A Regimental Affair

‘What? In Carlton House?’

‘Have you been there?’ asked Elizabeth, with just a hint of awe.

He laughed. ‘Heavens no! But the talk in London was all of how racy that place is. “Nero’s Hotel” they call it. Hardly the place for solemn nuptials, I should’ve thought!’

Elizabeth looked a little shaken. ‘But Henrietta was there, and speaks of how graceful an occasion it was. Fifty or more sat down to dinner beforehand.’

‘Beforehand?’

‘Apparently.’

Hervey pulled a face suggesting he found the idea curious.

‘And then the ceremony itself was in the crimson drawing room.’

‘Crimson?’ said Hervey, teasing. ‘That must be very close to scarlet.’

Elizabeth screwed up her face too, exactly as she always had. There was not so much Hannah More in Elizabeth that she could not smile at the ribald. ‘Mystery, Babylon the Great?’

‘You had better go no further,’ he admonished, with mock sternness.

CHAPTER FOUR. FIRST PARADE

Hounslow, three days later

The cavalry barracks at Hounslow had not been sparingly built, especially not the high wall which surrounded the twenty acres of parade square, stables and quarters. Hervey did not care for the look of the wall. It reminded him of Cork. No doubt its purpose was to keep out intruders of whatever description, as in Ireland. But this was England, and who would want to intrude on a cavalry barracks? Walls confined, and that went against the spirit of the Sixth. Something rather nobler than bricks had kept the regiment together when times were a good deal more troubled.

Entry was easily arranged, however. The picket corporal, a man from D Troop Hervey didn’t know but who recognized him, pointed the way to regimental headquarters. The man’s uniform was as new — nothing of the patches and fading they had all become used to by Toulouse, and which had scarcely been better by Waterloo. A reward from a grateful government it should have been, sighed Hervey to himself, but likely as not it was from a rich commanding officer. How good it was, though, one way or another, to see the regiment back in proper fettle.

As he walked towards regimental headquarters, soberly dressed in dark green with a black silk hat, the band struck up on the far side of the square. Hervey had not heard them since Ireland, and then it had been a thin noise they made. Now they filled the barracks with a strong treble and bass alike, the trumpeters’ triple-tonguing was admirably sharp, and the clarionets — still something of a novelty — were altogether less shrill than before. He walked round the square to take a closer look. There were three times the old number, and all as immaculately uniformed as the picket corporal, the four sable bandsmen brilliant in Turkish silks. The bandmaster was not old Mr Merryweather, though. This one was much more active. And when he shouted to the bandsmen — he was shouting a good deal — it was with a heavy German accent.

Picket turned out as if on review, and a band forty strong with a German bandmaster — Hervey headed for the orderly room convinced he might be in a foot-guards barracks. It was, indeed, an impression of efficiency that wholly belied the scene in Skinner Street.

The commanding officer received him unusually formally at orderly room. Hervey remained at attention, waiting in vain for the invitation to sit. ‘You will find that much is changed, Captain Hervey,’ said the Earl of Towcester, and with a note of challenge in his voice.

Hervey thought it best to say nothing beyond ‘Very good, Colonel.’ Lord Towcester’s pale blue eyes were the coldest he had ever seen, and his thin lips parted only a very little when he spoke; just enough to allow the words to slide past with a distinct sneer.

The adjutant, an extract from the Second whom he had never met, took a step forward. ‘The commanding officer is to be addressed as “his lordship”, Captain Hervey.’

The tone was of reprimand, and doubly did Hervey resent it, for it was hardly a gentleman’s way of correcting something so minor, quite besides the fact that it had always been the Sixth’s custom that all ranks called their commanding officer ‘Colonel’. He breathed deep. ‘As his lordship pleases.’

‘Very well, Hervey,’ replied Lord Towcester, looking up only momentarily. ‘I take note that you shall join for duty at the end of August. And you are aware that your brevet rank is not recognized regimentally?’

‘I am, your lordship.’

‘Very well. Do you stay to luncheon?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then I shall see you in the mess at that time. Until then, Captain Hervey.’

Hervey bowed.

The commanding officer rose and bowed stiffly by return.

‘And by the by, Captain Hervey,’ said the Earl of Towcester, turning his back to look out of the window, ‘I had just better say that I want none of those Indian ways in my regiment. We are His Majesty’s light dragoons, not Hindoo horse.’

Hervey was so taken aback by Lord Towcester’s manner, as well as his sentiment, that he could say nothing. Yet say something he must, for with the commanding officer’s back turned he could not now take his leave. ‘Thank you for receiving me, your lordship,’ he managed at length. He knew it needed a supplementary, but he could think of nothing he might utter. He left the orderly room dispirited.

There was a full hour to luncheon. Now he wished he were not staying. And that thought made him the more dispirited, for the shared table of the mess was a precious memory. Perhaps he ought to walk the lines. But he was not in uniform, and it might be awkward. He looked at his new watch again (a poor thing, he mourned, after Jessope’s hunter): watering parade would be finished and the stables quiet before the midday feed.

First Squadron’s stables were indeed a restorative. There might not have been the complete quality of the Rajah of Chintalpore’s establishment (he could still remember his disbelief on seeing so much blood), but the change here was every bit as striking as with the band. Every trooper looked as good as the chargers most officers were riding at the close of the Peninsula. Even after a year in Ireland, when the regiment had been able to readopt troop colours, they had only achieved uniformity at the cost of conformation and substance. But now A Troop had its bays again, and B its blacks (and, he would find later, E — the smartest — its chestnuts), and they were lookers in the best sense. And, pleasing to see, the Sixth were still disdaining the regulations, for the trumpeters’ mounts were greys. But sadly the regulation was applied in the one thing he hated most: every trooper’s tail was docked. It was not just India that convinced him of the horse’s right to a fly-whisk. No officer in the Sixth who had seen any appreciable service in the Peninsula supported the practice. Hervey lifted a few tails: none had been nicked, thank heavens. That was a device that had never taken hold in the regiment, thanks largely to the Earl of Sussex’s strictures, compelled by a riding master of uncompromising discipline. (‘The horse, sir, will carry its tail just as soon as you allow him to work through his back!’ The words rang in Hervey’s ears, and he remembered how they had stung him so when first he had joined.)

First Squadron’s lines were peaceful. There was the sound of hay-grinding here and there as the odd trooper had a little to finish, and here and there a jingling as a chain was pulled through its ring in the standing stalls. There was the odd stamp of iron on cobble as a horse shifted its weight, and the occasional snort and whicker. But otherwise he might have been in a cloister. This, he told himself, was what he was returning to — not a peevish colonel.

The ‘stables’ call summoned him from his musing, as it did the dragoons to the horse lines. Better that he were elsewhere than in the bustle of haying-up, feeding and watering to come, so he walked briskly to the mess. The place was as silent as the stables had been, with a half-hour before the first officers might arrive. Earlier in the