The Ionian Mission

PATRICK O’BRIAN

Copyright

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Copyright © Patrick O’Brian 1981

Patrick O’Brian asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006499220

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007429349

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Dedication

MARIAE SACRUM

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Diagram of a Square-Rigged Ship

Author’s Note

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

In Which We Serve by John Bayley

Keep Reading

About the Author

The Works of Patrick O’Brian

About the Publisher

The sails of a square-rigged ship, hung out to dry in a calm.

1 Flying jib

2 Jib

3 Fore topmast staysail

4 Fore staysail

5 Foresail, or course

6 Fore topsail

7 Fore topgallant

8 Mainstaysail

9 Main topmast staysail

10 Middle staysail

11 Main topgallant staysail

12 Mainsail, or course

13 Maintopsail

14 Main topgallant

15 Mizzen staysail

16 Mizzen topmast staysail

17 Mizzen topgallant staysail

18 Mizzen sail

19 Spanker

20 Mizzen topsail

21 Mizzen topgallant

Illustration source: Serres, Liber Nauticus. Courtesy of The Science and Technology Research Center, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation

Author’s Note

The Royal Navy of Nelson’s time was much given to music and poetry: no wardroom was complete without half a dozen German flutes and every month the Naval Chronicle published several pages of verse by officers on active service or half-pay. These poems presumably show naval talent at its highest, and they provide excellent material for a writer who wishes to show this perhaps unexpected side of the sailor’s life but who feels that his own pastiches cannot possibly give the same impression of authenticity. Yet the somewhat less accomplished pieces that never reached print are even more valuable: I have come across a certain number of them in the library at Greenwich, but to my knowledge there is no mine so rich as the Memoirs of Lieutenant Samuel Walters, RN, which remained in manuscript until 1949, when the Liverpool University Press published them, admirably edited by Professor Northcote Parkinson, to whom I make all proper acknowledgements for the lines I have borrowed.

Chapter One

Marriage was once represented as a field of battle rather than a bed of roses, and perhaps there are some who may still support this view; but just as Dr Maturin had made a far more unsuitable match than most, so he set about dealing with the situation in a far more compendious, peaceable and efficacious way than the great majority of husbands.

He had pursued his strikingly beautiful, spirited, fashionable wife for years and years before marrying her in mid-Channel aboard a man-of-war: for so many years indeed that he had become a confirmed bachelor at last, too old a dog to give up his tricks of smoking tobacco in bed, playing his ’cello at odd untimely moments, dissecting anything that interested him, even in the drawing-room; too old to be taught to shave regularly, to change his linen, or to wash when he did not feel the need – an impossible husband. He was not house-trained; and although he made earnest attempts at the beginning of their marriage he soon perceived that in time the strain must damage their relationship, all the more so since Diana was as intransigent as himself and far more apt to fly into a passion about such things as a pancreas in the drawer of the bedside table or orange marmalade ground into the Aubusson. And then again his deeply-ingrained habits of secrecy (for he was an intelligence-agent as well as a physician) made him even more unsuited for domestic life, which withers in the presence of reserve. He therefore gradually retired to the rooms he had long retained in an old-fashioned comfortable shabby inn called the Grapes, in the liberties of the Savoy, leaving Diana in the handsome modern house in Half Moon Street, a house shining with fresh white paint and new-furnished with elegant but fragile satinwood.

It was in no way a parting; there was no sort of violence or ill-will or disagreement about Stephen Maturin’s fading away from the intense social life of Half Moon Street to the dim, foggy lane by the Thames, where he could more easily attend the meetings of the Royal Society, the College of Surgeons, or the entomological or ornithological societies that interested him so very much more than Diana’s card-parties and routs, and where he could more safely carry out some of the delicate business that fell to his lot as a member of the naval intelligence department, business that necessarily had to be kept from the knowledge of his wife. It was not a parting in any sense of unkindness, but a mere geographical separation, one so slight that Stephen usually covered it every morning, walking up through the Green Park to breakfast with his wife, most often in her bedroom, she being a late riser; while he nearly always appeared at her frequent dinner-parties, playing the part of host to admiration, for he could be as smooth and complaisant as the most civilized of her guests so long as he was not required to keep it up too long. In any case Diana’s father and her first husband were serving officers and all her life she had been accustomed to separation. She was always delighted to see her husband and he to see her; they never quarrelled now that all reasons for disagreement were gone; and in fact this was probably the best possible arrangement for a pair with nothing in common but love and friendship, and a series of strange, surprising, shared adventures.

They never quarrelled, except when Stephen brought up the question of marriage according to the Roman rite, for their wedding had been performed in the brisk naval fashion by the captain of HMS Oedipus, an amiable young man and a fine navigator but no priest; and since Stephen, being of mixed Irish and Catalan parentage, was a Papist he was a bachelor still as far as the Church was concerned. Yet no persuasion, no kind words (and harsh ones he dared not use) could move Diana: she did not reason, but simply and steadily refused. There were times when her obstinacy grieved him, for apart from his own strong feelings on the matter he seemed to make out some obscure superstitious dread of a strange sacrament mingled with the general English dislike of Rome; yet there were also times when it added a certain not wholly disagreeable air of intrigue to the connection. Not that this ever occurred to the eminently respectable Mrs Broad of the Grapes, who liked her house to be just so and who would countenance nothing whatsoever in the roving line, a landlady who would at once turn away any man she suspected of leading out a wench. Mrs Broad had known Dr Maturin for many years; she was thoroughly used to him; and when he told her that he meant to stay at the inn she only stared for a while, amazed that any man born could sleep away from such a ravishing lady; and then accepted it as ‘one of the Doctor’s little ways’ with perfect calm. Some of his little ways had indeed been quite surprising in the past, seeing that they ranged from the quartering of badgers, rescued from a baiting, in her coal-shed to the introduction of separate limbs and even of whole orphans for dissection when they were in good supply towards the end of winter; but she had grown used to them little by little. The Doctor’s ’cello booming through the night and skeletons in every cupboard were nothing now to Mrs Broad; and nothing now could astonish her for long. She also thoroughly approved of Diana, whom she had come to know well during her first startled stay at the inn, where Stephen had brought her when they landed in England. Mrs Broad liked her for her beauty, which she candidly admired, and for her friendliness (‘no airs nor graces, and not above taking a little posset with a person behind the bar’) and for her evident affection for the Doctor. Mrs Maturin was very often at the Grapes, bringing shirts, blue worsted stockings, shoe-buckles, leaving messages, darting in for small sums of money, for although Diana was far richer than Stephen she was even more improvident. It seemed a strange kind of marriage, but Mrs Broad had once seen Mrs Maturin in one of the palace coaches with Lady Jersey – royal footmen up behind – and she had an indistinct notion that Diana was ‘something at Court’, which would naturally prevent her from living like mortals of ordinary flesh and blood.

