Nizams Daughters

of secrecy. He looked at Peto resolutely: ‘I see no good reason, sir, why I should not tell you all, for I shall be much in want of counsel these coming months. How long is our passage to Hindoostan?’

‘Four months at best; six at most.’

‘Oh,’ said Hervey, sounding a touch discouraged; ‘I had imagined half that time.’

Peto frowned again. ‘Captain Hervey, do you know anything of navigation — of sea currents and trade winds?’

Hervey confessed he did not.

‘I imagine you suppose we shall merely cruise south, round the Cape of Good Hope and then make directly for India?’

Hervey’s smile, and the inclination of his eyebrows, indicated that that was exactly what he had supposed.

‘Well, to begin with,’ sighed Peto, ‘we are making this passage at the least propitious time. To have full use of the south-west monsoon, which blows from October until April, we should have set out in the spring. Come,’ he said, rising and indicating the table on which there were spread several charts. ‘See here’ (he pointed with a pair of dividers): ‘we shall pass about ten leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands and continue westward, almost crossing the Atlantic to the coast of Brazil to get the south-east trades on the beam. Then, at about three degrees south of the Equator, we shall pick up the westerlies to bring us around the Cape. And in the Indian Ocean we shall need to stand well to the east of Madagascar to find what remains of the monsoon.’

Hervey apologized for his nescience as they returned to their chairs. But of greater moment was the disclosure of his assignment, for he was again seized by doubts as to what discretion he legitimately possessed in the matter. He had not been sworn to secrecy — quite — but in everything that had passed between Colonel Grant and the duke’s new aide-de-camp, there had been the very proper presumption of it. And yet Hervey knew too that he had been appointed to the staff principally because of what the duke himself had referred to as his ‘percipient exercise of judgement’ at Waterloo. He had neither experience nor training in work of a covert nature (though his present commission scarcely, to his mind, gave him the appellation spy). He would therefore have to trust his instincts, and these now told him that he could trust in Captain Laughton Peto — trust absolutely. ‘Then if we are to spend so long in each other’s company it is the very least I should do to apprise you fully of my business,’ he said, with a most conscious effort to avoid any further semblance of condescension. ‘I shall tell you each and every detail — though as yet they are few.’

The door opened and in came Flowerdew again. ‘Beg leave to bring a pudding, sir,’ he said, in a voice that called to mind Serjeant Strange’s mellow Suffolk vowels. Hervey shivered at the remembrance.

Peto eyed his steward gravely. ‘It is the Welsh venison pudding?’

‘Ay, Captain,’ replied Flowerdew, equally solemnly; ‘and there is a redcurrant jelly with it, and your cussy sauce.’

This news was received with evident satisfaction. Peto took both the greatest pride and the greatest pleasure in his table. It was, perhaps, unsurprising since he appeared to take the greatest pride in everything about his ship. Hervey knew enough about Admiralty to know that a ship in the hale condition that was the Nisus — with her fine fittings, new paint and gold leaf — was not found by chance: Peto would have had to go to endless pains to flatter the dockyard commissioner into providing that which was routinely denied to other, less persuasive, captains. Or else — and he suspected it was this latter — it was Peto’s own purse that had embellished his ship. As to his taking pleasure in his table, albeit somewhat self-consciously, Hervey was likewise not in the least surprised, for in his experience men exposed as a matter of course to great privation rarely persisted in a taste for frugality in times of plenty — and Peto had, more than once in his service, been reduced to a diet of biscuit and water.

When Flowerdew was gone the captain conducted his guest to the table and bade him resume his explanation.

‘It seems that the Duke of Wellington expects at any moment to be appointed governor-general in India,’ he confided.

Peto merely raised an eyebrow in disbelief — or in dismay.

‘He has been given to understand that Lord Moira will soon be dismissed,’ he continued, ‘since that gentleman apparently has little appetite for reversing the policies of Sir George Barlow — which, it is commonly supposed, were too feeble with the native princes. You will know, of course, that the duke’s own brother prosecuted a most vigorous policy before Sir George.’

Peto’s brow furrowed. ‘And yet, from all I read and hear, the Court of Directors do not appear to be developing any appetite for intervention. Quite the contrary, in fact.’

Hervey sighed briefly, but aptly conveying his own frustration with the limited intelligence imparted to him in Paris. ‘The Company, perhaps — yes. But I am to suppose that the government — the Board of Control, that is — takes the opposite view.’

‘And do you share these opinions?’ he asked, leaning across the table to replenish Hervey’s Sercial, a distinct challenge in the tone.

‘I confess for my own mind I know only what I read in the newspapers and the Edinburgh Review, and these are frequently contradictory accounts. I am the duke’s aide-de-camp and it matters only at this time that I understand perfectly what is in the duke’s mind,’ he answered resolutely.

‘And what is his need of you in Calcutta?’

‘I am to go in advance to India and to make certain appreciations of the situation.’ Hervey’s reply lacked just a measure of his former resolution.

Peto now had about him a decidedly disapproving air, though he said nothing.

‘I am sorry, Captain Peto, but you appear to object to this assignment,’ countered Hervey, puzzled.

‘The Honourable East India Company, sir,’ began Peto, ‘is neither honourable nor a company worth the name, for its monopoly has perverted trade. It is a body which maintains armies and retails tea.’

Hervey hesitated. ‘You speak as someone with a very singular grudge.’

‘My father might not have lost what little he had by way of stocks — his sole provision for the future — if, during the late blockade, the East Indies markets had been open.’

‘But the opening-up of trade — has not the Company’s monopoly of the eastern markets been repealed?’

‘The reform of the charter was only two years ago. It came too late to save my family’s interests.’

‘I am sorry to hear it,’ sighed Hervey, ‘for heaven knows the country has need of every enterprise now to repay its war debt. Your father — he is a merchant still?’

‘No, Captain Hervey, he was never a merchant: he had merely invested what little capital he possessed in an ill-starred joint-stock company.’

‘I fear that my father might have had the same story to tell had he not already purchased a modest annuity with his capital. Well, there is great need of enterprise nevertheless: the duke says we have spent eight hundred million fighting the French, when before the war it was scarce eighteen a year.’

‘Then there will be more slaughter in the east to pay for it. It will be the very devil of a business. That is why, I suppose, your principal is to go to India — to pay his way these past dozen years and more!’

Hervey frowned.

‘Do you know much of India, sir? I have made something of a study of that continent,’ Peto challenged.

‘I confess I know little, sir. I have with me a new history of the enterprise but I have yet to make more than a beginning with it.’

‘Well, I tell you that no good will come out of our enterprise there. I have read extensively of the trial of Warren Hastings, and of Mr Fox’s speeches in parliament on the East India Bill. What is our object in India, Captain Hervey? It is too ill-defined, I tell you. We shall be drawn ever greater into the wars that are endemic in that place, and our outlay will vastly exceed any receipts.’

‘So I may take it,’ smiled Hervey, ‘that you are not greatly enamoured of the activities of the Company?’

‘Hervey, mistake me not: we are a mercantile nation. But our business overseas is trade, not conquest. Read your book and then speak freely with my secretary, who was once a writer in Calcutta, and then we may talk of it with more felicity. And he may be able to teach you one or two words which might be of use — how to get a palanquin or a clean girl or some such. But come,’ he added, and with a lighter touch, ‘have some burgundy with that pudding.’

‘Thank you; it is an excellent pudding,’ replied Hervey, taking another large piece of dark meat on his fork.