The Hundred Days (20 page)

 ‘In the
nature of things you would have burnt the halffinished gunboat in that event.
Even if we had time to spare, which we have not, most certainly not, such a
miserable prize would not have been worth the while. Jack, I must tell you in
your private ear that we have some allies ashore, rather curious allies, I
admit, who look after these operations: I hope and trust that you will see many
another yard burnt or burning before we reach Durazzo. I am aware that this is
not your kind of war, brother: it is not glorious. Yet as you see, it is
effective.’

‘Do not take me for a bloody-minded man, Stephen, a
death-or-glory swashbuckling cove. Believe me, I had rather see a first-rate
burnt to the waterline than a ship’s boy killed or mutilated.’ Leaning over the
rail he called down orders that took the frigate away from the land. ‘Let us go
down and look at Christy-Pallière’s list with your additions,’ he said. ‘And
may I beg you to unbuckle your breeches at the knee, leave your coat on those
stunsails for the boy to bring down, and lower yourself through the lubber’s
hole. I will guide your feet.’

The list had been very much enriched by Stephen and
Jacob’s private information, and with the wind settling into the west a little
south and increasing to a fine topgallant breeze they went reaching down the
coast at a handsome pace. There was not a night without a fire, great or small,
to larboard; and Stephen noticed that Jack and the master were more than
usually exact in their calculation of distance made good, and that whenever the
ships were off one of the yards Jack Aubrey was in the foretop and Reade
highperched in the schooner’s rigging, gazing at the ruin with a grim
satisfaction. He also noticed that the gunroom was uneasy, remarkably
restrained: they knew that there was something in the intelligence line at
work, something that should not be openly discussed; though Somers, an ardent
fisherman, did say of the flaming carcass of a half-finished corvette, that it
was more like buying one’s salmon off a fishmonger’s slab than catching it with
a well-directed fly.

Yet the satisfaction did exist, and it reached its
height off Durazzo itself, with all seven yards (counting those of the suburbs)
in a blaze that lit the sky, and in which the masts and yards of a small
frigate and two corvettes flamed like enormous torches.

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘it may not be very glorious, Stephen;
but by God, your allies have cleaned the coast marvellously; and although they
have lost us a small fortune in prizemoney, they have saved us a world of time.
There may be something to be said for your Saint George and his omens after
all.’

Chapter Six

At Durazzo they stood out to sea, leaving the blaze
on their larboard quarter and sailing across an uneventful sea with a fine
topgallant breeze. But two days later, a little after seven bells in the last
dog-watch the mild northerly wind that had brought them so far gave a sigh and
faltered; and those that knew these waters well said ‘We’re in for a right
levanter, mate.’

Jack gazed at the sky: his officers, the bosun and
the older hands gazed at Jack: and no one was surprised when just before the
usual moment for the pipe ‘Stand by your hammocks’ the Commodore took over the
deck and called for preventer-stays, rolling tackles, the taking in of
topgallants, the rigging of storm-jibs and staysails, and the bowsing of the
guns so taut up against the sides that their carriages squeaked, all except for
the brass bow-chaser that fired the evening gun.

The hands perfectly agreed with the orders,
unwelcome though they were to the watch below, and they worked with remarkable
speed - scarcely a word of direction, all the original Surprises being truly
able seamen - partly because the larbowlins wanted to turn in after a long day
and partly because they all knew how violent and sudden and untrustworthy these
Mediterranean winds could be.

When at last the evening gun boomed out and the
bosun did pipe ‘Stand by your hammocks’, the first gust of the levanter came
racing across the water with a low cloud of spray: it struck the Surprise from
astern, a glancing blow that drove her foretop deep, so that she gave a sudden
peck like a horse going over a hedge and finding the ground on the far side
much lower than it had expected - a movement so violent that it flung Stephen
and Jacob the length of the gunroom, together with their backgammon board, the
dice and the men.

‘It was the all-dreaded thunder-stroke,’ said
Stephen.

‘I am in no position to contradict you, colleague,
being your subordinate,’ said Jacob, ‘but in my opinion it is the first blast
of a levanter. And I believe Shakespeare said thunder-stone.’

‘I do not set myself up as an authority on
Shakespeare,’ said Stephen.

