Nizams Daughters

‘Yes, and I am quite certain that it is a true model for the future,’ he said emphatically. ‘I have called it The Action off Lissa, A Latter-day Punic Victory. Note, mind, that I choose the word “action” rather than “battle”, for it was the manoeuvre before the engagement that was the really significant.’

Joseph Edmonds would have approved. That much Hervey was sure of, for Hannibal’s outwitting of the consuls at Cannae was his constant inspiration. Indeed, Edmonds had a notion that all military truth was extant in the three centuries before Christ, and that gunpowder merely hastened things rather than changed any fundamental principle. ‘Acceleration’ was what he called it.

‘I should have liked to meet your Major Edmonds,’ said Peto. ‘Indeed I believe I half-know him, for scarcely a week has passed that you have not spoken of him. Well, Hervey,’ he smiled, ‘you may now read my monograph at your leisure since I have had my clerk make a fair copy. He finishes it even as we speak.’

‘Captain Peto, I am very grateful—’

‘And you will mind, mark you, the inscription I have placed in it.’

Hervey inclined his head and raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

‘De l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace!’

‘Danton?’ Hervey smiled by return. ‘Pour les vaincre, pour les atterrer! Goodness, how it must give you satisfaction to turn the words of the enemy so!’

‘The enemy? Hervey, let me remind you: there is now peace on earth!’

It amused them each as much.

Flowerdew came up, knuckled his forehead and went to the hen coop. A few moments’ searching through the bedding produced two good-size eggs, and a little smile of satisfaction. ‘There, Captain, I said as they’d start layin’ again. It was that foul weather off Madagascar that stopped them up!’

‘Yes,’ shrugged Peto, ‘and I was the one who wanted to put them all in the pot! An egg for breakfast: oh what a prospect again! Captain Hervey shall have the other.’

‘Oh no, Flowerdew should have it by rights.’

‘As you please, Hervey, but Flowerdew will sell it to the highest bidder in the wardroom — isn’t that so?’

His steward merely grinned.

‘In that case,’ grinned Hervey back, ‘I shall claim the right to be the highest bidder. You will let me know the final price?’

‘Ay, sir, that I will! Right generous of you, sir.’

‘That egg may cost you more than a whole breakfast in St James’s, Hervey. A nice gesture, though. You’re a good sort. Men will always follow you, even though they’ll curse your ardour at times.’

Hervey was rather flattered.

‘How is your horse? Still out of sorts?’ Peto seemed done with fighting for the time being, theoretical or otherwise.

‘Out by the merest degree,’ he replied, ‘but it’s nothing more than a chill — nothing like as bad as that she came aboard with. It was that same foul weather near Madagascar, I think. The worst is over.’

‘She looked rather sorry for herself this morning, I thought.’

‘Well, she would wish for a good gallop, but her stall allows her plenty of movement. She’s borne it handsomely. Neither heavy seas nor heat appears to trouble her. I’m intensely obliged for your allowing her so much of your gundeck.’

‘And you yourself have not found things too… confining?’

Hervey smiled broadly. His ordeal was all but over, and he had much to thank Peto for. ‘My dear sir, for me it has been pleasure without alloy. I have read much, I have learned a language in no little measure, for your clerk has been a most excellent schoolmaster, and I have greatly enjoyed — and profited from — our colloquies.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ replied Peto, with genuine satisfaction; ‘and you have maintained a most vigorous regimen: I see you racing to the tops from time to time with the alacrity of a seasoned hand.’

‘And I believe that I am stronger than before through the exercises that Mr Locke puts upon his marines.’

‘Very probably,’ smiled Peto. ‘Locke is a diligent officer, though life has dealt him ill indeed.’

The stern lights were being lit, and Hervey lowered his voice lest the mates heard. ‘You know, when we were at Shrewsbury he was… well, an Olympian to us younger boys. He seems now… altogether cut down, diminished.’

