Company Of Spears

The lieutenant-governor nodded, this time unambiguously. ‘I am glad to hear it. Just so long as he and Colonel Somerset do not ride together.’ He finished his glass and reached once more for the decanter. ‘I must say too that I am increasingly ill-disposed towards the colonel. His manner this morning at the quayside was really most improper, and I’ve heard murmuring from the colonial staff too. He is decidedly against the idea of the Mounted Rifles, apparently. He believes proper cavalry’s what puts the fear of God into a black man. When General Bourke is returned I may ask him of Somerset’s humour.’

Hervey accepted more sherry and unbuttoned his coat a little, warming to the atmosphere in every sense. ‘May I ask of your own humour? Can you give me yet any enabling order for the frontier, and the limits if there be any?’

The lieutenant-governor sat back in his chair again, looking satisfied. ‘I can. You may take them with you after dinner, together with, I am prodigiously pleased to say, some very serviceable maps. But let me tell you now of what I have in mind, in the broadest of terms.’

Hervey listened keenly as Somervile began. They had known each other, and indeed had worked together, long enough for the one to inform the other of his intent without recourse to many words, and for the one to know precisely what the other had need of hearing. Somervile did not therefore itemize his requirements, as if a list for attention by a quartermaster (though he made sure that such detail was recorded in his written orders for the benefit of his staff and the record); instead he told Hervey what was his mind regarding the Xhosa. He wished to know, if it came to a fight – and he earnestly hoped that it would not – what was the best course of victory. He wished to know if in that regard the Cape Colony was in essence like India. If it were, then he, the lieutenant-governor, would have no concerns: if his pacific policies failed then he would rely on the correct application of his military resources. If it were not like India, then he would first have to recast that military strategy before gambling with his ‘diplomatic’ means. And this, he confided very readily, he would do on and with the advice of his old friend rather than by that of any general.

XVI

THE SETTLEMENTS

Algoa Bay, 23 August

With the fairest of winds, the passage from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth was ten days. Assisted by steam, as Hervey and his party were in the Fortune, a brig with just enough room to ship five horses as well as half a dozen passengers comfortably, the passage was made in six even though the winds were at times light.

They messed together during that time: Hervey, Fairbrother, Corporal Wainwright (whose lance rank had been another casualty of the change of command), Private Johnson and two Cape Dutch merchants returning to Port Elizabeth, whose English was limited to the needs of their trade and who therefore kept themselves much to their own society. Fairbrother himself, perceiving some antipathy towards him initially on the merchants’ part, was quick to pick a fight with them in their own language – some trivial thing, a little matter of history concerning the settlement of the Cape, but enough to promote an atmosphere of unease – although after two days they managed to bring themselves to some repairing civility, which made Fairbrother content. Hervey observed in this both a combative streak, which was admirable in a soldier if kept under strict regulation, and a propensity to see insult at every turn, which in combination was tiresome and altogether too volatile. What he also observed, however, was the effect of Fairbrother’s sharing a table with Wainwright and Johnson. At first it was all polite formality, but after a while Fairbrother noticed the happy familiarity between the two dragoons and Hervey, the warmth, the confidence, the mutual trust and respect – all the things that at one time he had thought the mark of an Englishman in his dealings with another. For as Hervey had already concluded, Fairbrother thought himself first an Englishman. That, indeed, had been his education, his upbringing – to begin with as the half kin and inseparable companion of a fair-faced Fairbrother, and then as the adopted heir of one who seemed to him the personification of all that Shakespeare and the misty-eyed poetry to which he was drawn spoke of distant England.

Fairbrother in turn spoke of it to Hervey as they neared their harbour.

‘You know, Hervey, I have observed much in the past few days that restores my spirits. These men of yours are vastly different from those of the Royal African Corps. You may not believe how so.’

Hervey could believe it only too well: he doubted that Edward Fairbrother had ever had to put a ball into the chest of a man in a red jacket, as he had at Badajoz. ‘I do not know what conclusion you draw from that observation, but it would be perilous to be sentimental.’