The Letter of Marque (32 page)

Their mama did not like it, and she would have liked it even less if she had not known that they could switch from one kind of language to another without the slightest difficulty; yet even so she turned to Mrs Martin, who was darning her husband's stockings, and said 'My dear Mrs Martin, I shall be heartbroken when the ship sails, but if those children stay here much longer, I am afraid they will grow into perfect little savages.'

'Two more days will do them no harm,' said Mrs Martin comfortably. 'And it is only two more days, I believe.'

'I am afraid it is,' said Sophie. 'The sauerkraut is promised for tomorrow, Mr Standish?'

'Yes, ma'am; and I am confident it will come,' said the purser, adding still.

She sighed. Of course she was sorry, very deeply sorry, to be losing her husband, and the prospect, though foreseen, though inevitable and though prayed for with all her heart and soul at one time, made her desperately low in her spirits; yet some exceedingly small part of this lowness was also connected with her leaving Shelmerston. She had lived a very quiet, retired life, and although she had been twice to Bath, twice to London and several times to Brighton, Shelmerston was unlike anything she had seen or imagined; indeed it was the nearest thing to a Caribbean pirates' base that any English country gentlewoman was likely to see, particularly as the sun had shone brilliantly from the day of her arrival. Yet it was a base inhabited by the civillest of pirates, where she could walk anywhere, smiled upon and saluted, wandering and exploring the narrow sanded streets without the least apprehension, she being the wife of the most deeply admired, most deeply respected man in the port, the commander of that fabulous gold-mine the Surprise.

The whores and demi-whores had startled her at first, for although she had noticed the odd trollop in Portsmouth, she had never seen anything like this number - a considerable part of the population, calmly accepted. There were some wicked old screws among them, but upon the whole they were young, pretty, brightly dressed and cheerful. They sang and laughed and had a great deal of fun, especially in the evening, when they danced.

They fascinated Sophie, and as she had several times thanked them openly and sincerely for their kindness to her children, they bore her no ill-will for her virtue. Indeed, the whole town fascinated her; there was always something going on, and if she had not engaged to help young Mr Standish with his accounts she would rarely have left the broad bow-window that commanded the entire sea-front, the wharves, the shipping and the bay itself, a royal box in a never-ending theatre.

The chief event of this afternoon was the appearance of the William's carriage, a vehicle originally intended for the Spanish Captain-General of Guatemala and very highly decorated to impress the natives of those parts; however, it had been taken by a Shelmerston privateer during the Seven Years War and resigned to the William in settlement of a debt some fifty years ago. The builders had had a team of six or eight mules in mind, but now, on the rare occasions the machine came out, it was drawn by four wondering farm-horses from Old Shelmerston. And at this moment, having cleared the arch from the stable-yard, they trotted soberly off towards Boulter's Wharf, accompanied by the children of the town, running on either side and cheering; and Sophie hurried upstairs to put on her sprigged muslin.

For some time it had been an open secret in the Navy that Jack Aubrey was to be restored to the post-captains' list; he no longer declined invitations - indeed, he entertained large parties of his old friends, straining the William's resources to the utmost - and he thoroughly looked forward to dining with Admiral Russell. 'The only thing I regret,' he said, as the carriage bowled along the turnpike road behind Allacombe, 'is that Stephen is not here. The Admiral has invited the new Physician of the Fleet, and they would have got along together famously.'

'Poor dear Stephen,' said Sophie, shaking her head. 'I suppose he will be in Sweden by now.'

'I suppose he will, if he has made a good passage,' said Jack.

They looked at one another gravely and said no more until the carriage turned in at the Admiral's gates.

Stephen had not made a good passage. In fact at this point he had not advanced much above thirty miles towards Stockholm, and even by the time the Surprise put to sea two days later, the Leopard, with her new rudder and false keel at last, had only just lost sight of Manton church. After the first few days' wait there was little point in Stephen's travelling north by land, because he would never have caught the packet; he therefore stayed where he was, settling at the Feathers and spending much of the day with his friend Parson Heath. As Stephen admitted to himself, he was not unwilling to have his journey delayed by shipwreck, act of God or anything truly out of his control; and then on quite another plane he was happy to become familiar with ruffs and reeves. He had seen them often enough passing through the Mediterranean lagoons on migration - rather dull birds - but now, leading him to a wildfowler's hide day after day, Heath showed him scores and even hundreds of ruffs in the full glory of their mating plumage, dancing, quivering, and sparring with one another, showing the extraordinary variety of their frills in ritual battle, all apparently in a state of unquenchable sexual excitement.

