Hervey 07 - An Act Of Courage

by Allan Mallinson

  ‘Sir, it’s Corporal Wainwright, sir,’ said the NCO, saluting. ‘Major Hervey’s coverman.’

  Laming half smiled. ‘Indeed! Do you seek me out? How is Major Hervey?’

  ‘He’s in trouble, sir,’ replied Wainwright, lowering his voice. ‘I came here to tell, sir, but I don’t know who.’

  ‘Trouble? What sort of trouble?’ Laming glanced about. There was no one within earshot, but it was perishing cold, and the street was no place to hear of it. ‘Come inside.’

  Wainwright removed his shako as they entered the legation, a fine palácio not many minutes’ walk from where Hervey was meant to be lodged at Reeves’s Hotel in the Rua do Prior. Laming removed his forage cap after announcing himself to a footman, who showed them to a small ante-room.

  ‘How do you know me, Corporal?’

  ‘Major Hervey spoke of you, sir, and you came to the barracks at Hounslow once.’

  Laming’s brow furrowed. ‘Are you the man who carried Major Hervey to that ship at Rangoon?’

  ‘Sir, yes, sir.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Laming, thoughtful. This was the man who had saved both Hervey’s life and his rein-arm, and by holding a pistol to an army surgeon. Laming was at once disposed to hear him carefully. ‘Tell me what is Major Hervey’s “trouble”.’

  ‘Sir, the Spaniards have got him prisoner. He’s in Badajoz.’

  Laming’s aspect changed in an instant. He scowled like an affronted hawk. ‘How? When? What’s to do?’

  ‘Sir, it’s a bit of a long story, but—’

  ‘Sit you down, Corporal,’ said Laming, and warmly, man to man, throwing his cloak roughly over a damask settee and settling in a big armchair. ‘But first, tell me: who else knows this?’

  ‘Well, sir, those at Elvas know, the general – the Portuguese general, I mean. And Dona Delgado and her father; they’re old friends of Major Hervey’s, sir. I went to them straight away.’

  ‘Delgado? Baron Delgado, is he?’

  ‘Sir; you know him, sir?’

  ‘Many years ago.’ Laming began to think he ought to let Wainwright give a chronological account, but he needed to know one thing more. ‘Who has sent you here, from Elvas to Lisbon, I mean?’

  ‘The general, sir. Well, he said as I could go.’

  Laming frowned. ‘Corporal, I know from Major Hervey what sort of a man you are, but—’

  ‘No, sir. I mean that when it started to look like they weren’t going to be able to get Major Hervey out of Badajoz I said that we had to tell somebody in Lisbon – the colonel or somebody. The general didn’t want to because he says that it wouldn’t go well for Major Hervey if it got out.’

  Laming huffed. ‘And no doubt it would go very ill for the general too!’

  ‘No, sir, he’s not like that. He’s offered to exchange with Major Hervey, but the Spaniards won’t have it.’

  ‘I bow to your good opinion, Corporal. So why have you not told the colonel yet? Which colonel, by the way?’

  ‘Colonel Norris, sir. He’s in charge of the mission here, the special mission, I mean, the one from England. There are three other majors too.’

  ‘Then why have you not told him? He is Major Hervey’s commanding officer, is he not? Yours too!’

  ‘Sir. But as I thought of it, coming to Lisbon from Elvas, I don’t think Major Hervey would want it. You see, he and the colonel had their differences about what should be done if troops come from England. The colonel wanted just to go as far as Torres Vedras, sir, but Major Hervey wanted to have men up near the border.’

  Laming raised an eyebrow, and sighed. He had heard it all before: Hervey and his certainty. ‘Major Hervey is ever of the opinion that between himself and the commander-in-chief there is but dead wood!’

  ‘Sir?’

  Laming shook his head. ‘No matter. Are you aware of any good reason for Major Hervey’s contrary opinion to that of a superior officer, Corporal? No – that is unfair. Proceed.’

  ‘Well, sir, as I said, I went to tell Major Hervey’s friends at Belem, the Delgados, and then came here, thinking as I might try to find Major Cope. He’s the Rifles major who gets on with Major Hervey, but he’s not here still, and neither are the others. And I don’t think Colonel Norris is either. So I was just wondering how I could get the message to Mr Forbes, sir. He’s the envoy here, and he seems to take Major Hervey’s side.’

