A Close Run Thing Read Online Free Page B

been returned with a peremptory note that the commander-in-chief did not wish to distract his field officers from their first duty of attending to their commands. Afterwards he had brooded, and contemplated selling out, but in the end he had turned once more to his trusty volume of Seneca and, taking deep draughts from the treatise on ‘The Steadfastness of Wise Men’, he had redoubled his stoic efforts in the place that Fortune had appointed him.
    If the final victory were, by rumour and his own reckoning, so close, however, then he knew these low spirits made little sense. Was it that he considered himself to blame for Hervey’s arrest? He had given him command of a flank picket, and it was by rights a lieutenant’s command; but, then, Hervey had seen more service than many of the lieutenants. Why in any case repine over the fate of an insignificant cornet when a sou’s worth of powder and shot might carry off his young head at an instant? The adjutant had cautioned him more than once that, if he were to take responsibility so personally for every last man in the Sixth, dyspepsy would soon overcome him. But the warning had had no effect.
    He wondered what Lord George Irvine would do if he were here. He had not the inkling of an idea, however, for Lord George understood the complexities, and possibilities, of the web in a way he never could. But, be whatever that may, he knew well enough that, behind him, the Sixth were restive, for they had been posted thus for four hours without a move. Pain shot through his jaw again, catching him off guard. ‘Christ!’ he exploded. ‘Dismount!’
    His trumpeter, with no cautionary word of command to alert him, blew the call hastily, cracking the first ‘Es’ badly and earning a blistering rebuke. There could in any event have been no more calculated an invitation to bring down Slade’s wrath upon the Sixth than this order. The brigade commander’s belief that cavalry should remain mounted ready for immediate action kept his regiments in the saddle for hours on end, and to no purpose. Edmonds considered Slade’s notion of immediate action to be positively risible in view of his chronic indecisiveness. Sore backs were the bane of the cavalry, and, whether Slade liked it or not, he was damned if he was going to sit there a moment longer for no good reason.
    Yet he was not without his doubts, too. He had to admit that the French were fighting with a tenacity he had not seen since Badajoz. Yesterday, Easter of all days, Soult had left three thousand dead and dying on the field before retiring behind the canal and the Garonne. And now, after another day’s fighting, it looked as if that fox of a marshal was going to contest every street in this lovely city. Edmonds was beginning to concede the likelihood of a Fabian march on Paris after all.
    These were self-indulgent thoughts, however. One consideration above all pressed to the fore (besides, that is, the ever receding prospect of seeing a tooth-operator): how was he to secure Hervey’s release? Come what may, there were bound to be charges: Slade would be eager to take the opportunity to humiliate the Sixth. The only chance lay in having a general court martial convened instead of one of the cosy field courts where the only concern was to uphold the dignity and authority of the commander – usually, and in this instance, the very officer to have initiated the charges. With Slade it was more a matter of
shoring up
that dignity and authority, he admitted with distaste. But a proper court, not one packed with toadies, would take the affair with the battery as mitigation. Damn it all, he almost exclaimed aloud, they ought to regard it as justification!
    But, pressing though Matthew Hervey’s arrest might be, there was at that moment even more immediate business at hand. All Edmonds’s instincts told him that this was turning into a scrimmage of a battle. A pall of smoke was rising over the city, and he began to wonder whether