Post Captain

by Patrick O'Brian

  Stephen said, 'I have a service to beg of you, Mr Macdonald.'

  'Name it, sir, I beg: nothing could give me greater pleasure.'

  'The loan of your pistols, if you please.'

  'For any purpose but to shoot a Marine officer, they are yours and welcome. In my canteen there, under the window, if you would be so good.'

  'Thank you, I will bring them back, or cause them to be brought, as soon as they have served their purpose.'

  The evening, as he rode back, was as sweet as an early autumn evening could be, still, intensely humid, a royal blue sea on the right hand, pure dunes on the left, and a benign warmth rising from the ground. The mild horse, a good-natured creature, had a comfortable walk; it knew its way, but it seemed to be in no hurry to reach its stable—indeed, it paused from time to time to take leaves from a shrub that he could not identify; and Stephen sank into an agreeable languor, almost separated from his body: a pair of eyes, no more, floating above the white road, looking from left to right. 'There are days—good evening to you, sir'—a parson went by, walking with his cat, the smoke from his pipe keeping him company as he walked—'there are days,' he reflected, 'when one sees as though one had been blind the rest of one's life. Such clarity—perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good. However,' he said, guiding the horse left-handed into the dunes, 'doing of some kind there must be.' He slid from the saddle and said to the horse, 'Now how can I be sure of your company, my dear?' The horse gazed at him with glistening, intelligent eyes, and brought its ears to bear. 'Yes, yes, you are an honest fellow, no doubt. But you may not like the bangs; and I may be longer than you choose to wait. Come, let me hobble you with this small convenient strap. How little I know about dunes,' he said, pacing out his distance and placing a folded handkerchief at the proper height on a sandy slope. 'A most curious study—a flora and a fauna entirely of its own, no doubt.' He spread his coat to preserve the pistols from the sand and loaded them carefully. 'What one is bound to do, one usually does with little acknowledged feeling; a vague desperation, no more,' he said, taking up his stance. Yet as he did so his face assumed a cold, dangerous aspect and his body moved with the easy precision of a machine. The sand spat up from the edge of the handkerchief; the smoke lay hardly stirring; the horse was little affected by the noise, but it watched idly for the first dozen shots or so.

  'I have never known such consistently accurate weapons,' he said aloud. 'I wonder, can I still do Dillon's old trick?' He took a coin from his pocket, tossed it high, and shot it fair and square on the top of its rise, between climbing and falling. 'Charming instruments indeed: I must cover them from the dew.' The sun had set; the light had so far diminished that the red tongue of flame lit up the misty hollow at each discharge; the handkerchief was long ago reduced to its component threads. 'Lord, I shall sleep tonight. Oh, what a prodigious dew.'

  In Dover, sheltered by the western heights, the darkness fell earlier. Jack Aubrey, having done what little business he had to do, and having called in vain at New Place—'Mr Lowndes was indisposed: Mrs Villiers was not at home'—sat drinking beer in an ale-house near the Castle. It was a sad, dirty, squalid little booth—a knocking-shop for the soldiers upstairs—but it had two ways out, and with Bonden and Lakey in the front room he felt reasonably safe from surprise. He was as low as he had ever been in his life, a dull, savage lowness; and the stupidity that came from the two pots he had drunk did nothing to raise it. Anger and indignation were his only refuge, and although they were foreign to his nature, he was steadily angry and indignant.

  An ensign and his flimsy little wench came in, hesitated on seeing Jack, and settled in the far corner, slapping and pushing each other for want of words. The woman of the house brought candles and asked whether he should like anything more; he looked out of the window at the gathering twilight and said no—what did he owe her, and for the men in the tap?

  'One and nine pence,' said the woman; and while he felt in his pockets she stared him full in the face with an open, ignorant, suspicious, avid curiosity, her eyes screwed close and her upper lip drawn back over her three yellow teeth. She did not like the cloak he wore over his uniform; she did not like the sobriety of his men, nor the way they kept themselves to themselves; again, gentlemen as were gentlemen called for wine, not beer; he had made no response to Betty's advances nor to her own modest proposal of accommodation; she wanted no pouffes in her house, and she should rather have his room than his company.

