what are my duties at home. I shall write, of course, and apply for furlough as soon as the war ceases — they seem to think it is imminent. Until then …’
‘What other family do you have?’ asked the veterinary officer, coughing again but warming to the intimacy he was rarely afforded in the mess as a whole.
‘A sister, one year my senior — but I should of course first say my father and mother.’
‘They are all well?’ Selden interrupted.
‘Yes, I believe them to be. My parents are no longer young but they are both active and have always enjoyed good health. They are the very best of people: I have always felt their absence more keenly than might be supposed. And my sister — Elizabeth — she has spirits to equal anyone. I own to having been in her thrall since childhood!’
‘And, Hervey, is there any other in your affections?’
So direct a question, and from a quarter he would least have expected, took him aback, and his disinclination to make any reply was plain. Selden was a kindly and cultured man, unusually gentlemanly for a veterinary surgeon, yet he generally remained aloof. His periodic bouts of fever racked him dreadfully, but although he had completed eighteen years’ service, and was entitled to retire on half-pay, he struggled on. He had been with the Sixth only since the start of the second campaign — and there was a whiff of sulphur in his history, said some — yet Hervey had always found him the most decent of company.
‘Forgive me, Hervey, but I have watched you with advantage these past three years. You have an uncommon facility for soldiering, and yet no preferment has come your way, and never will as long as money determines things.’ He began coughing again, so violently this time that Hervey thought he must choke. Another cup of brandy brought relief, however. ‘You must go east. Take up with John Company. They would value your aptitude — you would have a regiment in no time.’
Hervey might have had a thousand objections but he chose simply to point out the circumstances of which he had just spoken: ‘I cannot even begin to think such a thing when matters at home are so indeterminate.’
‘Of course you cannot. But after you have settled these concerns … or is there perhaps someone else you must take account of?’
‘Not at all!’
‘Forgive me once more, but I had thought that young Laming’s sister …’
Hervey blushed, and stammered slightly: ‘I … that is, how could you possibly have thought that? It is a year — more — since she came to Portugal, and then for a month only!’
‘Oh, I thought I saw something. Perhaps, then, it was more on her side? And the young Portuguese lady, what was her name …? Delgado, was it not?’
Hervey was even more astonished, for Selden’s observation these past three years had indeed been active. Frances Laming had enchanted him with her pretty smiles, but Isabella Delgado had positively tortured him with her dark beauty. ‘No, Selden, there is no-one. I had once a passion for the girl with whom I shared a schoolroom, though since that was a full ten years ago, and I dared not own it to her, I hardly think it need be taken account of now!’ But a smile overcame him at the thought.
A trumpet-call signalled that watch-setting was imminent, and Veterinary-Surgeon Selden took his leave, with much violent coughing, to allow Hervey to ready himself for that parade. It had been an extraordinary, if agreeable, meeting; but now that he was alone all his earlier disquiet returned, and with interest, for Selden had stirred up so much. The second call, however, began to reclaim him for the regulated world that was his daily existence, and as he fastened on his sword-belt he found once more that he could bury his uncertainties in the minutiae of his soldier’s routine. He almost spoke it aloud — ‘hitch up the scabbard, free the sabretache, set the shako square, draw on the gloves’. In the short term, at least, it never failed. So much so that, by the time he reached the picket, where he would take longer than any of the dragoons would have thought possible in determining their fitness for the night watch, his only thought was how sharp he would find their sabres.
CHAPTER TWO. CRUEL PUNISHMENT
‘Boney’s beat! Boney’s beat!’
Hervey woke with a start and sprang from his bed, but he almost fainted with the first step, so nauseous was the pain, and he fell against the wall, retching. The candle flickered in the sudden disturbance of still air, and he had to grope for his sword-belt in the half-darkness. Outside his cell it was no brighter, for the lantern in the corridor had dimmed to little more than a glow, but he could just make out the figures of the orderly corporal and Trumpeter Pye approaching.
‘It’s over! Boney’s habdicated.’
This time he heard the words — and was speechless.
‘It’s right enough, sir,’ continued Corporal Taylor as other officers began appearing, likewise roused by the commotion. ‘Boney’s finished. I ’eard Major Edmonds telling the sarn’t-major only ten minutes ago; but before that, even, a staff dragoon from headquarters was by and told me the intelligence had come from Paris last evening.’
The news, which they had awaited so keenly, and for so long, somehow lacked the inspiration that he presumed great news must have. It seemed unfitting that it should be hawked along the corridors of a cloistered billet by a corporal at this ungodliest of hours. He had imagined some ceremony or other would be attached to its heralding.
Next there appeared the adjutant, fully dressed, and at first Hervey supposed that this portended the ceremony he had anticipated, yet Barrow had so much an expression of the everyday that he again began to doubt the corporal’s information.
‘First parade at seven, details as usual, gentlemen,’ announced the adjutant. ‘Officers to assemble in the mess at eight. Sound reveille, Pye!’
Barrow was as ever spare with his words and did not wait for questions, marching briskly off towards the orderly room, spurs ringing on the flagstones. Hervey was angered. He was picket officer, and yet the adjutant had confided nothing to him. He may have been a mere cornet, but —
When the echo of Trumpeter Pye’s long reveille had died away — the first time the extended rather than the short call had been used since winter quarters — there came the gentler sound of a bell, and Hervey saw at the furthest end of the cloisters several nuns making for the chapel. The bell struck every second, and with so insistent a ring that he found his annoyance diminishing with each stroke. He wandered into the courtyard. It was too dark to make out the time by his watch, as dark as it had been at midnight when he had trudged the streets of the defeated city to do his rounds of the outlying picket. There had been no moon, and the streets had been as black as pitch, for the lamplighters had fled, and the occupants of the houses had shuttered and boarded their windows so that it was impossible to know whether they were lit inside or had been abandoned. How different it had been at Vitoria. There had been no question then of not knowing what lay behind the shutters, for they had all been prised off and the property sacked, Spanish property. Yet here, a French city, where the fighting had been immeasurably more bloody than at Vitoria, the provost-marshal’s men were patrolling the streets as if it had been Westminster. The Marquess of Wellington had ordered that there was to be no looting, and no looting there was — on pain of death by an English musket. Not that Hervey disapproved of such an order. He loathed the larceny where it exceeded what might reasonably be counted as foraging, but he hated most the bestiality to which men would sink in the process. Never did he imagine, on entering the king’s service, that one day it would be his duty to shoot a man wearing the same uniform — or, rather, the same king’s uniform — as he had done after Badajoz. The vision of that Connaught private, crazed with drink, taking the ball from Hervey’s pistol full in the chest yet still setting about him with murderous strength, would long remain. Yet the terror in the dying eyes of the young Spanish girl whom the man had violated, and the blood from her slashed throat, would more than mitigate any guilt, or even regret,
