The Sabre's Edge (14 page)

'I know Lord Nelson's body was preserved in brandy, sir. I thought it could help Captain Hervey.'

'You did, did you? Well, it can't have done too much harm, though it might have been better had you poured it all down his throat.' He took off his coat and pulled up his shirtsleeves. 'A digital examination, then, now the wound's exposed proper.'

Peto screwed up his eyes, the better to see the work, although it anticipated the flinch too.

Ritchie inserted a finger - the right index - with the utmost care, but the pain was so great that Hervey let out a cry and at once passed out.

'Good,' said Ritchie. 'Much the best way,' as he continued probing.

Peto grimaced, but more in anticipation of what Ritchie might say. Wainwright stood stock-still, at attention. He could do no more now than trust.

'There's been prodigious bleeding,' said Ritchie after a while. 'But no disruption of the glenoid cavity. No bone splinters either. And I believe I may feel the ball.' He withdrew his finger and wiped it on some lint, taking good care to observe Hervey's breathing as he did so.

The marines shifted their weight a little.

'Keep him proper upright, and hold his head back, one of you,' said Ritchie, wiping the sweat from his brow with his left arm. 'Probe-point bistoury, please, Magan.'

One of the assistants handed him the curved knife.

'Corporal, be aware that I might be doing your captain no favour in this. I may remove the ball, but if the shoulder is more damaged than I surmise it would be better that I disarticulate the limb now.'

Corporal Wainwright nodded. 'Sir.'

'Stand easy, man,' said Peto, kindly.

'But first there'll be more blood,' warned Ritchie, wiping his forehead again. 'Turn him round a wee bit more to the light.'

The marines turned him carefully with the linen sling.

'First I have to enlarge the wound.' He dipped the bistoury in the hot water. 'Curious thing how the patient afterwards says he felt the cold blade. Nelson did. Might as well make things as comfortable as possible.' He wiped the bistoury on his sleeve then deftly elongated the wound two ways, pulling the flesh apart either side with the thumb and finger of his left hand while he probed for the ball with the knifepoint.

Blood began to run copiously again. The assistants dabbed at it with lint.

'Forceps.'

Magan handed them to him and took the bistoury. Ritchie, as he had done with the knife, warmed the bullet-extracting forceps before putting them to the flesh.

Peto began silently to pray, although he was not a praying man. Wainwright
was
a praying man; he had scarcely ceased praying since first lifting Hervey into the saddle.

'Hold him hard. I don't want a struggle,' growled Ritchie as he pulled aside the flesh again and inserted the forceps.

But Hervey was in too deep a syncope to know how the instrument probed.

In the end it was done quickly. Out came forceps and ball in less than a minute. Ritchie examined the missile for signs of having struck bone. Then, satisfied, he tossed it to Corporal Wainwright. 'Your captain may want to see the intruder.'

'Sir. Will that mean he'll be well now, sir?'

Ritchie was already back to work with magnifying glass and the smaller forceps. 'I dare say so.' He tutted, picking out particles of blue serge from the wound. 'Lord, but this cloth's bitty. More light, there! A candle or two.'

It was Peto who obliged him quickest.

'But no braid, though, it seems,' said Ritchie in a tone of some relief, and peering even closer. 'Well, he's as good a chance as any. I'll suture now, Magan. Keep him steady, my lads. Good work.'

'And then to my cot,' said Peto, nodding with the greatest appearance of approval. 'Well done, Mr Ritchie. Well done, sir!'

'I could do no better, Captain. But your praise may be premature. It will be two weeks, perhaps three, before we see the laudable pus - the exuviae of the sickness. Only then can we say the arm is saved. What he needs now is to rest, and to be still. I'll bleed him tomorrow.'

PART
TWO HOME
TRUTHS

CHAPTER
SIX

CAMP FOLLOWERS

Calcutta, four months later

T
he girl ran a finger down the neat line
of the scar. Hervey felt no pain. Quite
the opposite, for her touch was always delicate and accompanied by the gentlest of kisses. He sighed with the pleasure of their intimacy. 'You had better go, Neeta. Manu will be here shortly, and you know how you dislike him.'

The girl hissed. 'I do not know why you keep him as your bearer when you have so good a servant as Mr Johnson!'

Hervey smiled.
^‘
Manu is a good bearer too. And he does Johnson's bidding willingly.'

The girl rose from the bed, tied a lungi about her, then sat at Hervey's dressing table and took one of his brushes to her long black hair, as Henrietta used to do.

What a solace she was - companion these past two years, and nurse these last two months. Yet how dismayed he had been when first she had come to Calcutta looking for him. Chittagong had seemed so far behind. He rose, put on his dressing

gown, then took her shoulders, watching in the mirror as she brushed - so very like Henrietta, and yet in appearance so different. It was all very safe, therefore. But he broke the rules. A bibi did not visit; she was but a 'sleeping-dictionary'. He kissed the top of her head, then went outside.

It was a quiet afternoon in the lines, even allowing for the usual retreat to the shade and the punkah, although the worst of the south-west monsoon's clammy heat was long past. There were a few mounted men about the cantonment, but no hawkers, no rumble of wheels. The Company was at war with Ava, but the war was so far distant that the seat of government was undisturbed.

