A Close Run Thing (21 page)

Hervey could not but feel it a flattering, if unusual, choice of route. ‘So you are not carrying orders from the regiment?’

‘No, sir. Are you expecting any?’

‘Major Edmonds instructed me to remain here until such arrived.’

There followed much pleasant but inconsequential conversation, during which the serjeant was able to recount other instances of his cornet’s capability (and, indeed, occasions, too, of less distinction), though Hervey himself was lost in contemplation of the
continuing
absence of orders. Suddenly, however, Armstrong’s turn of story sounded alarm – the affair of the Alcalde of Mayorga’s daughter and the barrel of sardines. ‘How
much
leave is owing to you, Serjeant Armstrong?’ he asked abruptly, anxious that the subject be changed.

Armstrong was quick to the signal: ‘More than I’m ever likely to be permitted to take, sir!’

‘Well, I have an idea,’ he began. ‘I have another month’s leave, perhaps more. Major Edmonds said that I was to stay until receiving orders from him or direct from Lord Sussex. I think that
you
should stay here, too – we can arrange lodgings hereabouts – and drill into our yeomanry troop some practical elements of the profession.’

At this Elizabeth frowned. ‘Do you think that Hugo Styles would welcome that?’ she asked doubtfully.

Hervey looked faintly surprised. ‘He is not so great a fool as to decline it, surely?’

‘I was thinking less of the strictly military side, Matthew. Might he not consider it further rivalry?’

But her brother did not catch her meaning. ‘That business in the park is long past,’ he replied.

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows and sighed to herself. Armstrong sensed at once what her brother had failed to, though he could not know the precise details. She, equally sensible of his position, hastened to make some explanation: ‘You must forgive me, Serjeant; I did not intend trespassing on military questions. I am merely anxious to avoid any unnecessary ill-feeling in the
district
: the yeomanry are so intimate a part of our life at present.’

‘No offence, Miss ’Ervey, none at all. These yeomen are proud men: regulars have to step lightly with ’em. To call ’em cat-shooters is horrible cruel.’

This was uncommon diplomacy, thought Hervey: it would have done even Serjeant Strange credit. Nevertheless he was pleased when his father’s repeating half-hunter came to his aid, striking the half-hour so as to make the Reverend Thomas Hervey spring up with singular speed muttering something about Evening Prayer. Hervey’s mother felt a need to speak to cook, and Elizabeth said she would go with her father to church.

And so, alone in the garden, Hervey and Armstrong sat for some time without speaking, the late-afternoon birdsong supplanting their earlier talk. Both found themselves listening to it intently, even. From the tops of the elms around the house and the yews in the churchyard, and from deep inside the beech hedges, there came a ceaseless chorus of blackbirds and finches which would soften between midday and this hour, and then resume until only a last, solitary thrush remained in the gathering dusk, deposed in turn by the eerier night sounds. Out in the vale rooks chattered and cawed continually. Over the cornfields the sky was full of wood pigeons with their buzzing and queer calls; and even up on the downs, where there were no hedges and precious few trees, the larks were so numerous that there was continuous song from one end of the plain
to
the other. How little birdsong there had seemed in Spain and France by comparison.

‘By God, Mr Hervey sir, this is grand,’ said Armstrong at length.

‘Grand? Yes,’ replied Hervey, ‘but you should see Longleat House to know what is grand in the …
grand
sense.’

‘And that’s a grand family you’ve got, too.’

Hervey smiled. ‘You have never spoken of
your
people, Serjeant Armstrong.’

‘Never seemed any point,’ he replied with a halfshrug.

‘How so?’

‘Because they’re all dead, sir.’

Hervey was disconcerted: this was something he surely ought to have known. ‘Serjeant Armstrong, I … I am truly sorry to learn that …’

‘Well, that’s why I enlisted – had to start again.’

‘Start again? What do you mean?’

‘Well, you remember that tar on the transport from France, the one that ’ad been at Trafalgar?’

‘Yes,’ he replied, intrigued by the association.

‘Well, how many of ’is mates d’ye think were killed in that battle?’

‘Four hundred or thereabouts, was it not?’

‘Ay, nearer four hundred and fifty, and nearly three times that many knocked about bad. Now, Lord Nelson ’ad twenty-seven ships o’ the line: that makes seventeen killed on each, as near as makes no odds.’