  He looked into the tap, told Bonden to wait for him at the boat, and walked out by the back way, straight into a company of whores and soldiers. Two of the whores were fighting there in the alley, tearing one another's hair and clothes, but the rest were cheerful enough, and two of the women called to him, coming alongside to whisper their talents, their prices, and their clean bill of health.

  He walked up to New Place. The demure look that accompanied the 'not at home' had convinced him that he should see Diana's light. A faint glow between the drawn curtains up there: he checked it twice, walking up and down the road, and then fetched a long cast round the houses to reach a lane that led behind New Place. The palings of the wilderness were no great obstacle, but the walled inner garden needed his cloak over the broken glass on top and then a most determined run and leap. Down in the garden the noise of the sea was suddenly cut off—a total, listening silence and the falling dew as he stood there amongst the crown imperials. Gradually the silence listened less; there were sounds inside the house—talking from various windows, somebody locking doors, closing the lower shutters. Then a quick heavy thudding on the path, the deep wuff-wuff of dog Fred, the mastiff, who was free of the garden and the yard by night, and who slept in the summerhouse. But dog Fred was a mute creature; he knew Captain Aubrey—thrust his wet nose into his hand—and said no more. He was not altogether easy in his mind, however, and when at last Jack gained the mossy path he followed him to the house, grumbling, pushing the back of his knees. Jack took off his coat, folded it on the ground, and then his sword: Fred at once lay on the coat, guarding both it and the sword.

  For months and months past a builder had been replacing the roof-tiles of New Place; his improvised crane, with its pulley, projecting from the parapet and its rope hung there still, hooked to a bucket. Jack quickly made the ends fast, tried it, took the strain, and swung himself up. Up, hand over hand, past the library, where Mr Lowndes was writing at his desk, past a window giving on to the stairs, up to the parapet. From this point it was only a few steps to Diana's window, but half-way up, before ever he reached the parapet, he had recognized Canning's great delighted laugh, a crowing noise that rose from a deep bass, a particular laugh, that could not be mistaken. For all that he went the whole way, until he was there, sitting on the parapet with a sharp-angled view of all of the room that mattered. For three deep breaths he might have burst through: it was extraordinarily vivid, the lit room, the faces, their expressions picked out by the candlelight, their intense life and their unconsciousness of a third person. Then shame, unhappiness, extreme weariness put out the rest, extinguished it utterly. No rage, no fire: all gone, and nothing to take their place. He moved some paces off to hear and see no more, and after a while he reached out to the end of the crane for the rope; automatically he frapped the two strands, took a sailor's grip on it, swung himself out into the darkness, and went down, down and down, pursued by that intensely amused laughter.

  Stephen spent Friday morning writing, coding and decoding; he had rarely worked so fast or so well, and he had the agreeable feeling that he had produced a clear statement of a complex situation. From a moral scruple he had refrained from his habitual dose, and he had spent the greater part of the night in a state of lucid consideration. When he had tied up all the ends, sealed his papers in a double cover and addressed the outer to Captain Dundas, he turned to his diary. 'This is perhaps the final detachment; and this is
perhaps the only way to live—free, surprisingly light and well, no diminution of interest but no commitment: a liberty I have hardly ever known. Life in its purest form—admirable in every way, only for the fact that it is not living, as I have ever understood the word. How it changes the nature of time! The minutes and the hours stretch out; there is leisure to see the movement of the present. I shall walk out beyond Walmer Castle, by way of the sand-dunes: there is a wilderness of time in that arenaceous world.'

  Jack also took a spell at his writing-table, but in the forenoon he was called away to the flagship.