Diana had been there still more often in recent days, because the Doctor was going to sea again with his particular friend Jack Aubrey, a post-captain in the Royal Navy, once known in the service as Lucky Jack Aubrey for his good fortune in taking prizes but now so miserably involved in his affairs that he was glad to accept an unenviable temporary command, the Worcester of seventy-four guns, one of the surviving Forty Thieves, that notorious set of line-of-battle ships built by contract with a degree of dishonesty in their scantlings, knees, fastenings – in their whole construction – that excited comment even in a time of widespread corruption: very strong comment indeed from those who had to take them to sea. She was to carry him to the Mediterranean, to Admiral Thornton’s squadron and the interminable blockade of the French fleet in Toulon. And since Stephen was to go to sea, it was obviously necessary that his sea-chest should be prepared. He had packed it himself on a great many occasions before this and it had always satisfied his modest needs even when he was a great way from shore, let alone in the Mediterranean, with Malta or Barcelona only a few hundred miles to leeward, according to the wind; but neither Diana nor Mrs Broad could bear his method of tossing things in pell-mell, the more fragile objects wrapped in his stockings, and they both perpetually interfered: tissue-paper, orderly layers of this and that, neatness, even labels.

The brassbound chest was open now and Dr Maturin was fishing in it, hoping to find his best neckcloth, the frilled white neckcloth the size of a moderate studding-sail that he was to put on for Diana’s farewell dinner. He fished with a surgical retractor, one of the most efficient instruments known to science, but nothing did he find; and when at last the steel claws grated on the bottom he called out, ‘Mrs Broad, Mrs Broad, who has hidden my neckcloth?’

Mrs Broad walked in without ceremony, the neckcloth over her arm, although Stephen was in his shirt. ‘Why, oh why did you take it away?’ he cried. ‘Have you no bowels, Mrs Broad?’

‘Mrs Maturin said it was to be new-starched,’ said Mrs Broad. ‘You would not like to have your frill all limp, I am sure.’

‘There is nothing I should like better,’ muttered Stephen, folding it about him.

‘And Mrs Maturin says you are to put on your nice new pumps,’ said Mrs Broad. ‘Which I have scratched the soles.’

‘I cannot walk to Half Moon Street in new pumps,’ said Stephen.

‘No, sir,’ said Mrs Broad patiently. ‘You are to go in a chair, like Mrs M said this morning. The men have been waiting in the tap this ten minutes past.’ Her eye wandered to the open chest, as neat as an apple-pie not half an hour ago. ‘Oh, Dr Maturin, fie,’ she cried. ‘Oh fie, Doctor, fie.’

‘Oh fie, Stephen,’ said Diana, tweaking his cravat straight, ‘How can you be so intolerably late? Jagiello has been slavering in the drawing-room this last age, and the others will be here any minute.’

‘There was a mad bull in Smithfield,’ said Stephen.

‘Does one really have to pass through Smithfield to reach Mayfair?’ asked Diana.

‘One does not, as you know very well. But I suddenly remembered that I was to call at Bart’s. And listen my dear, you have never been in time in your life, to my certain knowledge; so I beg you will keep your irony for some more suitable occasion.’

‘Why, Stephen, you are as furious as a mad bull yourself, I find,’ said Diana, kissing him. ‘And to think that I have bought you such a beautiful present. Come upstairs and look at it: Jagiello can receive any early worms.’ As she passed the drawing-room she called in, ‘Jagiello, pray do the civil for us if anyone should come: we shall not be a minute.’ Jagiello was almost domesticated at Half Moon Street, an absurdly beautiful young man, an exceedingly wealthy Lithuanian now attached to the Swedish embassy: he and Stephen and Jack Aubrey had been imprisoned in France together and they had escaped together, which accounted for an otherwise unlikely close friendship.

‘There,’ she said proudly, pointing to her bed, where there stood a gold-mounted dressing-case that was also a canteen and a backgammon-board: little drawers pulled in and out, ingenious slides and folding legs transformed it into a wash-hand-stand, a writing desk, a lectern; and looking-glasses and candleholders appeared on either side.

‘Acushla,’ he said, drawing her close, ‘this is regal splendour – this is imperial magnificence. The Physician of the Fleet has nothing finer. I am so grateful, my dear.’ And grateful, infinitely touched he was: while Diana put the gleaming object through its paces, explaining how it worked and telling him how she had stood over the workmen, bullying them into finishing it in time – oaths, sweet persuasion, promises until she was hoarse, as hoarse as a God-damned crow, Stephen chéri – he reflected on her generosity, her improvidence (rich though she was, she never had any money to spend, and this was far more than even she could afford), and on her ignorance of naval life, of the damp, cramped cupboard that a surgeon lived in at sea, even the surgeon of a seventy-four, a ship of the line: this precious piece of misguided craftsmanship might do very well for a field-officer, a soldier with a baggage-wagon and a dozen orderlies, but for a sailor it would have to be wrapped in waxed canvas and struck down into the driest part of the hold. Or perhaps it might be allowed in the bread-room…

‘But the shirts, dear Stephen,’ she was saying. ‘I am absolutely desolated about the shirts. I could not get the wretched woman to finish them. There are only a dozen here. But I will send the others down by coach. They may catch you in time.’

‘God’s love,’ cried Stephen, ‘there is no need, no need at all. A dozen shirts! I have never had so many at one time since I was breeched. And in any case I need no more than two for this voyage. Sure, it is almost over before it is begun.’

‘I wish you were back already,’ said Diana in a low voice. ‘I shall miss you so.’ And then, glancing out of the window, ‘There is Anne Trevor’s chariot. You will not mind her coming, Stephen? When she heard that Jagiello was dining here she begged and prayed to be invited, and I had not the heart to say no.’

‘Never in life, my dear. I am all for the satisfaction of natural desires, even in Miss Trevor, even in a Judas-haired rack-renting County Kerry absentee landowner with a Scotch Anabaptist vulture by way of an agent, or bailiff. Indeed, we might go so far as to leave them alone for two minutes.’

‘It seems a damned odd voyage to me,’ said Diana, frowning at the pile of shirts. ‘You never told me how it all came about. And it is all so sudden.’

‘In the crisis of a war naval orders are apt to be sudden. But I am just as pleased: I have some business to deal with in Barcelona, as you know: I should have travelled to the Mediterranean in any case, Jack or no Jack.’ This was true as far as it went; but Stephen had not seen fit to explain the full nature of his business in Barcelona, nor did he now say that he also had a rendezvous with French royalists no great way from Toulon, a rendezvous with some gentlemen who were heartily sick of Buonaparte, a rendezvous that might lead to great things.

