The Surgeon's Mate (8 page)

'Before you leave,' said Stephen, 'I will sling your arm anew. And may I suggest that before I do so, you should wash? In'the broad daylight people might think you had been in a battle of some kind.'

Jack looked at the glass. In the dimness of Miss Smith's bedroom neither had seen the ludicrous smear of rouge on his face: painfully ludicrous, now that he looked so grave. He washed vigorously, stood silent with what patience he could command while Stephen slung his arm, and ran out of the inn.

It seemed hardly a moment before he was back pounding up the stairs with two canvas-wrapped packets and a number of later covers. 'Forgive me, Stephen,' he said, 'nearly all of these are from Sophie, and I cannot read them in a public room.'

He was deep in the pile, busily sorting and arranging so as to read them in order, by the time Stephen had dressed to go to the hospital: his look of startled guilt had changed to one of eager, happy anticipation. By the time Stephen returned, the heap had been reduced to an exact sequence and read over twice; the letters lay under a water-carafe, with several sheets of accounts beside them; and Jack's face showed an odd mixture of deep contentment and worry.

'Sophie sends you her dear love in all of these,' he said. 'And all is well at home, apart from that damned fellow Kimber. George is breeched, and the girls are learning deportment and French. Lord, Stephen, to think of those turnip-headed little creatures learning French!'

'Had she received any of your letters from Boston?'

'Yes: two. Admiral Drury's duplicate dispatches had already told her Leopard was safe, and that good fellow Chads travelled down to Hampshire as soon as the court-martial was over to tell her how Java had picked us up and about Java and Constitution. He was very tactful about my wound: said it was nothing that would put me out of action for long, but it was thought better I should go to America with you and be exchanged from there rather than risk the hot southern passage in a crowded cartel. I am very much obliged to him: she believed it implicitly, and did not worry.'

'I am sure she did. I am sure she believed it.'

'Would the gentlemen like their breakfast now?' asked a chambermaid, bawling through the door.'

'If you please, my dear,' said Stephen. 'And listen, child, beg them to make the coffee twice as strong, will you now?'

'I am sure she did,' he said, as he sipped his thin brew. 'There is a Latin tag you are no doubt familiar with, to the effect that men are usually seen to believe what they wish to believe. I was reflecting upon that only the other day,' he went on, staring out of the window at Diana Villiers and Lady Harriet, who were walking along the far pavement, followed by a footman carrying parcels. 'I was reflecting upon that, and upon its corollary, to wit, that often men do not see what they do not wish to see. In all good faith they do not perceive it. I was reflecting because I had a most striking instance of it in myself. For weeks I had the evidence of a given physical condition in front of my eyes, and yet I did not see it. The physician in me must at least have noticed some of the symptoms; and however fleeting and inconclusive each severally may have been he must have seen that the sum, the convergence, was at least significant: but no, the man would have none of it, and was genuinely amazed when the state of which I speak was forced upon his attention. Gnosce teipsum is very well, but how to come to it? We are fallible creatures, Jack, and adepts at self-deception.'

'So my old nurse used to tell me,' said Jack: Stephen could be prosy at times, and Jack's attention had wandered to the accounts next to Sophie's letters.

'You mentioned that damned fellow Kimber,' said Stephen.

'Yes. He is still at his capers - keeps pressing her for money - swears that a few more thousand will save our stake and turn a dead loss into a handsome profit - talks of thousands now, as though they were the natural unit -I cannot make head or tail of the accounts he has shown her, though I am pretty good at figures - wants her to sell Delderwood - I do not think that goddam paper I signed just before we came away can have been a power of attorney, you know, or he could do without her consent.' 'What were the terms of your marriage-settlement?'

'I have no idea. I just agreed to whatever Sophie's mother - or rather her man of business - proposed, and signed my name where I was told: J. Booby, Captain, RN.'

