making for a ship with the others of the regiment who had not yet got aboard.’
Dom Mateo nodded slowly, as if conjuring the scene. ‘I wish I had been there. So very fine a thing. “Not a drum was heard.” ’
‘Indeed. I fear we had probably lost them all by then.’
Dom Mateo chose to ignore the remark. ‘But you were telling me, Hervey: you quit that village with the French on your heels, and made your way to the town, and then you plunged into the waves to save this villain of a serjeant?’
To save him for the provost marshal’s men, Hervey supposed. But as best he could remember, it was merely the impulse of a man who saw another dying needlessly. It almost cost him his Reddel sabre, too, as he recalled: he’d unbuckled his swordbelt and thrown it not quite dry as he dashed through the cold spray. A bigger wave had broken square in his breast, picking him up, almost knocking him over, but he pushed through and into the swell beyond, shouting to the redcoats to help the man. One of the sailors jumped from the cutter. Some of the redcoats were hanging on to the side, out of their depth now as the oars worked against the onshore wind to keep out of the breakers, the boat altering position even as Hervey and Armstrong began ducking beneath the surface to find their man. Two redcoats lost their footing, shouting desperately, for neither could swim. Hervey and the others struggled hard to seize and pitch them into the cutter.
It seemed an age before the bluejacket shouted, ‘Here!’
Hervey, Armstrong and a big Irishman who had been carrying the others’ muskets swam ten yards against the rising swell to close with him.
‘He’s too ’eavy for me!’
It took three of them to hold his head above water. Sodden uniform and equipment, Hervey supposed.
The cutter at last managed to steer to them, and then there were red and blue sleeves hauling Ellis aboard.
‘He’s stone dead! What to do, sir?’ shouted one of the bluejackets.
The midshipman, a face younger even than Hervey’s, did not balk. ‘We take him to his ship like the others!’ And he turned back to the half dozen still in the water. ‘There’s room for every man, but hasten yourselves or the boat will fetch up ashore!’
Hervey and Armstrong had already begun making their way back to the beach.
‘Bravo, Hervey! You are truly a noble fellow,’ declared Dom Mateo, making to slap him on the back. ‘And that corporal of yours too.’
Hervey shrugged. ‘You make it sound more than it was.
Anyway, the serjeant cheated the provost marshal. And do you know why he was such a weight? Every pocket of his coat and the lining itself was crammed with gold. Whether he had ill got it from the Spaniards, or else from the commissaries just as ill, I never knew. But men might have drowned on his account. I confess there were no tears from me.’
‘And your regiment was spared, too, its parade before the gallows.’
‘Just so. Later we learned he had escaped the provost marshal’s men just before reaching Corunna, and hidden among the lines of red, which must have been quite easy since there was a great mixing up of men.’
Dom Mateo shook his head. ‘Such events, Hervey! A lifetime’s book-learning in a matter of weeks. I truly envy you.’
‘I believe you truly do, Dom Mateo. But events here will soon be instructive, I dare say!’
Hervey part-shivered: events here would be the
‘I pray they
‘No more horses were taken off after that evening, not to my knowledge. Of my own, my groom had taken Stella and sold her, quite contrary to orders, to one of the Spaniards in the town, which did, I confess, please me, for she was too fine an animal to be turned into carrion. She made but a very few dollars, as you may imagine, and I would have been a pauper but for the Mameluke I took at the Esla, as I told you already. The others, I fear, all perished one way or another. We had compensation of twenty-five pounds an animal when we landed, as I recall. A sorry amount.’ He shook his head, sighing. ‘The whole affair was dreadful. Dreadful beyond telling.’
Dom Mateo looked over his shoulder at his column of tidy, disciplined redcoats. He wondered what reverses and deprivations
But, he told himself, theirs was not to be a test the like of Sir John Moore’s. All that his men had to do was drill like ‘that finest of instruments, British infantry’.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE RUSE DE GUERRE
‘Alarm!’
Hervey sprang from his bed. It was the time of night when body and mind had the instincts for flight. Where was Johnson? He remembered, and cursed. The candle was still burning. He groped for his boots, then his sword and his pistols. Outside there were running footsteps on the flagstones, and orders in rapid Portuguese. They might as well have been in Dutch.
His senses began returning as he buttoned his coat. He composed himself, thankful in a way that the test was come at last. He knew he acted on his own initiative, less and less sure of the licence given him by the charge. But he knew what Mr Canning desired, for his intention was aptly conveyed in writing. Except that it was expressed in the conditional; the cabinet was not bound by such things, parliament even less so. In any case, he had done all he could; the rest was in the hands of the God of Battle. And in Major Coa’s meticulous staff work.
The practice of the last week paraded before him, as it had done in the nodding moments before midnight when he had turned in. Every night for a week they had marched to the chosen ground and taken post, by moonlight or none, so that each man might do it now without the need of an order. Yesterday had been the first time in their red. Many a man would think this but another manoeuvre. Until, that is, he received his fifty rounds of ball cartridge.
And this was no Waterloo humbugging either. The rebels had not stolen a march, as the French had done that night. Neither were Dom Mateo and his officers many miles distant at a ball. His scouts had evidently done their work well, the general’s bold insistence on sending cavalry across the border each night paying exactly the dividend for which he had invested. By all accounts still, the rebels were expecting an unopposed advance on Elvas, no doubt intending to bustle the defenders from the fortress at daybreak. That was what Dom Mateo’s spies told him, and the bishop’s informers.
It would be a cold march to their battle positions, and a cold wait. And Hervey knew that doubts were worse when the body shivered.
The sun came up full in their eyes as the enemy showed themselves, but it was not so strong as to dazzle. And neither did the invader look as numerous as Hervey had supposed. There was not a swarm of cavalry, and no sign of Spanish regulars, unless they, like the Elvas regiment, had exchanged their uniforms for another. The rebels marched in column, French style, so their numbers could not accurately be gauged, but there was nothing like the impression of mass he had had so often in the Peninsula those long years past. The rebel scouts had clashed with Dom Mateo’s pickets just before dawn, and they would be able to see now the long, low ridge on which the defenders had taken post. With the redcoats concealed still, it must to them look weakly held.
Hervey watched keenly through his telescope as they began deploying into line half a mile away.
‘Four battalions, I’d say. Three thousand bayonets. What is behind by way of reserve I can’t say. I imagine
