The Nizam's Daughters

by Mallinson, Allan

Captain Hervey smiled sheepishly. ‘Sir, you have aboard a goat and several chickens. And I hear that it is not uncommon to see a cow under the forecastle. To what do you object in equines?’

  ‘Damn your impudence, sir!’ roared Peto, striking the rail again. But he knew well enough that his protests were to no avail. The frigate Nisus had been placed at the disposal of the Duke of Wellington’s aide-de-camp – and that was that. ‘Mr Belben!’ he shouted.

  The first lieutenant rushed aft and saluted. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Mr Belben, be so good as to find a berth for a cavalry charger,’ said the captain briskly.

  ‘Sir?’ replied the lieutenant, his youthful face contorted by incomprehension.

  ‘Do I have to repeat myself, Mr Belben?’ rasped Peto. ‘Do you not understand plain English?’ And, as his first lieutenant hurried away to contemplate his unprecedented orders, Peto turned back to this agent of the victor of Waterloo. ‘Come, Captain Hervey,’ he resumed cautiously; ‘I think we may better discuss this extraordinary commission of yours at my table.’

  Matthew Hervey was, in outward appearance at least, a man transformed from that of a year ago. Then, he had been a lieutenant for but a month, following the deposit of the better part of his savings, and the prize-money accrued over six years’ campaign service, with the regimental agents. Into the premises of Messrs Greenwood, Cox & Hammersly of Craig’s Court in Westminster he had walked a cornet on his first occasion to visit the capital, and there he had signed an instrument for the purchase of a lieutenancy in the 6th Light Dragoons. He had signed another for the sale of his cornetcy to an officer in the Twentieth anxious to avoid service in India, whither that regiment was posted, and had put his signature to a further instrument for the assignment of arrears of pay, held by the agents, towards the difference in price – £350. Other regiments were cheaper (and a few were markedly more expensive), but Hervey would never consider the option of changing horses. He loved the Sixth as if it were his family – which, in all but the literal sense, it was. Its commanding officer, Lord George Irvine, had always shown him the greatest kindness. Its choleric major, Joseph Edmonds, a soldier who had known almost nothing but campaigning in his thirty years’ service, had encouraged him in every particular of the profession, and had exercised a protecting, paternal hand on many an occasion. Sir Edward Lankester, his troop leader – urbane, coolly, almost contemptuously, brave – had been his idol, like an older brother. His fellow cornets, and lieutenants too, who had filled the mess with laughter and good company in the darkest of times, had been his people as surely as were his blood family in Horningsham. And Hervey would add yet more to that family, for in it he counted, as did any officer worth his salt, the companionship of the ranks – the non-commissioned officers who put his orders into action, and the dragoons, the private men, whose life turned and occasionally depended on those orders, and whose daily routine was either miserable or tolerable depending on the aptness and humanity of the officers. The Sixth, however, were a family that had seen misfortune. Waterloo, though a battle gained, had been, in the duke’s own words, hardly better than a battle lost. True, the Sixth had suffered not half as much as the infantry, but shot, shell and lance had plucked some of the best from its bosom. Hervey may have been in two minds about his new appointment – this mission especially – but before Waterloo he could never have contemplated having a choice at all.

  And so now he was Captain Hervey, with aiglets and the patronage of the duke himself, and no longer so impecunious that economy was for him strict necessity. Yet in one respect at least Matthew Hervey was unaltered: to frigate captains he was still in thrall. Captain Peto was, in any case, an officer to whom no ordinary mortal could be other than in thrall. Every reef and hitch, every furl and coil, even in the very extremities of the Nisus, was made in the expectation that his eye might at any time alight on the endeavour. And all was therefore perfection. What was more, however, he achieved this exemplary regimen without resort to flogging. Peto was, indeed, renowned as much for his implacable opposition to the practice as for his boldness in closing with a foe. He had once hanged a man for cowardice in the face of the enemy, but long before the Admiralty had put a stop to it he would not permit a bosun’s mate even to start a laggard.

