The Surgeon's Mate (21 page)

'Sophie told me I should find you here,' said Stephen. 'I called in on my way to London, and I have been sitting with her. She is worried about your health; and you are an ugly colour, sure. Will you show me your arm, now?'

'She knew I was here?' said Jack, his pleasure vanishing.

'Why, brother, one would think that you entertained the local nymphs in this forbidding bower,' said Stephen with a singularly ill-timed jocularity. 'Such guilty consternation I have rarely seen.'

'Not at all,' cried Jack. 'Oh, no,' and he asked after Stephen's voyage, after Diana, his reception in Paris, and the present state of France. Then, 'Will you walk up to the house? I was on my way there, with the post. You are staying with us, I trust? You will make the most welcome addition to our tete a tete, and we will have some music.'

'Alas, I am on the wing. My chaise is waiting at the door, and I mean to be in town tonight. I have broken my journey to see you - indeed, I crossed to Portsmouth for the purpose - because I wished to know how you are situated.'

'I am situated in bilge-water up to the neck, Stephen. There is all this damned legal business - though your Mr Skinner is an immense comfort: I am very grateful for him - and then the Admiralty is being troublesome about payment for the Waakzaamheid; and there are some other things.'

'I am sorry for that. But what I really meant is how you were situated for a ship. Your plans were undetermined when last I saw you.'

'I have none. I refused the Orion, which they kindly offered me as a sort of half-leave on full pay; and having done that I cannot suddenly ask for another, though as things have turned out I should give my eye-teeth to be ordered on foreign service, to be right out of the country."

'That is what I wanted to know: our purposes may suit. There is a possibility that I may have a mission in northern waters. It is no more than a possibility, but if I go, I had rather go with you than with any other. We are used to one another's ways; I do not have to play off any tedious mystifications with you; and I know you to be a rare hand at discretion. That is why I came: I wished to survey the ground and to know what I might suggest in London. May I take it that you would not be unwilling to accompany me, should the mission eventuate?'

'I should be very happy. Very happy indeed, Stephen.'

'I must warn you, that it is likely to be attended with a certain amount of risk, apart from the dangers of the elements. Have you heard of the fate of the Daphne!'

'Why, yes. It is common talk. It has not been in the newspapers that I know of, but everybody back from the Baltic speaks of it.'

'What do they say? I do not know the details.'

'The details vary, but all the accounts I have heard agree that she contrived to get too close to Groper Island - '

'Not Grimsholm?'

'It is all one. We call it Groper Island, just as we say Hogland, or the Belt, or the Sleeve; or Passages for that matter, or the Groyne. It seems that she got too close, probably in a flat calm, with the current setting in as it does in those waters, and that she was within gunshot before she was aware: otherwise, being a light thing, she would surely have towed into the offing, or even swept. However, what is certain is that they opened fire and sank her. They have forty-two pounders, perched high on the rock, with furnaces at hand - we used to see them glowing a great way off - and the likelihood is that they sent a red-hot shot into her magazine and blew her to pieces directly, for there were no survivors, and no trace of her that I can learn: only fishermen's tales.'

'Ay, that must have been the way of it. Well now, this same Grimsholm will probably be our destination.'

Jack whistled. 'A damned uncomfortable destination too,' he said. 'Shoal waters, ugly short seas, and then when you get there, such batteries! It is like a little Gibraltar, and not so little, neither: they have dug themselves in high up there, and they sweep a prodigious scope of sea. If those guns were well served, they could defy a fleet. Broadsides are not much use against well-placed, well-served artillery on a height, that can play on you with a plunging fire of red-hot shot. You know what the tower at Mortella did.'

'I do not.'

Of course you do, Stephen. The Mortella tower in Corsica - the Martello, as some say, the round tower we have copied by the score all round the coast. It was ordered to be taken in ninety-three or ninety-four; and although it only had two eighteen-pounders and a six, with thirty-two men and a young ensign to serve them, Lord Hood sent both Juno and Fortitude in to batter it, while the army landed fourteen hundred men. Well, the ships battered away for two hours and more, and by the end of that time Fortitude had sixty-two men killed and wounded, three guns dismounted, her mainmast shot through and through, her other masts wounded, and the hot shot had set her on fire, so she had to haul off, damned lucky not to have run aground. So if one Martello tower can do that to two men-of-war, while at the same time it keeps off fourteen hundred soldiers, just think what Grimsholm, much higher, fifty times as strong, and with no soldiers to worry about, could do. It will be no picnic.'

