Words of Command (Hervey 12) (Matthew Hervey) by Allan Mallinson

Author:Allan Mallinson [Mallinson, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448171279
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2015-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

XII

NELSON’S COUNTY

Next day

Despise Bonaparte as he did, Hervey had always embraced the Great Disturber’s caution to his generals – ‘Ask of me anything but time’. The whole of the day after his meeting with Lord Hill he spent at office – from dawn until late in the evening – while arrangements were made for the journey. Much of what he attended to was in its way routine, but things would be so much more to his liking thereby on return. And he was determined to leave on Saturday morning as soon as the sun was up.

Matters at office proceeded smoothly save in one respect: Fairbrother was not inclined to accompany him, and resisted all attempts to be persuaded otherwise. He claimed incipient malady, pressing affairs of business, undertakings given to General Gifford, an aversion to ‘tractless paths of boundless void’ (as he understood Norfolk to be at this time), and a desire to visit with several acquaintances for reasons varied and unrelenting – though he conceded that in a month or so if Hervey’s duties detained him in the north he would be glad to come to his assistance.

And indeed, after Hervey’s initial disappointment – dismay – at not having the company of one with whom he might converse freely and whose opinion he valued so highly, he saw that in truth Fairbrother might be more of help to him where he lay than in Nelson’s county. He therefore put a number of affairs of his own into the hands of his friend (how apt was Lord Hill’s appellation fidus Achates – the faithful Trojan, companion of Aeneas, who was the favourite of Apollo), and urged him also, when his particular business had been completed, and his visits made and his incipient malady overcome, to travel to Wiltshire to see his people – a voerloper as the Cape Dutch had it, telling all that he could in anticipation of the eventual, keenly looked-to return of the ever-absent son, brother, and father.

But although he, Hervey, was – and always had been – content enough with his own company, the mission on which he was to embark seemed to him to demand some interlocutor of sorts. There was a deal of evidence to be gathered and ‘rendered in writing’, there would be supplementary particulars to follow up once the day’s collecting had been assessed; and the sheer size of the county … He would need the properties of St Anthony of Padua to be in two places at once.

And he allowed himself a smile unexpectedly, such that Malet remarked on it and asked if all was well.

‘Not St Anthony,’ he replied, ‘but St Alban.’

‘Colonel, I would share your amusement if you would share your joke.’

‘I shan’t try your devotion, Malet; I was merely amused by the process by which I’d arrived at the answer.’

‘The answer to …?’

‘Who shall accompany me. I need an adjutant, and since I cannot spare you – since it is you who will be exercising command for me – I must choose another.

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