The Hundred Days (13 page)

‘You mean to play, Stephen?’ Jack murmured in his
ear.

‘Why, certainly.’

‘Bonden,’ called Jack, ‘place the music stand and
light along my fiddle, d’ye hear me, there?’

‘Aye-aye, sir: music stands and light along the
fiddle it is.’

Chapter Four

Once again the thunder roared from the saluting
batteries as Jack Aubrey’s squadron made its painful and dangerous way out of
Mahon harbour: short boards down the narrow Cala de San Esteban against an
irregular gusting southerly breeze and what tide the Mediterranean could summon
up at its worst. A small squadron now, since Briseis, Rainbow and Ganymede had
been sent off to protect the eastern trade and Dover was still escorting the
Indiamen on their homeward run.

Ringle, leading the way, was nimbler and brisk in
stays, as became a schooner of her class, and she was tolerably at home in such
waters; so was Surprise, handled by a man who had sailed her for the finest
part of his life at sea and who loved her dearly - a ship, furthermore, that
was blessed with an uncommonly high proportion of truly able seamen, thoroughly
accustomed to her ways and to her captain’s. Not that theirs was a happy lot as
the channel grew even narrower, the cries of ‘Hands about ship’ more frequent,
and the recently-shipped Marines (at least one in each gun-crew) more awkward
still: for in common decency the batteries’ salutes to the broad pennant had to
be returned, returned exactly: and this called for wonderful activity.

Yet the sufferings of the Surprises, though severe
and often commented upon, were not to be compared to those of the Pomones, a
huddled-together ship’s company with a

captain who had never commanded a post-ship before,
a disgruntled first lieutenant and a new second lieutenant - he was now officer
of the watch - who did not know a single

man aboard and whose orders
were often confused, often misunderstood and sometimes shouted down by
exasperated, frightened bosun’s mates, far too busy with their starters: and
all this in an unhandy, heavily-pitching frigate with far too much sail set
forward, pressing down her forefoot.

The Commodore and his officers watched from the
quarterdeck: often and often their faces assumed the appearance of whistling
and their heads shook with the same grave, foreboding motion. Had it not been
for the frenzied zeal of Pomone’s aged gunner and his mates she would never
have contributed a tenth part of her share of salutes, and even so she cut but
a wretched figure.

‘Shall I ever be able to use her heavy broadside in
the Adriatic?’ murmured Jack to
himself. ‘Or anywhere else, for that matter? Three
hundred blundering hopeless grass combing buggers, for all love,’ he added, as
the Pomone very, very nearly missed stays, her jib-boom brushing the pitiless
rock.

Unlikely though it had seemed at times, even the
Cala de San Esteban had an end: first Ringle cleared the point, stood on and
brought the wind abaft the beam; and she was followed by the others. Yet
although against probability he had escaped shipwreck, young Captain Vaux (a
deeply conscientious officer) did not, like some of his shipmates, give way to
relief and self-congratulation. ‘Silence, fore and aft,’ he cried in a voice
worthy the service, and in the shocked hush he went on, ‘Mr Bates, let us take
advantage of the guns being warm and the screens being rigged and make the
signal Permission to fire a few rounds.’

Fortunately Mr Bates, whose talents would never
have recommended him anywhere, had a thoroughly efficient master’s mate and
yeoman of the signals: between them they whipped the
flags from the locker, composed the hoist and ran it aloft. It had barely
broken out before another intelligent young master’s mate, the recently-joined
John Daniel,  murmured
to Mr Whewell, Surprise’s third lieutenant, ‘I beg pardon, sir, but Pomone is
asking permission to fire a few rounds.’

Mr Whewell confirmed this with his telescope and
the yeoman; then stepping across to Jack Aubrey he took off his hat and said,
‘Sir, if you please, Pomone requests permission to
fire a few rounds.’

‘Reply As many as you can afford: but with reduced
charges and abaft the beam.’

Captain Vaux was of a wealthy, open-handed family
and he dreaded having the appearance of one who owed his early promotion to his
connexions: he wanted his ship to be a fighting-machine as efficient as the
Surprise, and if a few hundredweight of powder would advance her in that
direction he was perfectly willing to pay for them, particularly as he could
renew his supplies in Malta.

A few minutes after the Commodore’s signal,
therefore, the gunfire began again, starting with single chasers, the
occasional carronade, and then fairly regular broadsides that surrounded the
frigate with a fine cloud of smoke - broadsides that grew perceptibly more
regular as time went on.