'I do not suppose it is in contemplation to attempt the reduction of the place by brute force, but rather by subtler and I trust bloodless means,' said Stephen. 'At least they must be tried first. But now I come to think of it, you are a family man, a man with growing responsibilities, and this is more an employment for an unattached young bachelor: I perfectly understand your reluctance.'

'If you mean to insinuate that I am not game..." began Jack. 'But I dare say you mean it as a joke. Forgive me, Stephen; I usually see a joke as quick as the next man, but I am a little off colour these days.' They walked along in silence under the trees, and then he said, 'You are on your way to town. I have to be in Whitehall the day after tomorrow, about Waakzaamheid, so let me go up with you now. I should like to see something of you after all this while: we will go snacks for the chaise, and stay at the Grapes, and that will kill three birds at one blow.'

Stephen had been lucky in his carriage: it was unusually quiet and well sprung, and as it ran smoothly over the turnpike road in the darkness they could talk without the least constraint. The enclosed and as it were timeless space, moving through a largely unseen world and detached from it, was ideally suited for the free flow of confidence, and presently Jack said, 'I do so hope this scheme of yours comes off, Stephen. I have particular reasons for wishing to be abroad; or rather for wishing to be ordered abroad.'

Stephen considered this remark: in his younger, poorer days Jack had often longed to be out of the country to escape his creditors and imprisonment for debt; but this could hardly be the case now. Even if much of it was difficult to realize, he still possessed large remnants of his fortune; and although at the improbable worst his liabilities might prove greater still, only a court could decide upon that, at the end of long, long legal proceedings: and at present his interests were in the hands of a very able man of business who would never allow any sudden clapping of his client into a sponging-house. 'Yet I understood from Sophie that the first hearing, the mere preliminaries, was not to come up before the middle of next term," he said.

'It is not that damned legal business,' said Jack. 'Indeed, sometimes I almost welcome all the endless paper-work; it acts as a kind of... No. The truth of the matter is - why, the truth of the matter is -.' He gave a short account of it, and ended, 'So, do you see, I hope that if I am ordered abroad, she will not come back here; or at least if she does that she will not settle just at hand. She spoke of Winchester, in her last. You need not tell me I am a scrub, Stephen; I know it very well.'

'I am not concerned with the moral issue,' said Stephen, 'but rather with what may usefully be done.' He was in fact surprised at such an abject degree of moral cowardice in a man whose physical courage could not be questioned: but, he reflected, he was not married; he did not know anything of domestic warfare at first hand, nor of the stakes involved, though he had some notion of the crushing nature of either defeat or victory and the extraordinarily powerful emotions that might come into play. He loved Sophie dearly, but he knew, and had long deplored, the jealous, possessive side of her character. The post-chaise bowled along: his mind drifted off to considerations on marriage, on the small number of successful unions he had known, and upon the probable balance of happiness and unhappiness, on the advantages and corresponding defects of other systems. 'Monogamy seems the only solution, alas,' he said to himself, 'although in a way it is as absurd as monarchy: Heaven forbid that we should fall into the errors of the Musulmans and Jews.'

'I will just say this,' said Jack, breaking in on his thoughts, 'though I know it don't amount to much. I have sent all I could: at least she is not short of money.' A pause, and he added, 'That is why the delay over the Waakzaamheid is so uncommon awkward, coming at this time, when most of what I have is tied up. It affects you too, Stephen: you share in head-money and gun-money; and seeing that you are pretty nearly the only surviving warrant officer, it should be a tidy sum.'

'I have a few observations to make,' said Stephen, brushing the Waakzaamheid aside. 'I offer them for what they are worth: they may be pertinent: they may be of some comfort to you. In the first place you must know that in women of an hysterical tendency, like the young person in question - for it would be idle, as well as uncandid, to feign that I do not know who she is - '

'I named no names,' cried Jack. 'God damn me, Stephen, if I so much as hinted at her name.'

