‘Yes, I thought them in very creditable condition,’ said Sir Eyre Somervile, having the greatest difficulty making his little kehilan walk rather than jogtrot. ‘A week, perhaps, before they’re ready for work?’
‘A week, yes, to begin on lightish work. This is mild and bettering weather. In any event, they’ll be fit enough by the time you’re ready for us.’
‘I shall still want you to go to the frontier meanwhile.’
‘Of course. Fearnley knows what to do.’
The lieutenant-governor managed at last to get his mare to walk. Her flanks glistened, Somervile’s face ran with sweat, and Hervey observed the spreading dampness under the arms of his long white coat and between his shoulder blades – and this despite the fact that they had done no more than trot for about ten minutes. Somervile was a good two stone plumper than when they had first met (and even then he had been carrying more weight than any handicapper would require). His opportunity for exercise these past months had not been what it had in Calcutta; but he had lost nothing of his gameness – nor his little arab mare her bottomless stamina. ‘I’m determined to join you there just as soon as General Bourke is returned. I must meet him first.’
‘I ought myself to be meeting him first, perhaps,’ said Hervey, with more circumspection than usual. He had no wish to begin on the wrong foot with the general officer commanding.
Somervile waved a hand airily. ‘Yes, yes, but I can attend to all that. The sooner I know your opinion of the frontier the sooner I can begin—’
The mare stumbled, throwing her rider painfully on to the saddle pommel. Somervile’s face turned red as he struggled not to curse too foully. ‘You are content with the barrack arrangements?’ he tried manfully, hoping the change of subject would prove a useful distraction.
Hervey looked almost as pained. ‘For the horses, yes; for the men, no. One privy between twenty. We had better arrangements in India.’
‘You have spoken to the town major, no doubt.’
‘The garrison engineer’s to do something.’
‘The King of France’s horses are better housed than a dragoon?’
Hervey smiled ruefully.
‘I was delighted to see your serjeant-major again. He is a most excellent fellow.’
‘He is, and he ought by right to have been RSM now, but the new colonel wished to bring his own man, and I could not budge him on it.’
‘You have a good opinion of him nevertheless, your new colonel?’
‘Holderness? Oh indeed, he is very gentlemanlike.’
‘And this sojourn of yours here, he will not resent it when you return?’
Hervey tilted his head. ‘I do not believe so. Indeed he was most particular on that point. And I think, in a way, it is as well that I’m here, since a new man ought not to feel his predecessor – however temporary – looking over his shoulders.’
His old friend raised an eyebrow. ‘Would that it were so with General Bourke. There’s no doubt the colony is in want of true civil government, and yet it is in large part still an armed camp.’
Somervile had been in Cape Town barely a fortnight more than Hervey, but the best part of two decades in Madras and Bengal had given him a keen judgement in these matters (as well as a taste for powder and the edge of the sword). Hervey had long been certain that he would rather shoot tiger with Eyre Somervile than with any other man – save, perhaps, Peto. ‘I would imagine that Bourke will be only too keen to address himself to the military side alone. Are you content with what he has proposed for the new regiments?’
Somervile answered very decidedly: ‘I am, but I should wish for more of that article.’ He indicated the platoon of the Fifty-fifth marching towards the castle.
Hervey nodded knowingly. It was good to see a regular regiment of Line here. Native troops – black, white, brown (or even, he supposed, yellow) – were all very well, but there was something about a red coat and the King’s crown on the helmet plate. It was like seeing a brick-built wall, properly laid and pointed, when all else was undressed stone, or mud and daub. The Fifty-fifth he had never encountered before. They had not been in the Peninsula, nor at Waterloo, but they had sweated away in Jamaica and had been at the Cape for five years. He could not but suppose they were hardened to ‘colonial’ fighting. ‘Indeed. It would be difficult to have excess of them. Except, you know, I’ve been reading that engineer officer’s report of his exploration of Kaffraria, and I wonder whether such regulated drill as theirs is most apt.’
‘They have a light company, do they not?’
