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Lawford’s Reckoning
“There is nothing so delightful as a quiet country wedding.”
Lawford’s Reckoning
Sable Crow who supports our fanfiction with her website SharpeTales.net.
And
Bernard Cornwell who brought Richard Sharpe into our world.
Having done his duty in India, Lawford must now confront what is possibly the greater challenge of returning to England to - at best – a chilly welcome at the family home in Hampshire. He must also fulfil at last his long-standing commitment to marry his fiancée, Miss Jessica Hayles. (An extract from his private memoir: together with a short preamble to set it in context.)
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I have just this morning begun what I am certain will be the very wearying task of the revision of another sorry excuse for yet a further chapter in this sporadic memoir – this utter farrago, which I fear it has become - as I dare say it must strike anyone who reads it. This time the subject I propose shall be what befell when I returned to England from India in the Year Five at the age of eight-and-twenty and had finally to confront my matrimonial duty, to which by then I had been committed for the - I cannot say how very wearying - duration of nineteen years. It is the first time that I have felt, if not equal to such an undertaking, able at least to countenance an attempt upon it since I was taken ill at Christmas in the Year ’26, a little over four months ago, about the time I moved into my new billet, a modest cottage on the Durford Estate, so that the House itself could be refurbished and got ready for my nephew, Henry, the Right Honourable the Viscount Petersfield, newly come of age, in order that he might take possession of it at last. The Reader will perhaps recall that I had been as the curator of the House at Durford Park, once called Durford Abbey, occupying it on sufferance and at the pleasure of my brother, the elder Henry (since the autumn of the Year Nine the Earl of Winchester) following my return from the Peninsula some fourteen, almost fifteen years ago, now. I had of course known for many years that such a removal would in the end be inevitable, and I had thought that I had prepared myself for it, but when it had come to it at last, although I had tried hard to demonstrate cheerfulness and fortitude, it had proved an exhausting, upsetting business, physically and mentally taxing notwithstanding all the great practical assistance and blessed steady comfort and support which my secretary, Mr Stephen Murdogh, had been able to afford me as he had carried me through the ordeal of disruption and displacement. I had been sorry to reckoning behind the gracious spaces, the beautifully-proportioned rooms - in particular I regretted the loss of the double-cube Library, with what had been, a century earlier, its innovative adjustable shelving - notwithstanding that my nephew Henry had kindly said that I should be welcome to return to the House and avail myself of it whenever I wished. I had been most of all sorry to reckoning behind the Broadwood grand pianoforte in the larger drawing-room, although Henry had likewise said that Stephen and I could return to the House to play upon it whenever we had a mind to do so (provided that I gave him notice, in case he had happened to be entertaining guests), as indeed he would like to hear music in the house: it would made it seem more alive, he said, for as yet he had had no Viscountess who could be relied upon to banish the silence by means of the application of her musical accomplishments (it had gone without saying that I could not play it without Stephen present – he has been my left arm these fifteen years now!). Meanwhile my brother Henry had further mitigated that loss by unexpectedly making me a present of one of Robert Wornum’s small upright ‘cottage’ instruments, a recent innovation and a very useful one for those constrained to live in reduced circumstances such as ours (it was a red-letter day for Stephen and me when the carter and his mate arrived at our door with the Wornum upright, wrapped in blankets and a tarpaulin and nestled between barrels and crates to keep it secure, on the bed of his vehicle! – and I did wonder if Henry had thought of this gesture on his own account, or whether Francis had suggested it to him – on reflection, it had occurred to me that it was the very kind of thing that Francis would have done, had he been in Henry’s position). It also went without saying that the Park and the grounds and gardens were still open to us, Stephen and myself, for our recreation, so all in all, we were by no means wholly deprived of the privileges of our former very comfortable existence - although our circumstances had nevertheless been sufficiently altered so as to make it seem as if the end of an era had come indeed.
The move, although hard for me (and no doubt worse for Stephen, who not only had had to organise it - seeing to the works at the cottage and managing the correspondence – extraordinarily voluminous! - between myself and Henry and Henry’s people at Cannock – old Trelissick had yet been Steward, and Mr Frankwell still Chief Clerk, and Stephen had had a residual dread of reading Frankwell’s replies to his letters requesting prompt payment of all the bills - and making sure the workmen were hired and their invoices paid, and orchestrating the logistics of actually getting me translated into the place - but also manage me and my volatile moods into the bargain), had been accomplished in the end, and I had found myself removed at last to the dwelling, in the kitchen of which I now sit, my papers spread almost in order upon the plain deal table – not as well-scrubbed as I remembered it from a time long gone, when the cottage, with its thatched roof, lime-washed walls and formerly well-tended garden, had been the home of Mark Lucas and his mother - but still decent enough. It is a pleasant property, neat and compact – but, ah, I shall be frank! – very small, notwithstanding two new rooms recently added, evidence of my brother Henry’s goodness towards me. Before the welcome addition of those rooms, I think that I had had more space to call my own in my tent when I had been on campaign in the Peninsula, if I am honest! I am not grumbling. I should not mind my circumstances were it not that I am aware that Stephen regrets very much the involuntary relinquishment of our former beautiful, well-appointed and spacious quarters (he does not complain, but I can tell that he does mourn our loss, nonetheless – his fleeting pensive looks and quiet sighs, which I suspect that he thinks I do not notice, are very expressive - and he always brightens at once – I see that old look of his which I remember from our first encounter, reminiscent of how a landscape, chilled by shadow, its colours muted, becomes all at once warm, more vivid, more vibrant, at the emergence of the sun from behind its veil of cloud - and his features become at once more animated – his movements more lively, his spirits more noticeably buoyant - when I ask him to accompany me to the House in order to consult a book in the Library, or to play upon the Broadwood in the greater drawing-room).
As I have mentioned, the cottage in which I now live was once the home of the Lucas family, from the time when Matthew Lucas first became Head Gardener on the Estate some forty years ago, around the time that Mark and his twin sister Martha were born, until Mrs Lucas, through no fault of her own, poor woman, was obliged to reckoning it following the disaster which my actions had precipitated, and which had occurred in the summer of the Year ‘98.
Since the late Wars we all of us, to a greater or less extent, now find ourselves in somewhat reduced circumstances: the establishment at Durford has accordingly shrunk considerably since those days, hence the availability of this tied house, for there has been no Head Gardener, and indeed, there have been very few gardeners at all, for many years now, except for the jobbing sort, hired from Petersfield, who are paid by the day, who will do the heavy work but who know little of botany or the finer points of horticulture. My nephew Henry has spoken of reviving the tradition and restoring the Durford gardens to something like he has heard that they had been when his father and I were growing up here in the latter years of the old century – there were then six-and-thirty gardeners, and all of them fully employed all the year round! – I do not dare hope that there will ever be an outdoors establishment that large again – twelve might be all that Henry can hope for, perhaps - but I trust that he will do all he can to make Durford bloom once more.
There were larger houses upon the Estate which I might have taken – indeed, Henry (my brother, that is – as I have observed, there have been altogether too many Lawfords called Henry, and too many called Charles, and indeed William, in this family – Francis was something of an anomaly, named for a wealthy cousin of whom Mama had had great expectations, which were not disappointed - and it grows at length somewhat confusing, even to me) had at first wanted me to have the use of a fine property which might easily have accommodated a family of moderate size together with a respectable number of servants, with outbuildings and stables. He had seemed perplexed when I declined the offer, notwithstanding I had explained that I had no need of such a place now that Jessica had been dead eight years, and our daughter and her Slingsby cousins, the spirited intelligent eldest, Elinor, who had so reminded me of my own dear Eloisa, and the two younger somewhat silly and vacuous girls, Cornelius’ true daughters (Susan, or Sukey, and Catherine, called Kitty) whom we had taken to live at Upper-Brook-street in order to remove them from the harmful influence of their parents (although that was not the reason we had given to Cornelius and Portia when we had made the offer – we had simply suggested that it might be better for the girls’ future prospects if they came to live with us in London, and left dull muddy Dorset behind), had married and had acquired establishments of their own. This cottage had been empty for about ten years when I had first petitioned Henry (the Earl, my brother) if I might occupy it, so there had been much to do to make it habitable again, the chief work being a new thatch, and then works carried out to exclude damp from the upper portion of the dwelling. Henry, as I have mentioned, also then kindly added a two-storey wing upon its eastern side to provide a proper sitting-room-cum-study downstairs to accommodate my books and papers, and the cottage pianoforte, and another chamber on the first floor so that Stephen at least does not have to sleep in the box-bed in the kitchen, with its ancient uncomfortable mattress: the result being that we are quite comfortable – if still, it must be said, rather snug. When I receive visitors, however, for the most part I ask Henry (my nephew – yes, I am still in thrall to the Viscount, even if this one is a perfectly amiable young man, my nephew, who, to my surprise and delight, frequently vouchsafes to me signs that he is actually quite fond of me, and who is happy to tolerate my eccentricities - an attitude which, of course, encompasses the matter of Stephen – that realisation came as a great relief!) if we might have the loan of the public rooms of the House, for it is difficult otherwise to accommodate guests whose expectations might not have been adjusted to accord with the reality of my present circumstances.
It is however the garden of this cottage which is the chief attraction of the place, for me, for it still retains much of the essential, particular charm, which I think of as specific to the gardens of the humbler sort of dwellings of this land – a quality uniquely English (at least, I have not seen the like in places where I have been anywhere else in the world) - which it had possessed in earlier years. The memory of its poppies and cornflowers, its roses and its hollyhocks, its lavender, its honeysuckle, its gillyflowers with their spice-like aroma and its scented stocks, had persisted like a beloved favourite dream throughout all my time in the burning and stifling lands of India - in Ireland with its chill Atlantic rain and its lowering skies - and in the scorching summers and freezing winters of the Peninsula - like a comforting talisman of England – of Home. It is, I think, likely the principal reason why I chose this cottage as my refuge in retirement. I sit out of doors when I can, in a warm and sheltered nook, out of the wind, when the sun shines and the weather is clement. We are in Spring now, and I look forward to passing many pleasant hours amongst the less diligently tended, somewhat dishevelled but still lovely and sweet-smelling perennials which were first planted and nurtured by Matthew Lucas and his family so long ago, in a quieter, slower, less busy age, before a still relatively innocent world had learned anything of Bonaparte and his blasphemous hubris and his monstrous violence and his overweening tyrannous ambitions. Should this prove to be my last Spring – I do not think it shall (Dr Willett – dear old Fazz, that is, Dr Fazackerley, was translated at last to that great anatomical lecture theatre in the sky some time ago now – seems fairly sanguine on that score), but the future is as opaque as my health is unpredictable - I hope I might derive from it all the enjoyment I can - for Eternity is a long time in which to be bereft of the especial joys of an English primavera.
Turning to the matter in hand, and looking through what I have written, I can only beg the Reader’s pardon – once again - for the muddle and confusion and the endless digressions – events, incidents, reflections, in and out of order - ! On review, it is clear that I was more incapable than I had thought when I first began it. It is all ahoo, as the nautical expression is, and I am sorry for it, but it is too late now to re-shape it from first principles. I merely wished to offer, if not an apology or justification, at least an explanation of certain chapters of my life, but I fear that it seems that I have but muddied the waters even further! However, I can do little more now. My time in this world, I know, is drawing towards its end – slowly, but ineluctably, nonetheless. The budget of my existence is not yet spent, but it diminishes, grows less daily, and is not replenished. To change the metaphor, I see I am approaching at last the end of what had once seemed the endless road upon which I had first set out when I had been but a boy of seventeen newly-come from school, and my feet had been set upon what had then been but a rough uncertain pathway into adult life, the first steps being those of the stair-way leading down from the principal doors of the House to the drive where the carriage had awaited to carry me to Portsmouth to meet the Falmouth packet in the Year ’94, and the Cork packet thereafter. That end is still some distance off, I think, yet it is not so remote that I cannot discern from afar the region wherein it lies – I see it now - there! there! where the road goes on far ahead, long ways beyond the nearer, familiar, friendly open rolling country - into regions unknown - until the metalled causeway runs out at last and becomes a track of beaten earth once again – before even that mere deer-path vanishes beneath the eaves of the darkling forest yonder, and is lost at last to sight. I can only follow it as best I can, with my faithful Mr Murdogh at my side. Decades before, my feet were eager to pursue that path, seeking adventure and excitement (such are the fond delusions of seventeen-year-old boys). Now they are somewhat weary - but still we must tread the road, Stephen and I - until we arrive at the point beyond which Providence will no longer permit him to accompany me.
No; having examined the matter at inordinate length, I think I have established that I have not the strength to begin again, to produce true order out of this muddle (1). Perhaps a well-disposed person in years to come will find this and re-shape it with sympathy, and present it decently to the world (as Stephen would have done, had I allowed him; in order to spare his feelings however I have prepared this in as much secrecy as could be managed, although I confess that since we have moved into the cottage it has become very much more difficult to hide from him the fact that these papers exist – and lately I have in any case become aware that he seems to be working on a manuscript of his own, which he appears to be equally reluctant to show to me, as he deftly conceals it within his writing-box, or slope, whenever I walk into the room - although not always quickly enough for awareness of the existence of his journal, or his novel, or whatever it is, to have escaped my notice!) but I lay no charge on anyone. These, then, are likely my latest ill-thought-out words, set down in this, my fifty-first year - in the year of Our Lord 1827. I hope only that they do not appear to the reader to be too obviously those of a sick and ageing man, fit only to be dismissed as the ramblings of one whose intellectual as well as whose bodily powers are clearly in pitiful and terminal decline.
There is no cause to be maudlin, however. For that reason I shall not touch upon my childhood (2), except to say that, after I had been ejected - breeched and cropped and denuded of my leading-strings - from the Edenic paradise of the nursery on my fourth birthday, it was not a happy one. Those who know me understand the circumstances and know the particulars, which do not need to be rehearsed here. Suffice it to say that I was born on the 10th day of January in the Year ‘77, the fourth child of the marriage of Charles Lawford, the Right Honourable the Viscount Petersfield, eldest surviving son of the Earl of Winchester, and his wife, the Viscountess, my mother, Harriet, née McCandless, of Spean Bridge, Lochaber, which for those unfamiliar with the geography of Scotland lies about ten miles north and east of Fort William at the head of the Great Glen in the Highlands. I was sent to school at Eton in the autumn of ‘89 when I was twelve years old, and thence to serve as Ensign in The King’s 33rd Regiment of Foot when I turned seventeen, in January of the Year ‘94. Those are the bare facts of my early life.
I never set out to write a political memoir, notwithstanding that for a significant period in my life I was a politician. All I ever said in the House of Commons and latterly in the Lords is recorded in Hansard. The results of my activities in those two chambers are embodied in the Reports of divers Select Committees of which I was at various times a member, and in the various Acts of Parliament in the drafting of which I had a hand. Regarding the persons with whom I had to do, as the subject of gossip and calumny myself through many years, I am not inclined to reveal secrets or rehearse anecdotes either novel or already familiar from other sources.
As to my military service, I have treated of the India years in a previous memoir – memoir, note, and not history. Neither does this present work purport to be (yet another!) account of the Peninsular War, although inevitably certain events of that campaign will feature in it from time to time. I am not a serious student of history and have not the knowledge of the scientific method necessary to attempt a task of that nature. I reckoning such things to those who are properly equipped to address them (there seems to be enough of them). There are several such authors who have written forensically and vividly of the late War in the Peninsula and I do advise readers keen for such detailed and precise technical information regarding matters such as the overcoming of the besetting logistical problems which on many occasions came close to losing us the war, or the great engineering works at Torres Vedras (for example), to go to those authors for enlightenment. I am merely an anecdotalist, with no pretensions to be anything other than that.
Another very good reason for my not attempting such a task – please bear with me now – (so much for my ‘short preamble’!) is that the Peninsular War ended abruptly and decisively for me on the night of the 19th of January in the Year ‘12 at Ciudad Rodrigo, when, one of more than one thousand Allied soldiers to be wounded or killed that night, I lost my left arm and sustained other serious insults to my body in the explosion of a mined breach and was subsequently sent home to England for good, a half-dead cripple, a scant few weeks later; so my knowledge of what happened between then and Toulouse, once Wellington’s Army had succeeded in chasing the French over the mountains and back into France at the end of the following year, and Waterloo (3) beyond that (after the ludicrous hiatus during Bonaparte’s first exile - I hope that I am generally perceived, as indeed I like to think of myself, as a mild and merciful person - but I could not but agree with the Prussians, who argued that the Allies should simply have shot the Enemy of Mankind out of hand after his first abdication in 1814, and have done with it - but no, Wellington had felt compelled to do the gentlemanly thing and plead for his life, at the cost of the lives of fifty thousand other men in the Netherlands in the following year), is but partial and truncated, like my arm, and necessarily second-hand, although I myself of course no longer possess a second hand, thanks to Bonaparte and his moustachioed myrmidons and that misguided faction of wretched and deluded people amongst the Spanish and Portuguese and other European nations who had half-wittedly supported him!
A select portion of the public is already well-acquainted with my adventures in Mysore, as I have said. I now turn briefly to that period between the spring of 1805, when I left India, where I had been first a Lieutenant in the Light Company of the 33rd, the old Havercakes, and then Captain of the 4th Company after poor James Fillmore had been killed at Seringapatam (4). At the very end of the Year Three, shortly after Gawilghur (we had not been required to fight there but the 4th had found itself there anyway in the aftermath, performing routine escort duties) the captaincy of the Light Company of the 77th fell vacant through illness, and somewhat to my astonishment Wellesley himself put in a good word for me, thus enabling me to exchange easily into the Pothooks (5). Uncle Hector had once told me that I should be of little use to anyone whilst I remained a Lieutenant - hardly more than a glorified Ensign; it had been an improvement to become Captain of a Battalion Company, but now - I can be of real use at last! I had thought, once I had my wings and my green plume again; I am no longer a mere ornament! - and I cannot say how pleased I was with myself to have the command of a flank Company - probably a good deal too pleased, for a sizeable portion of my share of the Seringapatam prize money (6) soon disappeared into the pocket of the regimental durzi, or tailor). Now, after a little over a year had passed since then, finally, I could make the arrangements to purchase my Majority at last – a grave and serious step, as this now meant that my long-deferred wedding to Miss Jessica Hayles could finally proceed (she had for the last nineteen years remained adamant that she would not consent to marry me unless I were a Major at least), in the process transferring into the 2nd Battalion the 47th, the Cauliflowers (please do not ask me why – ‘Havercakes’ had made sense to me, once the dietary options available to the Yorkshire poor had been expounded to me by Lieutenant Wilfred Halston - the son of a conscientious clergyman, he had come to know a great deal about the domestic economy of the Yorkshire poor when he had been growing up in his father’s rural Rectory near Leeds - when he, the officer in command of our half-company, had been undertaking the task of acclimatising me, the callow new Ensign, to life in the 33rd all those years ago - but generally I found the regimental eke-names mystifying). I had already attempted to transfer into the 2nd/35th, the Royal Sussexes. At the time I should greatly have preferred that appointment, but that application had been blocked without explanation – “ [this body had originally been founded as the Earl of Donegal’s Regiment of Foot in 1701, which might well cast light upon the snub - Ed] - “Had that been successful, however, I should have found myself in Italy at the battle of Maida in ’06 – and possibly killed - and Jessica with child! - and then in the disastrous Walcheren campaign two years later - so although I was initially displeased to have been directed to my second choice of the majority in the 2nd/47th, which had meant a move to Dublin, in the long run I think I had the best of it.
I had been half-way home to England when the vessel in which I was a passenger, HMS Trident, 3rd class, 64, put in at Jamestown, the principal – indeed, the only – settlement of any note in St Helena - where the post caught up with me, and somewhat to my dismay I learned that the 2/47th was now to remain as part of the Garrison in Dublin, which duty it had been undertaking since its formation in the Year ‘03. This came as an unwelcome surprise to me, as I had been given to understand that the 2nd had been about to be brought home from Ireland and stationed in the North of England in order to serve as a training Battalion and source of fresh men for the 1st, which by the beginning of the Year ’06 had been on its way to the Cape, the Dutch having by then been ousted following the battle of Blaauwberg on the 8th of January (just before my wedding, as it happened). This would better have served my purposes as a soon-to-be-newly-wed. I doubt I should have transferred to the 47th had I known in good time that there would be a change of plan and that the 2nd was to be kept in Ireland indefinitely, after all. I should have looked elsewhere for a Majority. Now there had been nothing to be done about it. Anyway, all this transferring to and fro which I, and many others, did - whilst advancing in rank - was a fairly usual kind of side-to-side shuffle in those days, amusingly reminiscent of the footwork in the cotillion or the quadrille (7). Much of it was undertaken to avoid having to pay the price of a promotion, for after an action there had often been vacancies going begging, no lucre required (not for nothing had we heartless subs then been used to toast to a bloody war or a sickly season!). This epoch, for me, lasted for five years and six months; a total of seven years away, if one includes the passage out and back. Then, in ‘06 began the three barren years of idleness, degradation and shame at the Dublin garrison. (I have written frankly of my time at the Arbour Hill Barracks elsewhere, for there had been much of which I needed to disburden myself. It is not edifying reading, however, and I do not intend for it ever to be sent to my publisher.)
One of the last things I did on my final visit to Seringapatam after I had arranged to go to Madras for embarkation was to present myself at the house of Lali-Ma in order to make my respectful farewell to her, and to her charges, and in particular to the sweet young fellow who had used to entertain me there on the infrequent occasions when I had been able to call. He was what I had considered to be of middle height, but in fact he had been tall, for an Indian - perhaps three inches or so less than myself (I had stood at about five feet and ten inches or so in those days, before sickness shrunk me to what I am today) – at any rate, he was a little taller than Stephen - say, about the same height as Mark - slim, graceful, fawn-like even, with fine, handsome features, and lustrous eyes made to seem larger by skilful and subtle use of cosmetics. His name was Aabharana (8); his nom-de-guerre in the house of Lali-Ma was Rangila, which signifed colourful, which I gather had once been an eke-name of a notorious pleasure-loving ruler in the north of India in years gone by who had liked to array himself in women’s clothing (9). To his parents, and to me, he was Aabha. His flattering name for me was Sajjana (10). Anyway, as I have said, I went to take my reckoning – Madame Lali and her charges had deserved that courtesy, for they had been good to me, particularly after Colonel Jean Gudin and I had gone to stay with them during the fall of the city, to ensure that no harm came to them from the British soldiers who, true to form, had transformed into a violent drunken rabble of thieves and rapists and murderers as soon as ever Seringapatam had been theirs - and also to give Aabha a present – a chain of bright, pure, butter-yellow gold, of respectably heavy weight, yet nevertheless dainty, in keeping with the feminine persona which he had liked to assume when entertaining his clients - set with rubies and emeralds, with which he had been very pleased, for he did so love to adorn himself with beautiful ornaments - his delights, he called them - and with his skin the colour of Arabian coffee the gold and the rich-hued gems looked very well on him. We parted in friendship, albeit I must confess with a degree of reluctance on my side, notwithstanding that I had done my best not to allow myself to develop an inevitably one-sided romantic attachment, although, of course, I being myself, I had in fact done so, to my chagrin if not to my surprise, knowing that I was a fool even as I felt a sharp pang at my heart at the prospect of never seeing him again, for of course he would forget me as soon as I had passed back through the door of the discreetly-positioned quiet, luxurious house into the busy street outside. (Would that all my amours, both before and after that, had ended in such a glow of mutual goodwill, so benignly, so amicably, so – almost – painlessly – or relatively so - with no, or at least, small, material harm done to either party!)
Aabha had perceived my regret however at the imminent prospect of the final parting.
“Be of good cheer, Sajjana,” he had said, “for thou goest to England to enter into the honourable estate of matrimony, dost thou not?” (I could almost have laughed at that, to hear a Hindoo, and a male courtesan into the bargain, quoting from the rubric of the marriage service of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England! I wondered where he could have heard it. I had a suspicion that he had had it from an English client bemoaning his fate as a reluctantly married man.)
“I do; and I wish it were otherwise.”
“But thou wilt have children, and thy wife will be made happy because of that; and then once that is achieved thou mayest take to thyself a bed-friend more to thy liking.”
“Aabha, really - !” I said to that, shocked - I think I actually spluttered, because that was so very close to what Jessica and I had agreed many years before, as we had slowly worked our way through the likely awkward convolutions of our forthcoming marriage throughout the very long – unhealthily long – period of betrothal. In fact, I had thought that I recalled that we had actually touched upon this very subject during our unsupervised walk in Lady Hayles’s flower garden in Liphook about a month before I had departed for India.
“Is that not the custom in thy land, where the husband prefereth to lie with men, lord?”
“No. By the way, Abha, I am not a lord. Not quite, anyway. My brother Charles is – he’s been Lord Otterbourne since he was ten – our grandpapa had had a spare minor baronial title hanging about, which he had not needed, and so he had given it him for his birthday, I do not know why, really – Charles had been already more than insufferable enough - but not the rest of us. We are merely Honourables. It’s just a technical point,” I said, still really quite astonished at his matter-of-fact approach to the matter. “Men who prefer to lie with women but who are tired of their wives take mistresses with impunity, all the time – it’s almost compulsory; but…”
“So what do they?” Aabha had said then, with genuine curiosity. “The others?”
“They – “ (what did they do? I really had had really very little idea at that time! but I had improvised from what little I had heard and read) – “they visit certain secret houses, and hope that they are not betrayed or apprehended, for the penalty for such behaviour in England is very severe. If they are detected they must hang, or at least risk being beaten or murdered by the mob if they are sent stand in the pillory. Or else they must burn.”
“Burn, Sajjana?” Aabha had said, horrified.
“Oh, no! Not like that! Figuratively, as we call it, that is, in picture of the mind – choosing not to act upon their feelings, but enduring in silence, consumed inwardly by a passion which can never be expressed or assuaged.”
“I see,” he had said, with a frown, as he had considered. “And what shalt thou do, then, Sajjana?”
“I do not know. The latter, I suppose.”
“You would immolate yourself thus, in figure of the imagination?”
“When I was young, Aabha, I behaved in such a way that I caused great pain not only to myself, but to another, for whom I had cared very much. He is now dead, largely as a result of my selfish actions, and I must bear the responsibility for that forever. I cannot take the chance that I might ever do that again, to anyone else.”
Aabha was thoughtful for some time. Then, half in jest, as I thought, he suggested that I take him back to England with me, as my servant! For a mad moment or two I wondered if I could indeed do so - but of course it was absurd. “England is very far away,” I reminded him - “a small, gloomy, kingdom - rather boggy and sad - set in the midst of a cold, damp, foggy archipelago – “
“Sajjana? I do not know that word, archi...?”
“Archipelago. It’s from the Greek. Originally it meant chief sea - it referred to the Aegean Sea, which is a reach of the Mediterranean – you have heard of the Mediterranean Sea?”
“Oh, yes, sir. The French who were here spoke of it.”
“The Aegean Sea is full of islands – six thousand islands - now the principal meaning of ‘Archipelago’ has changed – it has come to signify ‘a chain of islands’. Like – like the Dutch East Indies, or the Philippines - or even Japan,” I said, with a sudden flash of inspiration, hoping that the mention of the latter would induce more appropriate associations of grandeur and venerability in Aabha’s imagination than either of the first two examples. He nodded at that. “Anyway, Britain is an archipelago, like Japan, but about half the size, off the coast of Europe - six thousand islands, just as in the Aegean – but far away westward, four thousand leagues and more from India, at the edge of the world, where the sun sets,” I told him (immediately cringing, as I had known at once that I had sounded as if I had foolishly imagined that I had been addressing a childlike hottentot or pigmy even before the sentence in its entirety had been formulated in my brain, let alone left my mouth); at which Aabha laughed – quite rightly - and said,
“The world hath no edge, O Sajjana, thou not-quite-a-lord, for it is a sphere; and a little beyond England lies its vassal Ireland, which longs to be free of England, which has had its boot upon Ireland’s throat these many centuries, so I hear; and beyond Ireland across the great sea lieth America with its new hopeful colonies of free men; and beyond America and across another even greater ocean lieth China, and so on and so on, until in the end one cometh again to these hither lands. I have heard the Frenchmen that were here speak of this, too. They said also that England is a poor little country, of no account, cut off from partaking in the splendour and wealth of Europe because her King, who is a German – a fine state of affairs, Sajjana, if I might say so - persisteth in his foolish quarrel with their Republic, and that is why the English are always nowadays sailing about the world in their great oaken ships with their keels of elm and masts of pine, taller than temple towers or minarets, seeking lands more agreeable to them than their own wretched little foreign-ruled realm - lands where the sun shineth, and where there are riches to be had.”
I laughed – although what Aabha said had not been so far from the truth. It hurt me, in fact, to hear this shrewd assessment of the importance, or otherwise, of England, from the mouth of a dusky Indian youth, and a whore at that, but that was our perceived standing in the world generally then, before we had become a power truly to be reckoned with - for in those days Trafalgar and Waterloo, the two great confrontations which had secured our place as the dominant power in the world, had both of them still to be fought – and won. Then I said,
“But the climate of England is cold and damp, Aabha, and it would likely kill you; and the people are likewise cold, and phlegmatic towards strangers, chill and clammy and reluctant in their approaches, their addresses all mould and mildew – they do not love their German King, it is true, but I suspect that they would also not love you – and they are also greatly disapproving of - ” I indicated then the two of us as we reclined upon the divan, both in a deliciously scandalous state of nakedness beneath loose soft silken lounging robes, although Aabha, as was his custom, had been wearing many adornments upon his wrists and ankles and about his throat and waist, comprised of gold and gems of all kinds – rubies, or more probably spinels, the gems which the Mughal Emperors had favoured, the colour of pigeons’ blood; emeralds which shot green rays when one held them up before the setting sun; sapphires from Ceylon blue as the sky; even diamonds. These diamonds, Aabha had told me, were gifts from his wealthy European gentlemen, his hairy ‘bears’ (he had laughed as he had first told me this at one of our meetings, for my own natural appearance (like Jacob in Genesis I am a smooth man) had been a matter for wonder to him – it seems that, up until then, he had believed, on the evidence which he had so far seen, that all European men had been akin to apes - I had been the first he had ever encountered who had not corresponded to that pattern!; for the Europeans prized these stones above all the others. I also at our rendezvous had worn jewels, of his choosing - for nobody at all, he had averred to me often, according to opinion widely held in that endlessly astonishing land, could be considered beautiful in their natural state until they had been loaded with choice pieces of the goldsmith’s craft. I did think this a very strange and exotic custom, and one with which upon the first one or two occasions I had not been quite, or at all, comfortable - but I had submitted to it - at first to please Aabha, so that I should not be repulsive to him - and in the end because I had become accustomed to it, and had even learned to appreciate it. I do not think Aabha could have been impressed at all by my plain silver locket, which, hidden beneath my shirt and neck-cloth, had been my only ornament until then. I never revealed to him what lay concealed within it, of course, although I suspected that from what I had sometimes let slip concerning my sentimental past, he had drawn his own conclusions, which had probably not been far from the truth.
