Book 11 - The Reverse Of The Medal

by Patrick O'Brian

  Stephen looked at him with pale, considering, objective eyes and after a moment he said 'I will endeavour to arrange it. I will let you know tomorrow. Where can we meet?'

  'Oh anywhere. As I told you, there are only two men in London who know me.'

  'Can you come to Black's, in St James's Street?'

  'Opposite Button's?' asked Duhamel with a strange look—a glare of suspicion that faded almost at once. 'Yes, certainly. Would let us say six o'clock be convenient?'

  'Certainly,' said Stephen. 'Until six o'clock tomorrow, then.'

  They parted on coming to the road, where Duhamel bore away westwards to regain his carriage and Stephen walked slowly south, keeping his eye lifted for a hackney-coach. He found one at last in a new-building crescent, scarcely visible for the masons' carts and flying dust, and drove to Durrant's hotel.

  Here he asked for Captain Dundas and learnt without much surprise that he had gone out. 'Then I shall wait for him,' he said, and settled down for what might be a matter of hours, since notes miscarried and messages were forgotten, and even if they were not, the recipient rarely saw their urgency as clearly as the sender. It was indeed a matter of hours, but they did not drag excessively, because as usual there were many naval officers staying at the hotel and several who wished to show their kindness for Jack Aubrey came and sat with him for a while. The last of them, a fat, affable, spectacled post-captain called Hervey, was saying what a damned thing it was that the service should be deprived of such a fine seaman, with the heavy American frigates doing so well, when he broke off and said 'There is Heneage Dundas: he feels even more strongly than I do.'

  'Come and eat your mutton with me, both of you,' said Dundas, coming over to them.

  'Alas, I cannot,' said Hervey. 'I am engaged.' He peered at the clock in his poring way and sprang up, crying 'I am late, I am late already.'

  'For my part, I should be happy,' said Stephen, which was true: he liked Dundas, he had missed his breakfast with that infernal sea-chest, and in spite of his anxious mind he was extremely hungry.

  'You sail for the North American station quite soon, I believe?' he said, when they had reached their apple pie.

  'On Monday, wind and weather permitting,' said Dundas. 'Tomorrow I must make my adieux.'

  'Will you indulge me by walking into the smoking room?' asked Stephen. But when they came to it he saw that there were too many people by far and he said 'The truth of the matter is that I wish to speak to you privately. May we go upstairs, do you think?'

  Dundas led the way, gave him a chair and said 'I thought you had something on your mind.'

  'I believe we may do Aubrey an essential service,' said Stephen. 'I have been talking to a man in whom I have great confidence. He wishes to go to Canada. In return for being taken there he will give me information of great value concerning Jack.' Replying to the doubt and dissatisfaction in Dundas's face he went on, 'In these blank bald words it sounds intolerably naive, even simple-minded, but I am bound by the confidential nature of so many aspects—I am unable to relate a whole host of details that would compel conviction. Yet at least I can show you this.' He brought out the Blue Peter from his pocket, unwrapped it and held it out in a beam of sunlight.

  'What an astonishing great stone,' cried Dundas. 'Can it be a sapphire?'

  'It is Diana's blue diamond,' said Stephen. 'She was in Paris, you remember, when Jack and I were imprisoned there, and her leaving it behind was connected with our escape. Its eventual return was promised however and the man I am speaking of brought it to me this morning, on his way to Hartwell. I tell you this so that you will understand at least one of the reasons that I rely on his word and that I take what he says very seriously. There was nothing to prevent him from keeping the stone, yet he handed it over straight away, without any conditions whatsoever.'

  'It is an extraordinary great diamond,' said Dundas. 'I do not believe I have seen a finer outside the Tower. It must be worth a fortune.'

  'That is what is so impressive: a man that means to go to the New World and start a new life and that hands over an eminently portable fortune is not one to speak lightly.'

  'Do you know the reason for his wanting to go to Canada?'

  'I would not ask you to take him if he were a common criminal escaping from the law. No, he is sick of his colleagues' bad faith, their dissensions and their dissimulation, and wishes to make a clean and sudden break.'

  'He is a Frenchman, I collect, since he is going to Hartwell.'

  'I am not sure. He may come from the Rhine provinces. But at all events he is not a Buonapartist, that I can absolutely guarantee.'

  'Do you think a promise to take him on condition that his information proves useful to Jack would answer?'

  'I do not.'