  'I have worn you down a trifle, my spark,' thought Admiral Harte, looking at him with satisfaction. 'Captain Aubrey, I have orders for you. You are to look into Chaulieu. Thetis and Andromeda chased a corvette into the harbour. She is believed to be the Fanciulla. There are also said to be a number of gunboats and prams preparing to move up the coast. You are to take all possible measures, consistent with the safety of your ship, to disable the one and to destroy the others. And the utmost despatch is essential, do you hear me?'

  'Yes, sir. But form's sake, I must represent to you that the Polychrest needs to be docked, that I am still twenty-three men short of my complement, that she is making eighteen inches of water an hour in a dead calm, and that her leeway renders inshore navigation extremely hazardous.'

  'Stuff, Captain Aubrey: my carpenters say you can perfectly well stay out another month. As for her leeway, we all make leeway: the French make leeway, but they are not shy of running in and out of Chaulieu.' In case the hint should not have been clear enough, he repeated his last remark, dwelling on the word shy.

  'Oh, certainly, sir,' said Jack with real indifference. 'I spoke, as I say, purely for form's sake.'

  'I dare say you want your orders in writing?'

  'No, thank you, sir; I believe I shall remember them quite easily.'

  Returning to the ship he wondered whether Harte understood the nature of the service he required of the Polychrest—how very like a death-warrant these orders might be: he was not much of a seaman. On the other hand, he had vessels at his command more suitable by far for the intricate passage of the Ras du Point and the inner roads—the Aetna and the Tartarus would do the job admirably. Ignorance and malice in fairly even parts, he decided. Then again, Harte might have relied upon his contesting the order, insisting upon a survey, and so dishing himself: if so, he had chosen the moment well, as far as the Polychrest was concerned. 'But what does it signify?' he said, running up the side with a look of cheerful confidence. He gave the necessary orders, and a few minutes later the blue peter broke out at the foretopmasthead, with a gun to call attention to it. Stephen heard the gun, saw the signal, and hurried back to Deal.

  There were several other Polychrests ashore—Mr Goodridge, Pullings to see his sweetheart, Babbington with his doting parents, half a dozen liberty-men. He joined them on the shingle, where they were bargaining for a hoveller, and in ten minutes he was back in the pharmaceutical-bilgewater-damp-book smell of his own cabin. He had hardly closed his door before a hundred minute ties began to fasten insensibly on him, drawing him back into the role of a responsible naval surgeon, committed to complex daily life with a hundred other men.

  For once the Polychrest cast prettily to larboard and bore away on the height of the tide. A gentle breeze abaft the beam carried her shaving round the South Foreland, and by the time the hands were piped to supper they were in sight of Dover. Stephen came on deck by way of the fore-hatch from the sick-bay, and walked into the bows. As he stepped on to the forecastle the talk stopped dead, and he noticed an odd, sullen, shifty glance from old Plaice and Lakey. He had grown used to reserve from Bonden these last few days, for Bonden was the captain's coxswain, and he supposed Plaice had caught it by family affection; but it surprised him from Lakey, a noisy man with an open, cheerful heart. Presently he went below again, and he was busy with Mr Thompson when he heard 'All hands 'bout ship' as the Polychrest stood out into the offing. It was generally known that they were bound down-Channel to look into a French port: some said Wimereux, others Boulogne, and some pushed as far as Dieppe; but when the gun-room sat down to supper the news went about that Chaulieu was their goal.

  Stephen had never heard of the place. Smithers (who had recovered his spirits) knew it well: 'My friend, the Marquis of Dorset, was always there in his yacht, during the peace; and he was for ever begging me to run across with him—" 'Tis absolutely no more than a day and a night in my cutter," he would say. "You should come, George—we can't do without you and your flute." '

  Mr Goodridge, who looked thoughtful and withdrawn, added nothing to the conversation. After a discussion of yachts, their astonishing luxury and sailing qualities, it returned to Mr Smithers's triumphs, his yacht-owning friends, and their touching devotion to him; to the fatigues of the London season, and the difficulty of keeping débutantes at a decent distance. Once again Stephen noticed that all this pleased Parker; that although Parker was a man of respectable family and, in his way, a 'hard horse', he encouraged Smithers, listening attentively, and as it were taking something of it to himself. It surprised Stephen, but it did not raise his spirits; and leaning across the table he said privately to the master, 'I should be obliged, Mr Goodridge, if you would tell me something about this port.'

