The Reverse of the Medal (32 page)

CHAPTER TEN

'It is understood, then,' said Mr Lowndes of the Foreign Office, 'that you proceed to no action at present, but that unless circumstances are extraordinarily favourable you confine yourself to making contacts in Valparaiso and Santiago; and that the aggregate prizes taken, less ten per cent, shall be deducted from the agreed daily subvention, and that there shall be no other claims on His Majesty's Government.'

'There is also half the fair wear and tear,' said Stephen. 'In a ship of such immense value, and in seas of such unparalleled turbulence, the fair wear and tear is reckoned at a hundred and seventy pounds a month, a hundred and seventy pounds a lunar month: I must insist upon this point; I must insist that it be specifically set down.'

'Very well,' said Mr Lowndes sulkily. He made a note and continued, 'Here you have a list of the notables and military men recommended by the Chilean Council for Liberation and by our own sources of information; and here you have the statement of what munitions and what sums of money the Council may provide. It is also understood that these sums and this material will invariably be assumed to emanate from the Council itself and in no way from His Majesty's Government. And since it is surely unnecessary for me to repeat that in the event of any unsuccessful conflict with the local authorities the whole undertaking will be disavowed and that you will receive no official support whatsoever, I believe that is all, apart from what Colonel Warren and Sir Joseph may have to add.'

'For my part,' said Colonel Warren, who was speaking not as a soldier but as a member of the Committee, to which all three belonged, 'I have only to give Dr Maturin the relevant codes and the names of the people with whom he may communicate. Perhaps you will check them, sir,' he added, passing the packet to Stephen.

'On the naval side there are these two documents,' said Sir Joseph, tapping them with his spectacles. 'A letter of exemption that will prevent the pressing of Dr Maturin's people, and another that will allow him to refit and obtain supplies at His Majesty's yards, paying by ninety-day bills on London at no more than prime cost.'

'In that case,' said Mr Lowndes, standing up, 'it only remains for me to wish Dr Maturin every success.'

'And a happy return - a very happy return,' said the huge colonel in his strange shrill voice, shaking Stephen by the hand with a kindly look.

Sir Joseph saw them to the street door, and as soon as it closed behind them he directed his voice down the back stairs and called out 'Mrs Barlow, you may dish up as soon as you please.'

'I am so sorry, Maturin,' he said, returning to the room, 'it was inhuman of Lowndes to go on so long. He might have been settling a treaty with a hostile power rather than - how I hope he did not destroy your appetite. Knowing that you people of the old faith are required to mortify your flesh today, I went down early and found some really fresh oysters, a couple of hen lobsters, and such a bold turbot! If he is overcooked I shall never forgive the Foreign Office, never as long as I live.' He poured two glasses of sherry. 'But I must say I did admire your tenacity about the financial side.'

'It is wealth that does it,' said Stephen. 'Ever since I had a great deal of money I have found that I much dislike being parted from it, particularly in a sharp or overbearing manner. Whereas formerly I would meekly allow myself to be choused or bullied or put down, I now counter-attack with a confidence and an asperity that quite surprises me and that nearly always answers.' He raised, his glass and said 'I drink to your complete and early success.'

'Thank you,' said Blaine. 'Warren and I believe we are fairly close behind our fox. It is very high treason indeed and only about twenty men are capable of committing it - I mean, are in a position to commit it. This twentieth man is very wary and cunning, but I think Warren, with all the resources at his disposal, will find him out. Warren is much more intelligent than you might suppose from his military face and his shape; he is a eunuch, you know, and a man without -,

'If you please, sir,' said Mrs Barlow severely, at the door, and Sir Joseph, blushing, led Stephen to the dining-room. 'What news of poor Aubrey?' he asked, as they sat down.

'He has all the hands he wants - has turned many away and has accepted others only on liking - and means to make a short cruise in the Bay for a month or so, to see how they shake down and whether any fail to give satisfaction. I am to join him on Saturday, taking the early coach tomorrow.'

