Nizams Daughters

might yet pick out the great lighthouse of L’Ouessant. The sea was becoming a forbidding grey. The waves were long, with white horses running, and the spray was persuading Hervey that his cloak would have been prudent. Great shearwaters skimmed the troughs with rapid wing-beats, rearing up over the wavetops in long glides and plunging from time to time in search of a finny bite. Soon they too would be leaving to winter in the warmer islands of the South Atlantic, not many miles distant from where Bonaparte himself would pass both his winters and summers. Hervey shivered, if only slightly.

Captain Peto had spoken hardly at all since leaving Le Havre. His lieutenants were, it seemed, men in whom he had every confidence, and his sailing-master had been long years with Nisus. He spent much of the day in his cabin surrounded by sheaves of Admiralty papers and charts, visited only by his clerk, content for the most part to observe the set of the sails from a quarter gallery. Once or twice in the morning, and then again in the afternoon and evening, he visited the quarterdeck for his solitary promenade, when, as was the custom, the whole of the windward half was instantly cleared for him. No-one ventured to address him without leave, and although this ritual aloofness seemed perfectly regular to the ship’s officers, Hervey felt keenly the loss of the earlier intimacy. Now, though, he and Locke had the quarterdeck to themselves, with only the officer of the watch, the quartermaster and two mates by the wheel.

‘I shouldn’t brood on matters were I you.’

‘Do you take your own counsel in this?’ smiled Hervey by return.

‘No,’ he laughed, ‘but that need not stop me. Is advice so great an insult to judgement?’

‘No, indeed it is not!’ laughed Hervey, thankful for Locke’s forthright cheer.

‘Then tell me more of your lady: that is your trial, is it not?’

How queer, thought Hervey, that he should feel disposed to speaking his heart to Locke. He knew him now only two days. And at Shrewsbury their situations had been so different they could scarcely be called old friends. But common years could root trust deeper than first supposed, and he was content enough to speak with a man who shared something singular. And besides, they had gone through the breach almost shoulder to shoulder. The gendarmerie was hardly Badajoz, but at the point of any assault the scale of the affair was merely theoretical. ‘Well, in truth, I should not have let my hopes rise so high,’ he admitted. ‘The odds against seeing her before we set sail could scarcely have been longer. I believe the captain might have been offended that I asked for one more day.’

Locke smiled. ‘Well, the captain isn’t known for his patience where women are concerned. But I shouldn’t let it trouble you.’

Hervey sighed. How he wished, now, that he had not thought of the interception stratagem, that he had trusted instead to the arrangements in Paris, where Henrietta might be told of things with due propriety, instead of harum-scarum along the coast with Corporal Collins. ‘No, I have fudged things. And I thought myself so clever!’

‘Tell me of her, in any case,’ pressed Locke.

‘I told you of her family,’ he began resolutely; ‘or, rather, of her guardian — for her people died when she was scarcely more than an infant. We have known each other since the day she came to Wiltshire, to Longleat. We shared a schoolroom together.’

‘Not solely the lady of fashion, then? Not someone courted to be an adornment to a man’s ambition?’

Hervey glanced cautiously at him. ‘She is not someone who owns to nothing but fashion. She has read widely and has many accomplishments.’

‘And she’s pretty, I’m sure.’ His tone suggested he was leading to some general proposition.

‘She is very pretty. I do not have her likeness with me, else I would show you.’

‘An officer should take care only to fall in love with a woman of beauty and a good fortune, for these are necessary in the advancement of his career, are they not?’

Hervey frowned as much as Locke smiled. ‘That is very ill! It is bad enough hearing the same from Captain Peto!’

Locke smiled even more broadly: ‘Hervey, these are new and opportune times, but the day a pair of pretty eyes and connection in society do not count in the advancement of a husband will be very long in its coming. Our system is different, but I have observed that officers who rise to the highest ranks always marry the right wife!’

Hervey laughed too, but overcame the temptation to tell him he was already beholden to Henrietta’s connections — for although it seemed now a trifling affair in Ireland that required her influence, it would be wrong to underestimate her capacity to persuade. Heavens, but how he wished she were with him! Or had seen her for a few moments before sailing, even. Had it been unreasonable to ask Peto for one more day? The captain’s reaction had said as much.

‘Will you give me a straight answer if I ask a straight question?’ said Locke, breaking the vocal silence.

‘That or none at all,’ replied Hervey briskly, pushing as far away as he could the unpleasant realization of his failure, and wiping another bit of spray from his eyes.

‘Are you entirely disposed to this enterprise?’

Hervey started. It seemed a damned impudent question. ‘What the—’

Locke grasped his quarrel at once: ‘I mean the India enterprise! I’ve no cause to question your matrimonial affairs, I assure you!’ and he clapped a hand on his shoulder.

Hervey sighed to himself. Here was what came of speaking about matters which properly remained interior. ‘It’s the first time I have been detached from my regiment,’ he conceded. ‘I had not imagined I would feel quite so… well, at sea.’

Locke drew his head back, and then both began laughing at the absurdity of the unintended play on words.

Private Johnson had been unable to perfect any better means of communicating with the quarterdeck than by standing at the foot of the companion ladder to await the passing of an officer or mate. He had been deterred from the obvious and direct method — ascending the ladder — on their first morning at sea, by the Marines sentry. The exchange had been forthright, soldierly and ultimately bruising, leaving Johnson with little taste for the ways of the wooden world, but nevertheless a healthy respect for its discipline. This morning he had prevailed upon a midshipman who looked not half his age to convey the message that Jessye was ready for her tonic — which he himself would have mixed and administered, except that, with no locker space, the bottles were kept in Hervey’s cabin.

Hervey’s mare was on the mend. She was already on that road in Paris, but the sea air was doing her a great power of good. That and the tonic — two pinches sulphate of iron, a half of powdered nux vomica, and two each of gentian and aniseed. It had been the regimental standby since Major Edmonds had been a cornet. Hervey sprinkled the mixture into some molasses syrup and then rolled half a dozen barleyfavours from the sticky paste. Much ado, they agreed, but the surest way to have her ingest.

‘Tha thinks she’ll be all right, Cap’n ’Ervey?’

‘Heavens, yes: I don’t think we need continue this tonic beyond a day or so more.’

‘I meant will she be all right cooped up in ’ere for six months?’

A month’s box-rest was the longest Hervey remembered seeing any horse confined. ‘There’s no reason why she can’t stay the course, as long as the ship remains afloat. If the sea gets too high we can brace her into a standing stall. The real worry is the wasting of that muscle,’ he sighed, indicating the rounded quarters, testament to many hours of careful schooling. ‘It will take all of six months to get it back. But she’ll have fewer ailments this winter — of that I’ll be bound. No damned stuffy stable, with every cough of a morning becoming three by evening.’

‘Isn’t she gooin’ to go barmy, though?’ Johnson had hung up a turnip on a length of string so that she might have something to amuse herself by, but she hardly paid it notice, so taken was she by the constant activity about the deck.

‘Well, there’s plenty to keep her interest, and she’s not having any corn to hot her up. And she has space enough to stretch.’

Johnson was not entirely convinced.

But then neither was Hervey. ‘If I spend an hour each day with her, brushing and strapping, and you likewise, then we might keep the muscle hard. Come on, I’ll lend you a hand to skip her out.’