A Close Run Thing (17 page)

Dinner was late – past two – and the fast before the next day’s patronal feast of St John the Baptist was prematurely, but formally, abandoned at the grace. Hereafter began Hervey’s own inquisition. Campaigning was what his mother expected to hear of, and she would allow no other conversation. But his was, necessarily, an incomplete account, and perhaps a somewhat sentimental one thereby, for without the carnage and bestiality it could only be thus, and any essay by him into those horrors would have been repugnant in that company. It was, however, pleasing to a mother swelled with pride, and a father wishing some consolation for another son’s death. But the Reverend Thomas Hervey’s spirit was stronger than the flesh: he stayed with the account until Salamanca and then succumbed to the comfortable feeling induced by the safe return of his remaining son and the celebratory claret, an Haut-Brion of pre-war vintage (the blockade’s having prevented, in any case, newer being obtained).

Elizabeth stayed longer with the account but absented herself, regretfully, as Dover was reached in order to be about her weekly business in Warminster’s workhouse. Hervey walked with her to the stables where Towle had the ageing barouche ready.

‘Matthew, I have seen enough of distress these past five years in the town to know – well, perhaps to have a presentiment at least – of the miseries of war. You were all consideration itself at dinner but you must
remain
patient with us,’ she said, ‘and especially so this evening with Mr Keble, who was a dear friend of John’s at Oxford. Mr Keble himself is a dear man and, by all accounts, an exceptional one – John was always speaking of him. He was a scholar at only fifteen, and a fellow of John’s college before he was twenty. He has fine degrees in divinity and mathematics, and has won prizes for poetry. He is to be made deacon next year and was to have joined John’s parish as second curate. Father already thinks of him as if he were our John, so like him is he. And, I confess, also do I.’

Hervey smiled at once. ‘I am
delighted
to hear it,’ he replied, and with such emphatic stress on the participle that Elizabeth looked at him askance. There was no time, however (and it was perhaps as well), for her to enquire why his delight should be so pronounced, and she left him instead to his fancy that one day she and Edward Lankester would meet, and that she might thereby become wife to that noblest of soldiers. No man could hope more for his sister, and Elizabeth, he felt sure, would in the event share that opinion.

‘What of religious observance in the Army, Mr Hervey?’ John Keble asked as they began supper that evening, a collation which included the vicar of Horningsham’s favourite neat’s tongue in aspic, and Mrs Pomeroy’s revered frigize of chicken and rabbit.

‘Well,’ began Hervey, startled somewhat (he would rather, even, have faced questions about the commissary system, for, bad as that was, he considered the
commissaries
marginally more effective than the chaplains), ‘it is better than when I first joined,’ he suggested, hoping that this might be enough. It was a vain hope.

‘Indeed? How is it now, then?’ Keble continued.

‘In truth, Mr Keble, it is not at all good. It varies greatly from regiment to regiment depending on the colonel, but also on the chaplain – we now have one to each brigade. This is the Marquess – or the Duke, rather, as he has been elevated since Bonaparte’s defeat – this is the Duke of Wellington’s doing. Prior to this campaign we had no chaplains – well, very few. They are not on the whole of the quality you will see at Oxford, though.’

‘And it will be no housling ministry, I warrant. Do they celebrate the Holy Communion with any regularity and frequency?’

Elizabeth looked anxiously at her brother, who understood her meaning at once.

‘As a rule, no,’ he replied patiently, though he might easily have omitted the qualification and simply answered with the negative.

John Keble shook his head.

‘They do preach and pray with the wounded,’ he added in a half-hearted plea in mitigation.

‘And Methodists?’ Keble continued. ‘I have heard that they make converts.’

Hervey’s father huffed loudly. ‘Mr Keble, to my shame, we have here in Horningsham the oldest dissenting chapel in England!’

‘It is nonsense to speak so, Father,’ smiled Elizabeth. ‘You and the minister get on like houses on fire!’

