Book 17 - The Commodore

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Please to name the service in question.'

  'It is the carrying of a statue I have promised a friend in Weymouth; an impossible object for a waggon, but a mere trifle for a ship.'

  Stephen, extremely unwilling not to post straight down to Barham and Diana, stopped a passing hackney-coach, and with his hand on the door-handle he asked 'What would it weigh, at all? This is only a very little small thin sharp-bodied vessel.'

  'In the nature of three ton, I suppose; a little small thin porphyry Jove.'

  'Listen, my dear: may I say by all means—very happy—unless Captain Pullings says it must necessarily plunge through the schooner's bottom? I am on my way to see Mrs Broad in the Liberties of the Savoy—you remember Mrs Broad of the Grapes?'

  'Certainly: my best compliments to her, if you please.'

  'And from the Grapes it is no distance at all to the Pool.'

  'Until this evening, then,' called Blaine, withdrawing hastily to the wall as a coach and four came cantering up, spraying filth wide on either hand.

  Mrs Broad and Stephen were old friends. He kept a room up one pair of stairs the year round, even when he was in another hemisphere; he had a cupboard for his skeletons and presses for all manner of things that he might need—instruments, specimens, books, the unfinished manuscript of a work in lithotomy, a large number of old letters and used envelopes with notes on the back—when he was in London, and she was thoroughly used to his ways as well as Padeen's, who acted as his servant on shore, wearing breeches with silver buckles, of which he was inordinately, sinfully proud. She had known the Doctor for so long and in such difficult circumstances that nothing surprised her very much: it had been bears in the coal-hole and laundry before now, and badgers rescued from a baiting in the farther outhouse, as well as some very odd dissections indeed; and the suggestion of two little girls did not worry her particularly, however black and Popish they might be. She wept to hear how and why they had been taken from their native island; but having wiped her eyes she comforted Stephen's apprehensions by saying 'Lord bless you, Doctor, they will be happy enough here. We have every colour in the Liberties, black, grey, brown and yellow, everything except perhaps bright blue; and they can run about in the churchyard or watch the traffic in the Strand. But oh dear me, sir, what will you think of me? I have never asked after Mrs Maturin. How does your good lady do, sir? And Miss Brigid, bless her?'

  'I have not seen them yet, Mrs Broad. I had to come straight up from the chops of the Channel in the tender, while Captain Aubrey went ashore. But I may go down in the tender tomorrow: the wind sits perfectly; or I may take a chaise.'

  'Well, at least you will have supper here, and sleep in your room. Lucy and I have been airing it ever since Padeen came and made us understand you was not far off. "Clo' clo' clo'," he said, the way he had, poor fellow; and seeing me look stupid, Lucy cried "He means the Doctor is near at hand", and we all laughed. Oh dear me, how we laughed. And we put warm, lavendered sheets on the bed.'

  'Sup I cannot, Mrs Broad, for I am pledged to Sir Joseph Blaine, who sends you his compliments: but sleep I will, most happily. It would be best to give me the front-door key, for I may be late. But now I must run down to the Pool.'

  He walked into Black's, and there was Blaine, standing in front of the hall fire with his coat-tails over his elbows and his bottom exposed to the blaze. 'Captain Pullings says she can very well manage three tons,' said Stephen, 'but since he must sail on the turn of the tide he wonders very much how you will get your image aboard in time.'

  'Oh, what capital news! There will be no difficulty whatsoever, since it is already at Somerset House, and we have an ordnance barge that will bring it alongside in a trice. In a trice. Stephen, ain't you clemmed? This north-easter makes me so hungry that I should be pettish if it were anyone but you.,

  'I am of your way of thinking entirely. Let us go up at once.'

  They ate eagerly, almost in silence for some time, like old table-companions.

  'Come, that is better,' said Sir Joseph, putting some of his fowl's bones on a side-plate. 'Now I am more nearly human; though by no means satisfied yet. I shall certainly eat a Welsh rabbit, and probably a good many petits fours with my coffee. How did you find Mrs Broad?'

  'Blooming, I thank you; and she sends her duty. She is a very good creature, you know.'

  'I am sure of it.'

