A Close Run Thing (6 page)

‘Mr Evans says this sister will change thee bandages now, sir!’ announced his groom at length.

In his struggle with the complex Latin constructions of St Ignatius’ epilogue, Hervey did not catch this communication from the surgeon. Nor did Johnson wait for any acknowledgement: he was out of the door with the speed of one of the ferrets which travelled in his valise and supplemented the rations with rabbits. He had no intention of being the butt of Hervey’s protests when he tumbled to.

Hervey looked up absently and was all but transfixed by the image of other-worldliness. A white-habited nun, head bowed, holding strips of cloth and a bowl of steaming water, stood framed in the arched doorway like a phantom, albeit of a distinctly celestial kind. As she stepped into the cell, and light from the window fell on her, he saw that her overmantle was more blood-stained than white, though the habit beneath was brown like those of the nuns in Spain. Her face, what little of it was revealed by the wimple, was also smeared with blood and looked
excessively
drawn, though it was not old. In other circumstances it might have been described as prettyish, but a haunted look made any such worldly adjective inappropriate. It was certainly unlike those of the Spanish sisters, some of whose more sensual features had been decidedly tempting.

Suddenly he recollected himself and sprang up, though pain stabbed his thigh as he did so, adding to his discomposure.

‘I am sorry, Sister, but I was not expecting—’ he began in French. ‘I really think it better if the surgeon attends to this.’

‘Sir, the surgeon has been working throughout the night,’ she replied, in the measured voice of the Languedoc, by contrast with Hervey’s more guttural Alsace, and with evident distaste. ‘There are many soldiers – private soldiers – French and English, yet to be attended.’

Her tone stung him. In his confusion he had conveyed something wholly other than what he had meant. ‘I am sorry; I did not mean to …’ he stuttered; and then, sensing that any explanation would be pointless, he tried to dismiss her: ‘The dressing is perfectly well, Sister. In the circumstances I think you should return to the wounded.’

‘I think we must both do as we are bidden, sir,’ she replied firmly, putting the bowl on the floor and beginning to tear a piece of cloth into bandages with considerable violence.

Hervey could not have been more dismayed. Though
the
idea of being ministered to by a nun was by no means alien, since he had seen them, and women of rank, in hospitals in the Peninsula,
this
nun made him uneasy. To begin with, there was her spectral appearance. And, though the Marquess of Wellington may have issued instructions that the army was to enter France not as conquerors but as liberators, it seemed prudent first to be certain that this was how the French themselves regarded them. How he was to dispense with her ministration, however, was entirely beyond him; and at length, after it became apparent that no amount of protest would weaken her resolve, and with more chagrin than he could lately remember, he gave up, sat down and removed his blood-stained overalls. He need not have been concerned, for pain soon proved a great distractor: he suspected that this sister might be more devout than most, but she could scarcely have been less tender, cutting the dressing off briskly, and none too gently wiping away the caked blood.

‘It is clean, but some of the sutures are broken. I do not think the wound will putrefy, but I think they must be replaced.’

Hervey bit his lip and nodded, and she re-bandaged his leg without speaking. Her eyes were reddened, and he surmised that she had had no sleep for three, maybe four days, for that had been the duration of the fighting. And, though the armies may have had sleep, those tending the wounded could not have found their work slackening during that time. He would have
asked
her of the
blessés
, but her manner seemed not to invite it; and he suspected, too, that she was a woman of few words, perhaps ordinarily under a vow of silence. Instead he thanked her as she left, but she made no reply, glancing only at the
Spiritual Exercises
lying next to him and then bowing slightly. Hervey noticed for the first time that her feet were bare, and thought of the broken glass which, in stepping over, she must have taken to be evidence of his carousing.

The rest of his day promised little, and for a while he limped around the convent’s grounds to try to keep the leg from stiffening, though he might have wished for a less congested place to do so. The courtyard had become a forum for what seemed like every staff officer in the army, as it emerged that the Marquess of Wellington had also made it his advanced headquarters for the formal surrender of the city. The place had, indeed, more the air of Bedlam than of a convent, or even than of a cavalry billet. Had he suspected that in the midst of this seeming babble there might be the commander-in-chief he would have taken pains to make himself scarce; but nothing suggested such a distinction, and he almost literally stumbled on him around the east corner of the cloisters. Sir Stapleton Cotton, one of several generals in the assemblage, spied him before he could turn away.

