Rumours Of War h-6

by Allan Mallinson

  ‘I confess I have not.’

  ‘Well, you’ll see ’em aplenty once the guns begin to play.’

  There was just something in Knight’s tone, a challenge perhaps, that made Hervey stiffen. ‘I shall hope to bear it well, sir.’

  Knight finished his cup. ‘Ay, I’m sure you will,’ he replied, and with a note of conciliation now. ‘Do you know how long is the horse’s gut?’

  Hervey was brightened, like a schoolboy answering well on his declensions. ‘Upwards of thirty yards, I understand.’

  Knight nodded approvingly.

  The troop farrier’s voice interrupted the tutorial. ‘Mr Knight, sir, Sultan’s bad.’

  The veterinarian was up at once. He hurried to the end of the stalls where the big black trooper stood – hung, almost – in slings. Knight looked at him in despair; it had been so quick.

  ‘The sleepy staggers you think, sir?’

  Knight looked weary for once. ‘It matters little, Corporal Martin. The swellings are universal,’ he said, bending this way and that. ‘And the slings won’t allow of him his evacuations.’

  ‘Shall I take ’em off, sir?’

  The veterinarian had three fingers of his left hand to the groove of the gelding’s cheek, and in his right his hunter watch. ‘No. He’d fall and be cast. We’d never get him up.’

  Farrier-Corporal Martin looked baffled; there seemed no other course to take.

  ‘Pulsations are strong,’ said Knight after half a minute’s counting. ‘I’m certain it’s an apoplexy. I’ll have to bleed him.’

  Hervey’s veterinary knowledge was that of Clator, Coates’s lore and the farrier’s variously understood. Here before him was science, and he wanted to learn it. ‘May I ask exactly what is an apoplexy?’

  Knight was already rummaging in a small chest, one of half a dozen he had brought aboard. ‘Apoplexy is the incapacity of sense or movement through arterial blockage or rupture in the brain,’ he replied without looking up, but as if reading from one of his text books.

  Hervey put what he now knew of apoplexy with his understanding of the circulation of blood and concluded that bleeding was the obvious therapy, even though Daniel Coates had railed against the practice for years.

  Out from the ready-chest came fleam and bleeding stick. ‘And the measuring cup, Martin,’ snapped Knight, as he began unwrapping the instruments. ‘As a rule, Hervey, I do not hold with venesection. Not, at any rate, as a universal practice. But when there is such pressure of blood in the brain it can only be efficacious to relieve it by drawing off a little.’

  Hervey at once saw the logic. Why did opinion differ so much over blood-letting?

  ‘A little, mind. A quart at most. I don’t hold with running it off like—’ He glanced at the farrier. ‘Ready, Martin?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The veterinarian felt with his left forefinger along the jugular groove until he was satisfied he had found the spot. He deftly nicked the vein with the bleeding stick and then with thumb and index finger pressed either side of the incision to open it up, while Farrier-Corporal Martin collected the blood in the quart measuring cup.

  ‘You see, Hervey, there’s a deal of nonsense coming from the veterinary college at present. There are too many anatomists there – human anatomists at that. They’ve been too quick to dismiss farriers’ lore. Mind, a good deal of it needs dismissing.’

  Corporal Martin raised his eyebrows ever so slightly.

  ‘But for the most part it required a systematical inquiry; that is all. Have you read anything of these matters?’

  ‘I am reading Mr Coleman’s Instructions to Farriers.’

  ‘Are you, indeed?’ Knight sounded impressed.

  ‘And Everyman his own Farrier.’

  Corporal Martin raised his eyebrows again, this time more obviously.

  ‘And what do you make of Clator and Coleman?’

  The measuring cup was now full. Knight took his hand from the vein, which closed like a fish’s mouth after a fly, mopped up a trickle of blood with a piece of lint, and pressed his thumb to the wound.

  ‘Frankly, sir, I’m uncertain yet.’

  ‘Indeed, Hervey? Well, let me tell you what I have told the farriers – that they are to disregard Coleman. At best his instructions are of no use, and at worst they are downright cruel.’

  ‘What about Clator, sir?’

  ‘Clator is admirable, a wise old practitioner – if rather too quick to the bleeding stick.’ Knight took his thumb from the vein. There was no more blood. ‘And I believe he is wrong as regards the glanders and farcy.’

  Hervey said nothing, but was full of regard for the veterinarian’s dexterity with the blade; a heaving deck was a far cry from a cavalry stable.

  B Troop quartermaster, a short, stout but active man with no teeth, came up bearing a lantern. ‘I’d like ’ee to ’ave a look at Forty-seven, sir.’