So, as I have said, on the infrequent occasions when I had gone to the house of Lali-Ma to visit Aabha, part of our ritual had included his decking of me with many fine jewels, gifted him by his patrons, I had assumed, once he had bathed me and anointed me with the fragrant unguents which he loved as much as he loved his hoarded gems. I have to say that I had tended to find them rather cloying. My preferences have always been for the astringent citrus scents with their inherent essential promise of cleanliness, health and hygiene – bergamot, lemon verbena (a strange thing Mark told me once, strange to me, at any rate – bergamot and lemon verbena smell almost exactly alike, and from their appearance one could imagine them to be related, but they are not – the former is of the lamiaceae and related to mint, can you believe it! and the latter of the verbenaceae – well, the clue is in the name, there, I suppose) and in addition, always, of course, wholesome lavender - but I did not object to his choices. I had ever wished to be courteous in my dealings with him, and to defer to his wishes with regard to these preliminaries, for I knew how trying he found the attentions of some of our more boorish officers, who did not appreciate subtlety in these matters, and the importance of courtship, of wooing and of being wooed - who brushed aside the niceties and refinements of his practice and abruptly demanded their way, treating his own feelings with disregard, as if he had been an object merely - solely a means of satisfying their crude and brutish lust - as if he had had no real being as a person (having listened to what Aabha had had to say, I often wondered how their wives, if they had wives, could have born to endure their matrimonial attentions). Almost always, when it came to my adornment, Aabha chose pale gems – moonstones, pearls, zircons, other white stones – perhaps even diamonds, for he had of course been blessed with far wealthier benefactors than I (I never asked him about them, even under conditions of anonymity, for, amongst other reasons, it had, of course, flattered my vanity to pretend to myself that I was the only one) – for he had used to say that I was so luminously fair, like a moonstone myself (11), that the brightly-coloured jewels which he favoured for his own adornment would have extinguished me, as the glory of the sun extinguishes the delicate sheen of the moon when that chill but lustrous orb dares to show itself in the sky in hours of daylight. At our second or perhaps our third meeting he had added Ceylon sapphires to his artist’s pallet when he decked me out in the beautiful faceted stones which represented his wealth - his pension fund for his old age, of course - on account, he said, of my eyes, which they had complimented. (When I considered Aabha and his small hoard of treasure I could not but contrast it, not only with the cache of jewels which Richard Sharpe had been rumoured to have looted from the corpse of the Tippoo Sultan and for years after, he had later confessed to me, had guarded jealously, sewn into the seams of his clothes and concealed beneath false partitions in his pack – these fabled stones, I recalled, had according to gossip been the reason why Sharpe could have afforded to live like a Generalissimo on a Serjeant’s pay in those months following the fall of Seringapatam! - but also with my brother Henry’s cabinets full of his beloved geological specimens – lacklustre things one would not have looked at twice, really, although I had usually managed to work up at least some enthusiasm for the ones which exhibited fossil remains on the dreaded occasions when he had invited me to come and inspect them – I had once asked him what had first piqued his interest in rocks and fossils, and he had answered that he had been in the nursery one winter evening around the time of his fourth birthday, when a servant had come in with more coals for the scuttle and one had fallen upon the hearth and he had idly picked up the poker and hit it, and it had split in two, and there had been the ghost of a primaeval fern hidden within, and it had seemed like magic, and after that… a remark which had surprised me, for it had seemed to belie what had otherwise always struck me as Henry’s invincible workaday dullness (he had never said anything like that to me again, but it coloured my perception of him ever after) - and so it had seemed a kindness costing me little to praise his collection, for such praise had never failed to coax him out of his shell and induce him to speak with uncharacteristic animation for, oh, a good two minutes afterwards - three collections of rocks which could not have been more different, however, in appearance, significance, provenance and purpose!)
Only thus scented and bejewelled, it seemed, could I please Aabha sufficiently to gain his favour and inspire him for all that was to follow when we pretended lovers (for we were nothing of the sort, of course – he was the courtesan and I was his client, I had used to tell myself, sternly, nothing more, before every visit – and yet – and yet - ) played our languid lapidary games. He used to show me to myself in a glass once he had thus tricked me out. The first time he did that I am afraid I laughed, mainly from surprise, I think it must have been, for the sight, to me, was a startling one indeed! Why dost thou laugh, Sajjana? he asked me, surprised in his turn, and when I could not make him a coherent answer he simply said, thou art beautiful so, and I suppose that was why I had been startled, for I had seen for myself that he had spoken true, but the idea of that had still been strange and alien to my Western way of thinking. How can a man be beautiful? I had thought, my mind in a paroxysm of doubt and wonderment. Surely beauty is the prerogative of women? What has happened? What oriental magic has he wrought? Who is it that looks out from the glass? Is it I, indeed? Am I myself still?
“Ah. Because of thy religion?”
“Exactly so, Aabha.”
“Thou couldst adopt mine, Sajjana.”
The idea, so unexpected, was so delightful that I confess that I laughed.
“I am not laughing at the idea of turning Hindoo,” I said, quickly, not wishing to give offence. “Sometimes it seems to me to be an eminently much more sensible philosophy than Christianity, although I have heard learned Doctors of Divinity of the Church of England, my own brother Francis amongst them, opine that there is something of the religion of both the Hindoo and the Buddhist in the teachings of Christ, which cannot be a mere coincidence. Indeed, some have even asserted that Christ must have passed his youth and early manhood in the East, in India, learning from teachers of both faiths, or why else should the record have fallen silent concerning him from the age of twelve to that of thirty? But I do not know the truth or otherwise of that. I am neither learned nor wise in these matters. Anyway, at home in Hampshire – “
“Hampshire?”
“It is what is called a county – a shire - an administrative division – in the centre of that part of the south of England abutting the sea. It is large, as English counties go, and rich, because it has good farming land, and the sea-coast, of course, with several fine natural anchorages, inlets and harbours, enabling travel and trade. Portsmouth is there, where our Royal Navy has its head-quarters and chief dock-yard. My family’s second seat lies but six leagues north of Portsmouth, on the London road.”
“Leagues?”
“A league is three miles. Eighteen miles. Near a town called Petersfield.”
“Be there a Rajah of Hampshire?”
I could not help but laugh a little.
“There is an Earl, Aabha. In olden times an Earl was a war-leader, a kind of prince in small sort – a Rajah in little. It is a title which came from the northern European lands, when the south part of Britain was first invaded by tribes out of Germany, and then assaulted by adventurers from Denmark and then by those of the lands that lie even farther towards the northern Pole. Jarl, they said. Earl is an English form of that. The principal city of Hampshire – hardly a city – it is only called so because the Cathedral, the chief church of the Diocese is there - is called Winchester. The Earl of Winchester holds his land from the King, to whom he owes fealty. Winchester is also where the Assizes – the justice sessions - are held, in the Castle, four times a year. My – grandfather – is the Earl of Winchester. But these days not all the Earls are war-leaders, although many of them, our notable lords, do serve in the Army and the Navy.”
Aabha considered this.
“So, Sajjana, thy brother Charles – he will be the Earl one day? Haha, perhaps I should call thee Mirza, then, after all?” (12)
“Don’t tease! I have three brothers older than myself. The eldest one, Charles, he will indeed be the Earl. Unfortunately. The rest of us will have very little save what we can shift for ourselves to obtain, by our own effort, and wit, and luck, or what kind relatives might choose to bequeath to us in due course. Charles is not a good man. He is unworthy, but my parents have never wished to countenance that idea. He is the apple of their eye, as we say. It is a phrase from the Bible, the Book of Psalms, number Seventeen, I think. They have always allowed him to do as he pleases. My mother’s brother, my uncle Hector, who was a Scot, he knew what Charles was, however. He could not be fooled, Uncle Hector.”
“A Scot? Like the very fierce men in the Army of thy King, the ones who wear the skirts of the many-coloured squares?”
“Kilts. That’s right. Not all our Scottish regiments wear the kilt, though. The Seventy-Fourth, for example, do not. Uncle Hector had no time for Charles. He used to say that Charles had no particular characteristic to recommend him other than that he was merely the first of the litter, and that he would never have chosen even a spaniel upon such a principle. But that, I am afraid, is the English way, and Hector’s sister, my mother, married an Englishman, and so there was nothing to be done about it.”
“You are speaking of your Uncle as if he belongs to the past, Sajjana ?” said Aabha, after a small pause, as he considered.
“Uncle Hector died. He was killed at Assaye.”
“He perished in that great battle? A noble ending for a venerable warrior!”
“I wish that had been the truth of it, Aabha. It is the version of the truth which I wrote to my mother, his sister, at any rate, afterwards. But the fact is, he was murdered, after the battle was done, by a treacherous dog of an English deserter.”
“I am sorry. I too know what it is to lose a beloved Uncle. They are more precious than Fathers, in my poor experience. So thou and thine other two brothers, Henry and Francis, thou told’st me upon a time - you three plot to take Winchester from him, then, this bad Charles?”
I laughed. “Certainly not! In English law the rule is primogeniture – as I said, the first-born son takes all and the others must do as best they can for themselves, and try not to mind. It would undoubtedly be a good thing, for our family, for our people in England and in Barbados, that island in the West Indies which I told you about, where my family holds African people in servitude, although Francis is fighting against that in the abolitionist movement against fierce opposition from the Bishops – I fear Francis will never now make the Bishops’ Bench in the Lords - and for the world in general, if Charles could somehow be removed from the picture, but we cannot resort to fratricide!”
“That is most unjust, that you must endure this.”
“We have long since accepted the situation.”
“You younger brothers three would never make one Mahratta princeling, then, any of you!” Aabha said, laughing.
“Thou art correct!” I said, laughing at last. “At least our system keeps the estate together, though.”
“Ours also,” Aabha said, smiling slyly as he shifted to lie upon his side in order to begin to make his preliminary overtures. “The daughters of families such as yours – have they dowries?”
“They are given marriage portions, yes. It so happens I - I have no sisters and that is probably just as well. But as – as - I was saying – oh, Abha! - at my family’s house, there is no shortage of small temples scattered around the Park, apt for use in the novel – to us - rites of your – faith - built in imitation of the fanes of the old Greeks.”
“Greeks? Like the devil Iskander?”
“Alexander, as we call – oh! Aabha – a little less, just now, for mercy’s sake! Sometimes I think you are too skilled! A small space before him, but yes – yes - ”
“Why do Christian people build pagan shrines in their parks, Sajjana?” Aabha said ingenuously, after an interval.
“One reason is, that at a certain point in the last century, it became the fashion. Say Lord Peter Pieface had one built upon a distant knoll to add interest to the view from his drawing-room window, and soon after that his neighbour Sir Jeffery Jughead had one like, but not too like to it, erected amongst the trees just the other side of the lake in his own park, where it could cast its fascinating reflections. And soon every great house in that part of the county had one, and so it went on. At first these were not very convincing, made from plans derived from loose interpretations of Roman and Greek ruins in paintings - imagined by artists who had often never seen such things in real life - in which they had served as back-drops to the true subjects of their works – like scenery at a theatre – for a play or an opera - if you know what I mean.”
“I have once seen some French officers putting on such a spectacle for their own amusement. We have had theatre in India for many hundreds of years, Sajjana, but I think it is clearly a very different thing from the entertainments with which you Europeans are familiar. Our skilled performers and musicians do not need painted cloths to set a scene. But these strange dream-buildings in your English gardens?”
“Well, later on they became more true to history – as a result of wealthy leisured young men taking the Grand Tour of Europe and seeing these architectural relics for themselves, as they really were - I suppose. My – my - father - went on such a tour, and after his return he had several of these features which his grandfather had had built extensively remodelled, the better to conform to the new insistence upon authenticity. But there was more to it than that, of course. The urge to make these memorials to the memory of the ancients was flattery born of sincere veneration. We greatly admire the civilisations which left their mark in the architecture still to be seen in the lands about the Mediterranean Sea, you see. Even though those temples and palaces now almost all lie in ruins, we still find them aesthetically very pleasing, and wish to imitate them, for their forms embody many of the virtues which we value in the ancients, notwithstanding we do not believe in their religion. I am sure one of those noble edifices at Durford could be fitted up and decked out and made into a perfectly good place of worship for your favourite divinities, dear Aabha. Besides, I should so love to see the Rector’s face if next time he came to dinner there were devadasis dancing in procession through the park, making the air resound to the gay tinkling clamour of their small brass bells, and he was greeted by the chief of the servants of the household with a garland of marigolds when he reached the apex of the flight of steps which leads up to the House, and taiwaifs (13) in brightly-coloured silken saris twirling in the hall beyond! But, oh, Aabha…”
I thought of the people at Durford, most of whom would never have seen a dark face unless they had been at Portsmouth or Southampton, or, at a stretch, in London (I doubted any of them had ever been to Bristol or to Liverpool): I could not take Aabha home with me to Hampshire and then simply reckoning him stranded amongst cold-blooded unwelcoming strangers, suspicious of foreigners always, let alone in times such as these (particularly those who were brown-complexioned) and who would inevitably disapprove of him - and of us, it went without saying - and it was certain that I could not take him to Ireland. Aabha must therefore be content with his valuable present, and with an artful small regretful sigh say his farewell to me, as if were truly sorry to be saying goodbye. Fortunately, with his Oriental notions of the ineluctability of Fate, so he was, and so he did.
It strikes me that I have never told Stephen about Aabha, nor have I ever told Richard neither (Stephen, the gentle sprite, or elf - innocent Stephen – or at least, so he had been until, at the age of five-and-twenty, he had encountered me; Richard, the saturnine, dangerous djinn who for years haunted my darkest most secret dreams – the thought of whom, even now, conjures such shocking desires in me – which I have never dared name to their fullest extent, even to myself – not even in solitude, in the blackest most silent hours of night) both of them uncanny in their own particular degrees! (|I have ever been ashamed to recall the longing to experience again that – what I blush to term - ruthless ravishment – such as to which I had been subjected upon that occasion in India, far distant in time, now - which I confess I had indeed clumsily engineered, a thing of which Richard had indeed more than once accused me, and which I had always attempted to deny – having received Mama’s six-months-old letter only that morning in which she had referred so casually to the death from the Yellow Jack in the West Indies of Mark Lucas – for which I held, and still hold, myself responsible – believing that I could make atonement only by submitting to such rough usage at the hands of a member of his class upon that rain-wracked night, when lightning had split the sky and deafening thunder had shaken all the air!)
Further, it seems a strange and superstitious thing to confess, but I often used to think that Richard actually did have something of the Daemonic about him – I do not mean that I thought he really had been a Demon from the Pit, of course, but he had always seemed so very driven, as if by the relentless restless tireless single-minded energy which one could imagine to be the mark of a being of a higher order (if fallen) beyond that which normally inspires the common mortal who wishes to better himself, to rise (somewhat paradoxically, given that the Demons are said to be nothing more than Angels who have been cashiered, as it were – the price of their commissions confiscated, their insignia of rank ignominiously removed – harps unstrung, wings clipped, halos extinguished - some might say there is nothing more dangerous than a fallen Angel, especially one whose very name is a cunning rearrangement of Seraph!) I see him even now in the eye of memory as he was that day after the terrible battle at Talavera: the newly-promoted (ah, but for how long?) Captain Richard Sharpe and his Serjeant, Patrick Harper, appearing out of the fury of the fight with a (for Sharpe) career-saving French Eagle, which, in combat the details of which quite stretched credulity, they had only just succeeded in capturing after an epic struggle with the Dutch Colour-Sergeants – for it had been a Dutch battalion with which the South Essex had been engaged, Hollanders fighting for Bonaparte - as ferocious and bloody as anything out of Homer - the pair of them looking for all the world like Lucifer and his minion Beelzebub, covered in gore and filth and the residue of black powder, and both of them grinning like devils as Sharpe had brandished the blue-painted staff with its bent-winged gilded dickie-bird triumphantly in my face! Something that Simmerson had had to say to me earlier that day during our confrontation had recurred to me in that moment – after traducing me in the most offensive manner once I had compelled him at sword-point to relinquish command of the South Essex, he had turned his wrath in absentia upon Richard, whom he had now seemed to blame in earnest for the loss of the King’s Colour shortly before at Valdelacasa – Now I know why Wellesley retains a rag-mannered ruffian like Sharpe! he had shouted at me, for he can be no more than a ruffian himself, to presume to take away the command of a Regiment from a gentleman who has raised, equipped and trained it at his own expense - and give it to so foul an unnatural, unworthy creature, such as yourself, Lawford! But with Sharpe now standing before me in such wise I had been unable take issue with Simmerson’s verdict upon him. He had been, beyond all reasonable doubt, a ruffian. In fact, I had been so taken aback that I had thought at first that he had indeed been a fiend appeared out of Hell who had meant to murder me, so little did he resemble the civilised British officers to the company of whom I had been more generally used! I remember I had exclaimed,
“Coriolanus!” at which Sharpe had gaped at me in silence for a short interval, before answering me with,
“Who’s that sir? Some Spanish officer?”
I recall that that had left me somewhat dumbfounded. Around me, Simmerson’s former aides – mine, now, I had supposed, at least for the time being – had laughed - and not in any way which could be construed as pleasant or friendly or as an acknowledgement of the almost unbelievable feat which Richard and his Serjeant had less than half an hour before accomplished. It had been clear to me at once that I should need to appoint some new ones, but that would have to be a task for another day, once our wounded had been retrieved – at any rate, the ones who had survived the many grass-fires, in any event – that had been yet another horror of that bloody day - our dead buried and our remaining strength assessed. A bespectacled Rifleman – how could he take aim, I wondered? - with a striking pale complexion notwithstanding long exposure to the unforgiving summer weather of the Peninsula, and spectacular ginger ringlets, had meanwhile come sidling quickly up to Sharpe. One of Sharpe’s closest companions, as I had been shortly to discover, he would become well-known to me over the subsequent two-and-a-half years during which I was privileged to have the command of the South Essex’s First Battalion.
“It’s Shakespeare, sir,” this unlikely-seeming fellow had said, to Sharpe. “’Who’s yonder that does appear as he were flay’d? O gods!’ He has – ‘
“Shut up, Harris, I bloody knew that!” Then, turning back to me as this Harris had subsided - “It’s me, sir - Sharpe!”
“No! Surely not! But - so it is!” I had said, archly feigning surprise. “Well, Captain Sharpe, you had better come along with me - and Serjeant Harper too.”
“I, sir?” Harper had said, as if incredulous. I had the immediate feeling that Harper had known that Simmerson would never have included him in the triumphant embassy to Wellesley.
“Of course, Serjeant! Sir Arthur will be well pleased indeed when the two of you together place that in his hand – “ – indicating the Eagle upon its staff – Sharpe had presented it to me, as had been proper, but I had now returned it, for of course I had had no part to play in its winning, and I had had absolutely no desire to appropriate to myself any fragment of the honour which had belonged solely to Richard and to Patrick - “your feat will be noted in his despatch, you may depend upon it! I had better send advance word that he will need to ensure that he is wearing his third-best pair of gloves, however!”
There had been a good deal of matter of indeterminate origin clinging about the shaft of that Eagle – blood, dust, powder residue, as well as material about which I did not care to speculate. As I had handed it back to Richard I recall that I had glanced with a sigh at my own gloves – new on that day, together with my best coat, to do honour to our worthy foe, and now quite filthy and probably spoiled beyond all redemption. With a slight sinking of the heart I told myself that from now on I was probably going to have to get used to spending a good deal more on gloves.
I had concluded with a jest in order to counter the tone of scornful mockery to which Sharpe had recently been subjected by Simmerson’s chosen toadies, whose backsides I had suddenly found myself very much wanting to kick (for, in the aftermath of my confrontation with Simmerson earlier that day, my normally placid and eirenic blood had still been up to a remarkable degree). Sharpe’s Riflemen friends had laughed with genuine amusement and pleasure at our bantering exchange. The aides, I had noted, having laughed mockingly at Sharpe’s Shakespearian gaffe, had not laughed at all throughout the remainder of our brief conversation. I daresay they had been as much displeased at the idea of Serjeant Harper being sent to Sir Arthur for praise and commendation as they had been at the idea of the feat of Sharpe, the jumped-up Second Lieutenant and Quartermaster (and before that, the jumped-up Serjeant) and the emphatically and unashamedly Irish Harper, being mentioned in Sir Arthur’s despatch. Meanwhile I had looked around for a junior officer to send ahead to Wellesley with the tidings, for I had well recalled (from the days when I had been one such) how it had lifted the spirits of the young Subs to be made to feel that they had had an honourable part, however small, in great affairs, and had not after all been merely mostly for decoration, or, worse still, in the way and of little actual utility - I still recall that wretched demoralising sensation of uselessness and superfluity from the years of my own apprenticeship, first as an Ensign and then as a Lieutenant - as they had often been made to feel by more senior, experienced officers who had had little time or patience to spare for them. Kit Denny would do, I had thought – a bright boy, seventeen years old or so. I had seen him about on the handful of occasions when I had visited the South Essex on business from Wellesley before I had been given command of that Regiment, and I had judged him, if only on sight, to be a dutiful lad, keen and eager, deserving of such an honour. He would, I had thought then, have been thrilled to be the recipient even of such a small token of recognition from his Colonel.
“Where is Ensign Denny?” I had asked then, of nobody in particular. There had then come a telling interval of silence – the kind of silence which in those days had only ever implied one thing, so I had guessed what had happened even before Harper had volunteered the information.
“Mr Denny is dead, sir,” he had said, reluctantly, his tone suddenly heavy.
“Dead! Why? How?”
“I am sorry, sir,” Captain Leroy had put in. “But when Denny heard what was afoot, he would go with Lieutenant Sharpe and Serjeant Harper here.”
I had made my face stern – this active Coloneling (four months as a Lieutenant-Colonel on the Staff had done nothing to prepare me for this) was still so new to me I had had to do it as if I had been acting a part in a play - turned in my saddle to face Richard. “Sharpe,” I had said, frowning deliberately, “did you order Mr Denny to accompany you?”
“No, sir. I had no idea he was following us, I swear. I was so intent upon the hard fight I knew was coming it was like I had blinkers on me. I never even saw him in the ruck. First thing I knew of what had happened was when Captain Leroy told me the sad news afterwards.”
“He did it for the honour, as I guess, sir,” Leroy had volunteered, to that. “You know how boys can be. Often as not, they don’t see the danger, or the folly. Only the glory. I saw him run off and tried to recall him, but…”
“Denny disobeyed an order?” I had said, making my voice as icy as possible.
“There was much noise and confusion, sir,” Leroy had offered stiffly. “The Battalion was still trying to get properly back into line. The men didn’t know if they were going or coming.”
“Simmerson’s chaos?” I had said, silently cursing that bloody man.
“Yes, sir. The Serjeants and Corporals, they was hollerin’ for all they were worth, on top of all the noise of the battle. It’s my belief Mr Denny did not hear me.”
There had followed a chill silence.
“He died well, sir,” Harper had ventured then, as if he had sensed my anger and shock and sorrow and had now been seeking to placate and comfort me. “Fought bravely, so he did - like a proper man – a grown man twice his age, God love him. Poor lad was piked through the belly, back to front. Don’t tell his mother when you write – sorry, sir, not my place.”
“Oh, God! How ghastly!” I had cried, before remembering my new dignity. Being C.O. and receiving reports of what had happened on the field of battle was a very different matter from merely observing the results of conflict from a distance as a member of the General’s staff, I had rapidly been discovering. I struggled to control myself, then said, “It’s all right, Harper. Thank you, Captain Leroy – Serjeant.”
So that was what I had written to Christopher Denny’s widowed mother, when I had had the leisure, on the following day. The confusion of war. The boy’s gallantry. That he did not appear to have suffered (I left her to imagine a clean shot to his heart, and, in accordance with the wise advice of Patrick Harper, wrote nothing about the broken-off head of the Dutch Colour Serjeant’s pike which, when his body had been found, had been protruding six inches in advance of his belly). Then I had written some nonsense about the shadow of the captured Eagle falling upon Kit’s decently-shrouded body as it had been laid in his honoured and hallowed grave before the men had cast the earth upon it (that last had been a kindly-meant embellishment of my own – the Eagle had already gone to Wellesley at his headquarters, and we had not been able to find a clergyman – one of Sharpe’s Riflemen had pronounced some kind of fanatical Nonconformist rigmarole over Denny, the one whom I could not help but regard as being rather touched in the head, although in a harmless way, unlike Obadiah Hakeswill, whose Scripture-inspired madness had taken a form of utter malevolence - the Bible-obsessed Holy Innocent, Isaiah Tongue). I hope God will forgive me for the untruth, but I suppose that lie must rank amongst the least of my sins.
The moment of horror had passed; the interval of levity had come, and gone; now had arrived the enduring hours of grief and heaviness – the time of burial parties and solemn utterances and the writing of letters to the mothers and fathers far away who would soon be weeping for their lost sons on account of the words of condolence I must write, which I had known would rend their hearts cruelly, for all their kind intention, even as my quill had incised them onto the paper. It was always like that, I remember, after a battle as testing as the one which we had just survived. After Waterloo, Wellington famously said that the only thing worse than losing a battle was winning one – I have since heard him say this in Parliament on more than one occasion. If one has never been in the thick of an engagement, that can seem like the hollowest cant. But looking back to the aftermath of my sudden unexpected elevation to command in the very intensity of the fighting at Talavera, I now see the truth of that. Talavera had been a great and unexpected victory - but very quickly thereafter it had begun to feel like the very reverse, for owing to logistical reasons (and further problems with our Spanish ‘allies’) we had soon found ourselves having to retreat once again into Portugal, and very shortly after that the French had once again been in possession of Talavera - and so it had all been for – what? And Kit Denny’s mother had been left with nothing of her beloved son but his miniature likeness and a lock of his hair - and my fatuous bloody letter – carefully written as if I had known the boy, but it had all been a pretence and a lie – a well-intentioned kindly-meant lie, but a lie for all that. I had been in command of the South Essex for all of two days and already I had found further cause to hate myself – as if all the previous causes had not been sufficient!
I apologise for that lengthy digression, arising from my unforgettable memory of Sharpe that day, all because I had been musing upon his Mephistophelean characteristics! To return to the topic of Aabha, I cannot determine entirely why that should be, that I should have been so wary of mentioning him to either of them, Richard or Stephen. I imagine I must have feared Richard’s voluble angry censure, for he had often warned me in characteristically harsh and coarse terms against forming sentimental attachments to persons whom one remunerates for the privilege of intimacy, and he knew of what he spoke, at one time in his life having had to resort to that line of endeavour to make his living – even lowering himself to turning tricks in dark and stinking alleys for pennies when the thieving had been yielding especially poor results. At the time of the Fenner Affair, when he had come to London and met me in my new circumstances (in the summer of the Year ’13) he had even at first suspected me of paying Stephen primarily to share my bed, and had actually accused me of this to my face, throwing in the further barbed remark that he supposed that this had likely been the only way I could now have persuaded anyone to lie with me following what had happened to me at Ciudad Rodrigo. This had almost physically knocked me off my feet, such had been the viciousness of it – it really had landed like a blow to the belly: no-one other than my brother Charles had ever shown me such deliberate cruelty in my life! I had been so deeply shocked by this that I had been unable to say anything in return. I had simply stood there dumbly as Richard had stalked out of the room, unable even to weep. That had come later.
Had I not been in the long habit of assuming that if the low-born Sharpe had hurt me, either in my body or in my heart, then it was because I had deserved it - because of Mark - always because of Mark! – then I might have been able to attempt a reply, but I had not. As I have previously intimated, this had been at the height of the Fenner drama, which had probably accounted for the intensity of Rchard’s anger and bitterness towards me at that time, when he had discovered that I had seen fit to take an approach which had differed somewhat from his own concerning how we should deal with the matter. As I had slowly recovered from his onslaught (I am afraid that I had been trembling so violently in the aftermath of the incident that I had had to sit down for some time with a stiff brandy – by myself, as I could not bear the company even of Stephen – perhaps especially that of Stephen - at that point – what had made this so much worse, of course, was that the awful scene had taken place in the family house in Upper-Brook-street and it had been a vain hope on my part to imagine that none of the servants had overheard at least some of what had passed between us) I had begun to reason with myself that Richard had had every right to say as he had, seeing that he and Serjeant Harper had come close to losing their lives in the course of their investigations into the Foulness affair, and so I had duly resolved to reconcile with him if I could, notwithstanding what had passed between us. Even days later, however, when we both had had an interval in which to recollect ourselves, it had been all I that I could do to persuade him that, at the point at which I had offered Stephen the post of secretary some eighteen months earlier, I had certainly harboured no such ignoble intention as to make him my salaried bed-companion, and what had come about had simply happened through unintended mutual attraction (or so I had persisted in telling myself, anyway).
As to Stephen, I suppose I had dreaded the thought of his unspoken reproaches and lingering unhappy downcast silences, had I told him about Aabha, and I have always done all I could never to break that bruised reed (hence my elaborate scheme to send him to Brighton to fulfil his long-standing desire to see the sea, the time I had Richard to stay at Durford with the purpose of repairing our relations following the resolution of the Fenner Affair. As far as Richard was concerned, I have never been sure if my efforts there were entirely successful, but at least he apologised unprompted, and in the most contrite and generous of terms, for his wounding remarks both concerning Stephen’s status and my grimly altered physical appearance). Nonetheless I have often thought upon Aabha since those last days in India, wondering what had become of him and of all those who had dwelt in Lali’s house, for I had heard that not long after Sir Arthur Wellesley had ceased to be Governor of Seringapatam and the British had left to press their cause further north, the city had gone into rapid decline and many of the people had departed to seek better fortune elsewhere.