‘But it was understood that Jack was to have the Blackwater and take her to the North American station as soon as she was ready,’ said Diana. ‘He ought never to have been shoved into a temporary command in that rotten old Worcester. A man of his seniority, with his fighting record, ought to have been knighted long ago and given a decent ship, perhaps a squadron of his own. Sophie is perfectly furious: so is Admiral Berkeley, and Heneage Dundas, and all his service friends.’ Diana was well informed about Captain Aubrey’s affairs, he being married to her cousin Sophie and an old friend into the bargain; but she was not quite as well informed as Stephen, who now said, ‘You are aware of Jack’s predicament, of course?’

‘Of course I am, Stephen. Pray do not be an ass.’ Of course she was: all Captain Aubrey’s acquaintances knew that on coming ashore with his pockets full of French and Spanish gold he had fallen an even easier prey to the landsharks than most sailors, as being of a more trusting, sanguine disposition. He had made a disastrous plunge into the arms of a more than usually rapacious shark and he was now deep in law-suits, with the possibility of ruin at the end of them.

‘I am speaking more of the most recent phase. It seems that he forgot the discretion his legal advisers urged him to observe, and it seems to them that an absence from the country is now essential for a while. I forget the details – mayhem, attorneys flying out of a two-pair-of-stairs window, glass damaged to the extent of several pounds, clerks put in fear of their lives, blasphemous words, a breach of the King’s peace. That is why things are so sudden. And that is why he accepted this command. It is no more than a parenthesis in his career.’

‘He will come back for the Blackwater then, when she is ready? Sophie will be so happy.’

‘Why, as to that, my dear, as to that…’ Stephen hesitated; and then, overcoming the passion for reserve that among other things made him so unsuitable a husband, he said, ‘The fact of the matter is that he had very great difficulty in getting even this command: his friends were obliged to make the most pressing representations to those in power, reminding them of services rendered, of promises made by the late First Lord; and even with all that he might never have had it if Captain – if a friend had not very handsomely stood aside. There is some hindrance, some personal grudge in the Admiralty itself; and in spite of his record he may be disappointed of the Blackwater, although he has been fitting her out so long. The parenthesis may close only to find him on shore, eating his heart out for so much as a rowing-boat that flies the King’s flag.’

‘I suppose it is his shocking old father,’ said Diana.

General Aubrey was an opposition member of Parliament, a vehement enthusiastic loquacious Radical, a sad handicap to any son serving the Crown, whose ministers controlled appointment and promotion.

‘Sure, that has something to do with the matter,’ said Stephen. ‘But there is more to it than that, I believe. Do you know a man called Andrew Wray?’

‘Wray of the Treasury? Oh yes. One sees him everywhere: I was obliged to dance with him at Lucy Carrington’s ball the day you went off to your old reptiles, and he was at the Thurlows’ dinner. Listen: there is another carriage: it must be Admiral Faithorne. He is always as regular as a clock. Stephen, we are behaving abominably. We must go down. Why do you ask about that scrub Wray?’

‘You think him a scrub?’

‘Certainly I do. Too clever by half, like so many of those Treasury fellows, and an infernal blackguard as well – he treated Harriet Fanshaw so shabbily you would not believe it. A scrub for all his pretty ways, and a coxcomb: I would not touch him with a barge-pole.’

‘He is now acting as second secretary to the Admiralty during Sir John Barrow’s illness. But he was in the Treasury some time ago, when Jack told him he cheated at cards, told him quite openly, in his candid naval way, in Willis’s rooms.’

‘Good God, Stephen! You never told me. What a close old soul you are, upon my honour.’

‘You never asked.’

‘Did he call Jack out?’

‘He did not. I believe he is taking a safer course.’ A thundering treble knock on the front door cut off his words. ‘I will tell you later,’ he said. ‘Thank you, my dear, for my beautiful present.’

As they went down towards the hall Diana said, ‘You know all about ships and the sea, Stephen.’ Stephen bowed: he certainly should have known a fair amount about both, having sailed with Captain Aubrey since the turn of the century, and in fact he could now almost always discriminate between larboard and starboard: he prided himself extremely on his acquaintance with fore and aft and some even more recondite nautical terms. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘What is this barge-pole they are always talking about?’

‘Ho, as for that, mate,’ said Stephen, ‘you must understand that a barge is the captain’s particular boat, or pinnace as we say; and the pole is a kind of unarticulated mast.’

He opened the drawing-room door for her, disclosing not one young woman but two, alternately scorning one another and adoring Jagiello, who sat between them in his splendid Hussar’s uniform, looking amiable but absent. On seeing Stephen he sprang up, his spurs clashing, and cried, ‘Dear Doctor, how happy I am to see you,’ clasping him in both arms and smiling down on him very sweetly.

‘Admiral Faithorne,’ called the butler in a hieratic boom, and the clock struck the hour.

More guests arrived, and profiting by the frequently opened door the kitchen cat glided in, low to the ground, and swarmed up Stephen’s back to his left shoulder, where it sat purring hoarsely, rubbing its ear against his wig. Still more guests, one of them being the banker Nathan, Diana’s financial adviser, a man after Stephen’s own heart, he too being wholly devoted to the overthrow of Buonaparte, using his highly-specialized weapons with singular efficiency. And although the ceremony was spoilt by an ugly scene when the butler removed the cat, they did at last move into the dining-room, where they sat down to as good a meal as London could offer, for in spite of her sylph-like form Diana was rather greedy and in addition to an educated taste in wine she possessed an excellent cook. His talents had on this occasion been directed to the preparation of all Stephen’s favourite dishes.

‘May I help you to some of these truffles, ma’am?’ said he to his right-hand neighbour, a dowager whose influential countenance had helped to re-establish Diana’s reputation, damaged by ill-judged connections in India and the United States and only partially restored by her marriage.

‘Alas, I dare not,’ she said. ‘But it would give me great pleasure to see you do so. If you will take an old woman’s advice, you will eat up all the truffles that come your way, while your innards can still withstand ’em.’

‘Then I believe I shall,’ said Stephen, plunging a spoon into the pyramid. ‘It will be long before I see another. Tomorrow, with the blessing, I shall be aboard ship, and then hard tack, salt-horse, dried peas and small beer must be my lot: at least until that Buonaparte is brought down.’

