Well, thought Hervey, watching C Troop’s orderly corporal bringing the motionless dragoon to where the surgeon stood, Strickland had endured those years with commendable dignity. He had deserved his honour. It had been the cruellest fate that in three months he was dead too, killed in a smash with the Oxford mail as his chariot raced back to Hounslow along the foggy turnpike. Hervey had dined with him that very evening, and Strickland had taken him back to the United Service Club afterwards. Hervey’s last words on bidding his old friend goodnight had been a promise to join him at Hounslow within the week.
And how he had looked forward to that. The Spanish business (or ought he to say Portuguese?) had left a bitter taste. He had gone to Lisbon full of hope. Kat – Lady Katherine Greville – the much younger wife of old, absentee Lieutenant-General Sir Peregrine Greville, and some years now Hervey’s lover-patroness, had got him the commission through her influence with the Duke of Wellington. And then affairs had rapidly turned sour. He had fallen out with his commanding officer, Colonel Norris, over the best means of deploying the army of intervention (he could not feel much regret for that, since Norris was a tedious, pedantic, narrow-thinking artilleryman; though he had been his commanding officer), and although Hervey had been vindicated in his estimate of what was the best course for the army, he had paid a heavy price: he had never expected to see the fortress of Badajoz again, and certainly not as a prisoner. He had escaped – not without bloodshed – but to the prospect of court martial. Had he not had friends, ‘friends at court’ (and Kat was, as ever, his most assiduous friend in that regard), he was sure he would have been finished.
A sudden hubbub to the left of the line made him turn, and testily, imagining another dragoon had involuntarily dismounted (such an unfortunate was always the butt of ribald advice, even if he were an officer – more so, indeed, for greater would be the sconce on return to barracks). He smiled, however: a big dog fox trotted parallel to the line not fifty yards off, stopping every so often and giving the ranks a glance, wary rather than timorous, then trotting on with an air of indifference. It was strange, thought Hervey, that he should break cover so close, when there was nothing before them but a mile and more of heath. Perhaps the sight of several hundred horses was not of itself alarming if they were not accompanied by hounds? Or perhaps here was one fox who had never been hunted, and therefore inclined to see a regiment of cavalry rather than a field of hunting men? He now halted directly to the front of where Hervey stood, as if one horse in advance of the rest deserved particular scrutiny. Hervey saluted him: he was a fine fellow, clean-coated, full-brushed – last year’s cub, possibly. Many a time on Salisbury Plain with Daniel Coates he had observed the fox as close, and even in Spain, but he did not think he had seen a finer specimen. He could have sworn Reynard looked him straight in the eye. He took hold of his shako peak and bid him goodnight.
Another of the Chestnuts’ guns fired. The fox turned at once and ran left away from the line. Gilbert began dancing and pulling: there may have been no hounds, but a running fox surely spelled a chase. Horses the length of the line evidently thought the same, judging by the hallooing behind, until the cursing of the troop serjeant-majors brought back proper order. Spirits were high enough, reckoned Hervey; he could be content in that at least, even if the greenness of so many horses and dragoons dismayed him. But then, was that not a part of the satisfaction of command, the drilling of a regiment? He might have them for a few months only – six, the regiment’s colonel, Lord George Irvine, had thought likely – but that was sufficient time to drill them to a certain handiness; even to the satisfaction of the lieutenant-colonel who would in due course assume the substantive command. There might be no immediate prospect of active service (he thought it most unlikely there would be any reinforcement of the expeditionary force in Portugal, for there were five thousand redcoats there already, and the Duke of Wellington was most anxious to have them back), but – fortis fortuna adiuvat – opportunity there could come. The Greek war, for one, was unresolved; there was too the enduring promise – or threat – of aid to the civil power, and, of course, there was that combustible place Ireland. And if no one but he could be persuaded that the Sixth might have to draw sabres in earnest, there was the annual inspection in July: the major-general commanding the London District was known to be a man for the most exacting standards.
No, concluded Hervey, his six months’ tenure would not be a sinecure. He was even beginning to wonder what chance he might have of seeing his people in Wiltshire, his daughter especially. Georgiana was nine, and he had scarce seen through one month with her. He left her in the willing care of his sister (at least, in the dutiful care), and by so doing he blighted what remained of Elizabeth’s prospects, for she was closer now to forty than to thirty. Indeed, if there had been a silver lining in the black cloud of Badajoz it was the resolve that had grown out of his incarceration to put all this side of his affairs in order, to assume a decent responsibility for his daughter. It was hardly unusual to place a motherless child in the care of a guardian, but Georgiana was Henrietta’s daughter: he dishonoured his late wife’s memory, and their former love, by putting away their daughter thus. And so it was that he began to fret for leave to be with them – and, indeed, for the opportunity to press his suit (if he could put it as decidedly as that) with Sir Ivo Lankester’s widow. He had met Lady Lankester but twice, first in Calcutta when she was in new mourning weeds, and then at dinner at Lord George Irvine’s, but he had concluded that she would make him an admirable wife, and more especially an admirable mother to Georgiana, for she had an infant of her own. He could only hope that their differences in station, though in certain respects truly not great, and disparity of age (she was ten years his junior, perhaps more), would not incline her to set her face irrevocably against the notion.
Another gun fired, and a horse from F Troop bolted the ends of the line – towards the guns rather than away. Hervey groaned as he saw the wretched dragoon lying back almost flat in the saddle, reins at full length, while the trooper charged through the Chestnuts’ limbers. Thank God they had been dismounted at the Duke of York’s funeral! He could never have been confident of their steadiness otherwise. It was no surprise that Strickland had been so determined to return to Hounslow that night of the smash, to be ready for first parade. Foot drill was a not altogether alien practice for cavalry but it required very strict attention, especially when mustered with the Foot Guards under the eye of so many senior officers – the Duke of Wellington included. To dismount a regiment of cavalry had been an extraordinary rebuke to the nation, however. Everyone said so. The duke had been at the Horse Guards a month, now, insistent on withdrawing the troops from Portugal as soon as may be, for the dispatch of a mere five thousand men to Lisbon was these days a heavy drain on the disposable force of the country. Indeed it had been the cause of delay in the Duke of York’s funeral arrangements: there had simply not been enough soldiers to bury a field marshal. Hervey could still barely credit it, for Waterloo had been but a dozen years before!