and there stay a full month until the work here at Holland-park is done. Pray let me know immediately you return when it shall be.Your ever loving,Kat.
Hervey felt a moment’s unease at the intimacy of the endearment, though he had seen it on the page often enough (and, heaven knew right well, elsewhere too). Kat would expect him to drive this very evening to Holland Park, but that was out of the question. He must show himself at mess, and there was a field day tomorrow. And besides, was he not resolved on … regularizing his life?
He laid the letter aside and opened that from Peto, which he saw had been delivered in the day’s London post.
The United Service Club
18th March
My Dear Hervey,I am attending at the Admiralty this week, and expect to travel thence to Norfolk. Would you be so good as to dine with me tomorrow evening?Ever Yr good friend,Laughton Peto.
Hervey was much cheered by the revelation that his old friend was ashore and close at hand, and by the prospect of seeing him again so soon. He would reply first thing in the morning.
He picked up Lord George Irvine’s letter again. It could not, of course, contain the positive information that the command was his, but he was confident that no matter what the Horse Guards’ new regulations said, in practice all that was required was for the colonel of a regiment to make his wish known to the commander-in-chief, and the appointment was then but a formality. Yet he baulked at breaking the seal nevertheless. There was duty to attend to first – District Orders and the occurrence book; he could not simply pick the cherry from the cake. In any case, and despite all reason, he still felt uncertain. He laid down the letter once more and turned open the file of orders.
In ten minutes he learned that nothing had materially altered in the London District during his absence, and that nothing was likely to do so – no notice of reviews, general officer’s field days, levees nor the like. He looked at the copy of The London Gazette enclosed with the orders, noting its appointments – in particular that the King had been pleased to appoint his brother the Duke of Clarence to be High Admiral of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, ‘and of the Dominions, islands, Territories thereunto belonging’ – and wondering what, if any, consequence there would be for his friend Peto. He turned the page and glanced through the honours: there were to be three new barons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland: ‘Sir John Singleton Copley, Knight, the name, stile and title of Baron Lyndhurst … the right Honourable Sir Charles Abbott, Knt, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, the name, stile and title of Baron Tenterden … the Right Honourable William Conyngham Plunket, the name, stile and title of Baron Plunket, of Newtown, in the county of Cork’. There were several knights, and several more knights-commander of the various orders. And ‘to be Knight of the Royal Guelphic Order, Eyre Somervile Esq., C.B.’!
Hervey smiled broadly. He knew Eyre Somervile to be worthy of any honour, but why so singular an order of knighthood puzzled him.
He read on: a report on the royal assent to several Acts of Parliament – ‘An Act to amend and enlarge the powers and provisions of an Act, relating to the Heckbridge and Wentbridge Railway’; ‘An Act for providing a further maintenance for the Rector of the parish of St John, Horslydown, within the town and borough of Southwark, in the county of Surrey’; ‘An Act to enable the Birmingham Coal company to sue and be sued in the name of their Secretary, or one of the members of the said company’, various Acts for more effectually repairing and maintaining roads in the Midland counties and Lancashire, various Acts relating to financial instruments (he shook his head: these were tedious details to detain him); and finally ‘An Act for fixing, until the twenty-fifth day of March one thousand eight hundred and twenty-eight, the rates of subsistence to be paid to innkeepers and others on quartering soldiers’.
Hervey nodded at that. He considered himself more than a little fortunate to be in temporary command of a regiment quartered in barracks, for the vexations of billeting were many and unavoidable. Not least of these were the difficulties in maintaining a proper regime of feeding the troop horses, while in barracks the adjutant, the riding-master and the veterinary surgeon could cast their eyes over the entire regiment’s stables in a quarter of an hour, and as a consequence every man was a better horsemaster.
But that was all behind them. He laid down the orders and took up the adjutant’s occurrence book. He read it quickly, for it contained no more than the usual number of defaulters, routine comings and goings, receipts and issues, reports and returns. Then under the heading ‘Veterinary’ he saw ‘three horses from A Trp confined in isolation, symptoms of the farcy’.