‘Cornet Hervey! How are you, my boy? Come hither!’

He tried hard not to limp as he crossed the yard, wanting no sympathy.

‘Lord Wellington, this is Cornet Hervey of the Sixth.
It
was he who saw off the sortie on our left yesterday.’

The commander-in-chief nodded without smiling. ‘Smart work, boy, smart work,’ he said simply.

It was very probably the first time he had said anything complimentary to anyone in the cavalry for months, certainly to anyone in the Sixth. For all the regimental ambivalence towards Wellington, however, Hervey could not but feel a warm glow in those sparse words of praise. There were some in the cavalry, and Hervey would count himself among them, who would own that his strictures were all too frequently justified. If a regiment could not be relied on to rally after a charge – the marquess’s principal and recurring lament – then to what purpose was it in the field? Hervey knew full well that there was many an officer, though mercifully few in the Sixth now, who derided outpost work and the like and considered mere celerity of movement to be the criterion of efficiency. And it seemed that all were to be judged in Wellington’s eyes by their meagre accomplishments. But for a cornet to air such deprecating views risked regimental oblivion, as he had once discovered when venturing the opinion that the cavalry’s horsemastership was deficient – only that Edmonds had somewhat unexpectedly agreed with him. Wellington’s chiding for Maguilla and Vitoria had been a different matter, however. The affair at Maguilla had been misconstrued because Slade had not had the courage to tell him that his intelligence was faulty. As for Vitoria, with its rapaciousness and letting slip Marshal Jourdan and
much
of his army, no one could but denounce it; but to single out the cavalry when all they had done was steal a march on the infantry in the pillaging seemed not a little peevish. The day had been hot and long in its coming, and there had been wine in riverfuls. Hervey had detested the orgy of relief as heartily as any, but such was the mood of the army. Nor had Wellington himself fared ill from it, for the Eighteenth had taken the marshal’s baton, and Wellington had sent it to the prince regent. ‘You have sent me the baton of a marshal of France,’ wrote the prince in reply, ‘and I send you that of an English one in return.’

But for the present Hervey was content simply to bask in that economical praise ‘smart work’. Then, as suddenly as he had found himself in that grand assemblage, a trumpeter of the escort sounded ‘Markers’. The courtyard ceased to be a forum and became instead a parade square as volleys of shouted commands echoed from the high walls and signalled the time for Field-Marshal the Marquess of Wellington to ride in triumph into the city.

Captain Lankester was in his cell when Hervey found him, writing letters to the next of kin of the dozen dragoons from ‘A’ Troop who had died in the previous fortnight. How the orderly room would discover who and where the troopers’ kin were, and how many of them would be able to read the letters for themselves, was another matter, but that would not deter him. Hervey stood at the open door watching him – Captain
Sir
Edward Lankester, baronet, the senior troop and squadron leader, with a good-sized estate in Hertfordshire and a handsome income: he could have delegated this task to anyone and spent his time arranging comfortable quarters for himself in the city, and few outside the Sixth would have thought a deal of it. But he had not, and scarcely would he have contemplated it, for it was as much his own as it was the Sixth’s way. Lankester could give him no news, however, save that Edmonds wished to see him the instant the surgeon warranted him sound.

‘Why does the major wish to see me? Is it on account of General Slade?’

There was more than a note of foreboding in the question, but Lankester did not seem minded to allay it, even if he had had the power to do so. ‘I have not the shadow of an idea, since he has evidently elected not to confide in me – and, you may be sure, with every good reason.’ Hervey made no reply. Lankester dipped his pen in the silver ink-bottle of his exquisitely fitted writing-case and signed another letter with painstaking care: an illegible hand was to him as abhorrent as rust on a sabre. ‘My advice is that you present yourself before him at once,’ he added at length, and without looking up, for there were three more letters to write (the month had taken an unusually high toll) and his cornet’s troubles were trifling by comparison.

