The Surgeon's Mate (44 page)

'Nonsense,' said Stephen. 'These sheets are only dabbled in cold water. I like my shirts ironed; I like them to smell of lavender. Your uniform breeches with the cherry-coloured stripe do you no credit, Mr Jagiello: they need pressing. Monsieur Rousseau, pray take these shirts, these breeches and this coat to Madame Lehideux with our compliments. Tell her it will be a great relief to be shot of the shirts in particular; there is something lamentably squalid about shirts flying from the bars, and I do not let on to be either a seamstress or a laundry-maid. Say we are very much obliged to her for her kindness, particularly the young gentleman here.'

Shirts no longer flew from the window-bars, and Jagiello was in full voice, full flute, full view all day; he was excused sweeping, swabbing, scrubbing the table and chairs; he was excused all duties, and required to make himself agreeable; Jack and Stephen kept well out of sight, but as far as they could tell he seemed eminently successful. Apart from their daily letters, more and more voluminous, the two communicated by means of an alphabet held up, by singing together, and by signs. It was a laborious conversation, taking up most of their waking hours, and how the poor young lady found time to cook their meals and deal so beautifully with their clothes did not appear.

The quiet, ordered days dropped by. The mouse brought off a creditable brood. In the Moniteur Stephen read a categorical denial of the report, busily circulated by the now-desperate Allies, that there was a coolness between France and Saxony: on the contrary, the friendship between His Imperial Majesty and the Saxon king had never been closer, and there was not the least hint of disaffection among the valorous German troops. The Emperor, by a judicious shortening of his lines of communication, was going from strength to strength. A continual stream of brick- and stone-dust fell from the privy: small pieces of masonry were hidden in their beds: and all round them the Temple slowly crumbled away.

Rousseau grew steadily more glum and silent: it was rumoured that even the towers were not to be spared, and indeed on a Monday they saw workmen enter their part of the moat, leaving heaps of stone and even ladders by the half-demolished wall, a sight frustrating almost beyond endurance.

'Jagiello', said Jack, 'unless you spread more canvas they will have pulled the place to pieces before we can get out. Proper flats we shall look, if we are transferred just when I have the cross-stones almost free. I must have a cold chisel, a handspike, and some line. With the right tools I could do more in an hour than in a week of scraping. I really must have the right tools. And I must have them now.'

'I will do my best, sir," said Jagiello. 'But I doubt whether the moment is quite ripe.'

'Never mind manoeuvres,' said Jack. 'Always go straight at 'em. Things are growing very urgent indeed, and there is not a moment to lose.'

'Shall I risk everything at one throw?'

'Yes. Do.'

'What am I to ask for?'

'A cold chisel and five fathoms of one-inch line: that will make a capital beginning.'

Jagiello walked slowly into his room. They heard him playing in the window-seat.

'The soft complaining flute

In dying notes discovers

The woes of hopeless lovers,' observed Stephen.

'Oh what a damned unlucky thing to say,' cried Jack. 'I have no notion of your hopeless at all. The dear creature has acquiesced in the disappearance of her cutlery: why should she baulk at a cold chisel or two and a few fathoms of line! I wish you would not say things like that, Stephen.'

'It was only a quotation,' said Stephen.

Quotation or not, Jagiello came back after a long hour of silence looking pale, desperate, desolate. He shook his head, and looking across the moat they saw that the window was quite blank, its shutters closed.

'Never mind,' said Jack as they ate their supper, a supper that seemed unusually plain and sparse. 'Never mind: I shall get a purchase under the nearer stone before the week is out - never take it to heart, man; I am sufe you did your best.'

'It is not that, sir,' said Jagiello, pushing his plate away and leaning over the back of his chair to hide a tear. 'It is that I miss her so. She says she will never see me again.'

They looked anxiously at the window: even its pot-plants and the dove had been taken in. A great many thoughts passed through Jack's mind, among them a pang of regret for his coat, which he had sent across to be freshened and which might now be gone for ever, leaving him in his shirtsleeves; but in view of Jagiello's distress he did not mention it. Nor did he mention the dismal prospect of having to say farewell to that splendid succession of meals. Stephen wondered very much what Jagiello could possibly have said to spoil so promising a situation, yet for the same reason he went to bed with the question still unresolved.

