Company Of Spears mh-8

by Allan Mallinson

  Sam Kirwan drew in his breath and inclined his head. ‘I really don’t counsel that, sir. Unless I’m able to observe the illness run its course there’ll be no knowing for certain what it is. I’m by no means persuaded it’s glanders, nor farcy.’

  Hervey was ever open to persuasion in veterinary matters, and had Sam Kirwan been David Sledge then he would have taken the advice without question, but it seemed to him risky beyond reason. ‘It will profit us nothing to know the cause if we lose a troop’s worth of horses.’

  ‘I am of the opinion that the virus will be already abroad in the troop. As long as any sick horse’s confined to the infirmary then I’m sure there can be no serious chance of the contagion’s spreading. If I can observe what is its true nature then I might treat any others that fall sick.’

  The veterinarian’s proposition was logical. The alternative, as he said, was to shoot every animal when it showed the first sign of sickness, no matter what; and if it were a virulent but curable malady then the cost could be great – as well as needless. It all depended on how strict might be the quarantine. But in any case, if the virus was abroad in one troop, could it be contained there as well as in the hospital lines? Hervey shook his head, though not in dissent as much as dismay at the unhappy alternatives before him.

  ‘Very well. But we had better make a quarantine of A Troop’s lines as well.’ He looked his veterinary officer straight in the eye. ‘I have to turn this over to you, Sam. I have other business, and I tell you frankly, I cannot afford to misjudge it.’

  VIII

  GUNPOWDER, TREASON AND PLOT

  Later

  At one o’clock, Third Squadron paraded under the command of Captain Christopher Worsley, F Troop leader. Hervey watched from the edge of the square with the RSM, Major Dalrymple and Nasmyth, the Home Secretary’s man. Behind stood the commanding officer’s trumpeter, Corporal Parry, the best of the trumpet-major’s men, with next to him Private Johnson and the ‘redbreast’, a lantern-jawed man in the black top-hat, tail-coat and breeches, and bright red waistcoat, of the Bow Street Horse Patrol. Johnson was intent on keeping his distance, although the patrolman, formerly serjeant in the 15th Hussars, was disposed to be friendly.

  Hervey decided not to address the parade. Although as aid to the civil powers went this commission was a shade unusual, the men were practised enough. He knew that the troop leaders had spoken to them on the necessity of at first trying the flat of the sword (‘Peterloo’ was ever in the forefront of an officer’s mind when sent to do the magistrates’ bidding), and the dragoons looked eager and capable. He saw no occasion for eloquence therefore. But the parade was his, and he rode forward to take the command.

  ‘Third Squadron – five officers and eighty-eight other ranks – present in marching order, sir!’

  Captain Christopher Worsley was a soft-spoken officer, not given to display, rather dull some said. He had joined the Sixth after Waterloo, gone with the regiment to India, but had come back after three years on account of a recurrent dysentery which defied every medical authority in Bengal. After extensive cures in Germany, he had returned to the Active List, bought F (Depot) Troop just before Bhurtpore, and brought them from Maidstone to Hounslow when the Sixth had returned in the autumn. Hervey had never got to know him well, for Worsley had been a bookish subaltern in D Troop, while he himself had spent a good deal of time on detached duty with E. But, dullness apart, Worsley was held in general respect among his fellows, and he possessed the very marked advantage of having a young and most active serjeant-major. Troop Serjeant-major Collins had been born the same year as Hervey, although there was a discrepancy of two years in the age on his attestation papers and that in the baptismal rolls of the parish in which his father, a miller, was churchwarden. Collins had, without his father’s leave, enlisted in the Sixth the year before the French had invaded Portugal. He had given his age as eighteen rather than sixteen, and his first name as John rather than Angel, an early sign of his prudential judgement Hervey considered. Hervey was indeed the one man in the regiment who knew of these delinquencies, for he had once visited the Gloucestershire mill on his way to Ireland the year before Waterloo, where he had found a proud father and a good woman, his wife, long since reconciled to their only son’s chosen way, happy that they received (as they always had) regular letters and assurances of his well-being. Hervey had told them – as far as he could without making it appear that their son had been exposed to excessive danger – of young Corporal Collins’s courage and skill, and that he was certain to come home one day with a serjeant-major’s stripes. That had been all of thirteen years ago. It had perhaps taken longer to get the fourth stripe than Hervey had then imagined, for the reductions in the cavalry after Waterloo had been savage, but Alderman Collins had at last been able to see his son with four chevrons on his sleeve. In a week or so he would give a party in the great tithe barn at Ampney to celebrate the promotion, and the engagement to marry, both of which Alderman and Mrs Collins had long hoped for. Hervey fully intended being there.

