Book 17 - The Commodore

by Patrick O'Brian

  When Padeen was speaking Irish he stammered very much less—hardly at all if he were not nervous—and now he was discoursing as fluently as could be: 'That's the better—bless the good peg—a little higher—oh, the black thief, he missed the stroke—four it is—now for the five—glorious St Kevin, I have the five itself . . .'

  This was usual enough. Padeen alone often talked aloud when he was throwing dice or knuckle-bones or mending a net. Stephen did not so much listen as be aware of the homely, agreeable sound: but abruptly he stiffened. The paper dropped from his hand. It was exactly as though he had heard a faint childish voice cry 'Twelve!' or something very like it. Twelve in Irish, of course. With the utmost caution he stood up and set his door on the jar, with a book either side to prevent it moving.

  'For shame, Breed, honey,' said Padeen, 'it is a dó dhéag you must say. Listen, sweetheart, listen again will you now? A haon, a dó, a trí, a ceathir, a cúig, a sé, a seacht, a hocht, a naoi, a deich, a haon déag, a dó dhéag, with a noise like yia, yia. Now, a haon, a dó . . .'

  The little high voice piped 'A haon, a dó . . .' and so right through to 'a dó dheag,' which she said with just Padeen's Munster intonation.

  'There's a golden lamb, God and Mary and Patrick bless you,' said Padeen kissing her. 'Now let you throw the hoop on the four, which will make twelve altogether so it will too: since eight and four is twelve for evermore.'

  The dinner-bell clashed on Stephen's intensely listening ear with a most shocking effect—a galvanic effect. It scattered his wits strangely, and he had not fully recovered them before the passage outside creaked under Padeen's step: he was a big man, as tall though perhaps not as broad-shouldered as Jack Aubrey: and it was clear that he was carrying the child—they talked in a murmur, each into the other's ear.

  Dinner was a silent meal, and after a while Clarissa said, 'I should not have told you about Mrs Williams: it has taken your appetite away. But she forced her way into Brigid's room, crying that a good shake would cure this sort of trouble; and her clamour shocked the child.'

  'Sure, it angered me to hear of her conduct, the strong self-willed unruly shrew; but you were wholly and entirely right to let me know. If you had not done so she might have repeated the intrusion, with all the damage that would ensue: now I can deal with it.' He stirred his wine with a fork for some little while; recollected himself, looked attentively at the fork, wiped it on his napkin, laid it square on the table and said, 'No. It was not anger that took my appetite away but delight. I heard Brigid speak clear and plain, talking to Padeen.'

  'Oh I am so glad. But . . .' she hesitated '. . . did it make sense?'

  'It did indeed.'

  'I have heard them too. So has Nellie. But only when they were quite away by themselves—they were always together, you know—in the hay-loft, or with the hens and the black sow. We thought it was only gibberish, the sort of language that children make up.'

  'It is the pure Irish they speak.'

  'I am so glad,' said Ciarissa again.

  'Listen,' said Stephen, 'I think the balance is exceedingly delicate at this point and I dare not make any move at all—dare not rush blundering in. I must reflect, and consult with colleagues who know much more than I do: there is Dr Willis in Portsmouth. There is the great Dr Llers of Barcelona. For the now, I beg you will take no notice, no notice at all. Let the flower open.'

  Some time later he said, 'How happy I am you told me of that woman. At the present juncture her ignorant violence might wreck, spoil, desecrate . . . I shall cope with her.'

  'How shall you do that?' asked Clanissa after a pause.

  'I am contemplating on the means,' said Stephen; but the pale, reserved ferocity of his expression faded entirely with the entry of Nellie with the pudding and Padeen with Brigid. She sat there on her high-cushioned chair and as Stephen helped her to gooseberry fool she turned her face to him. He thought he saw a distinct look of acceptance, but he dared not speak directly. It was only when the meal was nearly over that he said, in Irish, 'Padeen, let you bring the little mare in twelve minutes,' and the words brought a quick turn of the small fair head, ordinarily immobile, absorbed in an inner world.

  The little mare carried him with a long easy stride down the miles of bare upland road, along the turnpike for a while and so to the lane leading up through Jack Aubrey's plantations to the knoll on which he had built his observatory: for Captain Aubrey was not only an officer professionally concerned with celestial navigation but also a disinterested astronomer and, although one would never have suspected it from his honest, open face, a mathematician: a late-developing mathematician it is true, but one of sufficient eminence to have his papers on nutations and the Jovian satellites published in the Philosophical Transactions and translated in several learned journals on the Continent.