Naturally I gave my native servant, the good and faithful Anil, a parting present too – a fine chased dagger of Damascus steel which I had bought at the auction of Major Ramsay Blewett’s gear after he had died of an apparent heart-stroke at the end of a hard march on a very hot day early in what I can only describe as the spring of ’05, although the Deccan of course knows no spring, at least not as we experience it in the north-west of the world. Anil expressed himself very pleased with the gift, and wished me well for my future career, and also regarding my matrimonial endeavour. Thus we, too, parted in friendship.
It so happened that when the time came for me to return to England from India, by great good fortune - intervention by General Lake (14), no less! - I had been able to secure a berth in a fast frigate, His Majesty’s Ship Trident, 64, Captain Benjamin Page - the same rather elderly third-rater in which General Wellesley was to sail home to England that very voyage (15), and just the sort of vessel Néreide, the ship in which I had travelled out, in the Year ’98, had been before it had been razee’d and turned instead into a heavy frigate. (I should point out that a ship of His Majesty’s Navy is nowhere near as accommodating as an East Indiaman – Indiamen having bulbous sides which increase their capacity for cargo – and the ships of the Royal Navy are far more crowded with hundreds of men and boys who must continually work the sails and the sheets and halyards, to render the vessels agile and quick to manoeuvre and bring the guns rapidly to bear, should they encounter an enemy - and our quarters were Spartan indeed: Sir Arthur slept in a corner of Captain Page’s day-cabin which had been screened off with sail-cloth, and my hammock was slung in the First Lieutenant’s already cramped cabin off the wardroom (he had the courtesy at least to appear not to resent this). Our dunnage had found some grudging space in the rearward hold; at least on this occasion I had not shamed myself by bringing a redundant small antique keyboard instrument along with the rest of it, which was just as well, considering the difficulties of entering a ship at anchor off the coast at Madras with the customary huge ocean swell obtaining in the Bay of Bengal – again I came within a small margin of falling in and being either drowned, or crushed between the side of the ship’s pinnace and the hull of Trident itself, but that is but a commonplace mishap at Madras.
At first I had been dismayed to find that Sir Arthur and I were to take passage in the same ship. I had never forgotten the fearful public dressing-down which he had given me in Harris’s tent that time in the Year ‘99, concerning the clavichord which I had foolishly brought out of England with the rest of my luggage, causing much difficulty for the native boatmen who had had to raft my gear ashore, and all unwittingly gained personal notoriety and provoked a good deal of mockery towards the officers of the 33rd by the officers of other Regiments by having done so, but now, to my surprise, I found that he was cordiality and affability incarnate! At the time I had imagined that this had been because he had been pleased to be going home at last.
“Lawford! I see you’ve finally taken my advice!” he said by way of greeting when he first spotted me on deck just after Trident had dropped and sheeted home its sails and catted its anchors and had begun to stand off from Madras and move out eastwards into the Bay of Bengal some miles from the coast, which had surprised me greatly – Captain Page had later explained why that had been necessary, at dinner that evening (I had left it to someone else to ask that question, as I had been still only a Captain, and a Captain in a Regiment of Foot, at that, the approximate equivalent of a second or third Lieutenant in the Royal Navy) – I recall that the ominous-sounding phrase ‘a lee-shore grounding’ had come up, putting me in mind of what had happened to the Jamaica-bound transports in the winter of ’95 when the men and officers of the 33rd – the lucky ones, myself included - had been cast up on a beach in Dorset – it had not simply been the wind, he had said, which could have had us on the rocks if it had become too lively, but the very underlying heave and push of the sea which could be perilous - preparatory to wearing at last upon a south-south-westerly course, the breeze, at first gentle but shortly to become quite brisk, now full on its stern.
“In taking passage home, Sir Arthur?” I had asked him.
“No! Although it’s high time you did, of course. Full seven years now, ain’t it?”
“Yes, sir, if one counts the passage out and back.”
“Even if it’s only six years in truth, it’s long enough for any Englishman to spend in India, in my opinion,” (the third of five sons of an Irish Earl had said to me, and I had tried not to look too quizzical). “It certainly starts to take it out of you after seven years, if you ain’t dead already, haha! Although if I am honest, part of me is sorry to be leaving. Wonderful land, wonderful! What I meant was, you’ve had your hair cut at last! Suits you, Lawford.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I debated with myself whether I ought to explain that the reason why I had finally submitted to the barber’s shears with resignation was because I had spent the last six weeks or so in the officers’ ward in the fever hospital in Madras on account of that persistent debilitating recurrent febrile illness which I had never been able entirely to shake off since Flanders, and a fever and prolonged bed-rest always meant a hair-cut, of course (I had decided that I was not going to attempt to re-grow my queue – every time I had done so in the past ten years it had always had to come off again on account of fever or sea-sickness or lice or some other tiresome cause, and in any case, the tide of history had now begun to turn against the style, at least amongst landsmen – I did not know what I was going to do with my collection of black silk-velvet ribbons – I supposed they might be usefully re-purposed as tourniquets in the event that we came under attack whilst at sea); then I had decided that I would keep that to myself in case it sounded to Wellesley as if I were angling for his sympathy. That thought had made me cringe inwardly. Besides, I had not wanted this latest bout of sickness to be widely known, as I had been aware that it could have adversely affected my prospects – this kind of thing had been happening with tedious regularity since Flanders, and every time it had, certain people of station superior to mine had looked upon me with a cooler and cooler eye each time I had attempted to advance in my career – or at least, so it had often seemed to me. Instead, I had merely bowed, and Sir Arthur had bowed in return in the most friendly and familiar manner – nothing cold or stiff about his deportment now! - and had walked off, having spotted a second old acquaintance, who was standing at the rail on another part of the deck watching with apparent wistfulness as the city of Madras – the whitewashed ramparts of Fort St George, dazzling in the March sunshine - the gaudily-decorated towers of the Hindoo temples - the graceful, slender white minarets of the mosques - hull-down already (as one might say of a ship as it appears to begin to sink beneath the horizon at about twenty or so miles distant owing to the curvature of the Earth), disappeared into the distance, now a long way astern.
We had sailed within distant sight of the coast for some time, but all that was truly familiar was soon lost far in the haze to the west, and then to the north-north-east. I too was sorry – even sad - to be leaving – indeed I surprised myself at my depth of feeling, for I had never thought that I should feel so affected by my departure from India, even though I had long felt in my heart that it was an enchanted land, somehow magical, and that I would regret the loss of it for the rest of my life once I was returned into the matter-of-fact world of England, where Kings and Princes consulted dull ministers in duller frock-coats to advise upon their best courses of action and did not employ wizards to divine the future from the stars of from pots of heated oil, and where those who hunted were gentlemen in badly-cut woollen coats riding upon horses in pursuit of foxes, rather than Nabobs and Rajahs in silks mounted upon gorgeously-caparisoned elephants, from the vantage-point of which they purposed to chase down tigers. I had not been sure why I had felt as I did. I had supposed that I would miss the sights and sounds and scents – even the stinks - of India, and I would also miss its people, whom on the whole I had liked (apart from those bastard guards in the Tippoo Sultan’s dungeon, of course – I imagine they had perished in the fall of the city, or perhaps, seeing that their master was dead, had run to free Doondiah Waugh from his cell and had then absconded with him into the wild). I had not supposed that I should miss those vile Thuggees who had once kidnapped me, either (briefly but nonetheless traumatically), apparently (according to Anil, at least) with a view to sacrificing me to their Goddess at their bloody feast of Durga Puja – the best day’s work Anil ever did for me was to thwart that scheme, snatching me from peril with the help of some friendly East India Company sepoys, and ensuring my safety!
As Trident’s giant stretches of canvas filled out and we began to pick up the knots whilst we now sailed parallel to the Coromandel Coast, I wondered if I were ever to return to India. Reason said that there was a good chance that I should, if I continued in service in the Army - and if I survived, of course - but in my heart I felt that I should never see that land again, and I was sorry for it. I was sorry, too, to be leaving behind Aabha in Seringapatam, and Uncle Hector at Assaye. I wished I could have brought his bones home with me, to be buried in the Highlands at last - but later Sharpe was to tell me that he had buried the Colonel’s body himself, with his feet towards the north-west, so that when he came out of his grave at the Resurrection he would see which stars to follow to reach his Scottish Heaven, and that touched me deeply, to know that Richard had in the end cared so much for the old fellow, who, I know, could exert a repressive and coercive pressure when he had been in the mood to be particularly Presbyterian and avuncular. I had felt his heavy hand upon my soul a great deal when I had first gone out to India (he had cared for me, I had known – but he had also known about the horrible circumstances in which I had left Durford, and had behaved towards me accordingly, according to his religious convictions), but for the most part I remembered how good he had been to me when I had been a lost boy, twelve years old and ready to founder. Thanks to the good offices of Richard, Hector on the day of Resurrection would be in the fine company of his fellow-Highlanders - all those brave men of the 74th - who lay there too, alongside him, and that thought at least had made me glad.
Then, as I watched the lands of the Madras Presidency settle lower and lower beneath the northern horizon, I felt a sudden pang for Rufus, my horse. If it is possible to love a non-human animal I suppose I had loved him. He had certainly been a very dear friend since I acquired him in the January of ‘99, and when it had come to the point of selling him I had almost faltered, for - and I knew that I was not imagining this - I could see the reproachful expression in his mild brown eyes - he had been perfectly aware of what was happening, I am sure of it - as I placed his reins into the hand of the young Lieutenant to whom I had sold him for a very reasonable sum (the young man, aged about nineteen and newly promoted from Ensign, was from a modest background – his father had been a country doctor, at Edmonton in Middlesex, I think, and the fees which he had charged had been commensurate with the means of most of his patients) - and he had been thrilled to acquire such a good, placid, sturdy and dependable horse for the exchange of so little gold, notwithstanding Rufus was now well into middle-age in equine terms.
“I am very sorry, dear old boy,” I had told Rufus, privately, before the deal had been struck, “but I cannot take you with me on a ship back to England. You would be sick and miserable, and it is a very long way indeed. The sea can be rough, and you might break a leg. And there is no grass at sea, and you could not exercise as you should. You did not thank me for Hakeswill’s thorn – and you certainly did not thank me for that Mahratta caltrop on the road to Deogaum, did you, poor old chap! (16) You have suffered many things on my worthless account. Now you have a new young officer to carry, and I hope that he will love you – in fact, I think he already does – and that he will take better care of you than ever did I.”
Rufus had looked unconvinced at first, but when the young Lieutenant had stroked his nose and fondled his ears and had spoken gently to him, he had at once taken to him, whinnying softly in reply to his endearments.
“May he bear you to good fortune,” I had said, to the boy. He had thanked me, and my last sight of Rufus, as I had turned to look - for I had not been able to prevent myself from turning back to call a final farewell to him - was that of the good horse nuzzling happily for some slices of mango in the palm of the hand of the pleasant young fellow; his ears twitched, so I knew that he had heard me, but he did not look up, so intent had he been upon his treat. Thus I was confident that Rufus had understood that he now had a new master, and so he would soon cease to regret me.
I knew that I should not miss the 77th. I had not been with the regiment for half long enough for it to come to feel like ‘home’, unlike the 33rd - although I knew that I should not miss the Havercakes either. Between Major Shee and Captain Morris and Sergeant Hakeswill my time in that body had not been rendered the happiest of experiences – and there was also the distressing memory of the death of Lieutenant Wilfred Halston, which had become hardly any less sharp and painful in the ten years since it had happened. I knew I need not regret leaving behind Richard Sharpe, as I understood that he too was supposed to be going home to England, to join the recently-founded Regiment of Rifles. I also knew that I should not miss the Indian climate. I never told Sir Arthur that, like him, I was returning partly for the benefit of my health, which had suffered what had threatened to become a profound and continuing decline, had I remained in India. It seems that it is indeed a true thing – as Sir Arthur had observed at our first meeting aboard the Trident - that no Englishman of anything less than the most robust health might hope to survive in that land for longer than seven years without suffering severe detriment to his vital spirits, and since Flanders mine had been indifferent at best.
By the time I had sailed on the Trident, after weeks in the fever hospital, my health had been in a parlous condition indeed, more so than I had at first realised. Following the excitement of embarkation and departure, which had kept up my spirits, and my blood fizzing, I had then suffered something of a collapse. I had had to spend several worrying days lying upon my cot; then, as my condition had not improved quickly enough to satisfy the ship’s surgeon, I had been transferred to a berth upon the orlop-deck directly beneath his concerned and watchful eye. It had gone without saying that I had almost persuaded myself once again that I was dying. This phase had lasted until we had got out from the horrid tropical conditions of the Indian Ocean into the keen refreshing winds of what had been by then the South Atlantic winter.
My final weeks in India had been passed, as I have said, in the hospital at Madras - a thoroughly tedious and unprofitable time for me; but whilst there at least I had been able to do a good turn for a young fellow by name Christopher Hollingsworth, a Lieutenant of the 19th Light Dragoons, of age about one-and-twenty, who had been robbed of all his money and possessions whilst he had been lying for many days insensible with the fever endemic to the region in his billet at Arcot near Vellore before he had been brought to the hospital. To help conduct his mind away from his troubles I had asked him about his experience of action, and whether the Army had so far lived up to his expectations. Two years earlier, he had told me, as a Cornet, he had been present at the Battle of Assaye and had witnessed (at a distance) the near-legendary deed of valour performed by a Sergeant of the 33rd on detached duty and serving as Arthur Wellesley’s orderly, when he had fought off Wellesley’s attackers (the General, surrounded by foes, and dazed, having fallen from his fatally injured horse) and preserved him from being seized into enemy hands - possibly even saved his life. He had never seen such bravery! He was all astonishment when I told him then that I had had the privilege to serve with that same Sergeant, now Ensign Richard Sharpe of the 74th on account of his actions that day at Assaye, in the Light Company of the 33rd at Seringapatam in the Year ‘99. Something in Hollingsworth’s shy wide-eyed admiration of Sharpe, and his evident pleasure at my having encouraged him to tell the tale, reminded me of myself at his age, which had unfortunately been a time of great sorrow and trouble for me. Accordingly I put him in funds (acting most probably out of pity for my former self, I decided, upon examining my conscience – after all, he had meant nothing to me personally, although his plight had touched me - and I had also been glad to hear his breathless first-hand account of Sharpe’s triumph, which had lifted my heart and raised my spirits) to the tune of some fifty guineas (it had been the sale of Rufus which had enabled me to be so generous). At first he had seemed overwhelmed, and had said that he could not possibly accept the money, but I had urged him to be practical, for he had been left with nothing - ten thousand miles from home! and so at length he had relented. Hollingsworth had said his uncle would repay me when I had returned to England. I had told him not to think of it, that it was a gift, not a loan; and only then did it turn out that his uncle was the Hon. William Stewart, Lieutenant-Colonel of the new Regiment of Rifles under Colonel Coote-Manningham – the Regiment known as the 95th, the latest of several Regiments to bear that designation.
“But he will certainly learn of your very great kindness towards me, sir, nonetheless,” the grateful young fellow had said. I doubted that very much, having once been a thoughtless, light-headed and casually forgetful boy myself; but to my surprise I later discovered that young Hollingsworth had indeed written of me to his uncle in glowing terms. I heard this from an acquaintance at Horse Guards on the occasion of a visit there shortly after my arrival in England that September (young Hollingsworth’s letter must have gone in the diplomatic bag on the overland route via Suez and Alexandria, seeing that it had arrived well before I had), and it was a circumstance which I had determined at once to turn to good use when I heard from the same source that Ensign (formerly Serjeant) Richard Sharpe had been expected back from India later that autumn (I had experienced a sudden frisson of bodily excitement at the possibility of seeing Richard again when he had told me that, which alarmed me considerably – the chief objective of my going home, after all, had been to be married to Jessica at long last, and I had known perfectly well that, after six years, I certainly should not have been still hankering for the tumbling embraces and rough caresses of Richard Sharpe! - this had been before I had discovered that the 2nd/47th had received orders to remain in Dublin after all, so I had not been going to spend any significant length of time in England) and was said to be seeking to join this novel body, the Rifles - although, I was informed, to my dismay, that it seemed unlikely that it would have him, he having not made much of a success of his time in the 74th - to put it in as neutral terms as possible.
For one thing, I had been further apprised, valorous deed at Assaye or not, Sharpe had not been deemed to have the makings of an officer. For another, at the age of eight-and-twenty he had been considered rather too old to be a Second-Lieutenant (the Rifles having no rank of Ensign, owing to the particular way in which that regiment fought in battle). I had disagreed with this assessment: throughout our mission together at Seringapatam in my opinion Sharpe had shown every sign of having the makings of a fine officer, if being counted as such subsisted in being a canny bold warrior and inspiring leader of men, and not just a place-holder who cuts a fine dash in a silver-laced coat and who can tell a fine hunting story in the mess after dinner; and if he had been too old to be deemed fit for anything at eight-and-twenty, then so must I have been, as we had been of an age. I had therefore lost no time in writing to Lieutenant-Colonel Stewart to call in the favour on Sharpe’s behalf whilst there had remained a chance that he would remember my name, and I am pleased to record that my intercession had achieved the desired result, so that on arrival in England Sharpe was almost at once admitted into the 95th (17). His beginning in that regiment was far from auspicious, of course, but the rest, as one might say, is history (the bonus to this was that I now felt that I had at last made amends for my failure to attend and speak for Richard at the Court of Inquiry which had resulted in his flogging on a time in Mysore, although that had hardly been my fault).
My main objective in returning home, however, as I have said, had been to fulfil my long-contracted obligation to my fiancée Miss Hayles, and marry her (a thing I have sometimes wished I had never done, for it but compounded my troubles and did little good either to Jessica (18) or to me, although I should not wish our daughter Eloisa unborn; she is was often a great comfort to me, and a light in the darkness in those times when circumstances dictated that I could not have another by me) (19), now that I was finally a Major and about to transfer – to the 47th, the Lancashires - they had been in the West Indies for years, but in the Year ’03 a second battalion had been raised, and it was this one which had happened to have a vacancy; it was stationed in Ireland (as I have said), which was the very last thing I should have chosen, but at least they did not have the Yellow Fever in Dublin - this time it had been courtesy of the Earl of Winchester (that is, the grandfather of my half-brother Henry, the present Earl (20), who provided the difference when it came to purchasing up from Captain to Major (I had not had to purchase the rank of Captain upon my transfer to the 4th Company – the promotion had been on merit, and besides, many officers had been killed in the storming of Seringapatam, so there had been numerous vacancies, and I took the place of poor Captain Fillmore, the officer who had tried, unsuccessfully, to defend Sharpe at his hearing after the skirmish at Malavelly) as it had suited the Earl’s purposes that I should wed at last, and my obtaining a majority had been a condition of the marriage from the first (I imagine old Hayles, by then well advanced in years, had been becoming uneasy regarding whether he had ever been going to get his money’s worth).
It had turned out that Wellesley, with a lack of enthusiasm not dissimilar from my own, upon his return had also been fated to marry a woman (21) to whom he had first proposed many years earlier, in 1793 (the year before I joined the 33rd, which seemed to me an age ago, given all that had happened in those twelve years since) but whose family had rejected him for his then lack of consequence, money and prospects; as far as I could tell when he had spoken of her to me, he had now felt neither any pang of affection nor residual shred of regard for a woman who could so meekly have allowed her so-called friends to persuade her not to marry him in denial of the urgings of her own heart; but the two had maintained a fitful correspondence at necessarily lengthy intervals over the years, and now he had felt obliged, it had seemed to me, to renew the proposal from nothing more than a sense of duty and honour, seeing that she was now well beyond the age of thirty, still unmarried, and likely to remain so otherwise as rumour had it that she had lost her looks yet had retained her studied arch and girlish demeanour and thus had seemed set fair to become a spinster of the more embarrassing and pitiable kind (one still encounters them in Bath and in Brighton, in Cheltenham and in Harrogate, the once-fashionable places of their youth, eking out quietly desperate lives of genteel poverty in lodging-houses and the cheaper sort of hotels, wearing thrice-darned stockings and dining on bread and dripping, sustained solely upon the interest of £1,000 capital in the four percentages per annum (22) if they are lucky – one’s heart bleeds for them – and I often wondered what in the end had become of my governess Jane Turnbull (23) and whether she had at last joined that sorry sisterhood; she would have been in her mid-forties by that date, so I supposed); and Sir Arthur had had my every sympathy.
The farther the Trident had drawn away from India, of course, the greater had grown my anxiety: I had left Durford under the blackest of clouds seven years earlier and I doubted very much whether the circumstances in which I had departed had been forgiven, let alone forgotten. I had dreaded seeing the Viscount and had devoutly hoped that he would be absent in the West Indies when I arrived at home. More than that, I dreaded the possibility of encountering Charles. I told myself fervently that when I arrived at Durford (deliberately unheralded) he would most probably be at his own house in another part of the country attending to his own affairs. I also told myself that I was now eight-and-twenty years old – as soon as I visited Horse Guards and picked up my new commission Major Lawford, formerly of the Pothooks, before that of the Havercakes, and now shortly to be of the Cauliflowers - and it was more than high time that I gave over trembling and feeling faint and as if I were about to vomit whenever I thought about my latest meeting with my eldest brother at the end of the July of the Year ‘98.
As Cape Town in the Year ‘05 had been for two years now in the possession of the Dutch, who at that time had been allied with Bonaparte, our homeward voyage had been punctuated instead by a sojourn at the Company’s island of St Helena, where we had taken on fresh water and supplies and had learned what we could of the most recent news from England, which had not been at all encouraging. I had begun to wonder what we should find when we arrived home – the French fleet in possession of the Channel, perhaps, and King George and his family prisoners in the Tower – or worse – dead - and their heads displayed on pikes upon London Bridge! - and this self-styled Emperor Napoléon squatting in Windsor Castle, issuing his hubristic edicts and stripping England of its food and its treasures and its gold – and its men - in order to feed them into the maw of the Moloch which his Europe-devouring war-machine had apparently become since the resumption of hostilities following the collapse of the Peace of Amiens in the Year ‘03. I thought of Mama, fifty-seven years old now (about the same age as Lali-Ma, I suppose), and alone, and of Miss Hayles and her ageing parents in nearby Liphook, and was seized by a terrible anxiety, which inevitably caused me to suffer another, albeit minor, relapse as I imagined French Jacobin ruffians in occupation of Durford Park – of Cannock House - of our house in Mayfair! and their officers laying siege to Jessica’s virtue! Even worse scenarios had of course soon suggested themselves to me, for I had been aware for a long time now of the vile acts of which the French were capable, even their officers, for many of them had been raised from the ranks, and had not been gentlemen. Sir Arthur, however, had showed great coolness and self-possession when others voiced their fears to him one night at a dinner in Governor Patten’s Jamestown residence, so that I was ashamed to express my feelings, and kept them to myself, for all that had served only to render my condition far worse (24). For uncounted weeks, however, notwithstanding Sir Arthur’s stoic composure, I had silently fretted myself into a declining state of health which had again begun to become a source of alarm to the ship’s surgeon - only to discover finally, of course, upon our arrival in Kent that my dreadful anxieties had been groundless. By the time that we had entered the Channel and our signalling-officers had passed on to the Captain the more encouraging news which they had been learning little by little from passing out-bound vessels for a few days now, my constitution had suffered further serious debilitation.
As things had turned out (to my great relief) following my arrival at Dover that September after a voyage of some six months’ duration, neither of them – neither the Viscount, nor Charles - was at home. As I had hoped, the Viscount was in Barbados (where no doubt even at the age of five-and-sixty he had been still enthusiastically debauching his stable of mulatto and quadroon mistresses), Charles meanwhile had been diligently persecuting his tenants at Mortimer Common up in Berkshire almost as if they had been Blacks cultivating cotton on the Lawford estate near Bridgetown (Mortimer Common is some way distant from Durford, although nowhere near distant enough, in my view – a scant thirty miles) and Mama had been in possession of the field, alone save for the faithful Curtis (her maid) and Mrs Milland (the everlasting housekeeper) for companionship.
It was however still not to be a happy bazgasht (25) for me: almost the first thing Mama said to me when I went to seek her out in the lesser drawing-room, where I had guessed that she would be at that hour of the day, in order to present her with a heavy calash of polished brass, remarking that I thought it would look well upon the hearth where it would catch the fire-light (and by the way, it struck me as bloody cold in that room, for the fire had not been lit although it had been by now September; it had then occurred to me that of course it was bound to strike me as cold - it took me a long time to become inured once again to what had now seemed to me as England’s unconscionably cold climate) was, why had I not saved Uncle Hector’s life when the traitor Dodd had been about to murder him at Assaye? (26). Somewhat taken aback (for as I have said, I had been away in India for seven years, and Assaye itself had been some two years in the past by this time) I had attempted to explain that India is a very large country, indeed, subcontinent consisting of many countries, and that I had not been at Assaye, but that I had remained in Mysore, near Seringapatam, many hundreds of miles to the south, the distance from Ullapool to Petersfield in fact, with the rest of the 33rd, where I had been for a time Captain of its Fourth Company until had I transferred to the 77th, patrolling the roads to keep them secure against the depredations of the Mahratta bandits, according to our standing orders, and that if I had gone to be with Uncle Hector without reckoning that would have made me a deserter, and that I should have been court-martialled and cashiered, and rightly so, but nevertheless I could not persuade her! In the aftermath of the fall of Seringapatam I had in fact chanced upon Uncle Hector’s heirloom claymore (which had seen action against the Old Pretender at Sheriffmuir in the Rebellion of ’15 and against Prince Charlie at Culloden in ‘45) in the Tippoo’s armoury, where I had had a suspicion that I might find it (it had been seized from him by one of the Tippoo’s lancers in the course of his capture) and had restored it to him, to his great delight and gratitude: this I pleaded in mitigation, but even this intelligence had not seemed to make an impression upon her.
Next, Mama asked me if I had read the Bible which she had given to me before I embarked for India. I told her – truthfully - that I had, most evenings, until it had been taken from me by the Tippoo Sultan’s guards.
“Why ever did you allow them do that, William?” she had asked me in tones of such icy displeasure that I had been reminded of the retreat to Bremen in ‘95. It would not have taken much more for the symptoms of the dysentery from which I had been suffering at the time to have reasserted themselves.
“I was their prisoner, Mama; Uncle Hector and I, we were made prisoners together. In a dungeon. Locks, bars, chains – things of that sort. We were in their power. They had pistols and sabres and spears, and the like. And whips.” And a fucking great man-eating tiger.
“You might have made a greater effort not to let them take it from you. It was a fine edition – tooled leather with gilded lettering on the spine, and two silver clasps! It had a concordance and a Harmony of the Gospels bound with it, and the Book of Common Prayer too. It cost me five guineas! And why should they have wanted it in any case, if they were Mahometans?”
“I am sure they took it for the silver clasps, Mama. They would not have wanted it for what they no doubt viewed as its heinous calumnies against Isa al-Masih.”
“There is no such person in the Bible!”
“The Prophet Isa al-Masih. It is their name for Jesus Christ, Mama – ‘Christ’ is Greek for ‘Messiah’, the anointed. Uncle Hector told me. He took issue with the followers of Mahomet but at least he had taken pains to study their scriptures and their exegetical writings, so he knew what it was about which he disagreed with them. I am sorry for your five guineas, Mama. I shall repay it, if you wish. I begged the guards not to take it, if they would be so kind, as it had been given me by you, by my mother - but they only laughed. But I was able to keep a page of it, secretly, at least at first. It was torn out in the struggle as I tried to hold on to the book. They beat me for resisting but they did not find the page. Anyway, I taught a man his letters - a private soldier who was a prisoner with us – I taught him to read, from that page.”
“You were locked in a dungeon with a - a private soldier?”
“Yes, Mama. A private soldier. There was a Serjeant, too, in a cell just across the way. Three of us from the Thirty-Third, and Uncle Hector, the East India Company Colonel. Why, did you think they would give officers luxurious quarters all to themselves? India is not Europe. There they see no distinction between the men and officers of our Army, or between our Army and that of John Company. They see only foreigners and infidels in red coats. And whether their flag be that of the Union, or the stripes and crosses of John Company, we are unwelcome intruders in their land.”
“Locking you in a cell with a common soldier - the very idea! Dirty brutes!”
“Common soldiers are all right, Mama, once one has become accustomed to their ways - ” I said, mentally touching wood at that – (many years later, in the Peninsula, when I had once invited Richard Sharpe to supper, on returning from stretching my legs I had found him clearing damp powder out of the pan of his rifle, which it was his fancy always to carry with him everywhere, as if he had still been in the ranks, with a fork from my travelling canteen – a sterling silver fork! la! the savage! the filthy animal! – one of the tines had remained permanently bent ever afterwards – I could have had it repaired in any town in Portugal or Spain, of course, but instead I had chosen to keep it as it was, for his sake - I confess! I took care to eat with it on the evening before the second assault upon Ciudad Rodrigo in the Year ’12, thinking that it might serve for me as a powerful talisman: however...). I might have had what the men had called the vapours at the discovery of the bent tine, had not Rifleman Daniel Hagman (dear Dan!) at that point handed me a sort of bag which he had fashioned out of best brown paper, with the words, Here, sir, breathe into that, good deep breaths, now, and you’ll soon feel better – (He was right – I did) - “they are rough but they have good hearts. They are also remarkably good at keeping themselves clean and tidy, often in difficult circumstances, for the Sergeants and Corporals take great pains to teach them this discipline when they are first taken as recruits to the depots to be drilled.”
“William, you are as obtuse as ever. I meant your captors, of course.”
“I dare say we were all of us pretty dirty by the time we finally escaped, Mama. Grown somewhat brutish too, no doubt.”
“The French would never have done such a low thing, whatever else they might do. They would surely have maintained the proper distinctions.”
“Do not you believe that, Mama! Was not their late revolution intended precisely as an experiment in doing away entirely with all distinctions of rank? Besides, the French do as much to their British prisoners as the Sultan’s men, it is said, and worse.”
“I do not believe you, William (27). The French are a civilised people. They taught the world how to be civilised! When your great name-sake the Conquerer came, the English, even their lords, were living in mud huts without chimneys, their children and dogs alike rolling upon the rushes on the floor together in the reek and stink – “
“Mama, you are a Scot. The Conqueror first stamped all over the South of England, then ravaged the North and after a time barged his way into Scotland and forced King Malcolm to sign the pernicious Treaty of Abernethy, and if that were not enough, took his son Duncan as an hostage to ensure his future good behaviour! The Viscount might be a brute, but at least he’s never agreed to barter a son into servitude for life – oh, wait. Never mind. But why do you puff the Norman Bastard? I am curious to know.”
