Man Of War

Hervey now hurried to Westminster Abbey. He had never been inside before, an admission which Fairbrother had found at once extraordinary and engaging. He wondered if indeed Fairbrother would still be at the abbey, for he had stayed twice as long at the Horse Guards as expected. The abbey had been their rendezvous, however, and it being empty of any other life save a candle trimmer, Hervey found his friend easily enough, by a marble monument to naval prowess, though not to ‘the immortal memory’.

‘Lord Nelson’s was as fine, I trust?’

Fairbrother looked resigned. ‘It is not here, but in the cathedral.’

Hervey frowned. ‘I should have known that. I don’t believe I did.’

‘This one is to Charles Holmes, rear-admiral of the Blue, commander-in-chief Jamaica . . . my father’s godfather. I did not know his memorial was here.’

‘You have more illustrious connections than do I,’ said Hervey, taking a closer look at the inscription. ‘It must give a man a powerful sense of obligation to have such a connection memorialized in the nation’s parish church.’

Fairbrother turned his head to him and smiled ironically. ‘You think me English, do you?’

Hervey pondered on it for a moment. He was not sure what he had thought. ‘I believe I do!’

‘Well, I may tell you one thing. I am less drawn to the appellation by monuments such as this, than by those yonder.’ He nodded to a jumble of busts and plaques across the nave. ‘You honour your men of letters as much as your men of war. There’s Chaucer’s grave there, and so many poets as to lift the weariest of spirits.’

‘I shall bear it in mind when next mine are low.’

‘And do recollect, if you will, my friend, that Admiral Holmes may have been my father’s godfather, but my mother’s – if such a thing there had been – was some heathen savage.’

Hervey put his hand on Fairbrother’s shoulder, and smiled warmly. ‘You do not suppose that I think so much of that? And I tell you once more that you quite mistake the matter if you imagine anything but the same of my brother officers at Hounslow.’

Fairbrother looked at him in evident disbelief. ‘Hervey, you astonish me.’

Hervey smiled. ‘Perhaps I do make somewhat light of it . . .’ In truth, he knew that acceptance by one’s fellow officers was a deuced tricky business. There were any number of things to which they might take exception, and which varied between regiments with no very great predictability. He himself, for all his unremarkable complexion, had found it to be so. He could still recollect how disapproving of Jessye, his ‘cob-charger’, his ‘covert-hack’, the mess had been at first; and how his name, because of its presumed connection, had brought him approval in certain quarters, and then, when clerical impoverishment had revealed itself, how that approval quickly disappeared. It had ceased to trouble him, however. Or rather, he had increasingly managed to confine it to a place of isolation. He was determined that his friend should have no fears on that account: ‘Perhaps I am inclined to dismiss these things for their unworthiness, but I sincerely trust that I judge it faithfully. You saw how were my troop at the Cape?’

‘I saw, of course.’ Indeed, Fairbrother had seen nothing but to admire. Therein lay the problem, though, for so excellent a body of men and such admirable officers were surely so elevated above what had been his own murky purlieus – the Royal Africans – that he could never hope to be received with more than plain civility.

But Hervey did not catch the nuance. ‘I tell you, you will find my regiment the more intrigued by an acquaintance with Chaucer than with illustrious family monuments.’

Fairbrother shook his head, returning the smile with faux weariness. ‘I do think you believe it to be so!’

‘I am certain of it,’ he said, resolute. ‘Now, shall we take a turn about the green lanes? I must tell you of my interview with the commander-in-chief . . .’

They left by way of the Dean’s Yard, and Hervey realized he must be walking the same cobbles as had his old friend Eyre Somervile, as an inky-fingered schoolboy. How perfect a nursery for affairs of state, it appeared to him, for the great enterprise that was India, and for the regulation of a dozen other places about the globe whose allegiance was to the Crown: the school stood in the shadow of the very place of coronation, within sight of parliament, a stone’s throw from the office that controlled the greatest navy the world had seen, and from the headquarters of the army that had done the most to bring about the destruction of the ‘Great Disturber’.