The Surgeon's Mate (5 page)

'Will you give me the certificate, now?' he said. 'I must show it to the priest. He cannot marry us without it. Would Friday suit you, Friday morning, quite early in the day? You would not wish much ceremony, as I suppose; but Jack can give you away, and then you will be a British subject once more.'

All the gaiety was gone from her face, completely gone, leaving it pale: an ill-looking, somewhat earthy pallor. She started up, walked to and fro, and then stood by the long window looking out into the garden, twisting the paper as she stood.

'But now I have the certificate, what is the hurry?' she said. 'What does it matter, all these formalities? Do not think I don't want to marry you... it is only that... Stephen, make me one of your little paper cigars, will you?'

He took out a cigar, cut it in two, and made two small rolls in a fine leaf from his pocket-book, one for her and one for himself. He held up an ember for her to light it, but she said, 'No. I cannot smoke here. Lady Harriet might come in. I do not want her to think - to know - that she is harbouring a dissolute dram-drinking tobacco-smoking creature. Light yours and come into the garden: I will smoke it there. You know, Stephen,' she said, opening the french window, 'ever since you told me about bourbon and complexion, I have not drunk a drop of anything but wine, and precious little of that; but by God I could do with a drink now.'

In the secluded shrubbery they paced side by side, and a thin cloud of smoke followed them. She said, 'With all this hurry - the business of the ball - gossiping with Lady Harriet - worrying about what to wear - I was quite out of myself. I forgot where I was. Maturin, do not be disappointed when I say I should like to wait.' A pause.

'You are the only man I have known who never asks questions, who is never impertinent even when he has the right to be.' She was looking at the ground, her head drooping; and although he had known her many years, in many states of temper and mind, he had never seen her in such distress or confusion. She was standing with the sun full on her and his penetrating, objective eye examined her downcast face; but before he had time to say 'Not at all' or 'As you please, entirely' a footman came stumping into sight at the end of the gravel walk and called out in a strong voice, 'The Honourable Mrs Wodehouse and Miss Smith to see you, ma'am.'

Diana threw Stephen a quick, apologetic glance and ran into the house. She might be in a strange hurry of spirits, but she moved with the perfect, unconscious grace that had always touched him, and he felt a wave of tenderness, allied to his former passionate love; perhaps its ghost.

The footman was still standing there, his wooden leg firmly planted in the gravel, waiting for Stephen: that is to say, a person dressed as a footman in the Admiral's hideous orange and purple livery was waiting there; but his independent attitude, his long pigtail, his pleasant battered old face made his true nature and origin obvious at a cable's length.

'I hope I see you well, sir?' he said, touching a crooked forefinger to his eyebrow.

'Very well, I thank you,' said Stephen, looking at him attentively. The last time he had seen that face it had been bloodless, glistening with sweat, tight-clenched not to cry out beneath his knife, as the Surprise limped westwards to Fort William, cruelly mauled by a French seventy-four. 'But you were not an amputation,' he said.

'No, sir: Bullock, forecastle-man, starboard watch, in the old Surprise.'

'Of course,' said Stephen, shaking him by the hand. 'What I mean is, I saved that leg. I did not cut it off.'

'Nor you did, sir,' said Bullock, 'but when I was in Benbow off the Cays, I copped it something cruel with a bar-shot; and our surgeon not being Dr Maturin, off it came, without so much as by your leave.'

'I am sure it was necessary,' said Stephen.

The remark, the support of his colleague, at least was necessary: but it seemed to carry no conviction at all, perhaps because the surgeon of the Benbow was nearly always drunk, and when sober, notoriously unskilful. The footman looked affectionately at Dr Maturin and said, 'And I hope Captain Aubrey is well, sir? I heard he come ashore off of Shannon as pleased as the Pope and twice as tall.'

'Prime, Bullock, prime. I shall be seeing him at the hospital directly.'

'My duty and very best respects, sir, if you please. John Bullock, forecastle-man, in the old Surprise.'

As prisoners of war in Boston, Aubrey and Maturin had been very kindly treated by their captors; they were penniless, they had no cold-weather clothes, and the officers of the USN Constitution had seen to all their needs. Neither intended to be behindhand in an action of this sort, and as he expected, Stephen found Jack with a wounded American lieutenant.

