Man Of War

A SIGHT SO TOUCHING IN

ITS MAJESTY

London, seven months later, 22 April 1828

Acting Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Hervey, officer commanding the detached troop of His Majesty’s 6th Light Dragoons in the Cape Colony, and acting commanding officer of the Corps of Cape Mounted Riflemen, rearranged his bones as he got down from the Rochester mail. The Canterbury turnpike was a fine, fast road, which served only to make the occasional pothole more jarring, though from Deptford, where it became a mere municipal affair, not evenly made or mended, the jolts had come with greater frequency and severity. His travelling companion, Captain Edward Fairbrother, also of the Mounted Rifles (the lieutenant-governor at the Cape, his old friend Sir Eyre Somervile, had insisted that Fairbrother should accompany him on account of his wound and the remittent fever), looked distinctly qualmish, for the coach’s rolling action had at times been pronounced – though not as bad as the packet’s rolling off the Azores, when even Hervey, whose sailing-stomach was strong, had been prostrated for two days. Yet despite heavy seas they had made the passage from Cape Town to the Medway in just short of six weeks.

Fairbrother, his indisposition notwithstanding, was as arrested by the sights and sounds of the metropolis as Hervey had been that day, thirteen years before, when first he had come to London – and by this same route. Southwark High Street, narrow, towering, inn-lined, had been all mid-morning bustle, so that the captain of Mounted Rifles had fancied he might be in Shakespeare’s London; or even Chaucer’s, for Hervey had pointed out The Tabard (though nowadays it was called The Talbot). And London Bridge, no wider than that high street but just as teeming and looking every bit as antique, had afforded him two sights as inspiring as might be: downstream the Tower of London, and all the evidence of the capital’s maritime commerce; upstream, but a stone’s throw from the mail, the new London Bridge, its massive, graceful arches not yet complete but already as sure and solid as anything he had seen – certainly these late years in Africa. Here was security, confidence, investment, and increasing wealth. Here was the future.

‘We may take a paddle steamer down the river later this week, if there’s time,’ Hervey had said in answer to his wide-eyed enquiries.

Fairbrother had liked that. And then in Lombard Street, where the mails drew up at the General Post Office, he was wholly taken by the crowded, purposeful activity, both wheeled and pedestrian. Never had he seen its like, not even in Kingston when a slaver filled the wharves with its black cattle. He shook his head slowly. ‘I begin to understand, my friend.’

‘Understand what?’ replied Hervey absently, seeing down what little baggage the mail would carry for them (Private Johnson would bring the bulk of it by stage later in the day).

‘The great enterprise.’

Hervey thought he understood, but elucidation he would leave until another time. He had his own preoccupations for the moment. He wanted above all to know the particulars of the Royal Navy’s engagement in the Ionian, what The Times was calling the Battle of Navarino Bay. The first report – the only one he had seen, and that in South Africa – spoke of a great many ships and a great many casualties. He had not the least idea whether his old friend Sir Laughton Peto’s ship had been engaged, however, for he knew that Peto had first to make passage to Gibraltar to take up his command, and that the journey thither, and thence to Greek waters, was with sail an unpredictable business.

It was his intention therefore, as soon as he and Fairbrother were established in the United Service Club, to go – this very afternoon – to the Horse Guards and ask his friend Lieutenant-Colonel Lord John Howard, assistant quartermaster-general, to give him sight of the official despatches (a month’s worth of mail and Gazettes had been adrift still when he left Cape Town). He might even learn something about the wretched board of inquiry. That was the true imperative for his recall to London. He did not relish it – far from it – but it were better that he grasp the nettle than be stung with it at the hands of some malefactor. There were always those who would see the army as a cruel instrument of repression. He had rather liked Shelley – admired him, even – when they had spent those days together in Rome a decade before (God rest his soul – for Shelley most assuredly possessed one, whatever he himself had professed . . .), but he abhorred the poet’s disliking of the army, and bridled even now at his invention of that word ‘liberticide’ and its appellation to the unlooked-for, and thankless, duty of aid to the civil power.