  'We brought back two little girls, Sarah and Emily, from a Melanesian island where all the people but for them had been destroyed by the smallpox caught from a passing whaler. They could not be left there to die slowly—they were already very much reduced—so I took them on board. Perhaps it would have been kinder to knock them on the head directly.'

  'It is said that one must beware of pity,' observed Sir Joseph.

  'At the time it seemed to me that there was no choice; but since then it has puzzled me extremely to know what to do with them. I should like them to be brought up understanding how a house is run, but not as servants; to have reasonable dowries—'

  'Dowries. For my infinite good luck your fortune is intact,' said Blaine with a laugh, since at the very beginning of this prodigious voyage an exasperated Stephen had sent him a letter with a power of attorney, begging him to transfer his wealth from the huge, slow, impersonal, negligent but solvent London house that looked after it to a small country bank that ceased payment a few months later, the depositors getting fourpence in the pound—a letter that in his agitation he had failed to sign with anything but his Christian name. This omission rendered the power of attorney invalid, but it accounted firstly for Blaine's and Maturin's most unusual custom of calling one another Stephen and Joseph, and secondly for Stephen's still being a man of uncommon substance. 'And as I remember it was nearly all in gold,' Blaine continued.

  'So it was; and so it is, for the greater part, still in my godfather's iron-bound chests. I changed only a small proportion, for current expenses. Reasonable dowries, then, in case they choose to marry rather than lead apes in Hell. To marry, perhaps some skilled and thinking artisan, a clock-maker for example, or one that makes scientific instruments: possibly an apothecary or a surgeon or a preparer of specimens for anatomy-classes: Catholic, of course. Certainly not a sailor. A sailor, who may be absent for years, throws impossible strains on his wife. If she is a woman of any degree of temperament at all there is of course the question of chastity; and in either case there is that of command or perhaps I should say of decision. A woman who has been running a household, perhaps an estate, acquires an authority and a power of decision that she is not always willing to renounce: nor indeed should she always do so, since men are not invariably born with innate financial wisdom; and those who have spent most of their time at sea may be far less well acquainted with business by land than a sensible woman. Then again there is the bringing-up of children . . .' Stephen prosed away until he noticed that Sir Joseph's attention was almost entirely taken up with his Welsh rabbit, and perhaps with some anxieties that he had brought away with him from the Admiralty.

  He stopped, and in the silence Blaine said 'Very true. There is little to be said for the marriage of a sailor; or for any other man, if it come to that. As for the perpetuation of the human race, there are times when it seems to me that the world would be far, far better if the race were to die out. We have made such a sorry piece of work of it—everything for happiness, and misery everywhere. Even in spite of my boiled fowl and my pint of claret and your company I find my spirits much oppressed.' He glanced round the room, still well filled with members, some of them at tables quite close, and said 'But of course I speak as a bachelor, and it suddenly comes to me that you are now a married man: it was inhuman of me to delay you with my porphyry Jove. Of course, you did not land at Shelmerston and post away into Hampshire with Jack Aubrey, so of course you have not seen Diana or had any news of her, or of Mrs Oakes?'

  'I have not,' replied Stephen, wondering a little at Blaine's emphasis.

  'Shall we take our coffee in the libr
ary?'

  'By all means. It is the finest room in the club.'

  Fine and even splendid it was, but its three great lustres shone upon books, comfortable chairs and Turkey carpet alone: never a member there.

  'Stephen,' said Joseph, when the waiter had left them with a pot of coffee, a tray of petits fours and a decanter of cognac, 'I did not think it right to tell you what is in my mind in a public office, however closed the room. These hypothetical ears may be no more than one of the hallucinations of a mind too long and too closely engaged on what for lack of a better word I shall call intelligence, but they may exist, and that is why I am so happy that we are sitting together here in this warm and well padded desert.' He poured coffee and absentmindedly ate half a dozen little meringues. 'Your private letters asked me to take care of Clarissa Oakes and told me about her exceptional fund of information.' Clarissa, a young gentlewoman reduced to beggary, had worked in a fashionable brothel within a musket-shot of the clubs in St James's Street, where she was well placed for learning a great many curious facts. 'I did take care of her, getting poor young Oakes his promotion and a ship, and when he was killed I took her down to Diana. Her fund of information was indeed exceptional and with her help we quickly identified the limping gentleman with the Garter who was connected with those wicked buggers Wray and Ledward.' The wicked buggers—and Blaine used the gross word literally—had been concerned with passing secret intelligence, particularly naval intelligence, to the enemy; they had been betrayed by a French agent, and after many changes of fortune Stephen had cut them both to pieces in an East Indian dissecting-room.