'Do you remember a man called Bullock, in the Surprise}' he said, as they walked away.

'Yes, I do,' said Jack. 'Forecastle-man, and a very good hand.'

'He sends his old captain his best respects.'

'Why, that's kind,' said Jack. 'John Bullock: he laid a gun as true as you could wish - dead on the mark, though rather slow. He was captain of the starboard bow-chaser. But I tell you what, Stephen: old captain is dead on the mark too. What with funerals and the blue devils and natural decrepitude, I feel like Methusalem's grandad.'

'You eat too much, brother, you drink too much, and you allow yourself to brood. A brisk ten-mile walk in the damp but interesting forests of the New World, outpacing the blue devils, will set you up - will renew your animal spirits. Ponce de Leon was of the opinion that the Fountain of Youth was to be found in these parts. And you are to consider, that a packet may arrive from England at any minute.'

'I dare say you are right about the Fountain of Youth, Stephen, but you are out as far as the packet is concerned. None sails before the thirteenth, and with these everlasting westerlies, we cannot hear for a great while yet. And anyhow, I could not take a walk today, even if there were a dozen Fountains of Youth and a tap-room too at the end of it. I have a damned unpleasant job at the prison, trying to identify the English deserters taken in the Chesapeake: they nearly all of them ran from our men-of-war. But before that I am going to see their master's mate, the one that was not knocked on the head. Shall you come?'

'No, Sir. The combatant officers are your natural province, the non-combatant mine. My particular concern today is their surgeon, an unusually learned man.'

The unusually learned man was sitting with a mug of spruce-beer in the empty operating-room, looking careworn, sad and weary, but resolute. He accepted Stephen's offering gracefully, and they talked about some of their cases for a while, taking alternative sips at the mug. When the spruce-beer - 'a dubious anti-scorbutic, sir, but a grateful beverage on such a day, and no doubt mildly carminative' - was done, Stephen said, 'I believe you told me, sir, that before you took to the sea, your practice lay chiefly among the ladies of Charleston?'

'Yes, sir. I was a man-midwife; or, if you prefer it, an accoucheur.'

'Just so. Your experience in these matters is therefore very much greater than mine, and I should be grateful for your lights. Apart from the obvious classical symptoms, what do you find to be the earliest signs of pregnancy?'

The surgeon pursed his lips and considered. 'Well, now,' he said, 'there is nothing wholly reliable, of course. But I believe the general facies rarely deceives me - the thickening of the skin; the pasty complexion in the very first stages, rapidly clearing; the cerous appearance of the eyelid and orbicular folds; the pallor of the caruncula lachrymalia; while the old wives' method of inspecting the nails and hair is not to be despised. And where the physician is familiar with his patient's ordinary behaviour, he can often form an opinion from variations in it, particularly in the case of younger women: abrupt, apparently causeless changes from gloom and anxiety to a high flow of spirits, even to exultation, will tell him much.'

'Sir,' said Stephen, 'I am much indebted to you for these remarks.'

In the course of his service in the Royal Navy Stephen Maturin had often reflected upon the diversity among sea-officers: he had sailed with men of great family and with others promoted from the lower deck; with companions who never opened a book and with poetic pursers; with captains who could cap any classical quotation and with some who could scarcely write a coherent dispatch without the help of their clerk; and although most came from the middle rank of society, this species had such a bewildering series of sub-species and local races that only an observer brought up among the intricacies of the English caste-system could find his way among them, confidently assessing their origin and present status. There was also a very great difference in wealth, particularly among the captains, since when merchant ships were thick upon the ground it was possible for an enterprising or a lucky commander to make a fortune in prize-money after a few hours' eager chase, whereas those who had to live on their pay led a meagre, anxious life, cutting a very poor figure indeed. Nevertheless they were all marked with the stamp of their profession: rich or poor, loutish or polite, they had all been battered by the elements, and many of them by the King's enemies. Even the most recently promoted lieutenant had served all his youth at sea, while many post-captains as high on the list as Jack Aubrey had been afloat, with few breaks, ever since 1792. They all had a long, long naval war in common, with its endless waiting in the wastes of ocean and its occasional bursts of furious activity.

