Company Of Spears

The mare stumbled, throwing her rider painfully on to the saddle pommel. Somervile’s face turned red as he struggled not to curse too foully. ‘You are content with the barrack arrangements?’ he tried manfully, hoping the change of subject would prove a useful distraction.

Hervey looked almost as pained. ‘For the horses, yes; for the men, no. One privy between twenty. We had better arrangements in India.’

‘You have spoken to the town major, no doubt.’

‘The garrison engineer’s to do something.’

‘The King of France’s horses are better housed than a dragoon?’

Hervey smiled ruefully.

‘I was delighted to see your serjeant-major again. He is a most excellent fellow.’

‘He is, and he ought by right to have been RSM now, but the new colonel wished to bring his own man, and I could not budge him on it.’

‘You have a good opinion of him nevertheless, your new colonel?’

‘Holderness? Oh indeed, he is very gentlemanlike.’

‘And this sojourn of yours here, he will not resent it when you return?’

Hervey tilted his head. ‘I do not believe so. Indeed he was most particular on that point. And I think, in a way, it is as well that I’m here, since a new man ought not to feel his predecessor – however temporary – looking over his shoulders.’

His old friend raised an eyebrow. ‘Would that it were so with General Bourke. There’s no doubt the colony is in want of true civil government, and yet it is in large part still an armed camp.’

Somervile had been in Cape Town barely a fortnight more than Hervey, but the best part of two decades in Madras and Bengal had given him a keen judgement in these matters (as well as a taste for powder and the edge of the sword). Hervey had long been certain that he would rather shoot tiger with Eyre Somervile than with any other man – save, perhaps, Peto. ‘I would imagine that Bourke will be only too keen to address himself to the military side alone. Are you content with what he has proposed for the new regiments?’

Somervile answered very decidedly: ‘I am, but I should wish for more of that article.’ He indicated the platoon of the Fifty-fifth marching towards the castle.

Hervey nodded knowingly. It was good to see a regular regiment of Line here. Native troops – black, white, brown (or even, he supposed, yellow) – were all very well, but there was something about a red coat and the King’s crown on the helmet plate. It was like seeing a brick-built wall, properly laid and pointed, when all else was undressed stone, or mud and daub. The Fifty-fifth he had never encountered before. They had not been in the Peninsula, nor at Waterloo, but they had sweated away in Jamaica and had been at the Cape for five years. He could not but suppose they were hardened to ‘colonial’ fighting. ‘Indeed. It would be difficult to have excess of them. Except, you know, I’ve been reading that engineer officer’s report of his exploration of Kaffraria, and I wonder whether such regulated drill as theirs is most apt.’

‘They have a light company, do they not?’

Eli was now on her toes, sensing a return to quarters, so that Hervey had to sit deep again to try to collect her. ‘Yes, and most usefully. It is merely that I imagine the country hasn’t changed greatly since the exploration, and the sort of scrub he describes is the devil for manoeuvring in close order; you recall the like in Madras? I’ve been here but a week, but by all accounts the Xhosa fight from behind cover of the scrub, in which case I should sooner have a company of riflemen who snipe than three of muskets who volley.’

‘Well, you may see the country for yourself right enough.’

‘Just so. And I’m content to leave the Rifles recruits with Streatfield, their major, for the time being. They’ll not be ready to begin mounted work for a month at least.’

As he settled Eli into a proper walk before starting on the long cobbled ramp to the gate, he glanced left and right about the curtain wall of the Castle of Good Hope. It would have been easy to imagine himself in Spain again, for the pentagonal fortress, with its bastions and ravelins, scarps and glacis, looked for all the world as if Marshal Vauban himself had been here. It looked, indeed, like the fortress at Badajoz. Hervey had a sudden moment’s doubt, then told himself that Badajoz was all in the past, and kicked for Eli to walk on with more address.