‘Let us drink to his confusion,’ said the dowager, raising her glass. The whole table drank to his confusion, and then at due intervals to Dr Maturin’s return, to his very happy return, to the Royal Navy, to one another, and then standing – a point of some difficulty to Miss Trevor, who was obliged to cling to Jagiello’s arm – to the King. In the midst of all this cheerfulness, of this excellent claret, burgundy and port, Stephen looked anxiously at the clock, a handsome French cartel on the wall behind Mr Nathan’s head: he was to take the Portsmouth mail, and he had a mortal horror of missing coaches. To his distress he saw that the hands had not moved since the lobster bisque; like most of the clocks in Diana’s house the cartel had stopped, and he knew that decency forbade even a surreptitious glance at his watch. Yet although he and Diana lived lives more independent than most married pairs they were very, very close in other respects: she caught his look and called down the table ‘Eat your pudding in peace, my dear; Jagiello has borrowed his ambassador’s coach, and he is very kindly driving us down.’

Shortly after this she and the other women withdrew. Jagiello moved up the table to the dowager’s place and Stephen said to him, ‘You are a good-hearted soul, my dear, so you are. Now I shall see Diana for the best part of another twelve hours; and I shall not have to fret my mind over that infernal mail-coach.’

‘Mrs Maturin tried to make me promise that she should drive,’ said Jagiello, ‘and I have given my word that she should, once the sun was up, subject to your approval.’ He sounded uneasy.

‘And did she submit to your condition?’ said Stephen, smiling. ‘That was kind. But you need not be concerned: she drives prodigiously well, and would send a team of camels through a needle’s eye at a brisk round trot.’

‘Oh,’ cried Jagiello, ‘how I admire a woman that can ride and drive, that understands horse!’ And he went on at some length about Mrs Maturin’s shining parts, which had needed only a thorough understanding of horses to be quite complete.

Stephen was aware of Nathan’s amused, benign, cynical face on the far side of the table, smiling at Jagiello’s enthusiasm: there was something about Jagiello that made people smile, he reflected – his youth, his cheerfulness, his abounding health, his beauty, perhaps his simplicity. ‘None of these qualities are mine, or ever have been,’ he said to himself. ‘Are the Jagiellos conscious of their happiness? Probably not. Fortunatos nimium …’ A yearning for coffee spurred his vitals, and seeing that the decanters had made their last round untouched by his pink and somewhat stertorous guests he said aloud, ‘Perhaps, gentlemen, we might join the ladies.’

Jagiello’s offer of the coach had come as a surprise, and the other carriages had been ordered early so that Dr Maturin should be able to make his farewells and reach the Portsmouth coach with half an hour to spare. The carriages therefore appeared at half past ten and rolled away, leaving Stephen, Diana, and Jagiello with a delightful sense of holiday, of free, unexpected, unmortgaged time. Nathan was also left behind, partly because he had come on foot from his house just round the corner and partly because he wished to speak to Diana about money. She had brought some magnificent jewels back from India and the United States, many of which she never wore; and in the present state of war, with Napoleon’s astonishing, horrifying victories over the Austrians and Prussians, their value had increased immensely. Nathan wanted her to take advantage of the fact and to put some of the rubies (‘vulgar great things, much too big, like raspberry tarts’ she said) into a select list of deeply depressed British stocks, a drug on the market – an investment that would yield splendid returns in the event of an Allied victory at last. However, he only smiled and bowed when she suggested that they should take the remains of the bombe glacée into the billiard-room and there eat it while they played. ‘Because in any case Stephen must say goodbye to his olive-tree,’ she observed. Hers was perhaps the only billiard-room in Half Moon Street to possess an olive: the room had been built out over the garden behind, and Stephen, prising up a flagstone by a convenient window, had set a rooted cutting from a tree growing in his own land of Catalonia, itself the descendant of one in the grove of Academe. He sat by it now, showing Nathan the five new leaves and the almost certain promise of a sixth. With another husband Nathan might have spoken about these stocks and shares; but Stephen would have nothing whatsoever to do with his wife’s fortune – he left it entirely to her.

‘Come, Stephen,’ said she, putting down her cue. ‘I have left you such a pretty position.’

Dr Maturin addressing himself to a shattered leg with a saw in his hand was a bold, deft, determined operator; his gestures were rapid, sure, precise. But billiards was not his game. Although his theory was sound enough his practice was contemptible. Now, having studied the possibilities at length, he gave his ball a hesitant poke, watched it roll deliberately into the top right-hand pocket without touching any of the others, and returned to his olive-tree. The other players belonged to a different world entirely: Nathan gathered the balls into a corner, nursing them in a long series of almost imperceptible cannons and breaking them only to leave his opponent in a most uncomfortable situation; Jagiello accomplished some surprising feats at the top of the table with a spot-stroke; but Diana favoured a more dashing game by far, delighting in the losing hazard. She walked round the table with a predatory gleam in her eye, sending the balls streaking up and down with a ringing crack. At one point, when she had already made a break of thirty-seven and needed only three to win, the balls were awkwardly placed in the middle. She hoisted her slim person on to the edge of the table and she was about to reach right out with her whole length poised over the baize when Stephen called, ‘Take the rest to it, my dear; take the long rest, for all love.’ There was a strong possibility that she was with child, and he did not like the position at all.

‘Bah,’ said she, lowering her cue to her outstretched hand: she glared along it, her eyes narrowed, the tip of her tongue showing from the corner of her mouth; she paused, and then with a strong smooth stroke sent the red straight into the bottom right-hand pocket while her own ball shot into that on the left. She slipped off the table with such a lithe, easy grace and such an open delighted triumph that Stephen’s heart stopped for a beat and the other men looked at her with the utmost fondness.

‘Captain Jagiello’s coach,’ said the butler.

As far as real battlefields and beds of roses were concerned, Captain Aubrey was far better acquainted with the first, partly because of his profession, which, with enormous intervals of delay, often cold and always wet, brought him into violent conflict with the King’s enemies, to say nothing of the Admiralty, the Navy Board, and bloody-minded superiors and subordinates, and partly because he was a wretched gardener. For all his loving care the roses at Ashgrove Cottage produced more greenfly, caterpillars, mildew, rust, and grey mould than flowers – never enough at any one time to make a bed for a dwarf, let alone a six-foot sea-officer who tipped the beam at sixteen stone. In the figurative sense, his marriage was a good deal nearer the roses than most; he was a good deal happier than he deserved (he was neither a sure provider nor quite strictly monogamous) and although he was not ideally happy, although he might secretly wish for a companion with more sense of a man’s carnal nature and somewhat less possessive, he was profoundly attached to Sophie: and in any case he was often away from home for years on end.

He now stood on the poop of HMS Worcester, about to set off again; and his wife sat a little way behind him, on an incongruous elbow-chair brought on deck for the occasion.

