Post Captain (21 page)

Seven stone odd was nothing much for the first hundred yards, nor the second; but the smell of his warmed burden grew unpleasant, and he was pleased to see that he was near the place he had entered the Heath, within sight of his own lit window.

'Stephen will soon set him right,' he thought: it was known that Stephen could raise the dead so long as the tide had not changed - had been seen to do it.

But there was no answer to his hail. The candle was low in its socket, with an unsnuffed mushroom of a wick; the fire was almost out; his note still stood propped against the milk jug. Jack put his footpad down, took the candle and looked at him. A grey, emaciated face: eyes almost closed, showing little crescents of white: stubble: blood over one half of it. A puny little narrow-chested cove, no good to man or beast. 'I had better leave him alone till Stephen comes,' he thought. 'I wonder whether there are any sausages left?'

Hours; the ticking of the clock; the quarter-chimes from the church; steady mending of the fire, staring at the flame; the fibres quite relaxed - a kind of placid happiness at last.

The first light brought Stephen. He paused in the doorway, looking attentively at the sleeping Jack and at the wild eyes of the footpad, lashed into a windsor chair.

'Good morning to you, sir,' he said, with a reserved nod. 'Good morning, sir. Oh sir, if you please -, 'Why, Stephen, there you are,' cried Jack. 'I was quite anxious for you.'

'Aye?' said Stephen, setting a cabbage-leaf parcel on the table and taking an egg from his pocket and a loaf from his bosom. 'I have brought a beef-steak to recruit you for your interview, and what passes for bread in these parts. I strongly urge you to take off your clothes, to sponge yourself all over - the copper will answer admirably -and to lie between sheets for an hour. Rested, shaved, coffee'd, steaked, you will be a different man. I urge the more strongly, because there is a louse crawling up your collar - pediculus vestimenti seeking promotion to p.capitis - and where we see one, we may reasonably assume the hidden presence of a score.'

'Pah!' said Jack, flinging off his coat. 'This is what comes of carrying that lousy villain. Damn you, sir.'

'I am most deeply sorry, sir: most heartily ashamed,' said the footpad, hanging his head.

'You might take a look at him, Stephen,' said Jack. 'I gave him a thump on the head. I shall go and light the copper and then turn in. You will give me a call, Stephen?'

'A shrewd thump,' said Stephen, mopping and probing. 'A very shrewd thump, upon my word. Does this hurt?'

'No more than the rest, sir. It is benevolent in you to trouble with me... but, oh sir, if I might have the liberty of my hands? I itch unbearably.'

'I dare say you do,' said Stephen, taking the bread-knife to the knot. 'You are strangely infested. What are these marks? They are certainly older than last night.'

'Oh, no more than extravasated blood, sir, under your correction. I tried to take a purse over towards Highgate last week. A person with a wench, which seemed to give me a certain... however, he beat me cruelly, and threw me into a pond.'

'It may be that your talents do not altogether fit you for purse-taking: certainly your diet does not.'

'Yet it was my diet, or rather my want of diet, that drove me to the Heath. I have not eaten these five days.'

'Pray, have you had any success?' asked Stephen. He broke the egg into the milk, beat it up with sugar and the remaining drops of rum, and began to feed the footpad with a spoon.

'None, sir. Oh how I thank you: ambrosia. None, sir. A black-pudding snatched from a boy in Flask Lane was my greatest feat. Nectar. None, sir. Yet I am sure if a man threatened me with a cudgel in the dark and desired me to give him my purse, I should do so at once. But not my victims, sir; they either beat me, or they declare they have no purse, or they pay no attention and walk on while I cry "Stand and deliver" beside them, or they take to abusing me - why do I not work? Am I not ashamed? Perhaps I lack the presence, the resolution; perhaps if I could have afforded a pistol... Might I take the liberty of begging for a little bread, sir? A very little piece of bread? There is a tiger in my bowels, if not in my appearance.'

'You must masticate deliberately. What do you reply to their suggestions?'

'About work, sir? Why, that I should be very glad to have it, that I should do any work I could find: I am an industrious creature, sir. Might I beg for just another slice? I could have added, that it was work that had been my undoing.'

'Truly?'

'Would it be proper to give an account of myself, sir?'

'A brief account of your undoing would be quite proper.'