  Captain Laughton Peto was in age two years, possibly three, Hervey’s senior. He was the same height and build, though his back was a little longer, and his hair was dark, full and straight and looked as though it might once have been pulled into a queue. His manner was not easy to fathom – at times the utmost insouciance, and at others zest for the merest detail of his ship’s routine. He might talk discursively one minute, and then in the next his clipped quarterdeck speech would seem almost incomprehensible. Hervey wondered if he were married, for it would go hard with any wife to live with so contrary a man. When they had first met, at Chatham not a week ago, there had been something of an edge to their intercourse. Peto had not been well disposed to the notion of holding his frigate ready for the conveyance of a staff officer, even an aide-de-camp of the Duke of Wellington, and wished only to be about his passage to the Indies before the winds became any less favourable. When Hervey had gone aboard Nisus he had been presented with sealed orders marked, ‘To be opened only at sea’, and so it was off the North Foreland that he had learned that he was to report to the Duke of Wellington with all possible haste, and to request that the ship on no account leave for the Indies without word from Paris – to which Peto had replied, with no little irritation, that he was not in the habit of disobeying Admiralty orders, for those were his instructions too from their lordships. Yet neither man had anticipated that there was to be any congruence in their instructions. So here where the Seine, having flowed peaceably through Bonaparte’s erstwhile capital, became salty by the Channel – for mastery of which Englishmen like Peto had fought since Drake’s day – the captain of the Nisus found himself once more at the disposal of the captain of light dragoons.

  Captain Peto’s quarters comprised a day cabin running to half the length of the stern windows, a dining space – the steerage – and two sleeping cabins, one of which, as on the short passage to France, he now gave up to Hervey. The principal cabins were well furnished. Comfortable chairs, as well as a large desk, occupied the day cabin, while a highly polished dining table of Cuban mahogany, and eight chairs, graced the steerage. There were even some pleasant-looking pictures on the bulkheads, including one or two small oils of indeterminate landscapes, and the table was laid with silver.

  ‘Take a seat, Hervey,’ said Peto, indicating a comfortable armchair; ‘one of my French Hepplewhites.’

  Hervey assumed them to be booty, acquired in one of the many dashing engagements he knew Peto to have seen. ‘I presume they are—’

  ‘I began with ten, but clearing for action takes its toll.’ He said it almost with relish. ‘There are many who consider the Hepplewhite chair in the French taste to be the acme of English cabinetmaking: there is not a single straight line anywhere in it,’ he continued absently, waving an outstretched palm towards one of the objects of his admiration. ‘I bought them in Bond Street when last I was attending at the Admiralty.’

  Bond Street? English cabinetmaking? Another fox’s paw he had nearly made of that!

  ‘You will take some Madeira with me, will you not?’ Hervey nodded approvingly.

  ‘A rather fine Sercial, I fancy – an eighty-three,’ continued Peto, pouring from a broad flat-bottomed decanter. ‘And a vintage, mind – not a solera.’

  Hervey took a sip and agreed that it was indeed special. ‘It puts me in mind of some German wines, in both colour and taste,’ he said.

  ‘You are well acquainted with Rhenish, are you?’ enquired Peto, evidently impressed.

  ‘The wines of Alsace to be precise. I had a governess from there who first told me of Gewürztraminer, and then the King’s Germans gave me the taste for it.’

  Peto nodded, favourably. ‘They say the Sercial derives originally from the Riesli
ng grape, so there is an affinity with the region.’ He paused, his mind seeming momentarily to be elsewhere, before clearing his throat and returning to his original intention. ‘Captain Hervey, you had better, I think, give me some account of what you are about so that I can best order my ship’s affairs. Start, if you will, at the beginning, for I must know it all.’

  Hervey waited first for Peto’s steward, a Suffolk man who had been almost twice as long at sea as his captain had been on earth, to finish laying the table, and then he began to explain, though not without some misgivings. ‘I am bound by confidentiality in this matter,’ he warned; ‘or, at least, by discretion.’

  Peto looked at him indignantly. ‘You do not suppose that I, myself, am without discretion in such matters?’

  ‘No, indeed – forgive my incivility,’ he stammered. ‘In truth I am as yet uneasy with the circumspection required.’

