‘What was his name?’
‘He didn’t give it,’ she said blithely. ‘He had no idea who I was, and I thought it better not to say.’
Quickly he found Addlestone on his map. ‘Johnson!’
His groom opened the door gingerly. ‘Sir?’
‘Ask Mr St Oswald to come here at once.’
‘What is it, dearest?’ Henrietta seemed puzzled that her scanty report should have caused such alarm.
‘Addlestone is well outside the boundaries of the scheme. From there those dragoons will be able to slip behind my picket line, and they’ll avoid even the flank picket if they strike a little further south first. Who was the officer with the party that you followed?’
Henrietta didn’t know, for she had yet to meet them all.
‘What colour were the horses?’
She smiled. ‘Chestnuts, all.’
‘E Troop —
The cornet came into the hut, squinting a little in the sudden, if dim, light. He saw Henrietta, and then looked at his troop leader curiously.
‘Not a word, St Oswald, not a word.’
‘No, sir, I… of course.’
‘I’ve just learned that about twenty men from E Troop, under Sandys or Binney, were lately assembled here,’ he pointed to Addlestone on the map, ‘which makes them very well placed to slip behind our line, if, indeed, they are not already doing so.’
Cornet St Oswald glanced at Henrietta again. His admiration for his captain grew daily. Whoever would think of sending his wife as an observing officer!
‘The flank pickets ought to pick them up, but if they ride south any further then they’ll be missed.’
St Oswald nodded. ‘Do you want me to go there?’
‘Yes. It looks to me as though their best move would be to come in on this road here, about half a mile behind where our line now is.’ He pointed out the lateral road which cut right across the area of the scheme. It was one of his own reporting lines — a line which would serve to get his pickets back in hand if they were pushed too badly before it.
The more Hervey studied the map, the more it occurred to him that the slackening of pressure all along his front was more than just fatigue. The regiment had checked just sufficiently forward for E Troop’s party to get in behind his own line without Colonel Freke Smyth’s staff suspecting they had come from outside the boundaries, for he might be persuaded that they had found a gap in the picket line and slipped through. That was cunning, Hervey thought. No, on second thoughts it was devious; there was a difference. He looked at Henrietta. Thank God she had come that way. Armstrong had missed Strickland’s men, but then he could not have been expected to be everywhere at once.
‘Sir!’ called one of the dragoons outside, excitedly. ‘A rocket!’
Hervey dashed from the hut. The firework was just beginning to fall, but its smoke trail was clear enough. It came from the right flank, from almost exactly where he made the lateral road to be.
‘Armstrong! He’s there after all!’ cried Hervey, with a little note of triumph, and grabbing his cornet’s arm. ‘Thomas, take your half-dozen dragoons and make the biggest demonstration you can. Take my repeating carbine — you know how it works well enough. It will make your party sound twice the size. Let me get one of Major Jago’s men first, though. The affair will need an umpire!’
Cornet St Oswald was pleased no end with the plum.
Major Jago himself now appeared with his lantern. ‘What do you make of that rocket, Hervey?’ he enquired suspiciously. ‘It isn’t a Congreve, that’s for sure.’
‘No sir,’ admitted Hervey, noticing Henrietta concealing herself from Jago. ‘I bought it two weeks ago in London.’ And then he wondered why he was being so guarded. ‘It is the alarm signal from one of my videttes on the flank. I believe there is an incursion. I am sending Cornet St Oswald and six men to intercept it. Would you send one of your staff with them?’
‘I shall go myself. Come on, young man!’ Jago called to St Oswald.
‘Matthew!’ whispered Henrietta when he had gone. ‘That was the officer who brought me here when I lost my way.’
Hervey groaned. Major Jago, he suspected, was not a man to miss much. ‘The question now, my love, is how we are going to take you back again.’
That question presented much less of a problem than he expected, for soon after Cornet St Oswald’s successful affair on the flank, Major Jago received word from Colonel Freke Smyth that the scheme was at an end, and that all of the regiment was to assemble at first light on the green at Addlestone so that the condition of the horses might be assessed by the veterinary surgeons and farriers of the Blues. Hervey had no doubts that the regiment would be adjudged exemplary in this, but he was surprised that the officers received a separate order to assemble at the Plough Inn, for it had been the invariable practice for them to attend at any such parade. But General Browning wished to breakfast with them, and that was that. Hervey was therefore able to ride with Henrietta as far as the crossroads short of the village, from where Johnson would escort her back to Hounslow.
Hervey felt a deep glow of satisfaction, as did his subalterns. After the order to ‘cease fire’, Major Jago had told him that not once had his picket line been penetrated by so much as a single scout, and that the affair on the flank had been the sharpest piece of work he had seen in many a year. He had not asked about Henrietta, but something in his remark about unorthodox tactics hinted that her identity and her part in things had not gone unnoticed. But it was Hervey’s ploy with Serjeant Armstrong — and, indeed, with Armstrong’s own conduct — that brought Jago’s especial praise. Armstrong’s orders had been to remain covert unless it were absolutely necessary to do otherwise. The rocket had been a desperate, and expensive, expedient to warn of the incursion. Now that the whole world knew of the wheeze, Hervey couldn’t very well keep his stratagem secret. He would surely have to admit that he had set his serjeant to follow the regiment from the outset. He began to fear that Jago’s praise was double-edged.
His fear soon proved not to be groundless. Lord Towcester was beside himself with rage when he learned of the rocket, and that it had been fired from
As soon as breakfast was finished and the major general and his staff were gone, Lord Towcester made to leave, and without a word. His adjutant, however, marched up to Hervey and addressed him sharply. ‘Captain Hervey, his lordship is very severely displeased that you should have sought throughout the inspection to thwart his ambition.’ He did not wait for a reply, turning on his heel instead and striding out after the commanding officer.
Hervey was speechless.
‘You too?’ said Strickland. ‘I had the foulest tongue-lashing of my life as we came here. “I should have known better than to trust to a damned papist”, was what Lord Towcester said to me. The man’s a mountebank!’
Hervey sighed. The Catholic relief measures had still a way to run, evidently. ‘I wonder how much a mountebank may do before he is called to account. I fear we’re in for a very hard ride indeed.’
CHAPTER NINE. FOR THE SAKE OF EXAMPLE
It was a black day indeed for the Sixth. Only the regimental serjeant-major and the two senior troop serjeant-majors had been serving when last there had been its like — and that had been in Flanders, when Pitt had
