The Thirteen Gun Salute (3 page)

Stephen walked in, and Diana at once went over to him as he stood there in the doorway. Unlike Sophie she had dressed rather carelessly, partly because she was not pleased with her husband and partly because as she said 'women with great bellies had no business with finery'. She plucked his waistcoat straight and said, 'Stephen, is it true that you sail tomorrow?'

'With the blessing,' he said, looking a little doubtfully into her face.

She turned straight out of the room and could be heard running upstairs two at a time, like a boy.

'Heavens, Sophie, what a magnificent gown you are wearing, to be sure,' said Stephen.

'It is the first time I have put it on,' she replied, with a wan little smile and tears brimming in her eyes. 'It is the Lyons velvet you were so very kind as to...

The guests arrived, Edward Smith, a shipmate of Jack's in three separate commissions and now captain of the Tremendous, 74, together with his pretty wife. Talk, much talk, the hearty talk of old friends, and in the midst of it Diana slipped in, blue silk from head to foot, the shade best calculated to set off the beauty of a woman with black hair, blue eyes, and an immense diamond, bluer still, hanging against her bosom. She had genuinely meant to make a discreet, unnoticed entrance, but conversation stopped dead, and Mrs Smith, a simple country lady who had been holding forth on jellies, gazed open-mouthed and mute at the Blue Peter pendant, which she had never seen before.

In a way this silence was just as well, for Killick, who acted as butler ashore, had recently been polished: he knew he must not jerk his thumb over his shoulder towards the dining-room in the sea-going way and say 'Wittles is up', but he was not yet quite sure of the right form: now, coming in just after Diana, he said in a low, hesitant tone that might not have been heard if there had been much of a din, 'Dinner- is on table sir which I mean ma'am if you please.'

A pretty good dinner in the English way, a dinner of two courses with five removes, but nothing to what Sophie would have ordered if she had known that this was to be Jack's last at home for an immense space of time. Yet at least the best port the cellar possessed had come up, and when the gorgeously-dressed women left them, the men settled down to it.

'When they are making good port wine, and the better kinds of claret and burgundy,' said Stephen, looking at the candle through his glass, 'men act like rational creatures. In almost all their other activities we see little but foolishness and chaos. Would not you say, sir, that the world was filled with chaos?'

'Indeed I should, sir,' said Captain Smith. 'Except in a well-run man-of-war, we see chaos all around us.'

'Chaos everywhere. Nothing could be simpler than carrying on a banking-house. You receive money, you write it down; you pay money out, you write it down; and the difference between the two sums is the customer's balance. But can I induce my bank to tell me my balance, answer my letters, attend to my instructions promptly? I cannot. When I go to expostulate I swim in chaos. The partner I wish to see is fishing for salmons in his native Tweed - papers have been mislaid - papers have not come to hand - nobody in the house can read Portuguese or understand the Portuguese way of doing business - it would be better if I were to make an appointment in a fortnight's time. I do not say they are dishonest (though there is a fourpence for unexplained sundries that I do not much care for) but I do say they are incompetent, vainly struggling in an amorphous fog. Tell me, sir, do you know of any banker that really understands his business? Some modern Fugger?'

'Oh, Stephen, if you please,' cried Jack, for both Edward and Henry Smith, the sons of an Evangelical parson they much admired, were spoken of as Blue Lights in the Navy (prayers every day aboard and twice on Sunday), and although their fighting qualities took away from any sanctimonious implication the words might possess, it was known that they were very strict about coarse words, oaths and impropriety. Both brothers, Blue Lights or not, had been steadily kind and attentive to him in his recent disgrace, at considerable risk to their naval careers, and he did not wish his guest to be offended.

'I refer to the Fuggers, Mr Aubrey,' said Stephen, looking coldly at him. 'The Fuggers, I repeat, an eminent High Dutch family of bankers, the very type of those who understood their business, particularly in the time of Charles V.'

