This is the only passage in the book when he comes anywhere close to admitting the full price for his adventures in Ceylon. Ill though he was, his wife was being dragged down with him. They had lost two sons and a daughter to the enterprise and the long monsoon months from June to November were hard to bear. Without light – without sun – the transition that took place in Newera just at a time when a distant Gloucestershire was bathed in plenty was hard to bear. Baker concluded his paragraph on the churchyard with this unexpectedly pietistic sentence: ‘The sunbeam has penetrated where the forest threw its dreary shade, and a ray of light has shone through the moral darkness of the spot.’
They took their leave of Fowler and the others and sailed home together. Old Sam Baker had remarried after the death of his first wife and had given up Lypiatt Park: there was nothing left for them in Gloucestershire. John and Elizabeth settled for the time being in Rugby; Valentine and the youngest brother James were in the army encamped before Sebastopol. Sam took his family to a rented house on the Atholl estate in Scotland. Towards Christmas, the weak and listless Henrietta allowed herself to be carted off to the French Pyrenees to get well again. Her husband also had it in mind to hunt the black bear he had heard roamed the winter slopes. The couple took their four children with them.
Henrietta Baker died at Bagnères-de-Bigorre on 29 December 1855. Since her marriage to Sam she had lived almost a third of her life in the tropics. She died in a room where deep snow lay outside the window and melted into the icy black waters of the Adour. One of the unmarried Martin sisters, Charlotte, who was only twenty-two, came out to France to rescue the children.
She found her brother-in-law stunned and almost completely helpless. He had arrived at Bagnères with the utter confidence that being a Baker was of itself a cure against ill. Henrietta would buck up, the children would scratch out a few words of French and in some snowy ravine behind the town the black bear would present a perfect shot. His own animal high spirits would act as tonic and emollient – things would soon be as they should be. But the maire of Bagnères was also a crack shot and had been into the mountains before him. One of the sights Charlotte Martin winced at seeing was Sam’s gun cases in the hotel bedroom, still buckled, still with the protective tampons of lint tucked into the weapons’ muzzles. Couldn’t it be said that he had dragged the family south to Bagnères simply to satisfy himself? No doctor would have prescribed such a trip to an out-of-season spa. C’était tragique, la mort de cette pauvre Anglaise, mais vous savez …
The widower who ate alone at his restaurant table was thirty-four years old and a casual eye might have added another ten to that. Something had happened to this man that was as unexpected and humiliating as flinching in the face of danger. The sheer ordinariness of death, its artless sprawl, had tripped him up. Henrietta had died not from the exhaustion that had brought her to this Christmas card spa town, but from typhus, caught from bed lice somewhere along the road. It was an awful outcome and might have ended another man’s career there and then.
Valentine Baker, always called Val in the family, was named for his naval grandfather. There is a photograph of him as a young man in Ceylon: he wears a high collar and stock, his hair is long, his arms are folded composedly across his chest. His moustache is in the experimental stage and has yet to find its voluptuous curves. It is the eyes that tell the story. What is most striking about Val’s expression is its calm. If the camera represents the outer, public world, then he is looking into it with an eerie self-possession. That same look in the eye of a wild animal would have sent an instant warning signal to Sam Baker, tightening his finger on the trigger.
A boy among men, Val came out to Ceylon on the Earl of Hardwicke with the rest of Sam’s party in 1845. From the beginning he was only ever a lukewarm farm colonist. For example: after a season or two on the plateau Sam Baker invented for himself a sort of woollen suit for his jungle explorations, the fabric dyed a muddy and streaky green by the juice of plants. It was cinched at the waist by the belt that carried the killer knife. He wore this kit without embarrassment and was always eager to press its advantages on others. It is not possible to picture Val ever wearing anything like it, even if it stood between him and sudden death.
He was at school in Gloucester during the Mauritius years and still only nineteen when he came to Newera. A windswept plateau halfway up a mountain was never going to satisfy his curiosity about life in the tropics. In any case, Val was only in Ceylon under licence – his father had long wished that he and his youngest brother James should enter the army. The family was rich and had worked its way into becoming part of the landed interest in Gloucestershire; and so, to old Sam Baker, the way forward for his youngest sons pointed to service in the Guards or, better still, a good cavalry regiment. Looked at in this light, Val’s journey to Ceylon was no more than a jaunt. Unfortunately, as his photograph shows, there was very little of the jaunty about him.
To have a soldier in the family was a fatherly ambition that could turn out, under the wrong circumstances, to be ruinously expensive. The army offered its officer elite the opportunity of a plural life such as some parsons had enjoyed in the eighteenth century – they were gentlemen first and soldiers only afterwards. In the fashionable regiments no officer, however cautious in his habits, could subsist on his pay alone. His path to senior rank was choked by elderly and often grievously incompetent men who saw the purchase system, by which everything from a cornetcy to a colonelship could be bought and sold, as a guarantee of their pension. The first step in a military career – the right regiment – was the most important one. Thereafter, deep pockets helped – Lord Brudenell raised himself by reckless purchase from cornet to command of his own regiment in just eight years. As Earl of Cardigan he is reputed to have spent a further £10,000 annually to ensure the 11th Hussars remained among the most fashionable (and reactionary) of British cavalry regiments. Cardigan’s manic personal vanity made him a particularly vivid example of what was, in a dozen or so regiments, the norm. The Guards, the Household Cavalry and certain favoured Hussar regiments had become, in effect, the junior branches of the aristocracy in uniform.
If this was old Sam Baker’s ambition for his son Val, it must have caused consternation when news came that he had ridden back down the mountain only a few months after arriving at Newera and purchased an ensignship in that very undistinguished foot regiment, the Ceylon Rifles.
Touching the role of a young officer in times of peace, Thackeray wrote woundingly: ‘The professional duties of a footman are quite as difficult and various.’ He had this further to say in his Book of Snobs, published in 1846, the year Val joined the Rifles:
When epaulets are not sold; when corporal punishments are abolished and Corporal Smith has a chance to have his gallantry rewarded as well as that of Lieutenant Grig; when there is no such rank as ensign and lieutenant (the existence of which rank is an absurd anomaly, and an insult upon all the rest of the army), and should there be no war, I should not be disinclined to be a major-general myself.
Val had joined as modest a regiment as could be found, tucked almost out of sight at the bottom of the Army List. His decision may have seemed inexplicable in Gloucestershire but a motive based on local conditions suggests itself. Up in Newera Sam, in his blustery and good-humoured way, was developing his role as the social outsider, a reputation he enjoyed and did his best to burnish. By joining the Rifles Val indicated an alternative. An ensign’s duties might be mostly comprised of smoking and lounging but what they also offered was the pleasure of belonging. The elements of obedience and submission implied by regimental life were handsomely offset by the sense of fraternity engendered. A man who purchased the queen’s commission anywhere was joining a select, if