  He looked long at him, now. Serjeant-major Collins was every inch what a colonel in a fashionable regiment would want. He possessed that invaluable cavalry quality ‘a good leg for a boot’. So did Mr Hairsine. Armstrong did not. Armstrong’s leather and brass may have gleamed more, but Collins’s was a frame made for a tailor. In fighting quality there was nothing to choose between them. In experience Armstrong had the better of his junior by a couple of years, in age by half a dozen. Hervey began to wonder if the old principle of promotion – seniority tempered by rejection – would indeed serve the battle-scarred Geordie Armstrong, or whether it would now favour instead the immaculate Angel Collins. He knew that with luck (and justice), the decision would be his, but it would not be easy, although seniority favoured Armstrong, and there could never be rejection of that record of service.

  ‘Leave to carry on, sir?’ Worsley sounded uncertain.

  Hervey realized he had kept him long. ‘Carry on.’

  A march was a good time to think, to mull things over, especially if there was a reliable guide and no chance of ambush. Hervey was grateful of it. ‘What path of glory’s to be had in Hounslow?’ Somervile had asked; yet here they were now, bent on saving parliament or the King himself from popish plotters and their gunpowder. Hervey could not wholly rejoice in the mission, however, certain as he was that no true opportunity for distinction came in aiding the civil power. The best that any soldier could hope for was that his body came out of it whole and his reputation not too badly tarnished, for if every Tory reviled Shelley and his republican notions still, yet they half agreed his picture of ‘An army, which liberticide and prey makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield’. Hervey shook his head. Thank God he had spent the past six years in India, where there were simple certainties – and no poets! Somervile was unquestionably right when he promised a surer path of glory in the Cape Colony. There he might wield his sabre freely and in no doubt as to who were the King’s enemies. With Somervile his judge and patron, he would have his distinction, and his glory even; and with it no doubt further promotion. But it would not be with the Sixth. Would he think meanly of himself for ever thereafter?

  They marched by way of Ealing, Brent and Enfield. As standing orders required, although the distance to Waltham Abbey was only half the daily march rate, they took the first ten miles slowly, with horses led in-hand the first half hour, and then, mounted, at a steady trot. Hervey had seen no reason to vary this, although the appearance of dismounted dragoons was of some curiosity to the population of Hounslow. After ten miles, nearing Brent, they halted on the common for the prescribed fifteen minutes, and gave each horse a handful of water to wash the mouth, and a wisp of hay. The dragoons themselves were allowed water but no pipe. The next six miles were done at a fast trot, and after forty-five minutes on short reins the regiment halted in the outskirts of Enfield. Here they rested for half an hour, the horses off-saddled and rubbed down, given a peck of corn and some wat
er, and the dragoons allowed tobacco. It was nearing five o’clock as they set off for the final ten-mile stretch, the first fifteen minutes horses led in-hand again, and then a brisk trot as before. In an hour and a half, as the sun began closing to the horizon, they rode into a big field of spring pasture at the Four Swans in Waltham Cross, the furthest point of the Bow Street man’s daily highway patrol, and there they dismounted.

  While the RSM went with the ‘redbreast’ to negotiate with the landlord for the green fodder, and beer for the dragoons, Hervey took off his shako, put on a plain lowbrow hat and a plain green cloak, and unfastened the throat plume so as to make the bridle less military-looking. ‘I want to spy out the road,’ he said to Dalrymple and Nasmyth, looking at his watch, then springing back into the saddle. ‘Is Colonel Denroche to meet us here?’

  ‘He is,’ said Nasmyth, looking at his own watch again. ‘In an hour.’ He gathered up his reins to accompany.

