Nizams Daughters

Hervey’s peroration.

‘He does not wish to lay down his arms,’ he replied, bruised. ‘Come.’

They turned about and marched back with the same composure as they had advanced, the ringing of Hervey’s spurs on the cobbles seeming twice as loud, for all else was silence.

‘What was their answer?’ asked Lieutenant Locke.

Hervey, his pride not a little damaged, felt the need of paraphrase. ‘La Garde meurt mais ne se rend pas! Like Cambronne at Waterloo,’ he sighed. ‘Well, so shall it be if they insist. Are the flares ready, McCarthy?’ he called, seeing him light a portfire.

‘Yessor!’

Hervey drew in his breath and drew out his sabre. He could not remember the last time he had gone into action dismounted. He thought it wise to pull off his spurs. Then glancing once about to see his storming party were ready, he gave McCarthy the word. ‘Fire them!’

Private McCarthy put the portfire to the powder trails, and seconds later three flashes, one after another, told Nisus it was time.

Hervey hardly expected delay, for there was no swell for which to compensate in laying the gun, but even he was surprised by the frigate’s response. In an instant one of her eighteen-pounders belched a long tongue of flame, the report reaching them almost at once in the still air. But they saw the shot approaching even before hearing the discharge. It first flew higher than he expected, but then its falling trajectory became apparent, and it crashed into the very doors of the gendarmerie building — so accurate a piece of gunnery that for a second Hervey was speechless.

‘Charge!’

Up! Forward! Boots pounding on cobbles — slipping, sliding. It seemed so slow! As bad as plough, almost. But they made the breach before the French rallied — hardly a shot from any quarter. The double doors were no more, the jambs pulled in with the force of the roundshot. Hervey was through first, a fraction ahead of the big lieutenant of Marines. Inside was all dust and wreckage — more than expected, and a sight he hoped never to see again after Waterloo: broken bodies of fine French officers. Marines rushed past him to the rooms beyond, almost knocking him down. This was their business: close-quarter fighting, confined. And they were eager for it. Not for them long lines and squares, wheeling, fronting and volleying like the infantry. They held their muskets close instead of at high port, ready to thrust with the bayonet or swing the butt up to groin, gut or chin. Brute strength — brutal — brutish. They worked in pairs, with no commands, with the utmost violence, and without check. Forward, forward, forward — momentum was everything to Marines!

There was nothing for Hervey to do. He had led them in. He was a hindrance now. He turned for the breach, but a blow like a prizefighter’s knocked him flat on his back. The Waterloo stars and the dancing lights were back, and the blackness rolled in as a cloud. Like a wounded animal, writhing in hopeless rage, he blindly slashed this way and that with his sabre. It made no contact.

‘Are ye all right, sor?’

Sometimes a voice was as welcome for its tone as what it brought. ‘Yes,’ groaned Hervey; ‘I’m all right, thank you,’ cursing inaudibly in language fouler than even Joseph Edmonds might have been tempted to.

Private McCarthy helped him to his feet and out through the breach. ‘Have a care here, sor,’ he warned as they ducked the lintel — the same that Hervey had run full tilt into.

Outside, his wits were restored soon enough. The shako had taken some of the force, and spared him an open wound, but his pride bore a bruise much worse than his forehead. Then it was all shouting again — Allez! Allez! — and those officers who had not taken Cambronne’s words literally were bustled out at the point of steel.

Later, the town major and the mayor expressed fulsome gratitude, the mayor assuring them that Le Havre wanted no truck with what remained of Bonaparte’s ambition. ‘Do not be too dismayed at the 104th, Captain Hervey,’ said the major; ‘they are not a bad regiment. I stood close to them at Hougoumont, but they lost a good many of their best officers and NCOs there.’