Hervey supposed well enough what the reason for Edmonds’s summons must be. But, God willing, he
would
endure no more than a rebuke. Even that, however, would be disagreeable in the extreme: some of the NCOs might take refuge in the knowledge of Edmonds’s soft heart, but his tongue could scourge an officer as surely as the lash scourged a defaulter. Hervey’s release from arrest had also been irregular – of that he was only too aware – and Edmonds’s imprecation ‘God preserve us, boy!’ rang in his ears still. A mere rebuke seemed improbable.

Hervey’s grip on the sword-scabbard had become clammy, even inside his glove, and his right hand was clenched so tight that his fingernails dug into the palm. The crucifix and the guidon had blurred as one, his eyes stinging with the effort of not blinking. Edmonds had addressed him with pronounced formality: ‘It is a very singular thing indeed, Mr Hervey, for a cornet to be placed in arrest upon the field of battle.’ He had asked for an explanation of the circumstances, ‘precisely and dispassionately’, and Hervey had in some measure done his bidding. He had at least given as wholly indifferent an account as anyone might. It was, perhaps, a more exact report than Edmonds had required, but Hervey had been at pains to elaborate on Serjeant Armstrong’s conduct in the affair with the battery, which he had deemed to be of the highest order. As he finished, he glanced down for the first time, as if to reinforce his closing cadence. He saw at once, and he had not done so before, perhaps not surprisingly in view of his trepidation, that Edmonds’s
face
was no longer swollen. So trivial was the observation in the circumstances that it discomfited him still further. The fact was not without its significance, however, for the tooth-operator had cleanly drawn the abscessed molar that morning, and the pain had at last given way to a soreness which the laudanum, in prodigious quantities since, was able to ease. The opiate was undeniably an element in the unexpected warmth with which the major now addressed him.

‘My dear boy,’ he began, rising from his chair and indicating another to him. Major Joseph Edmonds always took inordinate trouble to guard against any sign of favour towards Hervey, though heaven only knew how difficult he found that. Sometimes he concealed his regard so well that he appeared abrupt and unsympathetic, and it would have been the profoundest wonder to Hervey to discover in what affection, admiration even, the major held him. Lankester may have been the regimental paragon, and Edmonds would have been loudest in his praise, but something in the captain’s Corinthian accomplishment put Edmonds not wholly at ease in his company. In Hervey he saw something of himself as a young cornet, but – and this was the distinction – he saw in him, too, a quality, not easily defined, which might with care and good fortune secure his advancement beyond mere field rank. ‘My dear boy,’ he repeated, ‘everything you have told me accords perfectly with all that I have heard from several different quarters. The matter is entirely closed.’

Hervey’s relief was palpable. That relief in itself was sufficient balm in his troubled circumstances, but Edmonds’s next pronouncement was in the nature of a miracle-cure.

‘I have, no less, a letter of appreciation from the commander-in-chief,’ the major continued, his words now betraying just the faintest trace of the opium’s solvent. ‘The field marshal seems to be making a particular effort to praise his cavalry for a change, doubtless because there has been no riot since Vitoria. But then again, everyone will ascribe this new and godly discipline to an increase in flogging,’ he declared sardonically, for he himself loathed the practice intensely, and he considered the Sixth’s discipline to be the stronger for its absence. Clearing his throat he began to read the formal commendation: ‘“His Excellency the Commander-in-Chief is pleased to express his appreciation of the valuable service performed yesterday by the 6th Light Dragoons under the immediate command of Major Edmonds” – no doubt they had to delve hard to discover my name,’ he added caustically, ‘“… the soldierlike conduct … the constancy of duty … the celerity and gallantry of execution … The Commander-in-Chief will commend these observations to the Horse Guards in the highest possible terms of approbation …”’

Edmonds placed the letter on the table. ‘But the honour is all yours, my boy, and you may be assured that I shall convey that fact in my reply, though I must confide that my recommendation will hardly count for
much
. But Sir Stapleton Cotton, too, wants you to have some preferment. There will be a lieutenant’s vacancy soon when Rawlings goes to the Tenth and, while you are not the next in seniority, there would be no objection in the circumstances to the lieutenancy’s being yours if you can find the money.’