Desolation Island (21 page)

He waited, nothing loth, until the boy's anxious head appeared: with a violent, perilous writhe, Forshaw brought his short legs over the rim, landed in the top, and mutely offered the telescope. It was clear to Jack that for the moment the boy could not bring out a steady word, in spite of his studied calm. 'Now I come to think of it, Mr Forshaw,' he said, 'I have not seen you sky-larking with the other reefers. Do you find the height disturbs you?'

He spoke quite kindly, in a tone of conversation, but even so Forshaw's face turned scarlet, and he gave a hopelessly confused answer: 'it was terrible, sir; he did not mind it at all.'

'Nelson could do this sort of thing,' thought Jack, 'but I doubt that I can.' Nevertheless he went on. 'The great point is not to look down, until you have the knack of it; and to hold on to the shrouds with both hands, not the ratlines. Now, come along with me to the topgallant crosstrees. We will take it easy.'

Up and up towards the sky. 'You will find it much like the stairs at home, presently - look up all the time - don't hang on too hard - breathe easy - handsomely round the futtocks, now, always take the outer topgallant shrouds -there now, put your arm round the heel of the royal -that's the royal mast, you see: sometimes we step it abaft the topgallant, running right down to the cap; but that means more weight aloft - and sit on the jacks; they serve to spread the royal shrouds. There, ain't that prime?' He stared over the enormous expanse of ocean at the western horizon, and there, exactly where it should be, lay a dark mass, firmer than any cloud, He unslung his telescope, and in the glass Cape St Roque assumed its well-remembered form: the perfect landfall. 'There,' he said, nodding towards it, 'that is America. You may go down now, and tell Mr Turnbull. It is much easier going down, because of gravity: but you must look up all the time.'

Now and then he glanced down at the round face gazing religiously up, and beyond the face to the deck, long, thin, and wonderfully remote, a white-rimmed sliver in the sea with little figures moving on it; but most of the time he stared at the cape. 'How I hope to God that Stephen will let Pullings stay,' he said aloud. 'A year or so with that fellow Grant as my first would be..

The lookout's hail broke his train of thought, for by now the cape was visible from the yardarm below him, and he heard the cry, 'On deck, there. Land two points on the starboard bow.'

From this time on the more loving family Leopards took to pen and ink, and those who could not write dictated to their learned friends, sometimes in plain English but more often in terms as stilted and official as they could contrive, and those uttered in a hieratic tone. According to his promise, Stephen passed on Mrs Wogan's request that she might add a letter to the rapidly filling bay. 'I shall be interested to see what it contains,' he said; and as he expected, Jack turned away - turned fast, but not quite fast enough to hide his expression of extreme distaste, and of something very near contempt.

Captain Aubrey would do his utmost to deceive an enemy by the use of false colours and false signals, by making him believe that the ship was a harmless merchant-man, a neutral, or a compatriot, and by any other ruse that might occur to his fertile mind. All was fair in war: all, except for opening letters and listening behind doors. If Stephen, on the other hand, could bring Buonaparte one inch nearer to the brink of Hell by opening letters, he would happily violate a whole mail-coach full. 'You will read captured despatches with open glee and exultation,' he said, 'for you concede that they are public papers. If you value candour, you must therefore admit that any document bearing on the war is also a public paper: you are to rid your mind of these weak prejudices.'

In his heart Jack remained unconvinced; but Stephen received the letter. He sat there with it in his hands in the guarded privacy of the great cabin as the Leopard lay off Recife early in the morning, well out in the roadstead, with the reef that guarded the inner anchorage the best part of a mile away. The first sight of it struck him with a wholly unexpected force, for it was addressed to Diana: he had never thought of this possibility - had supposed their acquaintance to be slight - and it was some minutes before he could compose himself, and set about the seal. Seals and their attendant pitfalls had few mysteries for him, and this one required no more than a thin hot knife: yet even so he had to break off twice, because of the trembling of his hands. If the letter contained proof of Diana's guilty mind, he thought it would kill him.

