‘Of course, in my former corps the men were enlisted for ignoble reasons – to escape the hulks, or the gallows even. We were little more than a penal battalion. They were men from, as I believe, the more disagreeable parts of England.’
Hervey now smiled, and clapped a hand to Fairbrother’s shoulder. ‘Do not imagine that because mine is a regiment of cavalry we invariably recruit a nobler sort! Johnson is from one of the meanest cities, a workhouse pauper, a refugee from the coal pits; and Wainwright I myself found in the filthiest of hovels that would disgrace, I imagine, a plantation in Jamaica.’
‘Then your regiment has made of them a very great deal, Colonel Hervey. That, or Nature would claim them as her gentlemen.’
Hervey smiled the more. ‘Come now, that is a little high-blown; though I concede they are men of special worth. Wainwright has enough courage for a whole troop.’
Fairbrother shook his head to re-emphasize the point: ‘I do not think I have admired anything so much as what passes between you and them. It is as if rank has become of no need. I once heard it said that in an English regiment, the superior officer, if he is a gentleman, will never think of it, and the subordinate, if he is a gentleman, will never forget it. I am sorry to say that I did not observe as much in my former corps. And now it seems to me that it is possible to omit the word “officer” from that dictum.’
Hervey squeezed Fairbrother’s shoulder again. ‘You are a very delightful observer, if perhaps susceptible to sentiment. But I cannot laugh at that. I am glad you think the Sixth thus; I am proud, indeed. And I must say that I have greatly enjoyed these past days. You are – I will say it – exceedingly agreeable company. I would not have better conversation in my mess than I have shared with you at table.’
‘You mean you have been agreeably surprised by the conversation of one who wears the shadowed livery?’
Hervey withdrew his hand, and frowned very pointedly. ‘Fairbrother, I will speak plainly, for I have known you now long enough. If you persist in this resentfulness you will drive away any friendship and embitter yourself terribly. Give it up!’
Fairbrother turned his head from him for a moment, and then back, as if to make a firm break with what had gone before. ‘Hervey, I do most sincerely beg pardon.’
Hervey thought Algoa Bay one of the most beautiful sights he had beheld. On his passages to and from India he had not seen the bay before, his ship standing well out to catch the south-west monsoon, east of Madagascar, or the reverse on the passage home. The shore was white, whiter than anything he recalled of Madras – which in other respects he was minded of – and beyond it was a green that invited rather than threatened (the forests of the Coromandel coast had threatened): a green that promised life, and good life, shared, rather than the fortress-forest whose repellent and repelling occupants persuaded all but the most inquisitive to keep well clear. Hervey felt a powerful desire to be in that inviting green, as others had before him: first the Dutch, and then more and more English, by which of course he must include Irish, for here was land whose title an Irish peasant might own instead of paying the rack-rents to the absent landlord. And surely, in all this country (they had sailed eight hundred miles from Cape Colony), there was enough green for everyone?
But Hervey had read the colony’s historical record, Somervile had revealed to him the contents of the most confidential of papers, and Fairbrother had told him what so many outside the castle believed: the white man lived precariously at the Cape. He knew that what he observed inland of Algoa Bay was not a wilderness, and that out of the abundant green might come at any time native hordes to reclaim all that was settled. And even if those native hordes could be checked, there would surely be more. Could these Cape settlers, a few thousand adventurers, ever know what was to come out of that green heart of Africa – or when? Ex Africa aliquid novi semper: Atilius Regulus had killed the huge African snake, and the spoils of the creature were shipped to Rome for public display. The snake had been real enough, and yet the poets had seen it as boding evil for Rome, so that Africa to their minds became Rome-hating. The Carthaginians – black Hannibal – had almost destroyed the city: the Romans in their revenge had destroyed Carthage, poisoned the wells, ploughed salt into her fertile soil. Would that be what they would have to do here, at the very extremity of the continent, just as Rome had had to do?
