Rumours Of War

pleased for me in my new happiness.

I am your ever affectionate sister,

Katherine.

CHAPTER FIVE

ON HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE

The Tagus, 2 October

His Majesty’s Ship Acis, having had so much of her canvas blown out in the Bay of Biscay that she was all but under bare poles fore and aft, saluted and dropped anchor. Hervey’s relief was great, though not as great as Colonel Norris’s, the officer in charge of the special military mission to Lisbon. The colonel’s sea legs had early given way and he had spent the four days of the passage from Portsmouth alternately prone and supine in the cabin knocked up for him in the captain’s quarters. Hervey and the three others, when they were not holding on for dear life to the ratlines on the quarterdeck, had slept fitfully in their stygian cabins in the gunroom aft on the lower deck. Hervey had met them for the first time on going aboard – two majors of the Royal Engineers and one of Rifles. And within the limitations of the gunroom and the quarterdeck in seas in which many a ship would have foundered, they had formed a hearty fellowship and a common respect.

It had been the same the first time he had entered the Tagus, all of eighteen years before. He had been a cornet then, and his new companions likewise. They – the whole regiment, indeed – had sailed from Northfleet in the middle of July (he remembered it well; it had been his father’s birthday), and they had hove to a month later in Mondego Bay. But Sir Arthur Wellesley had had such trouble landing there in the weeks before that in a day or so they sailed again for Lisbon, and much despair there had then been on hearing that a battle was fought and won at Vimeiro, and that the French were asking for terms without the Sixth so much as laying a foot, human or equine, on Peninsular soil. And he remembered the chiding they had all had from the adjutant, an old soldier who had first fought the French in Flanders. Bonaparte didn’t give up after an affair of a few thousand men, he said. It would be long years campaigning: Paris would have to fall, and the man himself put in irons. They need not fret for action, he told them; it would come soon enough, and many would then wish it otherwise.

It had been true. A month they passed in Lisbon, and then Sir Arthur Wellesley was recalled to England to face an angry parliament over the terms afforded the French by the Convention of Cintra, and Sir John Moore had taken command of the army. And then at last they had got on the march for the Spanish border; Hervey had no need of his journal to recall it, so vivid still were those early days’ apprenticeship. It was then indeed that the hardships and privations had begun – three months the like of which the regiment had never known – greater by far than the adjutant could remember in Flanders, ten times worse than the affairs in Mysore. First the advance deep into Spain – ‘King’ Joseph Bonaparte’s Spain – the troops full of ardour, the going good, the little victories easy. Then, in December, the terrible retrograde movement, brightened only by the brilliant affair at Sahagun, and the desperate march through the frozen mountains to the sea, the fighting rearguards, the breakdown of discipline and the sullen morale in too many regiments, becoming instead mere battalions of stragglers. And then the battle at Corunna, the death of Moore and the ejection of the army from Spain. Thank God for the Royal Navy! Hervey shivered at the remembrance of it all, an episode that could only in part be expiated by the glories that followed under the renewed command of Sir Arthur Wellesley, later the Marquess and then the Duke of Wellington.

‘So do you think the place changed, Hervey?’ asked Cope, the Rifles major, as they peered through their telescopes at the distant prospect of the Castelo de Sao Jorge.

‘I think not in the least, though I hope we shall find the streets a deal less mean.’

‘Well do I recollect it,’ said Cope, taking a silk wipe to the condensation on the eye piece of his spyglass.

‘I confess I have scarce had a more agreeable billet as here, however.’ Hervey seemed almost now to be searching it out. ‘The most gentlemanly of men – a fidalgo, of the most upright character. And the most beautiful of daughters too. We were severally enraptured by her.’

‘Ay,’ sighed the Rifles major, with a wry smile, raising his telescope again. ‘I recollect many a green jacket here giving a girl a green gown.’

Hervey smiled as wryly, but was in truth abashed by the memory of his own feeble attempts at lovemaking. ‘Let us hope the years have been kind to all,’ he said, elliptically.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ came a voice from behind.

The two men turned to find Colonel Norris swaddled in a boat cloak. His cocked hat was pulled so far down as to push his ears outwards, his face the same sickly colour as the first day, and his efforts with the razor, although in one sense heroic, had evidently been neither skilled nor determined.

‘Good morning, Colonel,’ they replied as one.

‘What in the name of God happened this morning?’ he grumbled.

They had all had to turn out on deck an hour after sunrise, but Norris had neither felt the ship strike the rock nor, in his unhappy condition, had he understood the urgency with which the pumps had been got up, since when he had sought the seclusion of his cabin and prayed for their early release from the purgatory.

‘There are two passages into the Tagus, Colonel,’ began one of the engineer majors helpfully. ‘One is close to the fort of St Julian, which is narrow and not very deep, and the other further south, which is wider and apparently the one more usually taken.’

‘By which I presume you are to tell me we imprudently took the more northerly one.’

‘Just so, Colonel. The master, it seems, is an old Tagus hand, and so the captain was persuaded to let him bring the ship in without a pilot, for which the master then has half the pilotage. Fortunately we were running so fast that she got off.’

‘Not an auspicious beginning, gentlemen,’ declared the colonel. ‘It will cost someone dear at Gibraltar too; I suppose that’s where she’ll have to go for repair.’

‘That is what the lieutenant says,’ confirmed Major Cope, with something of a smile. ‘The captain we have not troubled in the matter.’

‘Very wise,’ agreed the colonel, but without a suggestion of a smile. ‘In any case, the captain is making his barge available without delay, and I shall avail myself of it. You may stay aboard or come ashore as you wish.’

Poor devil, thought Hervey. But another quarter of an hour of pitching and tossing in a little boat was clearly to be preferred if it were the speediest means of reaching dry land.

Cope just beat Hervey to the reply. ‘I’m with you, Colonel.’

‘And I, sir,’ added Hervey.

They had managed only a very little conversation with the colonel so far. Acis’s captain had dined his passengers the first evening aboard, but Hervey had been unable to gauge his new principal with any confidence. Colonel Norris was an artillery officer. He had been in the Peninsula before, though not, as far as Hervey could make out, greatly exercised. He was, however, the Duke of Wellington’s man, having been on the staff of the Board of Ordnance for the past five years. Manifestly there were depths to him, Hervey conceded. But, there was about him too something that Hervey found troubling. He had observed the same in only a few senior officers, and always the least effectual ones. It was the habit of assuming superior knowledge, of experience and insight. He had noted it that first evening: each time an officer – the captain included – had spoken of a thing, Colonel Norris had somehow sought to trump him or doubt his assertion. It did not augur well for a mission in which a subordinate’s observations and opinion were to form a part of the principal’s judgement.

Out swung the barge, and down, followed by the boat crew on the jumping ladder. Then a gangway was lowered so that the captain, colonel and his officers might descend with proper dignity. They settled as best they could in the little space between the bluejacket oars, braced as the midshipman gave the order to pull away, and set their faces against or away from the spray depending on whether they wished a parting view of the wooden walls, painted Nelson style still, or not.

Hervey’s face was salt-sprayed, for sure. He was transported to that first time they had come here, and the landing of the horses, the unlucky ones by lighter, those more fortunate left to swim ashore. It had been a hard