Warrior

hear things: recollect that it's but a cruise from Washington to Spanish-town. And see the date, too – a fortnight after we sailed.'

'I stand rebuked. And in truth I suppose I ought to take more cognizance of affairs in Washington if I am to go to Canada.'

'If?' Fairbrother turned to look at him accusingly.

'Merely the subjunctive mood. My mind is still quite made up.'

Fairbrother returned to his shaving. 'I am glad to hear it.' After a minute or so, he took a towel and began dabbing at his face. 'Fine fellows, Americans. D'ye know, they now have their own dictionary?'

'What nonsense are you trying?'

Fairbrother nodded to the Courant. 'See there, a notice: a man called Webster's got up a dictionary of American words.'

'Truly?'

'Not content with sending the old King packing, they now disdain the King's English!'

'The devil!' Hervey found the report.

'Fine fellows. I should very much like to see the country,' declared Fairbrother, laying down the towel and picking up the bowl of coffee. 'Hervey, my good friend, if your offer still stands, I should like to come with you to Canada.'

Hervey's surprise was marked.

Fairbrother ignored it. 'You're sure an exchange can be arranged?'

Hervey stood up, and with a look not merely of satisfaction but of admiration. 'Of course the offer stands. And I'm sure the agents can arrange an exchange with no difficulty. As I told you, these things are perfectly easily done when it is known how.'

Fairbrother cast off his robe, though the door was full open, and took up the clean linen laid out on a chair next to the press.

Hervey observed the sinews of an athlete, and wondered, again, how his friend kept such condition when he took no exercise and chose his food and drink entirely at will. It could only be, he concluded, some blood-gift of his mother's line. Ex Africa . . .

There was Madeira and seedcake on a sideboard in the lieutenantgovernor's ante-room, a breakfast for which both Hervey and Fairbrother were grateful.

'Sir Eyre-sahib will be coming shortly, Colonel Hervey sahib,' Jaswant assured them.

They were soon joined by the colonial secretary, Colonel Bird.

'I am sorry we had no opportunity to speak last evening, Hervey,' he said, taking coffee rather than Madeira. 'These are singular times, are they not? Who would have supposed that Jackson would be president of the United States?'

Hervey was somewhat taken aback by this early corroboration of his friend's superior intelligence gathering. 'Quite so.'

'Or, for that matter, the Duke of Wellington prime minister?'

'Who indeed.' Hervey helped himself to more cake, wondering what the supplementary question might be, for he knew Colonel Bird to be as shrewd as he was gentle.

'And that he, of all people, should champion Catholics?'

The cadence suggested that this was Colonel Bird's material interest, and the omission of the definite article before 'Catholics', though not determinative, served nevertheless to remind Hervey of Bird's own religion (and of the consequent animosity, it was said, of some in the colony).

'Shall the emancipation measure be carried, do you suppose?'

Hervey took a deep breath. In truth, emancipation was not a matter in which he was given to much thinking. Catholics or slaves, he was uncertain how the country had come to deprive them of their liberty in the first place. He concerned himself only with the practical questions arising – the murky affair of the gunpowder mills, the obsequies of his serjeant-major's wife. 'I think I would say that there appear to be two types of Catholic: the Irish and the English. I had occasion to attend a requiem mass in London, the whole regiment indeed, and it seemed no more remarkable than if we had been in Lisbon. Well, perhaps a little more so. The Irish, on the other hand . . . Let us say that if the emancipation bill is passed, and the parliament in Dublin restored – and that is their object, is it not? – it would be a Catholic parliament.'

Colonel Bird looked doubtful. 'That is assuming the franchise were extended. I cannot suppose that even the duke wishes the demands of Reform to be extended so far.'

Hervey raised his eyebrows. He knew (or supposed he knew) that the duke had little time for Reform in any part of England, let alone Ireland.

'It seems to me all of a piece – Ireland or Jamaica,' remarked Fairbrother drily from a corner, and between sips at his Madeira. 'Free the devils and they'll next want the vote.'

His friend had cast a fly on the water, so to speak, and Hervey was resolved not to rise to it. He returned to Colonel Bird. 'You must understand that I speak not for myself in this.'

'Of course, my dear Colonel, of course,' replied Bird, with a positively benign aspect. 'Captain Fairbrother's comparison with slavery, though I suspect he spoke with tongue in cheek, prompts me nevertheless to recall that Shaka has remarked unfavourably on the British as a consequence of it.'

Hervey frowned. 'I wonder at Shaka's moral perturbation in light of his marauding. How, indeed, does he know of the practice? The slavers never took from his part of the country.'

'No, but he will know well enough of the slaves here.'