Free A Close Run Thing by Allan Mallinson Page A

what are my duties at home. I shall write, of course, and apply for furlough as soon as the war ceases – they seem to think it is imminent. Until then …’
    ‘What other family do you have?’ asked the veterinary officer, coughing again but warming to the intimacy he was rarely afforded in the mess as a whole.
    ‘A sister, one year my senior – but I should of course first say my father and mother.’
    ‘They are all well?’ Selden interrupted.
    ‘Yes, I believe them to be. My parents are no longer young but they are both active and have always enjoyed good health. They are the very best of people: I have always felt their absence more keenly than might be supposed. And my sister – Elizabeth – she has spirits to equal anyone. I own to having been in her thrall since childhood!’
    ‘And, Hervey, is there any other in your affections?’
    So direct a question, and from a quarter he would least have expected, took him aback, and his disinclination to make any reply was plain. Selden was a kindly and cultured man, unusually gentlemanly for a veterinary surgeon, yet he generally remained aloof. His periodic bouts of fever racked him dreadfully, but although he had completed eighteen years’ service, and was entitled to retire on half-pay, he struggled on. He had been with the Sixth only since the start of the second campaign – and there was a whiff of sulphur in his history, said some – yet Hervey had always found him the most decent of company.
    ‘Forgive me, Hervey, but I have watched you with advantage these past three years. You have an uncommon facility for soldiering, and yet no preferment has come your way, and never will as long as money determines things.’ He began coughing again, so violently this time that Hervey thought he must choke. Another cup of brandy brought relief, however. ‘You must go east. Take up with John Company. They would value your aptitude – you would have a regiment in no time.’
    Hervey might have had a thousand objections but he chose simply to point out the circumstances of which he had just spoken: ‘I cannot even begin to think such a thing when matters at home are so indeterminate.’
    ‘Of course you cannot. But after you have settled these concerns … or is there perhaps someone else you must take account of?’
    ‘Not at all!’
    ‘Forgive me once more, but I had thought that young Laming’s sister …’
    Hervey blushed, and stammered slightly: ‘I … that is, how could you possibly have thought that? It is a year – more – since she came to Portugal, and then for a month only!’
    ‘Oh, I thought I saw something. Perhaps, then, it was more on her side? And the young Portuguese lady, what was her name …? Delgado, was it not?’
    Hervey was even more astonished, for Selden’s observation these past three years had indeed been active. Frances Laming had enchanted him with her pretty smiles, but Isabella Delgado had positively tortured him with her dark beauty. ‘No, Selden, there is no one. I had once a passion for the girl with whom I shared a schoolroom, though since that was a full ten years ago, and I dared not own it to her, I hardly think it need be taken account of now!’ But a smile overcame him at the thought.
    A trumpet-call signalled that watch-setting was imminent, and Veterinary-Surgeon Selden took his leave, with much violent coughing, to allow Hervey to ready himself for that parade. It had been an extraordinary, if agreeable, meeting; but now that he was alone all his earlier disquiet returned, and with interest, for Selden had stirred up so much. The second call, however, began to reclaim him for the regulated world that was his daily existence, and as he fastened on his sword-belt he found once more that he could bury his uncertainties in the minutiae of his soldier’s routine. He almost spoke it aloud – ‘hitch up the scabbard, free the sabretache, set the shako square, draw on the gloves’. In the short term, at least, it