Rumours Of War

many anatomists there – human anatomists at that. They’ve been too quick to dismiss farriers’ lore. Mind, a good deal of it needs dismissing.’

Corporal Martin raised his eyebrows ever so slightly.

‘But for the most part it required a systematical inquiry; that is all. Have you read anything of these matters?’

‘I am reading Mr Coleman’s Instructions to Farriers.’

‘Are you, indeed?’ Knight sounded impressed.

‘And Everyman his own Farrier.’

Corporal Martin raised his eyebrows again, this time more obviously.

‘And what do you make of Clator and Coleman?’

The measuring cup was now full. Knight took his hand from the vein, which closed like a fish’s mouth after a fly, mopped up a trickle of blood with a piece of lint, and pressed his thumb to the wound.

‘Frankly, sir, I’m uncertain yet.’

‘Indeed, Hervey? Well, let me tell you what I have told the farriers – that they are to disregard Coleman. At best his instructions are of no use, and at worst they are downright cruel.’

‘What about Clator, sir?’

‘Clator is admirable, a wise old practitioner – if rather too quick to the bleeding stick.’ Knight took his thumb from the vein. There was no more blood. ‘And I believe he is wrong as regards the glanders and farcy.’

Hervey said nothing, but was full of regard for the veterinarian’s dexterity with the blade; a heaving deck was a far cry from a cavalry stable.

B Troop quartermaster, a short, stout but active man with no teeth, came up bearing a lantern. ‘I’d like ’ee to ’ave a look at Forty-seven, sir.’

The quartermaster was from Norfolk. He had enlisted twenty years before, in the first year of the French Revolution, when the regiment had been scattered about the county for eighteen long months on Excise duty. Hervey was more than a shade wary of him, not least because he was not always able to understand what he said.

‘Proper sea-sick be ’e.’

Knight braced himself up at once, though in truth he was so tired that he would have lain down on the straw under the gelding’s feet. ‘Very well, Serjeant Colley. Have a dragoon keep a close watch on this here. Try tempting him with a warm mash in half an hour or so.’

He made for Forty-seven’s stall, and even more unsteadily, for the ship was pitching worse than before. Hervey watched him with increasing admiration. The veterinarian’s address was preserving half the regiment’s horses, no doubt of it. And not just for his ministrations now, for Knight personally, and with only a very little help from the quartermasters, had determined which horse should go where. He had put stable mate with stable mate, and the nappier ones and poorer doers in the more accessible stalls. His constant exertions since were keeping the sick ones up so that Nature and calmer seas could in time work their cure. No one was more important to the Sixth’s reputation at this time than Veterinary Surgeon Knight, and never had a young blade expected it.

But Forty-seven had been in a fearsome state. Unable to throw up – the lot of every equine – his uncomprehending terror had driven him to a state of brute violence. He had kicked, paddled, squealed and screamed worse than ever Hervey had seen before. Knight had been quick to his decision – ‘The axe, Martin’ – and they had taken the old gelding from his stall, in the greatest peril of their own safety, to the other side of a bulkhead where the feed was kept, and there the farrier-corporal had swung his axe. With the pitching and rolling of the ship, the confined space and limited headroom, and the horse’s own plunging, it had not been a clean execution. Four times Martin’s axe had had to swing before Forty-seven was finally despatched.

Hervey remembered his nausea in that bloody, stinking, wooden dungeon, for which in truth nothing had prepared him. Daniel Coates had taken him once to the butcher’s yard in Warminster to see the slaughter of two oxen, but it had been meagre schooling for the horrors of shipping horses. And he recalled how after they had covered Forty-seven with a paulin and got rid of the smell of blood, he had returned to his tiny canvas cabin on the deck above and there read his Prayer Book, as his daily custom had then been. He even remembered which psalm it had been: 109 – ‘Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way: even by ruling himself after thy word. With my whole heart have I sought thee: O let me not go wrong out of thy commandments.’

But it was no longer his custom to read the psalms daily. Indeed, his connection with the Prayer Book was increasingly from one Sunday only to the next. He wondered whether in recent years he had become altogether too complacent . . .

‘Boat your oars!’

He woke abruptly. Eighteen years! It was too long ago to be recalling. There was too much in the past that was painful, for one memory led involuntarily to another, and eventually to a snow-scape in North America and Henrietta’s icy death. And all because he, her own husband indeed, had lacked the resolution to oppose his commanding officer’s malign incompetence.

And yet, there was so much of the past to be recalled so as not to make the same mistakes in the future. That much was the very essence of what Daniel Coates called experience. Especially here in Portugal, where the people had paid a high price for their earlier mistakes. But that was, in truth, largely Colonel Norris’s business. His was but a supporting role, to advise on the suitability of this or that in so far as it touched on the mounted arm – the country, its going for the cavalry and its means of sustaining it; remounts, their suitability and cost; mules, even. Not a job for a blade, in truth, but it had just sufficient prospect of action to assure him that Portugal was the place for a brevet-major in want of the opportunity for advancement. A word from Norris to the commander-in-chief, the Duke of York, when they returned, and he might even get a merit promotion. Such things were not unknown. He congratulated himself that he would be within but a step of a lieutenant- colonelcy and command.

He had been within that short step before, and ten years earlier, when he had come back from India the first time. The Horse Guards had given him a brevet, and the Sixth’s colonel, the Earl of Sussex, had told him the regiment would be his, and that he would pay nothing for it. But Lord Towcester had put paid to that; and to so much more. Hervey could only wonder at his own acquiescence in the face of that cowardly martinet’s tormenting of the regiment. He would never make the same mistake again, though he could scarcely imagine meeting another like Towcester were he to live to a hundred.

No, his fortunes were once again in the hands of the Horse Guards and the providence of battle. It had been very well, indeed, that he had got himself here; or rather that Kat had got him here.

CHAPTER SIX

OLD ALLIANCES

Reeves’s Hotel, Rua do Prior, Lisbon, that evening

Private Johnson laid Hervey’s best coat over the back of a chair, and sighed. He had rubbed it with damp huckaback for a full five minutes. ‘Them ’airs ’ave got everywhere.’

‘Not as bad as the ink in Canada though, I fancy?’

Johnson grimaced. He had told Hervey not to put the bottle in the same trunk as his pelisse coat. But that had been ten years ago, and they had not had too many mishaps since then when it came to the baggage. But the cats at Reeves’s had made themselves comfortable in the opened portmanteaux the instant Johnson had left the room in search of coal, and, he observed, a Portugoose tom had a remarkable ability to shed white hair on dark blue worsted. Otherwise both Johnson and Hervey approved of their quarters, for Reeves’s was run in the English fashion. The hotel was well lit, with oil, the rooms were large and airy, and there was a good table. It stood in marked contrast with the streets between their landing and the Rua do Prior, for even in the fashionable Lapa district, where there were houses as elegant as anything to be seen in London, and in many cases the more attractive for being covered in vivid climbers, the streets were unconscionably filthy. And this to sensibilities long