'I used to live in Holywell Street, sir; I was a literary man. There were a great many of us, brought up to no trade or calling, but with a smattering of education and money enough to buy pens and a quire of paper, who commenced author and set up in that part of town. It was surprising how many of us were bastards; my own father was said to have been a judge - indeed, he may well have been: someone sent me to school near Slough for a while. A few had some little originality - I believe I had a real turn for verse to begin with - but it was the lower slopes of Helicon, sir, the sort of author that writes The Universal Directory for Taking Alive Rats or The Unhappy Birth, Wicked Life and Miserable End of that Deceitful Apostle, Judas Iscariot and pamphlets, of course - Thoughts of the Present Crisis, by a Nobleman, or A New Way of Funding the National Debt. For my part, I took to translating for the book sellers.'

'From what language?'

'Oh, all languages, sir. If it was oriental or classical, there was sure to be a Frenchman there before us; and as for Italian or Spanish, I could generally puzzle it out in the end. High Dutch, too: I was quite a proficient in the High Dutch by the time I had run through Fleischhacker's Elegant Diversions and Strumpff's Nearest Way to Heaven. I did tolerably well, sir, upon the whole, rarely going hungry or without a lodging, for I was neat, sober, punctual, and as I have said, industrious: I always kept my promised day, the printers could read my hand, and I corrected my proofs as soon as they came. But then a bookseller by the name of - but hush, I must name no names - Mr G sent for me and proposed Boursicot's South Seas. I was very happy to accept, for the market was slow, and I had had to live for a month on The Case of the Druids impartially considered, a little piece in the Ladies' Repository, and the druids did not run to more than bread and milk. We agreed for half a guinea a sheet; I dared not hold out for more, although it was printed very small, with all the notes set in pearl.'

'What might that mean in terms of weekly income?'

'Why, sir, taking the hard places with the smooth, and working twelve hours a day, it might have amounted to as much as five and twenty shillings! I was a cock-a-hoop, for next to the Abbé Prévost, Boursicot is the longest collection of voyages in French I know of, the longest work I had ever engaged in; and I thought I had my living for a great while ahead. My credit was good, so I moved downstairs to the two-pair front, a handsome room, for the sake of the light; I bought some furniture and several books that I should need - some very expensive dictionaries among them.'

'Did you require a dictionary for French, sir?'

'No, sir: I had one. These were Blanckley's Naval Expositor and Du Hamel, Aubin, and Saverien, to understand the hard words in the shipwrecks and manoeuvres, and to know what the travellers were about. I find it quite a help in translation to understand the text, sir; I always prefer it. So I worked away in my handsome room, refusing two or three offers from other booksellers and eating in a chop-house twice a week, until the day Mr G sent me his young man to say he had thought better of my project of translating Boursicot - that his associates felt the cost of the plate would be too high - and that in the present state of the trade there was no demand for such an article.'

'Did you have a contract?'

'No, sir. It was what the booksellers call a gentleman's agreement.'

'No hope, then?'

'None whatsoever, sir. I tried, of course, and was turned out of doors for my pains. He was angry with me for being ill-used, and he spread tales in the trade of my having grown saucy - the last thing a bookseller can bear in a hack. He even had a harmless little translation of mine abused in the Literary Review. I could get no more work. My goods were seized, and my creditors would have had my person too, if I were not so practised at giving them the slip.'

'You are acquainted with bailiffs, arrest for debt, the process of the law?'

'I know few things better, sir. I was born in a debtors' prison, and I have spent years in the Fleet and the Marshalsea. I wrote my Elements of Agriculture and my Plan for the Education of the Young Nobility and Gentry in the King's Bench.'

'Be so good as to give me a succinct account of the law as it at present stands.'

'Jack,' said Stephen, 'your watch is called.'

'Hey? Hey?' Jack had the sailor's knack of going instantly to sleep, snatching an hour's rest, and starting straight out of it; but this time he had been very far down, very far away, aboard a seventy-four off the Cape, swimming in a milk-warm phosphorescent sea, and for once he sat there on the side of his bed, looking stupid and bringing himself slowly into the present. Lord Melville, Queenie, Canning, Diana.

'What are you going to do with your prize?' asked Stephen.

'Eh? Oh, him. We ought to turn him over to the constable, I suppose.'

