Nizams Daughters

They were picking out her bed as the captain’s steward came up. Johnson had never found the job easier, for droppings and fouled straw went straight through the gunport, giving the following gulls the brief promise of a feast.

‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ said Flowerdew, knuckling his forehead, ‘captain’s compliments, and would you join him for dinner, at six, sir?’

‘Who’d be a bloody fart-catcher afloat!’ said Johnson when Flowerdew had gone.

‘Private Johnson, I never cease to be amazed by how ill you consider anyone in service. And yet you show no appetite for going back into the ranks of a troop yourself.’ Hervey was more puzzled than offended.

‘I’m ’appy to be of service, but not all this “by your leave” palaver. Like a lot of Susans they are! An’ tha knows I’m not frit by gooin’ back in t’ranks: it’s just that there’s too much frigging abaht — that’s what!’

One of the hands nearby was laughing.

‘For heaven’s sake, man, mind your language!’ appealed Hervey.

Johnson looked astonished. ‘Language? Tha should be on t’mess deck! It’s—’

‘Yes, very well — let’s not have all of it,’ Hervey protested, somehow wishing he had saved himself the trouble. ‘You know the captain’s strictures on profane or low words on deck.’

‘Suit thisen, Captain ’Ervey.’

Truly, it was not difficult at times to see why Johnson had been passed on from two lieutenants within the space of a couple of months. And why he had been the bane of the corporals in his troop. Yet it was his very irrepressibility that recommended him — that and the undisputed fact that he was a deuced fine groom. And then there was his resourcefulness. Never would Hervey forget that Waterloo dawn, rain still beating down, every dragoon skulking under his cloak until all but kicked from under by the picket. But not Johnson. He had spent the opportune hours progging, and managed to wake Hervey with a canteen of hot tea — the only officer in the Sixth, besides the major, to have that privilege. Sheffield vowels and brusquerie was hardly a great price to pay, whatever others thought.

Hervey dressed for the captain’s table with particular care that afternoon. He put on white cotton breeches, and court shoes instead of hussar boots, hoping, however, that the buckles might not look so obviously like the pinchbeck they were. He put on one of his fine lawn shirts, turning up the collar so that the points would project. Then he took out his best coat, finer cloth than his service tunic. How diligently Johnson had wrapped the buttons in paper to preserve their shine, he noted. Ten, top-to-bottom on each side of the bib front — he took care not to touch any as he hitchedto the tunic hooks. He fastened the belt and girdle, smiling again at how he and his fellow cornets had complained of the new pattern with its red hoops — the colour of the legionary infantry — which ‘vulgarized’ them. That and the new crossbelt with its deuced red stripe. And all because a new colonel — long gone — had wanted to be able to see instantly which were his officers. How trifling had been their concerns.

And so they both sat, with Peto likewise more formally attired than hitherto, sipping the presents with which Hervey had joined Nisus — all blue coats, gold lace and white breeches. The wind had fallen away in the early afternoon, and they were running very smoothly now through the water, the flatware on the table making not the slightest noise. At first, conversation was merely polite — the weather, Jessye’s sea legs, Hervey’s engagement with the language of the Mughal court. Not a word of the gendarmerie, however. A paltry affair, unworthy of mention? He simply could not judge.

Quite suddenly, Peto changed his tack. ‘Captain Hervey,’ he began, ‘you may think me overly curious, but I have observed you closely since our first meeting. This business of yours in India: it seems hardly patrician sport.’

Hervey’s frown said he was not sure of Peto’s meaning.

‘Officers who are well connected have little appetite for the Indies. They would rather do their soldiering in Brighton, would they not?’ replied Peto, with a note of the accusatory.

Hervey laughed. ‘I have no blue blood, sir — well, none to speak of, that is. Why did you presume otherwise?’

Peto looked surprised. ‘The Duke of Wellington, by my understanding, chooses his ADCs from the nobility. You are a Hervey, are you not?’

‘So distantly am I related that the Earl of Bristol would not know of my being on this earth!’ he smiled. ‘Indeed, those Herveys pronounce the name as if it were spelled with an a.’

‘Oh.’ Peto now seemed disappointed. ‘So neither are you descended, in any direct sense, from Admiral Augustus Hervey?’

‘I am afraid that I am not descended in any sense whatever,’ he smiled again.

‘Then by what influence did you become aide-decamp to so great a man?’

‘You have a decidedly low opinion of the way the army conducts its business, Captain Peto!’

‘I know what I know, sir!’

‘Well, the duke chose me — that is all there is of it.’ He hoped that it would put off further interrogation on the subject, but it did not.

‘Fiddlesticks, Captain Hervey! There’s a great deal more of it — of that I’ll be bound. I have observed an officer with a true instinct for his profession — if as such it may be dignified — and one with an uncommon eye for a horse in respects other than its bloodlines. I’m pleased the duke recognizes your aptitude, but I’m sceptical.’

‘I surmise that you are sceptical by nature, sir,’ replied Hervey, still smiling.

‘Like the philosopher, Captain Hervey, I deny nothing but I question everything.’

‘In what do you place your faith, then?’

‘I always strive to gain the weather gage and the first broadside!’ Peto said it with such relish that it made Hervey blink. ‘But I am forgetting myself: I have a very passable Bual that I think we may enjoy before our dinner.’ Champagne was evidently not the captain’s ultimate pleasure. He opened a locker and took out a bottle of Madeira from an inclined rack made to keep them fast in the heaviest of seas. He drew the cork deftly and poured two glasses. ‘It will not need tasting: Blandy has never failed me. My first captain had barrels of the stuff as ballast. Two or three times across the Atlantic and the Equator and it was very finely matured indeed.’

‘You buy direct from the island?’

‘Captain Hervey, Madeira has been my second home these past three years, for that was my station during the American war. And, I might say, it was the place of some fortune, for we took a frigate and two merchantmen in a year.’

‘That would mean prize-money, then?’ Hervey was gaining his ease.

‘Do not think ill of it, sir: the greater part goes to the officers, but then so does the enemy’s shot!’

Hervey assured him he meant no disrespect. ‘You have bought a handsome estate somewhere, no doubt?’ he added.

‘Not at all. It is invested in Berry Brothers in St James’s Street: a good wine, sir, will have a better return than bricks and mortar.’

‘You do not have a wife?’

‘Captain Hervey, I have scarce spent seven successive nights ashore since leaving Norfolk to be a captain’s servant, and I should scarcely wish to spend any more with a wife!’

Hervey laughed. ‘Well I, too, am not well acquainted with soft pillows. The army has not been idle these past years.’

‘Bah!’ said Peto; ‘I have followed events with the closest attention, and it seems to me that if your Duke of Wellington had shown a little more address you would have been over the Pyrenees two years before. And he was humbugged at Waterloo, I hear.’

‘Oh come, sir!’ spluttered Hervey, but still with a broad smile. ‘You can have but an imperfect conception of the difficulties the duke faced at Waterloo. He had few battalions which had seen service — most of those were in America. And his allied regiments were — at best — untried. It is astonishing that he did as he did.’

They had moved to the steerage and a very handsome table of salt-pork collops, a veal pie and crabs dressed with olive oil. Peto poured him burgundy again. Here was no less generous or attentive a host than poor d’Arcey Jessope himself, thought Hervey — though that delightful Coldstream dandy, killed stone dead by a tirailleur’s bullet at Waterloo, had been almost self-mocking in the fare he offered. Captain Laughton Peto would have been mortified by any want of gravity. For him the table was a serious affair, comparable, it seemed, with the very business of seamanship itself.