Rumours Of War

rather, letting his horse do so, for the snow lay too deep to make dismounted progress – and he had hunched his shoulders and bent his neck to take advantage of his cloak and its turned-up collar. But then he had felt shame, for was it not a very unsoldierly thing to take refuge so from the elements, just as from the enemy’s fire? And did not Daniel Coates’s ‘cold sleep’ lie that way too? Lieutenant Martyn: he did not sit bent. Neither did Serjeant Emmet, nor Serjeant Crook. He had hoped they had not seen him, and he had set about rousing those dragoons who looked as if they too were sinking Lethewards.

‘Yes, they flicker too much to be aught but,’ said Martyn, his tone quite certain.

He was not all that many years Hervey’s senior, neither had he seen any service, but he was assured and capable. Perhaps his height, almost six feet, gave him his first authority, and the prominent cheekbones and blue eyes a handsomeness the dragoons took for breeding. They liked Martyn and they trusted him. At Eton he had been an athlete, feted and admired; command sat easily with him. And now he had brought them through the worst of nights, to campfires that signalled a warm welcome. The dragoons would revere him.

How he had found his way Hervey could only wonder. True, they had followed the same road all along, but there had been many a time when it appeared but a white sameness in front of them, so that they might travel north or east or west without knowing, for they could see no stars on a night like this. Yet Martyn had somehow led them faithfully; Hervey could only hope that he too would be able to do so when the time came.

He trusted he could. Many had been the time on the plain on nights as dark or snowy when he had learned how to keep direction and calculate the distance gone. But there he had known his ground (he fancied he knew every fold of it between Imber and Warminster), while here it was first footing. His Scripture crowded in again (he had recited long passages to keep his mind active as they rode). It might be the very Wilderness itself, or the unknown lands beyond the Jordan. Was this how Joshua, his first hero, had fared? And Joshua sent men from Jericho to Ai, which is beside Beth-aven, on the east side of Beth-el, and spake unto them, saying, Go up and view the country.

Hervey prayed hard that it would soon be as Joshua had found.

*

It was two o’clock when the outlying pickets of the 15th Hussars challenged them: ‘Halt! Advance one and be recognized!’

Lieutenant Martyn coaxed his weary charger a few more yards.

‘Halt! Parole?’

‘Blenheim. Sixth Light Dragoons, escort to General Paget.’

‘Advance, friend!’

Martyn signalled for the escort to follow, taking post by the picket in order to see them all in – and that there were no French tagging on behind them.

Hervey came last with Serjeant Emmet. ‘Clear.’

‘Very well. Serjeant Emmet, carry on, but do not off-saddle yet. Mr Hervey and I had better report first to the general.’

‘Ay, sir.’

‘Let them have a little corn.’

‘Ay, sir.’

They dismounted. ‘Just loose his girth a little, Sykes,’ said Hervey, handing the reins to his groom. ‘He’s sure to blow himself up.’

It was not too great a fault (and scarcely deserving of the word vice), but it was a great annoyance to have to struggle to do up a girth, and then to have it all slack again when they moved off. Some believed it was a sign of more general dishonesty in a horse, but Hervey had never found it so. He had rather thought it a sign of intelligence indeed, for he reckoned a horse must have a fair capacity to reason in order to connect the volume of wind in its lungs with the circumference of the girth.

They warmed themselves at the inlying picket’s fire, taking turns as horse holders until all had managed to recover the full use of fingers and restore a degree of feeling in their feet. Hervey checked his gelding’s shoes, then he and Martyn took directions to Lord Paget’s billet.

They trudged towards the church. ‘Have a look inside, Hervey. It might serve.’

Hervey pushed one of the doors open. It was now shelter for the best part of a troop of the 15th Hussars, the horses packed in the side aisles like barrels in a hold, and the men themselves lying side by side in the nave without stepping room between them – and all as warm as toast, yet with no more than an oil lamp’s heat between a dozen of them.

‘No room for us there, I think.’

Martyn sighed, his breath as white as everything around them. ‘A very seasonal response, Hervey.’

Hervey smiled. The humour was more welcome for the hard conditions.

Round the corner, by the priest’s house, they came on Lord Paget’s sentry.

‘Can’t let you pass, sir. My orders,’ said the hussar, a private man but a sure one. Sure and cosy, for the sentry fire blazed brighter even than the picket’s (there was no room for wood any longer in the church).

‘I command the general’s escort,’ explained Martyn, equably.

‘The general’s sleeping, sir. He’ll be up soon though.’

‘How so?’

‘I don’t rightly know, sir, but I thinks as he’s going to Sirgoon while it’s still dark.’

‘Indeed!’ Martyn felt his prompt arrival doubly provident.

‘Where is the picket-officer?’

‘Sorry, sir, I don’t rightly know.’

There was no reason he should. Martyn supposed he would have to go back to find the picket-corporal again.

‘Mr Martyn, what’s up?’

The voice was unmistakable – brisk, even clipped.

‘Nothing is up, Captain Edmonds. But I should be obliged to know what are the general’s intentions.’

Edmonds was wearing his cloak. It was covered in snow, and his Tarleton helmet looked like a besom that had been hard at work clearing a path. Yet he seemed every bit as comfortably at home as if that indeed was where he was.

Joseph Edmonds – forty-two years old, Sir John Moore’s junior by only four, and half his life spent in the saddle, most of it on active service. He had advanced from cornet without payment, but for ten years and more he had been captain. He could not afford to purchase a majority (talk in the mess had it that his father was killed at Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, and that his mother had been left without a penny), and his prospects depended therefore on the enemy’s shot. Edmonds was not yet a bitter man, but his stock of civility had been run bare of late years.

‘Put very simply, Martyn, we march for Sahagun in an hour. Is there anything more you would know?’

Martyn thought for a moment. ‘No, Edmonds, not a thing.’

‘Is that young Hervey you have with you?’

‘It is, sir,’ answered Hervey for himself.

Edmonds said nothing, but seemed to nod his head. At least, snow fell from his Tarleton as if to say he did.

When they got back to where the escort were gathered, outside a tithe barn filled with men and horses from the Tenth, there were camp-kettles already on the boil.

‘Does tha want a mashin’ wi’ us, sir?’ asked one of the dragoons, in a voice so alien that Hervey for an instant could not be sure what the man had said.

‘Tea, sir,’ explained a helpful one, his accent not far from that which Hervey knew in Wiltshire. ‘Would you like to have some with us?’

Hervey was as much gratified by the offer as with the promise of the liquid itself, although the latter, when it came, revived him remarkably.

‘Tha’s a good knocker-up, sir! Us’d all say that.’

Hervey was once more mystified.

‘He means you did ’em well tonight, sir – keeping ’em awake. Don’t you, Johnno?’