  'Unhappily he turned out to be a hemi-demi royal, the Duke of Habachtsthal. He was brought up mainly in England, but he has a little principality close to Hanover and a much larger estate on the Rhine, both now occupied by the French, of course, and ideally suited for French blackmail. The old King was very fond of him and if he had been a marrying man, which he is not, he might perhaps have had one of our primcesses: but even without, he is very nearly untouchable.'

  'If I do not mistake he has high army rank—perhaps only honorary—and considerable influence.'

  'Yes. He acts as adviser to several bodies, and through his aide-de-camp Colonel Blagden he may be said to sit on some important committees.' A pause, in which they both drank brandy, and then Blaine went on, 'Of course, there was no possibility of direct proceedings against him without absolutely cast-iron evidence like that we had against Ledward and Wray: and this we do not possess. However, we did make a good deal of distant thunder. You would never believe, Stephen, what Byzantine ways Whitehall possesses of conveying a threat, of causing it to echo from wall to wall until it reaches the intended ear.'

  'What effect did it have?'

  'Excellent, to begin with. Information had been going across, as in Ledward's time, and it stopped abruptly. But presently our gentleman came to a better understanding of his own impunity, and last month we lost the greater part of a West Indies convoy. More than that, he is a very old court and ministry hand and I believe he has traced the threat back to its source or is near to doing so. I am afraid of his resentment, both for myself and you: he was very much attached to Ledward, and even, in their strange fashion, to Wray. He is a bitterly revengeful man . . . I am by no means sure of all this, Stephen; but there are one or two things that increase my feeling of uneasiness, however weak, illogical and even superstitious it may be. One is that both Montague and his cousin St Leger seem to be fighting shy of me, as I dare say you noticed at the Committee, when I . . .'

  A member in a bright blue coat with shining buttons walked in: he peered myopically at them, came a little nearer, and called out 'Sir Joseph, you have not seen Edward Cadogan, by any chance?'

  'No, sir, I have not,' said Blaine.

  'Then I shall have to look in the billiard-room.'

  The door closed behind him and Blaine poured more brandy. 'Then again, you will remember you asked me to arrange pardons for both Mrs Oakes and your Padeen for the crime of returning from Botany Bay without leave. It seemed to me a matter of no difficulty: Clarissa is the widow of a sea-officer killed in a very creditable action, and in the right quarters I could mention unusual services rendered to Intelligence; while your interest with the Admiralty and some of your more illustrious patients would surely cover poor Padeen. But my unofficial approaches have not been satisfactory—strange delays—a hint of unavowed reluctance. I do not like to press a direct request, still less present it in writing, until I am sure of a favourable response. I had thought of abandoning the usual channels and applying to the Duke of Sussex, seeing that you and he are both fellows of the Royal Society and founder-members of the Council Against Slavery, but he is gone to Lisbon; and the first stages in a matter of this kind must be by word of mouth.'

  'Certainly,' said Stephen.

  'In any event,' said Blaine after a pause for consideration, 'this second instance is no more than academic. If the two in question do not advertise their presence the likelihood of their being disturbed is utterly remote; and I cite their case only as an example of the tainting effect of an important man's dislike. If he has made his aversion evident—if he has cried "That old fool Blaine at the Admiralty" let us say—the news would spread; I should become at least slightly leprous, and no man in his senses would hurry to do me a favour. That is all. I do not intend to imply any direct malignity extending beyond me and perhaps you, if indeed that malignity exists at all, and is not the figment of a fagged-out mind and an overwrought imagination.'