Mama, for almost forty years now an hostage herself of the usurping ‘English’ aristocracy, had declined to answer that, saying merely,
“Anyway, why should you have taken it into your head to teach a common soldier how to read?”
(I had secretly congratulated myself at that, for Sharpe had been by no means the first whom I had tried to help in that way. I thought about Susannah, a young house-maid at Durford who had often been kind to me. When I had been about ten years old, and she I suppose about seventeen or eighteen, one day, and very shyly, she had approached me and said that she had seen me often with a book in my hand, and why had I so liked to read? So I told her about poetry and history and travel, and above all, about stories. I had asked her if she could read, and she had said no, but she would dearly love to learn; so secretly I had contrived to teach her, whenever a meeting could be arranged, and somehow, miraculously, and quite contrary to my usual experiences in life, we had never been detected, and Susannah had learned to read, and indeed in due course she had become very proficient. I hope this helped her to advance in life, but I was never to know, as I went to school at the age of twelve in the Year’89, and by the time I returned home that Christmas Susannah had gone from Durford, and I never could discover what had become of her ever after, although I had suspected the worst, because she had been pretty, and Charles, of course, had ever been dogging her steps.)
“So that he could better himself, Mama, for there really was nothing common about him. He was clever, quick, intelligent – quite out of the ordinary, for a ranker. He’d been a thief and a rogue from his childhood, and native wit and mental and bodily agility, which he had in abundance, certainly are aids to success in those callings; but the Army was the making of him: he had been turning out to be one of the best soldiers in the Light Company – until a regrettable incident involving a cruel and dishonest Serjeant threatened to bring disaster down upon him. However, the mission to Seringapatam turned things about for him – his promised reward for success was to be made a Serjeant in his turn, but it was clear to me that he could yet go farther, and I wanted to help him to advance in his career, to be more than that, if he could, once we were free. We had to keep our minds fixed upon the idea of winning our way to freedom, and the things we would have to do once we had escaped, you see, or it would have been the easiest thing to give way to despair, in that place – just to sit in a corner and mope and wait to die, whether by hunger or thirst or disease or the active malice of our captors. The reading lessons kept us busy and occupied. The Tippoo Sultan’s guards did not like it, though. They could not read the Roman letters we traced in the dirt upon the floor, and they took them to be signs of necromancy. They beat us for it.”
“Oh,” Mama said to that, sounding, I thought, not in the least interested. I don’t suppose you would want to know what else they did to me, I thought, then. No: you would not. “This man, this Private, he learned to read and write in very short order, for he was exceeding bright and quick, as I have said, and he did succeed in becoming a Serjeant. In fact, he is an officer now, Mama. He performed an act of very great valour, at the Battle of Assaye, and won a field commission.” Not that you have the slightest idea what that means, or what it tells you about a man.
“The Viscount does not approve of this reprehensible modern practice of raising officers from the ranks.”
“I dare say he does not, Mama. Do you not wish to know what this man – Richard Sharpe – did, to win his commission?”
“I suppose you will tell me, whether or no.”
“He saved Sir Arthur Wellesley’s life at the Battle of Assaye.”
“I had rather he had saved Hector’s. Wellesley. Plain Wesley, as it ought to be. He need not have bothered. That family is a curse and a plague upon this nation. Their grasping groping tentacles are everywhere. Raising common soldiers from the ranks is a mere sop to the Jacobins and the Whigs. It is Bonapartism, the Viscount says. Bonaparte was a mere Corporal, and now he calls himself Emperor of the French. Would your Private Sharpe usurp the King if he could?”
Before I could answer this, however, she went on, making a complete conversational left-wheel, “You will not have seen Timothy.” She then brought forth a small pug-dog from where it had been concealed upon the sofa, next to her, hidden in the folds of her unfashionably wide skirts.
“Mr Johnson is no more?” I said, doing my best to feign an interest I was very far from feeling, at that point, for I was so vexed concerning her remarks touching upon Richard.
“He passed away five years ago last Christmas. I am certain that I wrote to you. I do not recollect that I ever received your condolences.”
I am sorry to confess that I had hated that dog. His party-piece had been to force his vigorous amorous attentions upon the lower limbs of unsuspecting gentleman visitors, who of course had not had the protection of skirts. Mama had always affected not to notice. I was rejoiced to learn that he had died at last - the lewd, the horrid creature. However, I kept my counsel.
“At Christmas in the Year Eighteen-Hundred I was still with the Thirty-Third patrolling the roads of southern India, Madam, and we never remained in any one place for more than two or three nights together. I expect your letter failed to find me.”
Although Francis had some time before informed me in a letter that Mama had assured him that she had left off the habit in favour of Dr Sibly’s Lunar Tincture, which she had persuaded herself was doing her much good, I do think that her mind had quite succumbed to the laudanum at last, for after that exchange she had never again asked me about my time in India and had indeed displayed little interest when I had told her of my forthcoming departure to Dublin. She had at least shewn a little animation when I had said that I had meant to visit Sir Josiah and Lady Hayles the next day in order to put in train the arrangements for my long-deferred wedding to Jessica, however. As upon several occasions formerly, she expressed a preference for us to be married from Lawford House in Upper-Brook-Street, at St George’s, Hanover-square (a prospect which had in the past unfailingly filled me with dread, although, happily, in the event, that had never come to pass). However, I persisted in the conversation. I quizzed her – I am sorry to say rather harshly – as to what had happened to the rose-garden, which had struck me as neglected when I had gone to view it before entering the House, notwithstanding that it was now September and the blooms were for the most part over, and the bushes had of course been naturally gangling at the end of summer.
“It has never been the same since that red-haired boy went away,” she had said, vaguely. “Do you recall the one? The gardener’s boy. You were always with him, for a season, in the kitchen-garden, sketching his simples. I recollect that the Viscount did not care for the association.”
“Herbs, Mama,” I had said, suppressing a wince. “Those were not ‘simples’. He was no apothecary’s apprentice. His plants were for kitchen use. And the boy had a name.” In fact, I am ashamed to say that I had snapped at her, as I should have done to a slacking and lackadaisical subaltern - although she had hardly seemed to notice.
“After you had gone away the Viscount made it a rule that his name must never be mentioned,” she had replied - “so I forgot it. I suppose he was very vexed by the foolish boy’s running off to join the Army, when he had had such a good place here. If he ever had returned to civilian life you can depend upon it that he would not have been received at Durford, nor would he have had a character of the Viscount; he would have had to turn jobbing gardener (28) - and then he would have been sorry indeed!”
I cannot express how acutely this conversation had begun to pain me. The foolish boy had indeed had a name, of course. That foolish boy had been Mark, my Mark, the one-time Crown Prince of the kitchen garden - Mark Lucas – who should have course in time have been the Head Gardener. Had it not been for me. Forced by the Viscount into the 67th, the South Hampshires, when our puppyish amour had been exposed by my vile eldest brother Charles, he had been sent to the West Indies, where, along with almost all of the rest of his draft, he had promptly succumbed to the Yellow Fever. Mark. My first, my true, my only pure love – well, pure it had seemed to me - and I daresay my last of that sort. Those subsequent infrequent and really rather shameful interludes, however fleetingly delicious, with Richard (whom I suspect really has little regard for me, if the truth be known, notwithstanding all that happened between us in India and the Peninsula) and with Aabha (of course), and various others - liaisons so fleeting as to be of no concern here - do not deserve to be so called. Stephen, who had been innocent, of course, when I first summoned him from Cannock to come to work for me in the April of the Year ’12, loves me devotedly, but even that depth of selfless feeling does not merit the epithet of purity – at least, not on my part. Stephen has given of himself unstintingly for years now, and has asked for very little in return; I am most fond of him, but I am ashamed to confess that, in spite of all, I cannot love him – not in the way in which I had loved Mark in those days when I had wandered those few blessed weeks in that lost fool’s paradise of youth, that primavera of the heart, oblivious of encroaching reality, never suspecting that a cruel frost would swiftly blight the tender plant, or that a storm of hail would shred its green still-unfolding reckonings from their stems and bury them beneath shards of killing unforgiving ice.
When I had ridden on my borrowed mount (a friendly compliant beast, although I never received one look or heard one snort to suggest that he had understood my words or even unspoken intentions as Rufus had always seemed to) to Liphook, or rather the hamlet of Lynchmere, two miles distant from Liphook, the next day to pay my respects to Sir Josiah, as he was by then - by virtue of judicious string-pulling on the part of the Earl, of course - and his lady - and, naturally, Jessica - I was to find a warmer welcome, however. (I should at this point put on the record my absolute admiration for Jessica, always a resolute and clear-headed young woman from the time of our first acquaintance when she had been but five years old, and I a tongue-tied silly little boy of nine - so I fear I must have struck her, for at that age I had had none of the poise and confidence which had already distinguished her.) I will forever remember how she greeted me when I presented myself in the drawing-room of the house of her good parents two or three days after my arrival in England.
“Oh,” she had said, coolly, “it’s you - ” - quite as if it had been only a few days since she, a mere girl of sixteen, and my twenty-one-year-old self, after exchanging miniature portraits, locks of hair, and so on, had walked together in her mother’s flower-garden, in the scented aisles of which, as we had strolled arm-in-arm, I had promised her that, if I lived, and, so long as I had by that time obtained my Majority, then upon my return to England, as soon as I had seen to business at Durford I would come to her and put the preparations for our wedding immediately in hand - and not seven long years, as if I had been the protagonist of a ballad of faërie! It had been so long since my last letter (not entirely my fault; I had written before embarkation at Madras and several times since, whenever there had been a chance of getting mail taken off by vessels faster than the one in which I had been a passenger – I had certainly written from St Helena – but with the French and the Dutch at large in the ocean, any fate might have befallen our correspondence, and most likely had) that Jessica and her parents had been on the point of giving me up for lost. In fact, at first I had not been so sure that Jessica and her mother had been entirely glad to see me walk into their drawing-room that day - although they expressed themselves very pleased indeed to receive the bales of fine Indian silks and muslins, together with a rope of pearls of the first quality and a selection of gem-stones (only slightly flawed) which I had sent along in the carriage a day or so later in the care of Jeremy Collins, to whom I had lent my pistols for the occasion, together with a quartet of sturdy men of the outdoors-staff equipped with blunderbusses and cudgels. This represented my contribution to Jessica’s trousseau, and thus stood as a reassuring sign that I had not meant to seek release from the long-standing matrimonial arrangement.
I had also sent several pounds of pepper, cardamoms, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, curry reckonings (astonishing the variety of spices that begin with ‘c’, I had thought) fenugreek, turmeric and so forth, some of which found their way into the surprisingly large quantity of khichuri and kari that had eventually appeared at the wedding-breakfast, alongside other more reassuringly bland English dishes for the culinarily less adventurous amongst the guests - I ought to say, to a mixed reception, although I was mightily pleased to witness Cornelius Slingsby’s baffled reaction to a curried hard-boiled egg! (that in itself compensated me for much of what had happened throughout the rest of the day). All in all, I greatly astonished the Hayles household with these wonders of the Indies, and word spread throughout that part of the county (for servants do so love to gossip amongst themselves, and boast of their employers’ perceived relative superiorities when they encounter their counterparts from other houses – Mark had once shared with me many amusing anecdotes of his encounters with the gardeners of Uppark, Highclere Castle and so forth, when they had met at hiring fairs, for example) that I had returned from the Mahratta Wars the complete Nabob, richer than Lord Clive himself had been when he had come back to England after Plassey half a century before, which was arrant nonsense of course (or Uttar Pradesh, as we subs had been used to say in India, for utter rubbish, in our puerile schoolboy way - although once Uncle Hector had heard me repeat that jest and had used the occasion to impart to me a few home truths concerning to what degree many of our modern western languages, including English, owed a debt to old Sanskrit, I had never done so again). The days when it had been possible for a rapacious, unscrupulous and buccaneering Englishman to make a vast fortune in India through oppression, abuses and sharp practice had been long gone by then, by a generation, at least (and a good thing too, of course), but I dare say it made for some interesting conversations in the inns of Liphook, Bramshott, Griggs Green, Conford, Cold Ash Hill and their environs for more than nine nights afterwards.
There was to be more in this vein when the time eventually came for the speeches at the wedding-breakfast. I could not help but feel that Sir Josiah’s enthusiastic praise upon this occasion must chiefly have been addressed to the uniform, which indeed became me very well, I confess – he can have had no idea of anything which I might actually have done in India, heroic or otherwise, during the seven years of my absence, but I was pleased in that he had obviously been very relieved to see me, nonetheless. I thought then of the boy I had been, of whom he had just reminded me, come to do his duty to his fiancée and his future parents-in-law on that long-ago day, outwardly so polite and respectful, inwardly seething with impatience to reckoning and to get back to Durford, because at that time he had been foundation-shakingly in love with another boy who had lived and worked there, and thus he had grudged every moment of the already cruelly limited time in which they could still be together before he must embark for India which he had had to spend away from the place – away from the other boy, the gardener-lad with a rose in his hand, stepped straight out of an ill-omened folk-song - and I wondered what Sir Josiah would have thought of that, had he but known it.
“Do not you think so, my dear?” Sir Josiah had said then, in something of a worried tone, appealing to his wife, who had still been demonstrating but little enthusiasm at my unheralded reappearance amongst them (I really ought to have waited a day and sent a note to warn them in advance, but my encounter with Mama had so unsettled me that I had quite forgot my manners, and so Major William Lawford – reasonably fresh from Horse Guards and with the ink still barely dry upon the precious Commission in my pocket – had walked in upon them at unawares).
“He has grown quite two inches, I do declare,” was all Lady Hayles had to say to that (she had soon came round to a more accommodating frame of mind, however, once she had begun to help Jessica unpack the exotic parcels, variously opulent and fragrant and sometimes pungent, which had arrived the next day).
“Is not William looking very well indeed, Maria?” Sir Josiah had said, delightedly. “When Martins announced him just now I feared he would come before us with that gaunt tanned yellowish-brownish leathery look one so often sees in old India hands new-come from the East. But he appears in splendid health! No trace at all of isabelline in his cheeks! That’s right, William – you look very well indeed!”
“It is most kind of you to say so, sir.”
“And did you hunt tigers in India, William?” Sir Josiah had asked me eagerly, then. A little taken aback, I smiled inwardly at this. Gentlemen in England (Sir Josiah assuredly was a gentleman now, thanks to the Earl’s good offices and the Knight-Bachelordom which Jessica’s £30,000 had been able to procure for him – surely only the beginning of his ascent, at that price! a peerage awaited him in due course, or else there was no justice) frequently wanted to hear about this kind of thing, even if they could not have told a Rajah from a Sultan from a Nawab from a Nizam, and if examined could not have been found to care less, in any case.
“I am afraid I did not, sir. I once received quite a fright on account of a whole ambush of tigers – for the Tippoo Sultan – this eke-name name of Fateh Ali meant Tiger King - kept them as pets - and one in particular - when the Thirty-Third was at Seringapatam - and that proved a great deterrent to valour, at least on my part. They are beasts definitely not to be trifled with, even when old and slow and losing their teeth. I did make the acquaintance of someone who avidly partook of the sport, however, once I had transferred to the Seventy-Seventh.”
“And did he conquer his quarry?”
“He possessed two pelts with which he liked to adorn his tent to advertise his prowess in the pastime, sir, but on the occasion of his final foray I am afraid that he was killed - but not by the tiger.”
“How so?”
“It was reported that he had been tracking his prey, a notorious man-eater, on foot, pushing through thick jungle, when suddenly he had found himself balanced precariously upon the lip of a steep and hidden gully. So unexpected was this that he lost his footing and fell four fathoms down the rock-face into a dry stream-bed (for the Monsoon had been late that year). His companions, careless of their own safety in the event that the tiger should return to attack them, climbed down to assist him, but sadly his neck had been broke in the fall.”
“How terrible!” had said Lady Hayles, to this.
“On the one hand, madam, yes, it was. But on the other, in the course of recovering his body, his companions made a brilliant discovery: for in the basalt wall of the gully they discerned an aperture, clearly made by man to resemble the pillars and lintel of the door of a noble building, which, on closer inspection, proved to be the entrance-way into an ancient temple carved into the living rock, its walls decorated with marvellous paintings depicting the life of the Buddha, who was an Indian holy man who lived several hundreds of years before Christ. So whilst it was unfortunate that Captain Fellowes had been killed, he had all inadvertently advanced scholarship in the field of the study of the ancient history of India, for which his memory deserves much credit.”
“And the tiger?”
“It escaped unharmed, Miss Hayles.”
“Good,” Jessica had said, firmly. “I am glad to hear it.”
Mama had been barely compos mentis at the wedding, which had been meant to take place on 6th October of that year, as at first I had been told that I must get straight away to Dublin; but there was insufficient time to call the banns, HMS Trident having only arrived at Dover on 10th September; but with this and that we were too late, and so arranged it for the 9th of November, as that was the next convenient date for all parties; only then of course when His Majesty’s Schooner Pickle arrived at Falmouth on the 4th of that month, with just two or three days to go before the wedding, we heard of Trafalgar, which was both a triumph and a disaster for England, with the victory over the navies of both France and Spain, which saved us from extinction as a free nation, but at the too-dear price of the life of Lord Nelson; so with the entire population of the United Kingdom shocked and in mourning (obviously I very much regretted Nelson’s death, but I admit that I had been very much surprised by what I had considered to be the deeply un-British response to it by my countrymen – grown men weeping openly in the streets when they heard the news, women wearing black crèpe weeds for a man whom they had never met, and so on!) we had really no choice but to postpone the wedding to the first convenient date after Nelson’s funeral, which had been set for the 9th of January of the year ’06 – a most disagreeable month in which to marry – and we were eventually wed on the 12th, two days after my 29th birthday, (by which time Jessica and I had been betrothed for twenty years!). Mama by this time had been too far withdrawn into her laudanum-tainted world of shadows and sad fantasies of how her life might have been, had she been in a position to marry the man it seemed she had truly loved, and been Lady of a tract of bog and thin poor rock-strewn grazing-land in the wind-swept west of Donegal instead of mistress of many hundred acres of opulent prime agricultural terra firma hemmed by the rolling green downland of the smiling south of England, even to note and disapprove of the exhibition which our new relatives, Mr and Mrs Cornelius Slingsby (30), had made of themselves that day; and before another three years had passed, she had died.
My nuptials had been a torment to me for many reasons, not least on account of the failure of the wedding-night, which naturally followed hard upon the heels of the horrors of the day itself – my only recollection of events following upon the church service was of dancing in the evening – an activity in which I had taken great delight in in my youth (I had been very aware that I was good at it, and that young women had been pleased to have me as a partner on account of that, confident that I would not tread on their feet and ruin their embroidered slippers, or tear the delicate fabric of their gowns by stepping upon the hems, and thus it had imparted confidence to their own performance, and enjoyment to their evening, which knowledge had in turn had pleased me) – but upon that occasion Jessica and I had been called upon to open the proceedings, being obliged at first to dance an allemande, called by some the ländler, although the two are not the same (31) as a solitary couple whilst the guests looked on, cheering and applauding at first but soon falling decorously quiet, although Jessica and I had been painfully aware of the sly smiles and knowing glances which had continued to pass between the bejewelled and feathered dowagers, barely concealed by fans and glasses of refreshments advanced before their faces (people today will not remember, the modern waltz having since assumed the mantel of contemporary notoriety, the reputation which the allemande once had borne - that dance had formerly been considered very ‘fast’, being a series of evolutions which involved prolonged close intimate contact between the partners owing to the constant intertwining of their arms (32), unlike the more formal courtly dances which our parents had known, typical of an earlier age more bound by decorum; in the context of our nuptials it had been considered a vertical representation, in dance, of what had shortly been meant to take place horizontally, in the intimacy of the marriage-bed); this was, obviously, a private misery to me, and I have never discussed it with anyone (33). However, Jessica helped me through that ordeal by sheer power of will (I was very grateful now that she had insisted upon no fewer than three rehearsals in the week which had preceded our wedding-day, although at the time I had much resented her close management of me and my time and her dismissal of my own priorities – I had wanted to go to Town and merely drink myself insensible for several days in the company of Robert Ovalton, my trusted friend from Eton - to the extent that I had been already tired of our marriage before it had even begun), and once that trial was over we were joined by other couples, so the attention was no longer focussed upon us and our performance. It is no exaggeration to declare that I found the nervous strain of that day, and now that evening, very severe indeed.
Needless to say that Charles had had a great deal to do with the dread and anxiety which had dogged me throughout that day, mainly simply by being present - and now at the end of the ball and supper he had compounded this by frog-marching me to the couchée abetted by one of his ‘friends’ - I cannot recollect his name - some worthless hanger-on he had acquired during his wasted years at school and Oxford (34) and with whom he had from time to time attended the rake-hell assemblies convened at Uppark by the Viscount’s neighbour Harry Fetherstonehaugh (35) (an excellent reason why I was glad we had no sisters, although I know Mama was grieved for the lack of a daughter; for I do not know how Charles could have looked them in the eye, knowing how he and his associates went on upon those occasions, having no care whence the girls recruited for their sport had been procured, nor for their tender years, neither) and a totally slaughtered Slingsby.
Henry, Francis, Alfred (Jessica’s brother) and Bertram Rossendale, to their credit, refused to have anything to do with this rancid tradition. Jessica behaved well in the face of the oafishness of Charles and Slingsby and the cypher Etonian and/or Oxonian (a complete nonesuch) and once they had removed my breeches - a concession I had granted upon the condition that they had the decency not to touch Jessica – in fact, I had told Charles, quite in cold blood, that I would kill him if he laid lascivious hands upon Jessica, or allowed his (for want of a better word, friend) to do so. He had merely laughed at me, of course, and called me a sorry little molly. Had I not threatened him similarly that evening in the gardeners’ hut at Durford at the end of June of the Year ’98, and much good it had done me, or Mark Lucas, for that matter? So I told him (stupidly, boastfully, wickedly – for I had ever hated the killing which necessity had from time to time required of me to commit as an officer in King George’s Army – I should not have done so had I not been drinking steadily all that day – not at all my usual habit, but I could not have borne the proceedings otherwise) that I had slain men in India.
“Blacks, what of it?” he had said, then, utterly dismissive – the caitiff! – I wondered then what he might have said if a person of colour such as Henry’s excellent butler and chief of the Cannock House servants, George Wilkinson, named for the King and the Lawford Hall overseer, had been present, born in Barbados to a slave-woman (allegedly a son of our father, or perhaps our grandfather – I had long had an instinctive feeling of kinship towards the man, although I have never spoken of it to him, of course) but a free man of course, as soon as he had set his feet upon the deck of the packet which had subsequently brought him to England, in light of Lord Mansfield’s ruling in ‘72 - “No different from sticking pigs!”
“No different from sticking white men,” I had said, to that. Sharpe and I had had to take shots at two of our own men, to demonstrate our bona fide credentials as deserters to the French officer, Colonel Gudin, in Seringapatam - it had been necessary, in order to attempt to ensure the success of the secret mission upon which we had been engaged. Sharpe had missed his mark, but by some awful fluke – for I had aimed askance - I had not. That incident has haunted me ever since. (I tried to discover who he had been, afterwards, that man whom I had killed, but I never could. I do not know what I might have done with that knowledge, in any case. I did think of trying to find some anonymous way in which to attempt to make amends to his family, but my efforts did not succeed. I suppose, knowing only too well how other well-intended but gauche gestures of mine have tended to mis-fire over the years, these endeavours probably should only have resulted in more harm than good, in any case.) Until that moment I had never killed anyone, Indian or European. In my subsequent years in India and in the Peninsula, however, I killed my share of Mahrattas, and the French and their allies - mainly the ones who, a few moments earlier, had been doing their utmost to kill me, I should say - not that I am particularly proud of that. War is only ever another name for failure, for fighting, maiming and killing is what happens when men have, shamefully, been defeated in their attempts to find civilised means of resolving their differences – a thing which we ought never to forget. “Black men and white men, they all bleed scarlet and go down into the grave indifferently,” I had told Charles; but Charles and his friend had already been walking away, laughing harshly all the while until they had been out of ear-shot. (Charles had never laughed in any other way. He was one who, lacking a sense of humour and of fun, had only ever found amusement in cruelty.)
After that exchange, of course, I had been completely out of countenance and utterly unequal to the task ahead. Even without Charles’s intervention I doubt very much that I could have done what convention had required of me; however, Jessica had told me then not to fret about the wedding-night - we both had had a very long and trying day, she had said, and we had the rest of our lives in which to become better acquainted in accordance with the usual way of married couples – kind emollient remarks, for which she had had my everlasting gratitude. The dear girl. How I miss her – her sense, her practical wisdom, her kindness, her understanding which had always gone beyond mere words. I confess I had not wanted to be married to her, or to be married at all; but as I had had to be married, she had turned out to be without doubt the best person in the world to whom I could ever have been shackled with the bilboes of matrimony. Sometimes, even now, I send a prayer her way at night, my dear late sainted wife; and also to Eloisa, for even with dear Stephen staunch at my side I still find myself in sore need of their feminine good sense, good humour and practical sororal support in my life. I have wondered at times what the Rector might have had to say to that, to know that I subscribe to the Romish practice of soliciting the prayers of our dear departed, but then it has occurred to me that, actually, I do not care.
There was one other thing in particular about that day which had grated upon my nerves: the flowers. Throughout the period of the wedding preparations the repeated maxim of my future mother-in-law, Lady Hayles, had been ‘all agree that there is nothing quite so charming as a quiet country wedding!’ (I do not know whence she had got that mantra; perhaps she had read it in a novel – I cannot express how extremely it had come to prey upon my sensibilities by the time the day of the nuptials had arrived at last) and yet she put on an horticultural display in that small rural church the vulgarity of which had astonished and, I am sorry to say, offended me (no – not vulgarity; that is too harsh a word – it was not that - misjudged exuberance, perhaps, would be better; Lady Hayles was a good, kind woman, always motherly towards me, and I am sure her excesses proceeded from the best of intentions, having their origin in a laudable desire to exhibit generosity and to demonstrate her love for her daughter. Lady Hayles’s father had been a grocer, albeit a superior one – a purveyor of difficult-to-acquire comestibles, which had been no easy task in those long weary years of the middle of the last century when it had seemed, even then, as if England had been going to be forever in conflict with France, and all the small luxuries which make life pleasant - not hard to come by in Europe, even in time of war, but almost impossible to find in England unless one had the right contacts, which had usually involved knowing a rogue who knew a resourceful man with a fast cutter, some reliable charts of the coast of north-western France, some burly associates and a sense of adventure - had been so very difficult to locate. In her early years Maria Hayles had helped her father in his shop in St James’ Market, before he and his newly-acquired partner had opened their rather grander emporium in Piccadilly. Any social mis-steps on her part, I was sure, had been the innocent result of deficiency in education and breeding rather than inherent coarseness of feeling. My mother-in-law, although the daughter of a grocer, with all the social disadvantages which that had implied, had nevertheless been fundamentally an excellent person, whose simple pleasure and pride in Jessica’s own refinements and accomplishments (learned at an expensive boarding-school in Chiswick in the company of the daughters of Knights Bachelor, Baronets, the odd Viscount, two French emigré Comtes - those were three a penny in those days, of course, but some of them at least had been genuine - and an East India Company nabob or two) - were touching and admirable, but she had had the ancient church of St Peter at Lynchmere filled so full with exotic blooms that it had resembled more a hot-house than a place of worship – and that had been to me, for reasons which must be apparent! a torment in especial!
If all that had been not enough, there had been the matter of Cornelius Slingsby. For some time now he had been Jessica’s brother-in-law: after we had spoken our vows that day and the Rector had set the Almighty’s seal upon them with his uttered words of Doom, Slingsby had, inevitably, also become mine. The matter of Slingsby had been an increasingly festering sore in our family for some years now. It had rumbled and rumbled away. Slingsby had once done Jessica’s family a great favour when her wayward younger sister Portia had been knocked up and got in the family way by a cad in the Hertfordshire Militia, one Edward Wickham, when she had been staying with an aunt in St Albans at Christmas of the Year ’01 (not that his name matters, for the fellow was perfectly worthless) who promptly disappeared, leaving her severely in the lurch (I heard that he joined the 49th, and was sent out incontinent with a draft to Canada, where, in Quebec, with utter predictability, in the Year ’02 he had died as the result of a duel over a woman; but by all accounts he really was no loss to anyone, which had included an aunt and an uncle of his, his only surviving relatives, who, so the gossip ran, already had one ungovernable nephew, apparently called George (that very same George Wickham, it turned out, whom I was to encounter during my sojourn on Wellesley’s staff in the spring of the Year ‘09) with whom to contend, and so they consequently had had small room in their hearts to care much about what became of this one). Thus Slingsby was persuaded, by means of the beguiling clinking sound of golden guineas, to marry Portia – a gracious act by the then Earl, whom my brothers called grandfather even if I avoided doing so as much as I could, who could not countenance the stain of Portia’s shame tainting our name by association, and who, by calling in some favours amongst his peers, had been able to bribe him further with a commission in the 55th, the Westmorelands, and furthermore – once I was placed in command of the South Essex in the Year ’09 - a promise of a transfer to the Wide-Awakes, that famous and gallant body of heroes! - as soon as ever there was a suitable vacancy – all for to enhance his standing and, by this means, emphasise the connection between the Lawford family and that of Sir Josiah Hayles, for the further promotion of my father-in-law’s political career (for let us not forget that long-ago transaction – the £30,000 payment meant, in effect, to secure a knighthood, and political influence, and, eventually, to purchase a peerage). I really do not know why it was Slingsby they had fixed upon to rescue the trollop from ignominy and the workhouse, unless his desperation had made him an easy victim, for every career he had tried up until that point had ended in disaster and ignominy. I shall return to the topic of my wedding in due course, but for the time being let us go on a little, to my posting to Dublin in the spring of the Year ‘06.
