Company Of Spears

My Dear Hervey,I am attending at the Admiralty this week, and expect to travel thence to Norfolk. Would you be so good as to dine with me tomorrow evening?Ever Yr good friend,Laughton Peto.

Hervey was much cheered by the revelation that his old friend was ashore and close at hand, and by the prospect of seeing him again so soon. He would reply first thing in the morning.

He picked up Lord George Irvine’s letter again. It could not, of course, contain the positive information that the command was his, but he was confident that no matter what the Horse Guards’ new regulations said, in practice all that was required was for the colonel of a regiment to make his wish known to the commander-in-chief, and the appointment was then but a formality. Yet he baulked at breaking the seal nevertheless. There was duty to attend to first – District Orders and the occurrence book; he could not simply pick the cherry from the cake. In any case, and despite all reason, he still felt uncertain. He laid down the letter once more and turned open the file of orders.

In ten minutes he learned that nothing had materially altered in the London District during his absence, and that nothing was likely to do so – no notice of reviews, general officer’s field days, levees nor the like. He looked at the copy of The London Gazette enclosed with the orders, noting its appointments – in particular that the King had been pleased to appoint his brother the Duke of Clarence to be High Admiral of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, ‘and of the Dominions, islands, Territories thereunto belonging’ – and wondering what, if any, consequence there would be for his friend Peto. He turned the page and glanced through the honours: there were to be three new barons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland: ‘Sir John Singleton Copley, Knight, the name, stile and title of Baron Lyndhurst … the right Honourable Sir Charles Abbott, Knt, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, the name, stile and title of Baron Tenterden … the Right Honourable William Conyngham Plunket, the name, stile and title of Baron Plunket, of Newtown, in the county of Cork’. There were several knights, and several more knights-commander of the various orders. And ‘to be Knight of the Royal Guelphic Order, Eyre Somervile Esq., C.B.’!

Hervey smiled broadly. He knew Eyre Somervile to be worthy of any honour, but why so singular an order of knighthood puzzled him.

He read on: a report on the royal assent to several Acts of Parliament – ‘An Act to amend and enlarge the powers and provisions of an Act, relating to the Heckbridge and Wentbridge Railway’; ‘An Act for providing a further maintenance for the Rector of the parish of St John, Horslydown, within the town and borough of Southwark, in the county of Surrey’; ‘An Act to enable the Birmingham Coal company to sue and be sued in the name of their Secretary, or one of the members of the said company’, various Acts for more effectually repairing and maintaining roads in the Midland counties and Lancashire, various Acts relating to financial instruments (he shook his head: these were tedious details to detain him); and finally ‘An Act for fixing, until the twenty-fifth day of March one thousand eight hundred and twenty-eight, the rates of subsistence to be paid to innkeepers and others on quartering soldiers’.

Hervey nodded at that. He considered himself more than a little fortunate to be in temporary command of a regiment quartered in barracks, for the vexations of billeting were many and unavoidable. Not least of these were the difficulties in maintaining a proper regime of feeding the troop horses, while in barracks the adjutant, the riding-master and the veterinary surgeon could cast their eyes over the entire regiment’s stables in a quarter of an hour, and as a consequence every man was a better horsemaster.

But that was all behind them. He laid down the orders and took up the adjutant’s occurrence book. He read it quickly, for it contained no more than the usual number of defaulters, routine comings and goings, receipts and issues, reports and returns. Then under the heading ‘Veterinary’ he saw ‘three horses from A Trp confined in isolation, symptoms of the farcy’.

This was something he would rather not have read. There was always a certain number of the regiment’s horses unfit for duty – lameness, sores and abrasions, thrush, a cough – albeit a smaller number, the Sixth flattered themselves, than in other regiments. But the farcy was a different business altogether, an ulcerous death, and spread like the plague.