They saw no chink of light through the shutters in the darkness; the shutters were not opened at dawn, nor yet when the sun shone full upon them. This seemed final, for they knew - she was not always quite discreet - that it was her bedroom, and so decided a removal did away with doubt, with hope, with all but a forced and unconvincing cheerfulness.

Yet to their astonishment their breakfast came, and with it Jack's shining coat. The basket contained Jagiello's Lithuanian delight, smoked eel and slices of yellow cheese, while neatly tacked inside the coat they found a length of very strong silk cord, and a cold chisel in each pocket. Jagiello sprang from the table with a radiant face: they saw the garret window open, the lady and her pot-plants and her bird appear. She arranged the pots in the sun, and then, with a significant look and the kindest smile she took the dove from its cage, kissed it and launched it in the air.

This was not Rousseau's time, but he could be heard clashing his keys some way off; and he had two soldiers with him. Their boots echoed in the long vaulted passage. Stephen made the necessary signal to Jack, who backed out of the privy, brushing the brick-dust from his hands.

'Dr Maturin, if you please,' said Rousseau in the open door; and cocking his ear towards the farther room, 'How the young gentleman does sing, to be sure. You would say a canary-bird.'

'Mind your step, sir,' he said at the coffin-turn.

'Wait here a minute,' said the governor's secretary at the bottom of the stairs, and as Stephen stood there between his guards he heard voices raised in disagreement on the far side of the governor's door. Most unfortunately the soldiers and the turnkey fell to discussing the weather -fine, but perhaps too fine; perhaps the prelude to a storm; certainly the prelude to a storm - but even so he gathered that the governor was uneasy about some irregularity and that his interlocutors were trying to overcome his objections by reason, persuasion, and hectoring. They reached a compromise: 'He is to be returned before the closing of the gates, and both of you must sign for him,' said the governor's weak, anxious voice; and then, 'Come in.'

There were not two men with him but three, all soldiers: a big burly full colonel with a red, ill-tempered face, presumably Hector; a nondescript captain; and a dark, intelligent looking lieutenant in the sombre uniform of the artillery. As he walked in Stephen said 'Gentlemen, good day.' The governor and the lieutenant replied; the captain- moved his lips; the colonel merely stared.

A clerk brought papers, the colonel and the captain signed, the lieutenant said to Stephen 'This way, if you please,' and they walked to a carriage in the courtyard.

The workmen had made great progress since last Stephen saw the entrance to the Temple, and now that the outer bailey was gone he would not have known the place, but for its position. The covered ways traversing the moat now stood open to the sky and the gate-house itself was no more than a disordered heap of stones, being carried away by a long file of carts.

After some disobliging remarks about 'the awkward old sod - civilians always the same - they want their arses kicking, just like natives - a whiff of case-shot every three months' which seemed to be directed at the deputy-governor, the colonel and the captain talked about their private affairs with a brutal, truly military disregard for their companions. The two were evidently related, a certain Hortense being the wife of the one, sister to the other. But even if their conversation had been much more interesting Stephen was far too taken up with his thoughts and with observing their route to pay real attention.

They crossed the river by the Pont au Change, as though their destination were the ill-omened Conciergerie; but the loud metallic voices never ceased discussing Hortense and presently they were driving towards Saint Germain deg Pres. 'It will be the rue Saint-Dominique,' said Stephen to himself: 'Even worse.' At the height of the abbey the colonel stopped the coach and told his orderly to fetch a parcel from one of the little shops behind; and it was just as the man was coming back that Stephen saw Diana. She was in an open carriage, talking earnestly to another woman, an over-ornamented woman he had never met; she was bending forward to the front seat with that peculiarly supple grace that he would have known at any distance: and now they were not six feet apart. He instantly shielded his face with his hand and watched her through his fingers. She looked well, though her face was grave; surprisingly well, straight-backed, slim. He did not recognize the arms on the carriage door nor the rather flashy liveries of the footmen behind. The carriage was past in a moment, but as the soldiers' coachman moved out into the stream immediately afterwards he had it in view for quite ten minutes and from time to time he saw Diana's companion, who sat with her back to the horses, a woman on the edge of middle age dressed in the height of fashion or perhaps a little above it, good-looking in a hard, determined way, a fair example of the Napoleonic court, not Diana's style at all, at all. The carriage turned off some way short of the Hotel de La Mothe, to a large, newly-painted house that had belonged to the Princesse de Lamballe.