‘Indeed, we do,’ replied the old man chuckling, ‘though only when we avoid any mention of religion. On the whole it is better that way with men of God! But I would sooner spend an evening in the company of the old Jesuit from Wardour.
He
does not quote scripture at me the while, and we may have gentlemanly conversation about such matters of doctrine that are unknowable, and which therefore we may discourse upon without acrimony.’

‘And with good claret,’ chuckled Mrs Hervey.

‘This latter is very sage, sir,’ John Keble acknowledged; and then, with a smile so full that his face was wholly transformed, added, ‘as is yours, ma’am.’

‘They are not my words, however, Mr Keble,’ sighed the Reverend Thomas Hervey, ‘but dear Archbishop Laud’s.’

‘God rest his soul,’ said Keble before turning back to Hervey to press his point. ‘But, as to these Methodists, I would think that the meeting of soldiers in their cantonments to sing psalms, or to hear a sermon read by one of their comrades, is in the abstract perfectly innocent; indeed, it is laudable, but I think it might become otherwise.’

‘And I think that is precisely what the duke believes, too,’ agreed Hervey, surprised by Keble’s evident grasp of the requirements of good order and military discipline, ‘but I wonder why the established church makes no greater impression.’

Keble was quick to answer, though with more sadness in his tone than enthusiasm. ‘The Church has, I believe, in many quarters turned its back on its true origins. The best men do their duty faithfully but without fervour; the worst … well, let us say they are free from the tumults of conscience.’

‘But what of the Claphamites, Mr Keble?’ Elizabeth interjected. ‘They do their duty with fervour and confront their consciences squarely, do they not? And see what good deeds they do!’

‘Oh, a worthy movement, Miss Hervey, but fired by Protestant fervour.’

‘And is that to be denounced, then?’ she challenged, with some perturbation.

‘By no means, Miss Hervey,’ he replied, seemingly stung by her rebuke, ‘but the Church of England was not conceived in Protestantism: it is Catholic and reformed. Is that not what we affirm in the creed?’

Elizabeth looked to the head of the table. ‘Father, what is your opinion in this?’

The vicar of Horningsham spoke with unusual animation. ‘Mr Keble is wholly accurate upon this point, my dear. You must read the Thirty-Nine Articles as an affirmation of the doctrine of the Fathers of the Church, not as a Protestant tract – which latter is all that people seem to do today. As you read they will be a revelation to you! Lancelot Andrewes and the other Caroline divines were wholly lucid on this matter – poor Laud went to the scaffold because of it. We have drifted into Protestantism. It needs younger men
of
integrity and energy, however, to recall the Church to its proper destiny!’

‘And I believe your elder son to have been one of these, Mr Hervey,’ John Keble replied in a tone approaching ardour. ‘You should have heard his sermons at Oriel and seen his ministry in the hovels of Cowley. He was worthy indeed of taking up Andrewes’s torch.’

But Hervey’s mother had become likewise agitated: ‘Then are we to throw vipers at the Methodists again, Mr Keble?’

John Keble looked at her with polite but evident incomprehension.

‘Mr Keble,’ Elizabeth interjected sheepishly, ‘some years ago a Methodist was preaching outdoors in Warminster and a townsman threw an adder at him.’

‘“O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”’ Keble replied, hoping that the gospel after whom her younger son had been named might deflect them.

‘Just so, Mr Keble,’ said Mrs Hervey, equally opaquely. ‘And now, Matthew, turning to lighter matters, will you be going to see the marquess tomorrow?’

‘Well, Mother,’ he began hesitantly, ‘perhaps not tomorrow; but, yes, I shall pay my respects.’

‘I think if you knew whom you might also see at Longleat you would not long delay,’ she added with a smile.

‘Oh, Mother!’ sighed Elizabeth. ‘Do you have no artfulness?’

Hervey looked bemused, and all the more so for Elizabeth’s prim reprimand.

‘Henrietta Lindsay is come back to Longleat, Matthew; that is all,’ his sister explained.

