Company Of Spears

his seventy and five years the general was still the image of his Reynolds portrait, the dashing, con-quering ‘green dragoon’.

Punctually, a few minutes before the midday (for he would never have been late on parade), Daniel Coates’s mortal remains were borne to St Mary’s on Drove Farm’s best hay waggon. The men about the churchyard removed their hats, the women curtsied, and the Wiltshire Yeomanry stood to attention, resting on their swords, heads lowered. At the lych gate Coates’s foreman, in black Melton coat, and his six longest-serving shepherds, in starched smocks, took charge of the fine oak coffin and began bearing their late, respected employer to his final entrance to the church in which for more than twenty years he had worshipped unfailingly. As they reached the porch at the west end, the Venerable Thomas Hervey, in surplice and stole – as Daniel Coates would have approved, if not so many of the archdeacon’s clerical brethren in the diocese – took the head of the procession, and with open Prayer Book preceded his erstwhile parishioner and friend to the chancel steps.

‘“‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ saith the Lord. ‘He that believeth in me though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’”’

The congregation, standing, listened as the comforting yet chill words recalled them to their own mortality, and to the leveller that was the grave, each of them nodding some respect or other as the coffin passed.

‘“I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another. We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”’

The foreman saw to the lowering of the coffin onto two trestles in front of the chancel steps, and then placed on top of it Daniel Coates’s old sabre and trumpet, and the shepherd’s crook and shears which had long since taken their place as the tools of his trade.

Archdeacon Hervey bowed to the congregation, and they sat. He began to read, as the Order for the Burial of the Dead required, Psalm 39, Dixi, Custodiam. He had chosen this rather than the alternative since immediately before the doxology was a verse upon which he wished to reflect in his homily: ‘O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen.’

Hervey himself now rose and walked to the fine-carved lectern to read the Lesson, the words of which had become all too familiar during his two decades’ sojourn in regimentals. ‘“Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive…”’

Yet even as he read he found himself doubting the promises. Daniel Coates would no more be seen; was that not the essence? He would never again be there to give counsel. He, Hervey, was quite alone in this world now that Daniel Coates had followed the only other person who had truly known his mind. Now he must fend entirely for himself. But not selfishly; that time was over.

It was a long lesson, and he read the words deliberately, with the emphases in the places he would once have judged imperative, and which now he did but from habit. ‘“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”’

He glanced at Lord Bath as he left the lectern. The marquess seemed to nod his approval. The day before, Hervey had gone to Longleat to pay his customary respects to his late wife’s guardian, and to Lady Bath, finding them both welcoming, though it was not long before the open wound of their son and heir’s elopement was rubbed in some way, so that Lady Bath had to turn her face to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Of all the things I might have feared for Weymouth,’ Lord Bath had said, ‘an imprudent marriage never occurred to me. Mark you well, Hervey, the unhappiness when a son chooses such a way. I thank God there’s no issue.’

Hervey had been of the opinion for some time that there must be a reconciliation, for the elopement was evidently no whim of the moment regretted almost as quick and to be ‘dealt with’ by money and the usual arrangements. No, Lord Weymouth and Harriet Robbins were evidently happy in their unusual match, and he saw no reason for Lord Bath to pursue his design to disinherit his son of title and land. He did not know Weymouth well – hardly at all (he knew his younger brother better) – but he ventured to believe that he was a rational man, of sound mind; should prudence in the marriage stakes be so narrowly defined as Lord Bath had it? But he had said nothing, for his own circumstances were far from exemplary. Except that he had resolved to put them into perfect order.

Archdeacon Hervey now climbed the steps of the pulpit. He did not intend detaining his congregation long: the office of the Burial of the Dead was an occasion to commend the soul of the departed to God, not his reputation to man. Yet there were things he would say.

‘“O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen.”’ He looked up from his pulpit prayer book. ‘The Lord in his infinite wisdom did indeed spare Daniel Coates beyond his span of three-score and ten…’

Archdeacon Hervey went on to recount the story of Daniel Coates’s rise from indigency to prosperity and respectability, and to praise the wisdom and generosity he displayed in both public office and private affairs. The silence in the church was remarkable, a reverencing not so much of Archdeacon Hervey’s eloquence, adequate though that was, but of Daniel Coates’s memory – before, as Mr Hervey at length recalled, drawing his homily to a close, ‘“I go hence, and be no more seen.”’

There was at this applause by nodding heads and, if not quite ‘hear, hear’, then from a sort of buzzing in the pews, which told Archdeacon Hervey that the unusual effort had been worthwhile. He glanced at the foreman and bowed his head – the signal – and then the foreman, with a simple beckoning nod, reassembled his bearers. They took up the coffin with all solemnity, the tools of Daniel Coates’s two trades – and loves – still in place, turned slowly about and began the measured march from the chancel steps, their charge to be ‘no more seen’.

The congregation rose and turned to follow as Archdeacon Hervey led the procession out of the church to the grave on the sunny south side, which Coates’s own men had dug the day before.

Hervey accompanied his mother to the graveside, close behind Lord Bath, the principal mourner. And then came the words which he himself had had too frequent occasion to read when there had not been a chaplain to bury the dead. Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death … More than ever they seemed to him a perfect if unhappy rendering of the condition of so many men who had worn the Sixth’s badge. Indeed, they were apt, too, regarding his own condition, and for more time than he would have thought he could bear but for the company of regimental friends – and of two women who demanded nothing from him in return for that which they had so freely given.

Lord Bath declined the trowel, bending instead to take a handful of earth from the fresh-dug mound. Old General Tarleton, cocked hat set firm as if he were in uniform, raised his hand in salute, making no attempt to hide the missing fingers (exactly as Daniel Coates had told Hervey of long years ago).

‘“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed: we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life…”’

When Lord Bath had sprinkled the earth on the coffin, Archdeacon Hervey began the closing prayers. It was a fine, sunny day. Somehow, Hervey thought, it assisted with the promise of eternal life. Many a time he had stood at the graveside when the rain had drummed on oak, or on simple shroud, and then the promises had seemed corrupt.

‘“O Merciful God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Resurrection and the life … who also hath taught us (by his holy apostle Saint Paul) not to be sorry, as men without hope…”’

He had never been a man without hope, had he? The trials of late years had brought him despair, but never quite that utter loss of hope of which St Paul warned. Or did he deceive himself in that? He picked up a handful of earth and cast it into the grave, then turned to walk after his mother.

‘Major Hervey?’ The voice was commanding.

He glanced to his right. The distinguished mourner was advancing on him. ‘Yes, General?’

‘I imagined it to be you,’ said General Tarleton, jabbing his stick into the grass as he walked. ‘Coates spoke much of you in his letters.’

‘I’m very honoured, sir; I had no idea.’

General Sir Banastre Tarleton replaced his hat as they approached the lych gate. ‘Read about the business in