Peto understood. ‘He would take no leave when last we were in Portsmouth. He broods too much. Sea air seems to revive him, though. I warrant he could swing one of those cutlasses clean through the best Baltic fir sometimes.’

It was curious how little they had spoken up to now of Nisus’s officers. In the Sixth they would have talked freely about those who shared the regiment’s badge, for the officers and men were the regiment. Unlike His Majesty’s Ship Nisus, the 6th Light Dragoons had no other corporeal form. But Hervey and Peto could only agree: Locke needed a more clement diversion than a cloister with wooden walls.

When Peto broke to speak with the officer of the watch, Hervey went to the main deck, to Jessye’s tranquil stall. There she stood four-square, a little back from the door, grinding hay in her mouth in a slow, rhythmical motion, as content as he had ever seen her. She had lost the roundedness whence came so much of her supple agility, but not as much as he had feared, and he prayed again that soon they would be ashore to begin restoring that muscle. He pulled her forelock gently, and rubbed her muzzle. She whickered. Just loud enough for him to hear — no-one else. So many thoughts crowded in upon him — the years they had spent together, the shot and the shell, and the terrible sights and the terrible sounds. Could there be any secret closer, or safer, than that between a man and his horse? Thank heavens, then — for her sake at least — that there was peace on earth. She had seen and heard and done enough. India would be kinder to her, and he left for his cabin with a smile of satisfaction at the thought.

In his cot he turned to the psalms appointed for the evening — for the sixth time of reading during the passage. He smiled again when he saw them. ‘Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding,’ said Thirty-two. He frowned in dissent, for Jessye gave the lie to any literal rendering. ‘A horse is counted but a vain thing to save a man: neither shall he deliver any man by his great strength.’ Again, he dissented at Thirty-three. But in Thirty-four he could at least acknowledge a lament for Henry Locke’s condition: ‘Great are the troubles of the righteous.’ ‘Righteous’ was perhaps too preachy a word, but that admirable officer of Marines deserved something of equal worth. Without doubt, though, he brooded too much. Perhaps Locke would see his fortune restored in some future action, but with peace on earth it seemed unlikely. Jessye’s deliverance — and Hervey’s too, if he were to own to it, for only peace was likely to see Henrietta restored to him — would therefore be Locke’s damnation. It was, he pondered, a rather wretched sort of corollary to the adage of the ill wind.

Next morning

Captain Peto was standing with his clerk on the quarterdeck, dictating letters of presentation to the authorities in Calcutta. He had been minded to address this courtesy for some days now, seeing Nisus’s progress, by the chart, northwards along the coast of Coromandel towards the Bay of Bengal. And yesterday he had known it to be pressing when the crew had seen sea snakes swimming alongside — a sure sign of being in those waters, said his trusty almanack. They were vivid serpents, their sinewy lengths — dark blue with yellow bands — gliding effortlessly at the ship’s side alternately on and just below the surface. Peto had not cared for the sight, and even less when one was netted, and displayed later in a bottle of pickling fluid by an old hand who delighted in collecting such curios. This morning there were no serpents, but they were joined by a pair of squawking parakeets, as appealing to Peto as the snakes had been repulsive, their greens and reds all the more brilliant for the drab contrast of the quarterdeck in whose rigging they now sat whistling and calling. ‘Shall I try an’ catch one, sir?’ asked one of the mates at the wheel, in gentle Devon: ‘’E’d be a ’andsome thing in yome cabin.’

‘No,’ replied Peto, shaking his head; ‘we should only get the one, and then the other would fret. Leave them be.’ And in truth he had no special regard for the thought of the bird’s squawking the while in his quarters. He turned back to his clerk: ‘I shall take it as a propitious omen for our run into Bengal — like Noah’s dove!’

Peto was, indeed, well pleased with the fair winds of late. At the outset of the voyage, as they crossed an uncommonly tranquil Biscay, Nisus had all sail set and, though Peto had chafed at the