Treason's Harbour (29 page)

'Not at all well, sir, I am afraid.'

'Did you not catch the galley?'

'We caught her, sir. Indeed, we sank her. But she had nothing aboard: they were expecting us.'

'In that case,' said the Admiral, 'I shall finish this report while I have all the facts in my mind. There are some newspapers on that locker, and the latest Navy List: it reached us only yesterday.'

Jack took up the familiar volume; he had not been away long, but already there were important changes. Some admirals had died, and their places, as well as certain vacancies, had been filled, so that everybody on the post-captain's list moved up, the highest to the glory of rear-admiral, blue or yellow as the case might be, and the others to a point somewhat nearer their apotheosis. J. Aubrey was now well past half way: farther past than the number of new admirals accounted for, and looking for the reason he found that several captains senior to him had also died- a sickly season in the Indies, east and west - while two had been killed.

'A pack of lies- mean shuffling excuses- anything to throw the blame elsewhere - infernal scrub,' muttered the Admiral, tapping the pages of the report into a neat pile and ranging them exactly among many others. 'You have seen the flag promotion, Aubrey? It has indeed removed a number of officers from the command of ships" who at no period of their lives were capable of commanding them; but I am sorry to have occasion to observe, that the present state of the upper part of the list of captains is not much better than it stood before. It is impossible for a Commander-in-Chief to accomplish anything if his subordinates are incompetent.'

'No, sir,' said Jack, awkwardly enough; and after a disagreeable pause, 'I have brought you my official letter, sir,' - laying it on the desk - 'and I am concerned to say that it is unlikely to change your opinion.'

'Zounds,' said the Admiral - he was the only serving officer known to Jack who still said zounds - 'it goes on for ever. Two, no three pages, wrote small on both sides. You have now idea of how much I have to read, Aubrey. I am just in from off Toulon, and there was a great mass waiting here. Give me a precis.'

'A what, sir?' cried Jack.

'A succint abridgment, a summary, an abstract, for God's sake. You remind me of a half-witted midshipman I took aboard the Ajax once, in kindness to his father. "Have you no nous?" I asked him. "No, sir," says he."I did not know it would be wanted aboard ship, but shall certainly purchase some when next ashore." '

'Ha, ha, sir,' said Jack, and he launched into an account of his voyage, ending 'And so, sir, having made a cock of it, if you will allow me the expression, I came away, my only consolation being that there were no casualties, apart from the dragoman.'

'Clearly our intelligence was at fault,' said the Admiral, 'and we shall have to go into the reasons for that.' A brooding pause. 'It is possible that you might have accomplished something by a direct dash at Mubara, throwing your Turks ashore at dawn and supporting them with a cannonade, rather than hanging about for the galley. Speed is the essence of attack.' Jack's orders had distinctly required him to proceed first to the southern channel: he opened his mouth to say so, but closed it again without a word. 'I do not mean that as any kind of reproof, however. No, no... The fact is that I have some unpleasant news for you. Surprise is to go home, either to be laid up or sold out of the service. No, no,' he said, holding up his hand, 'I know exactly what you are going to say. I should have said it myself at your age and in your position. She is in very good shape, with many years of useful life before her, and for sailing she has not her equal. All that is very true, though in passing I may say that very costly repairs may be needed soon: but what is equally true is that she is very, very old; she was old when we took her from the French at the beginning of the last war, and by modern standards she is very small and very weak, an anachronism.'

'You will allow me to observe, sir, that Victory is older still.'

'Only a little: and you know what she has cost in repairs. But that is not the point. The Victory can still batter any French first-rate, whereas there is virtually no frigate in the French or American navies that the Surprise can fight on anything like equal terms.'

It was quite true. For many years the trend had been to bigger, heavier ships, and the most usual frigate in the Royal Navy was now an eighteen-pounder thirty-eight-gun vessel that gauged well over a thousand tons, almost twice the size of the Surprise. Still, in his distress Jack did say 'The Americans have their Norfolk, sir, as well as their Essex.'

'Another anachronism - the exception that proves the rule. What would the Surprise have to say to their President or any of the other forty-four gun frigates with their twenty-four pounders? Nothing at all. She might as well tackle a ship of the line. But do not take it so hard, Aubrey: there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, you know.'