Hervey wondered how this surprising grasp of naval
statistics
connected with the circumstances of Armstrong’s family. But he forbore to hurry him: Armstrong had a way with stories.

‘And every man at Trafalgar is an ’ero, and every one of them four hundred and fifty is a dead ’ero. But no one ’as ever heard of the men and bairns killed that same day in ’Ebburn colliery – thirty-five of ’em, two of Nelson’s ships’ worth of dead ’eroes, and as many cripples. And the dead all sent to their Maker in a split second’s explosion of firedamp – my father and ’is father, and my two brothers. I was the youngest and should’ve been there with ’em except I’d been ’urt in a roof-fall a day afore.’

Hervey was all but overcome, not just by the horror of the accident but by his knowing so little of things. From time to time news reached Horningsham of accidents in the coal mines nearby in Somerset, but the details were always sparse. ‘But I never knew that men could be killed in such numbers,’ he said at length, his brow furrowing in disbelief.

‘And
bairns
, and their
mothers
and
sisters
an’ all sometimes,’ added Armstrong emphatically, though more in resignation than in bitterness. Bitterness was reserved for what followed. ‘And you know what, Mr ’Ervey? That explosion made two dozen widows and a hundred orphans in ’Ebburn village, an’ all thrown on the parish with no extra from the coal owners. My mother died in three months in a damp and lousy poorhouse.’

The birdsong swelled as Hervey sank once more into
silence
. Armstrong sat impassively, disinclined to tempt him from his thoughts. At length Hervey confronted his shame. ‘Serjeant Armstrong, I am truly humbled to admit of my ignorance of all this, and I cannot conceive of how I have never read of these things in the newspapers if they are so frequent.’

‘That one at ’Ebburn was small by comparison! And you know why you don’t hear of ’em? Because the papers are forbidden to report ’em, that’s why.’

They remained a full hour talking, though much subdued. And they spoke of matters of which, only a short time before, Hervey would never have dreamed. That they were able to do so said much perhaps about mutual respect, but equally, it seemed to him afterwards, about the Sixth and its discipline, a discipline of which martinets like Slade could never have any comprehension.
Slade
– even at this time the ghastly remembrance could intrude!

Serjeant Armstrong’s temporary assignment with the Warminster Troop proved not nearly so quarrelsome as many had anticipated. He was in any event unlikely to have failed to win the esteem of the yeomen troopers themselves, for any demands he would make on them would surely derive from experience rather than solely from the drill book. In a remarkably short time he was able to improve both their horsemanship and their sword-skills. He had been particularly careful, however, in his dealings with the troop serjeant-major, a foreman on the Marquess of Bath’s estate, and had
shown
him the deference that he would his own in the Sixth – probably more. And with Hugo Styles he was so correct in his compliments, and so leading in his instruction, that the lieutenant’s standing in the eyes of the troop must have been considerably enhanced thereby.

They drilled on a Wednesday and a Saturday, and occasionally on a Sunday. Styles attended every muster, for his fortune was sufficiently mature not to require his presence elsewhere, and Henrietta Lindsay accompanied him. Hervey, who, at the outset at least, felt a duty of supervision lest his serjeant be placed in any position of disadvantage, was an equally punctilious spectator. At first he would stand aloof in some position of observation and watch the drill intently, until, by invitation or some other contrivance, he would find himself in the company of Henrietta and Styles. The latter tolerated his presence always with the very least civility that their status as gentlemen and officers compelled. Hervey’s disdain of Styles grew by degrees to detestation, for he could find in him no redeeming feature. His dress, speech and manner were contrived to an absurdly exaggerated extent. There were those in the Sixth, Hervey knew, who would certainly excel him in each, but they would give no offence in the doing. Styles was a man of considerable means, it was said, but there were some in the Sixth who were richer and yet would excite no such animosity. All these would-be candidates for equal disdain had the very quality, and in large measure, that
Styles
wholly lacked: generosity of spirit. And, what was perhaps more, they had shared the privations of a campaign. Hervey concluded that Styles was a man profoundly unsuited for anything but the most ornamental of commands. What a great good fortune it had been that the yeomanry had never been required to repel Bonaparte’s troops! One thing only puzzled Hervey: what it was that Henrietta found so agreeable in Styles.