This was something he would rather not have read. There was always a certain number of the regiment’s horses unfit for duty – lameness, sores and abrasions, thrush, a cough – albeit a smaller number, the Sixth flattered themselves, than in other regiments. But the farcy was a different business altogether, an ulcerous death, and spread like the plague.
But he was jumping to conclusions. After all, the entry read symptoms of the farcy. The symptoms might as easily betoken something else: a cold, and sores from ill-fitting saddlery, or stall-chafing. Harmless enough. The trouble was, a regiment quartered in barracks rather than billeted on innkeepers and the like circulated its ailments all too easily. If it were farcy it might be round the entire lines in a week.
He cursed. He had seen the farcy only once before, in a livery stables in Sussex when first the Sixth had paraded for the Peninsula. He had taken Jessye there, and two of his fellow cornets had taken their chargers too, to rest before embarkation. The symptoms in one of the post horses had gone unnoticed, and the infection had spread, so that the lairage was put in quarantine and Jessye missed Hervey’s first campaign – a thing he had always been grateful for since she would likely as not have perished with the others at Corunna. How she had not contracted the farcy there was beyond him – beyond any of the farriers even to explain. They had better pray hard that the symptoms here now were of something else. He would summon the veterinary surgeon at once. No, he would go to the infirmary lines and see for himself.
As a rule evening stables parade was finished by watch setting, and timings being advanced by three hours perforce made no difference to the routine. The mounting of the quarter-guard, which even in barracks the regiment knew as the inlying picket, signalled the change from the day’s routine to the night’s, just as in the field the evening stand-to-horses signalled that change. It was not customary for the commanding officer to visit in the barracks during the ‘silent hours’, the regiment at this time being in the care of the picket officer, but the commanding officer could go when and where he liked, and Hervey was of the mind that these were circumstances that permitted a variation in custom.
The infirmary lines were no different from the troop lines except that they were built with loose boxes rather than standing stalls in order to allow the patient to lie down at full stretch. They were high-ceilinged, allowing a good circulation of air, they were weatherproof, clean, well drained, and they smelled of new straw and tar. These lines were as good as they came, reckoned Hervey, and they were set well apart from the others. Not a bad beginning for quarantine.
He was surprised to find the veterinary surgeon still at duty, however, when there was scarce a dragoon to be seen anywhere else. ‘Sam, I am sorry to see you here so late.’
The veterinarian was taking the temperature of one of the isolation mares. ‘Good evening, sir,’ he replied, without taking his eyes from the thermometer. ‘Up five degrees,’ he said matter-of-factly to the orderly, who duly recorded it in the book.
The Sixth’s form of address among officers was a touch unusual. All except the commanding officer, who was called ‘Colonel’ by the newest dragoon, were on familiar terms, the rank-prefix used only very formally. Hervey, a brevet major in acting command, could hardly be addressed as ‘Colonel’, but neither did it seem correct for the officers – the more junior ones at least – to answer to him familiarly. Instead of ‘Hervey’ he was therefore ‘sir’, the form used by the dragoons for any officer, and for a serjeant-major too, as well as for any NCO when there was an officer on parade. As for the veterinarian, whose rank was always anomalous, the Sixth had for many years had their own custom: the officers called him by his Christian name.
Veterinary-Surgeon Samuel Kirwan was a ‘respectable’ practitioner. Indeed the Sixth had been lucky for twenty years in this regard, having been spared rough ‘cattle doctors’ little better educated than the farriers, getting instead men of learning from the new veterinary schools. Sam Kirwan had come to the regiment on its return from India, six months before. His father, a naval surgeon, had died after the Nile, his mother not long after that, and the orphan Kirwan had lived five years in the Yarmouth workhouse before a distant relative had claimed him. He had worked his way through the London Veterinary College and joined the artillery as assistant veterinary surgeon, until the vacancy with the Sixth gave him his own regimental practice. He was a little older than Hervey, but wholly inexperienced in campaigning, unlike the Sixth’s past veterinarians. He appeared not to have the instinct of a Frederick Selden, who had seen them so sour-tongued through the latter part of the Peninsula and Waterloo, nor the hands of a David Sledge, who had lately endured with them in India; but there was something in him of the science of John Knight, the man who had elevated veterinary surgery in the regiment to a position of indispensability (though – a great mercy in Hervey’s opinion – Sam Kirwan did not have John Knight’s dyspeptic nature).
