An Infamous Army (Alastair-Audley Tetralogy 4)

For their part, Lord Harrowby and Sir Henry Torrens had brought soothing intelligence from home. All the available cavalry were under orders, and some already marching for embarkation to Ostend; of the infantry, in addition to the corps and detachments already despatched, and now in Belgium, about two thousand effectives were to proceed from a rendezvous in the Downs to Ostend. The Government was willing, and indeed anxious, to meet his lordship’s requirements in every possible way.

His lordship stated these with disconcerting alacrity. He wanted equipment, and ammunition; he wanted field artillery, and horses; he wanted the militia called out: ‘Nothing can be done with a small and inefficient force,’ said his lordship uncompromisingly. ‘The war will linger on, and will end to our disadvantage.’

Harrowby began to explain the constitutional difficulties attached to calling out the militia. It was plain that his lordship made very little of these, but he was not one to waste his time in fruitless argument. He had another scheme, already proposed by him in a despatch to Lord Castlereagh. He thought it would be advisable to try to get twelve or fourteen thousand Portuguese troops into the Netherlands. ‘We can mix them with ours, and do what we please with them,’ he said. ‘They become very nearly as good as our own.’

Upon the following day, a third visitor from London appeared in the person of the Duke’s brother, the Marquis Wellesley. The Marquis was fifty-five years old, and nine years senior to the Duke. There was not much resemblance between the brothers, but strong ties of affection had survived the strain put on them by the younger man’s rise to heights beyond the elder’s reach. It had been Richard, not Arthur, who was to have been the great man of the family; it was Richard who had set Arthur’s feet on the ladder of his career, and had fostered his early progress from rung to rung. But Arthur, his feet once firmly planted, had climbed the ladder so fast that Richard had been left far behind him. It was only twenty-eight years since Richard had written to remind the Duke of Rutland of a younger brother of his, whom his Grace had been so kind as to take into his consideration for a commission in the Army. ‘He is here, at this moment, and perfectly idle,’ Richard had written. ‘It is a matter of indifference to me what commission he gets, providing he gets it soon.’ Richard, with his brilliant mind and scholarship, had been a coming man in those days, Arthur a youth of no more than ordinary promise. Seventeen years later, a Major-General, he had been made a Knight Companion of the Bath, and after that the honours had fallen so thick upon him that it had been difficult to keep count of them. He had been created in swift succession Viscount Wellington of Talavera, Earl of Wellington, then Marquis, and lastly duke; he was a Spanish Grandee of the First Class, Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo, Duke of Victoria, a Knight of the Garter, of the Golden Fleece, of the Order of Maria Theresa, of the Russian Order of Saint George, of the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle, of the Swedish Order of the Sword. An Emperor had lately clapped him on the shoulder, saying: ‘C’est pour vous encore sauver le monde!’ and yet he remained, reflected Richard, with a faint, whimsical smile, the same unaffected creature he had ever been. Nor had he outgrown his boyhood’s admiration of Richard. ‘A wonderful man,’ he called him, and honestly believed it.

The Marquis was a wonderfully handsome man, at all events, with large, far-sighted eyes under heavily-marked dark brows, an aquiline nose, with delicate, up-cut nostrils, a fine, rather thin-lipped mouth, and a lacquered skin of alabaster. He had beautiful manners too, a natural stateliness tempered by charm, and an instinct for ceremonial. No sudden cracks of loud laughter broke from him; he had never been known to utter hasty, harshly-worded snubs; and his stateliness never became mere stiffness. The Duke, on the other hand, could be absurdly stiff, and painfully rude, while his ungraciousness towards those whom he disliked was proverbial. He had no taste for pomp, very little for creature comforts, and although he had been christened Beau Douro in the Peninsula on account of a certain neatness and propriety of dress, he set no store by personal adornment. He was outspoken to a fault; his mind ran between straight and clearly defined lines; and he knew nothing of dissimulation. Ask him a question, and you might be sure of receiving an honest answer—though perhaps not the one you had hoped to hear, for his lordship, unconcerned with considerations of personal popularity, was rigorously concerned with the truth, and with what he saw to be his clear duty. Tact, such as his brother possessed, he did not employ; and when the members of His Majesty’s Government acted, in his judgment, foolishly, he told them so with very little more ceremony than he would have used with one of his own officers.

He met his elder brother with frank delight, gave his hand a quick shake, and said briskly: ‘Glad to see you, Wellesley! How d’ye do?’

‘How do you do?’ returned the Marquis, holding his hand a moment longer.

‘We are in a damned bad case,’ replied the Duke bluntly.