Hervey knew that Somervile was right. There was no prospect of a diplomatic peace without the military resources to crush the Xhosa if they refused diplomacy: si vis pacem, preparate bellum. But if the Xhosa were only a fraction of the native hordes that might pour into the colony, how might there ever be a settled peace? As Somervile pointed out, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies was not of a philosophical mind. From the perspective of Downing Street, the shores of southern Africa could be colonized in the usual way: cleared, fortified, settled, regulated – and with trade, the benign influence, conducted beyond the pale. Moreover, to Hervey there was no ill in such a vision. Why could not the Xhosa stay east of the Fish River, where by ‘treaty’ they had settled after the terrible fighting seven years ago? What accounted for their recent depredations across the Fish into the Crown Colony? They must know that it brought nothing but retribution. These Cape-Dutch farmers, these burghers (and for that matter the newer British settlers), were not men who would be satisfied with merely recovering their stolen cattle: they would want a reckoning – compensation, reparation, condign punishment.
And so the trouble would inevitably increase. Did the colony possess enough troops to fight a full-scale war with the Xhosa? That indeed was the question to which this preliminary reconnaissance was directed. History was no good presage: the fighting seven years ago had been savage, unpredictable, unconfined, the Xhosa attacking not just isolated farms but forts and the bigger settlements. Even Graham’s Town had been all but overrun. The equal savagery with which the insurrection had been put down – necessary savagery, said everyone, for there had been no alternative – had then sown the seeds of the present state of frontier insolence. In the aftermath of the French war, and with Bonaparte on St Helena, there had been plenty of troops at the Cape, but since Bonaparte’s death and the Xhosa rebellion there had been severe retrenchment; how much more savage now would they need to be if the Xhosa made war again? Must they destroy every kraal, poison the wells and plough salt into the soil beyond the Fish River?
If this magnificent landing – the sea, the beaches and the green beyond – minded Hervey of his first footing in Madras, he was soon persuaded of the difference. Madras had been all white villas the length of the shoreline (and a bustling shore at that), and a massive stone fortress, with the roofs of fine-looking buildings and the spire of St Mary’s church topping the walls, like a Hanse port. Here in Port Elizabeth there were few signs of comparable civilization. The place had been scarcely more than an empty beach not seven years before. On the heights above the Baakens River was not so much a fortress as a redoubt, wood- and earth-built in 1799 when the British had first taken the country from the Dutch. It was named Fort Frederick in honour of the then commander-in-chief, the late Duke of York, and close by were the Batavian barracks, to Hervey’s eye in no greater state of comfort than the day they had been rudely put up. He understood them to house two companies of the 55th (Westmoreland) Regiment – fretting to be on to India, their original destination, Fairbrother had told him. He could not blame them: in India there would be legions of little brown men who for a few annas would shave a private soldier of a morning, dhobi his linen, attend his uniform, black his boots and pipeclay his equipment. Here there were a few Hottentots who couldn’t be trusted with a sweeping brush. As for women, Hervey saw none to compare with that day when he came ashore in Madras.
On a promontory above the beach there was a stone pyramid. Hervey pointed as he and Fairbrother walked along the landing stage. ‘To a colonial pharo, no doubt!’
Fairbrother looked pained. ‘Do you not know?’
Hervey looked askan
ce. ‘It is of some greater significance, evidently.’
‘Hervey, it is all you need to know of a man.’ Fairbrother said it almost wistfully.
Hervey had unconsciously reassumed his military mask on touching dry land, and bridled somewhat at his companion’s obliqueness. ‘Do stop riddling.’
Fairbrother was not in the least perturbed. He was not under military orders in any significant sense (he could walk away at will), and by now the two had struck up more than a professional friendship; indeed, they had forgone all rank. ‘Hervey, do you know what it is to grieve for a woman?’
Hervey spun round. At that moment he felt the most powerful urge to strike Edward Fairbrother, an urge he had rarely felt other than in close action. The impudent assumption! Henrietta was in truth a saddening memory now, not the agonizing daily presence of the first years, nor even the dull remittent ache of the India sojourn. Yet his grief had driven him from the army, had made him for many months a melancholy companion, had sapped at his confidence and his will, distorted his view of humanity and duty, and ultimately led him to question – in many cases without an answer – so much of what he had once held dear. He knew what it was to grieve for a woman.
