Lieutenant (2 page)

He sat in the chapel for hours picking his way through fugues. A dozen notes, hardly music. But then those few notes spoke to each other, subject and answer, by repetition, by diminution, by augmentation, even looping backwards on themselves in a course like the retrograde motion of Mars. He listened as if he had as many ears as fingertips, and, like a blind man, could feel textures that were barely there. At the end of two or three pages of music he would hear all the voices twining together in a construction of such dizzying power that the walls of the chapel could barely contain it.

Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it
could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.

On the organ bench he sat through hundreds of sermons, his back to the crowded pews, and he mumbled the morsels of bread and sipped from the chalice with the others. But the God of sin and retribution, of the mysteries of suffering and resurrection, did not speak to him. He had no argument with God, but for him God was not in those words or those rituals.

He had seen God in the night sky long before he understood its patterns. There was something about the way the body of the stars moved together as one that he had always found miraculous and comforting.

On the long winter evenings Rooke would slip outside, past the kitchens, and stand in the yard looking up. In the cold the constellations were close and brilliant. He was comforted by the way you could always find the Charioteer and the Little Bear circling the sky together. Each sparkle did not need to find its way across the darkness alone but moved together with its fellows, held fast in its place by some mighty hand.

That the moon was sometimes a sliver and sometimes a plate had seemed when he was a child to be a sly trick. But when he understood the reason, he was awed. There was a pattern, but he had been looking for it on the wrong scale. A week was not enough to see it, a month was needed.

He hoped that all understanding might be as simple as a matter of scale. If a man had not a week, not a year, not even a
lifetime—if he had millennia, aeons—all the seemingly erratic movements of heavenly bodies and earthly vicissitudes would turn out to have meaning. Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.

As the chaplain had his Gospels, Rooke had his own sacred text in which his God made Himself plain: mathematics. Man had been given a brain that could think in numbers, and it could not be coincidence that the world was unlocked by that very tool. To understand any aspect of the cosmos was to look on the face of God: not directly, but by a species of triangulation, because to think mathematically was to feel the action of God in oneself.

He saw others comforted by their ideas of God: as a stern but kindly father, or a brother sharing a burden. What comforted Rooke, on the contrary, was the knowledge that as an individual he did not matter. Whatever he was, he was part of a whole, one insignificant note within the great fugue of being.

That imposed a morality beyond the terse handful of commands in the chaplain’s book. It was to acknowledge the unity of all things. To injure any was to damage all.

He dreamed of leaving the place, not just the Academy but Portsmouth, closed in on itself, squeezed tightly around the harbour, those narrow streets where everyone knew him too well, Benjamin Rooke’s eldest, a good enough lad but a little fey.

He had no evidence, but doggedly believed that there would one day be a place, somewhere in the world, for the person he was.

I
n 1775 Rooke turned thirteen and Dr Adair took his talented pupil with him to Greenwich to meet his friend the Astronomer Royal.

It was further from home than Rooke had ever travelled. He spent the journey staring from the coach window at everything that passed, all as unfamiliar as darkest Africa. Every muddy hamlet was unknown, every gawping farmhand was a stranger. By the end of the day he was drunk with novelty.

Dr Vickery was a man of middle age with a heavy-jowled face and sleepy eyes that slid away. Rooke recognised that: he also found it hard to meet the eyes of another person.

He was too overwhelmed by being in the long-windowed hexagonal room where Halley had calculated the movements of his comet to respond properly to the greeting of the
Astronomer Royal. But Dr Vickery was not troubled by the boy’s awkwardness. He drew him over to the wall to which was attached an enormous quarter-circle of brass, the calibrations about its edge as finely etched as the chasing on Dr Adair’s gold watch.

‘Master Rooke, I know you will find this quadrant of interest. Eight feet radius, and do you observe the marking of the arc plates? Done by Bird of London by the method of continual bisection.’

He shot a look at the boy, who knew about quadrants only from books and had no idea what the
method of continual bisection
might be.

‘Forgive me my enthusiasm, Master Rooke. Do you know, there are days when I wait impatiently for night, unlike the rest of the human species. So much so that my wife says I must have something of the bat in my constitution!’