Now, Dublin was a posting I never greatly wished for, and it was an altogether dispiriting period of my life, not least because of the cold and the constant chill rain and drizzle and the inescapable all-pervading dampness which persisted in the Barracks (36), which was close to the Liffey upon its northern bank, notwithstanding the elevated situation upon Arbour Hill, which should have been considered healthful, although indeed such conditions prevailed in all that country both winter and summer. I had been absent in the East for seven years and, as I have previously noted, I had grown inured to, if not fond of, the heat of India. I had forgotten how to endure the cold and the bone-chilling damp of the British Isles, and so I had found the Atlantic climate of Ireland insupportable at first. Whilst I was there I was often ill, as the conditions aggravated the recurring fever which I had first contracted in Flanders in the ill-fated campaign of ’94 - ’95, which was infuriating, as I felt every new period of indisposition as a further setback to my hopes of preferment. In addition, I was unable to go much into society when I was there, on account of the likelihood that there would be a resurgence of gossip about the Marquess of Ardara (37) or even the risk that I should encounter some of the Fitz-Simons family, who would most probably have taken great umbrage at the sight of me walking about brazenly wearing their kinsman’s striking features whilst bearing the name of the man who had shot and fatally wounded him in Hyde Park one February dawn almost thirty years earlier. It was for this reason that I quartered in the Barracks and did not take a house in the town, thinking it best to reckoning Jessica in London in Upper-Brook-Street to enjoy her own life with its round of shopping and calling and supper parties and routs (routs! whoever invented that idea of an evening’s entertainment ought to be transported to Australia for life with no remission!) and balls and the like (efficiently squired by my school-friend Lord Robert Ovalton, of course), although I am sure she would have enjoyed the same benefit from the exercise of riding in Phoenix Park as she did when identically employed in Rotten Row; in the same way I dare say she could have gone shopping for the latest fashions in Dame Street and found almost as broad a choice of style and quality as was available in the shops of Mayfair. I later regretted this decision: had I had my wife, and, later, my infant daughter living with me in a respectable town-house in one of the better districts of Dublin, I should have been compelled to maintain a much more regular system of existence, and a great deal of mischief might have been avoided thereby, not least that occasioned by my own lamentable behaviour. Jessica however, after initial reservations, seemed very pleased with the mode of living upon which we had decided, for, as I have said, I had arranged with Ovalton, whom at the time I should have entrusted with my life, let alone my wife, that he should escort her about London as necessary during my absences, so that she should not be deprived of her social diversions - a service which I recall even then he had seemed more than happy to perform. I had not been naïve. I had anticipated what had been likely to happen. I had just not expected what had happened, to have happened as quickly as it had. I had wished Jessica to enjoy a full and satisfying life of course. However, I had soon become aware from the tone of her correspondence, and from hints and warnings that I had from friends, and from reading between the lines in correspondence from Mama and Francis, that it had not taken long for Jessica and Ovalton to become lovers - not that I minded (although I was, I confess, a little surprised at just how quickly this had come to pass, as I have said – I myself having been almost always so very prevaricatory and havering when it had come to making advances towards potential partners in joy, notwithstanding Richard’s early advice, which would have done credit to Lord Nelson, of ‘Go straight at ‘em!’), for this was of course in accordance with the secret pact which Jessica and I had made during the period of our long betrothal before our marriage. I was however glad that Jessica had fixed upon Ovalton. He had been, I was certain, the best choice to make up to her for my deficiencies. I had liked him and admired him greatly since our schooldays, when he had been my rock against the bullies and the predators. I did not wish Jessica to have to essay the role of hypocrite at all, but to have with a worthier lover, as openly as was possible within the constraints of polite society, all the joy of the kind with which I could not provide her. Therefore I did not grudge her Ovalton, as he made her happy in a way that it had long been obvious that I never could. An unwelcome outcome of all this, however, was the inevitable gossip and the passing into circulation of unpleasant and untrue rumours regarding the circumstances of what, to society, had soon begun to look very much like a separation in all but name (38).
So after my time in India, where I had done moderately well and had begun to be spoken of as an officer to watch, as already intimated, in the spring of the Year Five I took passage to England, as previously described (a move which had been permitted on grounds of concerns about my health in addition to my petition in relation to my marriage) with as-yet unarticulated hopes of being taken onto Wellesley’s staff – a thing which did eventually come to pass, but not at that time, on account of his own difficulties with the authorities when he arrived at home (he was contemptuously belittled in some circles as the Sepoy General and for a long time his achievements in India really did not receive the recognition that they deserved; and also I should note here that the Sepoys themselves, who could be as good as any British soldier when properly trained and led, were similarly disregarded by the same sorry set of dreadful people who looked askance at Sir Arthur and who later tried with all their might to destroy him after the Cintra affair); I got the impression that I too was damned in the eyes of some on account of my association with him, which is, I supposed, why I was deemed fit only to be shunted off to Ireland, as had been Captain Morris about eighteen months earlier (he too had transferred out of the 33rd, and had gone home under something of a cloud involving the Light Company’s accounts – I never enquired for the details, although I got the impression that it had been about ninety-nine percent due to his incompetence, his laziness and his hopeless inability to keep on top of his paperwork, and there had not been much if anything by way of out-and-out criminality; Morris was a sad chaotic mess of a man and at the time I was simply glad to think that I would not have to have anything further to do with him - how fate laughs at us!) – I had had no idea that he had transferred into the Cauliflowers, apparently with a view to stashing away enough of the ready to purchase up when the expected vacant majority became available; so you can imagine how I felt when I walked into the mess in the Barracks on my first evening and saw him sitting there – the absolute icing on the Dublin cake, as it were – and his expression when he looked up and saw me told me all I needed to know about how he felt in return. He never had given me back my fourth-best coat after Gawilghur, which I had lent him for the journey south to head-quarters, to grant him some dignity after his uniform and accoutrements of rank had been stolen by some opportunistic thief and he had been reduced to wearing one of my faded and patched and (worst of all) no longer fashionable spares, even though he had complained querulously all the way that it was too tight for him and made him look like a pig in a blanket, and why did I have to be so bloody thin – well, at least he had managed to find himself a sash and a sabre amongst the detritus of the assault on the breach at the Outer Fort, so it had not been all bad news - and I suspect that that was because he had not wished to raise the embarrassing issue of the theft of his coat again – I had more than half-guessed the identity of the criminal, as the theft had been so obviously targeted, and I was fairly certain that so had Morris. Anyway, leaving India behind (once again) and returning first to England and thence transferring to Ireland, it seemed I had unwittingly purchased over him, and naturally he resented that, but it was not my fault that he had had not the cash to bag the majority for himself! – I daresay he had still been suffering from the thing which had thwarted his ambitions in India, viz., too great a fondness for the rum and for the gaming tables and for the ladies in Naig’s green tents. So much for my shiny new posting, I thought; Morris is bound to act the part of fly in the unguent, the scrub. The dismay I experienced was akin to what one feels when, having anticipated a perfectly boiled egg for one’s breakfast, one slices off the top to be confronted, not by the contents of a magical cauldron of molten golden deliciousness, but a congealed crumbling plug into which there is no possibility of plunging a bread-and-butter ‘soldier’, and if one is really unfortunate, it will even be encircled by the dreaded blue Ring of Doom, like melancholy made manifest! The reader might find something comical in such an image, but I can assure you there was nothing to laugh at at all in my plight: I had been supposed to begin my canter through public life in Parliament and Government launched from the mounting-block of a military career which, if not glittering or coruscating, might at least have been optimistically said to have twinkled pleasingly from time to time, and which would have given me credibility and the impression of bottom when I came at last to enter the House of Commons; but here I was, stalled, thwarted and posted sixty miles across the Irish Sea into the Outer Darkness prepared for hopeless cases like Charles Morris and Bartholomew Girdwood, veritable animals both - and Girdwood a crony of his, and, I might add, another thoroughgoing egregious scrub (although Girdwood disappeared into half-pay obscurity following a Court of Inquiry occasioned by an embarrassing encounter with some brigandish rebels whilst leading a half-company on patrol one day – five men dead, eleven wounded, and not one single one of the treasonous Irish dogs so much as captured, let alone killed). No-one missed Girdwood, not even Morris, or if he did he did not betray any sign of doing so. In particular no-one missed his poetic recitations after dinner, when, in an elevated mood, he had been wont to regale the mess with ballads of his own composition, exclusively upon martial themes. After listening to half an hour of Girdwood maundering on about the smoke of bloody battle and the muskets’ deadly rattle, &c, (for the record, muskets do not rattle when fired: they go “bang!” very loudly, and a volley at middle-distance gives rather the impression of the crackling of thorns under the pot, as the Preacher puts it, likening the sound to the laughter of the fool, which seems exceptionally appropriate in relation to a consideration of Girdwood’s vainglorious verses; although I concede that the ramrods do rattle in the barrels somewhat during the process of loading) I would be left puzzling over why it was that I could find no word in the famously rich and well-provided English language stronger than embarrassment or mortification to describe the emotion which his performances never failed to induce in me (and my life had never been lacking either in embarrassment or in mortification of all kinds, so it was not as if I was without experience of feelings of that sort). Girdwood was later to re-surface – Lieutenant-Colonel Girdwood now, in command of the 2nd Battalion the South Essex, and I was disgusted when I heard of that appointment, which was gazetted whilst I was still – just about - commanding the 1st in the Peninsula! – in connection with a scandal in which Sir Henry Simmerson, of whom more anon, was also implicated: that story is told elsewhere.
Now to revert to the topic of my marriage (for I regret I have wandered far from the theme again, although it strikes me that this persistent patten of wandering from the topic is absolutely eloquent of the fundamental difficulty which I had long had concerning the entire matrimonial project!). I recall that I once told Richard about my wedding day. It had been another of those occasions on which I had invited him to breakfast in an effort to cozen him into ending his feud with my embarrassing relative Cornelius Slingsby, at some point in the campaign leading up Busacco in the Year Ten.
“Have I ever told you about the day I got married, Richard?” I had said, in what I had fondly been hoping had been a light conversational tone, buttering a slice of bread and slicing it into ‘soldiers’ as I did so. I had never been able to repudiate that nursery habit (in fact, I do not recall that I had ever tried - eating a boiled egg without ‘soldiers’ had just seemed wrong to me when I had been a child; as a seventeen-year-old Ensign it had made me the butt of humour in the Mess, and I had affected not to care; now here I was, a man grown – more than that - three-and-thirty, even! and still I had not felt compelled to reckoning off my immemorial custom). There was a basket containing half-a-dozen lightly-boiled eggs on the table between us (I had taken care to instruct my orderly in their proper preparation: the first two had been boiled for three and a half minutes and the remainder incrementally for a little less so that they should reach perfection just as I and my guest had been finishing our first and second), and I recall that I had been greatly looking forward to dipping those butter-slathered King’s men into the delicious golden yolks. The hens which travelled in the coop in my baggage had just begun to lay again after an annoying hiatus of a fortnight or so, and I had been therefore very much anticipating the treat, and had been this morning especially pleased by the thought that the I should be sharing it with Richard.
“Not that I recall, sir,” Richard had said, deliberately resuming the wooden dead-pan intonation which he had affected in his days as a Serjeant. He knew how it had always annoyed me whenever he used it in my presence since his elevation, suspecting (rightly) that I regarded it as a provoking sign that, for all his anxious fretting, all his jealous guarding of his position as Captain of the Light Company, about which he cared desperately (this was the cause of the current friction between us, for he had feared that it was to be taken from him permanently and given to my brother-in-law Cornelius Slingsby, which I had repeatedly assured him had not been about to happen, although I remember that I had been finding it hard work to persuade him to believe me) Richard in his soul had never truly risen from the ranks, thus seeming to justify what men like Simmerson had always said concerning him, that he ‘carried his halberd in his face’, as the saying was, and that you could take the Serjeant out of the ranks but you could not take the ranks out of the Serjeant. “I trust it was an enjoyable event for all who had the privilege to be in attendance.”
“Hm. Enjoyable? Memorable, certainly! I thought that I might – you know - just have mentioned it. Briefly. In passing?” I of course had known perfectly well that I had told Richard about it - even in considerable detail - one evening at a private supper in my quarters not long after our reunion in Placencia in Spain, in the days when we had been preparing to march to engage the French at Talavera, before I had unexpectedly found myself his commanding officer.
“I do not think that you have, sir.”
He had remained adamant that I had never spoken to him upon the subject. I had known that he had merely been being perverse, on account of his displeasure with me regarding Slingsby, but there never had been any point in pressing any matter which he had been determined to oppose when he had been in one his negative contrary moods, as he clearly had been on this particular morning.
“You’ve never been married, have you, Richard?” was all I said.
“Me, sir? Married, sir? Not as such, sir, no. Never felt the inclination, nor seen the point. Why go to all that bother when it’s easy enough to get what you want without having to put a ring on some damned woman’s finger first.”
He looked at me pointedly as he said that, but I had not been going to rise to it, for all it had struck me as if he had intended it to hurt me. There had been a time, I confess, when I had wanted him to hurt me, to punish me for what had happened to Mark, as if Richard had been my chosen champion of that class – Mark, whom my family had cruelly abused on account of my lawless actions. But it had been ten years. A great deal had happened, to both of us, since Seringapatam. I was not going to allow myself to be put to shame by some coarse-mouthed brevet-Captain jumped up from the ranks! I told myself – even if that coarse-mouthed brevet-Captain happened to be Richard.
“So, you’ve not had to stand up in public and go through with the preposterous rigmarole,” I had gone on, heartily. “Marriage! ‘A remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication’! It was a dull cold day in January in the Year Six. I’d had my captaincy since May of Ninety-Nine, you remember – “
“Yes, sir. The Fourth Company, to take Captain Fillmore’s place.”
“Yes; poor Fillmore – “
“If he were as shite a Battalion Company captain as he were a defence counsel that day I was dragged before that joke of a Court of Inquiry in Major Shee’s tent, Easter Week of the Year Ninety-Nine, then, to be honest, the Fourth was better off without him, sir.”
“Well! Richard, really! You do speak of the dead most shocking tart!”
“It’s hypocritical to say nice things about useless people just because they’re dead, sir. Especially when the fuckers are even more useless dead than they were when they was alive.”
“Isn’t everyone more useless dead than alive?”
“You can at least use the dead as cover, sir. The most useless bloody Privates can often perform better service dead than alive once they’ve been stacked into a bulwark, like cord-wood.”
Those eggs had been fast losing their appeal now. I had sat silent for a few seconds, rendered temporarily speechless by Richard’s appalling words. “Richard - ! I always – I always rather liked Captain Fillmore,” I had attempted, making an effort to give him a way to retreat from his position. “He was good company in the Mess. True, he was never going to set Horse Guards on fire, but he was at least a gentleman – a man of honour - of nobility of feeling, even. I remember his recitations from Shakespeare - ”
“Gentleman! Shakespeare! Be damned to all of that! – sir. He couldn’t be arsed to try hard enough to stop them from flogging me to death. He was scared of Major Shee! I could tell. Scared of a drunken bully like John Shee! Sorry, sir, I don’t mean to be rude, but I speak as I find.”
“You can call me ‘William’, you know. At least now, here. I’m sure Captain Fillmore – “
“I’m sure he did, Billy.”
“Richard,” I had said to that, quietly enough, “do not presume too far, I beg.”
Following his previous unkindness, Richard had been playing with my feelings again. I was taken aback – as he had known I would be – all the way aback, in fact, to Seringapatam, that night after our triumphant return to General Harris’s camp, following the fall of the city.
“You were at least honest, just then,” I said, after a hesitation. “Speaking as one finds is not always the best policy, but – it is at least commendable - usually. What happened all that time ago was not entirely Captain Fillmore’s fault. In the matter of his defence he was somewhat hamstrung without me there to speak as to your character, a circumstance which I have regretted for the last decade, but we both know why that was.”
“Wasn’t it less than a year later you transferred into the Seventy-seventh?”
“Yes. as they had had a vacancy in their Light Company – was rather young for it – Arthur fussed a bit - but they’d reckoned I merited it after the Seringa business and a few other escapades, jaunts I went on with my uncle, snooping expeditions; sideways-move, well, not quite – command of a Flanking company is greatly to be preferred, so in practical terms it was diagonally upwards, so to speak – but for decency’s sake, after that I held back from purchasing up to Major three years beyond the usual statutory time.”
“My recollection, Billy – please don’t take umbrage, that name, it suits you – it always has – Bill was ridiculous but Billy is absolutely right - is that your betrothed had insisted that she wouldn’t marry you until you were Major Lawford at least, so your reticence does you credit, doesn’t it?”
I confess I looked at Richard a little uncertainly then. Following this third jab at my unprotected vulnerable heart, I had been momentarily concerned that he had been about to refer to certain facts regarding our shared history, for he had been sufficiently angered about the business regarding Slingsby, it had occurred to me then, to dare anything. Richard however had refrained from landing any further blows just then.
At length deeming it safe to go on, I had continued, “Hm, well, anyway, after a little, and knowing that my time in India was coming to an end – I had felt for some time within myself that my health had begun to suffer, you see - I knew that it was time to go home, and I also knew what that would mean: so I made enquiries concerning majorities, and discovered that there was one available in the Forty-Seventh’s Second Battalion. At the time I’d been expecting to be posted to the depot in Preston. Once I’d put matters in train to purchase that, the marriage trap was as good as sprung. I was permitted to return home to marry – long-standing family commitments and so on - and that was that. As I have said, I was originally told that the Second Forty-Seventh was shortly to be transferred to the North of England to serve as a training Battalion for the First, currently at the Cape, which would have been ideal, for then I could have settled Jessica at Cannock Hall, fewer than a hundred miles from Preston, but in the end that did not happen. So it was garrison duty in Dublin after that, for me. I felt it best that I reckoning Jessica in the care of my mother at Durford, to be near her own parents, for by the time I left to join the 47th she had been anticipating a joyful addition – our daughter, Eloisa – and – you know – Ireland, and so on. Dublin! God, that was dull and unpleasant in equal measure!” (It was inexpressibly difficult, having to continue upon the course I had determined – the jovial and generous commanding officer jollying the problematic subordinate - )
“So I understand, sir. Remind me never to be posted to Dublin.”
Richard had looked at me closely then – not aggressive, or even challenging, as before, but as if he had suddenly seen something which alarmed him. That made me feel even more uncomfortable and ill-at-ease than his former keen and scornful looks. Suddenly, briefly dropping his stiff, cynical, worldly Serjeant’s manner, he had said, in a voice full of concern,
“Are you sure you’re all right, sir?”
“All right, Richard?”
“You seem to be – pardon me, sir - perspiring – sweating, if I might be blunt about it. It occurs to me that the morning is a markedly cool one. There is a fog. It is late in September and we are occupying high ground, indeed a very elevated position. The air strikes me as chill and unwholesome. Do you feel warm? Hot, even? I trust you do not have a fever. I recall from India how you were a prey to relapsing episodes of the marsh-fever you contracted in Flanders.”
“I am very well, thank you, Richard,” I responded, somewhat shortly, for I knew that he was right, and frankly his observation alarmed me. As Richard well knew, and as I have related from time to time in my various preceeding volumes, I suffered repeated visitations from a feverish relapsing illness which I had acquired in the marshes of Flanders fifteen years earlier, and which I had never quite succeeded in shaking off. The Indian experience had only exacerbated it; the colds and damps of Ireland had confirmed it, and so far Iberia had done nothing to mitigate it, notwithstanding its reputation as an ideal resort for consumptives and those who were vulnerable to various other afflictions of the lungs. “Although I confess I do become rather over-heated whenever I have to consider the latest outrages which you have committed against my brother-in-law,” I added, as inspiration suddenly struck concerning how I might deflect our conversation away from my state of health.
“Unpleasant, you were saying, sir.”
“Richard?”
“Garrison duty in Dublin, sir. Repressing the poor bloody Irish by day, and drunken dinners and God knows what capers going on behind locked doors at night, or so I’ve heard. If ever I’m threatened with Dublin I think I’d rather resign my commission. And wasn’t Charlie Morris…?”
“Yes, he was there. And his pet goblin, Serjeant Obadiah Hakeswill.”
“Christ!”
“But we seem to have strayed somewhat from the original topic of our conversation. The wedding,” I went on, leading the conversation now firmly away from the subject of Dublin, which, at that moment, I thought, briefly recalling all the shameful things in which I had participated whilst there – and these did not even necessarily include the routine acts of repression against the Irish people in which I had also been obliged to involve myself – some of which I had even been required to organise – honestly, small wonder we had spent most of our waking hours there drunk or drugged to the rafters, and quite often both! – really they did not bear speaking about. It was not to be wondered at, neither, that we had always been so eager to seek oblivion, not merely in alcohol and the gamut of pharmacopeia but also in gross deeds of physical promiscuity, man with man, excesses which now cause me to gasp with shame and incredulity when I think upon those years. “It was not perhaps the worst day of my life - ” At this, Richard had looked down at the table-cloth and had said nothing. I knew that he had had a fairly good idea which one that had been, after all. “But anyway, it was still fairly ghastly, although it could have been a lot worse, of course. Mama had wanted Hanover-square again, which had done so splendidly for Charles and Henry – but it would have been my ultimate nightmare! - to do the deed before the unshielded pitiless gaze of London society – I do not think that she could have been thinking clearly! Charles and Amelia and Henry and Arabella had had their grand nuptial celebrations full in the public eye, of course, but I – it would simply have drawn attention – set the ancient gossip going again. Happily, Lady Hayles - Jessica’s mother – prevailed, with her romantic notions of a quiet country wedding, so in the end the marriage circus pitched its tent at my in-laws’ parish church at Lynchmere.”
“Where’s that? Never heard of it.”
“It’s a hamlet, near Liphook, in Hampshire. About six miles from Durford, perhaps a dozen miles from Petersfield? There were few guests of the grander sort, but it still involved my having to spend hours in the company of some of the people I disliked most of any in the world. It was also the day – I am not a pious man, Richard, how could I ever be? but I do try to observe the external decencies of public religion, of official Christianity, of the formulae of the Church of England – I might not go to Church very often when I am at home these days, but I do my best to support it, from the outside – I think of myself as a kind of human flying buttress.”
“A what?”
“It’s an architectural feature – you see them on the external walls of Gothic churches – a sort of, of, sloping half-arch, often pointed – their purpose is to take away some of the strain of supporting all that weight of stone from the vertical walls – it’s a clever engineering - never mind, I just meant supporting the Church externally. Or, if I am north of the border, I will attend my dear late uncle’s beloved Kirk – the Church and the Kirk are the twin pillars of the Faith in Great Britain, which on the whole I believe does make the world a better place – for most people, anyway – or at least, they strive to do so. They often fail, for they are but fragile human institutions – but nevertheless, they strive. But my wedding-day was also the day on which I was trapped into forswearing myself before God and man: forced into the contemptible role of hypocrite. I have never told that to anyone else, so please do not repeat it.”
“Of course not. But - foresworn, sir? How?”
“The vows. Surely you understand?”
“You have to make vows, sir? What, you mean, like swearing an oath to King George when you join the Army?”
“Richard! For God’s sake!” I exclaimed, almost unable to believe in this degree of ignorance. “Haven’t you ever been to a wedding?”
“Can’t say as I have, sir.”
“The man and the woman stand before the priest. First of all they swear that they are not married to other people, and the priest asks the congregation if anyone knows of any reason why they cannot legally marry each other. Almost always he draws a blank. Sometimes somebody, more often than not a spurned lover, makes an exhibition of themselves and gets put out by a Churchwarden. Just occasionally there are legitimate grounds for calling a halt to the proceedings, at least temporarily, whilst an investigation is carried out. That happened to my brother Francis, once.” “What – you mean, he was found out as a bigamist?” “No, Richard. Francis is a clergyman, remember? There was a terrific to-do. He’d got to that ‘if any of you know cause, or just impediment’ part, when suddenly a woman stood up at the back and started shrieking hysterically about breach-of-promise. Francis had to put a stop to the wedding at once and shoo everyone out of the church so they could sort themselves out. The couple never came back. It rattled him rather seriously. He has been nervous about officiating at weddings ever since – palms them off on his curate whenever he can. Anyway, the priest then recites the vows they must make – they are printed in the Book of Common Prayer – make sure you read them well in advance, if ever it looks like someone might finally have managed to entice you up the aisle! Hopefully it might change your mind. The Prayer Book is backed up by an Act of Parliament, so the vows have legal force – they’re part of the laws of England – anyway, the couple repeat them after him, first the man and then the woman. The congregation is there to bear witness to this, so the couple must speak up to be heard.”
“Oh. Oh, right, sir. I’m sorry. But where I come from, you see, most often people don’t bother with vows and church. They just get together. Sometimes they stay together, sometimes they just move on.”
Jesus! I thought. The people of England! And the radicals would give them the vote! “A second boiled egg, Richard?” I said then, brightly, helping myself to another of the delicacies to which I had just adverted him, in hope of encouraging him to do likewise. “I am afraid they must now be well past their best.”
“I can see you don’t approve,” Richard had gone on. “But it’s like – most people, at least the people I grew up with, don’t have money or land or big houses or fancy titles to pass down, so it doesn’t matter, vows and legal business and all that. I am blessed for boiled eggs, sir, but thank you.”
I have to mention here, I had been afflicted with an indisposition of the bowels for many years – partly through my besetting malady-in-the-head of nervousness and anxiety, partly through, I do not know what, some chronic physical indisposition which, although so far it has not killed me, never seems quite to resolve itself (it is this, I suppose, why I always found it so difficult to let go of what those two idiots, Fitzroy and Dimmock, did to me, by way of their ‘prank’, at Warley Barracks in ’95, and why it took the most severe and extreme circumstances – grave injuries encompassing the loss of a limb, and my old comrade Duncan Fitzroy dying before my eyes in the ward of the convent hospital, even as I spoke long-overdue words of forgiveness, after Ciudad Rodrigo in the year ’12, for me finally to cease fretting over it). It is, I suppose, constitutional. It does not seem to affect the rest of my relatives, so that I can only assume that I have it from the Fitz-Geralds. I had suffered from this for years. It was not a happy situation for someone whose position as Commanding Officer of a Battalion required that, when on campaign and in battle, I was obliged to spend my days from dawn to dusk in the saddle, often under intensive artillery bombardment which made the innards of even the most stolid iron-guts veteran quake, and far from any convenient latrine. Older officers whom I had discreetly asked for advice, when I had first been placed in command of the South Essex, had sworn by boiled eggs as a prophylactic against calamity in the field, for their costive effect, and now I felt that I had the benefit of the wisdom of their lore. Sometimes, however, I did forget that not every man was similarly tried by his rebellious constitution, and I did come to question myself, and wonder whether my officers had come to view my invitations to breakfast as a cross to be born rather than a gratifying token of their Colonel’s favour. I racked my brains meanwhile for something diversionary to say which was related neither to eggs nor to matrimony.
“How did you get on with that book I lent you, Richard?” I said, as I shelled another egg. “About a month ago? Oliver Goldsmith? The Vicar of Wakefield? Did you enjoy it?”
“Wouldn’t have minded if it had actually been about Wakefield, sir. I know Wakefield. Champion place. Right good town, the Wakefield I know - the one near Leeds. But it weren’t. And there were too many words. And that vicar got on my nerves. And it ain’t realistic.”
“How so?”
“Once you’re ruined, that’s it. I’ve seen it. In the workhouse in Wapping there was an old man, ancient cove, must have been seventy if he was a day, but otherwise just like Reverend Primrose. He had airs and graces. His family had been rich once, he used to boast. Then his father had invested all their money in something called the, the, South Sea Company. This was when he had been a small child, not long after old Anne had died and the first George had come over from Hanover, I got the impression. Then it had all blown up and his father had ended in the Marshalsea Prison, in Southwark, for all his As Evers from rich men who had once been his friends.”
“His what?”
“His vowels, sir. His IOUs that were always going to come good but never did. He had them in wallet which he kept under his shirt. He took them everywhere, according to the chap I knew. He eventually died of want in that place. You have to have friends on the outside, sir, to survive in the Marshalsea, you see – friends who can pay for your food and your laundry and your other expenses. He didn’t have friends. All he had was worthless notes of hand from his former associates, all of whom were dead by the time I knew his son. On paper he was worth about ten thousand pounds. In reality, he and his entire family had been in the gutter for more than half a century. They never got out of it. Well, this old cove, he never did, certainly. All his life he tried various schemes involving lawyers and accountants – everything except for real hard work, it seemed - but nothing availed and his son ended up at Brewhouse Lane, which was better than the Marshalsea, because at least they fed the paupers. He saw his father go mad over this ten grand that existed only on paper. I’ve seen how it goes, over and over, too, with debtors. Father goes bankrupt, daughters forced to marry scoundrels, or else to go on the game - sons reduced to thieving, or worse. It just don’t come right again, not unless all the world really is a stage, like Harris is always telling me, and you know a good fairy who can come down from the flies and wave a wand, and the play comes out right and everyone goes home happy.”
“I think that’s why there are novels, nowadays, Richard,” I said, carefully. “The world has grown very complicated and dangerous and - sad - this last ninety years, since Defoe published Robinson Crusoe. Things very often don’t come right in life any more, so they have to come right in novels, instead. If things never came right, even in novels, people would give up altogether, I think. Novels give people hope. I remember when I was a child - the author – he – or she - is your good fairy with the wand, you see, nowadays.”
“It ain’t hope if it’s founded on a lie, however kindly meant, seems to me, sir. Just the same cheat as religion, but with the hocus-pocus taken out.”
It struck me then that Richard seemed a little distracted, and I worried that I had been boring and/or baffling him - always my great fear when conversing with him. That was why I believed that our most successful, most authentic encounters had always been almost entirely wordless – no talking or philosophising, which had simply killed the moment, as I had frequently found out over the years. That was how we had always communicated most effectively - cutting the gab, as Richard might have said, and letting animal instinct take over and guide our mutual actions. His experiences of life were so different from mine and his education, could one call it that, so minimal and random – mere scraps and crumbs as he had gleaned over the years from things overheard in the Mess and from conversation with people like myself, and the worthy Rifleman Harris, whom I remember still with fond affection from his comic parodic songs with which he had been used to entertain us when circumstances had allowed, and for which his friend Rifleman Daniel Hagman had unfailingly found the justly appropriate melodies from his stock of immemorial English tunes which he had had by heart since his boyhood - and above all from Harris’s editorship of The Times of Torres Vedras in those months between October of the Year ‘10 and the following March - and of whose death, together with that of dear Dan Hagman, at Waterloo I had learned with much sorrow, when I had received a letter from Peter d’Alembord in the July of 1815 telling of that appalling, cataclysmic day of wrath. Dally himself had been severely wounded towards the end of that terrible day, the 18th of June, having very nearly lost a leg through the mistake of an exhausted surgeon in the course of the removal of a musket-ball from his thigh – the same injury and perilous circumstance as had been mine at Boxtel - and his own unreasonable insistence upon returning to the fight even before the bleeding had been staunched – a wound so very like my own that I had had to retire to my bed for several hours to recover from the remembered shock of what had so nearly been my own death more than twenty years before.
