Hervey 09 - Man Of War Read Online Free

first letter in a female hand that he had ever received. He had no certainty of the tone or convention, but he considered it the warmest expression of esteem. How different it felt – strangely different – taking to sea with a wife awaiting his return (for he already imagined her in the Norfolk drawing room, wed): his world was no longer wholly wooden, sea-girt and male.
    He folded the letter, replaced it between the bindings, wrapped it in the oilskin and put it back into his pocket. As he did so he thought again of Elizabeth’s sisterly duty – so admirable a thing – and then the object of that duty, and wondered how was his friend in southern waters. Perhaps – his own new command notwithstanding – he might even envy Hervey a little, for would not his friend have more prospect of the smell of black powder than would he himself in the Ionian? The native tribes of the Cape Colony would know no better than to chance against His Majesty’s land forces; but the Turk must know that he could have no fight at sea with a first-class naval power. And certainly not with three .
    He drained his cup, and glanced about his new quarters – new, but entirely familiar, for the difference between these and his earlier quarters was more of scale than design, or even luxury. He looked at the painting of Nisus , his first command – Flowerdew had fixed it on the starboard bulkhead exactly as it had been on Liffey , his last. He had loved Nisus – a frigate of, to his mind, most excellent proportions – to the exclusion of all else. Next to the painting – portrait – of her, Flowerdew had fixed the oil of his Norfolk home, in which he had yet truly to take residence. Never, indeed, had he thought he would prize it so much as now he did, for no longer was it an unlooked-for refuge ashore, more wreckers’ yard than haven: Elizabeth Hervey – Elizabeth Peto – would one day, soon, occupy it. Truly, he told himself, he was at this moment possessed of the very best of both worlds.

II
A SIGHT SO TOUCHING IN
ITS MAJESTY

    London, seven months later, 22 April 1828

    Acting Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Hervey, officer commanding the detached troop of His Majesty’s 6th Light Dragoons in the Cape Colony, and acting commanding officer of the Corps of Cape Mounted Riflemen, rearranged his bones as he got down from the Rochester mail. The Canterbury turnpike was a fine, fast road, which served only to make the occasional pothole more jarring, though from Deptford, where it became a mere municipal affair, not evenly made or mended, the jolts had come with greater frequency and severity. His travelling companion, Captain Edward Fairbrother, also of the Mounted Rifles (the lieutenant-governor at the Cape, his old friend Sir Eyre Somervile, had insisted that Fairbrother should accompany him on account of his wound and the remittent fever), looked distinctly qualmish, for the coach’s rolling action had at times been pronounced – though not as bad as the packet’s rolling off the Azores, when even Hervey, whose sailing-stomach was strong, had been prostrated for two days. Yet despite heavy seas they had made the passage from Cape Town to the Medway in just short of six weeks.
    Fairbrother, his indisposition notwithstanding, was as arrested by the sights and sounds of the metropolis as Hervey had been that day, thirteen years before, when first he had come to London – and by this same route. Southwark High Street, narrow, towering, inn-lined, had been all mid-morning bustle, so that the captain of Mounted Rifles had fancied he might be in Shakespeare’s London; or even Chaucer’s, for Hervey had pointed out The Tabard (though nowadays it was called The Talbot). And London Bridge, no wider than that high street but just as teeming and looking every bit as antique, had afforded him two sights as inspiring as might be: downstream the Tower of London, and all the evidence of the capital’s maritime commerce; upstream, but a stone’s