'Oh, I do not mind it, sir,' said Jack. 'Not at all. It was understood, when I brought the Worcester out, that this spell in the Mediterranean was to be a mere parenthesis, until the Blackwater should be ready.'

'The Blackwater? said Sir Francis, surprised.

'Yes, sir. I had a firm promise of her, for the North American station, as soon as she was ready.'

'From whom?'

'From the First Secretary himself, sir.'

'Ah, indeed,' said the Admiral, looking down. 'I see, I see. However, before you take the Surprise home I have some little jobs for her: a run up the Adriatic, to begin with.'

Jack said that he should be very happy, and then 'But I am afraid you must think me very uncivil, sir, for not having congratulated you on your promotion. I saw your flag had changed to red at the fore as I came over: give you joy with all my heart.'

'Thank you, Aubrey, thank you kindly; though at my time of life these things are only a matter of course. I hope you will live to hoist yours at the main. You will dine with me? I have some interesting people coming aboard.'

Once again Jack said that he should be very happy: and superficially happy he was, eating hearty and drinking the Admiral's good wine with an elegant woman on either side of him and his old friend Heneage Dundas smiling at him from across the table; but when he was being rowed back across the harbour sorrow for his ship welled up and nearly choked him. He had served in her as a midshipman and he had commanded her in the Indian Ocean, a difficult and temperamental little frigate, but wonderfully responsive, fast and mettlesome for those who knew her ways; she had never failed him in an emergency, and he would never know a more sea-kindly ship, by or large, in light airs or in a strong gale. The idea of her rotting away in some foul creek and then being broken up or sold out of the service to be cut down into a creeping merchantman was more than he could bear. If that galley had been what it seemed, he would have bought her himself, to preserve her from such a fate: he had known ships, particularly enemies' ships, sold for no great sum if they were not wanted for the Navy.

Nor was it likely that he should ever command such a crew again, a crew of hand-picked seamen, every one of whom could hand, reef and steer, and practically every one of whom he knew and liked as a man. He knew exactly where he was with the Surprises and they knew exactly where they were with him and his officers; the Surprises could be allowed liberties unheard-of in a ship with a mixed set of people, including landsmen and thieves as well as a large proportion of sullen, understandably resentful pressed men, a ship's company that needed the perpetual tight discipline usual in the service, the repetitive drilling in reefing, furling, shifting topmasts, hoisting out boats and so on, all adapted to the capacities of the least endowed, the hard driving, and almost inevitably the hard punishment. Jack Aubrey was a taut captain, but he had never shared the zeal for punishing that characterized so many officers; he loathed flogging; he could never with a clear conscience order it for faults he had committed at times himself, and although the traditions of the service being what they were he had in fact ordered many a round dozen in his time he found it a great relief not to have to do so, a great relief not to be righteously indignant and perpetually holier than everyone else in the ship. There had scarcely been a flogging aboard the Surprise since he took her over; and if only her people had included a somewhat more amiable, less uncouth captain's steward, a captain's cook with more than two puddings at his command, a couple of officers who could play well enough for Stephen and him to have an occasional quartet, and a stronger midshipmen's berth, he would have said that before Pullings was promoted and before so many of the hands were drafted away, the frigate had had the finest ship's company in the squadron, if not in the entire service.

'I shall not tell them until I am forced to it;' he thought, as the boat turned among the lighters and he saw his ship. She was moored well outside the yard, but he was not at all surprised to see two lumpish scows still attached to her and a party of dockyard mateys busy about her stern.

'Larboard side,' he said to his coxswain. Any ceremony in receiving him aboard would be ridiculous: he was the only man in the ship at this moment who possessed more than a thin duck shirt and trousers and a battered straw hat.

'Sir,' said Mowett, taking off his with what grace its broken brim allowed, 'I am very sorry to tell you that the villains will not have caulked the quarterdeck abaft the mizen before Tuesday. Your cabins are open to the..."

'No glass in the stern windows, neither,' cried Killick in a shrill fury.

'Killick, pipe down,' said Jack.

