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understanding of natural history was unusual for some years to come. He alone had schooled her, though she had taught him almost as much as he had imparted to her, and he always counted it an act of providence that an outbreak of farcy prior to sailing had kept her behind in England during the first campaign: the thought that he would have had to shoot her on the beach at Corunna with all the others filled him still with a peculiar dread.
    ‘“An horse is a vain thing for safety; neither shall he deliver any by his great strength.”’
    ‘Eh?’ challenged his groom.
    ‘Not my words, Johnson – the Psalmist’s.’
    ‘Well he must have been fuzzed!’
    ‘I mean that it is written in the Psalms,’ Hervey explained with a smile of mild dismay. ‘Thirty-three, I think’ – as if Johnson might somehow wish to look up the reference for himself.
    ‘They don’t say owt about ’orses that makes much sense.’
    Hervey gave up. ‘Her coat stares, Johnson. We must find her some blankets and make a mash – she’ll have colic before midnight, I’ll be bound. Wheat straw or not, tie her up for the time being.’
    A shrewd observer would next have noted a subtle change in Hervey’s manner. With Jessye he was easy and familiar; with his second charger he was perceptibly distant, respectful rather than affectionate.
    ‘Nero looks fine enough,’ he said.
    ‘Oh ay, sir, ’e’s all right; that cut’s nothin’.’
    Nero had been bred to look fine. A full hand and a half higher than Jessye, he had come to Hervey from the king’s stallion depot outside Hanover via an ensign in the Footguards. Lieutenant d’Arcey Jessope had been officer of the guard one day when His Majesty, in one of his periodic derangements, and conceiving himself to be in the Herrenhausen rather than at Windsor, had become convinced that Jessope, in his scarlet, was one of his Hanoverians. The king had taken him at once to the royal stables and presented him with the first animal that His Majesty considered appropriate for an officer of his
Leibgarde
. Jessope had thereby become the owner of a mount which, though magnificent, he subsequently found unmanageable. He would always ascribe this to late gelding, not wholly convincingly, whenever the subject arose, and he had been relieved to pass him on to Hervey for a song after the battle at Salamanca, a generous token of gratitude for his rescue half-dead from the mêlée. As Jessope himself had remarked laconically from his hospital bed, with an arm almost severed by a sabre slash he had little hope of being able to manage a ‘rig’.
    Jessope
. Hervey smiled at the thought of him, and wondered what recovery he was making since his return to England, and when indeed he might see him again. Doubtless he was being fêted at this very instant by the ladies of St James’s. He smiled again as he recalled Jessope’s description of Nero: ‘unmanageable’. Yet in one sense it was exact enough, for in the hands of any but those which had been trained in the classical method he was wholly unresponsive, positively wilful. In
Hochschule
hands his manners were impeccable. He could cover ground better even than Corporal Collins’s gelding and had jumped four foot six, though he lacked Jessye’s endurance. There had been times as a boy, in the riding-hall at Wilton House, when Hervey would gladly have quit his lessons with the Austrian
Reitlehrer
and gone back to his simple hunting seat, but he had frequently thanked God that the option of doing so had never been his. No riding master had been able since to disabuse him of his conviction that to be master of both a classical and an English seat was a peerless asset.
    Jessye was his concern that evening, however, and they managed eventually to rug her up with blankets from the chaplain’s quarters – the priest had not been seen since their arrival – and make a mash of what seemed to be bran, which Johnson had discovered unattended somewhere. The