A Regimental Affair (10 page)

But it was too fine a morning to be speaking of such things. Then Hervey suddenly remembered. ‘Dan, I can’t think how I’ve not told you before. I have a repeating carbine to show you.’

Coates whistled. ‘Now that
is
something! You’re sure it repeats,
though? It doesn’t just carry more charges? I’ve seen some cutcha affairs in my time – as your Indians would say.’

‘Believe me, Dan: this is a repeater right enough. I watched it put seven balls into a target in quick succession. And then put in another seven myself!’

‘Then this I really do want to see. Will you bring it over soon?’

‘Just as soon as I’m back from Hounslow – a week at most. Now come and see my mother. She is sorely in need of cheer this morning.’

It was a quarter after noon the next day when Hervey got word that Henrietta had arrived at Longleat. The hour presented a problem, since he supposed the family would be at their table: he could scarcely intrude without an invitation. But Daniel Coates’s admonition stung him still, and he was soon hurrying to the stable for his father’s cob. Between the two of them, Abel Towle and he had Jessye’s dam under saddle quicker than a dragoon at ‘alarm’, and Hervey was kicking on even as his father’s man was trying to pull the straw from her tail.

But slow, ever so slow, was the old mare. Hervey hadn’t the heart to demand a trot when she refused his asking, even though the road was downhill for most of the way – and the last mile nothing but. From the gatehouse, on grass grazed short and springy by Lord Bath’s blackfaces, she did manage a stumbling jog, though still, he rued, no more than a doubling pace for even a battalion company (a light company would have shown him their heels for certain).

At last he was at the steps of the great house. One o’clock: he had walked it quicker many a time, and still arrived with not a bead of sweat. But this time his agitation was not from exertion. Here was the strange tightness in his vitals again – the analogue of peril, a gauge which showed that destruction was at hand unless he took immediate action. But what was he to do? What control over events might he seize? Henrietta’s was surely the initiative, not his. Nothing he said now, no matter how ardent or profound, would change her heart if it were against him, for fickle she had never been.

He had in his pocket the necklace that the Rajah of Chintal had pressed upon him; a favourite, the rajah had explained, of his late
wife. It seemed so much a bauble now when he thought of how he had . . .
abandoned
Henrietta (could there be any other word?), first in London, then in France. And yet, surely, if she were so vexed with him – so vexed that their engagement was already broken for her part – she would have sent word that she would not receive him. He rallied a little, but then relapsed as quickly at the thought that she might merely wish to vent her anger on him.

He pulled the bell loop. Soon he would know the worst. Longleat park had been at the centre of his thoughts, one way or another, since first he was conscious of them. He heard the sheep on the hill and the rooks in the hanger: would he be allowed to hear them ever again?

The door opened. It was not a footman but the housekeeper who bid him enter, with a friendly ‘Good afternoon, Captain Hervey, sir.’

The smile encouraged him, and he smiled in return. ‘Mrs Cousens, I am very glad to be returned. Is Lady Henrietta at home?’

‘She is,’ came another voice, from the great staircase.

For all the times Matthew Hervey had been in want of words, never had he greater want than now. He could find nothing to utter but ‘Oh’. It sounded first like surprise – dismay, even.

But Henrietta was smiling – a warm, generous, open smile, for she had taken his ‘Oh’ to be rapture. Though she stood above him on the stairs she still contrived that doe-like look which had greeted him on his first return from France, the dark pools that were her eyes half raised to him, half turned from him. And there was a blush to her cheeks that no rouge had made.

He rushed to her eagerly, and they embraced with all the ease of seasoned lovers, kissing full and long, exchanging endearments with a happy passion, telling each other without words that all was now right and would never again be otherwise.

‘I watched for you coming,’ Henrietta laughed, shaking her head. ‘You have no idea how my heart leapt when I saw you ride through the arch. I wanted to run to greet you, but you made your way so slowly I feared the worst.’

‘My father’s cob,’ Hervey began, then said no more, for they kissed again.

The family being away, the lovers were able to enjoy a cold table together, each admitting to a curiously strong appetite. Afterwards they walked to the hanger and on to Heaven’s Gate, the place from which best to admire the house’s fine proportions and gardens. They had done so many a time before, but never alone. They sat on the same seat they had known since the schoolroom, and Hervey had never felt himself so content. Henrietta took off her hat, pushed her head back so that her face was full to the spring sunshine, and closed her eyes. The rajah’s necklace sat sensually about her neck. Its emeralds and rubies – so at home in the palace at Chintalpore – seemed the image of decadence in the Wiltshire countryside; but Henrietta revelled in the opulence, and Hervey loved her for it.

Perhaps it was her look of contentment that made him suddenly anxious again. A part of that contentment was surely her attachment to the place in which she had lived so happily and comfortably since her infant days.

Something of this communicated itself to Henrietta. ‘My dearest, what is the matter?’

Hervey measured his words. ‘You love this house, do you not?’

She answered at once. ‘Why, yes. There has never been a place so dear to me.’

Hervey’s look partly revealed his concern.

‘But that is not to say there won’t be in the future,’ she smiled, shaking her head a little. ‘Things are different now.’

That was not quite what he’d meant, however. ‘Have you heard the trouble that my father has with his bishop?’

She put a hand on his and squeezed it reassuringly. ‘Tell me what news.’

