Treason's Harbour (35 page)

The virtual rulers of the little state came beaming up the side to the full ceremonial welcome of bosun's calls, Marines presenting arms, bareheaded officers in their best coats, the ruffle of the drum; and Sciahan Bey, a short, broad-shouldered, scarred and grizzled Turkish warrior, skipped over to Jack with his arms spread wide and kissed him on both cheeks, immediately followed by Father Andros, which so pleased the Surprises that they uttered a discreet but universal cheer.

'Where is the Pullings?' asked Father Andros in Italian, looking about.

For a moment Jack could not recall the Italian for being made a commander so he made a dart at the Greek. 'Promotides,' he said, pointing upwards. But seeing that they looked shocked and grieved and that the priest crossed himself in the Orthodox manner, he tapped his epaulettes, crying 'No, no. Him capitano - pas morto- elevato in grado,' and raising his voice 'Dr Maturin. Pass the word for the Doctor.'

In the pause the priest called down into the boat for a petrified little girl who stood in the bows, not daring to sit, starched, frizzled and powdered almost out of humanity, carrying a bunch of roses as large as herself. It was something of a task getting her aboard, since she passionately resisted any motion at parting her from the flowers or any that might ruffle her stiff crimson dress; but it was accomplished at last and with her eyes fixed on Father Andros she went through her address to Jack, reluctantly yielding her bouquet at the end. While this was going on the Surprise had come to an anchor, and the clewing up of the maintopsail revealed Dr Maturin at the crosstrees, an extraordinarily elevated post for him. Much of the afternoon he had spent sitting in the broad, comfortable platform of the maintop in the hope of seeing a spotted eagle, one of the great prizes of this coast, and his patience had been rewarded with no less than two, playing together and flying so low that he could almost look into their eyes; but the topsail kept shutting out his view, and with the combined energy of frustration and delight he swarmed slowly up to this bold eminence, his gaze constantly turned towards the sky. There in the crosstrees he had indeed had a glorious sight of the birds; but they had vanished long ago, circling up and up into the sky until at last they were lost among the wispy clouds; and since then he had been horribly puzzled to get down again. The more he contemplated the void below the more impossible it seemed that he should ever have reached these vile cross-trees and the more convulsively he grasped the heel of the topgallantmast and any rope that offered. He was aware that if he instantly and with a firm manly resolution let himself dangle, perhaps with eyes closed, then his questing feet would most probably find a hold; but this awareness did him little practical good- it led to no decisive action, only to endless reflections about the imbecility of human will and the true nature of vertigo.

Jack, following his lieutenant's significant look at the close of the ceremony with the flowers, seized the position at once. He kissed the little girl, passed the bouquet to his coxswain, and said, 'Bonden, lay aloft: make these fast to the maintruck, and on your way down show the Doctor the most convenient way of reaching the deck. My compliments, and should be glad to see him in the cabin.'

By the time Stephen reached the deck it was covered with smiling, gift-bearing Kutaliotes of one kind and another - Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, Jew, Armenian, Copt- and more were coming in little boats. And by the time he reached the cabin it was deep in the fragrant smoke of Cephalonian tobacco; the hookah was bubbling away in the middle, and Captain Aubrey, Father Andros and Sciahan Bey were sitting about it on cushions, or to be more exact on all the Surprise's pillows hastily covered with signal flags, drinking coffee out of Wedgwood cups. They welcomed him cordially, even affectionately, and gave him an amber mouthpiece to smoke with. 'We have fallen wonderfully lucky,' said Jack. 'If I do not mistake, the Bey's people have found a monstrous fine bear, and we are going to hunt him tomorrow.'