  Indeed he was. He was also unsure of his capacity for such an assignment. He had been wholly – headily – flattered, as would any officer, when the Adjutant General had made the offer on the duke’s behalf of his becoming an ADC. But all his service had been with the Sixth, and though he knew the elements of staff practice he was by no means confident of his aptness for employment beyond regimental duty. But there was, immediately, the question of secrecy. He looked at Peto resolutely: ‘I see no good reason, sir, why I should not tell you all, for I shall be much in want of counsel these coming months. How long is our passage to Hindoostan?’

  ‘Four months at best; six at most.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Hervey, sounding a touch discouraged; ‘I had imagined half that time.’

  Peto frowned again. ‘Captain Hervey, do you know anything of navigation – of sea currents and trade winds?’

  Hervey confessed he did not.

  ‘I imagine you suppose we shall merely cruise south, round the Cape of Good Hope and then make directly for India?’

  Hervey’s smile, and the inclination of his eyebrows, indicated that that was exactly what he had supposed.

  ‘Well, to begin with,’ sighed Peto, ‘we are making this passage at the least propitious time. To have full use of the south-west monsoon, which blows from October until April, we should have set out in the spring. Come,’ he said, rising and indicating the table on which there were spread several charts. ‘See here’ (he pointed with a pair of dividers): ‘we shall pass about ten leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands and continue westward, almost crossing the Atlantic to the coast of Brazil to get the south-east trades on the beam. Then, at about three degrees south of the Equator, we shall pick up the westerlies to bring us around the Cape. And in the Indian Ocean we shall need to stand well to the east of Madagascar to find what remains of the monsoon.’

  Hervey apologized for his nescience as they returned to their chairs. But of greater moment was the disclosure of his assignment, for he was again seized by doubts as to what discretion he legitimately possessed in the matter. He had not been sworn to secrecy – quite – but in everything that had passed between Colonel Grant and the duke’s new aide-de-camp, there had been the very proper presumption of it. And yet Hervey knew too that he had been appointed to the staff principally because of what the duke himself had referred to as his ‘percipient exercise of judgement’ at Waterloo. He had neither experience nor training in work of a covert nature (though his present commission scarcely, to his mind, gave him the appellation spy). He would therefore have to trust his instincts, and these now told him that he could trust in Captain Laughton Peto – trust absolutely. ‘Then if we are to spend so long in each other’s company it is the very least I should do to apprise you fully of my business,’ he said, with a most conscious effort to avoid any further semblance of condescension. ‘I shall tell you each and every detail – though as yet they are few.’

  The door opened and in came Flowerdew again. ‘Beg leave to bring a pudding, sir,’ he said, in a voice that called to mind Serjeant Strange’s mellow Suffolk vowels. Hervey shivered at the remembrance.

  Peto eyed his steward gravely. ‘It is the Welsh venison pudding?’

  ‘Ay, Captain,’ replied Flowerdew, equally solemnly; ‘and there is a redcurrant jelly with it, and your cussy sauce.’

  This news was received with evident satisfaction. Peto took both the greatest pride and the greatest pleasure in his table. It was, perhaps, unsurprising since he appeared to take the greatest pride in everything about his ship. Hervey knew enough about Admiralty to know that a ship in the hale condition that was the Nisus – with her fine fittings, new paint and gold leaf – was not found by chance: Peto would have had to go to endless pains to flatter the dockyard commissioner into providing that which was routinely denied to other, less persuasive, captains. Or else – and he suspected it was this latter – it was Peto’s own purse that had embellished his ship. As to his taking pleasure in his table, albeit somewhat self-consciously, Hervey was likewise not in the least surprised, for in his experience men exposed as a matter of course to great privation rarely persisted in a taste for frugality in times of plenty – and Peto had, more than once in his service, been reduced to a diet of biscuit and water.

  When Flowerdew was gone the captain conducted his guest to the table and bade him resume his explanation.

  ‘It seems that the Duke of Wellington expects at any moment to be appointed governor-general in India,’ he confided.