At first reading it contained nothing of the sort. Mrs Wogan exceedingly lamented the sudden parting from her dearest Mrs Villiers - the event itself too dreadful and distressing to recall - and at one moment she had thought they were to be separated by the distance between this world and the next, for in her distraction at the sight of those odious ruffians, Mrs Wogan had fired off a pistol, or even two, and another had exploded of its own accord; and that, it appeared, turned a dispute over a harmless piece of gallantry into a capital crime - but, however, her lawyers had handled the matter very cleverly, and kind friends had come to her support, so that they were to be separated only by the distance of half this present world, and that, perhaps, not for very long. Mrs Villiers would remember her kindly to all their friends in Baltimore, particularly to Kitty van Buren and Mrs Taft, and she would be so obliging as to tell Mr Johnson that all was well, and that as he would hear from Mr Coulson in more detail, no irreparable harm had been done. The voyage had begun in the most shocking manner, and they had had the plague aboard; but for some time now things had been going better. The weather was delightful: her stores were holding out to admiration; and she had made friends with the surgeon. He was an ill-looking little man, and perhaps he was aware of it, for he had now allowed a horrid beard to overspread his countenance, quite frightful to behold; but one could grow used to anything, and his conversation was an agreeable break in the day. He was polite and generally kind; yet he could be snappish - he could give a short answer - although hitherto she had not dared to be impertinent, nor anything but most perfectly meek. He did not need 'fending off' as sailors would say; far from it; and she believed he must have a wounded heart. He was not married, that she could find. A learned man, but like- some others she had known, quite preposterously thoughtless in many of the common things of life: he had put to sea for a twelve months' voyage without a single pocket-handkerchief! She was hemming him a dozen out of a piece of cambric she had by her. She believed she must have a tendre for the man. Certainly she was disappointed when the knock was followed not by the doctor but by the chaplain, a man with Judas-coloured hair and two left legs who had been paying her a great deal of the most unwelcome attention, sitting with her and reading good works aloud. For her part, Mrs Wogan perfectly loathed the combination of incipient gallantry and the Bible; she had seen too much, far too much, of that in the States:

Mrs Wogan was not a bread-and-butter miss fresh from the schoolroom, and she knew what he would be at. Otherwise her life was not too disagreeable: monotonous, of course, but it was not the insufferable tedium of her last years in the convent. Her maid had amusing tales of the very lowest conceivable or rather inconceivable life in London; there was a dear fool of a dog that marched up and down the poop with her, and a nanny-goat that sometimes condescended to say good day: she had a good store of books, and she had actually read right through Clarissa Harlowe without hanging herself (though that was sometimes only for want of a convenient hook), without looking to see how the ninny would escape that vile coxcomb Lovelace - how Mrs Wogan despised conscious good looks in a man - and without skipping a line: a feat surely unparalleled in the female world. Indeed, were dear Mrs Villiers ever in the same unfortunate predicament, Mrs Wogan could advise nothing better than Richardson's works entire, together with Voltaire's as an antidote, and an unlimited supply of Naples biscuits; but Mrs Villiers was to believe that for her the very opposite -a life of total freedom, in the company of a well-bred

intelligent man - was the constant wish of her most affectionate friend, Louisa Wogan.

The first reading showed no guilt in Diana: rather the reverse. The letter was obviously designed to keep her in the dark. His heart had already absolved her, but his mind insisted upon a second reading, much slower, and a third, very carefully analysing the words and searching for those minute marks and repetitions that might betray a code. Nothing.

He leant back, quite satisfied. The letter was not candid, of course; and the most obviously uncandid thing about it, the absence of Herapath, pleased him extremely. Mrs Wogan knew that there was some risk of the letter's being read by the Captain (she certainly did not share his weak prejudices) and if she had any delicate information to convey, she meant to do so by means of Herapath. It was very probable that she should wish to enlarge upon the 'no irreparable harm' and to tell her chief just how much she had been obliged to give away to save her neck. Any agent worth a straw would do the same: any agent, that is to say, who had not been bought; and Mrs Wogan had not been bought. Furthermore, he had given her plenty of time to prepare her lover. He copied the letter for Sir Joseph, whose cryptographers might find a code where his close inspection, his heating of the paper, and his chemicals had detected none: then he replaced the seal and put the letter back in the bag, at the same time looking through the recent additions for a cover addressed in Herapath's distinctive hand. There was nothing.

'Jack,' he said, 'is there to be any shore leave?'

'No,' said Jack. 'I shall call on the Governor, of course, and do the civil; and I shall see whether I can get a few hands in the port. Otherwise the only people to go ashore will be you and whatever invalids you absolutely insist on landing.' He looked earnestly into Stephen's face at this point, and then went on, 'I do not mean to lose a minute; and I do not mean to lose a single man by desertion. You know how they run, if they are given half a chance.'