Henrietta herself was always entirely civil at these meetings, but nothing more (or so it seemed to him). As the weeks passed, however, Hervey showed less attention to the evolutions on the drill ground and greater address at joining the other two observers, and so obvious was that address that the lieutenant’s duty of civility was placed under a greater strain than he was sometimes capable of bearing. But when Hervey found himself in Henrietta’s sole company, as when, for instance, Styles took command of the troop for some manoeuvre or other, she spent so much time asking whether he did not admire this or other about the lieutenant and his yeomen that he became wholly cast down.

Then, on St Bartholomew’s Eve, a fast day which the vicarage at Horningsham kept strictly, Hervey’s long-expected letter arrived.

‘You look puzzled, brother. It is not ill news surely?’ asked Elizabeth, sipping her unsweetened tea with no great relish.

‘It is from my major. I am to rejoin the regiment in Cork within ten days,’ he replied.

‘But you were expecting these orders, were you not?’

‘I was, but there is something more. It seems that Major Edmonds – he is acting as officer commanding since the lieutenant-colonel was wounded in France – it seems that he had asked the colonel to secure me an appointment at the Horse Guards, but that this had not proved expedient.’

‘But that is surely a most agreeable compliment, is it not, Matthew?’ she asked, further puzzled by his want of enthusiasm.

‘Perhaps so, but the major said nothing of this to me, and it astounds me that he should think I might welcome such a preferment. It is almost as if he wished positively to see me away from the regiment.’ He knew, or at least confided, that this latter could not be so. Curiously, however, he sensed that, if the choice had been his now, then it might indeed have been for London rather than for Cork. For, much as the Sixth meant to him, at that moment the thought of quitting Horningsham for so distant a station as Cork, without resolving his feelings for Henrietta Lindsay, filled him with profound gloom. Had he now been with the regiment he would have been able to do what he had always done when troubled: he would have thrown himself at once into an excess of duties, not emerging until he was quite sure that his feelings were, like some difficult remount, in hand. But he was not with the regiment, and the feelings were not, in truth, an unwelcome intrusion. Elizabeth sensed all this better than he might have supposed, but again she said nothing.

‘I think I shall ride out on the plain a while,’ he said suddenly, almost jumping from his chair. ‘Shall you come with me?’

She declined, however, judging the invitation to be but politeness. ‘But call, do, on Daniel Coates, Matthew. He is ever wise in all matters,’ she urged.

He went to the stables, saddled Coates’s bay and within the hour he was on the downs, walking along the scarp with its distant views of Somerset, the Bristol road, and beyond, he supposed, to Cork. In some way or other he had imagined the ride might clear his mind, or steel him perhaps to what he must do. But the purpose was unaccomplished, for as he turned back at Wadman’s Coppice all he had succeeded in doing was to identify, by a process not unlike the appraisal of some military problem, two equally impaired options. First, he might proceed to Cork and put Henrietta Lindsay from his mind. The flaw in this, it was soon apparent, was that he did not possess the initiative in matters of the mind. Alternatively, he might make his still-indistinct feelings known and leave for Cork with some understanding between them. Here, however, the flaw seemed even greater, for he was near-certain that his feelings must be wholly unreciprocated – or else he might be deemed unsuitable by the marquess who, though no longer strictly her guardian since she had come of age, was unquestionably a man whose blessing must be sought. But in truth the real impediment was an incapacity to press himself with Henrietta, especially in light of her attachment, however imprecise, with Styles.

For a while he contemplated returning via Drove Farm, where he hoped Daniel Coates’s wisdom might extend to matters of this kind. But their talk had always been of the soldier’s art and of horses, and there was no reason to suppose that a facility with these might apply equally to his newer concern. Daniel Coates had, indeed, expressed himself only once on the subject: of soldiers marrying he had opined it ‘a cruel thing to make a camp-follower of a decent maid’. So instead Hervey made straight for Horningsham by descending the near-vertical sides of Arn Hill (it gave him cause to make much of the young gelding for his balance), and thence through Norridge Wood, the furthest place he and Henrietta had ventured on their childhood rambles together. (He could picture, with surprising recall, her old nurse huffing and puffing, and protesting at the distance they had brought her from Longleat.)