Hervey 06 - Rumours Of War

by Allan Mallinson

Johnson frowned. ‘That’s not right.’

  Hervey smiled at the expression of simple humanity. ‘No, I don’t think it is either. But what’s past is past.’

  Johnson was at once fired with determination to deliver the packages without delay, his small but defiant gesture of solidarity with these ill-treated exiles.

  Although his levee dress was otherwise elegant and understated, Hervey did indeed feel like Tiddy Doll when he was introduced to the chargé d’affaires of His Britannic Majesty’s embassy to His Late and Faithful Majesty King John VI, and presently to Her Serene Highness the Senhora Infanta Regent.

  ‘Major Hervey is to attend to the questions of horses,’ said Colonel Norris.

  And, thought Hervey, Norris said it just a shade loftily, as if he were some sort of military ostler. He bowed and took his leave so as to let Norris introduce the others.

  The reception was an agreeable and instructive affair, however, not in the least giving an impression of a city on the eve of war, though there were uniforms aplenty. Hervey wished his field coat had been more presentable (he had flatly refused to have it altered, saving himself several guineas in the process), for he could have worn it instead and not felt so . . . got up. The trouble was, he reckoned, the further removed the French war became, the less sense there was of what was most serviceable on campaign. Already some of the hussar regiments were wearing impossibly tight overalls and short jackets. The Portuguese officers present looked subdued in their regimentals by comparison, and it was well known that the dons, be they Spanish or Portuguese, liked nothing so much as to be dressed with braid and tassels.

  Hervey took a glass of punch and studied the scene closer, and especially the two dozen or so officers on the other side of the room. They did indeed look handy. In truth, they looked to him the image of the Portuguese army that Britain had dressed and trained a decade and a half before. The King’s Lusitanians, they had sometimes been called – and affectionately, too, for they had often as not shown as much address in the field as the King’s Germans. The Duke of Wellington had been unstinting in his praise: the army’s fighting cocks, he had dubbed them. And when at last they had crossed the Pyrenees and entered France, he had sent home the Spaniards but kept his Portuguese. Good men, Hervey recalled – the whole army said so. True and hardy, not given to mutiny and riot like so many others; tractable men. And tractable still, he supposed, wanting only a good officer in which to place their trust. It did not bear thinking about that one part of the army should be at fighting odds with the other.

  ‘Major Hervey, there is someone here with a claim on your acquaintance.’

  Hervey, intent on his distant examination of the uniform of an officer of the 9th Cazadores – the mailed epaulettes, as those of the officer of the 5th Cavalry next to him, eminently modest but practical – had not seen the lady approaching. He wondered how she knew his name.

  He bowed. ‘At your service, ma’am.’

  She was a handsome woman, in her late fifties perhaps, tall and forthright. She held out a hand. ‘I am Susan Forbes, Major Hervey. My husband you have already met.’ She indicated the chargé d’affaires, still receiving his guests.

  Hervey nodded. ‘Ah, indeed, ma’am. And who is he that would make my acquaintance, for I believe I know of no one in Lisbon that would have my name?’

  ‘She, Major Hervey,’ replied Mrs Forbes, and with a most engaging smile.

  Before the lines of mystification could quite leave his forehead, Mrs Forbes had taken him to the other side of the room, to a group of Portuguese ladies, who curtsied at their approach.

  Hervey bowed.

  One of them, markedly younger, about his own age, was smiling more than merely politely.

  ‘Doña Robert Broke, Major Hervey.’

  Hervey hesitated. He had some recollection of her face, but the name . . .

  ‘You may remember better Doña Isabella, Major Hervey,’ explained the woman, her eyebrows raised and her head slightly tilted to emphasize the possibility. ‘As do I better Cornet Hervey.’ She held out a hand.

  Hervey was astonished. He smiled; and very fully. ‘Isabella Delgado,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘I remember very well indeed!’

  Mrs Forbes began chatting obligingly to the others in Portuguese while Hervey sought to recover the intervening years.

  ‘I recall, too, that then we spoke only in French,’ he began.