The ship had been at single anchor in Spithead these long hours past, the Blue Peter as firmly established at her foretopmast head as though it had been nailed there, her foretopsail loosed, and her capstan-bars shipped and swifted a whole watch ago, ready to send her on her way: the entire ship’s company was in a state of angry tension – officers snappish, dinner delayed, all eyes indignantly turned to the shore. She swung broad on the slackening ebb, and Captain Aubrey moved over to the starboard rail, his telescope still trained on Portsmouth. His face, his naturally good-tempered, cheerful face, was set, dark, and stern: the wind still served, but only just, and once the tide began to make his ship might as well return to her moorings – she would never get out against the tide. He loathed unpunctuality; and unpunctuality it was, gross unpunctuality, that was keeping him here; he had already begged a long, long breathing-space from the port-admiral, who was devoted to Mrs Aubrey, but this could not last and any moment now a hoist would break out on that flagstaff over there, the Worcester’s signal to proceed to sea, and then sail she must, surgeon or no surgeon, leaving her gig’s crew to find their way as best they might.

Dr Maturin’s sea-chest had come aboard, and his well-remembered ’cello-case, brought in good time from the Portsmouth mail; but no Doctor had come with them. It was in vain that Bonden, the Captain’s coxswain, badgered the coachman and the guard: no, they had not seen a little ill-looking sallow cove in a full-bottomed wig; no, they had not left him by accident at Guildford, Godalming or Petersfield, because why? Because he was never on the bleeding coach to begin with, cully. Bonden might put that in his pipe and smoke it, or stuff it up his arse, whichever he preferred; and there was eighteenpence to pay on the bass fiddle, as being unnatural baggage, unaccompanied.

‘How I do loathe unpunctuality,’ said Captain Aubrey. ‘Even by land. Forward there: belay that smiting-line.’ This last was delivered in a voice so strong that it echoed from the walls of Noman’s Land Fort, and the words ‘that smiting-line’ mingled faintly with his next remark, which was addressed to his wife. ‘Really, Sophie, you would think that a fellow of Stephen’s parts, a prodigious natural philosopher, could be brought to understand the nature of the tide. Here is the moon at her perigee, in syzygy, and near the equator, as I showed you last night, and you smoked it directly, did you not?’

‘Oh, perfectly, my dear,’ said Sophie, looking wild: at least she had a clear recollection of the pale crescent over Porchester Castle.

‘Or at least he might grasp its importance to seamen,’ said Jack. ‘And a full-blown spring tide at that. Sometimes I despair … My dear,’ looking at his watch again – ‘I am afraid we must say goodbye. If ever he should appear at Ashgrove Cottage, you will tell him to post down to Plymouth. Mr Pullings, a bosun’s chair, if you please, a whip for the dunnage, and pass the word for the children.’

The cry ran through the ship ‘Children aft – children report to the Captain – all children aft’ and Jack’s two little girls came running from the galley, grasping massy half-eaten slabs of cold plum-duff, followed by George, their younger brother, in his first pair of pantaloons, carried by a hairy quartermaster. But George’s full-moon face was anxious and preoccupied; he whispered into the seaman’s hairy ear. ‘Can’t you wait?’ asked the seaman. George shook his head: the seaman whipped off the pantaloons, held the little boy well out over the leeward rail and called for a handful of tow.

On the poop itself Jack was still gazing through the innumerable masts – half the Channel fleet and countless transports, with smallcraft of every shape and size plying between them and the shore. He had the Sally Port clear in his glass, with the men-of-war’s boats going to and fro, and his own gig waiting there, his coxswain sitting in the stern-sheets, eating bread and cheese with one hand and haranguing his shipmates with the other: behind the Sally Port the rough unpaved triangular square and the Keppel’s Head inn at the far side, with its broad white balcony. And as he watched a coach and four took the corner at break-neck speed, scattering officers, seamen, Marines and their attendant trollops, and drew up, still rocking perilously, in the middle of the open space.

‘Our number, sir,’ said the signal-midshipman, his glass trained on the flagstaff. ‘And now Worcester proceed to sea.’ Another hoist, and the midshipman searched madly in his book. ‘Without further … further …’

‘Delay,’ said Jack without taking his eye from his telescope. ‘Acknowledge. Mr Pullings: strike the Blue Peter. All hands to weigh.’ He saw a woman pass the reins to a man, leap from the box and run down to the boats, followed by a small black figure from the body of the coach, carrying an enormous parcel. ‘Sophie,’ he said, loud over the bosun’s pipes and the pounding of feet, ‘ain’t that Diana?’

‘I am sure it is,’ said she, looking through the glass. ‘I can recognize her sprigged muslin from here. And that is poor Stephen, with the parcel.’

‘At last,’ said Jack. ‘At last. The usual hell-fire drama. Thank God he has someone to look after him, even if it is only Diana. Mr Pullings, our skeleton crew may take some time to win the anchor, though I am sure it will be done with every appearance of alacrity. Sweetheart, it is over the side with you, alas.’ He handed her down to the quarterdeck, where the bosun’s chair was swung inboard, waiting to lower her into the Arethusa’s barge, lent by their friend Billy Harvey.

‘Goodbye, my dearest,’ she said, smiling as well as she could, the great tears welling. ‘God bless and keep you.’

‘God bless you too,’ said Jack, and in a hard, unnatural voice he called ‘A whip for the children.’ One by one they were lowered down like little bundles to their mother, their eyes closed and their hands tightly clasped. ‘Mr Watson,’ he said to the midshipman in charge of the boat, ‘be so good as to speak my gig as you pull in, and tell ’em to spread more canvas, to spread every stitch they possess. My compliments and best thanks to Captain Harvey.

He turned to give the orders that would carry the Worcester into the offing on the very tail of the ebb: he had ten minutes in hand, which might just suffice with this breeze, Bonden being a capital smallcraft sailor; and these ten minutes must be spent in persuading the sharpest eyes in the Navy that the Worcester was in fact obeying orders with all imaginable zeal rather than sitting there with her hands in her pockets. Ordinarily he would have left all this to Tom Pullings, his first lieutenant, an old and trusted shipmate; but he knew that there was not a man aboard who was not perfectly well aware of his motions, the ship having a small temporary crew of old experienced hands, all men-of-war’s men, and since the seamen delighted in deception, above all any deception intended to blear the port-admiral’s eye, he was afraid they might overact their parts. It was a ticklish business, managing this tacit connivance at disobeying a direct order while at the same time maintaining his reputation as an efficient officer, and perhaps there was a little too much brisk running about to be quite convincing. At one point a gun from the shore brought his heart into his mouth, much as it had leapt when he was a youngster and the same Admiral, then a commander, had caught him playing the fool rather than attending to the exact trim of the outer jib; but it was only the great man emphasizing his desire that Andromache should send a lieutenant to his office: Andromache had spent more than forty seconds hoisting out a boat. Even so, Jack dared not risk the same reproof in the face of the fleet, and the Worcester was well under way, her best bower catted, her topsails sheeted home (though faintly), and her topgallants loose in the brails by the time the gig crossed her wake under a press of canvas and shot up her starboard side. Out here the flood was cutting up an awkward, high-chopping sea against the breeze and hooking on would require the most accurate judgement. However, Bonden was a most accurate judge of these things: he might decide to wait until the ship was clear of the Wight, but in any case there was no danger of the boat being stove alongside.

