Hervey 11 - On His Majesty's Service (8 page)

‘Oh, I’d reckon not,’ replied Fairbrother, in a knowing sort of way. ‘She’ll wish to sell us a bunch tomorrow if we’re passing. Why tell others and spoil her trade?’

‘Upon my word, you are reading London keenly!’

‘Not London, not especially. I observe it as universal nature.’

‘Well, she was bold and it was nicely done by both sides.’

‘None but the
fair
deserve the bold!’

‘That is very droll. The cold evidently neither dulls your brain nor cools your heart. I am all envy. Or is it the burgundy again?’

Fairbrother smiled. ‘You make matters easy for me. Recall the rhyme? – “Drinking is the soldier’s pleasure/ Rich the treasure/ Sweet the pleasure/ Sweet is pleasure after pain.”’

Hervey nodded. ‘I allow that you are in excellent form. London agrees with you.’

‘Oh, indeed,’ his friend assured him, as if the contrary notion were impossible. ‘My heart swelled as soon as we landed and began posting for here. Did not you see?’

Hervey had not seen. He had been far too preoccupied with his own thoughts. It was not London that swelled his heart, but what bounties London could bestow – at least, what the Horse Guards could bestow. For the rest … too much was changed for him to throw himself into the arms of the city as readily as Fairbrother seemed able.

And not a minute later they were reminded of the welcome those arms could take.

‘Would yer like a nice time, dearies?’ came the familiar invitation from beneath a gaslight as they turned into (of all places) Bow Street.

Hervey glanced across the road at the two swaddled doxies, and felt emboldened to sport. ‘Oh, girls, desist; I am a married man!’

But they were not to be played with by a couple of tipsy officers. ‘Begging yer pardon, I’m sure, but we’re only after yer money!’

In Leicester Street, which they found quicker than Hervey thought they might, the cold air sobering them, Forsyth’s was barred and bolted, though otherwise the shop was open for business. As they were let in, Hervey expressed himself surprised by the precaution. The presiding gunsmith, a corn-fed man with beady eyes, was in no doubt of the necessity, however: ‘Popery, sir! This popish Act of Parliament. Gordon, sir; riots!’

Hervey was a deal taken aback. ‘The Gordon riots are fifty years gone!’

‘Ay, sir; but memories are long of these things!’

Fairbrother was surveying the shop’s formidable contents, faintly bemused. ‘Might you not put your trade to use rather than barricade the premises?’

The man looked offended. ‘That, I believe – the public order – is
your
business, gentlemen. I should not wish the occasion to fire on staunch Protestants, however misguided!’

Hervey judged it better to withdraw. The sooner the Police bill was enacted, the better (although it was undeniably to the interests of the regiment that it was not). ‘Speaking of guns, we saw today a coachman with a very handy capped pistol. He said of it, we believe, that it was
dirigé
. I am not acquainted with the term; are you?’

The gunsmith thought a while, then shook his head, until suddenly the furrows in his brow disappeared. ‘The cabman did not say, perhaps, that the pistol was made by
Deringer
?’

Hervey looked at Fairbrother, who shrugged his shoulders as if to say that he might have.

‘Deringer of Philadelphia, in the United States of America, sir. He has of late made an art of travelling pistols, but they have not so far been imported in any quantity. We have a pair of capped pistols by Hetherington of Nottingham, sir – a very capable maker.’

‘Might we see them?’

The gunsmith pulled open a drawer beneath the counter and took out a polished case. Inside were two cap-lock pistols, the walnut fittings finely worked. ‘Handsome weapons, think you not, gentlemen?’

‘“Handsome is as handsome does”,’ said Hervey, taking one from the case and handing it to Fairbrother.

‘Quite so, sir. They are most do-able pistols, Birmingham-proofed, forty-bore.’

Hervey weighed the other pistol in his hand. It was about eight inches from butt to muzzle, shorter than the barrel itself of the regulation flintlock – handy enough, but still not as compact as the coachman’s. Yet 40-bore was certainly right for his purposes: the ball would weigh about half an ounce, which would do the business at close range. He cocked the hammer – it was a simple replacement of the frizzen, the pistol a converted flintlock – checked there was no cap fitted, brought it up to the aim and pulled the trigger.

‘It would serve, certainly, though the trigger guard is close for a glove, and there’s no safety lock.’

‘They are
travelling
pistols, sir.’

Hervey nodded. He could not expect them to be as robustly made as those for campaign service – and yet if the pistol were to be carried on the person rather than in the saddle holster, and loaded, he did not relish the idea of the hammer’s free movement. ‘I fancy it would not be beyond your workshop to fit one?’

‘By no means, sir.’

Hervey looked at Fairbrother. ‘What say you?’

‘I think the pistol will serve, but I too should want a safety lock.’

Hervey nodded again, this time decisively. ‘Very well, we shall take them – with a safety lock that may be worked with the thumb. I ought, I suppose, to enquire the price?’

The man thought for a moment. ‘Eight guineas, sir, to include the modification. A further fifteen shillings for horn and bullet former – and, perhaps, two dozen bullets and caps?’

Hervey glanced at Fairbrother, who nodded. ‘That will be in order. A week, then, shall we say? And if you have hearing of a Deringer weapon, perhaps you will alert me?’