  Peto merely raised an eyebrow in disbelief – or in dismay.

  ‘He has been given to understand that Lord Moira will soon be dismissed,’ he continued, ‘since that gentleman apparently has little appetite for reversing the policies of Sir George Barlow – which, it is commonly supposed, were too feeble with the native princes. You will know, of course, that the duke’s own brother prosecuted a most vigorous policy before Sir George.’

  Peto’s brow furrowed. ‘And yet, from all I read and hear, the Court of Directors do not appear to be developing any appetite for intervention. Quite the contrary, in fact.’

  Hervey sighed briefly, but aptly conveying his own frustration with the limited intelligence imparted to him in Paris. ‘The Company, perhaps – yes. But I am to suppose that the government – the Board of Control, that is – takes the opposite view.’

  ‘And do you share these opinions?’ he asked, leaning across the table to replenish Hervey’s Sercial, a distinct challenge in the tone.

  ‘I confess for my own mind I know only what I read in the newspapers and the Edinburgh Review, and these are frequently contradictory accounts. I am the duke’s aide-de-camp and it matters only at this time that I understand perfectly what is in the duke’s mind,’ he answered resolutely.

  ‘And what is his need of you in Calcutta?’

  ‘I am to go in advance to India and to make certain appreciations of the situation.’ Hervey’s reply lacked just a measure of his former resolution.

  Peto now had about him a decidedly disapproving air, though he said nothing.

  ‘I am sorry, Captain Peto, but you appear to object to this assignment,’ countered Hervey, puzzled.

  ‘The Honourable East India Company, sir,’ began Peto, ‘is neither honourable nor a company worth the name, for its monopoly has perverted trade. It is a body which maintains armies and retails tea.’

  Hervey hesitated. ‘You speak as someone with a very singular grudge.’

  ‘My father might not have lost what little he had by way of stocks – his sole provision for the future – if, during the late blockade, the East Indies markets had been open.’

  ‘But the opening-up of trade – has not the Company’s monopoly of the eastern markets been repealed?’

  ‘The reform of the charter was only two years ago. It came too late to save my family’s interests.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear it,’ sighed Hervey, ‘for heaven knows the country has need of every enterprise now to repay its war debt. Your father – he is a merchant still?’

  ‘No, Captain Hervey, he was never a merchant: he h
ad merely invested what little capital he possessed in an ill-starred joint-stock company.’

  ‘I fear that my father might have had the same story to tell had he not already purchased a modest annuity with his capital. Well, there is great need of enterprise nevertheless: the duke says we have spent eight hundred million fighting the French, when before the war it was scarce eighteen a year.’

  ‘Then there will be more slaughter in the east to pay for it. It will be the very devil of a business. That is why, I suppose, your principal is to go to India – to pay his way these past dozen years and more!’

  Hervey frowned.

  ‘Do you know much of India, sir? I have made something of a study of that continent,’ Peto challenged.

  ‘I confess I know little, sir. I have with me a new history of the enterprise but I have yet to make more than a beginning with it.’

  ‘Well, I tell you that no good will come out of our enterprise there. I have read extensively of the trial of Warren Hastings, and of Mr Fox’s speeches in parliament on the East India Bill. What is our object in India, Captain Hervey? It is too ill-defined, I tell you. We shall be drawn ever greater into the wars that are endemic in that place, and our outlay will vastly exceed any receipts.’

  ‘So I may take it,’ smiled Hervey, ‘that you are not greatly enamoured of the activities of the Company?’

  ‘Hervey, mistake me not: we are a mercantile nation. But our business overseas is trade, not conquest. Read your book and then speak freely with my secretary, who was once a writer in Calcutta, and then we may talk of it with more felicity. And he may be able to teach you one or two words which might be of use – how to get a palanquin or a clean girl or some such. But come,’ he added, and with a lighter touch, ‘have some burgundy with that pudding.’

  ‘Thank you; it is an excellent pudding,’ replied Hervey, taking another large piece of dark meat on his fork. ‘Welsh venison, you say? I had not supposed anyone might be so particular in choosing their game.’ And he took a large gulp of wine.