Words of Command (Hervey 12) (Matthew Hervey) Read Free Page B

and from the sea, Nelson’s Hardy; and Lord Exmouth, Cockburn, Broke of the
Shannon
; and chief among them, not
primus inter pares
, but towering above all, the Iron Duke … What more fortune could favour a man than to be taking leave of such fellow members as these to take command of the 6th Light Dragoons (Princess Augusta’s Own)?
    ‘Thank you, Charles,’ he said to the head porter as the doors were pulled wide for him; ‘Thank you,’ he added, nodding to the rest.
    Cornet St Alban opened the door of the regimental chariot – with its ‘VI LD’ device newly re-emblazoned on the deep-blue gloss – and then climbed in after him. ‘Leave to proceed, Colonel?’
    The carriage warmer had done its job; Hervey declined a blanket, sat back and said simply, ‘Very well.’
    St Alban nodded to the serjeant standing to attention on the pavement, who barked something (unintelligible to the several bystanders as well as to Hervey), at which the two dragoons standing either side of the pair of trace-shaved Clevelands whipped off the rugs. The postilion – Wakefield, Hervey noticed, one of the riding-master’s best corporals – at once sprang into the saddle while the other bundled the rugs into the basket at rear before jumping onto the footboard between the springs; and at a quarter past nine they struck off down Pall Mall.
    It was a Monday, not a dozen days shy of the new colonel’s thirty-ninth birthday – by no means a late age to come to command, especially when bloody wars and sickly seasons (the black-humoured toast of the ambitious officer) were not what they had once been. And Hervey fancied himself as sound in wind and limb as any – and more than most, indeed, for of late he had not had opportunity, even if he had had the inclination, for the sort of excesses of cellar or table that afflicted many a man in his thirties who found himself in command of a troop of cavalry in a home station. The late campaign in Bulgaria and Thrace had been a business of some heat. Yet nor had the exigencies of active service taken too high a toll: his hair was still his own, and without the little threads of silver, the ‘harbingers of seniority’; his eyes were clear and his face unlined save for here and there the faint trace of the battlefield, and no more weather-beaten than that of any man whose living was had out-of-doors. If he had been inclined to – if he had had the taste for – a sharper cut to his plain coat and a gayer knot in his cravat, he might even have been called a beau.
    ‘How does Hounslow go with you, Cornet St Alban?’
    ‘Very well, I believe, Colonel. There is perhaps too little opportunity for a field day, but I suppose that may be different when the squadrons are all of a piece once more.’
    Hervey said nothing by reply, save for a non-committal ‘Mm’. The regiment was, to be sure, still not wholly put back together after the late reduction and then augmentation; that much the adjutant’s extensive report made clear. How quickly and completely that reconstitution would be made he would have no very clear notion until he had seen things for himself. But of one thing he was sure, that matters would be infinitely better expedited for Malet’s being adjutant. For some years now the Sixth had employed ‘regimental’ officers rather than those commissioned from the ranks, the more usual practice, and in Lieutenant Lord Thomas Malet (as lately he was become, his father having succeeded to a cousin’s marquessate), though he had but a fraction of the service normally accrued by a serjeant-major, Hervey knew they were possessed of the most diligent executive. Keeping Malet in that saddle would be his principal object as far as appointments were concerned.
    ‘How is Mr Jenkinson?’
    ‘Very well, I believe, Colonel,’ replied St Alban again, with just a note of puzzlement at the singling out of a cornet joined not long before he.
    But Hervey was unwilling to reveal his purpose, even if the