  Laming raised an eyebrow. ‘You are remarkably well informed, Wainwright!’

  Wainwright was not in the slightest abashed. ‘I am Major Hervey’s covering corporal, sir. I couldn’t do my job right if I didn’t know. That’s what Major Hervey says, sir. He tells me everything. At least, everything he can, sir.’

  ‘Admirable,’ said Laming, sounding not altogether convinced. ‘Well, I think we may have resolved your difficulty in bringing the matter before the envoy, since that is very plainly what I myself am able to do. But there is now a British general here, and we must inform him.’

  Wainwright looked uneasy. ‘Would that be wise, sir?’

  Laming’s head rocked back. ‘You are very sure of yourself, Corporal!’

  Wainwright said nothing.

  ‘But then, as I recall, you did aim a pistol at one of your own officers in Rangoon.’

  ‘Sir, that was because he would have sawn off Major Hervey’s arm if I hadn’t. That’s why I took the major to the ship, sir. The surgeon there was able to save it!’ Wainwright was now sitting at attention.

  Laming held up a hand. ‘Hold hard, Corporal! I am by no means of a contrary mind to yours, but this is hardly something that the general is not going to hear of, one way or another. And it would be a deuced fine thing if he did so and then found out he might have had it from his own men earlier.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Sit easy, man. Now tell me, why did you go to Baron Delgado?’

  ‘Because he wanted Major Hervey to go to Elvas in the first place, sir. His brother is a bishop there, and both of them are strong for the regent. And Dona Delgado, sir – she’s his daughter – she speaks English and went with him; the first time, I mean. And then Major Hervey came back here and wrote a report for Colonel Norris, but then later there was word from Baron Delgado that the Miguelites were going to attack Elvas, and so Major Hervey went there again.’

  ‘Without Colonel Norris’s permission, I imagine?’

  ‘I’m not rightly sure, sir, but I would think so, yes.’

  Laming sighed. ‘Dona Delgado – is her name Isabella, do you know?’

  ‘Sir.’

  Laming nodded, slowly. ‘When the regiment was in Portugal,’ he began, as if explaining to a fellow officer, ‘during the war, that is, we rescued Baron Delgado and his family and brought them to Lisbon. We were going into the lines at Torres Vedras, and the baron had an estate at Santarem, on what would have been the French side. He was an officer in the militia, too, I think. What did they say to you when you told them of Major Hervey?’

  ‘Sir, Dona Delgado said to come here and speak to Mr Forbes while she went to see a friend of theirs in the government, and then to come back to Belem, where they live, so as to work out what to do next. Sir.’

  Laming looked long at Wainwright, trying to judge the affair properly, for here, indeed, was an NCO of uncommon percipience. ‘Dona Delgado – she speaks English well?’

  ‘Sir. She was married to an Englishman here, a consul.’

  Laming nodded again. As he recalled, when first the Sixth’s subalterns had paid court to Isabella Delgado, she had spoken a sort of English – very formal, learned from books. They had all got on so much better in French, with the baron especially. ‘What do you imagine Dona Delgado will say to this friend in the government?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know, sir, but I know that she won’t say that Major Hervey is in Badajoz. She said that right plainly, sir.’

  ‘Very well. When I have concluded business here we will go to Belem, and on the way you may tell me exactly how it came about that Major Herve
y was made prisoner. Is there anything else I ought to know at present?’

  Wainwright thought for a moment. ‘No, sir.’ He stood up.

  Laming remained seated, mulling over things one more time before committing himself to his interview with the chargé. ‘One more matter, Corporal Wainwright; sit down.’ He waited, then forced himself to the question. ‘Do you know who is Lady Katherine Greville?’

  Wainwright shifted only a fraction, but it was enough to alert Laming to the awkwardness – as if he needed alerting. ‘Sir.’

  ‘She is here in Lisbon, is she not?’

  Wainwright rested easy again, for the question was matter of fact. He shook his head. ‘Sir. Her ladyship was here, sir, up unto a fortnight ago, but then she went to Madeira, as was always her intention, she said.’