  ‘My late husband was English, as you may perceive,’ she explained, without losing any of the happy animation in her face. ‘He was consul in Oporto.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear you are widowed, ma’am. Has it been long?’

  ‘Five years, though I have a daughter to remind me daily of our former happiness.’ She maintained the smile throughout. ‘And you, Major Hervey?’

  ‘I, too, ma’am, have a daughter. I was myself bereaved some years ago.’

  Isabella Broke’s smile disappeared. ‘I am sad to hear it.’

  Hervey was not minded to dwell on it, however. ‘Your father, is he well?’ (He recalled her father was long widowed when he had first met him.)

  Isabella’s smile returned. ‘He is very well, Major Hervey. He lives here in Lisbon yet.’

  ‘I am glad of that. Please give him my greatest respects when next you see him – if he remembers the regiment, that is.’

  ‘I am sure he does, Major Hervey. Your regiment did him great service.’

  The Sixth had rescued the Barão de Santarem and his daughter as the army had fallen back into the lines of Torres Vedras. There had been many another daughter whom Sir Arthur Wellesley’s men had brought into the fold behind those formidable defensive lines, but it was doubtful that any had engendered a more devoted following by a regiment’s subalterns than had Isabella Delgado. And Hervey could almost see that daughter now, for despite the passing of a dozen years and more Isabella Delgado’s complexion was the same smooth ivory, her cheekbones prominent still, her hair as black and shining, her figure if anything a little sparer yet fuller-breasted. She had indeed grown very handsomely into womanhood.

  ‘Major Hervey?’

  ‘Oh, Mrs Forbes, I did not—’

  ‘I remarked that you will have the pleasure of Doña Isabella’s company at supper when the reception is ended.’

  Hervey smiled appreciatively.

  ‘If, that is, you are able still to stay, my dear?’ added Mrs Forbes, turning to her.

  ‘With much pleasure,’ replied Isabella, bowing her head.

  ‘Then I shall adjust the placement at once.’

  When the chargé’s wife was gone, Isabella drew Hervey to one side, with an assurance quite marked, so that he began to imagine she was a practised visitor at the embassy. ‘Major Hervey, it is very good to see you after all these years. I had not known that you were to be here.’

  Her English was estimable, but Hervey was uncertain as to whether or not their mission was expected. ‘Well, ma’am, it is doubly a pleasure in my case, for I believe you may recall that I had a true fondness for your country?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I recall as all the officers enjoyed their time in Lisbon.’

  ‘And I trust we shall again,’ replied Hervey, uncertain what exactly she did recall (he trusted not his own youthful infatuation).

  But Isabella was not inclined merely to small talk. Suddenly her brow furrowed. ‘Your coming gives us all great hope, Major Hervey. You cannot imagine how alarmed are the people here. Many have left already for Brazil again.’

  She spoke in a confidential way. Even so, Hervey was surprised their mission was known of so publicly. ‘How did you hear of our coming, ma’am?’

  She smiled. ‘It is no secret. There have been reports in all the newspapers. I fancy they just wait for The Times to arrive and then serve up the intelligence.’

  Hervey was not sure. Yet if His Majesty’s envoy in Lisbon trusted Doña Isabella Delgado Broke, then who was he to doubt her?

  ‘And, Major Hervey, we have all hoped. My father and others have
been pressing the embassy here these many months, as has the Marquez de Palmella in London. The princess regent has been . . . at pains – do you say? – to reassure the people, and to . . . confound those who oppose the new order.’

  She had spoken fluently hitherto, and Hervey wondered if her search for words revealed more than merely a desire for precision. But he dismissed it as an unworthy notion; and, more to the point, altogether too speculative.

  ‘Do I recollect, ma’am, that you had an uncle or some such at court?’

  She smiled again, impressed by his recall. ‘My uncle was at court, yes. He is now the bishop of Elvas. You will know where is Elvas, Major Hervey?’

