Hervey 11 - On His Majesty's Service by Allan Mallinson Read Free Book Online

morning again.’
    Hervey grimaced, and looked about. ‘We must get the wounded away. Where’s the foreman?’
    ‘Here, sir,’ answered a man with bow legs and few teeth.
    ‘Go and have these cabs and carriages take your men to hospital. To St George’s, isn’t it?’
    ‘St George’s can’t take these many, sir, cos she’s being builded again. Guy’s is best anyway: they knows ’ow to look after falls – all them steeplejacks they see.’
    Guy’s hospital was a deal closer than was Brussels after Waterloo (whither they had taken the wounded), but it would be a haul nevertheless. Hervey nodded resolutely. ‘Well, there’s nothing for it but to get them to Guy’s. The dead as well. Go to it!’
    He took a lighted cheroot from his friend. The officer’s art lay in determining what must be done, and the NCO’s in executing it. Hervey could only trust that a foreman of building labourers would possess sufficient of the latter’s.
    ‘Perhaps I should engage them instead?’ said Fairbrother.
    But there was no need. Between the beneficence of the private owners and the rough, authoritative manner of the foreman, there were at once four chaises at his disposal – and to some cheering from the other labourers, who perceived that the ‘quality’ were not passing on the other side of the street.
    ‘There is nothing I can do for him, I’m afraid,’ pronounced the surgeon at last, rising from beside the prostrate driver and rubbing reddening snow between his hands. ‘Have a tarpaulin cover him,’ he said, nodding to one of the labourers.
    Hervey asked him what was the procedure now that the injured had been attended to. Was he at liberty to go about his business, or must he find a magistrate to make a deposition? ‘I confess I am strange to this. There’s not a watchman to be seen.’
    The surgeon assured him that he need not detain himself: there would be an inquest in the usual way, but the coroner would not require him. ‘Though he would wish to commend your address in trying to save the man’s life,’ he added, pulling on his gloves. ‘We must pray that Mr Peel’s men, if they are come to our streets, will have seen service.’
    Hervey nodded; the compliment to the uniform was well made. ‘I bid you good-day, then, sir.’
    He made to leave, looking for Fairbrother and seeing him in amiable conversation with a knot of labourers, and was taken once more by how easy his friend was with such men – as he was with men of rank. When first they had met, at the Cape, he had seemed possessed of a resentful disposition, as well as of indolence. He, Hervey, had been inclined to attribute this to mixed blood, for no matter how fine was that of Fairbrother’s father – by Fairbrother’s own account a kind and worthy man – that of his mother had been confected in the unknown regions, before her people were abducted (and Jamaica, from all he had heard, was an easygoing sort of place too). But, strangely, once his friend became animated by some undertaking, there was no end to his capability. Indeed he could not own that he had ever served with a more capable soldier, whether officer, NCO or private man. And Fairbrother’s learning – the product, he claimed, of ample hours on half pay – was so prodigious as to make his company ever a revelation. In fact he now counted that company the equal of all. He had never formed so close an understanding with any in the Sixth (even as a cornet the care had been for the day-to-day of campaigning; there had been so little opportunity for true intimacy), and after Henrietta’s death he had positively sought to distance himself from any sensibility requiring intimacy, except with the opposite sex, in whose company alone he had seemed able, or willing, to let slip the mask of command. He had looked forward greatly to their serving together once more (Fairbrother had readily consented to leave the comfort of his summer hearth to accompany him to England and thence