'I am glad he is so fortunate with his crew: the cleverer men would of course come in droves to sail with such a captain, such a prize-taker. A wonderful change from having to rely on the receiving-ships! He does deserve some good luck after so much wretchedness. And yet, you know, that vile job did the ministry no good. Quinborough is perhaps the most unpopular man in the nation at present; he is hooted in the street, and the Radicals are clean forgotten in the general outcry against the sentence and the conduct of the trial. The town is full of praise for the officers and men at the Exchange and their cheering: Government completely mistook the feeling of the country. People enjoy seeing a short-weight baker pilloried, or a fraudulent stock-jobber, but they could not bear a naval officer being set up in the machine.'

'The seamen were indeed a glorious sight. I was astonished and delighted to see so many.'

'Government could scarcely have mismanaged the business worse. They delayed the execution of the sentence until the whole island was filled with indignation and until there happened to be a strong squadron in the Downs and several ships at the Nore, together with far more than usual in the Medway and the upper reaches of the Thames. All these ships present, to say nothing of the large floating population of seamen, at a time when tide and wind were perfect for bringing them up the river and taking them down again. Of course many officers came up and of course large parties were given leave - I am told that even the press-tender's crew appeared, on the pretence of looking for deserters. And now Quinborough and his friends are reduced to having pamphlets written to defend their conduct.'

The bold turbot came in, together with a bottle of Montrachet, and after a busy pause Stephen said 'I believe you may forgive Mr Lowndes after all.'

'A wordy animal,' said Sir Joseph, but without animosity; and then, 'Speaking of pamphlets, what did you think of your friend's? Of Mr Martin's?'

'Faith,' said Stephen, 'I have not read it. A packet came from the remote waste where he lives, the creature, just before I left for Bury. I saw from his note that all was well - a pretty wound and the stitches firm - so put it by to look into later. I imagine it is the paper on the True Weevils that he has been intending to write for some time.'

'Oh no, dear me no. Its title is A statement of Certain Immoral Practices prevailing in the Royal Navy, together with some remarks upon Flogging and Impressment.'

Stephen laid down his fork and his piece of bread. 'Is it very severe?' he asked.

'Scorpions ain't in it. He excepts the frigate S-- under the honourable conduct of Captain A- from charges of whoredom, sodomy, and cruel capricious tyrannical punishment, but he comes down on the rest like a thousand of bricks. And on the system of recruiting. Happily for him he can afford to do so, since as I understand it he has married and settled down on his living in the country.'

'He has no living in the country or anywhere else. He meant to go on sailing with Aubrey and me as a naval chaplain.'

'Well, I am heartily sorry for it, he being such a capital entomologist and a friend of yours; for after this outburst, however moral, however true, he will never get another ship. He would have been far better advised to keep to his True Weevils, or even better his New World Cicindelidae. However, let us hope that his wife brought him a reasonable fortune, so that he may continue to indulge in the luxury of telling his betters of their faults. Cicindelidae, those glorious beetles! I have not yet arranged or even classed above half the collection you was so very kind as to bring me, though I often sit up with them till one in the morning. But oh, Maturin, I blush to admit it, seeing that he was the rarest of the rare - an awkward movement sent duodecimpunctatus to the ground, and an even unhappier lurch, trying to save him, set my foot square on his back. If you should happen to pass by the shores of the Orinoco, I should be infinitely obliged...'

Beetles, the Entomological Association, and the Royal Society carried them to their cheese, and when Mrs Barlow brought in the coffee she said 'Sir Joseph, I have put the gentleman's bones under his hat on the chair in the hall.'

'Oh yes,' said Blaine, 'Cuvier sent Banks a parcel of bones for you, and Banks, knowing you would be here today, gave them to me.'

'They are probably those of a solitaire,' said Stephen, palping the parcel as he took his leave. 'How very kind and thoughtful in Cuvier.'

He walked fast to Black's, hurried upstairs to where all his possessions lay scattered abroad, waiting to be packed, and undid his packet. They were not the bones of a solitaire, far less those of a dodo, as he had half hoped, hut a mixed set of commonplace storks, cranes, and possibly one brown pelican. The bones were loosely wrapped in a gannet's skin, reasonably well preserved but in no way extraordinary. Any naturalist's shop near the Jardin des Plantes could have supplied it. Yet it did not seem likely that anyone would have carried a witless joke so very far and Stephen began examining the bones one by one. Nothing there: but on the inside of the skin there was a message. It looked like a taxidermist's notes but in fact it read Si la personne qui s 'int�sse au pavilion de partance voudrait bien donner rendez-vous en laissant un snot chez Jules, traiteur a Frith Street, elle en aurait des nouvelles.