  The quartermaster was from Norfolk. He had enlisted twenty years before, in the first year of the French Revolution, when the regiment had been scattered about the county for eighteen long months on Excise duty. Hervey was more than a shade wary of him, not least because he was not always able to understand what he said.

  ‘Proper sea-sick be ’e.’

  Knight braced himself up at once, though in truth he was so tired that he would have lain down on the straw under the gelding’s feet. ‘Very well, Serjeant Colley. Have a dragoon keep a close watch on this here. Try tempting him with a warm mash in half an hour or so.’

  He made for Forty-seven’s stall, and even more unsteadily, for the ship was pitching worse than before. Hervey watched him with increasing admiration. The veterinarian’s address was preserving half the regiment’s horses, no doubt of it. And not just for his ministrations now, for Knight personally, and with only a very little help from the quartermasters, had determined which horse should go where. He had put stable mate with stable mate, and the nappier ones and poorer doers in the more accessible stalls. His constant exertions since were keeping the sick ones up so that Nature and calmer seas could in time work their cure. No one was more important to the Sixth’s reputation at this time than Veterinary Surgeon Knight, and never had a young blade expected it.

  But Forty-seven had been in a fearsome state. Unable to throw up – the lot of every equine – his uncomprehending terror had driven him to a state of brute violence. He had kicked, paddled, squealed and screamed worse than ever Hervey had seen before. Knight had been quick to his decision – ‘The axe, Martin’ – and they had taken the old gelding from his stall, in the greatest peril of their own safety, to the other side of a bulkhead where the feed was kept, and there the farrier-corporal had swung his axe. With the pitching and rolling of the ship, the confined space and limited headroom, and the horse’s own plunging, it had not been a clean execution. Four times Martin’s axe had had to swing before Forty-seven was finally despatched.

  Hervey remembered his nausea in that bloody, stinking, wooden dungeon, for which in truth nothing had prepared him. Daniel Coates had taken him once to the butcher’s yard in Warminster to see the slaughter of two oxen, but it had been meagre schooling for the horrors of shipping horses. And he recalled how after they had covered Forty-seven with a paulin and got rid of the smell of blood, he had returned to his tiny canvas cabin on the deck above and there read his Prayer Book, as his daily custom had then been. He even remembered which psalm it had been: 109 – ‘Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way: even by ruling himself after thy word. With my whole heart have I sought thee: O let me not go wrong out of thy commandments.’

  But it was no longer his custom to read the psalms daily. Indeed, his connection with the Prayer Book was increasingly from one Sunday only to the next. He wondered whether in recent years he had become altogether too complacent . . .

  ‘Boat your oars!’

  He woke abruptly. Eighteen years! It was too long ago to be recalling. There was too much in the past that was painful, for one memory le
d involuntarily to another, and eventually to a snow-scape in North America and Henrietta’s icy death. And all because he, her own husband indeed, had lacked the resolution to oppose his commanding officer’s malign incompetence.

  And yet, there was so much of the past to be recalled so as not to make the same mistakes in the future. That much was the very essence of what Daniel Coates called experience. Especially here in Portugal, where the people had paid a high price for their earlier mistakes. But that was, in truth, largely Colonel Norris’s business. His was but a supporting role, to advise on the suitability of this or that in so far as it touched on the mounted arm – the country, its going for the cavalry and its means of sustaining it; remounts, their suitability and cost; mules, even. Not a job for a blade, in truth, but it had just sufficient prospect of action to assure him that Portugal was the place for a brevet-major in want of the opportunity for advancement. A word from Norris to the commander-in-chief, the Duke of York, when they returned, and he might even get a merit promotion. Such things were not unknown. He congratulated himself that he would be within but a step of a lieutenant-colonelcy and command.

  He had been within that short step before, and ten years earlier, when he had come back from India the first time. The Horse Guards had given him a brevet, and the Sixth’s colonel, the Earl of Sussex, had told him the regiment would be his, and that he would pay nothing for it. But Lord Towcester had put paid to that; and to so much more. Hervey could only wonder at his own acquiescence in the face of that cowardly martinet’s tormenting of the regiment. He would never make the same mistake again, though he could scarcely imagine meeting another like Towcester were he to live to a hundred.

  No, his fortunes were once again in the hands of the Horse Guards and the providence of battle. It had been very well, indeed, that he had got himself here; or rather that Kat had got him here.

  CHAPTER SIX

  OLD ALLIANCES

  Reeves’s Hotel, Rua do Prior, Lisbon, that evening

  Private Johnson laid Hervey’s best coat over the back of a chair, and sighed. He had rubbed it with damp huckaback for a full five minutes. ‘Them ’airs ’ave got everywhere.’