Stephen knew Mrs Williams of old; he drew some comfort from the fact that as one of the most grasping women of his acquaintance she would probably have tied up Jack's property as tight as the most adamantine, Rhadamanthine law, double-twisted, would allow; and he said, 'My dear, long, long ago, when you first heard of this man's doings in the far eastern seas, I begged you to turn your mind deliberately from the question until La Fleche should have carried us home. I urged you not to waste your time and your vital energy in vain conjectures and recrimination, but to set the matter to one side until you might usefully consider it with the necessary data at hand - until you could obtain skilled legal advice, and confront the fellow in the company of a man as adept in business as he. That was sound advice, and now, sir, it is sounder still. There are only a few days or weeks to go, and to spend them in a state of impotent fury, so that you arrive in England with your intellects disordered, would be simple indeed. Only a few days: Captain Broke's dispatch will certainly be sent the moment it is written. The news will be infinitely welcome to Government.'

'Yes, by God!' cried Jack, his face lightening as the recollection of victory blazed up afresh. 'And happy the man who carries it. Stephen, I shall follow your advice: I shall be an old Stoic: I shall preserve an equal mind, and I shall not worry about Kimber. Besides,' he added in a low tone, the light in his eye diminishing, 'I may have enough worries here in Halifax.'

A truer word he never spoke; for although the sling that Stephen insisted upon, and the wound, the low diet, and the physic, excused him from nightly attendance on Miss Smith, her claims upon his company by day, if not upon his person, were painfully insistent. She seemed to take a perverse delight in compromising herself and in advertising their liaison; she would come openly to the inn when he took refuge on his sickbed, and read to him; and when he sought air and exercise, unable to bear any more of Childe Harold in an emphatic, enthusiastic tone, she walked, hanging on his arm, in the more public parts of Halifax, or drove him, inexpertly, round and round the town in her brother's dogcart. He saw that other men, especially his cousin Aldington, did not envy him; and he was obliged to admit that the company of a flighty, histrionic, unsteady, headstrong, extremely active and ill-judging young woman was not particularly enviable - that Miss Smith had an opinion of her value warranted neither by her charms nor her understanding - and that there were times when he wished Lord Nelson had never, never met Lady Hamilton.

At no time did he wish it more ardently than the day he took her to visit the Shannon, when she spoke of the pair with such eagerness and glee that it seemed to him that not even the dullest could fail to take her meaning. None of the Shannon's officers was dull, and he saw a look of intelligence pass between Wallis and Etough. In spite of her protests, her piercing cry that she longed to see where the hero had lain, he took her straight back to the shore. On shipboard some of his natural authority returned; by land he was pitiably weak. For although he was not unacquainted with women, and although he was very far from indifferent to them, so much of his life had been passed at sea that he was comparatively defenceless: he could not bring himself to be deliberately harsh or unkind. In spite of the reputation he had earned in the Mediterranean during his younger days, he was not at heart a rake; he had never worked out any form of strategy for this kind of encounter and he was surprised, concerned and surprised, when it appeared that strategy was called for.

They met quite often at the dinners he was obliged to attend, and she made him wretched and conspicuous with her mistimed solicitude; so much so that he actually cried off from the Commissioner's ball, although this was a grave breach of naval etiquette. There was also the growing likelihood of Major Smith's return; and although few men had more physical courage than Jack Aubrey, he did not relish the idea of an explanation with the soldier at all, not on his present moral footing.

Day after day went by: the Diligence packet came in from England, with a fresh batch of letters and some warm stockings. And day after day she lay at single anchor next to HMS Nova Scotia, and still poor Captain Broke's dispatch remained unwritten.

'He wanders sadly after a few minutes of painful concentration,' said Stephen. 'The wound in his head, the depressed fracture of the skull, is even worse than we had feared, and it would be very wrong, very cruel, to urge him to give a considered statement of his victory for a great while yet.'

'I wonder they don't ask young Wallis to write it,' said Jack.

'They have done so, but he begs to be excused: he does not wish to lessen his captain's glory, nor to encroach upon it, in the least degree.'

'Very right, very honourable in him, I am sure,' said Jack in a discontented tone. 'But there is such a thing as being too scrupulous by half. However, I dare say the senior officer and the Commissioner will fadge up something between them, if Broke don't recover in the next day or so. They must be on fire to send the news home: I know I am. I am with child to be aboard the packet - see her there in the fairway, swinging to the tide, and the wind as fair as you could wish. I wonder they hang about so long.'

