The Sabre's Edge

Miners. The strength returns were not yet received in full, said the officiating adjutant-general, but his estimate was that the army would take to the field in excess of twenty thousand combatants.

Hervey scanned the order of battle keenly. The last regiment he came to gave him especial satisfaction, and did as much to assure him of victory as any other. Two rissalahs of Skinner's Irregular Horse would accompany the army, unbrigaded. He resolved at once to enlist them in his independent command.

In the afternoon he sent Corporal Wainwright with a dozen sicca rupees to buy provisions for the budgerow which would - he hoped - soon be taking them back up the Ganges. 'Calcutta will be no place to be these next weeks,' he said, smiling wryly. 'Not for sabres, that's for sure. You haven't seen an army assembling for the field, Corporal Wainwright. It's a grand affair of adjutants and quartermasters and serjeant-majors. Parades, lists, inspections - no end of a business!'

Corporal Wainwright hid his partial disappointment. The oldest sweat in his barrack-room had told him many things when he had first joined, not least that a dragoon should never volunteer for anything. Yet Jobie Wainwright would have liked to see the serjeant-majors and the adjutants and the quartermasters about their business, for he himself wanted one day to fill their boots, and how was he to learn if he did not see? But he was his troop-leader's coverman - Major Hervey's coverman, indeed, though he did not yet know it -and he went only where he might parry the cut or the thrust directed at his officer. That next meant to Dehli, or perhaps straight to Agra.

But his officer had a prior duty, one that could not possibly be spoken of between them. When Wainwright left for the bazaar, Hervey went to the Chitpore road.

The whole of native Calcutta, from nabob to bhisti, knew now that the army of Bengal was mobilizing. And every bibi knew likewise. They also knew that the army's object was what Lord Lake had failed to accomplish, and what had been the shaming cause of Sir David Ochterlony's death. Would John Company rise in triumph this time to the old taunt 'Go take Bhurtpore'? It was the talk of the princely palaces and the havelis of the Chitpore road, debated in the more modest dwellings of the Brahmins and around the bazaars. And in the bibi khanas; especially in the bibi khanas, for they knew all about Bhurtpore - 'the Pride of Hindoostan'. Was the fortress not impregnable? Did not the Futtah Bourge, the tower of skulls, stand as reminder to all who would forget it? No, it was impossible that a man should leave for Bhurtpore without visiting his bibi to bid her a proper goodbye, and to receive the soldier's farewell in return, and to assure her of the arrangements he had made for her well-being should he not come back.

Hervey now spoke the words that a bibi needed to hear, but they could never be enough. She loved him. She thought him the world itself. She also understood that in the army's hands lay the Company's honour and prestige, and it made her doubly fearful, for she knew what honour meant to her sahib, and the price he would be ready to pay if it were necessary. She would not say so -it would only distress him - but if his body were brought back to Calcutta she would throw herself into the flames of his funeral pyre in the duty of suttee. Except that for her it would not be a duty, rather an end to interminable grief.

She pleaded with her sahib to let her go with him to Bhurtpore; even to walk among the dhoolie-bearers and syces if she could not be with him. But tempted sorely as Hervey was, his soldier's duty stood all too clear: she was not welcome in the cantonment, and she could not be welcome on the campaign.

But leaving her was harder than he had supposed. He did not for one moment imagine he would not return (she would not tell him that she imagined only this) but the necessity of proceeding on that possibility gave their parting a fateful edge that all but overcame him. It was not possible for a man - a man with a soul - to see even native eyes which looked so loving, and not be touched deep. In truth, Hervey had come to love her, too, in a certain way. It was not a love which fulfilled all his needs; their minds, so differently schooled, could never wholly meet, but there was a tenderness that could make him content, for a time. He saw that period of contentment, however, only as time that stood still, not the sharing of life's time.

It was of no consequence, however. He had long known that he could only have shared life's time with Henrietta, and it mattered not how or with whom he shared time that stood still, for it was a wholly different property. As the sun began to sink in the direction to which his duty called, he rose from beside her to bathe. He was certain of one thing: he had not the will, and certainly not the heart, to sever himself from her now. It would take the lawful command of a superior to accomplish that - a return to England, alone or with the regiment. Yet did he have the desire and the will even to comply with such an order? Why should she not accompany him home?

That twisting ache which came in his vitals in such moments of apprehension hauled him back to the truth - that here in Hindoostan he might live largely as he pleased, but that in England (above all in Wiltshire) he must live as he was expected. All the Christian charity of his family combined could not accept an Indian paramour, let alone a wife. And beyond his immediate family - Henrietta's guardians and the gentry of those parts - such a thing could signal only that Hervey had announced his intention to withdraw from all society. He might even come to know what his late friend Shelley had called 'social hatred'.

Would that matter to him? As he lay in her arms he had imagined not. But now, as he sponged the cold water over his shoulders, he knew that he would always hark back - no matter how infrequently - to the earlier, sober days, and that it would begin eating at the heart of the arrangement. And his career? He would have to forgo it. Any arrangement with a native girl, except in a native station, was insupportable. Perhaps he might implicate Georgiana, to appoint his bibi as ayah to her? But what passed as a decent and honourable association in India would in England look no better than the slave-owner visiting the cabins of an evening.

As they embraced at their parting, Hervey was in more than half a mind to seek a commission in the Company's forces, to make his home here, to see how long he could make time stand still, until events resolved his troubles.

In the army's hands lay the Company's honour and prestige. If Hervey's bibi understood this, how much more did Somervile. The King's honour, indeed, now rested in the balance at Bhurtpore, and there were some in the great houses of Calcutta

those connected with the native powers especially

who would say that the very presence of the British in India was at stake, that in Combermere's hands lay the course of history.

'There is much to speak of, Hervey,' said Somervile, welcoming him at the door of No. 3, Fort William. 'Send for all your necessaries and rest the night here. A good dinner's the very least the council might provide before you go and pay their rent for the next hundred years.'

Hervey needed no inducement to stay with the Somerviles, for besides the unflagging pleasure he took in their company he had no agreeable alternative. He could not return to the bibi khana having said his farewell, the officers' mess was at this moment being readied to lumber in a score of yakhdans and bullock carts in the direction of Agra, and his own bungalow was once again shuttered and draped with dust sheets.

Emma joined them, the ayah with her, babe in arms.

For a moment Hervey saw something - the timeless vision of mother and child, perhaps - that reached deep into his own void. And his godson

- a contented baby, swaddled with affection, a child that would grow to manhood sure of its nurture. Mother and child seemed somehow to rebuke him. 'I had a mind to stay here when the Sixth is recalled,' he said, absently.

Emma read that mind, and thought better of questioning it.

Her husband was less nimble. ^‘Be sure to take six months' home leave beforehand, mark. It would be perilous to chance the marriage stakes on the angels who come out here.'

Serious advice, well-meant as ever - if blunt: Hervey could not take offence. 'Perhaps I shall,' he said, vaguely; and then, in a tone suggesting his true thoughts, 'and I should want to know how my own offspring fares.'

Emma sensed the danger. She nodded to her ayah. 'Mehrbani, Vaneeta.'

The ayah bowed and smiled back, and took the child to the nursery.

'When do you leave, Matthew?'