entreaties that he would return to her unharmed. Had Locke given it but a second’s thought he would have known it an unlikely possibility — about as great as leading a boarding party against a deck swept by carronades. But his relish for the fight was growing by the hour, and after Jhansikote nothing seemed impossible. He kissed each eye gently — and then her lips with all the passion that was welling for the battle to come. ‘I shall be back,’ he said defiantly; ‘and then you shall come with me to England!’
Half an hour before dawn, Hervey stepped down from the saddle in a nullah close to the nizam’s redoubts. He had ridden hard all night. There had been — just as on the ride to Jhansikote on the night of the mutiny — an obliging moon, and there had been stretches of the road on which he could put Jessye into a hand-gallop. For the rest of the time they had trotted hard, except when she was in need of respite or where they came upon a hackery travelling by night to escape, as they, the heat of the day. Those travellers who were on foot — and there were many — simply stood aside as they heard the pounding hooves. Hervey, Johnson and the Maratha subedar had made the forty miles between Chintalpore and here in six hours, and their horses had yet something in reserve.
Behind them, hurrying at best speed, was a halftroop of the rajah’s cavalry (Hervey had specified not fewer than thirty sowars) and two galloper guns. But since these were coming from Jhansikote they would be four hours behind at least. He wanted all the time he could to think of some way to overcome the guns, however, and he knew, from long experience in the Peninsula, that if he could observe the routine of a defended position at first light it would reveal the best means of proceeding against it. He loosened Jessye’s girth and unfastened the noseband on her bridle so that she could pull at the couch grass: he would give her some of the oats he carried later. As he stood rubbing her ears, wondering what he might see when the sun revealed the redoubts to his telescope, Johnson handed him a tin cup. ‘Tea, sir,’ he said simply.
‘Tea?’ said Hervey incredulously. They had only just arrived, yet the cup was hot to the touch. Not even Johnson could have brewed tea in the saddle!
‘Ay, tea.’
‘Well tell me, man: how in heaven’s name have you hot tea so quickly?’
‘I’ll show you,’ and he went to retrieve the tea’s conveyance. ‘Here, can you make it out?’ — it was very dark now that the moon had set — ‘It’s a stone bottle which keeps ’ot with this charcoal ’ere in a cooker underneath. And it all fits together in a tin ’arness. I bought it in t’bazaar.’
Dark as it was, Hervey grasped the principle and wondered why he had not seen the same on campaign. Perhaps, however, in the everyday of the Indian bazaar or the London emporium, such a thing seemed overcontrived for its simple product. Yet no-one who had been on campaign would ever undervalue hot tea before stand-to on a day when battle was expected.
‘Johnson,’ he said simply, with a note of disbelieving admiration, ‘I do not know how I should fare without you!’
They ate some chapattis and gave the horses a little corn, and soon the first shafts of daylight were piercing the darkness behind them. He told Johnson to take the three horses a little way back along the nullah, and then he and the subedar ascended its sides, and a hillock no wider than a dewpond, so that they might spy out the strength of the nizam’s lure. He was confident they would be able to do so undetected: the subedar knew the ground well from many a patrol, and the dastak official whom they had sought out at the village a mile or so back had confirmed that here exactly was where they would see the redoubts. He would have wished the sun were not rising behind them, for it risked their exposure in silhouette to an observer still concealed by the darkness. But then, had the positions been reversed, he would not have been able to use his telescope for fear of the sun’s reflection on its lens. In any case, avoiding a silhouette was but part of the scouting cavalryman’s art: he must find some background cover — a bush, or suchlike.
They found a handy euphorbia and crawled under its protecting greenery. Hervey took out his telescope and searched in the direction the official had indicated. He had first been surprised there were no campfires, and now, with the glass to his eye, he could find no flame, no movement — no activity whatever. And there was not a sound, either. These, truly, were soldiers of high discipline, he muttered to the subedar.