Eli was now on her toes, sensing a return to quarters, so that Hervey had to sit deep again to try to collect her. ‘Yes, and most usefully. It is merely that I imagine the country hasn’t changed greatly since the exploration, and the sort of scrub he describes is the devil for manoeuvring in close order; you recall the like in Madras? I’ve been here but a week, but by all accounts the Xhosa fight from behind cover of the scrub, in which case I should sooner have a company of riflemen who snipe than three of muskets who volley.’
‘Well, you may see the country for yourself right enough.’
‘Just so. And I’m content to leave the Rifles recruits with Streatfield, their major, for the time being. They’ll not be ready to begin mounted work for a month at least.’
As he settled Eli into a proper walk before starting on the long cobbled ramp to the gate, he glanced left and right about the curtain wall of the Castle of Good Hope. It would have been easy to imagine himself in Spain again, for the pentagonal fortress, with its bastions and ravelins, scarps and glacis, looked for all the world as if Marshal Vauban himself had been here. It looked, indeed, like the fortress at Badajoz. Hervey had a sudden moment’s doubt, then told himself that Badajoz was all in the past, and kicked for Eli to walk on with more address.
It was a solid affair this place. It was not as big as Badajoz, but it was serviceable, although it had not saved the Dutch when the British had landed here to wrest the station from them in the early years of the French war. Already Hervey had spent hours in the castle library learning of it what he could. He knew each of the bastions by name, and why they were so called – Leerdam, the western bastion, followed clockwise by Buuren, Catzenellenbogen, Nassau and Orange. He knew that the bell above the gate was cast in Amsterdam in 1697 and weighed more than a quarter of a ton. The Dutch had used it to tell the hours and to warn of danger (it could be heard two and a half leagues away, said the librarian). Inside the walls were all the offices of an outpost of the Royal Dutch East Indian Company – church, bakery, storehouses, magazines, cells, workshops and living quarters, and all painted yellow to reflect the heat while minimizing the glare. It had been built with the utmost permanence in mind, the maritime replenishment station of the same undertaking as Britain’s own John Company. Yet Hervey did not feel himself far-flung from the engine of affairs in London, nor excluded from the great enterprise in India; rather he felt – as he supposed must Somervile – that he was at a prime gearwheel in the vast machine that was the Honourable East India Company; a gearwheel that was set to expand somehow – and which at the same time was threatened with violent interruption. No, he did not feel himself to be without the opportunity for distinction; not here.
He woke. ‘I beg your pardon—’
‘I said that I feared Colonel Somerset was unfriendly. Scarcely a word to be had from him. He did not appear to share your pleasure in seeing a fine regiment landing its horses.’
‘Ah, Colonel Somerset.’ Hervey smiled, mock-pained. ‘The army is divided into two classes of men: those who were at Waterloo, and those who were not.’
Somervile returned the smile, though wryer. ‘I thought you were going to say those who are Somersets and those who are not!’
‘That too! But the Waterloo Somersets were deuced fine. I met Lord FitzRoy a little before the battle, a most agreeable man; and Lord Edward had the Household brigade.’
‘Well, FitzRoy is now Wellington’s man at the Horse
Guards. The Somersets’ reach will be ever long, therefore.’
Hervey raised his eyebrows as he looked directly at his old friend. ‘You could say, on the other hand, that since the duke is at the Horse Guards my reach is therefore long!’
Somervile was not sure what to make of the proposition. Was Hervey being entirely serious? ‘At any rate, I should not wish anything untoward there. We must not forget that the reason I am here is that Lord Charles Somerset was recalled, and peremptorily. He will be brooding, still, in London, and there are plenty of ears there all too ready to be beguiled. He will be especially solicitous of his son, and, no doubt, the son will be assiduous in writing home his opinion of affairs here – Waterloo man or not. Caution, Hervey; that is my counsel.’
Hervey shook his head. ‘Of course; caution. You may depend upon it.’
