Nizams Daughters

‘She might yet arrive, and—’

‘And you would ask the captain for another berth?’ smiled Locke.

‘No… I had not thought… that is—’

He smiled again. ‘A wife isn’t something to pack in a marine’s dunnage. We fight light, as they say. And I dare say, too, they don’t stow so well on a bat-horse either!’

Hervey frowned. ‘That is a cynic’s counsel indeed!’

‘I myself was married once,’ replied Locke, claiming thereby a right to the philosophy.

Hervey studied him for a second or so, trying to gauge his earnestness, and then pressed him to the details.

‘She took one look at my face when I returned home and away she went. She hardly took much to living in lodgings in Portsmouth in any case.’

Hervey expressed himself sorry.

‘I cannot say I blame her,’ sighed Locke, ‘but I thought I had married into stock made of sterner stuff. We had known each other since… well, since we shared a pew.’

Hervey did not think it appropriate to reveal that his attachment with Henrietta had an equal gestation. ‘And Locke-hall shall be without a mistress?’ he tried, curious as to the force which bound the man to his vision.

‘Never again should I marry, even were my wife to have us put asunder in law.’ And then he smiled: ‘But as lord of the manor there’d be lasses enough to keep me content. As long as the candle was blowed out!’

Hervey smiled, perhaps less fully than he might.

‘Matthew Hervey, don’t you preach at me. You think on how life would be if your fair looks were rearranged by grapeshot or a sabre-cut. Even the whores in Portsmouth run when they see my face.’

‘What, all of them?’ he asked in disbelief.

‘Well, I’ve not tried all of them, to be sure. But one whore who’s too particular is a powerful insult to a man’s… manhood.’

Hervey clapped his hand on Locke’s shoulder and smiled broadly. Even through the thick serge of the scarlet coat he could feel the brawn built of hours at exercise, the cutlass-swinging for which the Royals were renowned. Locke stood an inch in excess of six feet, taller than any man aboard — a powerful, if artless, fighter held in affection as well as respect by his marines. ‘I think you are as lucky in your ship as I am in my regiment,’ proclaimed Hervey.

Locke returned the smile as broadly. ‘Yes, she’s a fine ship. And what service she’s seen! That night before Trafalgar — she and Euryalus did work to make the meanest heart proud.’

‘Indeed,’ nodded Hervey, ‘there can be few who do not know it. And what poetic fortune it was, too.’

Locke seemed puzzled. ‘Poetic fortune?’

‘Yes,’ said Hervey; ‘that it should be Nisus with Euryalus, of all ships.’

‘Hervey,’ replied Locke, now looking quite decidedly puzzled, ‘I do not have the slightest idea of what you speak.’

‘Oh,’ said Hervey, surprised, but anxious not to cause embarrassment, ‘were Nisus and Euryalus not Trojans, Trojan warriors?’

‘Well,’ said Locke, his brow obviously furrowed, though concealed under the roundhat; ‘Nisus was a Trojan warrior — that I know. But of his attachment with Euryalus I know not. What is the connection?’

Hervey was relieved his remark seemed not to have caused his erstwhile idol to be abashed. ‘It’s just something I remember from those hours in the classroom at Shrewsbury,’ he said lightly. ‘Nisus and Euryalus were friends, the closest of friends — David and Jonathan, Pylades and Orestes.’

Locke nodded his understanding.

‘Together one night they stole into the enemy’s camp and killed many as they lay sleeping. Euryalus was wounded, and Nisus rushed to save him, but both were slain.’

Locke made no reply for the moment, and then sighed. ‘Well, had our Euryalus got into trouble that night, Nisus would not have been able to go to her aid: she could not afford to lose contact with the French. But I for one, in ordinary, own that the measure of a man is his steadfastness towards his comrades in battle.’

Hervey seemed uneasy.

‘ “Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his friend,” it says somewhere in the Bible does it not?’ said Locke by way of explanation.

‘Yes, in St John. For his friends, indeed.’

‘But I’m very much taken with the Trojan legend. I did not know it.’

Hervey smiled again, but his expression was still a little pained. ‘Would all Euryalus’s crew have acknowledged that Nisus’s captain did the right and proper thing — leaving her to her fate in order to stay on the tail of the French?’

Locke gave a sort of half-shrug. ‘The usages of battle are well understood in the Royal Navy. Why do you ask?’

Hervey asked because of Serjeant Strange, and for an instant he was tempted to tell Locke of it. But that was not his way, nor was this the time. ‘Oh, nothing — merely that I wished to have some notion of the way things are in the wooden world.’

‘They are different in the detail, for sure, but in the spirit I reckon not,’ said Locke. ‘You must learn of it. Mr Belben would, as a rule, take you round the ship, but I shall do it — to explain things with a landsman’s eye.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hervey eagerly, flattered by

Locke’s attention as if still the schoolboy.

‘But now you must excuse me: there’s the watch to set, and we shall have many hours to talk during the passage to the Indies. And I tell you, Matthew Hervey, I am right glad to have the opportunity. It is curious, is it not, how a couple of shared years at the same school make the intervening ones as nothing?’

Hervey smiled, eased by Locke’s frankness and warmed by his congeniality. How fortunate he was, always, with his comrades-in-arms.

He left the quarterdeck, returning the sentry’s salute with a touch to the brim of his hat, and strode purposefully to Jessye’s stall where he hoped to find practical business to occupy his mind for an hour or so before he turned in. But Jessye was lying down, eyes closed and breathing soundly. He crossed the deck and clambered onto one of the guns to sweep the quayside with his telescope in the dying light. But there was no sign of Collins. He snapped the glass closed, sighing, and stepped down. It was early still, but he was not yet at ease enough to go to the wardroom so instead he went to his cabin. There he undressed, threw some water over his face, cleaned his teeth with the expensive powder bought in Paris, and climbed into his swinging cot (with less difficulty than hitherto, he was relieved to find). He read the psalm appointed for the evening and then closed his eyes, leaving the safety light burning. He lay listening to the ship’s night-noises — the lapping of the waves, made audible by the open gunports either side of his cabin, and the creaking of timbers as the ship rolled ever so gently in the swell. The motion was seductive, and the manly burgundy invigorating. If only Henrietta had been beside him.

III. FIGHTING INSTRUCTIONS

Off Ushant, in the afternoon, two days out

A fresh north-easterly was blowing down the Channel. Nisus was running with all but her royals set, and the wind, the groaning canvas and the creaking of timbers in every quarter of the ship tried the intimacy of conversation. Next to nothing now could be made of Ushant and the coast of Brittany. The heavy cloud made it difficult, at this distance, to tell even where the sky ended and the sea began, though a telescope