‘And tell me when he’s first at riding school.’

Just as he’d thought. St Alban nodded, with a smile.

‘Now, send for the sar’nt-major, and I’ll tell you what we’re about.’

VIII

Salvete et Vale

Riding school, two days later

‘Att-e-en-shun!’

Fifteen recruits – they’d not be given the distinction ‘dragoons’ until they’d passed out of riding school and skill-at-arms – came to attention sharply, testament at least to the daily routine the serjeant of the Thirteenth had maintained aboard ship.

Roughrider-Corporal Walcot saluted as if his life depended on it, which with Armstrong standing by Hervey’s side he almost certainly thought it did – a life worth living, at any rate.

‘Recruit-ride all present and correct, Colonel.’

It was their second morning. They’d been in uniform for the best part of a year, but only now had they come under the prodigious regulation of a regiment. Hervey insisted on seeing recruits in their first raw days, before they’d been made so ‘regimental’ as to lose the frankness that might reveal just a little of the man. Not that he’d be able to remember them exactly, but that didn’t matter. He’d pen a few words about each in his order book. He might never have need or reason to read them again, but the Sixth were a small corps. Singletons mattered, for good or ill. It was different in the Guards or the Line. His late and much-lamented Coldstream friend D’Arcey Jessope used to say that he could never recognize his company unless the serjeants were posted. Except that Hervey always suspected it a conceit – and, indeed, in Jessope’s baggage after Waterloo his friends found a pocket book wrapped in oilskin containing the particulars of every man in his erstwhile command.

‘Name!’ Armstrong barked, but not unkindly.

‘Steele, sir!’

‘Steele, Colonel!’

Armstrong turned and glowered at Walcot.

‘Why, Corporal, have you not instructed these men in how the commanding officer of His Majesty’s Sixth Light Dragoons is addressed? Or is there some new regulation of which I am unaware and to which you only have been made privy?’

It happened not infrequently even with the dragoons. In the tautness of the moment a man could forget that if the commanding officer was on parade, any question, remark or order, no matter by whom it was asked, made or given, was answered as if direct to the commanding officer. And in the Sixth, it was the duty – and privilege – of all ranks to address the commanding officer as ‘Colonel’ rather than ‘sir’; even a recruit who was not yet accorded the distinction of being called a dragoon. (It didn’t require ‘the brains of an archbishop’ to grasp these particularities, as Armstrong was fond of remarking, but it did require alertness – although on a man’s second day it didn’t merit too excessive a verbal flogging.)

Corporal Walcot knew there could be no answer to the serjeant-major other than to repeat the instruction he’d already given them half a dozen times that morning (and which Armstrong knew of perfectly well, though he’d never say).