It was a joke, Rooke saw. The man was trying to put him at his ease. But he also thought that Mrs Vickery had put her finger on an odd and leathery quality to the man.

He was at Greenwich for two weeks and felt, for the first time in his life, that he was in the right place.

Dr Vickery showed him the mysteries of the quadrant and the Dollond telescope, let him wind one of the clocks made by Mr Harrison, its brass wings folding and stretching, folding and stretching, and the delicate ratchet advancing notch by notch. He taught him the moves of chessmen, demonstrated the
dangerous power of the seemingly helpless pawn, set him the problem of the Knight’s Tour to see what he could make of it.

In the Observatory library Rooke could not settle. As he read one book, another caught his eye, and then another. There was a boy at the Academy who was like that about buns, reaching for a third even while the first was in his mouth and a second in his hand.

On Dr Vickery’s recommendation he tried to follow Euler’s analysis of the motions of comets. He read Kepler’s account of how each of his errors had cancelled out the other and revealed the truth concerning the shape of orbits. He gulped down the journal of the great Captain Cook, and wanted to read Mr Banks’ account of New South Wales too, but had only time to skim the contents:
Quadrupeds—ants and their habitations—scarcity
of people—implements for catching fish—canoes—language
.

At the end of his stay, Dr Vickery gripped the boy’s hand and patted him on the shoulder, the two of them smiling past each other. Then he presented Rooke with a copy of his
Nautical
Almanac
for 1775. He opened it at the flyleaf so Rooke could read the inscription:
To Master Daniel Rooke, an astronomer of the
fairest promise
.

Two years later, just before he turned fifteen, Rooke’s schooldays came to an end. He wrote to Dr Vickery hinting for a position at the Observatory, or in another observatory, anywhere he might go on watching the heavens and performing solitary calculations.

Dr Vickery had to explain that the world did not need astronomers in any great quantity. Not even the Astronomer Royal could get young Rooke an appointment. Not until some other man died.

It was never put as baldly as that, but Rooke took the point. He must look elsewhere. For a boy born into his station in life, no matter how quick to catch on to Euclid, no matter how perfect his pitch, the best prospect was not a mile from home.

He might have enlisted in the navy, but naval commissions were too dear. His Majesty’s Marine Forces, Portsmouth Division, was the place for men like him: he would become a soldier of the sea. Promotion was slow, but commissions were cheaper.

Rooke knew his timing was lucky. War with the American colonies was giving the king a bottomless hunger for men, even for a studious boy who had no instinct for a fight. The Americans were daily expected to collapse. The rebels were barefoot, it was said, their guns nothing more than sticks.

Rooke showed Anne and Bessie where he was going, watching his sisters’ pale soft hands turning the globe he had made out of wire and paper carefully cut and glued. Making it had been a way of passing the difficult hours of the last days before he boarded his ship. His Majesty’s Marines promised a life of some sort, but waiting to start that life was an awkward time of hope and apprehension mixed, suspended between one existence and another.

‘The same latitude, more or less,’ he said. ‘See Boston here? But quite a different longitude, of course.’

Bessie was too young even to pretend to follow, did not, in any case, have that kind of mind. At eleven, Anne wanted to think it through.

‘So it will be a different time? When we are having dinner, you will be eating breakfast. If you could travel quickly enough you might have two breakfasts and two dinners!’

He put his arm around her and hugged her. He would miss his clever sister. She was the one person in the world with whom he had never needed to pretend to be someone else.

He was issued with the uniform, the white breeches, the red jacket with the braid and the regimental brass buttons. They gave him a musket and taught him how to load the powder and lead ball into the muzzle, ram the wadding down tight against them, pour powder into the pan to prime the charge.

It was an ingenious machine, its smooth metal parts operating by satisfying logic. The trigger caused the flint to fall, the falling flint made a spark against the striker plate, the spark caused the powder in the pan to explode and set off the charge behind the ball, propelling it along the barrel. It was as pleasing in its sequence as a sextant whose mirrors and slots told you where the sun was in the sky.