'Oh? I was not aware - perhaps I mistook your pronunciation. I beg pardon. But in any case Captain Smith is brother to the gentleman I told you about, the gentleman who is setting up a bank just at hand. That is to say another bank, for they have offices all over the county, and one in town of course. You know his other brother too, Henry Smith, who commands Revenge and who married Admiral Piggot's daughter: a thoroughly naval family. Poor Tom would have been a sailor too, but for his game leg. A most capital bank, I am sure; I am making some pretty considerable transfers, Tom Smith being so conveniently near. But as for your people, Stephen, I did not like to see young Robin lose fifteen thousand guineas in one session at Brooks's.'

'I am not to cry up my own family's bank,' said Captain Edward Smith, 'but at least I think I can assert that there is no chaos in Tom's concern, or as little as can be imagined in sublunar affairs. Letters that come in are answered the same day, fourpences do not pass unnoticed, and Tom's notes are honoured all over the country, even in Scotland, as readily as those of the Bank of England.'

'He plays a fine game of cricket, too, in spite of his poor leg,' said Jack. 'He has a man to run for him when he bats, and he bowls a most diabolical twister. I have known him since I was a boy.'

'I beg your pardon, sir, for not recognizing you before,' said Stephen. 'I have had the pleasure of seeing your brother quite often on board the Revenge, and if I had not been so bemused I should have made out the likeness directly.'

It was indeed very marked; and in the drawing-room Stephen contemplated upon the possible extent of family likeness: in this case the two brothers were both typical naval officers of the kind Stephen liked best - men with weather-beaten faces, good-looking, capable faces, whose open, friendly expressions quite lacked the self-consciousness,

self-satisfaction and morgue sometimes to be seen in soldiers; they were both physically very much alike, and Edward Smith had exactly the same rueful, kindly laugh and movement of his head as Henry.

Mrs Williams had turned to him for support. 'Surely you, sir, who have known Mr Aubrey so long, can make him understand how wrong it is to fly off in this wild manner, with the girls' birthday so near at hand and Parliament about to be summoned any day?'

'Why, ma'am,' said Captain Smith, with this same chuckle and inclination of the head, 'with the best will in the world to serve you, I am afraid that is more than I can undertake to do.'

And it was more than any of the others could undertake to do. When Jack Aubrey spoke in his service tone of voice, Sophie, Diana and Stephen knew perfectly well that he could and would fly off in that wild manner: Stephen in particular had often seen him do so. When there was some naval advantage to be gained by losing not a minute, where weather-gage, chase, engagement or escape were concerned, vessels under Aubrey's command were liable to slip their cables and fly off beyond recall, leaving liberty-men, comforts, and even the Captain's sacred coffee behind, to say nothing of unfulfilled social obligations. Stephen was aware that nothing could change this state of affairs; he had been aware of it all along; and that was why he was now standing on the quarterdeck of the Surprise, staring morosely into the offing, a victim of his own over-emphatic persuasion.

Another five or six days would have made things so much easier. Yet on the other hand Jack was in fact much safer afloat: with the opening of parliament just at hand he might have made another blunder, or what was far more likely, this obscure adverse influence might easily have fixed one upon him, either by provocation through a third party or by pure invention. No. Upon the whole Stephen was glad to be at sea. His affairs might still be in some disorder, but Jack had arranged for the purser to put off from Plymouth and join the ship off the Eddystone:Standish would bring many things, including letters, and the pilot-cutter that brought him out would carry letters back again. And then there was always their pause in Lisbon. With all its disadvantages - vexing to an already exacerbated spirit deprived of its habitual balm but trifling in sum - the great voyage that he and Martin had so looked forward to as natural philosophers had actually begun, a voyage that had an even greater importance far Maturin from the point of view of political intelligence. There was a considerable pro-French party in the South American possessions, and this party was also much in favour of slavery: Stephen was as strongly opposed to the French, in the sense of the imperialist, Bonapartist French, as he was to slavery, which he hated with all his being, just as he hated other forms of tyranny, such as that of the Castilians in Catalonia.