It had no right to be. Hervey had seen the effects of that detachment, men dying for want of the staples of war. And if the Calcutta quality, and the clerks and the merchants, really knew how badly went things they would be busy burying their silver and taking passage home. Not that the war would ever come to this. Ava might boast of marching into Bengal, and her great general, Maha Bundula, might lead the army, but the Burmans could never prevail against redcoats. In the end, he believed there was no one who could, for however ill he was served, a redcoat - a
King's
redcoat - fought with the ferocious conviction of his own superiority. That was why so many of them died: they did not accept defeat, because redcoats were never defeated. Too many people had traded on that simple notion in years past. They did so now with the army in the east.

Hervey wondered how many of those good companions he had known in Rangoon had since been stilled by the enemy's shot or the fever. He scarcely dared think of how Peto was faring, for he knew that gallant man would be everywhere his sailors faced danger, be it the enemy or the country. There would be so many widows' letters, or to other kin. And none of them would say that such and such a good servant of the King had died because other servants of the King had been careless of his life. But, in the end, the merchants of the Honourable Company would not need to bury their silver. The Burmans were no martial race. Their armies had been formed neither by the British, the Moghuls nor the French. Indeed, by what right did they begin a fight they could not win?

But it would be some time. Yesterday, Eyre Somervile had come, as he had every day since Hervey's return weak with fever, and the news from the east had been as dispiriting as might have been. General Campbell's force had fewer than three thousand effectives, and the flotilla was in a poor way too, with whole crews laid low by remittent fevers - even the bigger ships
(
Larne
was so incapacitated she had had to be replaced by
Arachne).
There had been some successes, but Campbell was besieged still, by Nature and the Burmans. And now there was speculation that Maha Bundula hims
elf, at the head of his army of
Arakan, twice the strength of anything Campbell could muster, might soon be marching through the Irawadi's delta.

Well, he must put it all out of his mind. Today he was to dine with Somervile and Emma for the first time since leaving for Rangoon; Ledley, the regimental surgeon, had at last pronounced him fit (Hervey had pronounced himself fit more than a week ago). It was near six o'clock and his bearer would soon be here to supervise the team of bhistis who filled his bath with hot water. The surgeon had been most explicit in his warning against any chill, for he was advised that the fever was born of the malaria of the Rangoon marshes and could recur at any time, perhaps even in severer form.

Hervey took care to put on a good lawn shirt when he had bathed, and a linen coat, for as soon as the sun set he would otherwise feel the cool of the evening keenly. He took up his brushes and smiled as he picked the strands of black hair from them. One evening soon he would dine with his bibi here - whatever the rules said. But she dared not return this evening. He would go instead to her at the bibi khana beyond the civil lines towards the Chitpore road, where the rich Bengali merchants lived. It was a comfortable and private place. He liked it there. He was pleased he kept her properly.

Emma Somervile greeted him with a kiss to the lips.
^‘
I never doubted you would be restored,' she said, smiling. 'But it has been many weeks, and you looked so fevered when last we visited.
^’

Hervey took a glass of champagne from the khitmagar and sat, as she bade him, beside her.

'Eyre will be here presently. There is an express boy come.
^’

'He is much occupied, I think. It must be the hardest thing to be so at odds with the Governor-General.
^’

Emma raised an eyebrow. 'It wears him more than I could have imagined. Oh, I do not mean the disagreements themselves, but the dismay at seeing so much going wrong when he had counselled against it from the start. And still Lord Amherst is not inclined to listen.
^’

Hervey frowned. 'There's a certain sort of man who would rather exhaust all his stock than admit to a wrong course and take a new one at half the cost. I fear there's many a grave that will be testimony to our Governor-General's obduracy. I'm only glad there are men such as Eyre who will expose the folly of it.'

Moments later Eyre Somervile entered the room with a look half triumphant and half exasperated. He dispensed with formal greetings.
'This
is just as I had expected -
worse
.'
He waved a letter at them. 'Maha Bundula is now in Ava. Bagyidaw's recalled Prince Tharrawaddy and Bundula is to have command of the army they've been assembling these past three months.'

'Do you have any notion how large?' asked Hervey.

'Thirty thousand - over and above the same number back from Arakan.' Somervile consulted the letter again. 'Also, three hundred jingals, the Cassay Horse from Manipur - about a thousand of them - artillery on elephant-back . . .'

'What is a jingal?' asked Emma.

'A gun,' replied Hervey, turning to her. 'Very light - the ball weighs less than a pound - but they tote them anywhere. And very destructive they are too.'

'Campbell will be thrown out of Rangoon in very short order indeed,' added her husband.

'How do you come by the intelligence, Eyre?'

Somervile seemed rapt in thought.

'Eyre?'

'I'm sorry, my dear. I was thinking how much time we had, for the report says that Bundula boasted to Tharrawaddy he would feast in Rangoon in eight days. He could not, of course - not from the time of making the boast. The distance is too great in the best of weather. I suspect he meant eight days after once besieging the place.'