Allan Mallinson - Nizams Daughters

‘You will take some Madeira with me, will you not?’ Hervey nodded approvingly.

‘A rather fine Sercial, I fancy — an eighty-three,’ continued Peto, pouring from a broad flat-bottomed decanter. ‘And a vintage, mind — not a solera.’

Hervey took a sip and agreed that it was indeed special. ‘It puts me in mind of some German wines, in both colour and taste,’ he said.

‘You are well acquainted with Rhenish, are you?’ enquired Peto, evidently impressed.

‘The wines of Alsace to be precise. I had a governess from there who first told me of Gewürztraminer, and then the King’s Germans gave me the taste for it.’

Peto nodded, favourably. ‘They say the Sercial derives originally from the Riesling grape, so there is an affinity with the region.’ He paused, his mind seeming momentarily to be elsewhere, before clearing his throat and returning to his original intention. ‘Captain Hervey, you had better, I think, give me some account of what you are about so that I can best order my ship’s affairs. Start, if you will, at the beginning, for I must know it all.’

Hervey waited first for Peto’s steward, a Suffolk man who had been almost twice as long at sea as his captain had been on earth, to finish laying the table, and then he began to explain, though not without some misgivings. ‘I am bound by confidentiality in this matter,’ he warned; ‘or, at least, by discretion.’

Peto looked at him indignantly. ‘You do not suppose that I, myself, am without discretion in such matters?’

‘No, indeed — forgive my incivility,’ he stammered. ‘In truth I am as yet uneasy with the circumspection required.’

Indeed he was. He was also unsure of his capacity for such an assignment. He had been wholly — headily — flattered, as would any officer, when the Adjutant General had made the offer on the duke’s behalf of his becoming an ADC. But all his service had been with the Sixth, and though he knew the elements of staff practice he was by no means confident of his aptness for employment beyond regimental duty. But there was, immediately, the question of secrecy. He looked at Peto resolutely: ‘I see no good reason, sir, why I should not tell you all, for I shall be much in want of counsel these coming months. How long is our passage to Hindoostan?’

‘Four months at best; six at most.’

‘Oh,’ said Hervey, sounding a touch discouraged; ‘I had imagined half that time.’

Peto frowned again. ‘Captain Hervey, do you know anything of navigation — of sea currents and trade winds?’

Hervey confessed he did not.

‘I imagine you suppose we shall merely cruise south, round the Cape of Good Hope and then make directly for India?’

Hervey’s smile, and the inclination of his eyebrows, indicated that that was exactly what he had supposed.

‘Well, to begin with,’ sighed Peto, ‘we are making this passage at the least propitious time. To have full use of the south-west monsoon, which blows from October until April, we should have set out in the spring. Come,’ he said, rising and indicating the table on which there were spread several charts. ‘See here’ (he pointed with a pair of dividers): ‘we shall pass about ten leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands and continue westward, almost crossing the Atlantic to the coast of Brazil to get the south-east trades on the beam. Then, at about three degrees south of the Equator, we shall pick up the westerlies to bring us around the Cape. And in the Indian Ocean we shall need to stand well to the east of Madagascar to find what remains of the monsoon.’

Hervey apologized for his nescience as they returned to their chairs. But of greater moment was the disclosure of his assignment, for he was again seized by doubts as to what discretion he legitimately possessed in the matter. He had not been sworn to secrecy — quite — but in everything that had passed between Colonel Grant and the duke’s new aide-de-camp, there had been the very proper presumption of it. And yet Hervey knew too that he had been appointed to the staff principally because of what the duke himself had referred to as his ‘percipient exercise of judgement’ at Waterloo. He had neither experience nor training in work of a covert nature (though his present commission scarcely, to his mind, gave him the appellation spy ). He would therefore have to trust his instincts, and these now told him that he could trust in Captain Laughton Peto — trust absolutely. ‘Then if we are to spend so long in each other’s company it is the very least I should do to apprise you fully of my business,’ he said, with a most conscious effort to avoid any further semblance of condescension. ‘I shall tell you each and every detail — though as yet they are few.’

The door opened and in came Flowerdew again. ‘Beg leave to bring a pudding, sir,’ he said, in a voice that called to mind Serjeant Strange’s mellow Suffolk vowels. Hervey shivered at the remembrance.

Peto eyed his steward gravely. ‘It is the Welsh venison pudding?’

‘Ay, Captain,’ replied Flowerdew, equally solemnly; ‘and there is a redcurrant jelly with it, and your cussy sauce.’

This news was received with evident satisfaction. Peto took both the greatest pride and the greatest pleasure in his table. It was, perhaps, unsurprising since he appeared to take the greatest pride in everything about his ship. Hervey knew enough about Admiralty to know that a ship in the hale condition that was the Nisus — with her fine fittings, new paint and gold leaf — was not found by chance: Peto would have had to go to endless pains to flatter the dockyard commissioner into providing that which was routinely denied to other, less persuasive, captains. Or else — and he suspected it was this latter — it was Peto’s own purse that had embellished his ship. As to his taking pleasure in his table, albeit somewhat self-consciously, Hervey was likewise not in the least surprised, for in his experience men exposed as a matter of course to great privation rarely persisted in a taste for frugality in times of plenty — and Peto had, more than once in his service, been reduced to a diet of biscuit and water.

When Flowerdew was gone the captain conducted his guest to the table and bade him resume his explanation.

‘It seems that the Duke of Wellington expects at any moment to be appointed governor-general in India,’ he confided.

Peto merely raised an eyebrow in disbelief — or in dismay.

‘He has been given to understand that Lord Moira will soon be dismissed,’ he continued, ‘since that gentleman apparently has little appetite for reversing the policies of Sir George Barlow — which, it is commonly supposed, were too feeble with the native princes. You will know, of course, that the duke’s own brother prosecuted a most vigorous policy before Sir George.’

Peto’s brow furrowed. ‘And yet, from all I read and hear, the Court of Directors do not appear to be developing any appetite for intervention. Quite the contrary, in fact.’

Hervey sighed briefly, but aptly conveying his own frustration with the limited intelligence imparted to him in Paris. ‘The Company, perhaps — yes. But I am to suppose that the government — the Board of Control, that is — takes the opposite view.’

‘And do you share these opinions?’ he asked, leaning across the table to replenish Hervey’s Sercial, a distinct challenge in the tone.

‘I confess for my own mind I know only what I read in the newspapers and the Edinburgh Review , and these are frequently contradictory accounts. I am the duke’s aide-de-camp and it matters only at this time that I understand perfectly what is in the duke’s mind,’ he answered resolutely.

‘And what is his need of you in Calcutta?’