The Marquis did not make the mistake of taking this to mean that his brother envisaged defeat at Bonaparte’s hands; he knew that it was merely the prelude to one of Arthur’s trenchant and comprehensive complaints of the Government’s supine behaviour. Already, and though he had not been in his presence above a minute, he was aware of Arthur’s driving will. Arthur’s terrible energy made him feel suddenly old. Presently, seated with Harrowby and Torrens at a table covered with papers, and listening to the Duke’s voice, he found that, well as he knew him, he could still be surprised by Arthur’s amazing capacity for detail. For Arthur had rolled up his maps and was being extremely definite on the subject of the ideal size and nature of camp kettles.

An extraordinary fellow, dear Arthur: really, a most bewildering f

ellow!

Six

The information imparted to Colonel Audley by Fremantle turned out to be correct, and not, as Audley had more than half suspected, a mild attempt to hoax him. He was to accompany the Duke to Ghent, but not, providentially, until June 8th. He was free therefore to present himself at Lady Vidal’s party on the 7th.

The fact of his being engaged to dine at the Duke’s table made it unnecessary for him to tell his sister-in-law where he meant to spend the rest of the evening. The Worths were bound for the Opera, where Judith hoped he might perhaps be able to join them.

Lady Barbara, wise in the ways of suitors, expected to see him among the first arrivals, and was piqued when he did not appear until late in the evening. He found her in a maddening mood, flirting with one civilian and two soldiers. She had nothing but a careless wave of the hand for him, and the Colonel, who had no intention of forming one of a court, paused only to exchange a word of greeting with her before passing on to pay his respects to Lady Frances Webster.

That inveterate hero worshipper had found a new object for her affections, a very different personage from Lord Byron, less dangerous but quite as glorious. At the fête at the Hôtel de Ville her eyes had dwelled soulfully upon the Duke of Wellington, and the Duke had lost very little time in becoming acquainted with her. When the Lady Frances discovered from Colonel Audley that there was no likelihood of his Grace’s putting in an appearance that evening, she sighed, and seemed to lose interest in the world.

So that’s Hookey’s latest, is it? thought the Colonel. Too angelic for my taste!

Caro Lamb recognised him, and summoned him to her side. He went at once, and was soon engaged in a light, swift give and take of badinage with her. His manners were too good to allow of his attention wandering, his gaze did not stray from the changeful little face before him; nor, when Caro presently flitted from him to another, did he do more than glance in Barbara’s direction. She was lying back in her chair, laughing up into Lavisse’s face, bent a little over her. There was a suggestion of possessiveness in Lavisse’s pose, and his left hand was resting on Barbara’s bare shoulder. Repressing a strong inclination to seize the slim Belgian by the collar and the seat of his elegant kneebreeches and throw him out, the Colonel turned away, and found himself confronting a sandy-haired ensign, who smiled and offered him a glass of wine. ‘You’re Colonel Audley, aren’t you, sir?’ he said. ‘Bab said you were coming. I’m Harry Alastair.’

‘How do you do?’ said the Colonel, accepting the glass of wine. ‘I believe I once met your brother George.’

‘Oh, did you? George is a Bad Man,’ said Harry cheerfully. ‘I heard today that the Life Guards are under marching orders, so he’ll be here pretty soon, I expect. But I say, what’s the news, sir? We are going to war, aren’t we?’

Colonel Audley did not think there was much doubt of that.

‘Well, I’m very glad to hear you say so,’ remarked his youthful interlocutor with simple pleasure. ‘Only, people talk such stuff that one doesn’t know what to believe. I thought you would probably know.’ He added in a burst of confidence: ‘It’s a great thing for me: I’ve never been in action, you know.’

Colonel Audley expressed a gratifying surprise. ‘I had thought you must have been with Graham,’ he said.

‘No,’ confessed Lord Harry. ‘As a matter of fact, I was still at Oxford then. Well, to tell you the truth, I only joined in December.’

‘How do you like it?’ asked the Colonel. ‘You’re with General Maitland, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. Oh, it’s famous sport! I like it above anything!’ said Lord Harry. ‘And if only we have the luck to come to grips with Boney himself—all our fellows are mad for the chance of a brush with him, I can tell you! Hallo, what’s Bab at now? She’s as wild as fire tonight! When George arrives they’ll set the whole town in a bustle between them, I daresay.’

A hot rivalry appeared to have sprung up between the men surrounding Barbara for possession of the flower she had been wearing tucked into her corsage. It was in her hand now, and as the Colonel glanced towards her she sprang lightly upon a stool, and held it high above her head.

‘No quarrelling, gentlemen!’ she called out. ‘He who can reach it may take it. Oh, Jack, my poor darling, you will never do it!’

Half a dozen arms reached up; the Lady Barbara, from the advantage of her stool, laughed down in the faces upturned to her. Colonel Audley, taller than any of that striving court, set down his wine glass and walked up behind her, and nipped the flower from her hand.

She turned quickly; a wave of colour rushed into her cheeks. ‘Oh! You! Infamous! I did not bargain for a man of your inches!’ she said.