  Indeed he did – Elvas, the great fortress, counterpoise to Badajoz the other side of the border. It was at Badajoz that he had put a ball into a Connaught man’s chest, deliberately and without hesitation, although ever since he had grieved for the need of it. But Elvas was of easier memory, a transit camp, no more, albeit his first time there he was awed by its sheer conception and proportion.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, Elvas. A handsome place as I recall.’

  During dinner, Hervey found any resentment of Isabella’s confidence steadily abating. There was about her an openness that reassured. She was, after all, the widow of a British official, her father was a fidalgo and, she told him, in spite of his advanced years an officer of the ordenança, the Fencibles. And Hervey had the assurance of his own memory too: the Barão de Santarem had been the staunchest of men during that winter’s siege a decade and a half ago, when only the lines of Torres Vedras stood between the French and the accomplishment of Bonaparte’s design. Yet he knew it would be foolhardy, for the time being at least, to place absolute trust in anyone, despite Isabella Delgado’s appeal. The opposition to Dom Pedro’s ‘new order’ – the child queen, a princess regent and a liberal constitution – came first from within the country. And the ‘absolutists’, those who would have Miguel as absolute monarch rather than a strong Cortes, were rooted in the aristocracy and the Church, whose continuing power and influence derived from royal favour. Why, then, should not the Barão de Santarem and his brother, the bishop of Elvas, be Miguelistas?

  Two days of inactivity followed for the mission, except for Colonel Norris, who had chosen to conduct his deliberations with the embassy in private. And while this seemed to Hervey and the others an unnecessary exclusion (indeed, something of an impediment to their real object), they had to concede that remonstrations were useless. It was the same with the Negócios Estrangeiros e Guerra, the ministry for foreign affairs and war, and the Conselho da Guerra, the council of military officers charged with the daily administration of the army; Norris seemed jealously to guard his position.

  Hervey wasted none of this unlooked-for time. He engaged a calash (a rickety contraption, he thought, and so small compared with an English chaise) and a guide, and set about exploring the city, so that on his second evening in Lisbon he was able to write home at length.

  Reeves’s Hotel

  Rua do Prior

  Lisbon

  3rd October 1826

  My Dear Elizabeth,

  You will be happy to learn that we had a very good and fast passage here, and that I am put up in good quarters run by an Englishman, very clean and comfortable. We had a good view of the city from the Tagus river, which we sailed up a fair distance, so that I sit writing this now not two furlongs from where I set foot ashore. Perhaps the first impression I had of Lisbon on this occasion – the first time I was here it was all so very strange that I think I had nothing with which to compare it – is how little smoke there is compared with London! I do not know why this is so, unless it is that so little of the fires are burned with coal. I do not recall having the same sense when we were in Rome, but there the city is so much smaller. Here, according to my cicerone, an excellent man, a teacher from the university, there are two hundred thousand souls! But the city has nothing of the feel of antiquity that Rome had, though there are many fine buildings, all of them of the Baroque. The earthquake which destroyed so much of the city’s finery was all of seventy years ago, but everywhere there is evidence still, sometimes in piles of rubble where a house had collapsed and never been revisited, elsewhere in the broken façades of the churches and public buildings. And yet there is fine building anew, not half a mile from me now a great basilica built to give thanks for the birth of a royal male heir, though he died of the smallpox before it was finished. There is, too, a feel of the Indies in many a street, just something in the shape of a window or a door, which reminds of where the wealth of this country is found. But oh! – the streets are as dirty and mean in places as visitors have complained, though I must say I have seen streets as bad in London, and for a reason I cannot suppose, the stench is not nearly so bad as before. I did not say that, unlike Rome, the houses are mainly white, except for the grandest which are painted very decorative, and some that are faced with tiles of different colours. There is a cold wind, but the sun is very hot when it shines, which it has today for a full eight hours.