'Ta, ta, ta,' said Stephen, waving his hand. 'In women of an hysterical tendency, I say, false pregnancies are by no means rare. All the gross symptoms of the nine-months disease are to be seen, the tumid belly, the suppression of the menses, even the production of milk; everything, except for the result. Secondly, I must tell you, as I told another friend not long ago, that even in the case of true pregnancy, rather better than twelve out of a hundred women miscarry. And thirdly, you are to consider the possibility of there being no pregnancy at all, true or hysterical. The lady may deceive herself; or she may deceive you. You would not be the first man to be cozened so. As I understand it, she has in fact made no very strenuous attempts to return, though several packets have gone to and fro. And it cannot be denied that a demand for money has a sadly untoward appearance.'

'Oh come, Stephen, what a blackguard thing to say. I know her. She may be rather - she may not be very wise - but she is incapable of doing that. Besides, I have begged her not to come - not yet. I tell you, Stephen, I know her.'

'Oh, as for knowing a woman... We read enter in unto her and know her: very well, and for the space of that coming together there is perhaps a true knowledge, a full communication; but after? It was a blackguard thing to say, I admit; but this is a blackguard world, in parts; and I should never have said it if I had not reasons to suppose that there might be some truth in it. I assert nothing, Jack, but the lady's reputation is very far from being perfect, as I know from another source, and I strongly advise you to take no decided step until you have some irrefragable independent evidence of her state - until you have really sifted the matter.'

'I know you mean it very kindly, Stephen,' said Jack, 'but I do beg you will not say things like that. It makes me feel more of a scrub than ever. I really cannot behave like a thief-taker towards a person who has... London Bridge already,' he cried, looking out of the window.'

A few minutes later they were at the Grapes, where they had stayed together years ago, when Jack was evading his creditors; for the Grapes lay within the liberties of the Savoy, a refuge for flying debtors. Stephen was a poor man; that is to say, he usually lived like a poor man, and an abstemious poor man at that; but he did allow himself some indulgences, and one of these was the keeping of a room in this small quiet comfortable inn all the year round. The people were used to his ways, and he was welcome whenever he came; he had cured Mrs Broad, the landlady and an excellent plain cook, of the marthambles, and the boots of a less creditable disease; he could do much as he pleased at the Grapes and more than once he had brought back an orphan child - a dead orphan child - for dissection, keeping it in his cupboard without adverse comment. Nor was there any comment now, when towards the end of a very late supper of codlings and humble pie he made an unseasonable call for a coach.

'Do not stir, Jack. We will meet for breakfast, if God allow. Good night to you, so,' he said; and as he put on his greatcoat he observed with satisfaction that however Jack might protest Miss Smith's perfect innocence he had evidently digested at least some of his words as well as three quarters of the humble pie; he was now looking brighter by far, scarcely hangdog at all, and he was laying into the Stilton with a fine healthy appetite.

Once again it was Sir Joseph who opened the door. 'Here you are at last! Come in, come in,' he cried. 'You have heard the news of poor dear Ponsich?' he asked, showing him upstairs.

'That is why I came back,' said Stephen.

'So I hoped. So I have been hoping ever since the telegraph brought your signal. Come, sit by the fire: I will move these papers - forgive the disorder - there is a mort of work in hand. The Americans are giving a great deal of trouble, in spite of your splendid work: half the Spaniards in Wellington's rear are Frenchmen at heart: things are not going well. And now there is this cruel news from the Baltic. If that Emperor of theirs is given a moment's respite he will bounce up like a jack-in-a-box, and all will be to do again. We have been longing for your return ever since the report came in.'

'Do you know what happened?'

'Yes. There was a lack of caution, I fear; and only too well do I remember Ponsich saying that he should take the bull by the horns. The sloop stood in, either under-estimating the carry of those great guns or trusting too much in her Danish colours, and before she could even hoist out a boat with a flag of truce they opened a very accurate fire with red-hot shot: one struck her magazine, and she was utterly destroyed. We should have sent a more experienced commander.'