Jack was still angry: he was also cold and unhappy. He glanced down at the heaving boat, the bowman poised with his hook, Bonden at the tiller gauging the scend of the sea, alternately filling a trifle and then luffing up, and at Stephen, looking meek in the stern-sheets, nursing his box: he sniffed, and went below without a word. The Marine sentry at the cabin door changed his smile to a look of remote wooden respect as he passed.

On the quarterdeck Mr Pullings said to a midshipman, ‘Mr Appleby, jump down to the purser and ask him for half a pint of sweet oil.’

‘Sweet oil, sir?’ cried the midshipman. ‘Yes, sir, directly,’ he said, seeing a hint of brimstone in the first lieutenant’s eye.

‘Pin her, Joe,’ said Bonden. The bowman hooked on at the mainchains, the big lugsail came down with a run, and speaking in a curt, official voice Bonden said, ‘Now, sir, if you please. We can’t hang about all day under the barky’s lee. I’ll look after your old parcel.’

The Worcester was a wall-sided ship and the way into her was a series of very shallow smooth wet slippery steps that rose vertically from the waterline, with no comfortable tumblehome, no inward slope, to help the pilgrim on his way; still, they had manropes on either side and this made it just possible for very agile, seamanlike mariners to go aboard: but Dr Maturin was neither agile nor yet seamanlike.

‘Come on, sir,’ said the coxswain impatiently as Stephen crouched there, hesitating with one foot on the gunwale. The gap between the ship and the gig began widening again and before it should reach proportions of a chasm Stephen made a galvanic spring, landing on the lowest step and grasping the manropes with all his might. Here he stood, gasping and contemplating the sheer height above: he knew he had behaved very ill, and that he was in disgrace. Bonden, though an old friend, had greeted him without a smile, saying, ‘You have cut it precious fine, sir. Do you know you have very nearly made us miss the tide? And may yet.’ And in the passage from the shore he had heard a good deal more about ‘missing the tide, and a roaring great old spring-tide too,’ and about the Captain’s horrid rage ‘at being made to look a ninny in the face of the whole fleet – like a flaming lion all through the ebb; which if he misses of it at last, there will be all Hell to pay, and with boiling pitch at that.’ Harsh words from Bonden, and no kindly stern-ladder or even bosun’s chair to bring him aboard … here the Worcester gave a lee-lurch, heaving her ugly larboard flank so high that the copper showed, while the starboard, with Stephen on it, sank to a corresponding depth. The cold sea surged deliberately up, soaking his legs and the greater part of his trunk. He gasped again, and clung tighter.

As she rolled back again vigorous, impatient hands seized his ankles, and he found himself propelled up the side. ‘I must remember to pay the proper compliment to the quarterdeck,’ he reflected, when he was very nearly there. ‘This may attenuate my fault.’ But in his agitation he forgot that he had earlier pinned his hat to his wig, to preserve it from the wind, and when on reaching the holy space he pulled it off – when both rose together – his gesture had more the appearance of ill-timed jocularity than of respect, so much so that some of the young gentlemen, two ship’s boys, and a Marine, who did not know him, dissolved in honest mirth, while those who did know him did not seem mollified at all.

‘Upon my word, Doctor,’ said Mowett, the officer of the watch, ‘you have cut it pretty fine, I must say. You very nearly made us miss our tide. What was you thinking of ? And you are all wet – sopping wet. How did you get so wet?’

Mr Pullings, standing by the weather rail, looking stiff and remote, said, ‘The rendezvous was for the height of flood two tides ago, sir,’ with no kind word of greeting.

Stephen had known Mowett and Pullings since they were mere snotty reefers of no consequence whatsoever, and at any other time he would have snapped them as tight shut as a snuff-box; but now their vast moral superiority, the general strong mute disapprobation of the Worcester’s company, and his own wet misery left him without a word, and although in the depths of his mind he was half aware that this harshness was at least in part assumed, that it belonged to the naval idea of fun he had so often suffered from, he could not bring himself to respond.

Pulling’s grim expression softened a little. He said, ‘You got a ducking, I see. You must not stand there in wet clothes: you will catch your death of cold. Has it reached your watch?’

Very, very often in Dr Maturin’s career, it – that is to say the sea, that element so alien to him – had reached his watch when he came aboard, and indeed sometimes it had closed over his head; but every time the fact astonished and distressed him. ‘Oh,’ he cried, groping in his fob, ‘I believe it has.’ He took out the watch and shook it, shedding still more water on the deck.’

‘Give it here, sir,’ said Pullings. ‘Mr Appleby, take this watch and put it in the sweet oil.’

The cabin door opened. ‘Well, Doctor,’ said Jack, looking even taller than usual and far more intimidating. ‘Good morning to you, or rather good afternoon. This is a strange hour to report aboard – this is cutting it pretty fine – this is coming it tolerably high, I believe. Do you know you very nearly made us miss our tide? Miss our tide right under the Admiral’s front window? Did not you see the Blue Peter flying all through the forenoon watch – nay, watch after God-damned watch? I must tell you, sir, that I have known men headed up in a barrel and thrown overboard for less: far less. Mr Mowett, you may round in and set the jib and forestaysail at last. At last,’ he said with heavy emphasis, looking at Stephen. ‘Why, you are all wet. Surely you did not fall in, like a mere lubber?’

‘I did not,’ said Stephen, goaded out of his humility. ‘The sea it was that rose.’

‘Well, you must not stand there, dripping all over the deck; it ain’t a pretty sight, and you may take cold. Come and shift yourself. Your sea-chest is in my cabin: at least it had some notion of punctuality.’

‘Jack,’ said Stephen, shedding his breeches in the cabin, ‘I beg your pardon. I am very sorry for my lateness. I regret it extremely.’

‘Punctuality,’ said Captain Aubrey: but then, feeling that this, the beginning of a homily on the great naval virtue, was hardly generous, he shook Stephen’s free hand and went on, ‘Damn my eyes, I was like a cat on hot tiles all through this vile morning and afternoon; so I spoke a little hasty. Join me on deck when you are shifted, Stephen. Bring the other glass, and we will take a last look at the shore before we round the Wight.’