'He was a monstrous fine bear indeed, my dear,' wrote Captain Aubrey in a letter dated Surprise, off Trieste, 'and if only we had been a little braver, you should have had his skin. He stood at bay, with his back to a rock, rearing up seven or eight feet tall - eyes flashing, red mouth foaming, hair on end - looking very like Admiral Duncan, and we could have shot him through and through. But no, no, cried Stephen - a bear is a gentleman, and must be dispatched with a spear. Very true, we said, and begged him to show us how. Not at all, said he: he was concerned only with seeing that the bear was not abused: the honour of killing him obviously belonged to a man of war, not to one of peace. This we could scarcely deny, but the question was, which man of war? I thought the Bey should certainly have the precedence, being of higher rank; he said that was great nonsense - common good manners required him to give way to a stranger. While we were arguing the toss the bear dropped down on all fours and walked quietly into a little bushy dell beside the rock, a most devilishly awkward place to tackle him in. Finally some meddling fellow suggested that both Sciahan and I should set about him together. We could not very well refuse, but I assure you we took our time about creeping in among those infernal bushes, crouching and grasping our spears and glaring into the deep shadows and expecting the brute to charge any second- he was as massive as a cart-horse, though lower on his pins. The only dogs left alive by this time were the cautious ones that kept well behind us, and we had them taken up, in case their silly din prevented us from hearing the bear. And so we minced along, listening with all our ears; and I have never been so frightened in all my life. Then there was Stephen screeching out "Gone away" and hallooing and waving his hat, and there was the bear a quarter of a mile off, going straight up the mountainside like a vast great hare. There we were obliged to leave him, I am afraid, since I had to get back to the ship; but Lord, sweetheart, how that day with even a very indifferent pack of hounds did lift my heart! So did a trifle of action the next night, when we were becalmed off Corfu, and the very enterprising Frenchman in command of the island, a General Donzelot, sent out a number of boats, trying to snap up one or two of the convoy. They did not succeed, and no one was seriously hurt, but we had a lively night of it, and in her agitation one of the merchantmen fell foul of us when a breeze got up, carrying away our jibboom; so we are quite glad to have reached the comparative peace of these waters, where there are plenty of our friends to protect us: three frigates and at least four sloops or brigs. We have only just arrived and I have not seen them all yet: Hervey, the senior naval officer, is looking into Venice until tomorrow. But Babbington is here in the Dryad, and he sent to ask me to dinner even before we had dropped our anchor. So is young Hoste. He has done wonders - a very active officer - and I wish I could like him better, yet there is something of Sidney Smith about him, something a trifle self-congratulatory and theatrical; and then he does burn a shocking number of small prizes, which does him no good and the French no harm, but which does ruin the poor unfortunate men that own and sail them. This is strictly between ourselves, my dear, not to be repeated to anyone. Henry Cotton is here too, in the Nymphe. He was on shore when we arrived, but his surgeon came over - you remember him, I am sure, Mr Thomas, the talkative gentleman that called on Stephen when he was staying with us - to beg that Dr Maturin would lend a hand in some particularly delicate operation; and he told me that there is now an overland post by way of Vienna that is fairly sure to get through, at least for the moment. The position in these parts is very confused: the local French commanders are able, energetic, resourceful men and sometimes I feel that our allies- but perhaps I had better leave that subject alone. Indeed, sweetheart, I must leave my letter alone too, for I have just heard Harry Cotton's barge come alongside, his hoarse old coxswain wheezing out "Nymphe, Nymphe", like an asthmatic grampus.'

Aboard the Nymphe herself, Dr Maturin leant over his patient's yellow, glistening, horror-filled face and said 'There: it is all over now. With the blessing you will do very well.' And to the man's messmates, almost as wan and horrified as their friend, 'You may untie him now; you may cast him off.'

'Thankee, sir,' said the patient in a whisper, as Stephen took the piece of padded leather from between his back teeth, 'thankee very kindly for your pains.'

'I have read your description of the operation, of course,' said the surgeon of the Cerberus, 'but I had not expected such dispatch. It might have been an act of presti - presti - legerdemain.'

'I admire your courage, sir,' said the surgeon of the Redwing.

'Come, gentlemen,' said Mr Thomas, 'I think we have all earned a little refreshment.'

They all walked off into the empty gunroom, where Mr Thomas treated them to a bottle of Tokay. 'My next case,' he said, after they had gossiped for a while about Malta and the Toulon blockade, 'is a perfectly commonplace wandering ball, a pistol ball received some years ago and now causing a certain amount of pain as the result of recent physical exertion. It is lodged just at the external edge of the levator anguli scapulae, and it presents no particular interest to the philosophical surgeon, but for the fact that it is lodged in a most romantic frame.'

'Indeed?' said Stephen, seeing that some remark was called for and that neither of the others felt inclined to make it.

'Yes, sir,' said Thomas with great satisfaction. 'Perhaps you will allow me to begin at the beginning?' This seemed a reasonable request, but his friends, who knew Mr Thomas, who had heard it all before, and who had seen Dr Maturin perform his suprapubic cystotomy, drank up their Tokay and took their leave; and even Maturin gave only the faintest smirk of assent.