  'Come with me, then, Doctor,' said the master. 'I have the charts spread out in my cabin. It will be easier to explain with these shoals laid down before us.'

  'These, I take it, are sandbanks,' said Stephen.

  'Just so. And the little figures show the depth at high water and at low: the red is where they are above the surface.'

  'A perilous maze. I did not know that so much sand could congregate in one place.'

  'Why, it is the set of the tides, do you see—they run precious fast round Point Noir and the Prelleys—and these old rivers. In ancient times they must have been much bigger, to have carried down all that silt.'

  'Have you a larger map, to give me a general view?'

  'Just behind you, sir, under Bishop Ussher.'

  This was more like the maps he was used to: it showed the Channel coast of France, running almost north and south below Etaples until a little beyond the mouth of the Risle, where it tended away westwards for three or four miles to form a shallow bay, or rather a rounded corner, ending on the west with the lie Saint-Jacques, a little pear-shaped island five hundred yards from the shore, which then resumed its southerly direction and ran off the page in the direction of Abbeville. In the inner angle of this rounded corner, the point where the coast began to run westward, there was a rectangle marked Square Tower, then nothing, not even a hamlet, for a mile westward, until a headland thrust out into the sea for two hundred yards: a star on top of it, and the name Fort de la Convention. Its shape was like that of the island, but in this case the pear had not quite succeeded in dropping off the mainland. These two pears, St Jacques and Convention, were something less than two miles apart, and between them, at the mouth of a modest stream called the Divonne, lay Chaulieu. It had been a considerable port in mediaeval times, but it had silted up; and the notorious banks in the bay had still further discouraged its trade. Yet it had its advantages: the island sheltered it from western gales and the banks from the north; the fierce tides kept its inner and outer roads clear, and for the last few years the French government had been cleaning the harbour, carrying an ambitious breakwater out to protect it from the north-east, and deepening the channels. The work had gone on right through the Peace of Amiens, for Chaulieu revived would be a valuable port for Bonaparte's invasion-flotilla as it crept up the coast from every port or even fishing-village capable of building a lugger right down to Biarritz—crept up to its assembly-points, Etaples, Boulogne, Wimereux and the rest. There were already over two thousand of these prams, cannonières and transports, and Chaulieu had built a dozen.

  'This is where their slips are,' said Goodridge, pointing to the mouth of the little river. 'And this is where they are doing m
ost of their dredging and stone-work, just inside the harbour jetty. It makes the harbour almost useless for the moment, but they don't care for that. They can lie snug in the inner road, under Convention; or in the outer, for that matter, under St Jacques, unless it comes on to blow from the north-east. And now I come to think of it, I believe I have a print. Yes: here we are.' He held out an odd-shaped volume with long strips of the coast seen from the offing, half a dozen to a page. A dull low coast, with nothing but these curious chalky rises each side of the mean village: both much of a height, and both, as he saw looking closely, crowned by the unmistakable hand of the industrious, ubiquitous Vauban.

  'Vauban,' observed Stephen, 'is like aniseed in a cake: a little is excellent; but how soon one sickens—these inevitable pepper-pots, from Alsace to the Roussillon.' He turned back to the chart. Now it was clear to him that the inner road, starting just outside the harbour and running up north-east past the Fort de la Convention on its headland, was protected by two long sandbanks, half a mile off the shore, labelled West Anvil and East Anvil; and that the outer road, parallel to the first, but on the seaward side of the Anvils, was sheltered on the east by the island and on the north by Old Paul Hill's bank. These two good anchorages sloped diagonally across the page, from low left to high right, and they were separated by the Anvils: but whereas the inner road was not much above half a mile wide and two long, the outer was a fine stretch of water, certainly twice that size. 'How curious that these banks should have English names,' he said. 'Pray, is this usual?'