The day was sparkling clear, the powerful telescopes showed the Sally Port sharp and bright, the inn and its white balcony, and on the balcony Sophie and Diana side by side, Jagiello tall on Diana’s arm, his arm in a sling, and next to Sophie a diminishing row of heads that must be the children: a flutter of handkerchiefs from time to time. ‘There is Jagiello,’ said Stephen. ‘I came down in his coach. That was the source of the trouble.’

‘But surely Jagiello is a most prodigious whip?’

‘Sure he is Jehu come again: we fairly swept out of London, and he driving in the Lithuanian manner, standing up and leaning out over his team, encouraging them with howls. This was very well for a while, and Diana and I were able to have a word in peace, because he and his cattle spoke the same language; but when we came to change horses the case was altered. Furthermore, Jagiello is not used to driving in England: Lithuania is an aristocratic country where the common people get out of the way, and when the slow wagon from Petersfield declined to pull over he was so displeased that he determined to shave it very close, by way of reproof. But the wagoner fetched the off-hand leader such a puck with his whip that we swerved, took a post and lost a wheel. No great harm, since we did not overturn, and once we had roused out a smith and he had lit his forge all was well in a couple of hours, apart from Jagiello’s arm, which had a sad wrench. I have rarely seen anyone so vexed. He told me privately that he would never have exceeded a hand-canter if he had known he was to drive in a mere howling democracy. That was scarcely just; but then he was horribly cast down, with Diana watching.’

‘Excitable foreigners,’ said Jack. ‘Jagiello is such a fine fellow that sometimes you almost forget it, but at-bottom he is only a foreigner, poor soul. I suppose you took the coach on?’

‘I did not. Diana took it, so she did, the sun being up by then. She is a far better fist with a four-in-hand than I am, the creature.’

He had the creature clear in his glass, and the sun full on her. All the years he had known her she had struggled against unkind circumstances: an expensive, fashionable way of life in her girlhood with no money to support it; then worse poverty still, and dependence; then difficult, troublesome, passionate and even violent lovers; and all this had worn her spirited temper, rendering it mordant and fierce, so that for a great while he had never associated Diana with laughter: beauty, dash, style, even wit, but not laughter. Now it had changed. He had never known her so happy as she had been these last few months, nor so handsome. He was not coxcomb enough to suppose that their marriage had a great deal to do with the matter; it was rather her setting up house at last, with a wide and varied acquaintance around her and the rich easy life she led there – she adored being rich; yet even so a visible, tangible husband was not without an effect, even if he were not of the right race, birth, shape, religion, or tastes – even if he were not what her friends might have wished her at an earlier time. Jack was perfectly silent, wholly concentrated on Sophie far over the water: she was now stooping to the little boy at her side; she held him up high, clear of the rail, and he and his sisters all waved again. He caught the twinkle of their handkerchiefs through the yards of Ajax and Bellerophon, and behind the eyepiece of his telescope he smiled tenderly, an expression rarely seen by his shipmates. ‘Do not suppose,’ said Stephen, continuing his inward discourse, ‘that I am in any way favourable to children’ – as though he had been accused of a crime – ‘There are far too many of them as it is, a monstrous superfluity: and I have no wish, no wish at all, to see myself perpetuated. But in Diana’s case, might it not settle her happiness?’ As though she were conscious of his gaze she too waved to the ship, and turning to Jagiello she pointed over the sea.

The Agamemnon, homeward-bound from the Straits, crossed their field of view, a great cloud of white canvas; and when she had passed Portsmouth was gone, cut off by a headland.

Jack straightened, snapped his telescope to, and looked up at the sails: they were trimmed much as he could wish, which was scarcely surprising since he himself had formed young Mowett’s idea of how a ship should be conducted, and they were urging the Worcester’s one thousand eight hundred and forty-two tons through the water at a sedate five knots, about all that could be expected with such a breeze and tide.

‘That is the last we shall see of the comforts of shore for some considerable time,’ observed Stephen.

‘Not at all. We are only running down to Plymouth to complete,’ said Jack absently, his eyes fixed aloft: the Worcester’s pole-topgallantmasts were too taut, too lofty by far for her slab-sided hull. If he had time in Plymouth he would try to replace them with stumps and separate royal-masts.

He deliberately set his mind to the problem of shipping these hypothetical royals abaft the cap and quite low, to relieve the strain on the notoriously ill-fastened ship in the event of a Mediterranean blow: he knew the wicked force of the mistral in the Gulf of Lions, and the killing short seas it could raise in under an hour, seas quite unlike the long Atlantic waves for which these ships were presumably designed. He did so to deaden the pain of parting, so much stronger than he had expected; but finding the sadness persist he swung himself up on to the hammock-netting and, calling to the bosun, made his way aloft, high aloft, to see what changes would have to be made when his stump topgallantmasts came aboard.

He was still aloft, swinging between sea and sky with the practised, unconscious ease of an orang-utan, close in technical argument with his dogged, obstinate, conservative, greybearded bosun, when a hundred feet and more below him the drum began to beat Roast Beef of Old England for the officers’ dinner.

Stephen walked into the wardroom, a fine long room with a fine long table down the middle, lit by a great stern-window right across its breadth, a room which, despite the lieutenants’ cabins on either side, offered plenty of space for a dozen officers, each with a servant behind his chair, and as many guests as they chose to invite. Yet at the moment it was sparsely inhabited: three Marines in their red coats by the window, the master standing in the middle, his hands on the back of his chair, quite lost in thought, the purser looking at his watch, Pullings and Mowett by the door, drinking grog and evidently waiting for Stephen.

‘Here you are, Doctor,’ cried Pullings, shaking his hand. ‘On time to the second.’ He was smiling all over his tanned friendly face, but there was more than a hint of anxiety in his eye, and in a low voice he went on, ‘Poor Mowett is afraid he upset you, sir, playing off his humours when you came aboard: it was only our fun, you know, sir, but we were afraid you might not have twigged it, being, as I might say, so uncommonly damp.’

‘Never in life, my dear,’ said Stephen. ‘What are you drinking?’

‘Two-water grog.’

‘Then pray give me a glass. William Mowett, your very good health. Tell me, when will the other gentlemen appear? I was deprived of my breakfast, and I raven: have they no sense of time, at all?’