  In the afternoon I went to the Poor Syon House, which is a nunnery of the order of Bridgettines, which was begun in England and then left three centuries ago and came to rest here in the quiet part. Major Strickland’s sister is there, Kitty, and I had promised Strickland I would take with me letters, money &tc, and give my news of her brother. I was very well received, with tea and cakes, but all conversation had to be transacted through a grille, which I confess I found tedious, and quite unlike the practice of my earlier years in the country and Spain, where most of the nuns were quite free in their association. But the Bridgettines are, I believe, a most austere order. It was difficult for me to see plainly through the grille, but Sister Kitty wore a veil with a white woollen cross quartered like a piece of medieval armour. I told her of our time in India, and what the regiment did now, and explained as best I could what I did now in Portugal, but throughout she said nothing, nor did she ask any question. I have a thought that the prospect of war again makes them fearful. But they stayed throughout the French wars, although Sister Kitty herself did not take her vows until two years after Waterloo. Their convent is very pleasant, quite green and leafy, almost like an English house. It was destroyed, they say, in the great earthquake, but quickly built again, but I cannot know how agreeable it is for them to be in Lisbon, save for the climate. I wanted to ask her if they would go back to England if the laws forbidding them to do so change, as many say they will, but I had not the chance. For my part I hope the laws will change, for it must go hard with their families not to see them. Strickland, I know, has not seen his sister in so many years that he could not recall it last. What harm could these women do, sequestered like this?

  But Hervey knew such a consideration would never of itself serve. The papers were full of it – the Tory papers at least. Repealing the Test Act would only invite trouble in Ireland, and there was not an army to safeguard both Ireland and the colonies. That, at least, is what the King thought (so it was said), and all his ministers, even the Duke of Wellington. And Hervey fancied that the trouble lay in too great a fear of the past, and too great a remove from the effects of the penal laws on humble folk trying to better their lives but in conscience. Sometimes Hervey found it hard to warm to the duke’s politics. The sooner the great man went to the Horse Guards, to the position for which the last thirty years had been perfect prelude, the better. There he could bring the army back to its former efficiency and avoid the rank world of placemen, rotten boroughs and political deals. That had been Hervey’s settled opinion for some time now, and the sight of his friend’s sister in exile for her faith only settled it deeper. But he was able to close the letter on a happier note at least:

  As to my military duties, I cannot tell, for we are idlers at present awaiting orders from the colonel (a tiresome man, but I will not belabour you with more of that). So for the moment I am pleased to receive an invitation for tomorrow to the house of the Baron of Santarem, whom we all kne
w so well for his hospitality and sensibility when first the regiment came to Lisbon . . .

  Next day, early, Hervey once more engaged a calash and made his way to Belem in the western outskirts of the city, where the Delgados had their town house.

  Belem, he recalled, was the place of the navigators, whence the caravels had set off on the great voyages of discovery, returning, if they did at all, treasure-laden; a place where the kings of Portugal had built extravagant churches and monuments to those days, which three hundred years later, even after the ruination of earthquake and war, still spoke something of the riches and confidence of that age. Here, unlike Lapa’s teeming elegance, was an expansive grandeur, the colours regal, the pace sedate. Hervey found he needed no guide once they came on the royal palace, its pink stone warmly familiar in the soft sunlight of a late-autumn morning, and he felt the keenest sense of a happy return as he hailed his driver to turn up to the porticoed doors of the white house in the Rua Vieira Portuense, where once he and his fellow cornets had been so kindly and divertingly received. Almost twenty years ago; it seemed impossible.

  Yet in the barão’s greeting the years fell away at once. ‘It is very pleasing to see you again, Mr Hervey,’ he began, in French as they had always spoken. ‘Or, as my daughter informs me, it is Major Hervey?’ He held out his hand with easy informality.

  Hervey bowed nevertheless as he took the hand, and then again to Isabella, who did not curtsy but held out hers instead.

  Two brindle pointers stood close by, tails wagging. There had always been dogs at Rua Vieira Portuense, and many had been the days when Hervey and his fellows had walked game with the barão’s spaniels and perdeguerras. The latter breed, he seemed to recall, had once been so good at pointing their birds that the King had banned their use. Happy memories of a simpler time, mused Hervey; a cornet’s time.

  ‘Yes, they are pleased to see a face that might give them a little sport,’ said the barão, smiling and patting their heads. ‘I fear I am able to give them little enough myself these days.’