Edrington to Kennedy, June 1800

Author: Marna
Fandom: Hornblower
Rating: General
Categories: Serious fiction, Epistolary fiction
Date published: 2004-11-10 (also on LiveJournal)
Archive URL: http://scriptorium.infotrope.net/fiction/kangaroo.mhtml
Length: words (0 kb)

This work is part of the All the King's Men series:
ATKM Reading Guide; Consent; Major MacPherson's Ass; All the King's Men; Pellew to Edrington, May 1799; Edrington to Pellew, May 1799; Hornblower to Edrington, May 1799; A Lying Sort of Summer; Thus Friends Absent Speak; Edrington to Kennedy, June 1800; Nature and Degree; A letter from Flanders, January 1802; A letter from Kingston, January 1802; Another Sunrise; For the Sake of a Wavering Light

Feedback welcome by email to Marna at marna@marna.ca or via LiveJournal comments

Disclaimer: The characters in this work belong to C. S. Forester and A&E and are used without permission. Please also read this site's standard disclaimer.

June 15, 1800
Sussex.

Good Lord, Archie, do you mean to be the death of my poor orderly?

He has just departed -- after the way he staggered and groaned beneath the weight of that great manuscript you call a letter, I felt compelled to give him a restorative drink, at least -- I use the word manuscript advisedly -- do you mean to set a whole new fashion on the stages of London after the war with your wardroom farces? If so I may say I think they will be notorious triumphs, even if you do spend the rest of your days evading the wrath of your former shipmates -- not without cause, I suspect, for I cannot credit that there has ever in this world been a Scotchman so Scotch as you make your Lt. Lennox out to be, and thus my suspicions of all your clever sketches are aroused.

As for us, we are mired here in a great swamp of paper, the regiment being turned out top to bottom and remade to some great design of Manningham's -- so I write this and sign that and meet with this man and that man and I inspect and I nod and I am, in fact, most perfectly superfluous. When the business of playing Major palls beyond bearing I take myself off home and play the Earl to much the same effect, and the main difference is that Mamma and my sister coo and wheedle and defer and pretend that I might of course if I thought it best, Alexander, overrule them and after three or so days of this I positively wish to be bellowed at, especially as my younger sister has finally, at the ripe old age of eighteen, managed to bewitch a young man into so completely forgetting his sense and decency as to propose marriage to a woman who has in the past introduced reptiles into the very bed of a fellow-officer -- I tried to warn him of the sort of connexion he is making but Lavinia has got ahead of me with the tale and he excuses her on the flimsy grounds that she was no more than nine at the time -- well, he will learn, soon enough, but in the meantime between Mamma's parasol on the one hand and the threat of adders between my sheets on the other, you see I am quite as helpless in the face of their endless wedding schemes as I am in the face of the regiment's tortise-like progress back to anything like readiness for battle, and I begin seriously to think of dressing a bolster in my regimentals, propping it up on the parade ground and running away to sea, for if it will but stay on my horse the bolster will perform admirably in my stead in most respects.

You musn't take it that I complain of the men we get -- they are a fine lot on the whole, no quota-men, few raw recruits and fewer wasters -- but it all takes so damnably long, and they feel it -- they want a fight, and we have none to offer them. I want one myself -- almost too much, if such a thing is possible -- the men take it out by drinking and brawling and we are no better. I had words with a friend two days past, a man I have known since before either of us was breeched, and I value him no little, but we were no more than a half-dozen more hasty words from a serious quarrel or worse when we pulled back from the matter at last and what I dislike most to recollect about it is how close I came to regret at having once again to govern my temper. I have been thinking of it since -- it has been years since I doubted my ability to fight, but now I find myself half-wondering how I shall do when the time comes to stop. I hardly feel fit for home now; we never speak of it but I feel the distance and I know they do as well. I have R~, the captain of whom we spoke once, for occasional company, but though neither of us seems to accomplish a great deal we are fated to be forever failing to accomplish it at different times and places, and besides that his mood is if anything less certain than mine, so while we have great relief in one another when we do meet we both think it best to do so only occasionally. I could never admit this to him in any case -- I wish I could talk it over with you -- I often think you were as much born in a battle as he seems to have been, and yet I don't mind you knowing, somehow.

Meanwhile for diversion, to the theatre tonight with Mamma and Lavinia -- I have some hopes of ascertaining, at long last, exactly what it is that prevents those two young fools from declaring themselves in Act One and having done, but I am not sanguine -- you recall the contretemps of which I wrote you some time back, concerning that fortunately ill-executed attempt on His Majesty's life -- quite the second most interesting performance I have attended this year, but as I spent much of it playing the impudent rake to divert a Princess from an understandable though undesireable tendancy to become hysterical, the end of it all is that I still cannot, properly speaking, claim to have seen The Tempest -- perhaps the third time may prove the charm.

I do have another diversion at the moment -- His Majesty having thankfully not quite felt I ought to be presented in the traditional style with the hand of said Princess as a reward for my little assistance on that occasion, he seems to have taken a notion to present me instead with a creature from his menagerie, some Antipodean monstrosity nearly as tall as I, and with a mighty power of locomotion -- I believe it is called a kangaroo, and I am much vexed with reading and enquiring after what little is known of them and discovering what sort of conditions they require for their keeping in order that I may regretfully discover to my own and his His Majesty's great disappointment that Sussex offers none of them whatsoever. On second thought, perhaps I shall accept the beast with fulsome thanks and present it to Lavinia as a wedding gift -- serve her exactly right if I did!

Blessedly, today Mamma and Lavinia are once again engaged with the dressmaker -- or possibly the milliner, I cannot keep any sort of track and wonder that they can -- so the afternoon is my own and I intend to ride out as far and as fast as may be, which will doubtless blow away some of these cobwebs and leave me tired, if not precisely satisfied, and so I must end this in haste if I am to catch the best part of the day. Remember me to Horatio.

As always,

A~.