I had tried my best, teaching Richard to read, but long ago I had finally had to admit to myself that all I had achieved had been to enable him to interpret the code of letters only so far that he could decipher and re-encrypt lists and reports and rosters – I had in fact not taught him to read at all. In despite of all I could do, I had never managed to inspire Richard to be much if at all interested in books – the only time he had ever showed any limited enthusiasm had been if a work had touched upon a military theme (I believe I had once succeeded in persuading him to read George Farquhar’s play The Recruiting Officer from beginning to end – I recall he thanked me afterwards and even said that it had been a source of inspiration to him when he had been leading a party around Essex and London late in ’09). Moreover, I sometimes think that he never understood perhaps more than one word in three of any I ever said to him, unless it were an order couched in the bald and colourless formulae to be found in the drill-manuals. This has caused me much pain over the years, for ever I had longed to be able to communicate with him upon the higher intellectual, even spiritual, plane. We had communicated well enough upon the level of the need of the body, certainly - longing, yearning, desire aching to be gratified – but the meeting of minds for which I had ever hankered had somehow never come to pass. In that sense we had been fated ever to be ships that had passed one another in the night.
As recorded elsewhere, my effort to bring Richard around in his thinking regarding Slingsby upon that occasion bore no fruit. An increasingly stony silence had taken hold as we had finished our breakfast of now sadly congealed eggs, cold toast and tepid coffee. In the end he had risen from his seat and had taken his reckoning of me with the barest courtesies. No, I am being over-generous. He showed me no courtesy at all. He merely stood up from his chair, flung aside his napkin and walked out on me. Rag-mannered, I remembered Sir Henry Simmerson had once characterised Sharpe to me, on the field of Talavera, as I had been carrying out Wellesley’s order to seize command of Simmerson’s precious Regiment. Rag-mannered ruffian. I had hated him for saying that. It had been unfair and, in despite of everything, untrue. It still was. I had known that Richard was capable of better behaviour than that. When he was feeling happy and confident, valued, and, dare I say it, loved, he could be the perfect natural gentleman, but at the moment, obviously, he had been feeling none of those things. Meanwhile I had done what I always had done in comparable circumstances – I had shrunk into myself, retreated, shut off all possibility of reconciliation - at least for that moment - whilst suffering a profound sinking of the heart, knowing for certain that there had been trouble to come, for I had lived through such scenarios at least half a dozen times since I had first known Richard – and come it duly had.
But now, forward, to the last week of August in the Year ’13 - post-Fenner, and before Richard’s wedding with Jane - the period of the prelude to his marriage, which was to turn out as disastrous as mine, if for somewhat different reasons - well, mine, although initially disastrous, did resolve satisfactorily enough in the end, settling into an amicable mutual understanding which delivered sufficient contentment both for Jessica and for myself - until her wretchedly premature death, which occurred when we had been married but twelve years, following three years of pain, sickness, wasting and awful unmerited suffering on her part which it had wrung my heart to have to witness. I had begged all the clergy I had known for an explanation - why Jessica had had to suffer so, when her sin, if such it had been, had arisen solely on account of my own grievous fault – because of which I had never been able to be her true husband – and our arrangement concerning her living for most of the time with Robert Ovalton once Eloisa had been promoted from the nursery to the schoolroom had been agreed by mutual consent, and no-one had been harmed by it – I venture not even Eloisa, for she had never know different, although – oh, God! her marriage prospects! For all her looks, her charm and her accomplishments, ending married to that brute Sir Warren Hungerford, the boot-blacking magnate, for she had been six-and-twenty and had endured five seasons, but no young man had been sufficiently enticed by her connexions and her ten thousand pounds, and between the iron-founder and his Hampshire burr and the notorious one-armed molly, junior minister in an increasingly unpopular administration (unfairly, just as the economy had finally begun to improve and taxes had at last been becoming far less onerous), nobody had wanted to take her on - except for that scoundrel. I do so wish she had had the sense to stay single rather, but, young ladies do so want to be married, for so society has ordered things that they believe themselves to be no-one unless they are tied to some utterly worthless scoundrel who at a scrape can pass for a man of substance, and Hungerford had been able to do that. Yes, of course my reputation had harmed her. It could never have done anything else. But, to return to Jessica, none had known the answer to why she had had to suffer so – not even dear Francis, my brother next to me in age, the finest cleric I have ever met, and who had understood me better than anyone else to whom I had ever been close, had known how to find the words to reconcile me to what had happened. For quite a time afterwards I had, as a result, if not outright rejected, had at least become agnostic regarding the Christian religion - although the patient loving attentions, eloquence and powers of persuasion of Stephen (parson’s son and quondam singing-boy of Lichfield Cathedral) added to Francis’ endeavours have since brought me back around once again to the ancient creed of my ancestors and compatriots.
In the last week of August of the year ‘13 Richard came to stay with me at Durford, Stephen having been safely consigned to Brighton in the mean-time. Since he had come to me, he had frequently expressed a hankering to see the sea when the sublime subject of the ocean had arisen in the course of our reading together in the evening after supper, he having spent almost his entire life, save for a brief holiday in the contiguous county of Derbyshire a couple of years before he had entered into my employment (to hear him speak of it one should have thought that he had made an expedition to the far side of the world!) until the age of five-and-twenty in Staffordshire in the land-locked west Midlands. Even since his arrival in maritime Hampshire a year since Stephen had still not yet been as far as Portsmouth, although that had lain but eighteen miles to the south, and so I had thought that this was the perfect time for his wish to be fulfilled.
“You were telling me about your father,” Richard had said, continuing a conversation which had been in progress for some time now.
For context, our discourse had been taking place in a leisurely manner in the bed of dark, elaborately-carved oak, some two or perhaps even three hundred years old, which to this day dominates the chamber which had once belonged to the Viscount - my father, according to the law (even when he had eventually become the Earl I had never quite been able to reckoning off thinking of him as the Viscount, notwithstanding that that title had devolved – very briefly – upon Charles, on the occasion of our father’s death in the year ’09 – that momentous year known in the lore of the family as ‘the Year of the Four Earls’, when Grandfather had died, and then first Father and then Charles and then Henry had inherited the coronet, in rapid succession – Charles had of course never lived to feel it touch his unworthy head, having died in the September of that year in his self-imposed Barbadian exile. By Michaelmas Henry had been wearing the ermine, so to speak - a very disgruntled Henry, at that – our Father, the man I had always thought of as the Viscount, had had a good long run-up to the job, an apprenticeship lasting almost forty years; Charles had just been getting used to the idea, following the death of Grandfather in the May of ’09, which had made Father the Earl and Charles the Viscount; but Henry had had no warning at all when Charles suddenly upped and died of a stroke at Lawford House in St George in Barbados in September that year (apparently after succumbing to a fatal attack of laughter, having read of my translation to the Colonelcy of the South Essex in an old copy of the Times) – the lot had simply fallen upon him out of the Blue, as it had done upon Judas’ stand-in, the understudy Apostle Matthias in the Book of Acts!). That bed is an example of the kind of thing one sees in many truly ancient houses in England, but seldom in a relatively recent dwelling in the Palladian style, such as Durford, which at that time had been standing a mere one hundred and twenty years. The bed, I had thought, must have been salvaged from the older partly-mediaeval, partly Tudor, partly Jacobean dwelling ranging in time from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, which had once existed on the site of the present building. I supposed they, the craftsmen and artisans employed by the architect, must have had to dismantle it and then put it back together in situ, as otherwise I could not imagine how they could have got it into that room. (The house at Durford had originally been an Abbey of the Premonstratensians, or Norbertines, a monastic movement having its origins in Prémontré in northern France, of whom few now have heard, but which I gather had been an offspringing of the Augustinian order.) It had been the Abbot’s lodging and it had stood upon the site for six hundred years before Sir Charles Lawford, Bt., had commissioned William Talman to demolish it and build the present grand house in the final decade of the seventeenth century. Anyway, the bed formerly had been the Viscount’s alone, he and Mama, for as long as I could remember, having occupied separate chambers at opposite ends of the second floor (or third storey, if one counts the half-subterranean kitchen, the sculleries and the housekeeper’s and servants’ region of the House), above the public rooms. The Viscount’s room, I recollect – although I had seen inside it a mere handful of times when he had been in occupation - perhaps even only once or twice, I cannot now recall - had been sparsely furnished in the antique manner – just this intimidatingly large and looming and altogether somewhat horrifying bed (when I had been very young – nineteen or twenty, say, and entirely without experience of such matters, except for what I had read in the torrid novels which had been popular at that time - I had used to imagine being a virgin bride brought there on her wedding-night by some horrid old Tudor aristocrat of three centuries back, some notorious brute like the Duke of Norfolk, say, before the Earls of Winchester of the line of the third creation had died out, and, I don’t know, half of me had been simply appalled whilst the other half had come close to swooning in anticipatory ecstasy), and a great chest fashioned in similar style - to my mind it had been altogether unappealing – bare and comfortless, hard and Spartan - a true reflection of the cold, harsh, implacable character of the man who had occupied it for four decades - only the silken bed-hangings had provided any hint of colour or of luxury. Mama’s, on the other hand, had been a barocco fantasy out of Fragonard or Watteau. But I had had a perverse fancy to entertain Richard in the Viscount’s ponderous, pillared, black, weirdly-embellished Jacobean funeral-car of a couch, six foot or more square, for I had doubted he would have appreciated Mama’s former surroundings, and I had also scrupled at the idea of our encounter taking place in my own chamber, out of delicacy towards Stephen’s feelings - even though he was away in Brighton, and so, I hoped, would never form an inkling concerning what I had been about during his absence (although, of course, inevitably, being no fool, he duly had.)
“Or, rather, the man who was not your father – and the one who was.”
“Richard, I – “
“You’ve told me enough at other times for me to be able to form a very good idea, sir,” Richard had said, meanwhile casually turning me onto my back and resuming the position of dominance which he had formerly adopted, so that for a short interval my mind had been transformed once again into gruel in anticipation of a repeat performance of what we had been about just a short while earlier. (It had been such a very long time, for me, to wait whilst longing for an encounter of this kind, after all - Stephen, love him, did his best, but he was always so mild, so reticent, so timid and inhibited, so paralysed by awareness of our difference in status that he could not achieve even an approximation to what Richard – who likewise had been very well aware of that difference, yet had not cared and had even seemed to take it as a challenge - could do to me!). I had not really known what to think, or how to feel, after such a lengthy interval of simply making the distant second-best of things with Stephen, and so naturally after the first movement - allegro vivace, so to speak, it had taken me an extended interval before I had been able to formulate my thoughts with any coherence once again whilst I awaited the andante cantabile and the menuetto allegretto. As for the concluding molto allegro - for the moment, however, we had still been carrying on our conversation.
“From an early age,” I said, “I conceived – if you will pardon the unfortunate diction - a pretty clear notion that my father believed that he was not in fact my father, but for many years I never heard it unequivocally spelled out by anyone who had first-hand knowledge of the circumstances of my birth - although of course Charles used to make spiteful remarks upon that topic whenever he could find an excuse to do so, and often even when he could not. I knew that there always was a strong probability - as you will likely remember, Richard - that I had had my initial being when the Viscount had been still en route from Barbados in April of the Year Seventy-Six.”
“I recollect you telling me, sir,” Richard had said, just a little distractedly.
“If that were indeed the case, then the most likely candidate for my paternity would have been that Irish Marquess whom I am sure that I have mentioned to you before, in whose company my mother had, according to rumour, been seen to be spending much time in Bath, which if true – “ (I had in fact been by then, and for some years now, entirely persuaded that it was true, for often I had had it pointed out to me – sometimes, I am sure, even innocently - how greatly I resembled Gerald Fitz-Simons, the Marquess of Ardara: in his day he had been renowned for his looks and his charm and his gallantry and his skill upon the dance-floor - as well, it had often been implied, as in the bed-chamber - so these needling remarks had often taken the form of sly and knowing anti-compliments). “I was always told the story that I had been born early - you know how it is… Mama had used to say it was why I had been a sickly child. It is the usual tale of the eight months’ child they tell in polite society to smooth over awkwardness when a lady becomes unexpectedly enceinte in the temporary absence of her husband at the crucial time – “
“Enceinte? Knocked-up?”
“Indeed – when there is unlooked-for increase - and people perform their calculations and the arithmetic does not … “
“Arithmetic? Surely your Marquess would have known all about arithmetic if he’d been a sharp? He should have seen ahead what trouble this would cause him, getting your mother up the duff, with her husband out of the country.” “Indeed he should. My family certainly held it in the forefront of their collective mind all through my childhood – until the agreement with Josiah Hayles. They had had to keep any hint of that very quiet indeed! At least at first – until the contract was signed and the lawyers had done their business with ribbons and sealing-wax. Any whiff of scandal and Jessica’s family would have cried foul, that they were being sold a pig in a poke! Notwithstanding the law, of course.”
“The law?”
“The law of England as it currently stands declares that any child born in wedlock is the husband’s – even if it is not. It is a very serious and significant step for anyone to contest that legal fact – which might not be an actual fact - even if they have evidence to hand.”
“Ah. This is about the dowry, sir? You have mentioned something of that sort before, but I confess I did not really understand it – you and Jessica, you were children, and your family somehow sold you to Jessica’s parents?”
“Ah, you remember truly,” I said.
“I never did get it - how did that work? The law says you can’t buy and sell people in England, that there ain’t no slaves in England - but that’s not true, of course – Jem Hocking sold me to John Lee, the chimney-sweep, for three-pound-ten-shilling, when I were eight years old!”
“I remember you telling me, Richard, that night – that historic night – at Seringapatam. I was shocked. I had had no idea, just as I had had no idea of many other things you told me, on that occasion. Jessica’s father – who was rich as a result of his endeavours in the iron-founding industry over many years – he and his father before him had made a great deal of money out of supplying the Army and the Navy with artillery pieces and other accoutrements of war – he wanted access to power and influence. Someone on the procurement side in the War Office had introduced him to the Earl. There was iron ore on, or rather, under, our land in Staffordshire, you see. The Earl and the Viscount together decided that I might as well be the sacrificial victim out of the four of us – to redeem my position within the family hierarchy – to justify their tolerance of me – to earn my keep, as it were, for according to the law I was a legitimate Lawford, notwithstanding the truth of the matter. I would be betrothed to Jessica in return for her significant dowry. Money for my family, who were strapped for cash on account of Charles’s spendthrift ways and gambling debts – social advancement and access to the levers of power for Josiah Hayles, who, all things considered, is actually quite a decent man, and he and his wife have been kinder to me for many years now than ever my own parents were. The Viscount had no time for me except in relation to what he could use me for. The marriage, the dowry. Fuck it, Richard, even my own mother disliked me for many years, for I represented her disgrace – even though Charles had been her first! I was nine years old when the betrothal took place. Jessica was five. They did that to Jessica and me because my mother was a tart who had never known how to keep her legs together. Well, like mother, like son, I suppose. Thirty thousand pounds – twelve hundred a year, invested in the four percents,” I had gone on, musingly. “Not a great income, but still a blessing.”
“Very nice, sir. You and Jessica must live pretty well.”
“Oh, it would have done us very nicely as newly-weds as an addition to my Major’s pay; we might not quite have been able to keep a carriage, but we could at least have taken a small neat respectable house in some less fashionable district of Town – somewhere not so far west, perhaps – Russell Square? with a cook, and a ladies’ maid for Jessica, and a couple of maids-of-all-work in addition, and a man-servant for the heavy lifting and to be handy with a cudgel after dark when I was absent in Dublin – had not the Viscount pocketed it to swell the general coffers years ago, alas.”
“What? You mean the bastard stole it? The money that was meant for you and Jessica?”
“I’m afraid Hayles was rather naïve in assuming that it would have been ear-marked for Jessica and me. I was a minor at the time, and the Viscount was legally my father. He could do whatever the hell he liked with it. Honour should have guided his decisions but unfortunately he was a stranger to the concept. So he took it for the family, by which he had meant Charles and Charles’s tradesman’s bills and gambling debts. However, by the time that came to light, Charles had died, and what should have gone to him from my mother’s estate when she passed away in the year Ten came to me instead, as did her bequests to Henry and Francis, for they had been so appalled when they had learned what the Viscount had done with Jessica’s dowry that they waived their right to their shares and instructed the attorney to make a deed of variation – “ (Francis had inherited a goodly sum from a childless aunt and uncle of ours in any case - Sir James and Maria, Lady Martin: their only son, my cousin Christopher, had gone as a missionary to the South Seas and so far as could be determined by the Captain and officers during a serendipitous visit to the island in question by the Astounding, 24, a small old-fashioned frigate of the Surprise class, in the Year ’01, had been eaten by cannibal natives) – “and Henry was going to get the lot from the Lawfords now that he was the Heir anyway - and old Hayles was kind enough to dig his hand into his pockets again from time to time, because he had received his end of the bargain and was perfectly satisfied with it, i.e. a knighthood and a seat in Parliament and a minor Government post, with an eventual peerage in the offing. It was mighty embarrassing, though, nonetheless.”
“Time to stop babbling, sir,” said Richard, then, as if suddenly he had been paying no attention, now growling a little in the old remembered, disturbing but nonetheless profoundly exciting way, so that I had simply had to shut up - for a little.
“Your wife’s parents truly had had no inkling, sir, when from what you say the rest of society certainly had?” he had gone on, eventually, when we had been putting ourselves to rights at the wash-stand afterwards.
“Wife?” I recall that I had said then, for my mind had still been in a complete whirl, as it always had been, after Richard. “Oh - I am sure that they had. At least, old Hayles. Sorry, I ought to stop calling him that. It implies lack of respect, and I do respect him, very much so. Sir Josiah. But I am persuaded that he reasoned that, as long as my – father – had been prepared to acknowledge me as his son, for the sake of the dowry, then his thirty thousand was still good for the advantages which he had been lulled into hoping to purchase withal. And this came to pass, as I have said, so I do not with hindsight regret overmuch the lure and the cozening. I should have been bitterly ashamed, however, if it had come to nothing, and Sir Josiah and his lady had after all been cheated of their expectations.”
“So it didn’t matter to this Hayles who your father was so long as appearances held good?”
“I do believe it did not. But nonetheless he has always been kindness itself to me. I think he had known how things had really stood in my family for a long time, but he did not blame me for anything, except perhaps for my shabby treatment of his daughter.”
“What? You don’t beat Jessica or lock her in the attic! She has fine gowns in the latest fashion, expensive pretty baubles, prime rations, a pleasant billet, a lady’s maid, liveried footmen to carry her parcels when she goes shopping for furbelows, a shiny lacquered Rowley carriage with a coat-of-arms painted on the doors - now, anyway, since you’ve had your legacy from your mother – with a handsome high-stepping matched pair of chestnut geldings withal! I’ve seen it! She has everything! Jessica is in clover! You don’t need to have a bad conscience about her, sir.”
“Yes, but – you know what I mean. We don’t – I can’t – not after that one time when, thank God, Eloisa was – was - “
“Yes, sir,” Richard had said forcefully (in retrospect I now understand that he had been desperate to silence me upon the topic of Eloisa’s begetting – I assumed that I must have told him of the mortifying circumstances when in my cups, upon a time, although I do not recollect precisely) - “ you don’t make her wear a chastity belt either, so I suppose she’s all right as far as that is concerned, too. She’s got, what’s his name, Lord Ronald Overall.”
“That is so,” I said, chastened. “She has Lord Robert Ovalton, for what he’s worth. His three boys are fine lads, though, and I do not mind them passing under a name which has never properly, I mean morally, even if it is mine legally, been mine, in any case. I do not begrudge Jessica her sons. Actually, from the little I have seen of them, I like them. They all seem to show promise in one way or another. I mean to pay their fees at Eton – well, for the middle one at least – he actually is called Ronald - for he appears to possess true academic ability. The other two - I have it mind to purchase a commission for at least one of them, if that is what he wishes, in due course. In a Regiment of Foot, because, whilst I am not poor, neither am I ‘made of money’, as the saying is. I cannot run to the Cavalry. Or if the Army does not suit, I shall ask Henry to use his legal connexions to find them both pupillages in the Inns of Court. Then if Jessica has any more boys they can go to sea – or else to India! I wish Uncle Hector were still alive. He could have spoken to one of his contacts in Leadenhall Street. Even though a Writership is not half the career it used to be, before the Hastings affair and the ever-increasing intermeddling of Parliament in the affairs of John Company! If we are not careful, Richard, I do believe we shall find that we have sleep-walked absent-mindedly into acquiring an Empire in the East before very much longer. Imperialism by inadvertence. That would be so very British, ha.”
“Hastings? I went there once when I was helping to run the recruiting parties out of Shorncliffe back in the Year Six, when Grace was still - how does Hastings bear upon India?”
“No, Richard, Warren Hastings – he was Governor-General of Bengal and there was a terrific scandal about malpractice in the East India Company – he was impeached and tried in the House of Lords – he was eventually completely exonerated but it took seven years and it ruined him financially. Round about the time of the French Revolution. It wasn’t over even by the time we came back from Flanders in Ninety-Five. It was in all of the papers, all of the time, for years! Surely you must - ”
“No; sorry, sir, still no idea. But you did once tell me about the understanding between you and Lady Lawford, about how you would conduct you marriage once there was a child, and what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, if you ask me. When are you going to have your turn?”
“I rather think that I’m having my turn now, Richard, don’t you?” I had said, in a manner I had fondly imagined had been flirtatious, hoping to cozen him into a second encore performance – the last ever, of course, I had told myself, regretfully, since he had been going to marry Jane – that – our fourteen-years-long on and off and on again affair, with all its misunderstandings and lengthy – God, I never did learn what was the plural of ‘hiatus’ - yes, all that would finally have to be all over, now!
“But I won’t always be around, will I, sir? I’m off back to London tomorrow, then I’ll be doing the deed with Jane by fast license the day after that, because the week’s wait will be up, and then, all being well – unless Simmerson tries to shove his oar in – how he’d have loved to stand up dramatically at the calling of the banns - if we had had them called! – like you were telling me about Francis! Just as well neither of us is resident in any parish in London - we’ll both be off to France, and sweet little Mr Secretary Murdogh can have you back again. I’m sorry. I did not mean to disrespect him. From what little I know of him I like him and I’m glad you have him by your side, as from my only encounter with him to date I have received the strong impression that he cares about you very much – at first I thought he was one of these jumped-up servants on the make, taking you for a ride, and I’m afraid I insulted him, but he was dignified and honest and he held his ground, and I completely changed my ideas about him. I was only rude to him at first because I was that angry with Fenner and Simmerson. Not his fault at all – could you tell him that, please? - and, so it turns out, not yours, either. I’m glad, too, that you are happy for Lady Lawford and her sons, and for this – Lord Ovalton.”
“Thank you. I have sometimes wondered if I was being just a little too sanguine about the whole business – my very irregular domestic arrangements. I just assumed people would understand and look away. Then I became afraid that they were judging me. But you have reassured me. But now, Richard – here’s the thing, you see – you recall that in the spring of the Year Ten, when things were a little quieter than they had been of late, I petitioned the Peer to allow me a short reckoning in England?”
“Aye, sir. That came as a surprise to me, to be honest, given as how you had often privately railed against those officers who were forever sloping off home to deal with their ‘urgent affairs’, which, I got the impression, often just meant that they were bored with the war and fancied a little hunting and fishing and the entertainments of the Season at home in England, however it left Wellington in the lurch.”
“Indeed. I had resolved not to do it. But Mama had been dying at last. She had had a stroke. Francis had written to me, begging me to come home if I could – and then had come Mama’s letter, wrought in characters so deformed that I could barely make out their import. She had desired me to come to her, for there was, she told me, something which she must impart to me before she died, so that she could depart with a clear conscience concerning me. You will not need to rack your brains, Richard, to guess what it was that she wished to tell me.”
“No, indeed, sir.” He sounded, I am sorry to confess, bored. All right, I had thought, I suppose I am a tedious person, a thing which I have long suspected, but could you please at least hear what I have to say?
“It was that Gerald Fitz-Simons, Marquess of Ardara, was indeed my father – a thing which had become gradually clear to me over the preceding decades, but which she now made explicit at the last. No more secrets or whispered gossip. The truth, at last. Ardara. The man, it seemed, she had loved indeed, against all sense and reason. Now that Grandfather and Father and Charles were dead, she could say so at last.”
Against all sense and reason, as indeed I had loved Richard, for fourteen years, by that point in our shared history. The greater fool I, of course. I should have cut free of him years before – another severing of leading-strings! - notwithstanding he would still have been an inescapable presence in my Battalion. I should certainly never have sought to renew that cherished intimacy we had briefly known in India. Surely ten years of separation should have been enough to inoculate me against him! But I had known, the minute I had encountered him once again in Oporto in the May of the year ’09, that it had not. Now, the scene jumping once again backwards to the autumn of the year ’10, as we had faced Masséna, I had become so tired of his arbitrary, casual, blow-hot-blow-cold treatment of me because of our differences over Slingsby. Sometimes he had still been affectionate towards me - but at this stage, after several uncomfortable encounters between the two of them, Richard and Cornelius, the bad in our relationship had come to outweigh the good by far, although, of course, I had still loved him, fool that I was. Some of the time, at least, throughout my latter years in the Peninsula, he had again been - in his surly and uncouth way – almost - tender towards me - as upon the day of the 19th of January in the year ’12, at Ciudad Rodrigo, when he had seemed to be aware that I had been what Uncle Hector would surely have termed fey, and he had been so solicitous of my comfort and concerned for my safety, and had tried to persuade me to go away from the breach before the onset that evening - and in those days following the disaster, when he had visited me in the convent, showing me such great affection upon one occasion that it had almost undone me! But those moments of gentleness could never entirely make up for the days on end when I had been the target of his gruff obtuseness, his incivility bordering upon rudeness, in those two and a half years when I had been his commanding officer, and he ever wary that I had been about to stab him in the back in some way, and always ready, therefore, to get in first with his killing blow.
Richard Sharpe has been my bane, I could say - but to this day I have never discovered how I might give him up! I am as addicted to him, I suppose, as my brother Charles had been addicted to gambling and womanizing, and Mama to laudanum, and Uncle Hector to God, and they are all dead, and so shall I be, and soon. And Stephen, dear Stephen, sees all this - and yet is loyal to me! I do not deserve Stephen’s love, and that is a fact – and yet – and yet – he gives and gives it unstintingly. And that in itself is a great source of suffering and guilt to me, for I do not love Stephen (notwithstanding my abiding fondness and affection for him) even as (when I was in relative health) I used him to satisfy those particular longings which could never otherwise have been assuaged. Now the reader perhaps understands why I wish him never to see this manuscript, for I would not wound that dear innocent – yes, in spite of all! innocent! fellow for all the world.
“So you know that now for certain, sir? About your mother?”
“It seems she had had a weakness for men of that stripe.”
I recall that Richard had whistled low at that. Not that any of it had come of a shock to him, of course. But to hear the truth of my paternity spoken aloud at last, and after all this time of hints and speculation – (Richard later told me that he had asked Patrick about all this, later, in a roundabout manner, not mentioning me, of course, just asking if he had known anything about this Marquess – ‘Ard-an-Ratha, sir, oh, yes, sure I know of him! His family used to own the wide tracts all about An Teanga Mheáin and Bealach Féich [Tangaveane and Ballybofey], too, for all the good it ever did them, as all it is, is bog and moss, rock, rain, wind and wilderness and open water. All the decent holdings, the good land, had gone years and years before. The English, you see, sir. Or rather, their puppets, the Protestant Scotch. First it was Cromwell, then that unwomanly bitch Elizabeth, then the other Cromwell, and then any Saxon bastard you care to name. And the Marquess come into his inheritance too early to know better than to do what he did, and a man no better than he should be, at that. At least, that was the talk in my own townland whenever the name Fitz-Simons was bruited.’
“Yet you didn’t tell me in Lisbon that winter, just a few months after you had been home?” Richard had sounded aggrieved, and I had duly felt guilty.
“I thought – I don’t know – not good for discipline? We were in a favourable position behind the Lines, but the men were at their leisure for much of the time, and nothing facilitates the spread of gossip in a regiment like too much leisure.”
“So it’s all right for your scrub up from the ranks to be a bastard, and everyone knows it, but not your fancy Colonel?” (Oh no, I thought, here he goes again, on his high horse.) “You thought I’d blab?” Richard said, at once on the brink of anger. I reminded myself that he had had a very trying month, and that the last two weeks in particular had been very hard indeed for him to endure.
“No! Richard! No! Of course not; I know that you would never do such as thing,” I said, emollient as I knew how. (I had become good at that, the coaxing and the wheedling; it was a skill I had first acquired during my time on Wellesley’s staff in the Peninsula, when I had had to do with my arrogant and entitled Spanish counterparts on the staff of General Cuesta before Talavera, and then subsequently had steadily finessed throughout my last eight months in Parliament.) “But these things have a strange way of getting out, regardless, I’ve noticed, over the years.”
“What we, er – what passed between us in Lisbon wouldn’t have been good for discipline either, if it had got out, would it, sir?” Richard had said then, with a sudden genuine grin which had completely flummoxed me. The weather-vane had been whirling and whirling.
“I know. I know. Major Forrest – I’m sure he had had half an idea, at least.”
“Robert Knowles asked me outright, at Elvas, in March last year, just before Badajoz,” Richard had said then. “He said Hakeswill had told him about us at Seringapatam.”
That had come like a punch in the belly. “Robert Knowles asked! – Hakesw- what? – what did you say to him?”
“I told Knowles the truth.”
“Richard! Good God!”
“Calm down, sir! There was no point trying to pretend otherwise. Knowles mightn’t have been what you could call an outstanding officer, but he’d always looked up to me. He was a a decent, honest, reasonably able man and he deserved that, at least, me being straight with him. Believe it or not, he even understood, he said. He looked up to me, as I said, and he liked you! You had such glamour, he said. Something about you, like, like a magic spell, he said. I didn’t really know what he meant by that. I’ve never really had time for the airy-fairy. But he said he could see very well why we might have, and that he didn’t hold it against me – or you – good man, Robert Knowles - anyway, he thought you had done a good deal to raise the men’s morale after Talavera. And when you were hurt at Ciudad Rodrigo, he did his part that night, and afterwards, helping to get you to the surgeons, and afterwards helping me with your gear - and at Badajoz he still did his best to defend Teresa and Antonia, nonetheless, so it can’t have outraged him all that much. And anyway, he’s dead now and it doesn’t matter. And he wouldn’t have told anyone else. He was a decent man.”
