Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [517]
The years after Plassey had seen a series of English victories. Wolfe had taken Quebec and secured Canada for the English. The last battles of the Seven Years War in Europe had been fought and won. At Minden, the death of a superior officer had given him the chance to be promoted lieutenant on the battlefield. But after that, there had been few opportunities either for battle promotion or for profit. What commissions came up – captain lieutenant or full captain – were usually snapped up by rich young men from the Guards. Soon after the accession of the new king George III, he had transferred to the 62nd in the hope of action and reward in the West Indies, but had seen little of either and was almost as poor as before.
One sad event had taken place just after his arrival there: his mother had died.
His father wrote to him gloomily about it and warned him that, although there would in time be something due to him from certain interests she had with her family, the funds would take time to come through and would in any case be small.
He was surprised, within the year, to hear from Jonathan that he had married again and that his new wife was already pregnant. There had been no more word in his father’s letters about the funds coming to him; and he had not cared to ask.
So he had settled down, on the lush and sultry island of Dominica, to several years of garrison duty where the only military activity was to train men in parade ground tactics that he suspected would be useless for anything but a set-piece battle, and the only casualties from such tropical sicknesses as malaria.
In this enforced and enervating idleness, until he struck up his friendship with Madame Leroux, Adam Shockley had two principal sources of pleasure. The first was his correspondence with his father.
Jonathan Shockley wrote well. His caustic wit, which had sometimes been daunting and confusing to Adam as a boy, came through far better in his letters to his son now that Adam was a man. He kept Adam abreast of Sarum affairs – of the weakened cloth trade, the doings of Mr Harris, and the scandal of young Lord Pembroke temporarily deserting his young wife – so that Adam could almost feel he was back in the close and hearing his father’s voice. He often gave him useful information, too, about more general political affairs.
Above all, he served as a conduit for his son’s other newfound pleasure. For Adam now developed a taste for books.
“I have made a late start upon my education,” he confessed to one of the other lieutenants, “but the truth is I have never enjoyed any kind of learning until now.”
Very soon, half of what he could save from his pay was going on purchases of books, which Jonathan willingly sent out to him, often with his own pungent comments upon them. Father and son wrote to each other on the merits of Dr Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary. Numerous lighter works – Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels arrived; then heavier matter: Clarendon’s great volumes of history, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the more recent philosophical works of Hume and Bishop Berkeley. He even read Voltaire, and admired that great man’s mockery of the confusion and humbug of the day’s organised religion.
“With great minds for company, a man is never lonely,” Adam concluded.
Jonathan’s comments on political events too were thought provoking. One letter which came soon after the American colony had protested about the English Parliament’s levying of a stamp duty tax on them, always remained in Adam’s mind.
I was vastly amused to hear that the colonists’ ambassador – I know not how else to describe the man – Mr Benjamin Franklin, being in London at the time the said Stamp Act was first brought in, made haste to procure for three of his friends positions as stamp masters, which I am assured would have given them little exertion but a handsome income each of £300 a year!
And now, my dear Adam, I shall give