Free Words of Command (Hervey 12) (Matthew Hervey) by Allan Mallinson

oh, what a further falling off was there. His solitude was made infinitely worse by self-knowledge, that he had taken a wife who was no wife, that it was his own fault, for he had done so ‘unadvisedly, lightly, wantonly’, as the Prayer Book warned against; and before that had taken another man’s wife … the ‘manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed’. He had put Kat from his mind a year ago – almost two years ago. But she kept returning. No matter what, she kept returning. He did not rightly understand why. She had never possessed him body and soul, as Henrietta had done (at least, he did not think she had). There might be days, weeks, even perhaps whole months, when she did not return; but then, at no especial time – nothing demanding a bosom for solace – her face would come before him. It came before him now. And he wished her here beside him. Not ‘to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites’ – though that, he knew, would entail – but for the ‘mutual society, help, and comfort’ expressed in embrace, as the Prayer Book promised. But it could never be. He had taken another man’s wife, but he could not compound the adultery by doing so while himself now bound by the vows of matrimony. He was thus condemned to the empty bed, to the darkness without embrace. There would be temptations, occasions, opportunities, and his feet were no less of clay than those of better men than he. But he would fight the temptations, for he knew too well the sickening of the soul that followed: ‘Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body’ – Corinthians (how wise, now, that admonishing man of Tarsus seemed). But Paul was a saint, and he himself a mere man: might there not be some sinless comfort – some Shunammite to keep him warm, as the ageing David: ‘So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel … and brought her to the king. And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not.’
    But kindly sleep came instead, knitting up the ravelled sleeve as always in the end it did – and for which he would give thanks, as habitually he did, though knowing that sleep was but a passing balm.
    fn1 ‘Look behind thee, and remember thou art but a man’ – the words of the crouching slave in the chariot, that in the triumphant procession the honoured general might not forget his limits and mortality.

III
PRINCIPLES OF MILITARY MOVEMENTS

Next morning
    Shaved, dressed, booted and spurred, breakfasted on ham, buttered eggs, toasted bread and coffee exemplary in its heat, Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Hervey put on his forage cap, fastened the chain of the cloak which Lance-Corporal Johnson had been holding to the hearty blaze in the Berkeley Arms’s great fireplace, pulled on his gloves, took up his sword-scabbard, nodded to the adjutant, and stepped out into the frozen courtyard.
    ‘Hep!’
    The Sixth’s peculiar executive word of command – every regiment’s was in some degree different – brought the half-dozen dragoons to attention in the saddle (among them Serjeant Acton, lately corporal, Hervey’s coverman in the Levant). The regimental serjeant-major, dismounted, took one step forward, halting with an emphatic crunching of snow, and saluted. ‘Good morning, Colonel.’
    Hervey returned the compliments. ‘Good morning, Mr Rennie. We might be in Galicia, think you not?’
    The RSM may have been an extract – brought in from another regiment (the 4th Dragoon Guards, Lord Holderness’s old corps) – but he had seen service as an orderly with Moore in the Peninsula, one of the few left in either mess (and fewer still in the canteen) who had charged against the French in that bitter cold, retrograde march to Corunna.
    But Rennie was ever a man of formality: ‘Yes, Colonel; the ground is frozen very hard.’
    An