‘Nor I. All I know of the
gentleman is that he had a second-best bed.’

‘I was aware that being gammoned twice running had
vexed you: but to this degree...I wonder that competitive games have survived
so long, such intense resentment do they breed. Even I dislike being beaten at
chess.’

Jacob, having picked up the last of the dice, was
about to say something very cutting indeed, when Somers walked in. ‘Well,
gentlemen,’ he said ‘I would not have you go on deck without tarpaulins and a
sou’wester for the world. I am soused as a herring, and must shift my clothes
directly.’ He moved towards his cabin, and Jacob called after him, ‘Is it
raining?’

‘No, no. It is only a prodigious spindrift worked
up by this levanter - coming aboard in buckets.’

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said Killick to Stephen (he
rarely took notice of the assistant surgeon), ‘which Mr Daniel has taken a
tumble and Poll thinks it may again be his collar-bone.’

His collar-bone it was, and he was stupid from
having pitched from a skid-beam to the deck, hitting his head and shoulder on a
gun and its carriage. Stephen strapped him up, eased his pain, and had him
carried by two strong men of his division (he was well-liked, though a newcomer)
to a cot where he could lie in what peace the ship allowed, which was not
inconsiderable. She had settled down to running about two points free, very
fast and, apart from the racing of water along her side, very quietly; and
since she was both undermanned and healthy, Daniel had an empty corner of the
sick-berth. But Stephen was not satisfied with his bone, still less with his
confusion and his general appearance. He sat with him until the young man
seemed easier, even dozing, and then told Poll to give him as much to drink as
he wanted, soup with an egg beaten up in it at the changing of the watch, and
no company to trouble him with advice of what he ought to have done.

Stephen returned to the gunroom, where he found Jacob
watching Somers and Harding playing chess on a heavyweather board, the men
pegging into holes. He drew him aside and said, ‘You knew Laennec much better
than I, did you not?’

‘I believe so. We used to talk at great length
about auscultation: I read his first treatise and made some suggestions that he
was kind enough to adopt in the final version.’

‘Then pray come and look at one of our most recent
patients.’

‘The scalded cook?’

‘No. Mr Daniel, a master’s mate. The Commodore
brought him aboard at Mahon. I do not like the sound
of his chest, and should like a second opinion.’

They tapped and listened, tapped and listened,
trying to distinguish between the echoes they produced and the working of the
ship. She was running even faster now, in the stronger wind, and the vibration
of her taut rigging, transmitted to her hull by its various points of
attachment, filled the sick-bay with a body of all-pervading sound, pierced by
the squeak or rattle of countless blocks.

The second opinion was not much firmer than the
first, but more foreboding. ‘That amiable young man of yours is in a bad way,
as you know very well: undernourished, meagre. I cannot directly point to an
inchoate phthisis; but if a pneumonia were to declare
itself tomorrow or the next day, I should not be surprised. And that contusion
may well turn very ugly. We have no leeches, I collect?’

‘The midshipmen stole them for bait.’

Four bells in the first watch, and Stephen
remembered his traditional appointment with the Commodore and toasted cheese:
he hurried up the various ladders, holding on with both hands and reflecting as
he climbed that it came naturally to him now. And what was young Daniel going
to do, in foul weather, with only one hand to cling by? The answer came at
once: he would sit in the master’s day cabin, making all the calculations
necessary for fine navigation. Mr Woodbine had already said that it was like
pure dew from Heaven, having a mate as clever with numbers as Newton or Ahasuerus.

For once he was early, though no earlier than the
scent of cheese toasting in its elegant silver dishes: Killick peered at him
through a crack in the door. Stephen had had plenty of time to reflect upon the
trifling interval between the perception of a grateful odour and active
salivation and to make a variety of experiments, checked by his austerely
beautiful and accurate Breguet repeater, before the door burst open and the
Commodore strode in, sure-footed on the heaving deck and scattering seawater in
most directions. ‘There you are, Stephen,’ he cried, his red face and bright
blue eyes full of delight - he looked ten years younger - ‘I am so sorry to
have kept you waiting: but I have never enjoyed a levanter half so much. It is
admirably steady now, for a levanter, and we are under close-reefed topsails
and courses, making close on fourteen knots! Fourteen knots! Should you not
like to come on deck and see the bow-wave we are throwing?’