  ‘No, if you please; I would rather scout on my own. It will arouse less suspicion, I think.’

  Nasmyth looked irritated, but chose not to contest the matter.

  ‘Do we meet the Sixtieth’s colonel too? I must have words with him.’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Nasmyth curtly. ‘That is a military matter.’

  Hervey turned instead to Major Dalrymple.

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Dalrymple apologetically. ‘My orders are solely in connection with the cavalry.’

  Hervey was angering. It did not seem too much to ask of the man acting on the direct authority of the General Officer Commanding the London District to know such a detail. It was, after all, not unimportant. ‘Very well, I shall ride over to the mills while there’s still daylight.’

  Nasmyth shook his head. ‘I wish you would not. The Sixtieth will have taken up their positions by now. It would be very perilous for all.’

  ‘In God’s name, man, I’ve got to speak with the Sixtieth else sure as fate we’ll blunder into each other! Believe me, I’ve seen it more times than I care to remember, and in circumstances a deal more favourable than these!’

  Nasmyth did not rise to the anger. ‘I am sure we can arrange for the Sixtieth’s colonel to come here, Hervey. I’m sure Colonel Denroche would wish it so.’

  Hervey bit his lip. He was obliged, by the normal usages of aid to the civil power, to submit to any order from a magistrate, or in this case the representative of the Home Secretary himself, but that did not, in his view, mean submitting to orders as to how to exercise his military authority. Except, of course, where such action might be contrary to the law of the land. He chose to be emollient, however. ‘I shall ride a mile or so yonder, to the crossroads – if this map’s faithful. I want to see what is the going off the road.’ He held his map out to Nasmyth, indicating his objective. ‘This, I take it, is the road by which the intruders will come?’

  ‘That is our intelligence. With one waggon, covered. And armed.’

  Hervey nodded. ‘And then I shall return by the old turnpike along the Lea. I shall be back in an hour,’ he said, turning Gilbert about before there were any more protests and impediments.

  * * *

  There had been other occasions when he had felt acutely the want of time for reconnaissance. It made no difference whether the enemy was French or Hindoostani – or even Luddite or Irish: a thorough survey of the ground repaid any expense. He rejoiced that for once he had a good map, or rather plan – the Board of Ordnance’s of 1801 – but he understood there had been extensive building during the late war, and it was as well to mark the changes while he could. Here after all was one of the biggest – perhaps the biggest – manufactories in England.

  That, however, was not his immediate impression as he came into Waltham Abbey. The town was sleepier even than Enfield. As he turned north into Powdermill Lane and began trotting alongside the river he was at once struck, and to his immense surprise, by how pastoral, how green and pleasant, was the scene: no towering foundries, no ‘dark Satanic mills’, no winding gear to lower poor colliers to the infernal regions, no smoking chimneys to begrime the country thereabout. There were so many trees he might have been in Epping Forest still, or else nearby on good Queen Bess’s old chase. There was no noise but for the creaking of waterwheels, no noxious vapours to sting the eyes and throat, no hurly-burly of any sort; only sailing barges which plied the sluggish Lea as peacefully as if they carried flour to City bakers rather than gunpowder to the Woolwich arsenal. But he knew full well how violence could suddenly intrude even on such a bucolic scene (he had drawn sabre and pistol in the English countryside before). And even here, in the quietness of birdsong and a light breeze in the oaks and elms, there was ever the threat of explosion as great as any he might hear on the battlefield. Greater, indeed: as loud as the magazines at Corunna and Ciudad Rodrigo when their powder had taken a spark; and as unpredictable as a volcano.