  'No. I suppose not. Though proper flats we should look if . . .' Dundas walked up and down, considering for a while, and then said 'Well, I suppose we shall have to take him. I will write Butcher a note to receive him as my guest. Fortunately we have room and to spare—no master until we reach Halifax. Does he speak English?'

  'Oh, very well. That is to say, very fluently. But he learnt it from a Scotch nursemaid and then a Scotch tutor, and it is the North British dialect that he speaks; it is neither very offensive nor incomprehensible—indeed, it has a certain wild archaic charm—and to any but the nicest ear it disguises the foreign accent entirely. He is a quiet, inoffensive gentleman, and is likely to keep his bed throughout the passage, being a most indifferent sailor.'

  'So much the better. It is quite against the regulations, you know, he being a foreigner.'

  'It is quite against the regulations to take young ladies to sea, foreign or home-bred, yet I believe I have known it done.'

  'Well,' said Dundas, 'let us go downstairs and find pen and ink.'

  Dr Maturin had all the next day to reflect upon what he had done and what he was doing. By all professional standards it was extraordinarily imprudent; and it was exceedingly unwise from a personal point of view, since he was compromising himself as deeply as possible and opening himself to very ugly accusations—his actions could be interpreted as criminal and they might in fact constitute crimes, capital crimes. He was relying solely on his instinct, and his instinct was by no means infallible. Sometimes it was affected by his wishes and before now it had deceived him very painfully. He reassured himself from time to time by looking at the splendid diamond in his pocket, like a talisman, and he spent the afternoon in the Covent Garden hummums, his sparse frame sweating in the hottest room until it could sweat no more.

  'Is Duhamel a punctual man?' he asked himself, sitting in the vestibule at Black's, where he could command the entrance and the porter's desk. 'Does he pay strict attention to time?' Answer came there none until six had stopped striking, when Duhamel appeared on the steps, carrying a packet. Stephen stepped forward before Duhamel could ask for him and led him upstairs to the long room overlooking St James's Street. Duhamel looked greyer still, but his face was as impassive as usual and he appeared to be perfectly composed.

  'I have arranged your passage to Halifax in the Eurydice,' said Stephen. 'You will have to be aboard before Monday, and you will travel as the captain's guest. He is a close friend of Captain Aubrey's. I have let it be understood that you are or have been to some degree attached to Hartwell, but I do most earnestly advise you to stay in your cabin on the plea of sea-sickness and to speak very little. Here is a note that will introduce you to the ship. You will see that I have retained the name of Duhamel.'

  'Upon the whole I prefer it: one complication the less,' said Duhamel, taking the note. 'I am very grateful to you, Maturin; I believe you will not regret it.' He looked round the room. At the far end an aged member was poring over the Parliamentary Debates with a reading-glass.

  'You may speak quite freely,' said Stephen. 'The gentleman is a bishop, an Anglican bishop; and he is deaf.'

  'Ah, an Anglican bishop,' said Duhamel. 'Quite so. I am glad we are in this particular room' he ad
ded, looking out into the street. He collected himself and said 'How shall I begin my account? Names, names—that is one of the difficulties. I am not sure of the names of the three men I mean to tell you about. My correspondent here in London used the name of Palmer, but it was not his own and although he was a remarkably gifted agent in many ways he betrayed himself in this; he did not always respond at once or naturally to his nom de guerre. The name of the second man will be familiar to you: it is Wray, Andrew. For a considerable time I knew him as Mr Grey, but he is not a good agent and after a while, getting drunk, he gave himself away. He is not a good agent at all, and really, Maturin, I wonder you did not detect him in Malta.'

  Stephen bowed his head as the light came flooding in, blinding humiliatingly obvious. 'I could hardly expect you to employ such a flashy, unreliable fellow,' he muttered.

  'He is not without real abilities,' said Duhamel, 'but it is true, he is emotional and timid; he has no bottom and he would not only crack at the first severe interrogation but he is liable to betray himself without any interrogation at all. We should never have gone any distance with him if it had not been for his friend, the third man, whom I know only as Mr Smith, a very highly-placed man indeed—his reports were fairly worshipped in the rue Villars.'

  'More highly-placed than Wray?'