As the light grew, almost with each tick of Hervey’s full hunter, he was able at last to make out one of the redoubts. ‘The guns must be run in: I can see nothing of them,’ he whispered, rubbing the condensation from the eyepiece before taking a further look. It was the same with the second redoubt: the embrasure could be made out clear enough, but again the gun appeared to be run in. He found the third: it was the same. Surely the guns would be run out for the dawn stand-to? Yet each of the eight redoubts looked, in the half-light, asleep, inattentive — not even the sign of a sentry. If only he now had the halftroop and the galloper guns: he wagered he could storm each in turn and take them at the point of the sword. Scarcely would the enemy have time to rouse! He even thought of rushing the nearest redoubt himself and, with the subedar, turning the gun on the other seven. But he knew well enough that, so alerted, they would overpower him first. No, he would have to wait another night and take each by stealth. But then he had spread word that the rajah’s troops were advancing: they would be waiting tomorrow, alert — surely?
The sun was now glinting over the hills to the east, the light growing ever stronger. After five more minutes, still peering through his telescope, Hervey started suddenly: ‘Great heavens! There’s no-one there — no-one at all!’
The subedar looked at him in astonishment. ‘Why would they build redoubts like that and then abandon them as quickly, sahib?’
‘I don’t know, Subedar sahib; I simply don’t know.’
He called for the horses, but as he did so there was a fearful squeal from one of them, and then squeals from all three. ‘What in God’s name is Johnson doing?’ he rasped as they scrambled down the hillock and into the nullah. The squealing continued as they ran to where Johnson was struggling to keep hold of the reins of the three terrified animals — rearing, jumping and kicking in a manner he had rarely seen. ‘What is it Johnson? What’s got into them?’
‘I don’t know, sir; they was all just ’aving a bit of this couch grass and suddenly they all goes barmy!’
‘Snake, sahib! They are panicking because of snake!’
There was no sign of a snake, however.
‘They know when there is snake, sahib; it is most likely gone by now, though.’
The horses were, indeed, settling. Hervey took Jessye’s reins and brought his hand up to her muzzle to reassure her. ‘Oh God,’ he said suddenly. ‘Subedar sahib, come look here: there’s blood on her nose!’
The subedar took one look and sucked in air between his teeth. ‘It is snakebite, sahib — no mistake.’
Hervey looked closer and saw the tell-tale pinpricks from which the blood oozed. He went cold with dread: he had heard of horses dying within minutes of a snakebite. Jessye was now standing stock-still, her legs spread as if to keep herself braced. She began to pant. Only a month before Waterloo he had read of a condition described as ‘shock’, explaining why he had seen horses most cruelly mutilated on the battlefield which had not succumbed, and yet others with little apparent injury failing to recover. The paper suggested it was a collapse of the respiratory system — and Jessye’s quickened breathing, and now her sweating flanks, pointed to just this. He called for a knife, but then decided against making free with it across the bite since the poison would already be deep. He took off the saddle and bridle as she began to shake.
In a while her forelegs began to buckle and she almost fell to the ground, just managing instead to drop unsteadily to her knees and then to roll onto her side. She lay sweating prodigiously, her breathing now growing shallow. ‘Sahib, send to the village for sadhu,’ pleaded the subedar.
Hervey had to check himself: the subedar’s plea was well meant, but he wanted no fakir dancing about his mare. He knew in his heart that nothing could be done for her, nothing that could arrest the poison’s evil, now deep in her vitals. Would Selden have bled her? The poison was in her blood, and bleeding would remove some of it, would it not? But Selden had always been so sceptical of bleeding. He would surely urge that not one drop of blood was better placed than in a vein. Jessye had survived so much — three years of the Peninsula, and then Waterloo. To succumb now to something that slithered in the couch grass was ignoble, the basest of ends — like Edmonds’s death to the first volley in that battle. He pulled his pistol from the saddle and began to prime it. He would not let her end come from a serpent: better that she die at the hand of a friend. He lifted her head, and she grunted. He pulled her ears, blew in her nostrils, wiped the blood from her muzzle, keeping the pistol out of sight as tears streamed down his cheeks. ‘Is she in pain, Subedar sahib?’
‘No sahib, she not in pain. Snake’s poison in horse only make it sleep in peace. Let me fetch sadhu, sahib. He