He gave the thermometer to the orderly, entered the mare’s temperature in his own notebook, and turned to the acting commanding officer. ‘Not at all encouraging.’
‘How certain are you it’s farcy, Sam?’
The veterinarian took off his spectacles as he turned. ‘That would not be my diagnosis.’
‘Indeed? It is entered in the adjutant’s book.’
Sam Kirwan smiled thinly and shook his head. ‘I reported only the symptoms. The farriers are quick to their conclusions.’
Hervey was encouraged. ‘Then the symptoms…?’
‘The inflammation is as described in the farcy, but there is also, in two of the cases, inflammation of the pituitary membrane which lines the partition along the inside of the nose. It is discernible only by digital examination.’
Hervey approached the mare, took off a glove and, holding her muzzle down with his left hand, probed gently with his second finger. ‘I don’t know that I can discern anything, Sam.’
‘Unless you are in the habit of such an examination, sir, it is unlikely to reveal itself. I would that you washed your hands now in that vinegar-water yonder; the disease – if it is farcy – is very contagious.’
Hervey did as he was told. ‘Shall you put a name to it?’
Sam Kirwan sighed. ‘I could, but it would be better instead to refer only to the symptoms, for this virus, if it is the type I have seen before, works in a mazey way. If I tell you it is glanders you will be alarmed.’
Hervey’s jaw dropped. ‘Good God. If we so much as suspect it then we ought to shoot every one of them!’
‘I said you would be alarmed. No, I do not recommend that we shoot them, not now that they are in here. I’ve had sulphur pots placed between the lines. I’ve ordered them lit at dusk. They’ll scrub the air well enough.’
Hervey shivered. An outbreak of glanders or farcy: besides the depredations on the order of battle (and the inconvenience and expense that would arise) there was the ignominy, the yellow flag flying at the barracks gate, the line in District Orders and all. It was not the thing of which a successful tenure of command was made.
‘If there is the slightest risk of contagion then I am of a mind to shoot them forthwith.’
But Sam Kirwan shook his head. ‘It would not be scientific to say that there is not the slightest risk, but I would not think it probable. I have observed that in such cases the virus takes a hold in the air even before the sick animal is removed, or even in the blood, yet does not show itself for several days. I very much fear that if it is glanders then A Troop’s horses will be already infected. The important thing will be to keep them from the others. But I am unconvinced that it is glanders, only less so than that it is the farcy.’
‘The two are horribly of a piece. Have you spoken to the adjutant so?’
‘I have. He has given orders, I understand, for exercise at different times.’
They looked at the other occupants of the infirmary in turn, and then parted respectfully, though Hervey left the lines by no means certain they were following the right course. Destroying three troop horses which might perfectly well recover, which might indeed have nothing worse than a cold, was not something to be ordered lightly; but the well-being of four hundred more was his principal responsibility. What was certain was that his reputation would never recover if his troopers did not. He would consider it carefully and speak with the veterinarian again in the morning.
By the time he reached his quarters in the officers’ house, the picket had alerted Private Johnson, and a good fire was taking hold in the hearth in his sitting room.
‘Ah thought tha were comin back afore now, sir. Ah didn’t know what to do.’
Perhaps it was the separation – Hervey was not usually without his groom for more than a day or so – but the vowels of Johnson’s native county sounded particularly alien. It was curious: Johnson had left those parts twenty years ago and more, had never returned save once, and very briefly, and heard them only in the speech of Corporal Stray and a few others, yet they had not moderated in the slightest. Indeed, Hervey was quite convinced that they had become more pro-nounced of late, as if Johnson took some sort of perverse refuge in them.
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