‘Quite.’

‘And he troubles too over the court martial – of the dragoon, the one who struck an officer – the penalty of death withal.’

‘Ah yes, I know of it. I am apprised of all capital sentences in the presidency, for the simple fact that they’re ultimately mine to remit. But he hasn’t spoken to me of it. Why does it trouble him?’

‘I don’t know the particulars, but the man is not of fundamentally bad character, it would seem.’

Somervile, already helping himself to more kichree, though his plate was not yet empty, sighed and raised his eyebrows. ‘Cruel necessity.’

Fairbrother sighed too, resignedly. ‘No doubt.’

‘Or is the colonel become sentimental in his seniority? Perhaps if the regiment were to flog, the odd execution wouldn’t seem so harsh.’

Fairbrother smiled. ‘You deliberately try me, Sir Eyre.’

The Sixth had held flogging in abeyance for many years, even during the late wars with France. No one doubted its efficacy in maintaining good order and military discipline – not least the Duke of Wellington himself – but in a regiment of cavalry, its recruits brought with care and the whole under good regulation, its application ought rarely if ever to be strictly necessary. That had indeed been the tradition of the Sixth for as long as any had served, save for one unhappy instance when they’d a martinet for a colonel – a man from another regiment who’d bought command and exercised it as he would a stallion that he couldn’t master save with sharpened rowels and wire bit. Besides, he too, Fairbrother, had a deep contempt for flogging. It couldn’t be otherwise, he’d say, if anyone had seen the backs of recalcitrant slaves (especially knowing that he himself might have been on the receiving end of the lash if his father had left him the wrong side of the blanket).

‘I shall await our friend’s application for remission, though I must say that any plea in mitigation would have to pass muster with his fellow commanding officers here to be successful. I couldn’t risk an outbreak of violent insubordination – in King’s regiments or Company’s alike. It’s tricky enough since Bentinck decided – quite without consulting – to abolish flogging in the black regiments.’

‘The governor-general? He has?’

‘Very decidedly. And now every sepoy thinks he must be superior to a man wearing the King’s coat. No good will come of it. Not, at least, in the Bengal army, “the martial races” as Fort William’s wont to call them – deuced hotheads for the most part. The Madrasee’s made of sounder stuff. But it won’t be easy. The Nairs especially can be refractory.’

Fairbrother nodded. He hadn’t heard of the Nairs – or indeed of many other tribes – but was content to let the question go. In truth, he’d admit, he was only too content that he himself was not called on to make decisions requiring great exercise of the mind. He was a man of some means – even more so now since the death of his father – and was content to wander through life taking his pleasure in whatever amused him. That he could, when roused, fight with unmatched skill, had first recommended him to Hervey – that and his ability to see things not as others, a particular instinct for the native man’s way of thinking, which must stem, so he (and Hervey) supposed, from his own quarterings. At the Cape he’d often known what the Xhosa and the Zulu were thinking, and in consequence what to do, even though the veld was a far cry from the forests of the Ashantee whence his mother’s people had been taken. The people of India were another matter again, however; another matter entirely. He might share their coffee complexion (those from the northern parts, at least – coffee and cream – not the Tamuls and those hereabout), but how and what they thought he didn’t suppose he’d any notion of.