Jack Aubrey's other shipmates, above all those who had been with him since his early commands, were also quite used to his abrupt departures. Yet although they were not spiritually disconcerted by the frigate's leaving Shelmerston with a large variety of ropes dangling disgracefully, open pots of paint lying about on deck, part of her starboard blackstrake scraped bare and part tarred and lamp-blacked, while all the officers' washing was still ashore, they were physically much affected, since all this horrible, unseamanlike confusion must be reduced to order without the loss of a moment. They were all on deck, and now that Penlee Head was well astern they, and virtually the whole of the ship's company with them, were exceedingly busy. Exceedingly busy, but not in the least put out or surprised: all the more knowing old hands knew that Jack Aubrey rarely or never put to sea in this tearing hurry unless he had had private intelligence ('And who off of, mate? Who off of?' would ask the oldest and most knowing of them all, tapping the sides of their noses) of an attackable enemy or a glorious prize within the next few hundred miles of sea; and for this reason they flew about their duties with an even greater zeal than unqualified devotion would have required.

Tom Pullings, a captain by courtesy but in fact only a commander in the Royal Navy, and a commander who, like so many of his rank, had no ship to command, was sailing once again as a volunteer, and at present he occupied the quarterdeck with the Captain. Davidge was in the waist with the carpenter and a large number of powerful hands, stowing the frigate's many boats; West and the bosun were on the forecastle apparently playing cat's cradle with an improbable amount of cordage, while hands crept round them, above them, outboard of them, each a thorough-going seaman intent upon his business.

All these officers had been aboard the Surprise in her last spectacularly successful cruise, which had been intended as a mere trial run in home waters, a preparation for this present long voyage, and all had done well out of it; Davidge and West were present chiefly because they felt committed to Aubrey, but partly because they would like to do even better (both had had very heavy debts to pay out of their prize-money) and because, it being generally understood in the service that Aubrey would sooner or later be reinstated, they rather hoped they might regain the Navy List in his wake. Pullings' prime motion was plain devotion to Jack, helped a little by a certain developing shrewishness in Mrs Pullings (unimaginable to those who had only seen her as a timid country-mouse several years and four stout children ago), who more and more frequently asked him why he had no ship when scrubs like Willis and Caley were provided for and who had written a letter, neither very wise nor very well spelt, to the Admiralty, pressing his claims.

Much the same kind of attachment had brought and kept Jack Aubrey's regular followers aboard - his followers in the naval sense, his coxswain, his steward, his bargemen, and a considerable number of hands who had sailed with him all this war and sometimes a part of the last, like old Plaice and his cousins and a dreadful man called Awkward Davies, an uncommonly powerful, clumsy, violent, drunken and illtempered creature who had haunted him voyage after voyage in spite of all that could be said or done. For these men there was also the fact that being aboard a man-of-war run Navy fashion was the natural and proper way of life, as natural as their loose trousers and comfortable roomy frocks. Wearing long togs to astonish friends and relations ashore was gratifying to the mind, and so was screeching and hallooing around the streets of Gosport or kicking up Bob's a-dying from Wapping to the Tower; but apart from fun of that sort, the land's main function was to provide marine stores - it was not a place for real existence. Then again following the sea was what they were used to, and they liked what they were used to, a regular life with no changes of any kind, no mad interference with the steady succession of salt pork on Sunday and Thursday, salt beef on Tuesday and Saturday, with banian-days between; the sea itself could be relied upon to provide all the variety that could possibly be desired.

Obviously this attachment to the frigate and her commander and to the ordered pattern of naval life was unevenly spread among the ship's company. There were some recently-entered hands, taken on during the Surprise's journey from the Baltic, whose devotion was primarily to Mammon. They were thoroughly able seamen - they would never have been aboard otherwise - but they did not yet form part of the crew. The real Surprises, that is to say those who had sailed in her time out of mind and the men from Shelmerston who had fought in her last two actions, looked upon these Orkneymen with distant reserve, and Jack had not yet made up his mind how to deal with the situation.

A glance at the vane showed him that the breeze had backed far enough; and the sky said that in all likelihood it would go on backing until at least sunset. The gangways and the forecastle were reasonably clear, and after a considering pause he said, 'Captain Pullings, I believe we may attend to the foretopsailyard at last.'