Company Of Spears

But he was jumping to conclusions. After all, the entry read symptoms of the farcy. The symptoms might as easily betoken something else: a cold, and sores from ill-fitting saddlery, or stall-chafing. Harmless enough. The trouble was, a regiment quartered in barracks rather than billeted on innkeepers and the like circulated its ailments all too easily. If it were farcy it might be round the entire lines in a week.

He cursed. He had seen the farcy only once before, in a livery stables in Sussex when first the Sixth had paraded for the Peninsula. He had taken Jessye there, and two of his fellow cornets had taken their chargers too, to rest before embarkation. The symptoms in one of the post horses had gone unnoticed, and the infection had spread, so that the lairage was put in quarantine and Jessye missed Hervey’s first campaign – a thing he had always been grateful for since she would likely as not have perished with the others at Corunna. How she had not contracted the farcy there was beyond him – beyond any of the farriers even to explain. They had better pray hard that the symptoms here now were of something else. He would summon the veterinary surgeon at once. No, he would go to the infirmary lines and see for himself.

As a rule evening stables parade was finished by watch setting, and timings being advanced by three hours perforce made no difference to the routine. The mounting of the quarter-guard, which even in barracks the regiment knew as the inlying picket, signalled the change from the day’s routine to the night’s, just as in the field the evening stand-to-horses signalled that change. It was not customary for the commanding officer to visit in the barracks during the ‘silent hours’, the regiment at this time being in the care of the picket officer, but the commanding officer could go when and where he liked, and Hervey was of the mind that these were circumstances that permitted a variation in custom.

The infirmary lines were no different from the troop lines except that they were built with loose boxes rather than standing stalls in order to allow the patient to lie down at full stretch. They were high-ceilinged, allowing a good circulation of air, they were weatherproof, clean, well drained, and they smelled of new straw and tar. These lines were as good as they came, reckoned Hervey, and they were set well apart from the others. Not a bad beginning for quarantine.

He was surprised to find the veterinary surgeon still at duty, however, when there was scarce a dragoon to be seen anywhere else. ‘Sam, I am sorry to see you here so late.’

The veterinarian was taking the temperature of one of the isolation mares. ‘Good evening, sir,’ he replied, without taking his eyes from the thermometer. ‘Up five degrees,’ he said matter-of-factly to the orderly, who duly recorded it in the book.

The Sixth’s form of address among officers was a touch unusual. All except the commanding officer, who was called ‘Colonel’ by the newest dragoon, were on familiar terms, the rank-prefix used only very formally. Hervey, a brevet major in acting command, could hardly be addressed as ‘Colonel’, but neither did it seem correct for the officers – the more junior ones at least – to answer to him familiarly. Instead of ‘Hervey’ he was therefore ‘sir’, the form used by the dragoons for any officer, and for a serjeant-major too, as well as for any NCO when there was an officer on parade. As for the veterinarian, whose rank was always anomalous, the Sixth had for many years had their own custom: the officers called him by his Christian name.

Veterinary-Surgeon Samuel Kirwan was a ‘respectable’ practitioner. Indeed the Sixth had been lucky for twenty years in this regard, having been spared rough ‘cattle doctors’ little better educated than the farriers, getting instead men of learning from the new veterinary schools. Sam Kirwan had come to the regiment on its return from India, six months before. His father, a naval surgeon, had died after the Nile, his mother not long after that, and the orphan Kirwan had lived five years in the Yarmouth workhouse before a distant relative had claimed him. He had worked his way through the London Veterinary College and joined the artillery as assistant veterinary surgeon, until the vacancy with the Sixth gave him his own regimental practice. He was a little older than Hervey, but wholly inexperienced in campaigning, unlike the Sixth’s past veterinarians. He appeared not to have the instinct of a Frederick Selden, who had seen them so sour-tongued through the latter part of the Peninsula and Waterloo, nor the hands of a David Sledge, who had lately endured with them in India; but there was something in him of the science of John Knight, the man who had elevated veterinary surgery in the regiment to a position of indispensability (though – a great mercy in Hervey’s opinion – Sam Kirwan did not have John Knight’s dyspeptic nature).