‘There ain’t no other gentlemen,’ said Pullings. ‘We only have a skeleton crew, and so,’ – laughing heartily, since the conceit had only just come to him – ‘we have only a skeleton wardroom, ha, ha. Come, let me introduce the others right away: I have a surprise for you, and I long to show it. I fairly gripe to show you my surprise.’ Mr Adams the purser had seen the Doctor in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the Commissioner’s ball, and was very happy to see him again; Mr Gill the master, a sad contrast to the purser’s fat round-faced jollity, claimed an acquaintance from the days when he was a master’s mate in the Hannibal, and Stephen had repaired him after the battle of Algeciras – ‘though there were too many of us for you to remember me,’ he said. Captain Harris of the Marines was amazingly glad to be sailing with Dr Maturin: his cousin James Macdonald had often spoken of the Doctor’s skill in taking off his forearm, and there was nothing so comfortable as the thought that if one were blasted to pieces there was a really eminent hand aboard to put one together again. His lieutenants, very young pink men, only bowed, somewhat awed, for Stephen had a great reputation as a raiser of the dead and as the invariable companion of one of the most successful frigate-captains in the service.

Pullings hurried them away to table, took his place at the head, dashed through his soup – the usual wardroom soup, Stephen noticed, quite useful for poultices; though at the same time he did notice a familiar, exquisite, yet unnameable scent on the air – and then called out to the steward, ‘Jakes, is it done?’

‘Done, sir, done to a turn,’ came the distant answer, and a moment later the steward raced in from the galley with a golden pie.

Pullings thrust in his knife, thrust in his spoon, and his anxiety gave way to triumph. ‘There, Doctor,’ he said, passing Stephen his plate. ‘There’s my surprise – there’s your real welcome aboard!’

‘Bless me,’ cried Stephen, staring at his goose and truffle pie – more truffle than goose – ‘Mr Pullings, joy, I am amazed, amazed and delighted.’

‘I hoped you might be,’ said Pullings, and he explained to the others that long ago, when first made lieutenant, he had seen that the Doctor loved trubs, so he had gone out into the forest, the New Forest, where he lived by land, and had dug him a basket, by way of welcome aboard: and Mowett had composed a song.

‘Welcome aboard, welcome aboard,’ sang Mr Mowett

‘Sober as Adam or drunk as a lord

Eat like Lucullus and drink like a king,

Doze in your hammock while sirens do sing,

Welcome, dear Doctor, oh welcome aboard,

Welcome aboard,

Welcome aboard.’

The others ground their glasses on the table, chanting ‘Welcome aboard, welcome aboard,’ and then drank to him in the thin harsh purple liquid that passed for claret in the Worcester’s wardroom.

Thin though it was, the claret was nothing like so disagreeable as the substance called port that ended the meal. This probably had the same basis of vinegar and cochineal, but Ananias, the Gosport wine-merchant, had added molasses, raw spirit, and perhaps a little sugar of lead, a false date and a flaming lie by way of a label.

Stephen and Pullings lingered over the decanter when the others had gone, and Stephen said, ‘I do not like to sound discontented, Tom, but surely this ship is more than usually damp, confined, awkward, comfortless? The mould on the beam that traverses my cabin is two inches thick, and although I am no Goliath my head beats against it. Sure, I have known better accommodations in a frigate; whereas this, if I do not mistake, is a ship of the line, no less.’

‘I do not like to sound discontented neither,’ said Pullings, ‘nor to crab any ship I belong to; but between you and me, Doctor, between you and me, she is more what we call a floating coffin than a ship. And as for the damp, what do you expect? She was built in Sankey’s yard, one of the Forty Thieves: twenty-year-old wood and green stuff with the sap in it all clapped together promiscuous and fastened with copper – precious little copper – and then overmasted to please the landsmen’s fancy, so that when it comes on to blow her timbers all sprawl abroad. She is British-built, sir, and most of what we have sailed in, you and I, have been Spanish or French. They may not be very clever at fighting or sailing ’em, but God love us, they do know how to build.’ He put down his glass and said, ‘I do wish we had a can of Margate beer. But beer ain’t genteel.’

‘It might be more healthy,’ said Stephen. ‘So we are to put in at Plymouth, I hear?’

‘That’s right, sir: to complete. You will have your two mates – and don’t I wish they may like it, when they see the dog-holes where we must stow them – and we must find the best part of our crew, three hundred hands or so. Lord, Doctor, how I hope we can get hold of some right seamen! The Captain can always fill half a frigate with good men come volunteerly, but they won’t amount to much in a ship of the line – no prize-money in a ship of the line on blockade. And of course we are to have three more lieutenants and maybe a chaplain: the Captain is against it, but Admiral Thornton likes to have chaplains aboard and we may have to carry half a dozen out for the fleet. He is rather a blue-light admiral, though a good fighting-man, and he thinks it encourages the hands to have a proper funeral, with the words said by a real parson. Then we must have midshipmen, and this time the Captain swears he will enter none but what are regularly bred to the sea, none but what can hand, reef and steer, work their tides and take double altitudes, and understand the mathematics; he is not going to take a floating nursery, says he. For although you may scarcely believe it, Doctor, a dozen good seamanlike reefers are very useful aboard, learning the raw hands their duty; we are sure to have a good many – raw hands I mean – and they must learn their duty pretty quick, with the French grown so bold and the Americans coming right up into the Channel.’

‘Are not the Frenchmen all shut up in Rochefort and Brest?’

‘Their ships of the line: but when it comes on to blow hard from the east and our squadrons have to run for Torbay, their frigates slip out and chew up our merchantmen something cruel. I dare say we shall have a convoy to see down to the Straits. And then there are the privateers too, very presumptuous reptiles in the Bay. Still, the receiving ships may give us some decent drafts: the Captain has good friends in Plymouth. I hope so indeed, because there is no man in the service to work them up into a smart crew like the Captain, and a smart crew will offset an unweatherly slab-sided old ship. She has the guns, after all, and I can just see him sending her smack into the French line, if only they come out of Toulon, smack into the middle, both broadsides roaring.’ The port, in addition to cochineal, contained a good deal of impure alcohol, and Pullings, a little elevated, cried, ‘Both broadsides into the thick of ’em – breaks the line – takes a first-rate – takes another – he is made a lord, and Tom Pullings a commander at last!’ He turned his glowing, radiant face to the opening door.

‘Well, sir, I am sure you shall be before long,’ said Preserved Killick. He was the Captain’s steward, a coarse, plain, ugly seaman, still quite unpolished in spite of his years of office, but a very old shipmate and therefore entitled to be familiar in an empty wardroom.

‘Preserved Killick,’ said Stephen, shaking his hand, ‘I am happy to see you. Drink this,’ – handing him his glass – ‘it will do you good.’

‘Thankee, sir,’ said Killick, tossing it off without a wink; and in an official voice, though without changing his uncouth, easy posture, he went on, ‘Captain’s compliments and whenever Dr M has the leisure and inclination for a little music, would welcome his company in the cabin. Which he is a-tuning of his old fiddle this minute, sir.’

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