On His Majesty's Service

As the door closed, Hervey let his shoulders sink below the water. That he could do so without bending his knees was remarkable. ‘Capital,’ he said, smiling and shaking his head. In India, where everything was worked on a voluptuary scale, the bathtubs were not one half the size. His head, even, was below the top, so that the outlook was solely a white-painted ceiling, which now served as a sort of canvas on which to picture the events past that gave him pleasure, and in the future that promised likewise – a vivid fresco, a tableau of people and places that few men were given to know.

Yet almost at once the pleasurable recollections were displaced by darker ones. He had lain in his cot aboard the steamer many a time, or dozed in a deck chair, yet not once had such thoughts come – or else so fleetingly that they were gone before they made any true impression. Perhaps he had banished them, but was now ready to let them come? For come he had always known they must. Once, as they cruised off the Ashanti coast, he had woken from a dream of the whitening bones of the dragoons he had left behind. And yet the bones had not rebuked him, nor even in truth disturbed him – only puzzled him, for he had left many bones to whiten in distant places in the service of the King, and never before had they appeared before him, in his sleep or otherwise. Afterwards he had pondered on it, asking again what more he might have done to save them, but the dereliction that had led to the ambush at the royal kraal had not been his. Everyone knew it – and he knew it himself, of which not even scrupulosity, had he been inclined to suffer it, could have dissuaded him.

It was not bones that paraded before him now, however, but the faces of the living – though momentarily, as if to remind of what he had turned over in his mind during the leisure of his passage home. Serjeant-Major Armstrong, his NCO-friend of many years, new-widowed, father of five (was it?) – what now might his prospects be? Armstrong might find a wife, if he could overcome his grief for the sake of the children – as he, Hervey, had done – but that would take many months, perhaps more. Were Armstrong an officer he might elect to go onto half pay until his arrangements could be regularized, but an enlisted man had no such option. Had he, Hervey, been taking the lieutenant-colonelcy at once instead of, first, the mission to the Russians (he wondered if he really wished for this mission, now), he could have approved indefinite leave, having Armstrong’s duties performed by a serjeant with temporary rank … Perhaps he might prevail on Lord Holderness, the commanding officer whom soon he would succeed, to do likewise?

But these things were ever perilous. It ought, after all, to be considered no singular thing for an NCO to conduct himself in the manner that Armstrong had in that desperate fight with the Xhosa; as Lord Hill was wont to say, it was the duty of the officers to show their men how to die, and that of the NCOs how to fight. He must trust therefore to Lord Holderness’s good sense and consideration – which he had after all shown in ample measure during his command – or, at least, to a certain disinterest, for within the year Holderness would be major-general, and the regiment’s regulation therefore no longer his concern.

He slid further into the bathtub, his head went under, and, as if it were the Jordan, he surfaced purified of dark thoughts. For there before his eyes was Georgiana – eleven years old. Yes, he had been absent for many of those years, but that did not matter now with the prospect of happy reunion and … re-acquaintance. Their last time together (he now understood) he had not admitted her years. He smiled at the thought of buying her ‘Mrs Teachwell’s’ Fables in Monosyllables, despite her having told him – in the same breath, almost – that ‘I know what are nouns and prepositions, Papa. And verbs and adjectives – and all the other parts of speech. Aunt Elizabeth has taught me.’ He knew now that he could not make up lost years by treating her as if she were still in the middle of them. When last he had seen her, six months ago and more, he had been struck by how tall she was grown, and how like her mother – the large, happy eyes, the raven ringlets. In six months she would perhaps have grown even more like her, and he was surprised to find himself perfectly contented with the prospect.

‘Aunt Elizabeth has taught me.’ He smiled to himself again. At first he had been inclined to think of the words as a rebuke, albeit unintended. He owed more to his sister than he could repay – and perhaps always had – but that must not prevent his now repaying what he could, if only in treating her with proper sensibility. It had been for her sake, though, as well as for Georgiana’s (he told himself) that he had in large part been so determined on marriage.

