Company Of Spears

The door to the adjutant’s office opened. ‘Hervey?’

‘I shall go to Wiltshire this afternoon, after orderly room. Would you give my compliments to Captain Shute and inform him that the regiment will come under his orders?’

III

LAST POST

Horningsham, 13 March

The journey to Wiltshire, a hundred miles almost to the furlong, took nine and a half hours, the fastest time he had ever posted. The regimental chariot, lightly loaded, two excellent roadsters from Leicestershire for the first twenty miles, fair flew along the turnpikes, the estimable Corporal Denny astride the leader with scarcely a half-hour but in the saddle. Denny, a twenty-year dragoon who had been the chariot-man for the past five, knew the road as far as Andover well, so that Hervey had only to be alert for the last stretch across Salisbury Plain. Fortunately there was a good moon and the way was clear. They changed horses at Amesbury, the last posting house before the dozen miles of barren, hard chalk downland, a lonely tract of sheep and of isolated settlements where families kept themselves to themselves in a sturdy but sometimes unholy way.

They passed the Great Henge, an eerie, heathen place of, it was said, ancient sacrifice, though now but a silent, woolly fold. Then, slowing to a walk, they descended to misty Shrewton, still and dark but for the odd candle in a window, and the oil lamps of its empty inn. The loneliest stretch came next, five miles of high, windblown, rough grazing, the road rutted and pot-holed, only partially mended after the icy winter rains. They took it at a jogtrot, scarcely better than a good, stretching walk on metalled going, and in an hour slowed again for the steep descent into forlorn Chitterne, not a light to be seen, not a barking dog to proclaim any life at all, passing the dark shapes of dwelling houses every bit as ghostly in their stillness as the monoliths at Stonehenge. Then it was up to the high chalk again for the straight league and a half to graceful Heytesbury, off the plain at last and on to the rich plough of the Wylye valley, a village as different from its downland neighbours as a blood to a cob. In Heytesbury there were lights, in the street, in the upper windows, and in the lower ones too; and the sound of the fiddle from one of its inns, despite the steady approach of midnight; and one whole window of Heytesbury’s abbey church was lit as if a dozen monks were yet saying compline within. The chariot picked up speed, on turnpike once more, rattling into Warminster as the clocks were beginning to strike the hour, and thence to skirt the great estate of Longleat, the seat of Henrietta’s guardian, until at twenty minutes to one o’clock of the new day they were in Horningsham poor, pretty, well-regulated Horningsham, the village of the Bath estate, the parish of the Reverend – indeed, the Venerable – Thomas Hervey M.A. (Oxon.).

They went first to the Bath Arms to arrange hay and a roof for the horses, and a bed for Corporal Denny, then Hervey walked with just his small-pack the half mile or so to his father’s darkened vicarage, where he crept without a sound into the stable, lay down in the straw, as he had so many times as a boy, pulled his cloak about him and slept without stirring until dawn.

When he woke, the household was still abed (it was a little after six), so he shaved and bathed under the stable pump, and generally made himself presentable for the family’s reveille before giving the stable’s sole occupant – his father’s driving pony – a peck of oats and an armful of hay. At seven o’clock, as had been the rule at the vicarage for as many years as he could remember, the door to the servants’ hall was unbolted and thrown open, and the routine of the morning was begun.

The vicar of Horningsham did not keep a large establishment; he had not the means. There was a cook, Mrs Pomeroy, the same Hervey had known in his nursery, a housemaid, a manservant, a scullion and a gardener cum groom. Neither his mother nor his sister had a lady’s maid, something Hervey had tried on several occasions to rectify, begging them to let him pay her wages in part compensation for the additional burden he imposed on them by Georgiana’s ‘wardship’. But they would not have it. Even when the Reverend Thomas Hervey had been made Archdeacon of Sarum, and the family had risen one whole floor in the society of Wiltshire, they were not inclined to relent, accustomed as they long were to the habitual economy of a poor country living.