'A powerful instinct, Maturin, I believe,' said Mr Heath.

'Powerful indeed, sir. Powerful indeed."

The reeves' instinct, though certainly less spectacular, was perhaps stronger still. In spite of total neglect from their mates, the eagerness of predators whose living depended on their efficiency, and some exceptionally bitter weather, Stephen and Heath saw three of the brave birds bring off their entire clutch, while a fourth began hatching just as a choir-boy messenger came to say that the Leopard was moving out of the yard.

The Leopards themselves improved slightly on acquaintance. This was partly because as soon as she was towed out of Manton harbour a fine topgallant breeze filled her sails and carried her along at six and even seven knots, a splendid pace for her in her present state and one that put even the sullen Mr Roke in a good humour: it was also because a disabled seaman, once a foremast hand in the Boadicea and now employed in the Manton yard, recognized Dr Maturin, while at the same time the broad sheet of sailcloth nailed to his sea-chest, a temporary direction with the words S. Maturin, passenger to Stockholm, was torn off as the chest came aboard again, revealing the names of the ships he had served in, painted on the front according to the custom of the service and crossed through with a fine red line at the end of each commission.

Stephen had noticed that seafaring men, though upon the whole somewhat credulous and ignorant of the world, were often knowing, suspicious, and wary at the wrong time; but this independent double testimony was irresistible, and at dinner on the first day out Mr Roke, after a general silence, said 'So it seems you was a Leopard, sir?'

'Just so,' said Stephen.

'Why did you never tell us, when you came aboard?'

'You never asked.'

'He did not like to show away,' said the purser.

They pondered on this, and then the surgeon said 'You must be the Dr Maturin of The Diseases of Seamen.'

Stephen bowed. The purser sighed and shook his head and observed that that was the Board all over: they just gave you a chitty saying 'Receive So-and-So aboard, to be borne for victuals only, as far as Stockholm", without a word of his quality: he might be Agamemnon or Nebuchadnezzar and you would be none the wiser. 'We thought you was just an ordinary commercial, going to the Baltic on business, like these gents,' - pointing at the merchants, who looked down at the spotted tablecloth.

'She was still a man-of-war when you was in her, I dare say?' said Roke.

'It was her last voyage as a fifty-gun ship, the voyage in which she sank the Waakzaamheid, a Dutch seventy-four, in the high southern latitudes. It was not a well known action, because in those waters there could be no remains, no prisoners; and I believe it was never gazetted.'

'Oh tell us about it, Doctor, if you please,' cried Roke,- his face shining with sudden reflected glory, and the other sailors drew their chairs nearer. 'A fifty-gun ship to sink a seventy-four!'

'You must understand that I was below, and that although I heard the gunfire I saw nothing of it: all I can tell you is what I was told by those that took part.' They did not mind at all; they listened greedily, pressing him for exact details, requiring him to repeat various episodes so that they should get it just so; for the Leopard, though now at some removes from her state of grace, was still their ship. That was the great point. They were polite about Jack Aubrey's recent feats -indignant at his ill-usage too - but all that was on a different plane and quite remote: it was the Leopard, the tangible Leopard, that really mattered.

In the next few days he told the tale, or particular actions in it, again and again; sometimes in the captain's cabin, where he was invited to dine and where he pointed out the exact places where the stern-chasers had been made fast and where traces could still be seen, sometimes on the quarterdeck, where his hearers put him right if he made the slightest change of epithet or order; and all this while the breeze held true, running them north-north-east as fast as they could wish. Faster than ever Stephen wished. He saw his first northern birds - eider in the Skager Rack - with a sinking heart. A kindly western shift wafted them down the Cattegat and right through the Belt. Never a pause until a broken foretopmast checked them a little north of Gland; from then on their progress was slow and they lost all hope of an excellent run, which caused a great deal of cursing and irritation; yet their progress could not be too slow for him, and these hours of dawdling were a relief from his continually mounting tension.