'They will hang him.'

'Yes, of course. It is the devil - you cannot have a fellow walking about taking purses; and yet you do not like to see him hang. Perhaps he may be transported.'

'I will give you twelve and sixpence for him.'

'Do you mean to dissect him already?' - Stephen often bought corpses warm from the gallows. 'And do you really possess twelve and sixpence at this moment? No, no, I'll not take your money - you shall have him as a present. I resign him to you. I smell coffee, toast!'

He sat there eating steak, his bright blue eyes protruding with the effort, and with thought and concentration. They were in fact trying to pierce the future, but they happened to be fixed on his captive, who sat mute with dread upon his chair, very secretly scratching and from time to time making little gestures of submission. One of these caught Jack's attention, and he frowned. 'You sir!' he cried in a strong sea-going voice that brought the poor man's heart to his mouth and stopped his searching hand. 'You, sir! You had better eat this and look sharp about it,' cutting an unctuous gobbet - 'I have sold you to the Doctor, so you must obey his orders now, or you will find yourself headed up in a cask and tossed overboard. Do you mind me, hey?'

'Yes, sir.'

'I must be away now, Stephen. We meet this afternoon?'

'My movements are uncertain: I may look into Seething Lane, though it is scarcely worth while until next week.'

The plunge into the Admiralty courtyard; the waiting room, with half a dozen acquaintances - disconnected gossip, his mind and theirs being elsewhere; the staircase to the First Lord's room, and there, half-way up, a fat officer leaning against the rail, silent weeping, his slab, pale cheeks all wet with tears. A silent marine watched him from the landing, two porters from the hall, aghast.

Lord Melville had been disagreeably affected by his latest interview, that was plain. He had to collect himself and bring immediate business to mind, and for some moments he leafed through the papers on his desk. He said, 'I have just been treated to a display of emotion that has lowered the officer extremely in my opinion. I know that you prize fortitude, Captain Aubrey; that you are not shaken by disagreeable news.'

'I hope I can bear it, my lord.'

'For I must tell you that I cannot make you post for the Cacafuego action. I am bound by my predecessor's decision and I cannot create a precedent. A post-ship is therefore out of the question; and as for sloops, there are only eight-nine in commission, whereas we have four hundred-odd commanders on the list.' He let this sink in, and although there was nothing new about his information- Jack knew the figures by heart, just as he knew that Lord Melville was not being wholly candid, for there were also thirty-four sloops building as well as a dozen for harbour service and in ordinary - its repetition had a deadening effect. 'However,' he went on, 'the former administration also left us a project for an experimental vessel that I am prepared, in certain circumstances, to rate as a sloop rather than a post-ship, although she carries twenty-four thirty-two-pounder carronades. She was designed to carry a particular weapon, a secret weapon that we abandoned after trial, and we are having her completed for general purposes: we have therefore named her the Polychrest. Perhaps you would like to see her draught?'

'Very much indeed, my lord.'

'She is an interesting experiment,' he said, opening the portfolio, 'being intended to sail against wind and tide. The projector, Mr Eldon, was a most ingenious man, and he spent a fortune on his plans and models.'

An interesting experiment indeed: he had heard of her. She was known as the Carpenter's Mistake, and no one in the service had ever imagined she would be launched. How had she survived St Vincent's reforms? What extraordinary combination of interest had managed to get her off the stocks, let alone on to them? She had head and stern alike, two maintopsailyards, a false bottom, no hold, and sliding keels and rudders. The drawing showed that she was being built in a private yard at Portsmouth -Hickman's, of no savoury reputation.

'It is true that the Polychrest was primarily designed as a carrier for this weapon; but she was so far advanced that it would have been an unjustifiable waste to abandon her too; and with the modifications that you see here in green ink, the Board is of the opinion that she will be eminently serviceable in home waters. Her construction does not allow the carrying of stores for a cruise of any duration, but vessels of this size are always required in the Channel, and I have it in contemplation to attach the Polychrest to Admiral Harte's squadron in the Downs. For reasons that I shall not enter into, dispatch is called for. Her captain will be required to proceed to Portsmouth immediately, to hasten on her fitting-out, to commission her, and to take her to sea with the utmost expedition. Do you wish to be considered for the appointment, Captain Aubrey?'