  'Oh yes. And of much greater force of mind: when you see them together it is like master and pupil. A hard man, too.' Duhamel looked at his watch. 'I must be brief,' he said. 'However, although Smith has great abilities and Wray enough to get himself a name, they are both poor, expensive, and given to very high play; and although they are both nominally and I believe genuinely volunteers they are both constantly asking for money. After the reorganization in the rue Villars, supplies were very much reduced. They sent appeal after appeal, each more pressing, but they were told that their recent information had been insufficient in quantity and quality, which was true. They replied that in another few weeks Sir Joseph Blaine would be finally disposed of, that they would then have full access to the Committee and that their information would be of the greatest possible value.' Duhamel looked at his watch once more and held it to his ear. 'In the meantime they mounted the Stock Exchange fraud.'

  Although he felt Duhamel's piercing eye upon him, Stephen could not entirely conceal his emotion; his heart was beating so that he felt its pulsation strong in his throat, and then again he was most deeply shocked at his dull stupidity—the whole thing was so evident. He said, 'You seem preoccupied by the time.'

  'Yes,' said Duhamel, shifting his chair nearer to the window. 'Of course, I am sorry that your friend was put to such distress, but apart from that, the objective observer must confess that the affair was neatly handled. You may say that given the exact knowledge of Captain Aubrey's movements and of his father's connexions, together with the possession of an agent as capable as Palmer, the thing was simple; but that would be shallow reasoning . . . Maturin, you will not be offended if perhaps I run out in a few minutes and return somewhat later?'

  'Never in life,' said Stephen.

  'At one time I thought they had succeeded entirely, and although of course they could not make much money without betraying themselves, they did clear enough for their most pressing debts.'

  'That was when Wray paid what he owed me,' reflected Stephen, his shame renewed.

  'But that did not suffice,' said Duhamel, 'and they made two other proposals: the first, that some surprisingly large bills should be negotiated on the northern market, and the second, that you should be handed over at Lorient. The proposal about the bills was either declined or withdrawn. I am not sure which; and you were not delivered. Lucan was extremely angry—he had gone down to Brittany himself—and he cut off even the monthly grant. They are now in a very bad way and they have prepared what they assert is an unusually valuable report.' Once again Duhamel looked at his watch. He went on, 'Palmer told me about the Stock Exchange business in great detail when we were fishing in a stream not far from Hartwell. He was a man you would have liked, Maturin: he could make a kingfisher perch on his hand. He had all sorts of qualities. But that was the last time I ever saw him. A very large reward was offered—the chase became too hot—and so they killed him, in case he should be discovered or betrayed. They did not ship him away; they killed him or had him killed. That I could not possibly forgive. It was merely criminal.'

  'Duhamel,' said Stephen in a low voice, moving his chair closer, so that it almost touched the glass of the window, 'can you give me any tangible, concrete proof?'

  'No,' said Duhamel. 'Not at present. But I hope I shall be able to do so in five minutes' time.' He went on talking about Palmer, a man he had evidently loved dearly; but his words came somewhat at random. They stopped in mid-sentence: he caught up his packet, said 'Forgive me, Maturin. Watch, watch at the window,' and hurried from the room.

  Stephen saw him appear on the pavement below, turn left, walk fast up towards Piccadilly, cross at great hazard among the carriages, and stroll down on the other side of the street towards St James's Park. Almost opposite Stephen's window, at the height of Button's club, he paused and looked at his watch again, as though he were waiting for someone. Stephen's eye ran down the street, and among the people walking up from the park and Whitehall he saw Wray and his taller, older friend Ledward, arm in arm. They disengaged themselves to take off their hats as Duhamel approached and all three stood there talking for a few moments: then Ledward gave Duhamel an envelope in exchange for the packet and they parted, the two going into Button's and Duhamel, not without a slight glance at Stephen's window, back towards Piccadilly.

  Stephen ran downstairs, seized pen and paper at the porter's desk, wrote fast, and cried 'Charles, Charles, pray send a lad with this to Sir Joseph Blaine's in Shepherd Market haste post-haste—there is not a moment to be lost.'

  'Why, sir,' said the hall-porter, smiling at him, 'never fret yourself about haste post-haste: here is Sir Joseph himself, coming up the steps, a-leaning on Colonel Warren's arm.'

  Patrick O’Brian

  WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE

  FEW EVENTS in the continuing history of literature are as satisfying as those moments when a writer, leaving behind the dissonance of experiment and imitation, finds his own authentic voice and settles into a lifetime of successful creativity in a style which he makes his own. That is what gives the excitement to literary biography; we the audience, knowing the success that will come, can delight in the thrills and spills of early false starts; can catch a pre-echo of subsequent triumph buried amongst the juvenilia. Doesn’t this crude early Psmith story give us, for a page or two, a foretaste of Blandings? How will Larkin shake off Yeats and his own self-depreciation and irony in time to become the poet of Dockery and Son? Will Golding even find a publisher?