“Bless his memory, then. But bloody Hakeswill murdered him! Lord, Richard, I am sorry. Knowles was indeed a good man. Lacking in flare and creativity in the field, perhaps, but the spirit of emulation was not wanting in him. Do you know, he told me once that, before ever he had to make a difficult decision once things were afoot, he would always ask himself, what would Richard Sharpe do?”
There was a pause, and then Richard had said, and I admit it quite threw me at that moment -
“That makes me feel very small, sir.”
“It ought not! You know he held you in the highest regard. That is a great thing in your favour.”
“It is because of that. It turns out that I never thought as much of him as I should have done. I never found out quite what a good man he was until after he was dead. I am sorry. I misjudged him. Another reason that I’m glad Hakeswill is dead. He killed too many good people.”
“I’m aware of that. He tried to kill me, twice – at least. Not that I think of myself as good.”
“He bloody what?”
“He sabotaged Rufus’ saddle-blanket. Before I transferred to the Seventy-Seventh, Light Company. End of the Year Three, perhaps. I was still Captain of the Fourth Company of the Thirty-Third in December. Gawilghur, the aftermath. Early eighteen-four? Yes, spring of the Year Four. Hakeswill put a thorn under it. Rufus threw me when I mounted him. I hit my head. I was out cold for hours. They got in Doctor Venkatesh – remember him from Seringapatam? - and he damn near cut my skull open because he feared swelling, only I woke up just as he had been about to do it, so he did not have to. Then, then, Hakeswill had me kidnapped by brigands! My God, I hadn’t thought about that in years!”
“Sir! Sir - what the fuck?”
Richard had started up and had now seized me in his arms, not in an amorous way now, but as if he had wanted to defend me in retrospect, as it were, which I found extremely touching.
“I know. It’s bizarre. But Hakeswill found out I was taking a period of reckoning. I had planned to ride south to Seringa - to see – someone - as it happened - and he apparently arranged for me to be waylaid. I didn’t find out he’d been behind that until Dublin! Morris told me one night, in the Mess, when he was drunk. He just thought it was hilarious. Hakeswill had already been discharged by then, and he’d gone back to England and disappeared, probably into London. According to Morris, the idea had been that these appalling people had been going to sacrifice me to Kali in some awful ritual those Thuggee people have – “
“Kali, sir?”
“She’s like, oh, I don’t know, the Mother Goddess in her destructive aspect. I didn’t really understand when Anil tried to explain it afterwards. I just thought of Mama on her bad days after she’d taken too much laudanum the night before and she was delusional and imagining things about me, like it was my fault her stupid pug had died, or something.”
“I remember Anil. A good man.”
“Yes. He used to look out for me. He saved me on many occasions from shame and ridicule. That time he saved my life.”
“For God’s sake, though, sir! I’m even gladder that fucker Hakeswill’s dead, now!”
Richard was silent for a time, and appeared as if reflecting. Then he said,
“Did you ever meet him, sir - this Marquess?”
“I did not. I do not know if I regret that.”
“He had no interest in you at all?”
“He might have had, had the Viscount not killed him in a duel when I was just a little over one month old.”
“Bloody hell, sir!” Richard was then silent for a little whilst he absorbed the import of this.
“Was it sabres?” he had ventured, finally. “I know they went in for sabres, duellists, in the proper old days. Gave the business some class, at least.”
“My Uncle Hector offered to fight for my mother’s honour with a sabre, when the Dishonourable Captain Charles Lawford had at first refused to marry her. But no. In this case, it was pistols. Pistols were just beginning to become all the rage just then, unfortunately. It meant that any bully with a grudge could murder almost with impunity at the slightest provocation, as long as he was careful. Hit or miss. Bang, gone. When it was sabres some skill, as you have intimated, had been required, some courage, some pretence of honour, at least - and onlookers could step in and stop it once first blood had been drawn. Although I am not sure whether I regret his death, or not. By all accounts Fitz-Simons was a rogue and a scrub and a notorious spoiler of married women, for all his looks, his graceful bearing upon the dance-floor, his wit and his charm. He had preyed upon my mother. The Viscount had neglected her for years, of course, had all but abandoned her to live in Barbados with his seraglio of dusky beauties. That does not excuse her own behaviour. But she was wretched, lonely, humiliated, for all society knew how the Viscount carried on at our place at St George, not too far from Bridgetown – well, nowhere is too far from Bridgetown in Barbados, it is barely twenty miles by fiftteen, although it is possibly three times the size of Jersey - throughout the British West Indies it was known as Liberty Hall! Of course she fell an easy victim to Ardara and his practices. But all the same, I have often wondered, what if I had met him, what might we have had to say to one another… I hope he might have had at least the decency to apologise for having caused me to be brought into the world! Anyway, the Viscount, that old brute, saw him in Town one day - quite by chance, for Ardara had not often been in London by then - it had become too hot for him, what with debts at Hawkes’ and debts at Lock’s and Hoby’s and Fortnum’s, and money he owed to those he had been caught sharping at cards, to say nothing of his numerous bas- – pardon me, Richard – he owed his tailor and his hat-maker and his boot-maker and even his butcher and his baker and his grocer - on every hand – he was having to run from bums and bailiffs and tradesmen, and those he had cheated at the gaming tables in the clubs of St James’s, and in private houses, and in the hells - and from angry husbands, fathers and brothers - scaddling from one safe-house to another - for, perhaps not so strange to relate, he still had his loyal friends – after all, he had had a genuine gift for charming men and women alike. But bloody Petersfield called him out. He used a choice mode of address. He called Fitz-Simons a rogering, roistering buggering whoreson, a get of a bog-dwelling Irish pimp - I do believe.”
“Buggering?”
“There were rumours. Fitz-Simons did exert an extraordinary power over people – men and women alike, as I said, fell victim to it.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, next morning, in the afore-dawn light, shortly after seven o’clock in Hyde Park, just before the sun came up – for after all, it was February - there was a swift mutual discharge of pieces – and that was that.”
I recall that Richard had whistled at that, albeit softly.
“Stone dead?” he had asked.
“The Viscount gut-shot him. I don’t know if that was deliberate. The Viscount had been a professional soldier. I fear he might have done it on purpose.”
“Bastard.”
“It took Fitz-Simons three days to die, by which time the Viscount had been about to board a fast brig to Barbados, from Portsmouth. He stopped off at Durford only to have his sea-chest packed and to gloat over Mama’s grief. The death of the Marquess and the consequent restoration of her honour, Charles informed me many years later that he told her in the course of his latest fond farewell, was his St Valentine’s Day present to her. He left her in a condition of utter prostration, for in despite of everything she had still been in love with Fitz-Simons - with Ardara - I fear. She had barely recovered from her confinement! I had been a mewling, puling infant in the nursery refusing the teat of the wet-nurse, screaming with the colic and vomiting curdled cow’s milk all over the walls every night! The Viscount stayed away for four years, save for two or three brief visits home, one of which was a gruelling week during which we entertained Thomas Gainsborough as house-guest.”
“Who’s that, sir?”
“The portrait painter,” I said, trying not to exaggerate my tone of patience. “The one I told you about. The big painting on the main staircase? The Viscount had engaged him to paint a portrait of our family in the interest of public relations, so all the visitors to the house could see what a paragon of a paterfamilias he was; for the King, the third George himself, in whose intimate circles the Viscount had moved when he had been a young man – they were much of an age - had begun to take a disapproving interest in his goings-on, and the Earl had taken him to task for it. Charles – my brother Charles, that is – I am sorry – too many people in this family have had the same names over two hundred years now - took great care to tell me all of this, once I was old enough to understand.”
“I hope you don’t mind me saying, sir, but your brother Charles, and that bastard who wasn’t and yet who was your father – from what you say, they’ve always struck me as a right pair of fucking horrible cunts.”
“Richard!”
“Sorry, sir, it just slipped out, like.”
“ – you still imagine yourself to be a Serjeant, so much is plain! But yes, you are not wrong. They were loathsome individuals, and you, obviously, have had their measure long ere this.”
“Since you first started letting slip a few things about what it was like for you, growing up in your family, that night back at Seringapatam! This – Marquess of Ardara, sir – if he was the dissolute dishonourable scoundrel they said he was – why did he not just fail to appear for the meeting in the park? He could have legged it, easy enough – disappeared abroad for a bit. There wasn’t a war going on then, at least not in Europe.”
“I imagine his situation would have been much the same in Paris or Madrid or Lisbon or anywhere else he might have thought to hide his head, from what people have said of him. Perhaps he had just realised that the road had run out at last.”
“I thought I’d had it rough in life,” Richard had said, eventually. “The workhouse - the chimney-sweep - the rookery - bloody Yorkshire. But the things that go on in your circles, sir, behind the grand gilded doors of the drawing-rooms in those great houses in Mayfair…”
“To say nothing of the assembly rooms and salons of Brighton and Bath. Well, then, Richard, there you are.”
It seemed to me that a thought then occurred to Richard.
“There was a scandal, presumably?”
“Quite the greatest in a long time, by all accounts.”
“Surely the cause for the duel was known?”
“It must have been. But there was an official account made for public consumption. It was given out that the Viscount had accused Fitz-Simons of cheating at cards, to the great detriment of a cousin-in-law of his, who happened to have gone out of the country, so he had been obliged to do his duty for the sake of the fellow’s distressed wife and offspring. Well, Fitz-Simons did cheat at cards. Leger-de-main. Had aces up his sleeve, systems in his head, all that stuff. He cheated at dice, too. Greeked them. That means – “
“I know, sir. I’ve seen it. Done it. You just toss them along the table like you’re skimming stones, so there’s a better chance they’ll land just so.”
“Probably cheated at roulette too, although God knows how anyone can do that. Magnets? Anyway, everyone had long suspected that he was a crook, although it seems he was so good at it that he never was definitively caught at it. He had a system – “
“I’ve heard of this one. Martingale?”
“Sounds convincing, but you have to have limitless funds for that, and he never had limitless funds. You also need accomplices if you are going to cheat at whist - you can’t carry out successful cheats on your own, you have to have people in collusion - and for a long time he was very successful, so I surmise he had crooked friends. You need code-words, as well as the extra cards and the odd loaded die. And I suppose he was good at numbers, too. Being indecently good at numbers is another way to cheat at cards without physically having extra ones hidden up your sleeve. There’s a mathematics thing called Probability. Much harder to spot than cards up one’s sleeve. Almost impossible, in fact, unless one is also of a mathematical bent and one can see the thoughts in process upon the face. It was how Ardara made his living. But until then nobody had ever called him out for it. It was simply too embarrassing for his victims to admit to having been taken for flats by a bog-hopping member of the Irish peerage, d’ye see? Gilded potatoes, the Peer’s brother Richard calls ‘em – and that includes the Wellesleys! They’d have been humiliated. But the Viscount, the man the law of England calls my father – he did not care a fig what anyone thought of him. He’d been a card-sharper too in his day, and been called out for it numerous times. He’d known how to look after himself in a duel. Captain in the Nineteenth Regiment of Foot, he had been, as you know, before Uncle George had been lost – or perhaps just mislaid - at sea and he had been promoted from Spare to Heir. He was once notorious for it in Edinburgh, when he had been stationed in the Castle garrison.”
“It’s held me back all my life that I’ve never known who my father was,” Richard had said, after a further period of reflection.
“Yes; and that’s monstrous unfair.”
“But you’ve known for a long time who your father was, and yet it’s just made things worse for you. I think – I think you’ve had it just as bad as I have, sir.”
“Hm,” I said. “Anyway. But now! Oh, Lord, here we are again! The day! Here was the day – my wedding-day! – a day which is supposed to be the day one remembers as the best in one’s life, when everything coincides and one’s personal stars align to make sense of one’s existence, of what one is supposed to be doing here on earth! And they were there, Charles and – and my – for the sake of argument, my father - barely able to keep their contempt for me in check, although one should have thought they would have been doing all they could to stamp on the gossip, for the good of the family name, but – there you are. Human nature. Cornelius was late, can you believe it? My bride’s sister’s husband! The pair of them! The wedding ceremony had been about to commence – the band had been playing the Air from Mr Handel’s Water Music, I remember, dum-de-dum-de-daaa – and it had sounded so loud in the church; everyone had fallen silent, at first with growing anticipation, and then with burgeoning embarrassment as the bride and her attendants had failed to manifest themselves, until a deadly hush had begun to descend upon the proceedings. I had been convinced that they could all hear my heart thumping, it was so quiet – and there had still been no sign either of Cornelius or of his doxy of a wife, either. She could at least have come to help her sister robe for the event, I thought. And there I was, standing expectantly by the chancel steps on the south side of the quire. And there was that pleasant, agreeable fellow Bertram Rossendale, my second, brother of that fellow who tracked you down and brought you Prinny’s invitation when you had gone to the Chelmsford barracks last month.”
“Your second, sir? Is matrimony some kind of an endless duel then – pistols at dawn before the wedding-breakfast, and every dawn thereafter?”
“Well, no, of course not – ideally. Don’t let me put you off,” I said, heartily, although I am sorry to say that Richard was later to discover that it was less of a ceaselessly repeated duel and more of a long and weary skirmish, he sniping from amongst the rocks of his professional integrity, as it were, whilst Jane and Rossendale’s brother had flittered and skulked in the underbrush of society, taking pot-shots at his reputation, some of which had struck home with wounding force in the minds of the British public, on account of his involvement in that unfortunate business concerning the Scarsdale Yeomanry, in Keighley in the year ‘14. But I had hardly been wrong – in those days, just as, if a participant in a duel had failed to appear at the agreed hour and location his second had been expected to fight in his stead, so, if a bridegroom had not presented himself in church at the appointed time, or, once at the altar, had got cold feet at the last minute, the groomsman had (supposedly) been generally thought to be obliged to offer to take his place. (I told Richard then of how a now-visibly nervous Bertram Rossendale, of blessed memory, had said to me, Christ, William, you look undone - like death – covered in terror and confusion! – are you sure you mean to continue with this? You are not obliged to perjure yourself – if you cannot in good conscience make the vows, I beg you reckoning now - I shall offer to do your part - but of course he had known that I could not simply flee - and how dismayed but yet how relieved he had appeared when I had replied in a voice which must have been all but inaudible, for I barely been able to speak - I must - I must! I cannot get out – I cannot – Sternus vulgaris! – oh, what a bloody joke! - Lord, I do pity you, William! Rossendale had said, to that (39).
Someone seated nearby must have heard, for this had leached back into society, thus poisoning the marriage from the outset; I told Richard too of how Jessica’s expression of happy hopeful anticipation had faded at once, and how her face had changed, as if an inner light had been extinguished, when I had turned to her before the altar, fenced as it had been with carven wooden pickets meant to protect the Sacrament from encroaching animals (for it was not meet to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs) to repeat the vows after the Rector, my voice shaking and my heart pounding in my gullet, and my knees threatening to give way under me - and she had seen in my eyes not love, but - misery, fear, shame and - perhaps worst of all, despair - as I had indeed perjured myself in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation.
“I didn’t really know him, Richard – Bertram - but he was posted to the Dublin garrison at the same time as me, so we were at least acquaintances and on congenial terms on the few occasions when we actually spoke to each other in the Mess. Outside of the Army our people moved in similar circles, so we had actually heard of each other, or at least, of the names of each other’s families. I’d been dimly aware of a fellow called Rossendale at school, a couple of forms higher than I. It might well have been Bertram. Anyway, he had heard of the quandary I was in, with the wedding being on, then off, then on again, because of Nelson’s funeral, and the fellow I had asked previously to be my groomsman no longer being available as he’d transferred into another regiment in the mean-time and was currently halfway to the Cape, so I hadn’t known whom else to ask (I could not ask Ovalton, who might have been the obvious choice otherwise, as it had been obvious that he had already had designs upon Jessica, and she upon him, during her visits to Lawford House in the weeks preceding our first arranged wedding date, when she had come up to Town to choose her wedding clothes and trousseau – it had been the hiatus whilst we had been waiting about for Nelson’s funeral to take place which had done the harm), and although Charles Morris had been dropping bloody great big hints for weeks I said to myself I’d be damned if I was going to ask him - Morris had been patently desperate to be asked to stand up next to me in church, because of the chance to rub shoulders with what he must have fondly imagined would be the cream of London society – I not having disabused him regarding the actual rustic venue - with a view to his own advancement; but I wasn’t having any of that, not after India and what he and Hakeswill had done to you - and Rossendale had kindly sent me a note in which he had written that he would be willing to do me a good turn and step up. I could have kissed him (I did not, of course)! There had been nothing in it for him – he had acted simply out of kindness of heart, and this had deeply touched my own. Anyway, we took reckoning and travelled back to England together. The wedding was a picturesque bucolic affair, the church – a humble example of late Saxon or early Norman architecture, or possibly both - decked out with white flowers like … like a maiden’s funeral. It was January! Jessica’s mother must have set her people to raid every hot-house for five counties round! The scent was overpowering. To this day I can never catch the scent of lilies without wanting to retch. I should have preferred it if Jessica had come out to Dublin for a quiet wedding in the garrison chapel, if I am honest, but I suppose she was owed her great day of public acclaim after such a ridiculously long engagement to a fiancé who had been absent for seven long years, like a character in a ballad. God, I hope they don’t treat children like that any more! It was all like something out of the bloody Middle Ages!”
“That’s what I thought when you first told me about the arrangement, sir, that night after Seringa fell. Why you ever went along with it once you were – not just of age - you were twenty-nine! It still baffles me.”
“Our parents desired it,” I said. “Under God and the King, one’s parents’ wishes are as divine commandments, are they not?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know, sir, although I expect they are, for people of your class.”
I admit I had rather walked into that one.
“And then there was the small matter of the money. Thirty thousand pounds! All gone, spent, swallowed up, years before. Charles’s gambling debts – the debts accrued by the Cannock estate on account of the corrupt steward. There was no paying any of that back. The wedding simply had to go forward.”
“Oh, the money,” Richard had said fixing me with an accusing look, which had made me shrivel inside, somewhat.
“The whole blasted county had been invited! About a fifth of those who had been invited actually came, as Jessica’s parents had calculated – but rather a small church with every pew stuffed uncomfortably full than a grand one mortifyingly two-thirds empty, I suppose.”
Mama had hankered for Hanover-square, of course, as I have previously noted; but the Viscount had never been under any illusions regarding how society would view the union between the industrialist’s daughter and an alleged youngest son who been almost certainly the bastard get of a penniless Irish peer. It was still a very busy and expensive affair, however, notwithstanding Lady Hayles’s constant harping-on about ‘a quiet country wedding’.
“That bastard Hakeswill – “ Richard had said, then, as a thought had seemed to occur to him, prompted by what I had said earlier. “You told me how he’d appeared at the same time as Morris, before you got there. How long was he in Dublin with you?”
“Only a few months, thank God. He was discharged on medical grounds. He’d been injured somehow, I recall. Managed to stick himself in the foot with his halberd, or something. How he hung onto that thing I’ll never know. I told him to hand it into the stores and get himself a fusil, like a proper Light Company sergeant, even before Seringapatam! You can imagine how he took that.”
“How like that piece of shit to fake a foot injury! Thank God for that, though!”
“Why are you still concerned with Hakeswill, Richard? Surely he’s well and truly in the past now.”
“Something – just something Maggie Joyce mentioned, when I was with her recently. Something she said about the Ratcliffe Highway murders, down by Wapping - you know, happened a couple of years ago. Very big deal. I can’t bring it to mind just now. It was you mentioning Hakeswill. I’ll remember shortly, probably. Yeah, he’s well and truly in the past – until he shows up again.”
I had shuddered at the mention of the Ratcliffe Highway murders. The details of that case had kept decent people in England awake for nights together around the Christmas of the year ’11. Richard’s words regarding Hakeswill had also set alarms jangling in my head.
“But I should think Morris was furious that you snubbed him, sir.”
“Yes; another reason why he hates me with a vengeance. I imagine that was why he started spreading rumours. Did I ever tell you, Richard, that Hakeswill tried to kill me once – this would have been after you had gone to Bombay to take passage to England, towards the beginning of the Year Four – “
“ – and I ended up spending months in the fever hospital, and missed the sailing of the Company convoy! I had to wait in Bombay a whole stinking year, and I mean stinking! No, I don’t think you have, sir.”
“I could never prove anything, but I am certain it was Hakeswill. I had had cause to reprimand him for harassing one of the married men in his customary way only a day or so before. Someone snagged thorns into Rufus’s saddle-blanket over-night; the following morning he threw me as I mounted him, and I damn near broke my neck. I was unconscious for hours, and pretty much out of things for a week after. I almost got trepanned by Doctor Venkatesh! You remember him? Good man, very good. Tippoo’s physician.”
“Yes, sir, a fine man indeed. He greatly helped me.”
“I recall,” I said, feeling renewed shame for what had happened to Richard. “He came to work for us – the British - after Seringa fell. My accident though - not Rufus’s fault at all; at all; no, no. Dear animal. I so miss him. I hope he is well, if he lives still, although I doubt it – it has been long now. And that boy to whom I sold him, the young Lieutenant of the 19th Dragoons. He was a good young fellow.”
“You never told me that before, sir. About Hakeswill.”
“It made me doubly determined to get out of India, as fast as possible, after that. I had been planning to make arrangements to go home, but… I’d finally begun to enjoy the place! The thought that someone could do that, though… oh, I was telling you about the admirable Rossendale and I’ve been rambling. I don’t suppose you have had the pleasure of meeting Rossendale, Richard?“
“I have never yet had the honour of meeting Bertram Rossendale, sir.”
“Well, I hope you do, one day. He is a very amiable man. One can pass a painless hour with such a fellow, at the very least; and at the best he can provide a useful entrée into more elevated circles, if your career should ever be in need of a bunk-up. His aunt is an intimate of the Duchess of Richmond. He’s the elder son, too – the younger one is said to be a handsome devil but a wastrel and womaniser of the first water - in the fullness of time Bertram will be a power in his own right, assuming the French don’t do for him first, though, so brother Johnny won’t matter.”
“He’s serving still then, sir?”
“Lieutenant-Colonel of the Second Forty-Seventh, now, I believe. A fine regiment. I no longer regret the time I spent with it myself, in Dublin – at least, not for its own sake.”
“I’ll be sure to look him up next time I’m in London, sir.”
I had been almost certain that I had detected a little irony there. Certainly a little insolence. I let it pass.
“You were saying, sir, earlier, about Mr Slingsby, at your wedding.”
“Ah. Well. Jessica was waiting at the west door with her father, and the parish band had struck up now with Mr Handel’s tarradiddle from Solomon for the bridal procession – Rossendale suddenly yelped ‘Baggage to the rear!’ – because he’d seen Cornelius arrive at the door, so finally we could start – gave me a hell of a turn, though - ! but Cornelius was absolutely bloody steaming drunk!”
“Who, sir? Mr Slingsby, sir? Surely not, sir.” (Serjeant Sharpe had made a sudden unexpected reappearance.)
“He was.”
“Then that must have been very awkward indeed, sir.”
“You can picture the scene, Richard – and please stop sirring me! I’m aware you are only doing it to tease.”
“Indeed, I can see it. Very vividly, I can see it, in fact – indeed, as if it were a staged and lime-lit tableau at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane - a spectacle such as Serjeant Harper and I enjoyed but three weeks past!”
“Well, he pushed past Jessica and her papa and came barrelling up the nave, exclaiming that he was the King of the Jews and his wife, that is, Portia, was the Queen of Sheba! I can only suppose, on account of what the band was playing - d’ye see, Richard?”
I think Richard had not seen, but he had not been going to admit to that. Evidently the thing to which I alluded was something an educated and cultured man would have known at once, and so would have found the anecdote amusing. Sharpe had not been that man. Instead, he said,
“Portia? Isn’t that the name of that horse of yours you’ve just given him?”
“It is! Bloody funny coincidence! I didn’t name the mare, she was already called that when I bought her in the Year Ten off a chap in the Forty-Fourth who had decided to sell his commission and go home in disgust when Wellington had us withdraw to Portugal after Talavera. One of those croaking bastards who are forever writing home and getting quoted in Parliament and the papers. He obviously wanted his pound of flesh from the Peer!”
Richard had just looked at me blankly until the silence had threatened to become embarrassing. Obviously this had not been the time for another lesson in Shakespeare (I had still cringed regularly at the memory of Coriolanus in those days). I had gone on,
“Cornelius demanded they be seated in the front pew at the head of the south aisle, on account of his being the wisest King in the world, so wise that even King George hung on his every word! Which was of course the prerogative of my family, because the Vi – my father – “ – I had somehow managed to spit out the word – “ and Jessica’s father and the Rector took the Viscount’s side, as he was representing the Earl (who had been very old and slowly dying of the gout or the dropsy or the marthambles or what have you, up in Staffordshire), like the good Englishmen they were. Er, I meant, the right to sit in the most prominent pew, not the right to be King of the Jews, of course.”
“How very embarrassing this must have been for one and all, sir.”
“Quite so. Well, my family would not budge, as was their right; but neither would Cornelius give over.”
“So what happened in the end, sir?”
“The Churchwardens had to put him out, Richard!” I said. “In all my life that is the only time I have ever seen a brace of Churchwardens obliged to wield their staves in anger! Except the time a protest against the price of grain broke out during Matins at Lammas in, the year Eighty-Seven, I think it was. I would have been ten years old. The only other time, in my experience, anything remotely interesting had ever happened at church - and Mama made Curtis take me home before it had even half begun!”
“Curtis?”
“Mama’s lady’s maid. A rumour had got around that the Rector had been hoarding grain in the crypt.”
“And had he?”
“Someone had evidently been reading an inflammatory pamphlet about the enormities of the Clergy. The Rector was able to demonstrate to the satisfaction of all that the church possessed no crypt, however.”
“A mercy, sir.”
“Indeed. It later turned out he’d been hoarding it in the tower, on the floor between the ringing chamber and the bell-housing, but the Tower Captain, he was the steward of the glebe-lands, he was in on it and so the tenants never found out.”
“… and as for your brother-in-law, sir - did he put up a fight?”
“Oh, do stop bloody sirring me, Richard! I’ve already said!” I am afraid that I exclaimed rather testily, in a sudden pet - at the age of thirty-three going on another three decades or thereabouts, the tetchy old General to the life again, annoyed by the fawning deference of a callow subaltern! “Please remember that you are an officer and no longer a Serjeant. It’s been, how many years now? Eh? Seven, ain’t it?” But the squall quickly passed. All was sunshine again, and I laughed the gayest laugh I could contrive. Time was that I could do that and make it seem perfectly natural and heartfelt, but too much had happened, to both of us, over too long an interval, and I knew it must have sounded forced, for I detected the tiniest almost imperceptible twitch of Richard’s sceptical eyebrow. “He did not - he told the Rector that he would report him to Zadok the Priest for insubordination!”
“And the Rector said?”
“The good cleric showed great presence of mind. He retorted that he would see about that, as he happened to be second cousin once removed on his mother’s side to Nathan the Prophet.”
“And then?”
“Cornelius turned him about in the press and fled.”
“A most distressing spectacle.”
It occurs to me now that Richard must have had little idea of what a Churchwarden was – perhaps he had thought it was something like a parish beadle, for he had certainly known about those. He could have had little idea of who Zadok the Priest had been, or Nathan the Prophet either, come to that. I had never really wanted to believe in the depths of his ignorance, and I daresay he had not wanted to embarrass himself by asking me elementary questions about subjects with which he had at least been aware that an officer should have had a passing familiarity! I imagine he had thought it best to meet all such references and remarks which he found puzzling and enigmatic with stone-faced silence, a technique which I imagined that he would have honed over years passed sitting morosely and without a word to say for himself at the dining tables of the officers’ mess whilst the others, gentlemen like myself, born to wealth and privilege and the advantages which those things had been able to obtain – amongst them education, poise and social confidence (although not so much of that, in my case – I had simply become practised at pretending that I possessed those latter two, from the days when I had been an ensign paralysed by fear and uncertainty, being coached by kind Lieutenant Halston as to what, as a leader of men, I ought to know, and deliberately making an effort to ape the manners and bearing and voices of the senior officers) - had engaged in the construction of a coruscating galaxy of conversation around him. Better to be thought to have private, pathetic and mysterious reasons for remaining taciturn and unforthcoming in company, he had likely thought, than be dismissed as a churlish uncouth mule. (Another reason, incidentally, why he had on these occasions, whilst the others had talked and laughed about all manner of things which had passed completely above his head, and he had had no option but to sit in clod-like silence, tended to over-indulge a greedy fondness for the roast potatoes and other things left on the platters which the gentleman-officers had had the manners, the tact and the discretion to reckoning for the kitchen orderlies to take back to their families – I had observed him doing this on more than one occasion! - a habit which had already marked him out in the minds of some as the pauper orphan who had never had enough to eat in the workhouse where he had passed his childhood to the age of eight or thereabouts.) But by this time Grace, Lady Hale, had been dead for four years, and their child with her – also the Danish girl Astrid – another year was to pass until Richard had learned the true, terrible story of what had become of her; and now there was Teresa (and two or three others besides, if the truth were known), and I suspected that it had been difficult for him to go on playing the star-crossed lover who did not speak at dinner lest he weep, when everyone knew about his Guerillera lady-hawk, and envied him his possession of her (although Richard would have angrily disagreed with the idea that anyone could ever have been said to possess Teresa).