But for all that on Thursday morning, when the Surprise heaved in sight, he went aboard her directly.

He had come on deck unusually early, having had a poor night and having been unable to bear another comic sneeze in the wardroom. His colleague, the present surgeon of the Leopard, was not a bad young man, but he had come by the notion that it was droll to exaggerate the sound of a sneeze; by now it had grown perfectly habitual, and every time he made this din, which was quite often, he would gaze round the table to share the fun.

Stephen was early on deck, therefore, and he found the captain and most of his officers peering anxiously at a vessel to windward, hull up on the starboard quarter.

'She has no pennant,' said the captain. 'She cannot be a man-of-war.'

"No. She is a privateer for sure, an American privateer," said the master.

'If only you had got the topmast up last night we might have run in to Vestervik. There is no hope now: look at her feather.'

A very fine feather it was: with topgallants and weather studdingsails abroad she was making better than ten knots, and her bows threw the white water wide on either side.

During their mutual reproaches - for the master naturally returned the captain's blame - the pleasant young mate, whose name was Francis, borrowed Roke's telescope. He stared long and hard, and then with a worried face he passed the glass to Stephen.

'Comfort yourself, Mr Francis,' said Stephen when he had made triply sure. 'That is the Surprise, commanded by Mr Aubrey. He was to meet me in Stockholm. Captain Worlidge, may I beg you to lie to and hang out a flag to show that we should like to communicate with her? She will take me in to Stockholm, and that will be a great saving of time.'

He had acquired great authority as the oldest Leopard of them all; he now spoke with staggering assurance; and the alternative was so worthless that Worlidge said he was always ready to oblige a King's officer, and the Leopard laid her main topsail to the mast.

No one could have looked at the new Member for Milport's face without his heart lifting: it was not that Jack Aubrey's was exultant or filled with obvious pleasure - indeed for some time after they had lain close to the Leopard it was clouded - but it possessed a shining inner life, a harmony of its own, and the strange almost paralytic deadness that had hung over it in repose these last months was now quite gone. His had been a naturally cheerful countenance until all joy was driven out of it, a fine ruddy face whose lines and creases had been formed by laughter and smiling; now it was essentially the same again, ruddier if anything, and lit by eyes that seemed an even brighter blue.

Stephen felt his sadness and near-desperation recede, almost vanish, as they talked and talked about Cousin Edward Norton's extraordinarily handsome conduct, and about the House of Commons, where they agreed that Jack's wisest course would be silence except in the case of overwhelming conviction on a naval point, and a general but by no means unconditional support of the Ministry: or at least of Lord Melville. Then, having heard a fairly detailed account of the Leopard's grounding, Jack, together with Pullings and Martin, showed Stephen the new Manilla rigging and the slightly greater rake they had given the foremast. 'I believe she gains an extra fathom of line,' said Jack.

'Sure, she is going as fast as a horse at a good round trot,' said Stephen, looking over the side at the swift smooth run of the sea, dipping to show the ship's copper amidships; and as he spoke he realized that each hour was bringing him some ten miles nearer Stockholm and that tomorrow would probably see him ashore.

'I should not trust this wind, though," said Pullings. 'It has been veering all this watch, and I doubt the studdingsails stand until eight bells.'

This view of the present racing along to become the future grew in Stephen's mind as they ate their dinner, and by the time they had said everything that could be said about parliament, Ashgrove, Woolcombe, the children, Philip Aubrey and the Surprise's new iron water-tanks, his mind tended to stray away. In spite of the very profound satisfaction of seeing the old Jack Aubrey on the other side of the table, his anxiety was welling up again.

Jack knew why Stephen had come into the Baltic, of course, and towards the end of the meal he saw that his friend was looking both wretchedly ill and ten years older; but this was ground he could not possibly venture upon unasked, and after a long, awkward silence - most unusual with them - it occurred to him that he must not return to his own affairs, that he had already been far too self-centred and unfeeling. He therefore called for another pot of coffee and spoke about Standish and music. 'Since we met,' he said, 'I am glad to say the ship has acquired a purser. He is not at all experienced - has never been to sea, and Sophie helps him with his sums - but he is a gentlemanlike fellow, a friend of Martin's, and he plays an amazingly fine fiddle.'