The stabbing flame and the heart-shaking din of a
great gun exercise of this kind nearly always spread cheerfulness and high
spirits - the noise alone was exhilarating, and exhilaration has some affinity
with joy. Yet although Pomone’s cannon roared and bellowed prodigiously, there
was precious little joy aboard her near neighbour the Surprise.

Even after dinner (two pounds of fresh Minorcan
beef a head) and dinner’s charming grog, and even after supper, the general
gloom persisted. Killick’s misfortune was known to the last detail; the
wretched boy’s capers were recounted again and again; and the dreadful fall,
the shattering of the precious horn.

It was much the same the next day, and the next;
and even when Mahon was far astern, beneath
the western horizon from the main royal masthead, the squadron holding its
course for Malta with a steady, gentle
topgallant breeze on the starboard quarter.

No joy among the people of Surprise, for the luck
had gone out of the ship together with the broken horn: for what could be
expected of a broken horn, however expertly repaired? Many a time did the older
hands mutter something about virginity, maidenhead; and this, with a melancholy
shake of the head conveyed all that was to be conveyed. No joy among those of
Pomone, either; for not only did their new skipper prove a right Tartar,
keeping them at the great-gun exercise morning, noon and night, stopping the
grog of a whole gun-crew for the least trifling mistake, but some of those
badly hurt by recoil, powder-flash or rope-burn, had to be taken across to the
pennant-ship, their own surgeon being so far gone with the double-pox that he
did not choose to risk his hand on the delicate cases, and aboard Surprise the
Pomones soon learnt what had happened. Nor among the Ringles,
their captain having dined with the Commodore and his boat’s crew having spent
the afternoon among their friends and cousins. No joy.

Yet the officer in command of the Surprise’s Royal
Marines, Captain Hobden, had a long-legged, rangy, limping yellow dog, Naseby, whose mother had belonged
to the horse-artillery and who absolutely delighted in the smell of powder, even that which came wafting faintly across from
Pomone, the laborious Pomone. He was a friendly young creature, used to
shipboard life and scrupulously clean, though somewhat given to theft: but he
at least was thoroughly cheerful, the animal. He was fond of Marines and their
familiar uniform, of course, but he also liked seamen; and as Captain Hobden
was much given to playing the German flute (an abomination to dogs) while his
other ranks spent their free time cleaning their weapons, polishing, brushing
and pipeclaying their equipment, Naseby very soon found out the smoking-circle
in the galley. It was not a very jovial, lively place at present, but they were
kind to him and the women might give him a biscuit or even a piece of sugar;
and in any case it was company.

‘Well, Naseby, here you are again,’ said
Poll, when they were far and far from land, the stars beginning to prick. ‘At
least it wasn’t you.’ She gave him an edge of cake and went on ‘...there they
were, the Doctor and his mate, or rather the two doctors as I should say,
stamping up and down in a horrid passion and uttering words which I shall not
repeat them in mixed company, like a pair of mad lions.’

At this point Killick came in with an improbable
pile of shirts in his arms, kept there by his pointed chin - linen to be aired
in the galley when the fires were drawn. He had been washing, ironing and
goffering (where appropriate) all Jack’s and Stephen’s shirts, neck-cloths,
handkerchiefs, waistcoats, drawers and duck trousers, and polishing the great
cabin’s silver to an unearthly brilliance in the hope of forgiveness: but from
the great cabin to the galley and even to ship’s heads he was still looked upon
with a sour, disappointed dislike: and none of the women, nor even the ship’s
boys, called him Mr Killick any more.

But even in a pitch of distress that had cut his
appetite, his pleasure in tobacco and his sleep, his intense curiosity lingered
on and now he asked why the doctors were swearing so.

‘Well, Killick,’ said Poll Skeeping. ‘I am
surprised you should not know, being it was your so-called Hand of Glory, that was to make us all so rich.’

‘Oh no,’ whispered Killick.

‘Oh yes,’ cried Poll, tossing her head. ‘As you
know very well, the doctors kept it in a jar of double-refined spirits of wine
so that it should stay fresh and clean: and what happened? I’ll tell you what
happened, if you really need to be told. Some God-damned villain or villains
had been drawing off the spirit and replacing it with water, so now it’s just
bloody water and damn all else, while the Hand has grown gamy, like. It is all
up with the finer tissues, but at least they have put it out to dry and they
hope to draw the tendons and wire the bones together tomorrow evening.’

