A Regimental Affair Read Online Free

speak about with Henrietta. He had rehearsed it the better part of his passage home from India, and the delight he was taking in the prospect of seeing her was now and again marred by the darker parts of those litanies. However, that she might throw him over – or that she might, indeed, have done so already – could not take away the pleasure just in seeing her again, for it had been all but two years since their hasty affiancing and his even hastier departure. But for the time being at least, Hervey had only practical concerns, and these were welcome as a distraction from those others.
    On that last occasion for posting to Wiltshire, he had gone to the Saracen’s Head in Skinner Street, the offices of the Universal Coach and Wagon Company, to pay over the odds for an inside seat on one of their mails, a balloon coach which had conveyed him at a full nine miles an hour to Salisbury; thence, after a night’s fitful sleep at the Red Lion, he had taken the Bath stage for Warminster. And although he hoped the demand for seats had slackened in the intervening two years, this was his intention again now.
    Lord John Howard was minded to go with him to Horningsham, for Hervey’s sister Elizabeth had become the object of his considerable admiration (but which fact he had not yet been quite able to tell his friend). Duty at the Horse Guards, however, would delay that pleasure a further while.
    As the chaise got closer to Snow Hill, its progress was checked to an unusual degree, even allowing for the habitual congestion of the narrow thoroughfares of the City. Lord John Howard stuck his head out of the window and called to the driver for his opinion of the delay.
    ‘Cashman, sir! They’re hangin’ ’im at noon outside Beckwith’s gun shop in Skinner Street. I doubts as I’ll be able to get the carriage through to the Saracen’s at this rate.’
    From both windows they could see men and women, in the main respectably dressed, walking with grim purpose in the same direction they were heading, though with more ease.
    ‘I think it better if we alight,’ said Howard. ‘This will never do.’
    They stepped down from the chaise – not without difficulty – and Hervey paid the driver. ‘Straight on up here, then, sir, on acrossGray’s Inn Road and you’ll be there soon enough. And mind, gentlemen; there’ll be pick-pokes and nippers all over the place.’
    They thanked him and joined the flow of people eastwards. ‘Who is this Cashman?’ asked Hervey, fastening tight his coat. ‘I heard speak of him at the United Services this morning.’
    ‘Ah,’ replied Howard, raising an eyebrow. ‘It’s a very rum affair indeed. There was a big gathering of Radicals on the Spa Fields at Clerkenwell last December. The crowd was whipped up by agitators and the like, and then a couple of hundred of them marched into the City, breaking into some gun shops on the way.’
    ‘What happened when they got there?’
    ‘Oh, the Mayor had things properly seen to. They couldn’t make any mischief at the Exchange, so they set off for the Tower instead.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘The Mayor had sent for the cavalry, and they dispersed them without too much trouble.’
    ‘And Cashman was one of the ringleaders?’
    ‘Heavens, no. He was just one of the poor sots to be taken in by the likes of Hunt.’
    ‘Hunt?’ Hervey had been little enough in England these past five years to know anything much of the troubles, let alone the names of the ringleaders.
    ‘ “Orator” Hunt they call him – a fearful rabble-rouser. Makes mischief all over the country at present, what with his calls for reform. He and others like him are the real villains of the piece. But it was Cashman who broke into Beckwith’s, and he stands convicted of stealing arms for the purposes of insurrection. He’s being hanged outside the very shop.’
    Hervey sighed a sigh of ‘cruel necessity’.
    Howard caught his meaning and was – to Hervey’s surprise – not wholly