“Well,” I said, reverting once again to the topic of my wedding-day, “after that, things went rapidly downhill. For one thing, I fainted. It was a cold January day, but believe it or not, I damn well fainted! Rossendale noticed me going and caught me before I could fall down completely. He helped me out to the vestry and ministered to me with the contents of his hip-flask for ten minutes whilst the parish band played selections from Handel’s greatest successes. Finally I was fit to go out and – quite literally - face the music again. The congregation was agog. Jessica and her mother were looking daggers at me by this time and I can’t blame them. The Rector (who, I had noticed whilst we had been in the vestry, had also been attacking his hip-flask like an unweaned infant its mother’s teat – I did not blame him, as he had a scowling impatient Earl trailing a family of scowling impatient aristocratic hangers-on, a drunken Cornelius Slingsby and a mother of the bride rapidly approaching a condition of hysteria, all together in his church – a combination of circumstances which I do not think that he could have encountered very much before) - rather bungled his opening remarks and asked if either of us knew any impediment why we might not be Lawfordly joined together in matrimony – then tried again, only to manage awfully the next time – then afterwards Charles - you know, my eldest brother - he got really tight at the wedding-breakfast and mocked me for a performing monkey in a third-rate circus, and that really did not go down well with my new in-laws; then he tried to persuade one of Jessica’s younger cousins to go off with him into the orangery - so Jessica informed me later. His wife was mortified. Amelia must have been so relieved when he finally decided to take himself off to our estate in Barbados and stay there, as indeed we all were – myself especially. But let us now draw a veil across the rest of what transpired upon that infamous day. What I am saying, Richard, and I am sorry that I have taken so long to do so,” I said – “it is on account of my regrettable digressive habit - is that, I know that Slingsby is an invincible inebriate and a hopeless poltroon and all the rest of it. He had been married to my sister-in-law for some years before Jessica and I were wed, so I had heard a good deal of his deficiencies often enough - he had run through all the professions – Medicine, the Law, Politics - even, believe it or not, the Church – “
“The Church, sir? He’s never a Reverend!”
“It seems when it came to it, old Douglas, the Bishop of Salisbury before Fisher, refused to ordain him!”
“Salisbury? Wouldn’t it have been Winchester?”
“Slingsby and his wife lived at Blandford Forum. That’s Dorset. In fact, it’s adjacent to Knowlton. The borough I represent in Parliament, Richard,” I said, in response to his puzzled look. “I’m a Member of Parliament, remember? I don’t represent Blandford, I am relieved to say. The two Dorset members, Pitt and Portman, do that, thank God. Dorset lies within the Diocese of Salisbury. We never did find out why Douglas wouldn’t ordain him when it came to it, although I shouldn’t have been at all surprised if it had turned out that it was because he’d been reeking of rum, or failed to pass some sort of test, or perhaps both. I don’t know how they go about these things; the Church of England moves in a bloody mysterious way, if the example of its Bishops is anything to go by! One assumes they must give aspiring ordinands some kind of grilling, though - name the Twelve Apostles, or who were the six wives of King Henry the Eighth, or are gargoyles native to England or are they an introduced species, and when does the open season on them begin, or something, I really couldn’t say – I never thought to ask Francis – after he’d had his Viva and got his degree he just quietly went off to Winchester one day, end of June in ’91 or thereabouts, a Wednesday, I think it was, and saw old Brownlow North in his chapel in the Bishop’s Palace and came back upon the morrow both a deacon and a priest (they like to make a thorough job of it and get it all over with in one sitting, apparently – saves having to bother the Bishop again at a later date) and took up his living the very next Sunday; but anyway, Cornelius went into Douglas’s private chapel a layman anticipating apotheosis and emerged at the end of it as unconsecrate as you or I, and that was that.”
“Thank Christ for that, sir, is all I can say. The Church of England has enough problems without adding to them. I mean, Doctor Drax - ”
“Amen! Alleluia. I still can’t fathom what happened. I had always assumed that one had either to be a fearful duffer or a monster of depravity not to qualify for ordination in the Church of England after one had taken one’s degree and attained the age of four-and-twenty years. I don’t know of any other sine qua non. Perhaps Slingsby is both. Anyway, every profession he’s tried, he’s failed at it - made a hideous dogs’ breakfast of all of them. Yet, for all that, he had for some time managed to serve in the Dorset Militia in the capacity of second Lieutenant without quite disgracing himself utterly – “
“Militia,” Richard said to that, dismissively.
“Yes, yes, I know - a tin soldier parading in front of easily-impressed yokels in Blandford on market day - but it was enough for – the Viscount, as was - to be able to pull strings and get him a commission in the 55th” (I cannot get it out of my mind that he had hoped that Slingsby would just die of the Yellow Jack in the West Indies like the rest of them – Portia really had no further use for him now that he had performed the function of concealing her iniquity like a human fig-leaf and it would not have mattered one way of the other if he had or not – the Viscount had form on that score, as we know) “and then the South Essex as an absolute last resort – a famous gallant battalion whose Light Company had taken an Eagle, but beleaguered and running out of officers as well as men. Believe me, I sympathise with you, Richard. I do not like having to act in a way which makes it seem to the Battalion as if I want Cornelius to take your place as Captain of my Light Company. It’s just that in order to maintain peace at home – and it is very important that I do, for family as well as for political reasons back in England - I am obliged to go through the motions of at least appearing to be giving him a final chance to make good.” I struggled a little now, before continuing. “I promised Jessica – I had to – somehow she’d heard rumours about my idiotic behaviour, last year, in May, in Oporto.”
“Ah. The murky business with Lord Pumphrey and Patricio Mendoça.”
“Yes. I’d promised Jessica I would never … when abroad. Yet I did. It would have finished me if Pumphrey had not intervened.”
“Intervened? I reckon he was behind it in the first place!”
“Surely there is no evidence to suggest – ?“
“Just a gut-feeling, sir. I hope I’m never proved right, of course. It would turn the world upside-down if it ever came to light that Pumps has been working for the French all this time, would it not?”
“Richard!”
“Just saying.”
“Richard,” I said, anxiety like bile suddenly surging through my gut – perhaps because what Richard had said had provoked misgivings of my own, long-suppressed, to burst to the surface of my consciousness like an eruption from a submarine vent – “If your suspicions regarding William Pumphrey are grounded upon any tangible evidence, however slight, you have an absolute duty to speak up.”
“They aren’t, sir. It’s just a feeling that there’s something off about him. I mean, more off than the obvious. You can’t just dob someone in on a feeling. Where I grew up – I mean, in St Giles – that would get you your throat cut in a very dark alley. In fact, if you dobbed someone in and there was a cast iron case, it would still get you your throat cut. In any case, it’s just plain wrong.”
“Anyway,” I said, thinking that I would certainly be paying closer attention to the conduct of Lord Pumphrey (40) from now on, on account of Richard’s ‘feeling’, as it had struck me that whatever he might have sensed regarding that functionary might well have been in accordance with what I too had begun to suspect some time ago, and, as Richard had remarked, more than the merely obvious – and I would never have ‘dobbed someone in’ on account of that - “Thank the Lord it was Daddy Hill who dealt with that awful faux-pas of mine in Oporto. The Peer would have had my head paraded on a spontoon up the Rua de Santa Catarina without compunction, to keep the Portuguese happy.”
“You were really terrified of old Nosey once upon a time, weren’t you, sir?” Richard had ventured, then, grinning wickedly.
“I shouldn’t go that far – !“
“Come, sir; I heard you once hid under a table when he walked into the mess at Warley unannounced, one night after we’d just got back from Flanders.”
“Who told you that!”
“Obadiah Hakeswill, believe it or not. One night just after Seringapatam. In the serjeants’ mess. He was in his cups, being very friendly, very familiar. Even put his arm round me. Behaving like we were best mates. An act he’d put on in front of all the others, so I knew he was up to something and that in due course he’d be coming after me again, or you even. And he did! I felt like decking him. Didn’t though. That would have been stupid. It was very strange. It was almost like he was trying to wheedle information out of me that night. I can’t think what that might have been about. Must have been feeling particularly bonhominous on that occasion, if that’s a word.”
“It isn’t,” I said then, rather primly - probably. “But Slingsby – “ I had been getting fairly desperate by now, having received the strong impression that my efforts to mollify Richard had really not been having any great effect - “Jessica insists. She is holding my feet to the fire about it – she’s made me swear I’ll do all I can to further Slingsby’s career, for her sister’s sake – so that they can rise in the world on their own account and cease to be an embarrassment to the rest of us, I suppose is her thinking. Her argument was irrefutable. So I have been doing all I can to bring Cornelius on - for all the good it will do. Your future as Captain of the Light Company ultimately is secure, Richard – for as long as it lasts – “
“As long as it lasts?” he had said at once, suspiciously.
“You really should, you know, now be aspiring to higher things at this stage of your career – “
“Sir?” Richard had said, sounding deeply affronted now, as if he really had not been able to imagine anything more exalted than being in perpetuity Captain of the Light Company of a very junior Regiment of Foot, notwithstanding the chained eagle which beautified its shako-plate.
“There is more to life than remaining a captain forever, Richard. I know you love the rôle and that you are exceedingly good at it, but you should be thinking of promotion – of progressing your career. Wellington’s staff might be a next step to think about.”
“The fucking staff?”
“It was the making of me, Richard,” I said, stiffly. “Remember Talavera.”
“How can I think of promotion when Horse Guards won’t ratify my captaincy!” he had said, with a sudden scowl.
He had had me, there.
“I know my efforts on behalf of my brother-in-law will come to nothing and that he will inevitably let us all down, probably badly; but until that happens, I must make a convincing show of persisting with my campaign to advance his prospects,” I had gone on, lamely.
“I understand, sir. It’s just that I have a difficulty with that, because I know in my bones that Slingsby will let us down badly – he’ll end up costing good men their lives before this charade is over. I’ve seen his kind before. Too bloody many of them.”
I had had nothing to say in reply to that. I had merely pursed my lips in a moue of frustration – but at least I had refrained from trying to buy off Richard with the offer of yet another blasted boiled egg!
1 The latest addition to the manuscript, from analysis of the handwriting and the chemical composition of the ink; probably inserted some time in the spring of 1830 when Lawford was mere weeks away from death. Ed.
2 So it turns out that I could not refrain from doing so. When I began this work the memories of my early years were all still securely locked up in my mind, but the more I wrote, the more I remembered, as I suppose must only be natural. I always remembered Charles as a bully. That was how I characterised him to others, who I see now must have thought me weak and spiritless for making such a mountain out of the mole-hill of such a commonplace thing as what must have appeared from my filtered accounts as little more than the usual sort of rough horseplay which commonly takes place between brothers. I suppose I must have made myself forget what else he was. Now I fear I have revealed too much.
3 Great God! Waterloo! I never told anyone, although Stephen will have formed an inkling – I never have been able to hide anything of substance from him! On the morning of the 18th of June in the Year ’15 I awoke at about half-past two o’clock with the impression of the greatest dread oppressing my mind. I went at once to that window of my chamber which faced east. Darkness still had reigned, but it had been clear from the dull ruddy streak upon the horizon that the night was far spent, and that day was at hand. I knew I did not have very long to wait until the Sun rose, so I stood at the window in my night-gown, watching as the bar of scarlet and crimson increased in brilliancy to orange and pink, and light began to flow upon the land like an advancing phalanx of brightly-caparisoned cavalry, their cuirasses beginning to gleam in the growing light of day; and after perhaps half an hour the Sun, soon to appear in all his splendour, like a Field-Marshal as if come to direct his hosts on to glory, raised a limb above the parapet of the world. I thought of going back to bed then (which had still been kept warm by Stephen, who had remained peacefully asleep in despite of my restlessness) as I had become chilled as I had waited for the sun. However, I do not know why, but all at once a thought had come to me, and I had understood that I must stay there and wait – simply wait - and so I did, more or less, all day, for the next seventeen, eighteen hours, looking always to the east – for if the threatened blow was to fall, it would fall there, in Flanders, that immemorial cockpit – if not in France itself, if the Allies had been sufficiently collected to advance and to meet Bonaparte there - but a scant eighty or ninety leagues distant! My absent arm troubled me far more than had lately been usual with restlessness and random sensations; two or three times pangs of acutest pain, such as there had not been in the three years since Ciudad Rodrigo, seized hold of me as I stood at the window consumed with intense and unaccountable anxiety. Meanwhile, it had been becoming almost as if I could see the threat, like an ominous cloud, gathering in that eastern quarter of the sky, more and more dreadful - until just as I was certain that disaster must have befallen (for I knew that Sharpe had returned from civilian life and had gone to the war, and that all my old comrades from the South Essex, those of them who had survived the Peninsula at any rate, had been there also, and I feared for them; Peter d’Alembord had written to me from Bruxelles at the beginning of the month, giving expression to his own severe forebodings), I felt in my heart, suddenly, that instead, it was deliverance! for, to my fancy, at about eight o’ clock that night [nine o’clock in Belgium – Ed.] it was as if the ground shook suddenly, and the glass had rattled in the frame (indeed, there had come a clap of thunder unheralded by any lightning, Stephen, who had remained by my side all day, had told me afterwards – I had not noticed this as my thoughts had been utterly preoccupied with the fate of my distant friends who had faced that terrible threat), and it seemed as if the glowering cloud which for many hours had held itself raised in menace above that small shallow valley in the north-west of Europe like a great mailed fist clenched to strike had all at once – inexplicably – incredibly – dissipated! BR>
“There, sir,” Stephen had murmured, coaxingly, at that point. “There. Does not your heart tell you that the great work is achieved, at last? My countryman – for I am an Irishman, sir, notwithstanding that I was born in the English Midlands – my countryman, Lord Wellington, is triumphant, I am certain. Rest now.” BR> And so I had allowed him to lead me back to my bed. I had not eaten all that day – I had not been able to countenance food - Stephen had had to insist that I sip from a glass of water from time to time - but it had not mattered, for now I had wanted only to sleep.
I was to discover some three days later, when I was attending a grand event in London at which, quite unexpectedly, the stunning news of Wellington’s final victory over Bonaparte at Waterloo was first announced in England, that the hour of Doom had indeed struck at the very time that I had felt it. I experienced a similar thing that very same year, in July, when very early in the morning when I had awoken early and could not find sleep again I rose from my bed and went to the window of my chamber which overlooked the Park, at the front of the house, where at once I received the strangest impression that the sun had been about to rise in the south! for the sky in that quarter, above the place where, I knew, lay Portsmouth near twenty miles off, glowed a dull angry crimson, as if the town were ablaze [Lawford seems to have had a premonition of the fate of Portsmouth in the Second World War here – Ed] – but in a few moments the illusion vanished, and the sun soon rose in the north-north-east, as ever it does at that season of the year. These impressions, these random moments of clairvoyancy, the fleeting conviction that I am feeling or seeing in a brief instant that which shall be, only began to visit me following that night at Ciudad Rodrigo when my heart failed me thrice and each time I was, it seemed miraculously, recalled to life by a nun who was attendant upon me, who pounded upon my breast-bone until the vital pulse was restored. I do not speak of them to Stephen, for he is ever too susceptible to the lure of the uncanny, a common peril to the unusually sensitive mind, especially if that mind have an Irish or Welsh or Scottish cast, and I do not wish to trouble him; but I wish my Uncle McCandless had still been alive when this first began to occur, for I should have welcomed his Highland opinion upon the subject of the Second Sight.
4 It was widely observed amongst the senior officers how rapidly Lawford gained in confidence and presence as soon as he was out from under the yoke of Captain Morris, rapidly blooming in his new role as commanding officer of the 4th Coy. Ed.
5 The men of the 77th were known as the ‘Pothooks’ from the alleged resemblance of the number 77 to the iron hooks from which cooking-pots were suspended over the fire. It was just as well for Lawford that he finally transferred out of the 33rd when he did. Major-General Wellesley (as he now was) of necessity had been obliged to pass on command of the Havercakes to Colonel John Shee, undoubtedly against his better judgment. Under Shee the regiment fell into disarray, with drinking, gambling and indiscipline becoming rife. Mercifully Shee died of a catastrophic seizure in 1802. He was succeeded by Lt-Col Arthur Gore, who took stern measures and rapidly restored discipline and morale. The men of the 47th were known as the ‘Cauliflowers’ on account of their white facings, although some have argued that the pale roses on their Regimental colour resembled that vegetable. Ed.
6 A Lieutenant at the time of the Seringapatam action, Lawford would have been entitled to about £420 in prize money (about £42,000 today - 2026) vastly less than the sums awarded to the senior officers involved: General Harris’s share of the spoils was £130,000, Baird received £11,000 and Wellesley £4,000. (Source: Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune. Rory Muir. Yale: 2019.) Private Sharpe did well to obey his instincts and fill his boots when he seized the chance in the tunnel of the Watergate of Seringapatam on 4th May 1799. Ed.
7 Probably my favourite dance after the Ecossaise, which my McCandless cousins had taught me in the summer of ’89.
8 Shining; ornamented. Ed.
9 Muhammad Shah. Ed.
10 This term comprehends many shades of meaning, including polite, kind, honest, mild, and so on. Overall it signifies ‘Gentleman’. Ed.
11 That caused me to ponder, how might Aabha have seen Richard: a black diamond, perhaps? Mark used to make me think of a peridot, on account of his moss-green eyes. Oh, how I shall always mourn and deprecate and grieve for what happened to Mark, because of me! Mr Potter, the Viscount’s head gardener at the time, had been used to talk of recommending him to Kew, to study under Mr William Aiton (son of that great William Aiton who had been that establishment’s first Director)! I wish he had written that letter! I wish he had received a favourable response! I wish that Mark had then gone happily botanising around the world upon future voyages, collecting specimens for Sir Joseph Banks - far away from me and my selfish coveting of his beauty, his grace, his intelligence, his delightful company! Stephen though. He has long since proved the true corundum. His price is very far above rubies.
12 Prince or gentleman. NB regarding the ‘Earl of Winchester’: in real life the Earldom of Winchester was established three times: in 1207 (Saer de Quincey); in 1322 (Hugh le Despencer); and in 1472 (Lewis de Bruges). This is where fiction diverges from fact. There was no fourth creation of the Earldom of Winchester in 1704. In 1500 the Earldom lapsed. In 1551 the Marquessate of Winchester was created for William Paulet. This still exists, and to this day the Marquess of Winchester is a Paulet. Ed.
13 Higher-class nautch girls and courtesans. WL uses several words of Hindi and Arabic origin in the present MS, giving the impression that he felt free to express his affection and respect for India and its peoples in this private document far more readily than he had felt able to in the public works. Ed.
14 Gerard Lake, British Commander-in-Chief in India, 1801-1807. Ed.
15 It seemed that quite by chance he had heard of what Sharpe and I did in Seringapatam in ‘99, and, ascribing a far greater degree of heroism to me than I ever deserved, put in the good word for me with Admiral Rainier, and so I was duly invited to accept a berth aboard the Trident.
16 I had to walk beside Rufus for many days before he was able to bear me once more.
17 This anecdote was invented to explain the rather odd remark by Major Dunnett in Ch. 1 of Sharpe’s Rifles, viz., that the Colonel had only agreed to have Sharpe in the Battalion “as a favour to Willie Lawford”, which is a puzzle, because at the time Lawford was still only a Major himself, stuck in the obscurity of garrison duty in Dublin, in no position to seek or obtain favours from anyone. It seems clear from Sharpe’s Fortress that the Willie in question was actually not Major the Honourable William Lawford but Lt-Col William Wallace, colonel of the 74th, who had suggested to an unhappy Sharpe that he might be better off transferring to the new-fangled 95th with its novel approach to class and preferment; but as Rifles was published before Fortress the decision was made to take the assertion of the fictional Warren Dunnett of the 95th at face value rather than assume that the real-life William Wallace of the 74th had been the intended recipient of the favour. One concludes that, yet again, Cornwell had actually forgotten who William Lawford was! (In Sharpe’s Escape it is fairly clear that he thinks Lawford is Colonel Windham, from Sharpe’s Company, which is quite a bizarre error, as Company is set in 1812 and Escape two years earlier – a situation produced by Cornwell’s unorthodox approach to the composition of this series.) At any rate, the confusion seems to have arisen on account of the plethora of Willies which in real life then occupied the officers’ messes of the British Army wherever they were stationed in the world. Ed.
18 A thing I must say at once, to refute everything evil wagging tongues have ever said, I did love Jessica. I could not love her as a husband, it goes without saying, but I loved her nonetheless as a sister and a friend and a helpmeet, and as the mother of our daughter. Her cruelly early death in the Year ‘18 was a cause of greatest distress to me. I can honestly declare that the pain and subsequent incapacity which it caused me was no less than if I had lost another limb.
19 My dearest girl. All my hopes now rest upon Grace. Eloisa, Lady Hungerford, died in a riding accident in Hyde Park in December 1829 (a dog ran in front of her horse which, startled, reared and threw her), at the age of 23, when her daughter Grace was three months old, and Grace’s older brother, George, was two. (There is a sad pathos in seeing in the MS how Lawford strikes through is and replaces it with was. It seems strange that Lawford did not rest his hopes equally upon his two grand-children, unless he had already seen in George too great a resemblance in character, if not in feature, to his son-in-law Sir Warren. Ed.)
20 Lawford is here being frank about his position within the family, scrupling to call the late Earl his grandfather, because he was not. Ed.
21 Kitty Pakenham. Her sad history may be deduced from a reading of Elizabeth Longford’s two-volume 1969/1970 biography of Wellington. Ed.
22 £40 a year. Ed.
23 Lawford need not have worried: after Jane Turnbull left her employment at Durford Park in 1786 she found another place in the distant rugged north of England as governess to the bastard daughter of a dancer of the Paris Opera, deceased, and a wealthy English gentleman with aristocratic connections, whom she eventually married, after a period of much turbulence which determined in a torrid scandal. [Jane Eyre reference.] Ed.
24 Here we were met by the Governor, Colonel Patton, as eccentric an old fellow as ever I saw, and who had been dressed in the fashion of the court of the first King Charles. The only other incident of note on this voyage had taken place when we found ourselves becalmed for about ten days in that region of the ocean which sailors call the Doldrums; in the grey, windless and oppressively hot weather the whole ship’s company had grown bored beyond all believing, so when Captain Lewis of the Marines decided that for a wager of twenty guineas he would dive over the side fully-clothed and swim the whole way around the ship, notwithstanding that the Trident had been dogged by sharks in relays all the way from Madagascar, and that the three which were currently stalking us were particularly large, cunning and vicious brutes - we had caught more than a glimpse of what they could do when one day the Purser authorised a side of beef, which had become too putrid even for the officers of the Royal Navy to contemplate, to be thrown over the rail - his challenge was immediately accepted by the Surgeon: the Marine Captain, who, it must be said, had taken pride in his reputation as being a strong swimmer, went head-first into the ocean, where the gaping pockets of his scarlet coat at once filled with water and caused it to act upon him in the capacity of a sea-anchor, and he had been promptly beset by those wolves of the deep: the first shark which had attacked him proved the most irresolute of the three, because when he had punched it on the snout it had at once retreated, to the cheers of the ship’s company - wearing an expression upon its face which had seemed to me to embody profound embarrassment – but that had proved a short respite only, for soon the Marine Captain had emitted the most terrible shriek imaginable before he had then been entirely eaten by the largest shark I had ever seen in my life - the multitudinous seas had become at once incarnadined, making the green one red indeed, as Shakespeare says in his Scottish play - the sight having the most sobering effect imaginable on everyone who witnessed it! (I certainly learned my lesson regarding succumbing to the temptation, engendered by boredom, to the commission of acts of recklessness after that: when I was later as good as imprisoned in the Dublin Barracks and wishing for something, for anything to happen to alleviate the ennui peculiar to that posting, even a full-scale rebellion, I often upbraided myself, saying to myself ever after, Remember Captain Lewis!) I had been asked to dine with the Captain that evening, and had been looking forward to it as a distraction from the tedium of the voyage, but after that I had little appetite for food, and none at all for claret.
Sharks are hideous hell-beasts, there is no denying. On another occasion, I and some companions, at the invitation of the Captain, had been standing upon the stern-gallery (a kind of balcony overhanging the sea out of doors beyond the great cabin) observing as men on the poop above us were endeavouring to haul in an eight-foot specimen, which they had just hooked, up and over the taff-rail. It had been putting up a rare fight and bets were being taken as to whether it would escape or not. Suddenly the line broke and it fell into our midst, lunging and snapping like a very fiend from the abyss! We fell over each other in our desperation to regain the great cabin, our route of retreat to safety severely obstructed by the large number of empty champagne bottles which littered the deck and which were now rolling about like fallen skittles with the movement of the ship, having been kicked over in the scramble to get away from those appalling dagger-like teeth!
25 Homecoming. Ed.
26 Dodd did not kill McCandless. The true culprit was Obadiah Hakeswill, his motive the one which was usual for him – revenge for a slight, real or imagined. Hakeswill bore a grudge against McCandless for his correction of him in front of the men, and his rebuking of him regarding Hakeswill’s continual sacrilegious references to the Scriptures, and most of all for his championing of Sharpe and his thwarting of Hakeswill’s attempts to arrest Sharpe (on another fabricated charge) during the march north to engage Scindia’s army in the September of 1803. Neither Lawford nor Sharpe ever knew the truth of this, but it came out when a notebook was retrieved from the corpse of a Private Kendrick, a known toady of Hakeswill’s, at Gawilghur, in which the fact had been itemised cryptically as HM Obit 23S03 OH Fecit presumably for future purposes of blackmail, and born out by an overheard remark made by a Private Lowry which had been noted down in a letter home to England from a comrade, which did not come to light until the middle years of the 20th Century. (Kendrick’s note in itself was too obscure to damn Hakeswill at the time, and the connection was only definitively made some one hundred and fifty years after the event, by an historian of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment; the Regiment having been formed at the amalgamation of the 33rd and 76th in 1881). Ed.
27 Not for the first time.
28 Jobbing gardeners were held in very low esteem and were usually expected to perform a host of menial chores unconnected with gardening in addition to their horticultural duties. A jobbing gardener had no employment security. Old age and ill-health meant that they frequently ended their days in the poorhouse. Ed. On the Life of a Jobbing Gardener | The Gardens Trust; The gardeners that time (almost) forgot | English Heritage (english-heritage.org.uk)
29 i.e. put into breeches and freed from his leading-strings, with his baby-hair cut off, probably upon the eve of his fourth birthday, that is, the 9th of January 1781. Ed.
30 Lieutenant and Mrs Cornelius Slingsby. Mrs Slingsby, Portia, was Jessica’s sister. See Richard Sharpe’s recollections for an account of what took place. Ed.
31 A vigorous dance involving close intricate suggestive physical contact, in which the partners came near to tying themselves in knots. Ed.
32 I later tried to teach Sharpe the allemande during the winter of 1810-11, but as I was in that instance in the person of the gentleman, and he the lady, and neither nimble nor delicate upon his feet (or at least, he was, when skirmishing amidst scrub and scree and evading the French voltigeurs, but not upon a dance-floor) and he being three inches taller than myself, our efforts inevitably ended in a farcical (if delicious – for me) heap of entangled limbs upon the floor of the officers’ mess; and after that we confined our efforts to the less decorous and more serpentine of the popular dances of the day. Particularly the horizontal ones (occasionally, in strictest privacy).
33 But he did. Lawford confessed to Richard Sharpe his arduous but at first fruitless efforts to consummate the marriage when they were wintering in Lisbon between October 1810 to March 1811. Having finally succeeded, his latest attempt resulting in conception, that was the end of the matrimonial relationship in truth, although it continued to exist in name up to the time of Jessica’s death in 1818. Lawford had been rather drunk at the time of his confiding in Sharpe and so had probably forgotten that he had spoken of the matter. Ed.
34 Eton and Oxford both flowed over him like a zephyr which did not even ruffle his hair. As it turned out, I did not mind leaving school early in order to join the Army, but I have often regretted that I never got to spend so much as a term at Oxford.
35 Fetherstonehaugh debauched the 15-year-old Emma Harte (later Lady Hamilton and Nelson’s mistress) at Uppark in 1780; she was got with child, whereupon he sent her away with no provision made either for her or the baby – Fetherstonehaugh, a rake after Charles’s own heart but with a stronger constitution, died in 1846, aged 91. Ed.
36 The Barracks at Arbour Hill, Dublin, built in 1701-2 in an impressive neo-classical style, designed by the Surveyor General, Thomas de Burgh, who was also the architect of the celebrated Library at Trinity College. The Barracks complex was extended in the late 18th century. Over time, it became the longest-inhabited such complex of military buildings in the world. For a time following Independence it was known as Collins Barracks. It became the National Museum of the Republic of Ireland in the late 20th century. Ed.
37 A handsome and charming scoundrel of the Irish peerage, a noted gambler and seducer of married women, in possession of a broken-down castle by the Atlantic Ocean upon the west coast of Donegal, and a few hundred acres of bog and poor land fit only to graze a handful of scrawny scabby sheep. There had once been money, wide fertile acres and honour in plenty, but all that was taken from the Fitz-Simons family in the time of the two Cromwells, Thomas and Oliver: Gerald Fitz-Simons, the Marquess in question, had been reduced to living on his wits in London and in Bath, and in the European capitals before the wars with France, mainly by playing cards and gaming in general. One thing he was not was an experienced duellist (oddly, given his propensity for sharping, and for bedding other men’s wives). This proved a disadvantage on the ill-omened day, 11th February in the year ‘77, when Viscount Petersfield, certain that Fitz-Simons had cuckolded him and moreover insinuated his latest bastard into the nursery at Durford, invited him to an early-morning meeting in Hyde Park and fatally shot him. At the time Fitz-Simons had been in equal measure despised and secretly envied by other men. The more kindly-disposed held that he could have turned out well had he not inherited at such a young age, when, lacking the guidance of a mentor, he had quickly run through what little fortune had remained to him, his father having died of what appears to have been congestive heart failure (now known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) whilst still in his early fifties. Ed.
38 Jessica and I had an unusual marriage, it is true, but I can write with veracity that we had at least learned to love each other as brother and sister; and I was very much grieved by her far too early death in the Year ‘18, when, after such a painfully long engagement – for we had been betrothed as children, as once had been the custom, difficult as it is to believe such a thing in these much-altered times – there had been a good deal about aristocratic life in England even towards the end of the last century which had seen but little improvement from how things had been in the Middle Ages - we had been married but thirteen years. [Lawford was 29 years old when he finally married Jessica in January 1806. Jessica was 24. This was fairly usual for persons of that class, at that time, although the length of the betrothal had been anything but. However, a marriage which had lasted for twelve years actually represented something of an achievement, given the high risk of mortality from disease, childbirth, and, of course, death in battle, which had prevailed in that era. Ed.]
39 Laurence Sterne. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. 1768.
40 Pumphrey was not only later revealed as a double agent working for the French intelligence service as well as for the British Foreign Office, but also exposed as having been involved in the guinea boat trade – a middle-man in the smuggling of British gold to France for profit throughout the war. Pumphrey was a thoroughgoing black-hearted traitor and deserved all that eventually came to him in Warsaw in 1830. Ed.
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