Hervey did not doubt it, and felt meanly for having condemned them so roundly. The Line battalions had, after all, borne the brunt of Bonaparte’s onslaught all that day in June. Waterloo had changed things. He knew himself to be changed. The army was now divided into two distinct parts: those who had been there, and those who wished they had been. And to those who had been there, the world would never be the same again; for they each knew they had escaped death by the chance of the fall of shot or the line of a musket ball, and were determined either to enjoy their deliverance to the fullest or to learn why fortune had favoured them above other men.

* * *

Hervey returned to the Nisus at six o’clock with three carts in tow. On the first were two one-hundredweight sacks of bran and five more of barley. On the second, a much bigger waggon, was the best part of two tons of hay, and on the third the same of straw. Nisus had come alongside one of the wharves, and her crew, under the eagle eyes of her marines, now made light work of stowing the forage. They showed a pleasure in doing so, even, with more than one nod of respect sent Hervey’s way, for the assault on the gendarmerie had been retailed through the ship.

Peto shook his hand as he came aboard but allowed himself few words on the affair. Hervey expressed himself much taken by the skill and speed with which the carpenters had erected a most solid-looking stable for Jessye — with a roof that would carry rainwater over the side, and the gunport allowing for good circulation of air — adding that he had not imagined they would have it done so quickly. But Peto had resumed his former peremptory manner. ‘Great gods, Captain Hervey!’ he spluttered. ‘My carpenters are not country cabinetmakers: their business is with battle damage!’ And a short time later his sensibilities were even more severely assaulted by the arrival of Private Johnson and a travelling horsebox, for when the cochers let down the ramped door to the rear, and Johnson led out Jessye, her lack of blood was at once apparent. Neither was she on her toes — and her ears were flat. Indeed, the effects of her fortnight’s chill were all too evident, so that the contrast between what was expected to emerge from the box and what in reality did was all the more pronounced.

And to compound the affront to Peto’s notions of good and handsome order, Hervey’s groom now hailed Nisus’s quarterdeck, only just remembering to touch his shako peak: ‘Bloody ’ell, Mr ’Ervey! What was all that firin’?’

Peto looked askance. ‘Does he address you, sir — aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington?!’

Hervey shifted uneasily at the rail, making awful comparison in his mind with the captain’s steward. ‘Yes,’ he replied simply, ‘we have been together some time.’

‘Most singular indeed!’ concluded Peto, shaking his head as he turned for the other side of the deck.

Hervey glanced back to the quayside. So unmilitary a sight, indeed, was Johnson, and so unprepossessing did Jessye look, that he could find no reply.

He was blowing into her nose and pulling her ears as the marines’ commanding officer approached. ‘I took you for a dandy,’ the lieutenant laughed; ‘your horse tells me you are not!’

Hervey had not cared for the look of the lieutenant on the crossing to France, though he had seen him only at a distance, and his impression had not changed when he had come doubling along the street with his marines. His face — knocked-about and horribly scarred — was that of a pug rather than an officer. But how he could fight! He had gone at the breach with as much vigour — and even more strength — than Serjeant Armstrong would have. And his smile was not the sneer Hervey had first thought, but a warm, almost familiar one. ‘I will wager she could beat anything you have seen over two miles!’ smiled Hervey back.

‘I don’t doubt it for a minute. Why else would the Duke of Wellington’s aide-de-camp have such a hack?’

He was about to try another riposte when the lieutenant laughed out loud. ‘You have scarce changed a jot since Shrewsbury, Matthew Hervey!’

He stared back blankly.

‘No, you do not recognize me! You were once my doul, but I was bonnier then. A Yankee frigate did for me — grape sweeping across the forecastle just as we boarded her. Lucky to keep my sight. Locke — Henry Locke, of Locke-hall in the county of Worcester.’

Hervey remembered — indeed he did. But a boy whose looks were the envy of his house at Shrewsbury. ‘My God,’ he started, before checking himself. ‘I mean… no, I should not have recognized you. But how very pleased I am to make your acquaintance again. What are you doing in His Majesty’s Marines?’

‘I might ask you the same manner of question. And I believe the answer to both is that we have been fighting