'Sir,' said the purser, 'the storekeeper would not let me have hammocks and beds on my personal indent. He made game of my clothes, affected to believe I was in liquor, desired me to tell my story of camels and Arabs to the Marines, and walked off, laughing.'

'Nor in the quarter-galleries,' muttered Killick.

'No slops, either,' said the purser. 'And this to a purser of fifteen years' standing.'

'And the post, sir,' said Mowett. 'There is a sack for us, but it has been sent across to St Isidore's, and they say they are shut today, because of the feast.'

'Closed?' said Jack. 'Be damned to that. Bonden, my gig. Killick, jump across to Searle's, take me a room for the next few days, and lay on dinner tomorrow for Dromedary's officers. Mr Adams, come along with me.'

Then, turning at the gangway, 'Where is the Doctor?'

'He has taken Rogers, Mann and Himmelfahrt to the hospital, sir."

To the hospital, like a conscientious surgeon, to see his earlier patients, to bring three more, and to talk and even operate with his colleagues; but also, like a conscientious intelligence-agent, to Laura Fielding's house, quite late in the evening.

The outer door was open, but the lantern at the far end was not lit, and as he walked along the dark stone passage he thought 'What a cut-throat place it is, to be sure: as silent as death.' At the door he groped for the bell-chain, heard the faint answering peal, instantly drowned by Ponto's bellowing, and then Laura's voice asking who was there.

'Stephen Maturin," he said.

'Mother of God,' she cried, opening the door and letting out a flood of light, 'How happy I am to see you again.' And as he walked in, clearly visible, 'Oh, oh! Have you been shipwrecked?'

'Not at all,' said Stephen, rather nettled, for he had borrowed a pair of purple breeches at the hospital, and he had been shaved. 'Do you find my appearance not quite the thing?'

'Not in the least, dear Doctor. Only you are usually so... so point-device, shall I say?'

'By all means.'

'And always in uniform, so I was a little surprised to see your white coat.'

'We call it a banyan,' said Stephen, considering the garment, a loose sailcloth jacket with tapes instead of buttons, run up by Bonden out of what little light canvas the Dromedary had to spare. 'Yet perhaps it may look a little desperate on shore: perhaps it may. An ancient gentlewoman, Colonel Fellowes' mother, I believe, gave me this coin as I turned the corner of the street, saying "Not for drink, my good man. Pas gin. Niente debaucho."

But for the moment I have nothing else. A parcel of black thieves on horseback took away my bell may they rot for ever in the deep cinders of Hell and my collections and all my clothes was the way of it. However, like a prudent man I had not taken my other chest with my good uniform, at which I rather rejoice.' By this time they had reached the sitting-room and the little round table upon which Mrs Fielding's supper was laid out: three triangles of cold polenta, a hard-boiled egg, and a jug of lemonade. 'Will you believe it, my dear,' he said, sitting down opposite her and instantly seizing upon one of the triangles, 'that best coat of mine cost eleven guineas. Eleven guineas: a shocking sum indeed.' He was embarrassed - a rare state for him - and he talked somewhat at random: she poured him a glass of lemonade and watched a little wistfully as he reached out for the egg. 'But,' said he, unconsciously withdrawing his hand, 'if I had fetched all this splendour from the hotel where I left it, and put it on, I should never have had time to reach this house with any chance of finding you still up; and I thought it better to compromise your reputation in a banyan, as we agreed, than to leave it intact in a gorgeous coat.'

'It is truly benevolent in you to trouble with me, and to come so soon,' she said, taking his hand and looking at him with great troubled eyes.

'Not at all, my dear,' said Stephen, returning the pressure. 'Tell me now, have these people been pestering you since I went away?'

'Only twice. I had to go to St Simon's the next day, and I told him you had spent the night with me. He was pleased, and said I should have a letter the next time.'

'The same foreigner with the Neapolitan accent - the small pale middle-aged man?'

'Yes; but the one who gave me the letter was an Italian.'

'How is Mr Fielding?'

'Oh, he is not well. He does not say so - only that he had a fall and hurt his hand - but he is not himself. I am afraid he is very ill: sick to his heart. I will show you his letter.'