'Pavilion de partance,' said Maturin aloud, frowning. He tried a number of recombinations but still it came out as pavilion de partance; and the more he repeated it the more it seemed to him that perhaps he had heard it long ago in France.

He walked down the stairs towards the library, still muttering; but at their foot he met the amiable Admiral Smyth. 'Good evening to you, sir,' he said. 'I was on my way to find a naval encyclopaedia, but now I may cut my journey short, I find. Pray what is meant by a pavilion de partance?'

'Why, Doctor,' said the Admiral, smiling benignly, 'you must often have seen it, I am sure - the blue flag with a white square in the middle that we hoist at the foretopmasthead to signify that we mean to sail directly. It is generally called the Blue Peter.'

'The Blue Peter! Oh, of course, of course. Thank you, Admiral - very many thanks indeed.'

'Not at all,' said the Admiral, chuckling. He carried on along the corridor while Stephen returned to his stairs and his room. There he tossed his three shirts off the elbow chair and sat down. His mind or perhaps his breast was filled with a tumult of emotions, some of them exquisitely painful. The series of incidents called up by the name of the flag and by the now comprehensible message had come back to him accurately and in great detail the moment Admiral Smyth gave his definition, yet now as he sat there staring at the blank window he went over the history again and again. The Blue Peter was a very large heart-shaped diamond, blue of course, that had belonged to Diana when she was in Paris earlier in the war, and it was an object that she delighted in, an object to which she was most passionately attached. She could live there perfectly well, since before she became a British subject again by marrying Stephen she was legally an American; and she was still there when Jack Aubrey's sloop the Ariel was wrecked on the Breton coast. Stephen was suspected of being an intelligence-agent and he and Jack, together with their companion Jagiello, an officer in the Swedish service, were taken to Paris and lodged in the Temple prison. It seemed likely that Stephen at least would be shot and Diana attempted to save him by bribing a minister's wife with the diamond, an act that very nearly sealed his fate by seeming to prove that he was an agent of great importance. They were in fact released, but for an entirely different reason: a body of influential men in Paris, headed by Talleyrand, were convinced that at this juncture Buonaparte could be put down and the war brought to an end if England would agree to a negotiated peace, and they needed an exceptional, well-introduced messenger to carry their proposals. Their agent, Duhamel, a senior member of one of the French intelligence services, put it to Stephen that he was the right man, and after a good deal of fencing Stephen agreed, his terms being the liberation of his companions and of Diana and the restitution of the diamond. The restitution of the diamond was politically impossible at such short notice, but it was promised at a later date. That was years ago, and there had been no word of the Blue Peter; indeed, so much had happened since then that the blaze of the great stone was now little more than the memory of a memory.

'It is an odd proposition,' he said, looking at the gannet's skin again, 'and not without its dangers.' He considered the possible disadvantages for a while - abduction, plain murder, and so on - and then said 'But all in all it is worth trying; and I can take the slow coach at noon. It will still get me there in time for Jack's holy tide, the tide that must on no account be missed.' He wrote a few lines stating that if the gentleman who had honoured him with the bones would present himself in the meadow at the end of the carriage-road in the Regent's park at half past eight o'clock tomorrow morning, Dr Maturin would be happy to meet him: Dr M begged that the gentleman might be unaccompanied and that he might carry a book in his hand. He took this down to the hall-porter, asked him to send a lad round to Frith Street, and returned to his packing. His packing was slow, laborious, and inefficient; there were plenty of skilled hands in the club who would have done it for him, but the habit of secrecy had so grown upon him, had become so nearly instinctive, that he did not like strangers to see even his shirts unfolded. It was his sea-chest that gave him most trouble: it had two trays and a little inner chest or till, and time and again he filled the whole and forced down the lid, only to find that one of these three was lying on his bed or behind the door. Towards midnight he had the entirety closed and locked, and then he perceived that the pair of pocket-pistols he meant to take with him in the morning were in the lowest compartment of all.