‘I cannot leave my command like that!’
‘Your command – both Rifles and dragoons – is well found. Thanks to you. And there are things I would have you advance on my behalf in Whitehall. We have a peace for now in Kaffraria, but I am certain it will not hold indefinitely.
Hervey nodded.
‘Besides, you have obligations under the law,’ added Somervile, with something of a smile.
‘Law? What law?’ asked Hervey, rallying at the challenge.
‘Mosaic:
Hervey shook his head. ‘I confess I haven’t an idea what you’re speaking of. The fever must be addling me.’
Somervile picked up the bible from the table beside Hervey’s bed. ‘Deuteronomy,’ he said, turning the pages confidently. ‘I’m astonished you need reminding. Here, chapter twenty … verse seven: “And what man is there that hath betrothed a wife…”’ He handed it to him. ‘Read on. And none of your churchy primness! A wise bird, Moses.’
Hervey read. And he smiled (a shade lickerish, thought Somervile) as he tried to imagine complying with the injunction. ‘Oh yes, wisdom indeed!’
‘I fear, though, that our Nation may think the business here but a skirmish compared with the Greek war.’
Hervey quickened. ‘Oh? How so?’
‘Nothing worth your regrets: no work for cavalry, as far as I can make out; nor even for foot,’ he began airily. ‘The whole thing appears to have been decided at sea. We had first news of it this morning, a considerable battle in the Ionian: a combined fleet – English, French, Russian – with Codrington commanding. Appears they sent the Turkish fleet to the bottom of Navarino Bay.’
‘Navarino Bay?’
‘You will know it better as Pylos, perhaps, if you recall Thucydides.’
‘I’m afraid I recall nothing. A considerable affair, you say?’
‘Indeed, a hundred ships and more. Bigger than Trafalgar.’
Hervey sat upright, the blanket quite falling away. ‘Have you the casualty lists?’
Somervile shook his head. ‘I expect they’ll come with the official papers. This is news from
Hervey said not a word. His mind was wholly occupied by thoughts of Peto: had he not been under orders to join Codrington’s squadron? His fevered face began losing the remains of its colour.
Somervile leaned forward to steady him. ‘Hervey, my dear fellow, are you quite well?’
THE END
HISTORICAL AFTERWORD
The extraordinary ‘Indian’ gardens at Sezincote, with the statuary that so engaged Hervey and Kezia Lankester, are open to the public. So too is the ‘Mughal’ house.
Private Johnson’s brush with the Bow Street investigators was also not without foundation. At the Court of Exchequer on 29th April 1827,
A word on South African history: until Nelson Mandela, Shaka Zulu was probably the most famous southern African in history, though for rather different reasons. He murdered – there is no getting round the word – a million people. He was indeed most singular.
Shaka’s mother, Nandi, was a daughter of a chieftain of the eLangeni clan. Shaka’s father was a chieftain of the small, and then unknown, Zulu clan. But unwed pregnancy and a failed marriage forced Nandi to return to her tribe, where she was less welcomed than she had been then with the Zulus. Shaka grew up fatherless among people who despised him as well as his mother, the butt of every joke, ridiculed for his weakly body (and underdeveloped sexual organs), lonely and bitter.
At the age of twenty-three he was called to serve as a warrior with the Mtetwa clan and did so for the next six years. In his first battle he fought the Butelezi, winning territories that included those of the Zulu. The Mtetwa chieftain, Dingiswayo, saw his leadership qualities and earmarked him to be chieftain of the Zulu, thus making them a buffer to the Mtetwa territory. Dingiswayo made him leader of the Mtetwa army, meanwhile, and here Shaka refined his battle tactics and weapons, as well as the army’s organization. When Senzangakona Zulu died, Shaka was made chieftain.
Shaka worked his Zulu warriors ruthlessly, punishing any the sign of the slightest hesitation with death. The first people he attacked were the eLangeni clan, sparing only those who had showed him and his mother kindness. He destroyed the Butelezi clan, leaving few survivors, taking Butelezi maidens to form a seraglio which eventually numbered over a thousand. But, convinced that any offspring might someday oppose him, he shied from full consummation.
By 1817, Zulu territory had increased fourfold, and Shaka and Dingiswayo compacted to engage in a major expedition to win even more. Dingiswayo died, however, and so by 1820 Shaka ruled most of southeast Africa and Natal.
In 1824 Shaka’s mother, Nandi, died. In hysterical grief at the funeral he ordered several men to be executed, but in the chaos, over 7,000 people died. The true extent of his mental instability was revealed when he then practically ordered the clan’s death by starvation in reverence to Nandi. After three months, sense of a kind was restored, but the seed of doubt against Shaka – and perhaps in his own mind too – had been sown. Shaka and his army began to go downhill, which is where, in the winter of 1827, Matthew Hervey and his men meet them.
Students of early Zulu history may dispute my account of the first contact with Shaka’s army. They would be right to do so. Chief Matiwane owed no allegiance to Shaka. His clan, the Ngwanes, although one of the Nguni people like the ‘pure’ Zulu, had for a decade resisted incorporation into Shaka’s greater Zulu kingdom. In the course of evasion, however, they became a marauding tribe as troublesome as the Zulu to the Xhosa and others of Kaffraria. But at the time of Hervey’s brush with them the precise status of Matiwane’s warriors was unknown, and their depredations were lumped together with those of Shaka in the reports reaching Cape Town. Scholars also disagree: while published sources have tended to make Matiwane
THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON’S CAVALRY
AN EXPLANATTORY NOTE
Here is a picture – a very incomplete one – of the cavalry in the Duke of Wellington’s day. The picture remained the same, with but minor changes, until after the Crimean War nearly half a century later.
Like the infantry, the cavalry was organized in regiments. Each had a colonel as titular head, usually a very senior officer (in the case of the 10th Light Dragoons, for instance, it was the Prince of Wales; in the case of the fictional 6th Light Dragoons it was first the Earl of Sussex and then Lord George Irvine, both lieutenant generals) who kept a fatherly if distant eye on things, in particular the appointment of officers. The actual command of the regiment was exercised by a lieutenant-colonel. He had a major as his second in command (or ‘senior major’ as he was known in the Sixth and other regiments), an adjutant who was usually commissioned from the ranks, a regimental serjeant-major (RSM) and various other ‘specialist’ staff.
A cavalry regiment comprised a number of troops identified by a letter (A Troop, B Troop, etc.), each of a
