A Close Run Thing

Hervey’s brow furrowed at the thought that there might be a second case. T don’t understand it at all, Sarn’t-Major. Moon blindness — Specific Ophthalmia — it’s so rare that none of us has seen it before, and now there sounds as if there might be two horses in the same troop! Clamp, the other chestnut — he has been well enough since Christmas?’

‘Sir!’

‘And did anything cause that sickness that you know of?’

‘He’d had a bang on the ’ead from something, but I can’t remember what.’

‘Had he indeed! And this one, number …’ Hervey stooped to find the regimental number on the off-fore hoof (the Sixth had lately adopted this practice instead of the approved method of cutting the number into the coat). ‘J77 — did he have any knocks about the head?’

‘He ’ad a thorn in ’is eye a week ago, sir.’

Hervey made a thoughtful umm sound. ‘Fetch a candle, Clamp!’

‘What are you thinking, Mr Hervey?’ asked the serjeant-major.

‘I’m thinking that I should like to see the eye for myself. Would you hold up his head for me?’

‘His eye will be way back in its socket by the time you prise it open.’

‘That’s why I’m not going to force it. Hold the candle up close, Clamp!’ He placed his hand carefully on the gelding’s brow and gently extended his thumb so that it rested on the margin of the upper lid.

‘What exactly are you doing, then?’

‘There’s a muscle just above the eyelid, the retractor muscle,’ he replied. ‘If you press gently but firmly on it, it ceases to act with any strength and the lid can be lifted quite easily.’

Hervey pressed for almost a minute and then drew up the lid slowly, using his other hand to pull down the lower lid. The gelding stood quite calm and still.

‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ muttered the serjeant-major.

‘An old trooper taught me that: Daniel Coates — he was with the Sixteenth in America. He taught me to ride, use a sword and a pistol, and everything about handling a troop — and all before I was twelve! I should think there is very little that Daniel Coates does not know,’ said Hervey absently.

‘Do you see anything?’ the serjeant-major pressed, even more intrigued.

‘Take a look at the pupil for yourself, Sarn’t-Major. What do you see?’

‘The middle’s very blue.’

‘What else?’

‘Nothing that I can tell, sir. It’s very watery of course.’

‘The pupil — is it diminished?’

‘No, I would not say it was.’

‘Just so, Sarn’t-Major!’ And with that Hervey let the eye close. ‘We must summon the veterinary officer.’

‘I’m afraid he’s been bedded down, sir — fever again.’

‘The poor devil’s riddled with it. He ought to give up. Well, Sarn’t-Major, this horse is not to be shot. He needs some damp muslin over his eyes and then turning out in a day or so. He has Common Ophthalmia, not Specific. The symptoms are all but identical, except that with moon blindness the pupil is invariably diminished. Clamp, what is the other chestnut’s number?’

‘J78, sir. Him and 77 was bought as a pair in England.’

‘Umm,’ went Hervey again. ‘Order feeding-off, then, Sarn’t-Major.’

And now at last he could go and see his own chargers, stabled in a tithe barn on clean straw, the first they had seen in months. Inevitably they were chewing it.

‘It’s all right, sir,’ chirped Johnson, ‘it’s wheat straw.’

Hervey’s little mare whickered in recognition while continuing to chew her bed, but she looked badly run up.

‘Is there no hay anywhere?’ he asked, pulling her ears.

‘Not yet, sir, nothing decent; quartermasters are still out progging.’

Jessye was by common consent the handiest charger in the Sixth, although when Hervey had first joined for duty she had been derided as a covert-hack, fit only to take a blade to a meet but not to follow hounds. Barely an inch over fifteen hands, yet she had the sturdiness and intelligence of her dam, a Welsh cob which for twenty years had carried his father round his parish, and the speed and endurance of her sire, a thoroughbred whose bloodlines went directly back to the Godolphin Arab. She had struggled out of the womb on Hervey’s fourteenth birthday, the day he left the vicarage for Shrewsbury School, a birthday present of such apt timing that his understanding of natural history was unusual for some years to come. He alone had schooled her, though she had taught him almost as much as he had imparted to her, and he always counted it an act of providence that an outbreak of farcy prior to sailing had kept her behind in England during the first campaign: the thought that he would have had to shoot her on the beach at Corunna with all the others filled him still with a peculiar dread.

‘“An horse is a vain thing for safety; neither shall he deliver any by his great strength.”’

‘Eh?’ challenged his groom.

‘Not my words, Johnson — the Psalmist’s.’

‘Well he must have been fuzzed!’

‘I mean that it is written in the Psalms,’ Hervey explained with a smile of mild dismay. ‘Thirty-three, I think’ — as if Johnson might somehow wish to look up the reference for himself.

‘They don’t say owt about ’orses that makes much sense.’

Hervey gave up. ‘Her coat stares, Johnson. We must find her some blankets and make a mash — she’ll have colic before midnight, I’ll be bound. Wheat straw or not, tie her up for the time being.’

A shrewd observer would next have noted a subtle change in Hervey’s manner. With Jessye he was easy and familiar; with his second charger he was perceptibly distant, respectful rather than affectionate.

‘Nero looks fine enough,’ he said.

‘Oh ay, sir, ’e’s all right; that cut’s nothin’.’

Nero had been bred to look fine. A full hand and a half higher than Jessye, he had come to Hervey from the king’s stallion depot outside Hanover via an ensign in the Footguards. Lieutenant d’Arcey Jessope had been officer of the guard one day when His Majesty, in one of his periodic derangements, and conceiving himself to be in the Herrenhausen rather than at Windsor, had become convinced that Jessope, in his scarlet, was one of his Hanoverians. The king had taken him at once to the royal stables and presented him with the first animal that His Majesty considered appropriate for an officer of his Leibgarde. Jessope had thereby become the owner of a mount which, though magnificent, he subsequently found unmanageable. He would always ascribe this to late gelding, not wholly convincingly, whenever the subject arose, and he had been relieved to pass him on to Hervey for a song after the battle at Salamanca, a generous token of gratitude for his rescue half-dead from the melee. As Jessope himself had remarked laconically from his hospital bed, with an arm almost severed by a sabre slash he had little hope of being able to manage a ‘rig’.

Jessope. Hervey smiled at the thought of him, and wondered what recovery he was making since his return to England, and when indeed he might see him again. Doubtless he was being feted at this very instant by the ladies of St James’s. He smiled again as he recalled Jessope’s description of Nero: ‘unmanageable’. Yet in one sense it was exact enough, for in the hands of any but those which had been trained in the classical method he was wholly unresponsive, positively wilful. In Hochschule hands his manners were impeccable. He could cover ground better even than Corporal Collins’s gelding and had jumped four foot six, though he lacked Jessye’s endurance. There had been times as a boy, in the riding-hall at Wilton House, when Hervey would gladly have quit his lessons with the Austrian Reit-lehrer and gone back to his simple hunting seat, but he had frequently thanked God that the option of doing so had never been his. No riding master had been able since to disabuse him of his conviction that to be master of both a classical and an English seat was a peerless asset.

Jessye was his concern that evening, however, and they managed eventually to rug her up with blankets from the chaplain’s quarters — the priest had not been seen since their arrival — and make a mash of what seemed to be bran, which Johnson had discovered unattended somewhere. The quartermasters came in with two waggon- loads of good hay soon afterwards and, though it meant turning out the troopers again to replace the dusty stuff in the lines, the work was done quickly and Hervey was able to have the orderly trumpeter sound the mess call by six