  ‘Not as bad as the ink in Canada though, I fancy?’

  Johnson grimaced. He had told Hervey not to put the bottle in the same trunk as his pelisse coat. But that had been ten years ago, and they had not had too many mishaps since then when it came to the baggage. But the cats at Reeves’s had made themselves comfortable in the opened portmanteaux the instant Johnson had left the room in search of coal, and, he observed, a Portugoose tom had a remarkable ability to shed white hair on dark blue worsted. Otherwise both Johnson and Hervey approved of their quarters, for Reeves’s was run in the English fashion. The hotel was well lit, with oil, the rooms were large and airy, and there was a good table. It stood in marked contrast with the streets between their landing and the Rua do Prior, for even in the fashionable Lapa district, where there were houses as elegant as anything to be seen in London, and in many cases the more attractive for being covered in vivid climbers, the streets were unconscionably filthy. And this to sensibilities long eroded by the sights and stinks of Calcutta.

  ‘So which o’ t’brothers is t’wrong’n, sir? Tha were gooin to tell me but tha never did.’

  Hervey thought he had explained everything before leaving Hounslow. But it was a twisted affair, he would admit, and the details curious. ‘That depends on how you wish to view it,’ he said, determined not to oversimplify the business. ‘I told you that the old king of Portugal lived in Brazil, because that is where the royal family fled when Bonaparte first took Lisbon. And when he died earlier this year his elder son Dom Pedro succeeded him, but he wanted to stay in Brazil and be emperor there, so he abdicated in favour of his daughter – who’s the same age as Georgiana – and said there would be a constitution.’

  ‘What’s a constitution?’

  Hervey was inclined to sigh, not least because he did not know the exact details of what it was that Dom Pedro proposed, and it was a fair question since the word scarcely had much currency either in India or at home. ‘I believe it would allow for there to be more power given to the Cortes – the parliament – and such like. But the point is that Dom Pedro’s brother, Miguel, believes the throne should be his, and that he should have absolute power and not be governed by parliament. And his supporters, among which, it seems, are to be found many army officers, are threatening to overthrow the infanta. Is that clear enough?’

  ‘Like in Bhurtpore.’

  ‘Very like in Bhurtpore. Some of the regiments have defected to Dom Miguel and crossed the border into Spain, and the Spaniards are giving them money and powder, and the Portuguese regent – a princess, by the way – fears an invasion soon, perhaps even with Spanish troops. That is what the British ambassador believes also, and that is why we are here – to see what a British force might be able to do to avert such a thing. It would be civil war otherwise, and that would be an invitation for all sorts of meddling. By Spain and France I mean.’

  Hervey put down his hairbrushes, pleased with his exposition of a not uncomplicated question.

  Johnson handed him a white lawn shirt. ‘So we’re for Pedro an’ ’is daughter?’

  ‘Yes, though there’s many in England who aren’t.’

  ‘What’s ’is daughter called?’

  Hervey thought a moment. ‘It quite escapes me. I shall recall it later, or else ask at the legation. If I ever get there.’ He pulled the shirt over his head and began fastening the buttons. ‘You know,’ he began again, nodding to the coat, ‘I do so dislike those new-pattern epaulettes. They’re absurdly large. I’ll look like Tiddy Doll.’

  Johnson said nothing. He held no view other than that they required more cleaning. ‘And you want me to take that stuff to yon nunnery?’ he asked instead, holding up the coat.

  Hervey slipped on the tunic and began fastening the buttons. ‘If you would. I promised Major Strickland I would deliver it the instant I arrived. Corporal Wainwright may go with you if you both have a mind. Where is the letter by the way?’

  ‘It’s wi’ t’money.’

  ‘Very well. The place is called Poor Syon House. Engage a carriage; they are sure to know where it is – not far, I believe. And inform Miss Strickland I will visit in due course to tell her of her brother, and to take any letters for him when the time comes to leave.’

  ‘Right. Do they talk English?’

  Hervey blinked. ‘They are English, Johnson. That’s why Miss Strickland’s there.’

  ‘Well, tha never said. Why are they ’ere?’

  ‘I imagine it’s an agreeable place to be. Why shouldn’t they be here?’ He fastened the top button of the bib-front and pulled the points of his shirt proud of the collar.

  ‘I mean, why wouldn’t they want to be ’ome – in England?’

  Hervey considered the implications of the question for a few seconds. His groom’s deficiency in English history was hardly to be deprecated, given the meanness of his upbringing, but his nescience could still surprise. He replied, kindly, ‘Because, Johnson, they are not allowed. They may come home as they please, of course, but not in their robes. There are no nunneries in England.’

  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 sh
ade 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.