It was full dark when they left, and the glass had dropped five degrees – so marked that they pulled up their collars as high as in the morning, and hastened step to that of the Fifty-second. All earlier thoughts of the theatre were banished in the contemplation of a good fire at the United Service, and an easy supper. In any case, Hervey had work to be about – letters to write, campaigns to plan; and Fairbrother, though thinking how agreeable might be the company of the flower girl who had so charmingly importuned them in Covent Garden, said he was more than content to return instead to a decanter of port and the latest
Edinburgh Review
.

Quickened further by the gradient of the Haymarket, they overtook all before them. Two recruiting serjeants saluted from the steps of a public house below the Theatre Royal as they forged past, prompting Hervey to say then what he had been keeping for the United Service – that his thoughts had returned to ‘family’, though not to Hertfordshire, nor even Wiltshire.

Barely opening his mouth, so bitter now was the cold, he announced plainly: ‘Tomorrow we go to Hounslow.’

¹
‘He found a city of bricks and left a city of marble.’ Said of Augustus Caesar and Rome.

IV

THE DIVIDEND OF PEACE

Next morning

Hervey slept little, and even then without rest. As soon as he nodded, unwelcome dreams began shivering him. Each time he woke (and he was scarcely conscious of sleeping at all) his mind was full of the images of estrangement. What had possessed him to visit Holland Park, slipping from the United Service after supper without telling his friend, only to find it barred and shuttered? The cabman, mute until he had seen that there was no one at home to admit him, told him that Kat was well – it was the common knowledge of his trade – that she and the household had gone to Ireland a month and more ago, and that it was only that he supposed his fare to have intelligence of her return that he had carried him to Holland Park in the first place. And so Hervey had returned to his silent club and restless bed, and there, half-sleeping, half-waking, had counted the hours to reveille; and the barring and shuttering which, he knew full well, was only what any prudent household would do on exchanging town for country, became a sort of dreamy symbol of what there had once been but which was now gone and could never be again.

Nearing four o’clock, he rose and put on his dressing gown, and over it his greatcoat (the fire was long out), lit the lamp on the writing table and took up a pen. Yesterday, before going to the Horse Guards, he had written to Wiltshire, expressing some hope that he would be able to return for Georgiana’s birthday, but that it would be consequent on his marching orders (had it ever been otherwise?). He had written to Hertfordshire too. Now he must write to Kat, if only to tell her that he had been to Holland Park.

Some force stayed his hand, however. He found it impossible to write even the salutation. Each time he dipped the pen in the inkwell, carefully draining off the excess on the rim of the glass bowl, he found that no words formed in his mind. Or rather, that several words formed themselves, but none of them he judged apt. He could not begin ‘My dear Kat’, and certainly not ‘My dearest Kat’ (as once he would), nor simply ‘Dear Kat’; and most assuredly not ‘Dear Lady Katherine’. But without a beginning, how could anything follow? The salutation was indeed the encapsulation of his predicament: what now was his connection with Kat? It was not even that of last summer, when she had told him she was with his child. There had been an interval of full six months; feelings might intensify or abate in that time, but they did not remain as they had been. What indeed
were
his feelings? What were the proprieties to observe in his peculiar circumstances – a new-married officer and the wife of a general who secretly carried his child? He put down the pen, sick to the pit of his stomach.

There was, he knew from long years (the debilitating contemplation of Henrietta), one antidote to this condition – activity,
any
activity. It did not cure, but it did relieve. And sometimes the relief continued long after the activity ceased, by placing the demon-cause out of mind’s reach. He dressed quickly, slipped silently from his room, descended the stairs of the sleeping club, and stepped out into an empty Pall Mall. A horse, a gallop, would have been his natural support, but in its absence the most vigorous walking – marching – would suffice. He would imagine himself a cornet in Spain again, dismounted, forging through snow which the infantry had not yet trod. And beneath his frosty breath he would keep repeating the line of scripture:
For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers
. It would call him to duty. It never failed.

He set off towards St James’s Palace, hastening past the watchmen’s braziers and the guards, through Milkmaid’s Passage and into the darkness of the Green Park. Here, shortening step, he broke into a double, clenching his gloved hands to his chest and matching his breathing to the four-pace rhythm. With the snow underfoot, the moon was bright enough to light his way once his eyes had disaccustomed themselves to the gas lamps of St James’s, and he doubled confidently to the wall which enclosed the gardens of the King’s new palace at the other side of the park, except for running into a goose-girl whose terrier then snapped at his heels for twenty yards, the geese honking noisily as if in encouragement. At the wall he turned right and lengthened the step to challenge himself the more on the grade to the Piccadilly-bar, where gaslight once more lit the scene – a few empty cabs plodding east, and night-soil carts passing both ways. He doubled on the spot for a while, taking in the torch-lit façade of Apsley House, where first he had met Kat. It had then been the residence of the commander-in-chief, and now it was that of the prime minister. He would not see its inside again; what there had once been was now gone, and would never be again …

He doubled across the road at a cinder crossing, giving the lonely sweeper a penny without stopping, and on into Hyde Park, wary now of footpads, then along the New Road, where poor Strickland had met his end when his chariot ran into the Oxford Mail, then turning off south down an interminable rutted path to the Royal Military Asylum, and thence along King’s Road, catching the toll-booth napping, and back round the south side of Buckingham House into the Mall as far as the Duke of York’s Steps, which he took two at a time into Waterloo Place, where he finally ceased doubling and for the last fifty yards walked on a long rein to get his breath back.