None of this applied to their wives however, and here the diversity was greater still. Some sailors, perhaps guided by their apprehensive families, married in their own class or sometimes higher; but others, home after the long and dangerous tedium of the Brest or Toulon blockade or a three-year commission in the Indies, East or West, sometimes flung themselves into the strangest arms. And although in many cases these unions proved happy enough, sailors being excellent husbands, often away and handy about the house when ashore, it did make for a curious gathering when the spouses were all invited to a ball.

Stephen contemplated them from among the potted plants: in spite of their differences in size and shape, the sailors' uniform made them a single body; much the same, though with more variation, could be said about the soldiers; but the women had chosen their own clothes, and the results were interesting. He had already recognized a former barmaid from the Keppel's Head in Portsmouth, now swathed in pink muslin and adorned with a wedding-ring; and there were some other ladies whose faces were vaguely familiar, perhaps from other inns, or from the stage, or from tobacco shops.

There was a clear distinction between the dresses, between those women who could both choose and afford good ones and those who could not, a distinction almost as clear as that between the jewels the ladies wore: and these ranged from the garnet pendant round the neck of a child who had married a lieutenant with nothing but his pay of a hundred a year to Mrs Leveson-Gower's rubies, which would have built a thirty-two gun frigate and provisioned her for six months, and Lady Harriet's thumping great emeralds. But it was not this that interested Stephen as he stood watching the crowd: he was more concerned with the ladies' bearing and behaviour, partly as a lesson in female social adaptability in a society so strongly aware of rank, overt or implied, and partly because he had a theory that the more free or even wanton a given past might have been, the more reserved, correct, and even prudish would be the established present.

His observation, interrupted from time to time by a glance at the top of the staircase to see whether Diana would ever finish dressing, did not bear his theory out and the only conclusion he could draw was that those with style retained it whatever their origins, while those who had none were lumpish or affected or both; though even these were already enjoying themselves. The general gaiety, the universal delight at the Shannon's victory, so filled the entire gathering that nearly all the women were in good looks, and the ordinary worries of dress and consequence and husband's rank counted far less than usual. In short, that shared happiness and a strong fellow-feeling abolished distinction for the time being, in spite of the sometimes conflicting but always powerful hierarchies of service rank, social origin, wealth, and beauty.

This was not a discovery that warranted any very prolonged seclusion among the plants - an uninteresting set, filicales and bromeliads for the most part - and Stephen moved out into the mainstream, where he almost immediately met Jack, accompanied by an equally tall but far bulkier man in the uniform of the First Foot Guards, a blaze of scarlet and gold. 'Why, there you are,' said Jack. 'I have been looking for you. Do you know my cousin Aldington? Dr Maturin, Colonel Aldington.'

'How d'ye do, sir,' said the soldier in the tone he thought suited to the subfusc garments of a naval surgeon. Stephen only bowed. 'This is going to be a prodigious fine ball,' said the Colonel to Jack. 'I can feel it in the air. The last I was at - oh, and I forgot to tell you, Sophie and I stood up together - was at the Winchester assembly, a miserable affair. Not thirty couple, and never a girl worth looking at. I took refuge in the card-room, and lost four pound ten.'

'Sophie was at the assembly?' said Jack.

'Yes, she was there with her sister, looking very well: we danced together twice. I flatter myself we - by God, there's a damned fine figure of a woman,' he exclaimed, staring at the head of the staircase. Diana was coming down in a long blue dress and a blaze of diamonds that eclipsed all the other jewels in the large, beautiful, and well-filled room: she always held herself very well, and now as she came slowly down, straight and slim, she looked superb. 'I should not mind dancing with her,' he said.

'I will introduce you, if you like,' said Jack. 'She is Sophie's cousin.'

'If she is your cousin, she is mine, in a way,' said the soldier. And then, 'Damn me if it ain't Di Villiers. What on earth is she doing here? I knew her in London, years ago. I don't need an introduction.'