A Regimental Affair

the whole of west Wiltshire. Why do you ask?’

Hervey paused another while, and then smiled. ‘You’ll think me proud, but he would not see the advantages in my new carbine. He could only see the faults. And that, I’ve observed, is the mark of someone become old.’

Elizabeth gave him a disapproving look. ‘I should not wish you to be my judge in anything, brother!’

‘I have never known you to be other than an optimist — to a fault, indeed!’ he replied at once, opening the door of the house for her as if it were an end to the matter.

The door to their father’s library was open, and the Reverend Thomas Hervey was sitting by his fire (a fire was always lit there throughout May) with glass in hand and contentment on his face. He turned as he heard them come in. ‘Well, well, well. Here’s a turn-up, eh? All those weeks troubling over my books, and then the archdeacon is all sweetness and light. I’m not sure I ever met a more reasonable fellow.’

Elizabeth soon demonstrated that her brother’s opinion of her was more brotherly than exact. ‘Father, I should not be too quick to that sentiment were I you, for I did not observe any change in his mind, only a desire to have things done with.’

‘Oh?’ said Mr Hervey, disappointed with her opinion, though unsurprised — proud, in fact — that she should give it so freely. Elizabeth had been his mainstay these past three years since the death of his elder son.

She poured him more sherry. ‘Well, Father, on each and every complaint you assured him that you believed you were following the practice of the early Church; “before Rome erred and strayed” — those were your very words.’

Mr Hervey nodded, and Matthew Hervey grew a little in awe of his sister, for here were affairs that he had never had occasion for mastering.

‘And you gave him evidence, and cited authorities,’ Elizabeth continued. ‘And it seemed to me that the archdeacon was inclined to concede your argument lest it reveal his own ignorance. So that, even now, he may be delving into his books in order to refute that argument should the time come.’

‘Oh, now, surely—’ protested Mr Hervey.

But Elizabeth persisted. ‘Because it appeared to me that the only issue on which he was certain that you stood in breach of any ordinance was that of facing east at the communion table. I notice that you forbore, for once, to call it an altar. And that was his chief concern.’

Her brother thought it only right that he should make some contribution. ‘And how was this resolved, Father? The Prayer Book is quite explicit, is it not?’

‘Explicit, yes, but not dogmatic. I didn’t argue the point, though. I assured the archdeacon instead that he would hear of no further complaint in this regard.’

‘Oh, so you did concede in one matter at least!’ tried Hervey.

‘Matthew,’ his father replied gravely, ‘I have said what I have said.’

Hervey looked a little chastened. And then his father relented. ‘Your friend from the wooden world is come, by the way.’

‘Captain Peto?’

‘He stays at the Bath Arms, but he’ll dine with us — in about an hour, indeed. We are all so late today.’

Hervey was thoroughly enlivened by the news. ‘Oh how I wish Henrietta were back to meet him! There’ll be so little chance before Thursday. What did you think of him, Father? Is he not the very embodiment of a frigate captain?’

‘I thought him a very fine fellow at once,’ he replied squarely.

Elizabeth smiled. ‘His voice was perhaps a little too great for such confined quarters, and he seemed to bump into the furniture rather a lot. But I liked him at once, too. Do you know, he says he believes this to be the furthest inland he has ever been?’

Hervey’s smile was even broader. ‘I can well believe it!’ And then the clock struck the half-hour. ‘Oh, have you seen Johnson? I must tell him about tomorrow.’

Elizabeth frowned, but it was an approving sort of frown. Private Johnson had preceded Hervey to Horningsham by several days, and with him Jessye, and had been warmly welcomed by all. ‘Find Hannah Towle first, for he’s been making eyes at her all day!’

In a village such as Horningsham, which owed its well-being to a great house like Longleat, it was by no means unusual for important affairs of state to be played out within the witness of the meanest of its inhabitants. But even Horningsham did not expect ever to be party to the news that broke next morning. It appalled and fascinated everyone alike, from day-labourer to Lord Bath himself. The details were dreadful, and needed no embellishing in the retelling. The shock about the village was so apparent that even Private Johnson, a visitor with an undeveloped sensitivity, felt its strange effect during his progress from one end of Horningsham to the other on an errand for Hannah Towle.

One of the yeoman farmers, the same that had proposed to Mrs Strange and whose property lay remote at the very edge of the parish bounds, had been found murdered in his own house, and his maidservant, the only other occupant, was likewise dead and her body disposed of in the garden well. Nothing more was known but that the house bore the signs of ransacking for money and valuables, and that the parish constable had hastened there at once. In no one’s memory had there ever been such a thing — in the most distant past, even — and it was everywhere assumed that the culprits must be from Warminster Common, which all knew to be a sink of growing proportions. Except, as the Reverend Thomas Hervey pointed out, the farm lay the other side of the village from the common, so the murderers would have had to make a very great detour in order not to have been seen there. The farmer himself had no kin in the village, and his maidservant’s family was from the neighbouring parish, so Mr Hervey had no immediate pastoral calling: the coroner’s business would likely be slow, and the funeral many days off therefore — a mercy in not claiming his attention as the wedding approached.

At Longleat, Lord Bath was in a mood of some despair, for — the more personal effects of the crime apart — he believed it reflected ill on the stewardship of his demesne. Such things might happen in cities, or on an estate where the owner took no careful interest in affairs other than its rents. But not here. Wiltshire wasn’t Clare or Kerry after all, and he was not an absentee landlord. And what might the parish constable discover? He was good enough when it came to the odd bit of mischief, but this was altogether too grave a crime for a man whose principal occupation was the maintenance of the Longleat fire engine. No, it would not do. Lord Bath would not wait for the trail to go stone cold while Constable Gedge completed his thorough but fruitless enquiries. He would send at once to London for Bow Street detectors.

When Hervey set out for Longleat in the mid-morning he had a mind to call on Mrs Strange to condole with her, for he imagined that an offer of marriage on the farmer’s part supposed some degree of intimacy, or at least familiarity. But as he passed the school he heard the children singing a hymn — and by no means a sombre one — so he presumed Mrs Strange was not so indisposed as to put off her charges and draw the curtains at home. He therefore rode on to his appointment with Henrietta, who would be returned, he trusted, from that nearby fashionable spa where ladies could find everything that a lady needed. The appointment was not so much with Henrietta, however, as the two of them with Mr Keble. John Keble had also dined at the vicarage the night before, and the meeting this morning, he had explained, was in order to discharge his obligation in certain matters respecting the Prayer Book.

The meeting began well. They sat in a small summer breakfast room, the late spring sunshine warm through windows full east, with orchids from the Longleat hothouses about them. Hervey’s and Henrietta’s chairs were drawn close enough together for them to place a hand on one another’s from time to time, with Mr Keble’s chair somehow arranged so as not to be too formal, though not yet so intimate as to make for any additional awkwardness in his discourse with them.

First Mr Keble explained that, in order to preach as he intended, and so that the dean, who was to officiate, might omit the lengthy declaration of the duties of man and wife which the Prayer Book otherwise required, he felt obliged to ‘share with them certain things’. And so the familiar injunctions of Saints Peter and Paul were rehearsed, and the parties were content. Then, with a certain delicacy of manner, he asked their leave to go a little further. He wished, with considerable authority as well as delicacy, to ‘lay their minds at rest’, as he put it; to disabuse them of any doubts they might have as to ‘the worthiness of the desires of the flesh within wedlock’. Henrietta smiled serenely, and her countenance gave no indication of whether the desires of the flesh were in any respect understood. Hervey shifted slightly in his chair, and feared somehow that his own understanding would be all too readily exposed.