  Laming could only wonder again at Wainwright’s easy confidence. He did not like exposing so much to a corporal, but Wainwright’s attentiveness and discretion gave him confidence to pursue his line of questions. ‘Did she have dealings with the legation, do you know?’

  ‘Sir. She used to go there a lot.’

  ‘And Colonel Norris – were they acquainted?’

  Wainwright shifted again. ‘Sir. Lady Katherine tried to get him to see things Major Hervey’s way.’

  ‘Did she indeed. How very fortunate is Major Hervey with his female supporters.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Laming rose. ‘Wait here. I shan’t be long.’

  At Badajoz, Hervey’s defiant anger had again given way to guilty introspection. He had woken early; and alone in his ‘cell’ (as he thought of it, for good furniture and fine hangings could not disguise a locked door), the failures and pain of the decade and more since Waterloo, the high-water mark of his uncomplicated subaltern’s life, were displacing any recollection of the good he had done since, or of his short-lived marital bliss, or of his occasional joy since Henrietta’s passing.

  The midday bells of the fortress-city, pealing exuberantly for Natividade, drew his thoughts to that other cell, at Toulouse, when the war with Bonaparte seemed at last finished. There he had lain on a simple bed, his leg bandaged, the wound sutured, and in a place not unlike this – stone walls, a certain solid austerity. The nun sent to tend him, Sister Maria de Chantonnay, a Carmelite and a Bourbon remnant, one of the few of either order to escape Bonaparte’s persecution, had nursed him back to fitness for the saddle, and in the course of it, though he had not realized it at the time, nursed his mind too. For in five years’ continual campaigning in the Peninsula he had never slept out of reach of sabre and pistol; and, he had later come to recognize, such a sleep eroded the Christian man’s sensibility. Sister Maria had spoken of her aubade, her prayer of joy on waking. At the time, it had seemed to him a charming thing, perfectly suited to her calling, but nothing more (his long catechism in his father’s church, and at Shrewsbury, had stamped on him a somewhat ‘upright’ habit in his devotions).

  The aubade, which he had never forgotten, had of late years touched him deep, perhaps because of the manner of its expression – everyday, unselfconscious – but also because (as only later he came fully to understand) it was the most perfect vocal expression of her calling, the waking wife’s embrace of her husband: ‘Oh my God, it is to praise you that I arise. I unite myself to all the praise and adoration offered you by your son Jesus on his arising, and I abandon myself to you with all my heart.’ Once, he had known that exultation himself, with Henrietta; but not since. Since then, he felt nothing at all on waking. Sometimes he had found a certain pleasure, in the arms of his bibi – and, he would freely admit, with Lady Katherine Greville – but it was never so deep, and never frequent enough. More often he felt only black despair. After Henrietta’s death, the despair had continued day and night, week in, week out, month after month. And but for the grace of God and the love of his sister, and the fellowship of the Sixth, it might have been year after year. Henrietta was a dimmer memory now, but a memory nevertheless, and a memory that often rebuked him. How he envied Sister Maria. Her vows had been liberating, while his own – or rather, his chosen way – had brought him to this.

  He shook his head. That was too easy; he could not blame obligation to the army. He had re-read his letter to Georgiana (several times), and the pride in it was all too evident – and the conceit. He had brought himself to his situation now through ambition unchecked by the usual decencies – the dastur, as they had it in India: the observances, the customs of the service – and through an arrogant presumption of his own superior judgement in all things touching on his profession. Nor indeed was it ‘just’ the sin of pride that accounted for his dispirits: he stood in unequivocal contradiction of Scripture, through a liaison with another man’s wife. And that adultery was doubly to be condemned, since he had very patently used Lady Katherine Greville. True, she had used him; but that did not diminish his sin.

  He shook his head again: and there is no health in us. The words of the Prayer Book had a way of laying bare the soul. Indeed, they raged at him: if there be any of you, who by this means cannot quiet his own conscience herein, but requireth further comfort or counsel, let him come to me, or to some other discreet and learned Minister of God’s Word, and open his grief; that by the ministry of God’s holy Word he may receive the benefit of absolution, together with ghostly counsel and advice.

