A Close Run Thing

wealth but, it seemed to Hervey, real judgement was needed to know when to sell out. But Coates did not want to speak of business. T see the Army hasn’t given you a taste for the straight leg, then, Matthew?’ he smiled approvingly, nodding to the hunting length of Hervey’s stirrups.

‘No, Dan, it has not. I cannot abide it. All through Spain we bumped along. The King’s Germans didn’t: they ride at half our length and always rise to the trot, and their horses are the better for it. Ours seemed to have no end of sore backs.’

It gave Coates no pleasure to hear it, but he could take satisfaction in Hervey’s opinion: it had been one of the hard lessons of America, lessons of which he had spoken endlessly when they had ridden out together. ‘Yes, I always said I learned more about campaigning from the colonists than from our own officers: they had little idea other than how to drill. How in heaven’s name can you lean out with a straight leg?’

‘I reckon I had the advantage of an extra half-sword riding at hunting length — all the difference when cutting at an infantryman trying to use his bayonet. There’s an ensign in the Coldstream who would be dead but for that reach.’

‘Ay, I saw that time and again. But the reach has no purpose unless the sword is sharp.’

Hervey sighed. ‘We put straw in our scabbards as best we could, and it stopped the rattling, too, but that steel sorely blunted the blades. The Germans had wooden scabbards and had not half the trouble.’

Daniel Coates’s interest in each and every detail seemed limitless. They crossed Summer Down with the old soldier apparently oblivious to the vastness of his flock, which calmly parted for them as they trotted through, and they descended the east slopes, into the dry valley where, legend had it, King Alfred hid his army before Edington. Yet scarcely did Coates seem to notice their progress. Only when they climbed on to Chapperton Down, where the Imber shepherds grazed their flocks (though on this morning the Imber sheep were the other side of the valley), did he return to the present. ‘Come on!’ he called suddenly, urging his bay into a canter, ‘keep with me till Wadman’s Coppice an’ then it’s flat out to Brounker’s Well. D’ye remember the gallop, Matthew?’

That he did! Though he would have preferred to be on Jessye now, for that fast and sure-footed little mare was made for just such a run on the plain. But this gelding felt handy, too, and soon revealed a turn of speed, pulling the whole mile and more to the ancient coppice and making Hervey work hard to check him. Letting him have his head for the last half-mile into the dry valley beyond, they reached Brounker’s Well a dozen lengths clear. As he pulled up and turned south for the Imber road, Hervey laughed and called to Coates: ‘By heavens, you’re spending some of your wealth on horseflesh, Dan!’

‘What else is worth it, Matthew? Not a woman in a thousand, that’s for sure!’ he called back.

They both laughed even louder.

‘The gelding is yours, Matthew!’

‘What? Dan … I can’t possibly …’ Hervey spluttered, but his protests were unlikely to make any impression.

‘I’ve more to be grateful to your family for than ever I could repay — not even with a troop’s worth of horses. Without your father I would have trudged on down that lane where he found me coughing up my lungs thirty years ago and more. It was ’im that found me employ on the estate, and it was ’im that lent me the money for the first year’s rent on Drove Farm fifteen years back. The horse is yours for as long as you wants ’im. Take ’im — at least until you go to Ireland. And by then you won’t want to leave him anyway. He’s a homecoming present, Matthew — why should I not give you a homecoming present?’

Interest to pay or not, he was sure that such a gift was more than he could accept, and he might have continued protesting but for the sudden appearance of a score or more horsemen on the Imber road.

‘Warminster Troop. Come on and see ’em,’ said Coates, spurring into a canter again.

Though the troop had been raised before he had left for Spain, this was Hervey’s first encounter with them. Their appearance was, in one respect at least, impressive, for the blue dolmans and Tarleton helmets looked almost new. But the troopers themselves did not have the stamp of men under habitual discipline, hardened by service in which a bed was the infrequent alternative to a straw billet or a muddy bivouac. Indeed, in some respects they had a faintly theatrical appearance, for the Tarleton had been out of regular service for two years at least. But, although the Tarleton had been disliked for field service (it was almost as cumbersome as the hussars’ mirleton), he considered it still a very handsome head-dress.

‘Good morning, Coates,’ called their lieutenant.

‘Good morning, Mr Styles,’ replied Daniel Coates, raising his hat to the guidon. Hervey blanched at the man’s lofty manner, and looked with disdain at the pallid face and fleshy thighs of this leader of yeomen, but he raised his hat to the guidon nevertheless. Styles, however, assumed that both salutes were his and waved his hand airily in acknowledgement.

‘And who, indeed, was that?’ asked Hervey when the troop had passed.

‘Mr Hugo Styles, son and heir of Sir George Styles of Leighton Park at Westbury,’ replied Coates, ‘and a right Johnny Raw!’

‘I do not know of a Sir George Styles,’ said Hervey, puzzled.

‘No, you would not. He bought Leighton Park three years ago, and a baronetcy a year or so before that. He owns most of the mills in Devizes.’

‘Not a man at home much in the saddle, I should say.’

‘I dare say not,’ sighed Coates. ‘He fancies himself very much the gentleman, though, and disports himself as a blade hereabouts.’

‘Then I am doubly certain that I shall not call on him.’ A supercilious yeomanry officer was, by all accounts, nothing unusual, and hardly something to be troubled by: it did not appear to trouble Coates. But, simmered Hervey to himself, that Daniel Coates, JP and sometime trumpeter to General Tarleton, should not receive the commonest of courtesies from someone wearing the king’s uniform was detestable. ‘Dan, that milksop hailed you as if you were Dick-in-the-green!’

‘Not to worrit, Matthew. You’ll be looking to a troop yourself next,’ said Coates, seeing his anger and wishing to divert him.

‘Hah! And where would / find two thousand pounds, Dan?’

Coates whistled. ‘Is that what it takes nowadays, Matthew?’

‘In addition Dan, in addition. Three thousand is the price.’

‘Well, I’ll be … You should go to India!’

‘You are the second to tell me that,’ replied Hervey, with a smile at last, ‘but I have no desire to leave the Sixth. They are the very finest of fellows.’

Hervey had expected a dinner of mutton at Drove Farm — a joint perhaps, or a pudding even — but not venison.

‘Shot by me on Summer Down this last week,’ said Coates with evident pride as Hervey remarked on its tenderness. ‘And when dinner is finished I’ll show you the means by which I dropped her.’

That morning’s ride had given them both prodigious appetites, and it was not until a custard of some size had come and gone that Coates revealed the means by which he had taken the venison, fetching from the hall an ordinary-looking carbine. ‘It’s not what it seems, though — well, not what you might think,’ he explained.

‘Rifled?’ suggested Hervey.

‘Ay, that, too,’ said Coates, delving into a leather bag and pulling out a cartridge that looked longer than usual. ‘This here is powder and bullet, and it’s fired by an initiator in the base — I mean a cap which gives off an igniting spark when this pin here strikes it,’ he continued, pointing to the firing pin. ‘The pin’s held in this block,’ he continued, ‘and is struck by a cocking hammer — see?’

Hervey did see, and quickly enough: ‘A breech-loader? I had heard there were such but never saw one before.’

‘The breech-loader is nothing new — we had ’em in America!’ Coates laughed. ‘They had their problems — they were slow, for a start — but instead of trying to improve them the Ordnance gave up! You see, you can lie down, behind cover, and load one of these easy enough. You can’t very well with a muzzle-loader.’

‘But I have never heard of this initiator,’ said Hervey, still puzzled.