They rode on up the cobbled ramp without speaking, until Somervile gave voice to his other concern. ‘It would have been well that General Bourke were here, and not just to welcome your troop. There are things I would know as to his thinking, although I must say that he has made admirable economies.’
‘Better, I think, that we are able to lay on a proper parade for him in a month or so.’
‘Just so,’ agreed Somervile. ‘But I do wish he’d not gone off to St Helena at the very time he knew I must arrive here. What in heaven’s name possessed him to think there was any requirement for him there?’ His mare began slipping and sliding on the cobbles, quite diverting him for the moment until she was back in hand, by which time he had resolved to change the subject. ‘Quite a scientific sort of man, by the look of it, your veterinary surgeon. Quite particular he was about his urine samples.’
Now Eli stumbled. ‘Damn!’ Hervey was thrown off balance, and doubly to his chagrin since he had presumed her so capable. ‘Not fit enough by miles. What? Sam Kirwan? Yes, exactly so. He’d applied to go to India, to study tropical infections, but I persuaded him here instead – for the time being at least.’
And already, he explained, thanks to his lieutenant’s telling, he had cause to be grateful for those powers of persuasion, for Sam Kirwan had saved one trooper from choking when it swallowed its tongue in a gale off the Azores, and saved another’s sight when it dislodged an eye from its socket. The War Office did not like sending horses to the Cape Colony. In the early years they had shipped them in their many hundreds, and a large number of those that survived the passage had broken down before they could be got fit for work (one in three did not see a second year in service). The alternative, which the War Office now preferred, was to buy the country-breds and native ponies, which, they believed, increasingly served. It had indeed been the War Office’s intention in the Sixth’s case to authorize local purchase rather than take on the expense of shipping, but Hervey had been able to persuade the Duke of Wellington’s staff, and they in turn Lord Palmerston’s, that the cost of shipping might easily be offset by the reduced time the reinforcement would need to remain in the colony training the coun-try-breds to the trumpet.
‘Much depends now, therefore, on Sam Kirwan’s supervision of the regime of acclimation: three to four weeks, we reckon. Which is why I feel able to undertake your reconnaissance of the eastern frontier.’
‘The Mounted Rifles will give your men a good run for their money in a couple of months, I imagine?’
Hervey nodded. He was not inclined to see any mischief in his old friend’s suggestion. In any case it was undoubtedly true (neither was it a bad thing). The Rifles were already well found: there were eighty or so men enlisted, some from the former colonial corps, and a hundred-odd cob-ponies had been broken and backed thanks to the zeal and capability of the dozen rough-riders from the old Cape Regiment. Recruits had begun their drill with the double-barrelled rifles which Lord Charles Somerset had of his own initiative ordered from the Westley-Richards factory in Birmingham, and there were enough NCOs of sound experience to teach sharpshooting.
‘When I have had a satisfactory parade state for the troop – in a day or so – I believe I should be ready to leave for the frontier. Shall you be able to give me more particular orders?’
‘They are being copied as we speak.’
Through the arched gateway and into the bailey clattered the two mares. The quarterguard presented arms, and Somervile acknowledged, raising his hat high.
‘And there is another thing I would have you look to. Lord Charles Somerset says in his letter of relinquishment to me – which I must acknowledge is a handsome enough memorandum – that there is an officer in Cape Town who might render signal service. If he can be persuaded to bestir himself. I thought it appropriate that he accompany you to the frontier. His name is Edward Fairbrother, of the Royal African Corps.’
Hervey was puzzled. ‘The corps was disbanded some years ago, was it not?’
They came to a halt outside the long, boxlike building that was headquarters of His Majesty’s administration in the Cape Colony. Orderlies standing ready took hold of the bridles, and Sir Eyre Somervile, and Lieutenant-Colonel (Acting) Matthew Hervey, commandant of the new Corps of Cape Mounted Riflemen, dismounted with as little ceremony as possible.
‘Five years ago, to be precise,’ said Somervile, taking the steps to his quarters with impressive bounds, even though his breath was in short measure. ‘The hard cases, I think you call them, were sent to Sierra Leone, and the officers who declined to accompany them were forced to transfer to half pay. One or two stayed here – they were made land grants on the Fish River – but most returned to England.’