It was only when he had perceived and noted this that he found how strongly he had been moved: his knees were trembling, his breath came short against the beating of his heart, and if he had been addressed he could hardly have answered in a natural voice. He mastered these outward symptoms quickly enough, but his mind was not fully at his command before the coach wheeled in under a covered archway. He had not even taken an exact account of their turnings and he was not sure where they were, though it was probable that this building and its courtyards backed on to the rue Saint-Dominique.

Fortunately they put him into a small empty room for a two hours' wait - a traditional measure to increase anxiety and distress - and as he collected his wits his emotion died away. The place was obviously military: quite apart from the soldiers moving about in the courtyard, there was a kind of scrubbed squalor common to all armies he had ever known. Conscript hands had no doubt whitewashed the lumps of slag bordering the paths and the wooden post against the pockmarked wall, but no swab, no brush had ever been applied to the filthy chocolate-coloured paint within: nor, he reflected, would any navy, even the French navy, tolerate the unwashed glass, the fetid smell, the general seediness. At one time he heard screams, but whether they were genuine or false he could not tell: such things were not an unusual prelude to an interrogation.

The same seediness, the same contradiction, was apparent in the room to which he was led at last: some of the officers were particularly gorgeous, but they sat at rickety unpainted tables and they had remarkably dirty dog-eared files before them. These tables formed three sides of a square, and Stephen was told to sit on a bench that made the fourth: it was rather like the arrangement for a court-martial. What would have been the president's seat was filled by the colonel who was so fond of kicking civilians' arses, but he looked discontented and bored and Stephen had the intimate conviction that he was a nullity, of use partly for his rank and partly, if the army intelligence people, were half as subtle as their political colleagues, to induce a man under interrogation to underestimate his enemies and so betray himself. The man in real control was a major in a plain undress uniform, a man remarkable only for his cold deep-set eyes: he said, 'Dr Maturin, we know who and what you are. But before we deal with the matter of your colleagues in France we have a few questions to put to you.'

'I am fully prepared to answer any questions within the limits, the narrow limits, of those that may be put to an officer who is a prisoner of war,' said Stephen.

'You were not a prisoner of war when you were last in Paris, nor were you here in the character of an officer: but leaving that aside for the moment, you are nevertheless required to give an account of your movements. Let us begin when you were the surgeon of the Java, captured by the American Constitution.'

'You are mistaken, sir. A glance at the Navy List will show you that the surgeon of the Java was a gentleman by the name of Fox.'

'Then how do you explain the fact that the description of the surgeon fits you exactly, even to the marks on your hands?' asked the major, taking a paper from his file. 'Five foot six, slight build, black hair, pale eyes, muddy complexion, three nails on the right hand torn out, both hands somewhat crippled: speaks perfect French with a southern accent.'

Stephen instantly realized that this must have come from a French agent in the Brazilian port to which the Constitution had taken them, a man who had seen his coded documents and who had evidently taken him for the Java's surgeon: an understandable confusion, since he berthed with Fox and their captured dunnage had been jumbled together. The essential point was that the major's paper did not come from Boston, where Stephen was known only too well. It was perfectly possible that even with this lapse of time his doings in the States were unknown to Paris: communication was irregular - as irregular as the Royal Navy could conceivably make it - and in killing Dubreuil and Pontet-Canet he had after all destroyed the Frenchmen's chief sources of information. If the strings of their net were as tangled and out of date as this, he might hope to elude them altogether. Looking down to conceal any gleam of triumph that might show in his eyes he said that he could not be held responsible for any man's description, and that he must decline to comment.