‘I believe you have lived too long outside decent society else you would never have presumed.’ He spat the words icily, intending to wound as deep by return.
Fairbrother froze. Then he put both hands to Hervey’s shoulders.
Hervey did not recoil, although it was so alien a gesture.
‘My dear fellow.’ The voice was as warm with sympathy as Hervey’s had been cold with anger. ‘I believe I may indeed have lived for too long outside decent society. And in that case, for it was not principally of my own choosing, I beg you would forgive me. It was a most arrogant presumption, and I am sorry for it. I confess that I am altogether too disposed to it.’
Hervey’s face softened. ‘Then we have more in common than you suppose.’ He turned and continued along the broad wooden walk to the quayside. ‘Hadn’t you better tell me what is the pyramid?’
‘Have you heard of General Donkin?’
‘I saw much of his brigade at Talavera.’
‘He was briefly governor here at the Cape. He had been in India, and his wife – of but a very few years – died there, and he was returning with his young son when he received orders to assume the governorship to allow Lord Charles Somerset to return to England. It was he – not Somerset – who put the frontier on to a proper footing. There were settlers arriving from England, and there were many from my old corps too who were being promised grants of land. He surveyed the whole area. And that pyramid is a memorial to his wife.’
Hervey stopped again. He looked at the monument, then back at the brig, from which flat-bottomed boats were already warping her cargo to the landing stages, and then at his new friend. ‘Her name, I imagine, was Elizabeth?’
Fairbrother nodded.
Hervey found himself vowing he would one day do the same, before recalling himself to his senses. ‘I think we may delay our necessary calls and business here. It is a warm day, and I think I would have you know something. Let us find a quiet spot, and I will tell you of why I spoke so sharp.’
Thanks to the fleetness of the lighters, and the address of the postal official and his steam barge, it took but a couple of hours to arrange for the officer commanding the frontier, and the district magistrate – the landdrost – of Port Elizabeth, to receive them. They met at the garrison headquarters, a thatched, stone-walled, single-storey affair the size and shape of the nave of a small English parish church. The officer commanding, Major Hearne of the 49th (Hertfordshire) Foot, greeted them cordially. Hervey had taken the precaution, though his friend wore only semi-military dress, of introducing Fairbrother as ‘Captain’ and aidant. The landdrost, a former officer in the Cape Regiment but now with a prospering farm and waistline, was equally welcoming. They explained that they were of course aware of the arrival of the new lieutenant-governor, and hoped that this presaged greater attention to the frontier, declaring very candidly that General Bourke appeared too encumbered with matters of economy to cast his customary soldier’s eye on the situation.
The four of them sat down to coffee – a fiercely strong liquid made from beans brought from the East Indies – and Cape brandy, much rougher than its French begetter, if not as strong.
‘How much am I to assume you know of the frontier, Colonel Hervey?’ asked Major Hearne.
The officer commanding the frontier was a little older than Hervey, with a broken nose and powder-burn scar on his cheekbone. It was the first time that Hervey could remember an officer of evident seniority – and experience – who was now his subordinate. ‘I have read what there is to read, Major Hearne, but I believe it would be better to assume no knowledge. I have scarce been at the Cape a month, after all.’
‘Very well, Colonel. Perhaps we need go back no further than to 1819. The Xhosa all but overwhelmed the settled frontier, even Graham’s-town. You may imagine they dealt most savagely with either sex. And they in turn were dealt with very severely, at Lord Charles Somerset’s perfectly reasonable bidding. But then, with a most contrary magnanimity, he proceeded to treat with them as if he were at the Congress of Vienna.’
Hervey sipped at his brandy. This much he knew, but he would not interrupt since it was as well to know what those at the frontier believed.
