'Better than sending to Derryman's for a chaise, I think.'
'Indeed,' said Hervey, thankfully (better and a good deal cheaper – half a crown for the chariot man, Corporal Denny). 'I'll send word as soon as I have the day, and then you may arrange things for the parade itself.'
'Of course.'
As Hervey made to leave, Malet handed him a small bundle of letters. 'These were brought from the officers' house for you. There's one with the Horse Guards' stamp.'
'Indeed?' Hervey took them, trying not to show excessive interest (a letter from the commander-in-chief's headquarters could be no occasion for disquiet now that the inquiry into the events at Waltham Abbey was scotched).
'And our respects, of course, to Lady— to Mrs Hervey.'
'Thank you, Malet,' he replied, quietly, putting the letters into his pocket and nodding his goodbye.
Outside the orderly room, Private Johnson was waiting for him. 'Ah didn't think tha were back, sir, till next week.'
Hervey was impressed by the speed at which notice of his return travelled the barracks, though Johnson had always had an ear for comings and goings. 'There were matters to be about.'
'Mrs Armstrong, ay.'
'The most wretched business. Are you able to come with me to London?'
Since only guard duty would require leave of absence of any but his own officer, and since as an officer's groom he was excused such duty, Johnson was able to say 'yes' at once, albeit with a certain reluctance. He was unsure, as he had confided many months before, that Hervey's new bride would welcome his continuance. Hervey had assured him in the most decided fashion that there was no cause for even the slightest unease in that respect, but Johnson fancied he understood the way of new wives. Lady Henrietta Hervey – Mrs Hervey, as Johnson had always known her, being perennially unmindful of the correct usages – had welcomed him unreservedly. He would have done anything for her. He thought, still, that if he too had been at Serjeant-Major Armstrong's side that day in the white wastes of America, she might be alive yet, even though once many years ago when he had voiced the same, Hervey, though deeply touched, had told him most unequivocally that he would with certainty have perished by the axe or the arrow. Nevertheless, Lady Henrietta Hervey remained to Johnson's mind the apotheosis of wedded-womanhood. Lady Lankester – Mrs Matthew Hervey as now was – for all that she was the widow of a regimental hero, was not, to his mind, of the same water.
It was some time before Hervey thought to open his letters. Private Johnson had a good deal to say, and there was the question of how and where to begin on the 'arrangements'. It was the very devil that the regiment no longer had its own chaplain, and that the rector of the parish in which were the barracks, and the priest of the Hounslow mission, were both absentees. His first notion was to send word to his friend John Keble, who would surely know how to proceed, but time precluded it. He knew no clergyman, of any rank, in London. He certainly knew no Catholic. Yet there must be such counsel. A decade or so ago, before the Great Disturber was despatched to his final, fatal exile on St Helena, there had been priests and religious aplenty in London. True, they spoke in French – they were pensioners, indeed, of King George during their temporary exile – but that would have been no impediment. It was an age past, however: he must needs consult, now, with the English Mission.
How he disliked that word – mission – as if England were some heathen place, like the Americas of the conquistadores, or the Africa to which he would soon return. It was strange: in Portugal and Spain he had had no resentment of the Pope's religion. He had attended its services, at times even frequently. He liked the air of those churches, great and small, the sense of the living, independent of any actual human presence. In an English church, even in the one he loved the most, his father's in Horningsham, the sense was of something past, gone. In the Peninsula the Duke of Wellington had issued the most particular instructions to the army concerning the respect to be accorded the religion of His Majesty's allies. When the Blessèd Sacrament was carried in procession about the streets, an officer was to remove his headdress, and other ranks were to present arms. And it was strange how this order not only avoided offence to the allies, but also increased the esteem in which their religion was held.
Perhaps his memory played him false, though. He himself had called a good deal of it mummery, and worse, as had others of the Sixth. Yet it was not the same loathing – by no means the same – as that which they sometimes had of the Catholic church in England, where too often it had been the begetter of treachery. Or in Ireland, where contempt for the mean condition of the native population, the ignorance and indolence, was at once extended to their religion, which somehow seemed both the cause and the effect.
But then in Rome, whither his sister had taken him to interrupt the melancholy of Henrietta's death, he had found his way to the English seminary, where the rector himself had greeted him with a warmth that was at once welcoming and yet disturbing. On his knees in the Martyrs' Chapel, tears had welled up at the thought of what he had lost – and what his daughter had lost – and he had found something comforting in that place.
Yes, he would seek out the headquarters of the English Mission in London, and he would do it without hesitation or distaste. He would speak to its chief priest – the bishop, whatever was his style – and ask him how the Sixth might bury the wife of one of its most esteemed soldiers, with all the proper ceremony of her religion. And with all the proper ceremony of the regiment.
'What is that you said, Johnson?'
'Ah said, sir, t'serjeant-major were a good man.'
' "Were a good man"? He is still.'
'Ah know, but wi' Mrs Armstrong gone an' all . . .'
'I don't see . . .'
'Ah reckon it'll go bad wi'im.'
'Of course it will go badly with him. How . . .'How did Johnson think that Henrietta's death had gone with him?
Johnson could usually be relied on for the blithest of outlooks, but in this case it was not so much insensibility as the conviction that Hervey bore misfortune in some other way. 'Ah reckon 'e'll chuck it for them kinder of 'is. 'E were right soft on 'em.'
Hervey would have reminded his groom that he too had once 'chucked it' – had resigned his commission – except that that was not the material point (Johnson's prognosis somehow stirred guilt in him). 'Then we must pray that he does not. See to it that he does not, for his best place is in the regiment; the best place for his children, indeed.'
Johnson had no argument with that. He owned that his own long life to date – half and more of the allotted span – was on account of his wearing regimentals. Corunna, Talavera, Salamanca and many another Peninsula scrape, Waterloo, countless affairs in India: these were nothing compared with the vicissitudes he would have faced in his native county – the silted lungs, the broken back, the roof-falls, the fire-damp . . .
''E'd a'been a right good RSM.'