  He had never had so unquiet a conscience as now, but there was no minister with ghostly counsel or advice for him here in Badajoz. For now, he must take his own counsel. There were comfortable words in his Prayer Book. They had seen him through dark and dangerous times before. They asked him the questions that a ‘discreet and learned Minister of God’s Word’ would ask. Was he in love and charity with his neighbour? He could not claim it. He even deceived and neglected his sister, and by extension therefore his daughter. Did he, truly and earnestly, intend to lead a new life? Yes; but if he was to follow the commandments of God, and walk from henceforth in his holy ways, he must walk henceforth from Lady Katherine Greville.

  He needed no ghostly counsel to tell him this. Perhaps, then, this cell was not entirely a defeat? Perhaps, as at Toulouse, the introspection it imposed was a blessing. One way or another he would have to amend his life; of that he was certain.

  But how did he first escape his manmade chains, for he could not lead a new life shackled thus? He looked at the tray on the table in front of him. It was so much better than he had had in the days before. Steam came from the coffee pot, the bread was warm, there were eggs, oranges too. This was his own Christmas feast, and it must be the physician’s doing. In Dr Sanchez there was indeed some curious sort of affinity, and Hervey began to wonder if in him lay his best chance of escape. What other was there? At every visit, Sanchez pressed on him the option of parole: all he had to do was give his word not to take up arms in Portugal again. They probably did not expect him to keep it anyway. The general he had taken prisoner all those years ago at Benavente had given his parole at Dartmoor and returned to France, only to appear before the regiment again at Waterloo. Hervey shook his head. That might serve for Frenchmen – or a Spaniard, no doubt – but it was no option for him. An Englishman did not break his parole.

  What made the physician so keen to press him for it? Hervey pondered something Sanchez had said the day before, something about the obligations of old allies. Might it be that he was himself antipathetic to the Miguelite cause? He was a physician of the town, after all, not an army man, nor even a government official. He was obviously trusted by the authorities, but being a medical man he might not have been obliged to declare any opinion. Hervey fancied there was, too, a certain something in the man’s air that suggested a partiality to a red coat – more than the merely humane. But when would that partiality be ripe enough to gather? And how would he know?

  Colonel Laming, having presented his card at the legation, and having no immediate duties requiring him to return to General Clinton’s headquarters, took a coche to Belem. He had changed h
is mind about taking Corporal Wainwright with him, instructing him instead to continue searching for the Rifles major, but to reveal nothing to Colonel Norris, and then to report to the headquarters that evening – in the hope, simply, that the news at Belem would be good.

  Finding a conveyance on Christmas morning had not been easy, and progress had then been even slower. The streets were full of people on their way to or from church, or to the family celebrations of the festival, and every carriage in the city seemed to be abroad, nose-to-tail and driving at the snail’s pace. The cacophony of agitated pedestrians, hawkers, vendors, iron wheels and church bells had made the transaction with the one coachman he found for hire all but impossible, for Laming pronounced Belem as it was written – ‘Balem’, Bethlehem – whereas the coachman knew it only as ‘Beleim’, so that even as they drove, Laming was uncertain that they were actually bound for the Delgados. There ought to be a star to guide them, he told himself drily. However, once they were free of the narrower streets of the city, and he caught glimpses of the Tagus and the docks to his left, he became less anxious. He knew he would recognize the house once he was close, for he and the other cornets had been frequent callers, shooting with the barão, enjoying his cellar and table, squiring his daughter and her cousins. Agreeable days’ furlough they had been, the French at a safe arm’s-length beyond the lines of Torres Vedras, and Sir Arthur Wellesley content that his officers should have a little recreation, especially if it disposed the people of Lisbon to have confidence in the army and its commander.

  Two and a half hours after leaving the legation, he reached the Rua Vieira Portuense, where the white house with its porticoed doors was at once familiar. He saw that the courtyard was all activity, as he might have expected on this day, but instead of the carriage there setting down visitors, servants were carrying port-manteaux to the boot, and others were stowing blankets inside. Two brindle pointers stood close by, their tails wagging as one, spaniels were running free, and an old perdeguerra lay in the sun in a corner, watching the bustle with a wistful look as if he imagined there would be sport today, and he long past it. There had always been dogs at Belem, just as in the best of houses in England. Laming warmed to the recollection of his days here.