‘He was summoned to the palace yesterday. The bishop – kindly, says my father – told him that he must observe strictly the rubrics of the Prayer Book, or that he might have to answer to the consistory court.’

‘And what shall he do?’

‘I don’t know, for I am not sure how dearly he holds his convictions. At worst, though, he might be deprived of the living, and though he says his annuity is sufficient for the family, I don’t believe it to be so. In which case it will be my duty to support them.’

Henrietta nodded her understanding, and sympathy.

Evidently the full implications were escaping her, thought Hervey. He made a despondent gesture with his hand, nodding in the direction of the house. ‘My dear, I have better prospects now within the regiment, but even so, how might I—’

‘Matthew,
dearest
.’ Henrietta squeezed his hand. ‘That is of no matter to me. None at all.’

‘But—’

‘Matthew, I do have a little money of my own.’

The extent of Henrietta Lindsay’s fortune had never been the subject of speculation within Hervey’s hearing. He knew her people to have been from the Borders, and that somehow their estates had become derelict, so that they had come south just after she had been born; and that soon afterwards both her parents had died, and distant kinship had brought her to Longleat to be the marquess’s ward. More than that he did not know. ‘It is hardly a good beginning.’

She smiled. ‘Matthew, if fortune hunter you be, there can scarcely have been a less determined one!’

He blushed deeply at the memory of his early hesitancy. Now he knew that he would have done with it once and for all. ‘When shall we be married?’

She was only momentarily taken aback. ‘The first of May.’

Hervey seemed a little surprised at the exactness.

‘As soon as I knew you were come back I made a beginning.’

‘I see,’ he said, smiling back with no little admiration. ‘Could it not be the week before, though?’

‘No, Matthew, I’m afraid it could not.’

‘The first of May is a regimental review. It wouldn’t be easy for people to get down. Are plans so
very
far advanced?’

‘I did so want a May wedding. As Princess Charlotte had.’

He understood that female desire. Might the nuptials be later, then? Heaven knows he had no wish himself for delay, but—

‘Well,’ she said, solemnly. ‘We have to have a good moon, or else the carriages will never make the lanes safely.’

That was reasonable, Hervey acknowledged. But there would be another good moon towards the month’s end.

‘
No
, Matthew, that will not do,’ said Henrietta, most emphatically, and more than a little flushed. ‘Do not have me spell it out. There are some things over which I can have no influence!’

They looked at each other. She was not going to turn away, whatever her instincts. Then it began to dawn on Hervey, and he became as red as the sky would later be. He put his arms around her again. It was an embrace with a new intimacy, for they had crossed a threshold, if only in the mind.

‘And so what do you think of the arrangements for your wedding, Matthew?’ said Elizabeth as they waited for the family carriage to take them to dine at Longleat that evening (his arriving home late with the invitation had caused her no little confusion).

Her tone intrigued him. ‘Why do you say that?’

Elizabeth smiled wryly, but said nothing.

‘Do you
know
of them, then?’

‘Of course I know of them! Do you not think that Henrietta might have wished to discuss them? And you were not here to listen!’

And so for a week Elizabeth had had it in her power to set his mind at ease – if only she had had any cause to think it necessary. Why in God’s name had he not asked her, Hervey rued.

‘What do you think of the notion of a wedding in Longleat House?’ she pressed. ‘You are surely very flattered by it?’

‘Oh, indeed; it is a very elegant notion,’ he agreed readily. It was true that he had thought little before, if at all, about the ceremonies themselves, supposing they would be conducted in the usual way in his father’s church at Horningsham; or, if canon law required it, at Longbridge Deverill, for in that parish, strictly, lay the great house.

‘Henrietta has thought of nothing else since Princess Charlotte’s wedding,’ Elizabeth explained.

‘Yes,’ said Hervey, pensively. ‘I read something of it in Madras. Prince Leopold . . . of Saxony?’

‘Henrietta was a maid of honour to the Queen.’

Hervey was impressed.

‘She would be the first to tell you there were eleven more.’

A dozen virgins: in days not too far gone, the reward for saving a royal elephant, he recalled. How distant Chintal now seemed. He smiled.

‘Oh, you must not joke of it, Matthew,’ Elizabeth warned. ‘Henrietta is very devoted to the princess.’

‘I did not know she even knew the princess.’

‘I don’t think she does – not well, that is. But I should say that her affection for her is very great.’

Hervey nodded, content.

‘That is why she is so especially enamoured of a May wedding, as Princess Charlotte’s was. And why she is so intent on its being in Longleat House, for the royal ceremony took place in the Prince Regent’s palace.’

‘What? In Carlton House?’

‘Have you been there?’ asked Elizabeth, with just a hint of awe.

He laughed. ‘Heavens no! But the talk in London was all of how racy that place is. “Nero’s Hotel” they call it. Hardly the place for solemn nuptials, I should’ve thought!’

Elizabeth looked a little shaken. ‘But Henrietta was there, and speaks of how graceful an occasion it was. Fifty or more sat down to dinner beforehand.’

‘
Beforehand?
’

‘Apparently.’

Hervey pulled a face suggesting he found the idea curious.

‘And then the ceremony itself was in the crimson drawing room.’

‘Crimson?’ said Hervey, teasing. ‘That must be very close to scarlet.’

Elizabeth screwed up her face too, exactly as she always had. There was not so much Hannah More in Elizabeth that she could not smile at the ribald. ‘Mystery, Babylon the Great?’