'Here arc the names of those that must go,' said Stephen. 'I examined them with great care not an hour ago.'

'How I shall tell Pullings, I do not know,' said Jack, looking at the list. 'It will fairly break his heart.'

Heart-broken he seemed, as he was handed down the side in a canvas bag to join the others in the hired tender; he was too weak even to sit up, and that was a comfort to him, because he could lie with his face concealed. Few others were quite so reduced, but all were pitiable sights and many were as fractious as ill-conditioned children. One Ayliffe, as Stephen eased him into the sling, called out, 'Handsomely, handsomely, you bearded piss-cat: handsomely, can't you?' Stephen might have saved his life; but the surgeon's fell shears had also sliced off a pigtail of ten years patient growth and cultivation, and now, with the sun beating down on his bald white pate, the loss was very present to Ayliffe's peevish mind.

'Take that man's name,' cried the new first lieutenant.

'Take it yourself, you old French fart,' said the seaman. 'And stuff it up. There ain't no flogging here.'

The other invalids went down the side in disapproving silence; for although in extreme illness, unexpected, unusual emergency, or drunkenness they too might throw discipline aside, this was coming it pretty high, higher than the state of things allowed - after all, the ship was not on fire, nor had she struck, nor was Ayliffe roaring drunk. Stephen was about to follow them when Herapath said, 'May I come with you, sir?'

'You may not, Mr Herapath,' said Stephen. 'It was stated that there was to be no shore leave; and the transcription of our records calls for all your time, all your powers. You miss nothing: Recife is a most uninteresting port.'

'In that case, may I beg you to be so kind as to leave this with the consul of the United States?' He produced a letter: Stephen put it in his pocket.

Late, late that night, with no sound in the ship but the tradewind singing quietly in the rigging, the occasional movement of the anchor-watch, the bells and the cry of All's well from the sentries that followed each half-hourly stroke, Stephen snuffed his candle, pressed his hands to his aching, red-rimmed eyes, took up his diary, and wrote, 'I have seen Jack glow with pleasure when he has made a perfect landfall: when he has calculated his tides, his currents, and his shifting winds, and the event proves him right; and for this once my prediction too has been as exact as I could wish. Poor lady, how she must have laboured with her coding; and how heartily she must have cursed Fisher when he would be reading her South on Resignation. Judging from what she had not time to encode, I believe Sir Joseph's experts will extract a remarkably complete picture from the rest, and that he will be gratified by the spectacle of a nascent system of intelligence: infant steps, perhaps, but surely those of a promising, even of a prodigious infant. I feel for her, with that good man prosing on and on, and her precious moments racing by. Her seal, though artful enough with its double guard of hair, showed evident marks of impatience. When we meet tomorrow I have little doubt that our eyes will match, like those of a pair of albino ferrets; for although my copies and my letters to Sir Joseph in duplicate may have been longer, I am more accustomed to the act than she. I do not have to count on my fingers for my code, blot and write again, with little calculations in the margin; nor did I have to contend with extreme vexation of spirit. I must keep the triumph from my glowing eye, however: perhaps I shall wear green spectacles.'

He closed his book, itself a monument of cryptography, and lay down in his cot. Sleep was welling up to dowse his mind, but for a while it still burned clear, reflecting both upon the satisfactions of his trade and upon its very dirty sides - the constant dissimulation, the long-lived lie soaking into the liar's deepest fibre, however justified the lie - the sacrifice, in some cases he had known, not only of the agent's life but also of his private essence - upon whales - upon the curious division of the wardroom into two parties, Grant, Turnbull, and Larkin on the one side, and Babbington, Captain Moore, and Byron, the new acting fourth lieutenant, on the other, with the purser Benton and the insignificant Marine lieutenant Howard in between. Perhaps Fisher too; although of recent days his friendship with Grant had increased. An odd creature, the chaplain, perhaps somewhat shallow, unsteady; his conduct during the height of the epidemic had disappointed Stephen, as far as he had had time to be disappointed; more promise than performance: too much taken up with his own troubles? More willing to receive comfort than to give it? Certainly most reluctant to handle filth. And this marked concern for Mrs Wogan's welfare... They were not parties opposed by any animosity, however, at least not evident animosity; they rather represented different attitudes and they were probably to be found throughout the ship, with Jack's old shipmates and volunteers on the one hand and the rest of the crew on the other. 'Will he find any more men?' was the last of these thoughts that had coherent form.