  Stephen took out a soft pouch made of llama-skin. 'These are the leaves of Erythroxylon coca, the cuca or coca shrub,' he said. 'I have used them for a great while, and so have most of the inhabitants of Peru. If you roll them into a moderate ball in your mouth, then add a little of this lime and so thrust it into your cheek, chewing gently from time to time, you will experience first an agreeable warm tingling of your tongue, the inner lining of your cheeks and the border of your larynx, followed by an increasingly remarkable and evident clarity of mind, a serenity, and a perception that almost all worries are of little real consequence, most of them being the result of confused, anxious and generally fallacious notions that crowd and increase in direct proportion to the decline of pure single-minded reason. I should not advise the taking of it now, if you value your night's sleep, since it tends to keep one awake, but do try it in the morning. It is the most virtuous of leaves.'

  'If it diminishes anxiety by even a half per cent, pray let me have it at once,' said Blaine. 'The Dutch Duke is not the least of my cares, but he is much outweighed in real importance by the situation in the Adriatic, and in Malta once again, to say nothing of the present crisis in the Levant.'

  The Ringle stood in to Shelmerston on the very last breath of the expiring north-east breeze, crossed the bar and dropped anchor inside the Surprise, whose thin crew of ship-keepers greeted her with the expected cries: 'Where had they been? What had they been a-doing of? Bowsing up their jibe, no doubt. The slow coach could have come down quicker. The waggon would have beat them by half a day.'

  Stephen, Tom Pullings, Sarah, Emily and Padeen hurried ashore, piled into two chaises and set off directly for Ashgrove. But in spite of all their haste, express letters, signals and orders travelling by semaphore from the Admiralty roof to Portsmouth had preceded them, and it was with the third of these in her hand that Mrs Williams, a short, thick, red-faced woman, now redder than usual with excitement, said to her daughter Sophie Aubrey, 'The Ringle passed Portland Bill at half-past four, so Dr Maturin is sure to be here this afternoon. I think it my duty—and Mrs Morris agrees with me—to tell Captain Aubrey the whole of Diana's disgraceful misconduct, so that he may break it gently to his friend.'

  'Mama,' said Sophie firmly, 'I beg you will do no such thing. You know he is to lie quiet, and Dr Gowers said . . .'

  'Dr Gowers, ma'am, if you please,' said the butler.

  'Good morning, ladies,' said Gowers. 'I will just have a look at the Cap
tain, if you please, and then we can attend to the children.'

  'He is as well as can be expected,' he said, coming down the stairs, 'but he must be kept perfectly quiet, with the room still darkened; and perhaps he could be read to in a low voice. Blair's sermons, or Young's Night Thoughts would answer very well. There has been far too much mental agitation recently. And he is to take three of these drops in a little water every hour. Soup this evening, not too thick; and perhaps a little cheese. No beef or mutton, of course.' He and Sophie hurried away to Charlotte, Fanny and George, who, immediately upon their hasty arrival from Dorset, had seen fit to come down with a high fever, a noisy cough, headache, restlessness, thirst, and a tendency to complain.

  When they had gone, Mrs Williams walked softly into her son-in-law's room, sat by his bed, and asked him how he did. Having heard that he was pretty well and that he looked forward to seeing Stephen Maturin, she coughed, drew her chair nearer and said, 'Captain, in order that you should be able to break the dreadful news gradually and gently to your poor unfortunate friend, I think it my duty to tell you that since the birth of this idiot child Diana has been drinking heavily. She has been driving about the countryside, dining with people as far as twenty miles away, sometimes fast, raffish people like the Willises, frequently going to balls and ridottos in Portsmouth, and perpetually fox-hunting sometimes without even a groom to accompany her. She is no sort of a mother to the poor little girl, and if it were not for her friend, this Mrs Oakes, the child would be left entirely to the care of the servants. And worse still,' she said, lowering her voice, 'worse still, Mr Aubrey—I say this of my own niece with the greatest reluctance, as you may imagine—worse still, there are doubts about her conduct. I say doubts, but . . . Among others Colonel Hoskins has been frequently mentioned, and Mrs Hoskins no longer returns Diana's calls. Mrs Morris says—but here she is. Come in, Selina, dear.'