'Well, now, some time ago we were off Pola, steering south-west with a light breeze at north or thereabouts, very early in the morning or perhaps I should say late at night- before the idlers had been called, in any case; and in passing I may observe that it is tolerably whimsical to speak of them as idlers, more whimsical if anything than calling the master, purser and surgeon noncombatants. I am sure that when I was surgeon's mate in the old Andromeda, or assistant-surgeon as we say nowadays, and indeed it is far more proper, mate having a certain colloquial, familiar connotation by no means suitable for a member of a learned profession- I am sure I went away in cutting-out expeditions or in sweeps along the coast in the yawl - twice I had command of the yawl! - or in the barge more often than the great majority of line-of-battle-ship mids. But as I was saying or at all events intended to say, this hour between night and day is the very best time, so long as there is no great wind, for believe me, anything more than a topgallantsail breeze will infallibly put them down, the very best time for catching those fish they call scombri in these parts which I take to be close kin to our mackerel, though they eat far more delicate; and there I was with my wand over the taffrail, fishing along the side of the wake with a piece of bacon-rind cut in the shape of a sand-eel - some say they can be catched in greater numbers with red flannel, but I swear by my bacon-rind. Mark you,' he said, raising one finger, 'it must be well soaked. But once it has spent four and twenty hours in the steep-tub, once it is really pliable, there is nothing to touch your lithe white unctuous rind for enticing the big fellows. So there I was with the lieutenant of Marines beside me, in full expectation of catching the gunroom's breakfast -simple broiling on a piping hot well-oiled gridiron is best, I assure you: elaborate sauces and Persian apparatus take away their true flavour- but, however, before I had had so much as a single bite Norton cried out "Hold" or perhaps "Hush" - something to that effect. Norton, I should have said, was the Marine: William Norton, of a Westmorland family, related to the Collingwoods. "Listen," he says, "Ain't that musketry?" '

Musketry it was, and after an exact account of what the officer of the watch said - his initial scepticism and growing conviction - and how the Nymphe was put about, Mr Thomas very slowly brought the sun up over the eastern horizon to reveal a houario that had evidently just captured the small skiff it was now taking in tow. The frigate at once gave chase, and with all the more zeal because the increasing light showed French uniforms aboard the houario. But pretty soon it appeared that the chase, which could sail closer to the wind than the square-rigged Nymphe, would weather Cape Promontore whereas the frigate would not- in short, that the houario would escape. Here Mr Thomas branched off on to considerations to do with sailing - the fore-and-aft rig as opposed to the square- various combinations that might with advantage be tried - the true force of windmills, how measured by a friend of his - and Stephen's attention wandered until he heard the words 'But to cut a long story short, down came her foresail when she was within a cable's length of the point- she flew up into the wind directly, of course- and there was a fellow bounding about the deck like a Jack-in-a-box, knocking people down right and left. The very last moments I did not see, because the captain called out to me with that unnecessary, illiberal vehemence so many sailors affect, desiring me to take my tackle out of the way - parenthetically I may say that I gave him such a dose, such a comfortable dose, the next day, when he was to take physic: I did not scruple to add two scruples of colocynth to his black draught, ha, ha, ha! Colocynth for ever, and the strong watery gripes. Are you not amused, my dear sir?'

'Very much amused, colleague.'

'But I was on deck again by the time we were lying to and our boat was coming back from the captured houario, and there he was, laughing all over his face and waving to his friends as they stood there lining the rail and cheering.'

'To whom do you refer, colleague?'

'Why, to the Jack-in-a-box, of course. He was laughing all over his face because he had escaped from the French, and he was waving to his friends on the quarterdeck because he had served in this very ship before he was captured. He had once been third lieutenant of the Nymphe and there were still many people aboard who had been shipmates with him. That was what was so romantic, don't you see? He escaped from the French, rowed out to sea in a little boat hoping to find the English frigate he had heard was cruising off the cape, was taken by an enemy patrol when he could actually see our topsails against the sky, and then when he was saved at the last moment he found that his rescuer was his very own ship, or had been. I should have said it was he who cut the houario's halliard, bringing down her foresail with a run. Rescued by his very own ship! If that ain't romantic, I don't know what romance is.'