In due course he got his commission as second lieutenant and was assigned to His Majesty’s ship of the line
Resolution
. As he sat in the tender watching the ship grow larger he determined that this would be a fresh start. No one knew him here: Daniel Rooke, so clever he was stupid. Along with the new red coat and the musket on its strap over his shoulder, he could put on a brand-new self.

By chance his hammock in the bowels of
Resolution
hung next to that of a man who could not have been more different from himself.

Talbot Silk was small and quick of make, his narrow face and overly thin mouth far from handsome but transformed by an eager liveliness that was hard to resist.

‘Now Rooke,’ he said that first afternoon, when the quartermaster had showed them their hammocks and left them to it. ‘There’s a good fellow, I beg you to tell me straight, are you a snorer? Because if you are, we will have to come to an arrangement.’

‘Why no,’ Rooke began, ‘that is, I do not know, how can I know? I, well, that is, you will have to tell me whether I am or not.’

Silk gave him a wry look, had already summed up his neighbour and forgiven him.

‘By Jove, Rooke, I can see that you and I will get on famously. I will stay awake tonight on purpose and let you know in the morning. Now come with me, I happen to know that there are
not enough dumplings to go around tonight, so let us be Johnny-on-the-spot, eh?’

Silk was disliked by no one: he was cordial, amusing and easy, always in the right place with just the right words. It was rumoured, among the more malicious of his fellow officers, that his father was a dancing master. It was true that he was light on his feet in a conversation. He could amuse others with a droll quirk of the eyebrow and a dry tone of voice, was a storyteller who could turn the most commonplace event into something entertaining.

Silk’s charm had already taken him far: only two years older than Rooke, but already first lieutenant, and with his lively eyes on the next prize. War was no more than an opportunity on the way to the creation of Captain Silk.

With Silk beside him as a model of how it was done, Rooke worked at inventing an acceptable version of himself for use in the rough camaraderie of the officers’ mess. He learned how to exchange a banality or two. He steeled himself to return the gaze of others. Watching the games of cup-and-walnut that the lieutenants played on the mess table, he could see that winning was simply a matter of becoming deaf to the patter, and thought he would like to take a turn, but was too shy.

The new Daniel Rooke was not entirely unlike the old one. He was still a quiet fellow who liked to hang back in the shadows, and forgot himself so far one night as to accept the challenge of multiplying 759 by 453 in his head. At the Academy that would
have opened him to mockery, but on board
Resolution
it seemed nothing worse than remarkable.

He supposed that in the little world of a ship, such a talent made him useful to know. A man standing beside a clever duffer might enjoy some reflected glory from his gifts.

At dinner in the mess, Rooke could laugh along with everyone else at Silk’s description of what the bosun had said when he dropped the double block on his foot. He could turn to his neighbour and share the joke, just another lieutenant enjoying himself. After dinner he could raise his glass with all the others and join them in shouting the favourite toast of junior officers hopeful of advancement:
to war and a sickly season!

Resolution
blockaded Boston Harbour and did the Atlantic run with supplies to His Majesty’s forces in the colony, but for Rooke’s first year aboard her she was not involved in the fighting. War was a leisurely thing, in which a young man who knew how to reckon the position of the ship by the lunar distance method and had a copy of the
Almanac
inscribed by the Astronomer Royal was useful on the quarterdeck.

Rooke supposed he should have known that a ship was a floating observatory, but it came as an unexpected gift. Not quite an astronomer, but at least a navigator, he spent his days steadying the sextant and then in the large quiet light of the
Great Cabin working through the arithmetic of longitude and latitude. On board
Resolution
his talents seemed at last to have found a home.

When the ship put into Antigua, in the Leeward Islands, for supplies, Silk was full of a scheme. Someone had told him about a certain house, at the end of a certain laneway up the hill behind English Harbour, where a group of red-blooded young British officers would be made welcome.

‘Yes, you too!’ he insisted. ‘Think of it as part of your education if you must, Rooke, at least as important as trigonometry or Greek!’

Rooke did not take much convincing. He was glad to have an opportunity to make certain discoveries one could guess at from the shapes of one’s sisters and their friends, but which he knew would never be learned except from experience.