Book 11 - The Reverse Of The Medal

by Patrick O'Brian

  '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, but 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'intéresse au pavilion de partance voudrait bien donner rendez-vous en laissant un snot chez Jules, traiteur à 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 delig
hted 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.

  'Life is not worth it,' he said, and went to bed with Martin's pamphlet, an accurate, well-informed statement of abuses in the service, and in the present circumstances perhaps the most impolitic essay ever written by a naval chaplain; for Mrs Martin had brought him no fortune whatsoever and he had no benefice nor any prospect of a benefice—he had relied entirely upon Jack Aubrey's patronage, Jack Aubrey's permanence.

  One of the reasons there was so much travelling between France and England was the presence of the Comte de Lille, the de jure King Louis XVIII, at Hartwell in Buckinghamshire. His advisers were constantly in touch with the various royalist groups, particularly those in Paris, and since some of Buonaparte's ministers thought it wise to insure against all eventualities they not only connived at this traffic but even sent emissaries of their own with messages that usually contained expressions of respect and good will but little else—nothing concrete. The number of these messengers rose and fell with Buonaparte's fortunes—there had been very few lately—and the figures provided the British intelligence services with a fairly accurate idea of the climate of informed opinion in Paris.

  'It will probably be one of them,' said Stephen, as his coach carried him swiftly towards the Regent's park. Yet on the other hand, he reflected, the French intelligence services had very soon taken to slipping their own people in among these messengers, or if not their own people then those uneasy particoloured creatures the double or even triple agents, and conceivably the sender of the bones might be one of these. Obviously it was a man who knew that Stephen had been invited to Paris to address the Institut de France on the solitaire, a man who knew of his connexion with the Royal Society and of the interchange between Banks and Cuvier; but that was no really close identification. Thoroughly undesirable people might also know these things. 'I am glad I dug out my pistols,' he said. 'Though how I shall ever bring myself to face that chest again, I do not know.'

  'Here we are, my lord,' said the driver. 'And an uncommon quick run it was.'

  'So we are,' said Stephen, 'and so it was.'

  Yet in spite of their quick run he was not first at the rendezvous. Leaning on the white rails at the end of the road and looking out over the grass that stretched away and away to the north, Stephen saw a solitary figure pacing to and fro with a book in his hand.

  There was no sun, but the high pale sky sent down a strong diffused light and Stephen recognized the man almost at once. He smiled, ducked under the rail and walked out over the rough meadow towards the distant figure. Far to the west a flock of sheep were grazing, white on the vivid green: he passed a hare in her form, clapped close with her ears flat, persuaded she was invisible and so near he could have touched her, and at a suitable distance he called out 'Duhamel, I am happy to see you again,' taking off his hat as he did so.

  Duhamel looked much older, much greyer, much more worn than when last they parted, but he returned Stephen's salute with equal cheerfulness and said that he too was delighted to see Maturin, adding that 'he hoped he saw him well'.

  'I am truly sorry to have brought you to this remote spot,' said Stephen, 'but since I did not know who you were, it appeared to me that extreme discretion was best for all concerned. How clever of you to find it.'

  'Oh, I know it well,' said Duhamel. 'I was shooting here last autumn with my English correspondent. Unhappily we had only borrowed guns and wretched dogs, but I shot four hares and he shot two and a pheasant. We must have seen thirty or forty. Hares, I mean, not pheasants.'

  'You are fond of shooting, Duhamel?'

  'Yes. Though I far prefer fishing. Sitting on the bank of a quiet stream and watching a float seems to me present happiness itself.' He paused, and went on 'I must apologise for communicating with you in such an improper fashion, but the last time I was in London I found your inn destroyed—I did not know any other direction, and I could scarcely carry this to the Admiralty without fear of compromising you.' He brought out a little packet of jeweller's cotton, opened it, and there in the strong light was the immediate blaze of the diamond, no longer a memory but actual, and far more brilliant, far bluer than Stephen's mental image, a most glorious thing, cold and heavy in his hand.

  'Thank you,' he said, slipping it into his breeches pocket after a long moment's silent gaze, 'I am very much indebted to you, Duhamel.'

  'It was the bargain,' said Duhamel. 'And there is only one man to thank, if thanks are due, and that is d'Anglars. You may call him a paederast if you choose, but he is the only man of his word I know among all that rotten bunch of self-seeking politicians. He insisted upon its return.'

  'I hope in time to make my acknowledgements. So will the lady, I am sure,' said Stephen. 'Shall we walk back towards the town?' He had of course observed Duhamel's bitterness, but he took no notice of it until they had gone a considerable way in silence, when he began, 'Generally speaking questions are out of place in our calling, but may I ask whether it would be safe for you to come and drink a cup of coffee with me? There is a French pastry-cook in Marylebone who understands the making of coffee, a rare accomplishment in this island.'

  'Oh, quite safe, I t
hank you. I am accredited to Monsieur de Lille. There are only three men in London—two men now—who know what I am. But I am afraid I must decline. I have a carriage waiting for me beyond that line of builder's waggons, and I must go on to Hartwell.'

  'Then I shall have time to pack my chest and catch the slow coach quite easily,' reflected Stephen. But Duhamel went on in an altered voice, 'Our calling . . . Oh Maturin, do you not grow sick of the perpetual lies and duplicity, the perpetual bad faith? Not only directed against the enemy but against other organizations and within the same group.' Duhamel's face was greyer now and it twitched with the strength of his emotion. 'The struggle for power and political advantage and the falsity and betrayal right and left—shifting alliances—no faith or loyalty. There is a plan for sacrificing me, I know. My correspondent here in London, the man I was shooting with, was sacrificed: though that was only for money, whereas mine is to prove my chief's loyalty to the Emperor. You were going to be sacrificed in Brittany; and I could not have saved you, since it was Lucan's people who arranged Madame de La Feuillade's affair. But as you did not go I suppose you know all about that.' With one accord they turned about and walked back over the grass. 'I am sick of it all,' said Duhamel. 'That is one of the reasons I am so glad to be finished with this particular mission so cleanly—something straight and clean at last.' He threw out his hands in a gesture of disgust and cried 'Listen, Maturin, I want to be shot of it all. I want to go to Canada—to Quebec. If you can arrange it I will give you the equivalent ten times over. Ten times the equivalent. I know something of your affairs and I give you my word that what I can tell you touches your organization and Captain Aubrey very closely.'