Allan Mallinson - A Call to Arms

Again, the argument was not new to him. Indeed, Hervey had been the first to rehearse it. His appetite now seemed suddenly to leave him, and he pushed his plate to one side. ‘It is more than that. My daughter is without a mother. Would it be right for her to be without a father, too?’

Peto did not answer. These were waters in which he had no sailing experience and no right instinct, but he did have one more challenge for his friend, and he squared up to it direct. ‘Hervey, are you in any degree fearful of having lost some aptness for command?’

Hervey was stung more deeply than by anything in months. No one had ever suggested this or anything like it. Only Laughton Peto could have imagined such a thing; not even Daniel Coates could read him thus.

Peto did not press his question. Instead he said simply, ‘Such a thing would go ill with me, and would remain until next I had the chance to show otherwise. Isn’t that the way with men under orders? Those at least who take their profession seriously?’

It was the first time that Hervey had seen Peto let slip the mask of command. And that a man as proud as he should have done so was high testimony indeed to their mutual regard and friendship. Hervey simply breathed deep, and resolved on a different path to their discourse. ‘Let’s leave it for the morning. Tell me how was your journey. We ourselves are intending to visit Naples.’

‘Ha!’ exclaimed Peto, his voice rising above the waves again. ‘You’d do as well to take a ship. We were stopped interminably. Everywhere the talk was of Carbonari.’

‘You were stopped by Carbonari?’

‘No! By that ass Ferdinand’s troops — “King of the Two Sicilies” indeed! I can think nothing of a man who requires foreign troops lest his own people try to depose him.’

Hervey looked askance. There were precedents closer to home. ‘Had we not better have a care in France’s regard, therefore?’

‘Perhaps so. But at least theirs is a French king, and our troops are in barracks there. Ferdinand would not have a throne if it weren’t for Habsburg troops tramping the roads.’

‘I doubt that Bonaparte would have been worsted without the Austrians,’ tried Hervey.

‘ I don’t doubt it. But we didn’t fight one tyrant only to replace him with another.’

‘Well, I for one shall be pleased if it means we reach Naples without molestation by bandits, even if they do wear pretty ribbons,’ said Hervey most emphatically.

The cameriere had returned, and Peto was taking more of the veal, with appreciative noises. ‘By the way, how is your sister?’

Hervey smiled, pleased with the further evidence of Peto’s approval of the veal, and at the thought of happy reports to be made of Elizabeth. ‘She is very well. The country suits her, even if her heart is still at home. You shall see for yourself tomorrow.’

‘I look forward to it. And have you any other acquaintances in Rome? I heard English spoken all along the street.’

‘Indeed we have. The poet Shelley no less.’

Peto was all attention, but his eyes were narrowed. ‘An intriguing man, indeed; perhaps in both senses of the word. I have read some of his essays. His sentiment’s sound for much of it, but he goes altogether too far.’

Hervey smiled again. ‘I should not be able to share even your limited generosity. But he’s a great admirer of the Carbonari, and the most engaging of company off the page!’

And Elizabeth’s journal recorded that Peto found it just so in the days that followed. And an altogether more agreeable occupation it was for her to write than before. ‘They speak of martial things all the time. And even Mr Shelley seems much taken by it,’ she noted at the end of the first week. ‘I confess, too, there is much to admire about Commodore Peto. He is such a commanding man. He speaks plainly yet is not without sensibility.’

The pines on the Janiculum gave the little reconnaissance party shade and therefore, they supposed, some cover from observation as they scanned the great fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo below.

‘Well, Commodore, could you reach it from here?’

‘Just, I think. Two thousand yards, I’d say. One of my long twenty-fours, full charge and with the quoin out. What damage it would do those walls, though, I couldn’t vouch for. The shot would be plunging. It’d make a pretty mess of the roofs, but little else, I fancy.’

‘How close would you have to come to breach the parapet wall?’

Peto peered again through his telescope. ‘I can’t judge their thickness. It’s not as if they were ship’s timbers. I shouldn’t trust to more than five hundred yards, playing on the same point with a whole gun deck. But how would you overcome the outer ramparts, and the moat?’

Hervey nodded, acknowledging the problem was no little one. ‘I’ve been considering that a while, since first seeing them indeed.I don’t believe they could be overcome in any direct assault. Every angle is covered too well.’

‘Then how?’

‘The weaker flank is the river. I think a storming party could get under those embanked walls and then scale them while sharpshooters kept the tops clear. I could see Henry Locke going at it, couldn’t you?’

Peto agreed. Lieutenant Locke and his marines had never been concerned with tactics, only with audacious frontal assault, though he had paid dear for it — first with his fine looks and then with his life. ‘Do we suppose the bridge is no longer standing?’

‘I think we must, though even if it were I think it would be given the most severe raking by the defenders. The other weak point is what they call the Passetto, running through the Borgo.’

‘A tunnel?’

‘No. It looks rather like an aqueduct. It runs from the Pope’s palace right into the north-west bastion.’

‘For sorties?’

‘The opposite: a bolt route.’

‘Then it would surely be blown as soon as they were safe in the bastion?’

Elizabeth Hervey, standing behind them a little way, smiled. ‘You see, Mr Shelley, my brother is restored to his former spirits. I do not know if he truly loves fighting, but he is wholly absorbed by the study of it. He cannot traverse a piece of country, no matter how pretty, without observing on its aptness to defend or attack. There is a farmer in our parts in Wiltshire who used to be a general’s trumpeter many years ago, and he and Matthew will ride all day on the downs spying out the land.’

Shelley had observed the deeper change too, having had heed of it at the first meeting with Peto. ‘I own to very great pleasure in your brother’s company, Miss Hervey, but his true heart is always elsewhere. And I do not mean that it grieves the while for his lost love. Does that seem cruel?’

Elizabeth sighed. ‘I do not think that any of us can say what is his heart or his mind, nor Matthew himself even, for there is such a confusion of sentiment. But painful though it is to say it, I am of the opinion that Matthew could only be free of his slough of despond if he were to put on uniform again.’

‘Yes. I do agree. If a man quits the circumstances of his pain he only ever leaves the pain distant. Your brother, I judge, is hero enough to fight the demons on their own ground.’

Before their first meeting, every evangelical instinct in Elizabeth had tended to being appalled by Shelley. Yet now she considered him a true friend. Indeed, at their first meeting his very appearance and air had captivated her. She wondered how it might have been had they all met in Wiltshire, and then concluded that since such a thing was unthinkable, it was also pointless to imagine. ‘He has received two letters, you know, asking that he would return to his regiment. But he will not entertain it. They are for India; that is half of the problem, I’m sure.’