  The resolution seen from here looks inevitable. Obviously, we say now, a Charles Monteith was going to come along and rescue Golding! Any fool can tell, now, that Larkin was never meant to be a novelist! Clearly, O’Brian was always the pre-ordained creator of Aubrey, Maturin, Villiers, a writer who would win a safe place amongst the pantheon of great historical novelists.

  In fact, of course, we, his readers are the beneficiaries of the usual mixture of luck, of the ambition and determination of the author, and of the cultural and historical background out of which he happened to emerge. What if Sir Dick White or some other modern successor to O’Brian’s brilliant creation, Sir Joseph Blaine, had kept him in the intelligence world after the War? A different, undoubtedly distinguished, but hidden career would have followed. What if the weather in Wales had been better, and the O’Brians had stayed for ever among the more northern Celts? It is impossible to believe that the same books would have followed Testimonies, or, above all, that the rich seed-bed of his Irish, French and English childhood and young adulthood would so naturally have flowered as it did into a unique European voice as a result of the admixture of south east France, Catalonia, and the Mediterranean.

  The richness and divers
ity of his experience explains the fact that O’Brian’s writing is not academic, scholar though he certainly is. He has not learnt out of books about the relationship between spies and the projection of power. His understanding of the uneasy domination by the big nations of Europe (England, France, Russia) of the smaller (Ireland, Wales, Catalonia) is not theoretical. It is partly bred in the bone, partly the result of acute and prolonged observation (allied to very considerable linguistic gifts) conducted from a very well located base in an area around which every European Empire has ebbed and flowed. His first-hand knowledge of the sea is obviously considerable, too; he is an experienced small boat sailor, though he never, as far as I know, had the luck like Golding to find himself in command of a warship of the Royal Navy.

  The experience then, of action, of people, of the complexity of European history and culture, of the sea, comes from the life. The scholarship, however, is indeed formidable. His biography of Joseph Banks is first-rate; what is more, the research done for that book into the natural history of the period is, I suspect, just the tip of the iceberg of the underpinning work he has done in order to make Maturin authentic. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were not the materials amongst O’Brian’s notes for first-rate biographies of Cuvier, Van Buren, and perhaps Faraday too. Not forgetting the the of navigation and the technology of telescopes and chronometers; remember that Aubrey too addressed the Royal Society on these matters and was in touch with the Herschels. And if Aubrey could give a lecture to the Royal Society in the first decade of the nineteenth century, O’Brian will have put himself into the position where he could write that lecture now with an authenticity which would test the archivists in Carlton Gardens if they were asked, blind, to judge its provenance.

  That is a measure of the thoroughness of the work O’Brian does. The density of the knowledge is truly remarkable. Nonetheless, there is no sense of showing off or unnecessary display; but the fact is, whenever I can check, the house always turns out to be built on the solid, authentic rock of primary research. For example, I happen to have on my wall a picture and description of the diving bell used to recover bullion from the wreck of HMS Thetis, which ran onto Cape Frio in December 1830 (my great-grandfather, a midship man on board was amongst those saved). This bell is quite recognisably a slightly improved version of that employed with less successful outcome for exactly the same purpose in Treason’s Harbour. If you were to want a monograph on early nineteenth century diving bells, I have no doubt O’Brian would be your man. Or again the exotic (and extremely amorous) behaviour of the South Sea islanders, together with a hundred little details, which Aubrey and Maturin find in Clarissa Oakes, could come straight from my great-great-grandfather’s (unpublished) account of his cruise to the same islands a little later in HMS Seringapatam—though happily Aubrey shows none of my forebear’s tedious commitment to the exposition of the scriptures. The professional scholars—Lavery, Rodger, and West give much more thorough witness to all this than I can; what is, however, immensely comforting to those of us who enjoy O’Brian’s books without the scholarly background is the well-founded trust we can have that there is no cheating: when we are told something, it is true. Just as there is little beyond learned footnotes and unresolved disputes which high scholarship can add to what Mary Renault (who was an early and important fan of O’Brian’s) tells us about Alexander the Great, so too we can commit ourselves to the enjoyment of the Aubrey novels as literature knowing that we are in the safest possible historical hands.