  He rode north for almost a mile, and still the land was the Board of Ordnance’s. In among the trees he could see the little curved-roof stone buildings, or else flimsy wooden ones which would blow apart readily rather than contain the blast and do fearful destruction to all inside. The more he saw the more astonished he was, for His Majesty’s principal gunpowder mills would, he felt sure, have been at once familiar to great Henry himself when first the manufacture of powder began here three centuries ago. It was a most curious, almost primitive affair, the advances of science and engineering having passed by this very heart of the nation’s machinery of war. There was not even a wall around the site to speak of, nothing to keep out male-factors, although he supposed the road might easily be closed at the southern and northern ends, and then the river on the one side would form a barrier, and the part-canalized Mill Head on the west another. Indeed there were so many cuts and sluices to channel the power-water or let small boats take powder from one process to the next that it appeared to him a veritable little Venice. He would have wished for a more thoroughgoing reconnaissance; all he could do now was gain an impression of the ground over which they might manoeuvre, if ‘manoeuvre’ was not too pretentious a description of a scramble at night after Irish hoddy-noddies.

  He had yet to discover it for certain, but he felt sure the place must be stoutly patrolled by watchmen, to whom even a navvy fortified by spirits and armed with a pickaxe handle was not too formidable an opponent, for the watchmen would, of course, be firearmed, or have access to firearms. Doubtless the ringleaders would be carrying pistols; perhaps even muskets. They would think themselves well set up for the night’s work, expecting nothing out of the ordinary of the watch, so that a sharp fusillade from the Sixtieth might confound them altogether. Not that it would be a fusillade: aimed shots was what the Sixtieth’s riflemen would deliver, even in the dark, for there would be moon enough tonight to make out figures at fifty yards. And that was something that spoke of the intruders’ inaptness too: a bit of a moon they no doubt considered to their advantage – enough to light their path but not enough to give them away. Hervey shook his head. Poor fools! It would be no hunter’s moon tonight, but enough to give the pursuer his line; and with each dragoon carrying a torch those who escaped the Sixtieth’s marksmanship would not evade the following sabre. Poor fools; poor, damned, gullible, Irish fools!

  The ground to the left of the Powdermill Lane was firm enough. Hervey reckoned a man could run a good way before tiring. A pity it was not soft going, to let a horse overhaul a running man not too far from the road. He could see the odd fugitive getting into the woods on the common, where he would then have the advantage if he kept his head. If this were the only road approaching the mills (the parallel canal a couple of hundred yards across the common had a towpath, but according to his map little more), it would be well to put the better part of the squadron in the woods to begin with, leaving a strong party of carbines at the inlets where the Powdermill Lane and canal converged. The rest could picket the lane and the towpath and then drive the intruders north onto the carbines like beaters at a shoot. Unl
ess they were given to panic (which of course, being Irish, was a very distinct possibility), or bent on murder, there was no reason why every one of them should not be taken prisoner. And that would be of the greatest advantage to the Home Office in their pursuit of intelligence. He needed to know for certain, however, where the Sixtieth were: close garrison of the corning mills and storage sheds was their task, but he must make sure there was no possibility of their mistaking his men for intruders.

  ‘Halt!’

  A rifleman, green-uniformed and grim-faced, stepped into the road from behind a rhododendron bush. Hervey pulled up at once. ‘Good evening, Corporal. I am Major Hervey of the Sixth Light Dragoons.’

  The Sixtieth corporal at once shouldered his rifle and saluted. ‘Sir!’

  ‘I was hoping to find your colonel.’

  ‘Don’t know where the colonel is, sir. The captain’s just yonder a couple of hundred yards; at the flour mill beyond the big magazine, sir.’

  Hervey was surprised by how far north the picket was posted, several hundred yards from any building; but that was a question for the captain. ‘That will do, Corporal. Thank you.’

  The corporal stood aside to let him pass. Hervey touched his hat in reply to the second salute, and put Gilbert back into a trot.

  The metalled road now turned into soft track, which in turn all but disappeared at the Grand Magazine. Here was a safe enough place reckoned Hervey: it was entirely surrounded by water, though there was no sign of a guard. He picked his way carefully, wondering how they would fare if there were no moon, for the cloud was becoming heavy.

  At the mill he met the officer commanding Number One Company, a young captain who quickly told him of the arrangements. The flour mill, he explained, was owned by the Ordnance; they had bought it to better regulate the flow of water from the Lea to the powder-corning mills, and it was to be the forward company post. His orders were to picket the Powdermill Lane (which Hervey had just ridden) as far as the big bend in the Lea where the sentry had challenged, and, on the other side of the common, south along the canal as far as the old corning house.