‘By your leave, sir,’ said Killick, in an obscurely
injured or offended tone, ‘wittles is up.’ He walked in, stone-cold sober, as
steady as a rock, bearing his elaborate toastedcheese affair with its
spirit-lamps burning blue, and followed by his equally grave and sober mate
Grimble, bearing a decanter of Romanée-Conti. ‘Which it wants eating this
directly minute,’ said Killick, with the clear implication that the Commodore
was late, and set the dish down with a certain ceremony.

It was indeed a splendid affair, half a dozen
little covered rectangular dishes poised on a stand whose lower level held the
spirit-lamps, the whole made with love by a Dublin silversmith not far from
Stephen’s Green. But both were too hungry to admire until each had eaten two
dishes, wiped them clean with what little Dalmatian soft-tack remained; then
they gazed at the silver with some complacency and drank their capital wine,
holding the glasses up so that candlelight shone through.

‘I do not like to boast about the qualities of the
ship,’ said Jack, ‘but touching wood and barring all accidents, errors and
omissions, we ought to log well over two hundred miles in four and twenty
hours, as we sometimes did in the Trades, or even better; and if nothing
carries away, and if this dear levanter don’t blow itself out in a single day,
as they sometimes do, we should raise your Pantellaria on Friday, and the Cape
Bon you mention so often. One, three, six or nine days is the rule for this
wind.’

‘So it is for my homely tramontane. But, Jack, do
you not fear the impervious horrors of a leeward shore?’

‘Lord, Stephen, what a fellow you are! Don’t you
know we are in the lonian already, with Cape Santa Maria far astern and no
lee-shore for a hundred sea-miles?’

‘What is the difference between a sea and a land
mile, tell?’

‘Oh, nothing much, except that the sea-mile is
rather longer, and very, very much wetter, ha, ha ha! Lord, what a wag I am,’
he said, wiping his eyes when he had had his laugh out. ‘Very
much wetter. But leaving wit aside, another three days, do you see - if
we do not waste our time stopping at Malta - should place us well
west of Pantellaria.’

 They were
indeed west of Pantellaria before the levanter, in its turn, died in half a
dozen sullen howls: the two surgeons contemplated the shore and the little
fishing port from the taffrail. ‘After long reflexion,’ said Stephen Maturin,
‘it appears to me that there is no great point in knowing whether the
messengers have passed or not: our mission is the same in either case - to
dissuade the Dey from shipping that which he does not yet possess. And with
this wind Mr Aubrey assures me that nothing could have left Algiers, even if the Dey had the
treasure in his care - a most unlikely event. He also states that it is
extremely improbable that a houario could have survived such a tempest: a
houario is not a xebec. Yet conceivably it might have taken shelter in the
harbour over there,’ - nodding towards Pantellaria - ‘and since I think we had
rather know than not know, I shall beg you to accompany the boat, which the
purser is taking in, ostensibly for the purchase of horsehide, tallow, scourges
and things of that kind, and ask whether there is any news of a Durazzo houario
- your Italian is better than mine. And then, richer in knowledge, we can push
on, passing by Cape Bon, which I long to see at this time of the year. You
have no objection to climbing down into the boat?’

‘None in the least, dear
colleague.
No one can say that my spirit is affected by six-foot waves: and by the way,
what is the difference between a houario and a xebec?’

‘Oh, there are so many regional variations, and
without endless technical details it could not be made plain: but very roughly
the xebec is longer, stronger, and most remarkably fleet. Dear colleague, here
is the boat. Pray urge them to waste not a minute.’

They wasted not a minute, and Mr Candish, having
bought hide and, with Dr Jacob’s help, two puncheons
of the famous local wine, they returned: but empty-handed as far as news of the
Durazzo houario was concerned. The captain of the port, who had sold them the
leather and the wine, had no word of any such vessel calling or passing, and he
very much doubted that so light a craft could have survived such a furious
blow. However, he said, they need not be afraid: there would be no wind of any
kind for at least three days, only very slight western airs, bringing a very
welcome drizzle. If the gentlemen would like company while they lay off the
island, he would be happy to send some young women.