Hervey felt his gut twist, and he fought hard not to show it. ‘Well, that is agreeable, Mother. No, you are quite right, it is
very
agreeable to hear. I have not seen Henrietta Lindsay in years. I expect she is quite grown now.’ He looked at Elizabeth, who looked down at her plate, and he searched for some way by which to change the subject. ‘But I thought that first I should go to see Daniel Coates!’

‘Coates!’ exclaimed the vicar of Horningsham, suddenly come back to consciousness. ‘The only man with any idea at all how to deal with those rick-burners!’

‘And how is that, Father?’ asked Elizabeth kindly, laying her hand on his forearm. But her father had slipped peacefully back into upright yet profound sleep.

Daniel Coates –
rick-burners
? What was the connection? wondered Hervey. Coates was not a violent man – at least, he had not been when last Hervey had seen him before leaving for Spain. Had the unrest at home taken its toll of yeoman fortitude? But Coates was a tenant sheepfarmer: why might he be troubled by rick-burners?

‘Daniel is a churchwarden now, and a magistrate,’
revealed
his mother. ‘At Upton Scudamore. Your father holds the benefice
in commendam
.’

Daniel Coates a churchwarden and a magistrate! Hervey could only wonder at the change in the country these past few years. Daniel Coates – old soldier, his childhood hero, a poor tenant farmer who had once been shepherd on the Longleat estate: it had been he who had taught him to ride cavalry-fashion, to shoot straight and use a sword so well that on joining the Sixth he had been dismissed riding school and skill-at-arms quicker than anyone could remember. Hervey could not present himself unannounced to Henrietta Lindsay, but he most certainly could to Daniel Coates! And in Coates was, perhaps, his best chance of gaining a reliable secular opinion of what the country had become while he had been away; in John Keble he knew he had such a mentor in the clerical view. ‘Mr Keble,’ he said, with sudden resolution, ‘may we take a turn about the garden? I should be obliged for your opinion on this country to which I return, it would seem, as something of a stranger.’

VI

THE YEOMEN OF WILTSHIRE

Salisbury Plain, Midsummer Day

HIS FATHER’S COB
knew the way to Upton Scudamore well enough, and the pace at which the vicar of Horningsham liked to cover the five or so miles of rutted lanes which crossed the vale, skirted the prehistoric mystery that was Cley Hill, and connected the handsome estate village with the rougher settlement by the great west scarp of Salisbury Plain. Daniel Coates’s farm lay on the edge of the downs, virtually under the scarp. When he had taken the tenancy fifteen years earlier it had been nothing but a few dilapidated buildings and three acres of poor pasture, with a hundred or so more of common land on the Westbury side. He had rebuilt it stone by stone, brick by brick – Hervey had carried many of them himself. There was nothing poor-looking about the place now, however.

Coates received him with an easy combination of
deference
and familiarity, but ‘Master Hervey’, and soon thereafter simply ‘Matthew’, was subjected to a veritable cannonade of questions, a bombardment lasting a full half-hour without respite. Finally, Coates seemed to become aware of his insensibility and was then much abashed: ‘My dear Matthew, how could I ’ave been so inhospitable – your glass is empty, and you have not spoken except for to speak back,’ he said, reaching for a jug of purl.

‘Dan, I have so keenly imagined this time for many months, but I want more than anything to ride on the downs again, as we have done together since I was on the leading-rein. There I promise I shall answer every enquiry you have a care to make!’

‘And so shall it be, Matthew; so shall it be!’ Coates replied with the broadest of smiles, and he summoned his housemaid to take word to the stables.

Hervey had never known a groom before at Drove Farm: when first he had gone to Spain there had not been so much as a labourer, and certainly no housemaid. Now as they went into the stableyard there was a smart-looking fellow holding a fine pair of bay hunters. Prosperity indeed, thought Hervey. But their discourse did not immediately resume on leaving the yard, for Daniel Coates took Hervey at his word and waited until they had reached the downs before pressing him once more to the details of his campaigning. So with scarcely an exchange they rode out along the empty expanse of Warminster Bottom, past Dirtley Wood and up the steep scarp of the great plain on to
Knapp
Down, both men happy to let the memories stir in silence.