It was a solid affair this place. It was not as big as Badajoz, but it was serviceable, although it had not saved the Dutch when the British had landed here to wrest the station from them in the early years of the French war. Already Hervey had spent hours in the castle library learning of it what he could. He knew each of the bastions by name, and why they were so called – Leerdam, the western bastion, followed clockwise by Buuren, Catzenellenbogen, Nassau and Orange. He knew that the bell above the gate was cast in Amsterdam in 1697 and weighed more than a quarter of a ton. The Dutch had used it to tell the hours and to warn of danger (it could be heard two and a half leagues away, said the librarian). Inside the walls were all the offices of an outpost of the Royal Dutch East Indian Company – church, bakery, storehouses, magazines, cells, workshops and living quarters, and all painted yellow to reflect the heat while minimizing the glare. It had been built with the utmost permanence in mind, the maritime replenishment station of the same undertaking as Britain’s own John Company. Yet Hervey did not feel himself far-flung from the engine of affairs in London, nor excluded from the great enterprise in India; rather he felt – as he supposed must Somervile – that he was at a prime gearwheel in the vast machine that was the Honourable East India Company; a gearwheel that was set to expand somehow – and which at the same time was threatened with violent interruption. No, he did not feel himself to be without the opportunity for distinction; not here.

He woke. ‘I beg your pardon—’

‘I said that I feared Colonel Somerset was unfriendly. Scarcely a word to be had from him. He did not appear to share your pleasure in seeing a fine regiment landing its horses.’

‘Ah, Colonel Somerset.’ Hervey smiled, mock-pained. ‘The army is divided into two classes of men: those who were at Waterloo, and those who were not.’

Somervile returned the smile, though wryer. ‘I thought you were going to say those who are Somersets and those who are not!’

‘That too! But the Waterloo Somersets were deuced fine. I met Lord FitzRoy a little before the battle, a most agreeable man; and Lord Edward had the Household brigade.’

‘Well, FitzRoy is now Wellington’s man at the Horse Guards. The Somersets’ reach will be ever long, therefore.’

Hervey raised his eyebrows as he looked directly at his old friend. ‘You could say, on the other hand, that since the duke is at the Horse Guards my reach is therefore long!’

Somervile was not sure what to make of the proposition. Was Hervey being entirely serious? ‘At any rate, I should not wish anything untoward there. We must not forget that the reason I am here is that Lord Charles Somerset was recalled, and peremptorily. He will be brooding, still, in London, and there are plenty of ears there all too ready to be beguiled. He will be especially solicitous of his son, and, no doubt, the son will be assiduous in writing home his opinion of affairs here – Waterloo man or not. Caution, Hervey; that is my counsel.’

Hervey shook his head. ‘Of course; caution. You may depend upon it.’

They rode on up the cobbled ramp without speaking, until Somervile gave voice to his other concern. ‘It would have been well that General Bourke were here, and not just to welcome your troop. There are things I would know as to his thinking, although I must say that he has made admirable economies.’

‘Better, I think, that we are able to lay on a proper parade for him in a month or so.’

‘Just so,’ agreed Somervile. ‘But I do wish he’d not gone off to St Helena at the very time he knew I must arrive here. What in heaven’s name possessed him to think there was any requirement for him there?’ His mare began slipping and sliding on the cobbles, quite diverting him for the moment until she was back in hand, by which time he had resolved to change the subject. ‘Quite a scientific sort of man, by the look of it, your veterinary surgeon. Quite particular he was about his urine samples.’

Now Eli stumbled. ‘Damn!’ Hervey was thrown off balance, and doubly to his chagrin since he had presumed her so capable. ‘Not fit enough by miles. What? Sam Kirwan? Yes, exactly so. He’d applied to go to India, to study tropical infections, but I persuaded him here instead – for the time being at least.’

And already, he explained, thanks to his lieutenant’s telling, he had cause to be grateful for those powers of persuasion, for Sam Kirwan had saved one trooper from choking when it swallowed its tongue in a gale off the Azores, and saved another’s sight when it dislodged an eye from its socket. The War Office did not like sending horses to the Cape Colony. In the early years they had shipped them in their many hundreds, and a large number of