Major Hearne unrolled a map on the table. ‘The principal Xhosa chief was – is – a wily old bird named Gaika. Somerset had him sign a treaty which pushed the frontier east to the Keiskama River’ (he pointed to the map) ‘with the idea that the country between there and the Fish should not be settled, but patrolled to make sure the Xhosa weren’t encroaching – patrolled principally from here, Fort Willshire.’ He indicated the point on the Keiskama nearest the Fish, not five miles north-east, and ten miles due north of the ford and mil-itary post at Trompetter’s Drift.
Again Hervey knew this, but he studied the map closely nevertheless; there was nothing like the proximity of the country to give a map life. He saw that the furthest distance between the two rivers was perhaps twenty-five miles, about the same as from Fort Willshire to the sea, and if the same distance was patrolled north-west of the fort it meant a troop mounted on good horses might make a detailed reconnaissance of the unsettled territory in two days. If they were to make but a cursory search – if the Xhosa left spoor – they might do it in only one. He thought the territory a prudent ‘glacis’ if the Fish River was to be the true limit of the settler parties. But so rangy a border was bound to be a temptation to both sides. ‘And has the scheme been successful?’ he asked, not entirely expecting the answer to be ‘yes’.
‘To begin with, it was. The settlements were well regulated, all of them between the Bushman’s River and the Fish.’ The major glanced at the landdrost.
The landdrost, sweating remarkably heavily thought Hervey for one accustomed to the country (in truth it seemed not greatly warmer than a spring day in Wiltshire), took up the invitation. ‘There are two townships east of here, Colonel: Bathurst, about five miles inland from the estuary of the Kowie, which is the next river west from the Fish, and Graham’s-town, fifteen or so miles further up the Kowie. There is a landdrost at each, who answers to me. They have had a difficult job. Most of the settlers were unsuited to the requirements of agriculture here: they simply did not know how to work the land. General Donkin originally stipulated that only vines and wheat were to be cultivated, since cattle were bound to attract the Xhosa. All other supplies were to come from here, or from Cape Town. But there was persistent corn blight, and many of the settlers began drifting to the townships where the Cape commissariat had set up ration depots. Not surprisingly, the landdrosts began turning a blind eye to the growing practice of keeping cattle – I confess that I myself did so – for without them the settlements here would have failed half a dozen years ago.’
Hervey nodded. ‘And between the Fish and the Keiskama?’
&
nbsp; The landdrost tilted his head.
Hervey wanted to be sure. ‘The cattle have been ranging into the unsettled territory?’
‘Some of the Dutch burghers, especially, found the temptation too great. They even began supplying the company at Fort Willshire.’
Major Hearne took back the reins. ‘In the early days the patrols from Willshire were effective in keeping the Xhosa out. And the burghers themselves are sturdy souls: they were more than capable of driving off a reiving party. But of late the incursions have been more determined.’
The landdrost, wiping his brow with a towelling swatch, reasserted his primacy. ‘There has been of late a troubling affair east of Graham’s-town; and Colonel, if you wish to be of assistance to the new lieutenant-governor, I believe you would do no better than take yourself there.’
Hervey looked at Major Hearne.
‘I concur,’ said the officer commanding the frontier.
Hervey glanced at Fairbrother, who shook his head just perceptibly, indicating he had nothing to ask.
‘Very well. You had better tell me of it. And I shall want to see beyond the Fish – see Fort Willshire and the country there. Perhaps we might set out tomorrow morning, to make Graham’s-town in the day.’
‘I will accompany you, of course, Colonel.’
‘That won’t be necessary, Major Hearne. Captain Fairbrother knows the country, and your detachments at Graham’s-town can give us what else we may need. You will have duties here, I know.’
The major looked relieved. ‘Thank you, Colonel. In truth, my wife is close to her time and—’
Hervey held up a hand. ‘Then I should positively refuse you permission to accompany me.’
‘Perhaps you will dine with us, Colonel? And the landdrost too.’
Hervey smiled politely. ‘That would be most welcome.’
‘And Captain Fairbrother, of course.’
Fairbrother looked faintly surprised. ‘Thank you … sir.’
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