An Act Of Courage

she had spoken a sort of English – very formal, learned from books. They had all got on so much better in French, with the baron especially. ‘What do you imagine Dona Delgado will say to this friend in the government?’

‘I don’t rightly know, sir, but I know that she won’t say that Major Hervey is in Badajoz. She said that right plainly, sir.’

‘Very well. When I have concluded business here we will go to Belem, and on the way you may tell me exactly how it came about that Major Hervey was made prisoner. Is there anything else I ought to know at present?’

Wainwright thought for a moment. ‘No, sir.’ He stood up.

Laming remained seated, mulling over things one more time before committing himself to his interview with the charge. ‘One more matter, Corporal Wainwright; sit down.’ He waited, then forced himself to the question. ‘Do you know who is Lady Katherine Greville?’

Wainwright shifted only a fraction, but it was enough to alert Laming to the awkwardness – as if he needed alerting. ‘Sir.’

‘She is here in Lisbon, is she not?’

Wainwright rested easy again, for the question was matter of fact. He shook his head. ‘Sir. Her ladyship was here, sir, up unto a fortnight ago, but then she went to Madeira, as was always her intention, she said.’

Laming could only wonder again at Wainwright’s easy confidence. He did not like exposing so much to a corporal, but Wainwright’s attentiveness and discretion gave him confidence to pursue his line of questions. ‘Did she have dealings with the legation, do you know?’

‘Sir. She used to go there a lot.’

‘And Colonel Norris – were they acquainted?’

Wainwright shifted again. ‘Sir. Lady Katherine tried to get him to see things Major Hervey’s way.’

‘Did she indeed. How very fortunate is Major Hervey with his female supporters.’

‘Sir?’

‘Nothing.’ Laming rose. ‘Wait here. I shan’t be long.’

At Badajoz, Hervey’s defiant anger had again given way to guilty introspection. He had woken early; and alone in his ‘cell’ (as he thought of it, for good furniture and fine hangings could not disguise a locked door), the failures and pain of the decade and more since Waterloo, the high-water mark of his uncomplicated subaltern’s life, were displacing any recollection of the good he had done since, or of his short-lived marital bliss, or of his occasional joy since Henrietta’s passing.

The midday bells of the fortress-city, pealing exuberantly for Natividade, drew his thoughts to that other cell, at Toulouse, when the war with Bonaparte seemed at last finished. There he had lain on a simple bed, his leg bandaged, the wound sutured, and in a place not unlike this – stone walls, a certain solid austerity. The nun sent to tend him, Sister Maria de Chantonnay, a Carmelite and a Bourbon remnant, one of the few of either order to escape Bonaparte’s persecution, had nursed him back to fitness for the saddle, and in the course of it, though he had not realized it at the time, nursed his mind too. For in five years’ continual campaigning in the Peninsula he had never slept out of reach of sabre and pistol; and, he had later come to recognize, such a sleep eroded the Christian man’s sensibility. Sister Maria had spoken of her aubade, her prayer of joy on waking. At the time, it had seemed to him a charming thing, perfectly suited to her calling, but nothing more (his long catechism in his father’s church, and at Shrewsbury, had stamped on him a somewhat ‘upright’ habit in his devotions).

The aubade, which he had never forgotten, had of late years touched him deep, perhaps because of the manner of its expression – everyday, unselfconscious – but also because (as only later he came fully to understand) it was the most perfect vocal expression of her calling, the waking wife’s embrace of her husband: ‘Oh my God, it is to praise you that I arise. I unite myself to all the praise and adoration offered you by your son Jesus on his arising, and I abandon myself to you with all my heart.’ Once, he had known that exultation himself, with Henrietta; but not since. Since then, he felt nothing at all on waking. Sometimes he had found a certain pleasure, in the arms of his bibi – and, he would freely admit, with Lady Katherine Greville – but it was never so deep, and never frequent enough. More often he felt only black despair. After Henrietta’s death, the despair had continued day and night, week in, week out, month after month. And but for the grace of God and the love of his sister, and the fellowship of the Sixth, it might have been year after year. Henrietta was a dimmer memory now, but a memory nevertheless, and a memory that often rebuked him. How he envied Sister Maria. Her vows had been liberating, while his own – or rather, his chosen way – had brought him to this.

He shook his head. That was too easy; he could not blame obligation to the army. He had re-read his letter to Georgiana (several times), and the pride in it was all too evident – and the conceit. He had brought himself to his situation now through ambition unchecked by the usual decencies – the dastur, as they had it in India: the observances, the customs of the service – and through an arrogant presumption of his own superior judgement in all things touching on his profession. Nor indeed was it ‘just’ the sin of pride that accounted for his dispirits: he stood in unequivocal contradiction of Scripture, through a liaison with another man’s wife. And that adultery was doubly to be condemned, since he had very patently used Lady Katherine Greville. True, she had used him; but that did not diminish his sin.

He shook his head again: and there is no health in us. The words of the Prayer Book had a way of laying bare the soul. Indeed, they raged at him: if there be any of you, who by this means cannot quiet his own conscience herein, but requireth further comfort or counsel, let him come to me, or to some other discreet and learned Minister of God’s Word, and open his grief; that by the ministry of God’s holy Word he may receive the benefit of absolution, together with ghostly counsel and advice.

He had never had so unquiet a conscience as now, but there was no minister with ghostly counsel or advice for him here in Badajoz. For now, he must take his own counsel. There were comfortable words in his Prayer Book. They had seen him through dark and dangerous times before. They asked him the questions that a ‘discreet and learned Minister of God’s Word’ would ask. Was he in love and charity with his neighbour? He could not claim it. He even deceived and neglected his sister, and by extension therefore his daughter. Did he, truly and earnestly, intend to lead a new life? Yes; but if he was to follow the commandments of God, and walk from henceforth in his holy ways, he must walk henceforth from Lady Katherine Greville.

He needed no ghostly counsel to tell him this. Perhaps, then, this cell was not entirely a defeat? Perhaps, as at Toulouse, the introspection it imposed was a blessing. One way or another he would have to amend his life; of that he was certain.

But how did he first escape his manmade chains, for he could not lead a new life shackled thus? He looked at the tray on the table in front of him. It was so much better than he had had in the days before. Steam came from the coffee pot, the bread was warm, there were eggs, oranges too. This was his own Christmas feast, and it must be the physician’s doing. In Dr Sanchez there was indeed some curious sort of affinity, and Hervey began to wonder if in him lay his best chance of escape. What other was there? At every visit, Sanchez pressed on him the option of parole: all he had to do was give his word not to take up arms in Portugal again. They probably did not expect him to keep it anyway. The general he had taken prisoner all those years ago at Benavente had given his parole at Dartmoor and returned to France, only to appear before the regiment again at Waterloo. Hervey shook his head. That might serve for Frenchmen – or a Spaniard, no doubt – but it was no option for him. An Englishman did not break his parole.

What made the physician so keen to press him for it? Hervey pondered something Sanchez had said the day before, something about the obligations of old allies. Might it be that he was himself antipathetic to the Miguelite cause? He was a physician of the town, after all, not an army man, nor even a government official. He was obviously trusted by the authorities, but being a medical man he might not have been obliged to declare any opinion. Hervey fancied there was, too, a certain something in the man’s air that suggested a partiality to a red coat – more than the merely humane. But when would that partiality be ripe enough to gather? And how would he know?

Colonel Laming, having presented his card at the legation, and having no immediate duties requiring him to return to General Clinton’s headquarters, took a coche to Belem. He had changed his