‘And so Fairbrother knows the frontier?’
‘Apparently very well, and speaks Xhosa – or Kaffir, as probably he calls it. Or yet Nguni, for that matter.’
Hervey smiled. His own facility with languages was entirely practical, whereas Somervile’s delved deep into their history and character. ‘How is your Xhosa, Lieutenant-Governor?’
Somervile did not immediately return the smile. ‘I am not yet fluent, but I can converse perfectly reasonably with my fundisa. There was little else to detain me during the passage.’
Hervey nodded, chastened. ‘Then I will speak with this Edward Fairbrother. There was a Fairbrother in the Eighteenth; I wonder if they are any sort of kin?’
XV
ROYAL AFRICANS
Later that day
It began raining in the late morning, at first a mere mizzle, and then more decided, but it was no more to Hervey than the sort of late-winter downpour he had known on Salisbury Plain, though not nearly as cold. Johnson had complained about the weather since arriving. He had received the knowledge of the reversal of seasons in the southern hemisphere with considerable scepticism, believing his informants were intent on some joke at his expense (if anything, his brush with the Bow Street forces of the law had made him excessively wary). He had lit fires and worn woollens at every opportunity, and told Hervey severally that even when the weather took a turn for the worse in Sheffield in August they could at least go about in flimsy.
Hervey had quickly stayed his groom’s grumbling protests this morning, however. He was determined on seeking out Lieutenant Fairbrother as soon as possible; and with the troop engaged on its march to quarters, and the Rifles in the capable hands of Major Streatfield, there was nothing that need detain him. He therefore called for his waterdeck cape and set off on foot for Fairbrother’s lodgings, dismissing Johnson at the last minute, seeing how close were the lodgings and that he would not have need of the saddle.
He could reasonably have summoned Fairbrother to the castle, he told himself as he set off: the lieutenant was not on the Active List but he was still subject to military authority. And it might have served to do so, for it did no harm to remind a man of his duties. By convention, however, an officer on half pay was allowed the courtesies of formal retirement, and in any case, Hervey took the pragmatic view that persuading a man to do something he might find disagreeable was much the more likely if the persuader did not stand on his dignity.
The rain began to run down the back of his neck, and it troubled him that he was troubled by it. A soaking – like a baking, or a dusting or a freezing – was but a part of the soldier’s life. Had he become soft of late in Hounslow? He wished he wore his shako instead of the forage cap, for it would have kept his neck dry. And he wished too that his new tunic were made, for he had a mind that Rifle green might make more of an impression on Fairbrother than would blue – unless Fairbrother was indeed related to the cornet of that name in the Eighteenth (whom Hervey had known in the Peninsula as a very dashing sabreur).
Lieutenant Fairbrother’s lodgings were about half a mile from the castle next to an expanse of greenery known as the Company’s Gardens, originally a market garden for the Dutch East India Company but now a handsome park filled more with exotic plants and the makings of some sturdy oaks. Hervey’s instructions took him through the gardens to one of a dozen brightly painted timber houses on the western side. A Hottentot woman answered the bell. She was not a great age, but her hair was white; she wore a print dress of European fashion, but no cap. There was about her both dignity and authority. Hervey explained who he was, and she admitted him and showed him to a flower-filled sitting room.
‘I am Master Fairbrother’s housekeeper, sir. I will see if he may receive you,’ she said, with a certain formality. ‘Please be seated.’
Hervey took a seat by a window with a prospect of Table Mountain. He sat for more than a quarter of an hour trying to remain composed, though inclining to exasperation at the delay in any sort of reply. There was a fire in the hearth, which at least began the process of drying out his trousers. He wondered what Sam Kirwan would be thinking of the prospects of studying his science in a tropical climate.
At length the housekeeper reappeared, and with a look that said she had had some difficulty. ‘Master Fairbrother will come very presently, Colonel Hervey. May I offer yourself tea?’
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