‘And yet Georgiana had remained in the protection of Elizabeth, for that was evidently where she found things most agreeable. That, of course, must change (he meant that she must find living other than with Elizabeth agreeable), and he was sure it would just as soon as he could make some proper establishment at Hounslow. Well, sure enough. For with Kezia, his wife of but six months, he could not see his course with anything like the same clarity. Kezia, lately Lady Lankester, whose husband (then his commanding officer) had been killed at the siege of Bhurtpore these three years past, had taken him in marriage with unexpected readiness, and yet she showed such little inclination to embrace all the purposes (as the Prayer Book had it) for which matrimony was ordained … Well, he checked himself: there had been so little opportunity to live as man and wife. There were a dozen or so years between them, but so had there been between Kezia and her first husband, with whom there had been issue. Yet there was between them a gulf of incomprehension that … well, he had not the power to comprehend. She had followed her first husband to India, but had been unwilling to come with him even to the Cape – and had said very plainly that she would not go with him to Canada if he were to accept command of a regiment there when command of his own at Hounslow had looked increasingly remote. He understood perfectly that her music was to her a very considerable matter, that she was possessed of an excessively fine voice and a rare skill at the fortepiano, and yet …

He sighed, as he had many times during the passage home, and steeled himself: it did not serve to make any comparison, however remotely, with what there had once been, for his late wife – it was now more than ten years – had been so wholly different in spirit. For there was Georgiana to remember. It would all be regularized, put on a proper footing, resolved, just as soon as he could make a proper establishment at Hounslow. November was the month indicated, when Lord Holderness would be made major-general and the lieutenant-colonelcy would pass to him – or certainly that was what Lord John Howard had told him at the Cape was the commander-in-chief’s intention.

If only this assignment in the near Levant, in Bulgaria, could be foreshortened and Hol’ness promoted early. The Turkish war was hardly one in which the King’s ministers had the remotest intention of becoming engaged, especially not after the debacle of Navarino – the ‘untoward event’, as the Duke of Wellington had called it. Untoward indeed: three squadrons in concert, one British, one French, one Russian, had sent the pride of the Sultan’s admiralty to the bottom in the Bay of Navarino, and then His Majesty’s government and that of France had expressed their utmost regret, leaving the Russians, their erstwhile ally in the romantic crusade to unyoke the Hellenes from the tyranny of Mahomet, to make true war with the Turk – and to do so ashore. What a mazey way to conduct affairs of state!

So why was the Horse Guards so eager to have an observer at the ceremonies? Lord Hill could not believe there would be any novelty of strategy revealed? And, if truth be known, he, Hervey, was not a little affronted at the thought of relieving Lord Bingham so that that new-come officer (Bingham had not even been in uniform at the time of Waterloo) might take command of the 17th Lancers, for which he had paid an unconscionably large sum. He wished Lord Hill had not asked him to be the relief. He wished Lord Hill had not suggested it in such a way as to make it seem that it was by way of their former association, a sort of favour indeed. Except, of course, there was something undoubtedly thrilling in the prospect of observing the clash of armies on a scale not seen since Waterloo.

He sighed, and ducked his head under the water again: he would travel to Hertfordshire, to where Kezia lived with her people, as soon as the Horse Guards gave him leave, and thence to Wiltshire to see Georgiana and his own people; and then he would ready himself for the assignment with the army of the Tsar.

But thoughts of Navarino made him break surface almost at once, for in that battle his old friend Peto – cruelly disappointed in his betrothal to Elizabeth, who had (though with great resolution and with sound reason, he now conceded) broken off the engagement, to marry instead a former officer of the King’s German Legion – had suffered the most grievous wounds in command of his ship. What life lay ahead for Captain Sir Laughton Peto now? To be sure, he was well tended in Norfolk, his native county, where the Marquess of Cholmondeley had made Houghton Hall an Invalides. But with no prospect of sea service again, and scarcely of a wife, how might that estimable man fare? He swallowed hard: Houghton – it had been by Kat’s hand, Lady Katherine Greville’s. In her letter, which he received just before leaving for the Cape again, she had written of her expectation of some improvement in his old friend’s condition (though how that could be with such grievous wounds he found hard to understand): ‘And George’ (the new, young Marquess of Cholmondeley) ‘has most eagerly