Company Of Spears

The Chestnuts thundered away for a full ten minutes more. Slowly the Sixth’s lines began to straighten, and the troopers to stand quiet. Hervey was at last gratified. It had been barely a year since they had stood before the walls of the great fortress at Bhurtpore, where thirty times the number of guns had each thrown three times the weight of shot that horse artillery could dispose, and yet the regiment could not be called ‘steady to fire’. It was not their fault, and certainly not his predecessor’s in command, for the regiment had not brought those battle-hardened horses back from India with them, exchanging them instead (as required by the War Office for reasons of economy) with the outgoing regiment at Hounslow.

Predecessor in command: he ought to say predecessors, for there had been three officers with the privilege of commanding dragoons in the past twelve months or so. Hervey sighed. What a sorry procession it had been. Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Ivo Lankester, Bart, whose elder brother had been killed in temporary command of the regiment at Waterloo, had died at the head of his men in the storming of Bhurtpore, leaving a wife of but a year, and with child. Command had devolved without purchase therefore on the senior major, Eustace Joynson, a man much loved by all ranks for his devotion to duty, and facility with administration. But Joynson was a tired man and full of sadness (a wayward daughter – his ‘life sentence’ as he confessed to Hervey). He was ill-fitted to command, and he knew it, and so he had taken the windfall lieutenant-colonelcy to the regimental agents (it was said he would get fifteen thousand for it at least), and in the interim, while the commander-in-chief’s staff considered the bids, so to speak, the Sixth had come under the orders of Hervey’s old friend Major Benedict Strickland. Strickland had been senior to him by months only, but Hervey had looked forward nevertheless to rejoining the regiment after his ill-starred mission in Portugal. In all likelihood, Hervey reckoned, Strickland had been the first Catholic to have command of a regiment under a Hanoverian king, albeit temporary command, for the Test Act required that all holders of military office be communicants of the Church of England (as well as taking the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, denying the doctrine of Transubstantiation). The Relief Act of 1793 had opened a door to Catholic officers, if a very small one, requiring a simple oath of loyalty rather than anything troubling to tender consciences; and Strickland had observed his religion discreetly. Even so, he had not always found things easy. When the Earl of Towcester – infamous memory! – had commanded, ten years past, ‘damned papists’ had been his taunt, but always protected by position, so that Strickland would have been on uncertain ground had he called him out.

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.