'Why the packet, for all love? She is only to carry the duplicate and the mails: Wallis or Falkiner is to go in the Nova Scotia sloop with the original, and in the nature of things the dispatch must arrive before its echo.'

'You would think so, would you not? But the packet is a flyer, and the sloop is not. What is more, Diligence is not one of your established Falmouth packets; she is a hired packet, and she goes to Portsmouth, right on our doorstep, and I lay you three to one she gets there first, although I dare say Capel will give the sloop a tide or so, if only for the look of the thing.'

'A lady to see you, sir,' said a servant.

'Oh my God,' muttered Jack, and he hurried into the bedroom. Now that the outlying people had all seen the Chesapeake the inn was not so full: they had a sitting-room, and it was into this sitting-room that Diana was shown.

'You look blooming, my dear,' said Stephen.

'I am glad of that,' she replied: and as their eyes met he knew what was in her mind. He had observed this silent transference often, but never so often as with Diana: it came irregularly - there was no commanding it -but when it did come, it was wholly conclusive. It worked in both directions and once it had happened there was not the least possibility of a lie, which could be embarrassing to him both as a physician and as an intelligence agent: he thought it was helped if not positively caused by the interaction of the two gazes and for this reason he sometimes wore blue- or green-tinted spectacles. However, Diana's first words were that they were to sail almost immediately. 'Lady Harriet told me, as a great secret, that Captain Capel and the Commissioner between them have written Captain Broke's dispatches, and they are to go off at once, one set in the Nova Scotia and the duplicate in the packet. But since everyone will know as soon as the orders are sent out, I thought no harm in telling you.'

Her second piece of news was that Miss Smith had overturned her dogcart, taking an awkward corner too fast. 'I came by soon after,' she said, 'and there it was, lying in a heap, with a man sitting on the horse's head. How I despise a woman who cannot take a tumble without flying into hysterics.'

'Was there much damage, so?'

'No. A wheel came off and she tore her petticoat, that is all. I walked her home - tell me, Stephen, who is this Dido?'

'As I recall, she was Queen of Carthage: she granted Aeneas the last favours, and she was much concerned when he left her - when he slung his hook, as we say.'

'Oh. Well, that is a change from Lady Hamilton, at all events. She was in the secret too, and she kept on saying "I shall be a second Dido". How Jack came to be so simple, I cannot tell. Really, upon my honour, a girl like Amanda Smith! I could have told him how it would end.'

'That would have been a great satisfaction to you, Villiers.'

Before she could reply Jack walked in. 'How d'ye do, cousin?' he said. 'I heard your voice, and I thought I would just give you good day before going out. You are looking very well - peaches and cream ain't in it.'

'Thank you, Jack. I was just telling Stephen that Miss Smith has been overset in her dogcart; and that we are to sail directly, either in the Nova Scotia or in the packet.'

'Are we, by God?' cried Jack: and then, 'I hope she was not hurt? No arms or legs broken, or anything like that?'

'No. She was quit for the fright and a torn petticoat. But since we are to go so soon, now is the time to make your farewells and pack your belongings.'

'Oh, as for that, I have nothing but what I stand up in. I shall step round and ask for orders for the packet and then pull across and make sure of decent berths for us.' He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he should ask whether they would like a cabin between them: they had wished Captain Broke to marry them aboard the Shannon, and although the battle and Brake's wound had put an end to that, Jack had understood that the ceremony would take place in Halifax. But as neither had ever uttered a single word since, he felt a delicacy about raising the matter now: he said nothing.

A silence fell when he had gone: at last Diana said 'What is that?' pointing at the remains of their late breakfast.

'It is technically known as coffee,' said Stephen. 'Should you wish for a cup? I cannot recommend it, unless you particularly like ground acorns and roast barley, infused in tide-water.' After another silence he went on, 'We spoke of our marriage some time ago. My dear, since the ship is to sail so very soon, should we not walk round to the presbytery now? It is still before twelve: I am well with Father Costello, and he would pronounce the conjugo without any difficulty.'