Alas for their hopes. When in one of their few free
moments (Pomone’s working-up was proving quite exceptionally bloody; and a
surprising crop of boils, disturbingly like the Aleppo button, had broken out
in Surprise) the medical men approached the table next to a scuttle where the
poor hand had been left to dry - indeed to desiccate - they found nothing but a
very faint bloody trace, the wooden dissecting board and the print of a large
dog’s right forefoot on the padded stool.

‘Your beautiful present utterly desecrated, deep in
the maw of that vile mongrel’ - ‘All our work wasted,’ they cried, and they
cursed the dog with extreme violence in Berber and Gaelic.

Stephen found Hobden in the gunroom, fingering his
unlucky flute while the two off-duty lieutenants played backgammon. ‘Sir,’ he
said, pale with anger, ‘I must have your dog. He has stolen my preserved hand
and I must either open him or exhibit a powerful emetic before it is too late.’

‘How do you know it was my dog? There are all the
ship’s cats, thieves to a man.’

‘Come with me to the galley and I will show you.’

Naseby was indeed in the galley,
comfortably installed among the women, who started up. Stephen seized the dog,
raised his deeply-scarred right fore-paw, showed it to Hobden and said,
‘There’s your proof.’

‘You never stole anything, did you, Naseby?’ asked Hobden. Naseby was a clever dog: he could
find a hare and do all sorts of things like counting up to eight beUs and opening
a latched door; but he could not lie. Perfectly aware of the accusation, he
drooped ears and body, licked his lips and confessed total guilt.

‘I must either cut him and recover my hand or give
him a very strong emetic: and if the emetic does not work, then it must be the
knife.’

 ‘It was your
own silly fault for leaving it about,’ cried Hobden. ‘You shall not touch my
dog, you pragmatical bastard.’

‘Will you stand by those words, sir?’ asked Stephen
after a short pause, his head cocked to one side.

‘Until my dying day,’ said Hobden, rather too loud.
Stephen left the room, smiling. He found Somers, the second lieutenant,
standing on the forecastle and gazing up at the beauty of the headsails,
brilliant in the sun and scarcely less so in the white shadow. ‘Mr Somers,’ he
said, ‘I beg pardon for interrupting you - a glorious sight, indeed - but I
have had a disagreement with Captain Hobden, who used, and stood by, a very
blackguardly insult, made in public - in the galley itself, for God’s sake. May
I beg you to be my second?’

‘Of course you may, my dear Maturin. How very much I regret
it. I shall wait upon him at once.’

‘Come in,’ cried Jack Aubrey, looking up from his
desk.

‘I beg pardon for interrupting you, sir,’ said
Harding, the frigate’s first lieutenant, ‘but I have some awkward, pressing
things to tell you.’ He said this in a low voice, and Jack led him aft to the
locker under the stern windows, where he could speak in perfect safety - in a
ship a hundred and twenty feet long with two hundred men crammed into her,
privacy was a rare commodity, as he knew from very long experience.

‘Well, sir,’ Harding went on, obviously disliking
the role of informer, ‘Dr Maturin has challenged Hobden, Hobden’s dog having
eaten a preserved hand; and Hobden, having been told that the hand must be
recovered by knife or purge, gave Maturin the lie. I tell you this because the
people are very much upset. I do not have to tell you, sir, that seamen or at
least our seamen, are as superstitious as a parcel of old women: they looked
upon the horn; sir, as the surest possible guarantee of luck: and next to the
horn, or even before it, this Hand of Glory... you know about it, sir?’

‘Of course I do. Thank you for telling me all this,
Harding: it was very proper in you. Now pray be so good as to tell Hobden that
I wish to see him at once. He will waste no time with uniform.’

A minute later he called ‘Come in’ again, and a
shirtsleeved, duck-trousered Hobden appeared.

‘Captain Hobden,’ said Jack in a tone of the
deepest displeasure, ‘I understand that your dog ate Dr Maturin’s preserved
hand, and that when he checked you with the fact you gave him the lie or
something worse. You must either withdraw the insult and
let him retrieve the hand as best he may, or you must leave this ship at Malta. I cannot give you more
than five minutes to reflect, dogs’ powers of digestion being what they are.
But while you are reflecting, remember this: in the heat of the moment any man
may blurt out a blackguardly expression: yet after a while any man worth a
groat knows he must unsay it. A note of apology would answer, if you find the
spoken word stick in your gullet.’