Hervey himself had been in two minds about the reports. There was many a vocal supporter in Madras of Colonel Sale’s methods – he himself had instituted many an encouragement to sobriety in the Sixth – but command of a battalion of infantry in which the mortality rate had run at ten per cent was not for the faint-hearted. Certainly, an adjutant who married a missionary and got himself ordained was something he found curious to contemplate. He reserved his judgement of the – reportedly – far-from-teetotal Colonel Dennie.

It was as well that he did, for he soon found him at office in a bell-tent in the middle of the Somersets’ camp. The picket had turned out and presented arms as fast as any he’d seen, and the picket officer and serjeant appeared before he was out of the saddle. Whatever was the regime of discipline, its first appearance was promising.

‘Good afternoon to you, General,’ said Dennie, rising. ‘We’re just come and you must take us as you find.’

It was not perhaps the most regular of beginnings, but there again, neither was his visit. A general arriving without ceremony could put a regiment in a spin.

Dennie was five or six years his senior in age and an inch or so shorter – wiry, bushy-browed, and with every appearance of a choleric disposition. Sleeman had told him he was fierce and fiery, irritably impatient of acts of injustice to which he himself would have been no party but which would scarcely have moved a less sensitive man. No doubt he perceived a slight where only courtesy was intended – and perhaps the reverse was true, that he intended only courtesy yet somehow managed to give offence. He, Hervey, reckoned he’d just have to see.

He shook his hand – uncommon custom that it was on meeting – and smiled unconcernedly. ‘It is good to see your regiment again. The stockade at Rangoon was it not?’

There’d been ‘trouble’ there too, but no want of fight either.

‘I do believe it was … And you’re come now without a staff?’

‘I’m come without a staff because I’m just returned from Chintalpore and thought to see how things stood with your quarters.’

‘Well, there’s too much canvas, but I’d rather have it that way, with the companies close to instead of boarded out, no matter how comfortable the billets.’

There was sense in that, for it was a good deal easier to keep out the hawkers of whatever it was the stills of Sthambadree brewed. ‘How many are you?’

‘Seven hundred and eighty-three all ranks.’

Hervey nodded. It wasn’t a thousand, but it was more than some of the battalions in Madras could muster. He didn’t suppose there was a single one in India save for the native regiments (nor anywhere else for that matter) that was up to strength.

‘May I offer a libation, General?’

‘A common drink will do.’

Dennie laughed and nodded to his orderly.

Hervey sat down. He’d let out the rope to see what he did with it. Dennie had been in regimentals seven years before he himself was made a cornet. Although that counted for nothing when it came to the Articles of War, it would count for much when it came to the realities of war. Dennie had been with Lake in the campaigns against the Marathas while he’d still been at Shrewsbury, and he’d come out of Ava with a brevet half-colonelcy and a CB. It couldn’t have been easy for such a man to play second fiddle to Sale for so long. Hervey expected he’d need a tight rein.