  Jack had just closed the door of this building and he was standing on its step contemplating the English Channel when Stephen came in sight, round the last upward curve.

  'Ho, Stephen,' he hailed, though the distance was not great. 'Have you come back? What a splendid fellow you are, upon my sacred honour! True to your day and almost to your hour. I dare say you could not wait to see the squadron—a glorious sight! Although it is nothing like what I promised you in the first place—no squadron ever is. I have been gloating over them this last half hour, ever since Pyramus came in.' And indeed the slide of the revolving copper dome was pointing directly down at Portsmouth, Spithead and St Helens. 'Should you like to have a look? It would not be the least trouble . . .' He glanced at Stephen's mount, paused, and in quite another tone he went on, 'But Lord, how I rattle on about my own affairs. Forgive me, Stephen. How do you do? I hope your journey was . . .'

  'I am well, I thank you, Jack: and I am happy to see that your head is mended, though you look sadly worn. But my journey did not answer as I could have wished. I had hoped to find Diana; and I did not. I came upon some of her horses, however: this is one.'

  'I recognized her,' said Jack, caressing the mare. 'And I too had hoped . . .'

  'No. She had sold two mares and a stallion to a man that breeds running horses near Doncaster. He very kindly let me have Lalla here, but he had little notion of Diana's movements apart from Ripon and Thirsk, where she had friends: she had spoken of Ulster, too, where Frances lives.'

  He swung out of the saddle and they walked slowly on towards the stables. 'But that is of no great account. Do you remember Pratt, the thief-taker?'

  'By God, I should think I do,' cried Jack: and well he might. Earlier in his career he had been accused of rigging the Stock Exchange, and Pratt, who as the son of a gaoler had spent much of his childhood among thieves and who had improved his knowledge of the underworld by serving with the Bow Street runners before setting up on his own account, had acted for Jack and his lawyers, finding an essential witness in a masterly fashion—masterly but inefficacious since the witness's face, upon which identification depended, had been as one might say erased.

  'Well, I have retained Pratt and his colleagues to find her out and I have little doubt of their eventual success. I do not mean to persecute her, you understand, brother: it is because she is labouring under two separate misunderstandings, both of which I wish to remove, an act that can be done only by word of mouth.'

  'Of course. Certainly,' said Jack, to fill the silence; and the mare, turning her head, gazed at them with her lustrous Arabian eyes, blowing gently on them as she did so.

  'You know about Brigid, of course. She is called an idiot, which is wholly incorrect: hers is a particular form of development, slower than most; but Diana does not know this. She believes there is idiocy, which she cannot bear . . .' Jack too had a horror of anything like insanity, and a word almost escaped him. '. . . and feeling no doubt that her reluctant presence was not only useless but positively harmful, she went away. She believes that I should blame her for doing so: that is the first misunderstanding. The second is, as I said, that she believes in this idiocy, and I wish to tell her
that she is mistaken. Children of this kind are rarer than true idiots—who, I may say, can be told at a glance—but they are not very uncommon. There are two of them in Padeen's village in the County Kerry—they are called leanaí sidhe in Ireland—and both were I will not say cured but brought into this world rather than another. They were taken at the critical moment. Padeen is the sort of person who can do this. He is strangely gifted.'

  'I remember him taking a trapped cat in his hand and undoing the jaws with never a scratch: and there was the savage stone-horse we took out for the Sultan.'

  'Just so: and many another example. But in this particular development, in Brigid's particular development, the balance is extremely delicate: it may go either way. The circumstances—the physical environment itself—are so exceptional. I must consult with Dr Willis: I must write to Dr Llers in Barcelona, the great expert in these matters. Yet in any case Mrs Williams must be kept away. She called and savaged Clarissa with impertinent questions and then insisted on seeing the child, her grand-niece: she frightened her, offering to give her a great shaking if she would not speak. I am happy to say that Clarissa put her out of the house directly.'

  'I have a great esteem for Clarissa Oakes.'

  'So have I. But that woman shall not go to Barham again. I must have a word with her.'

  They were almost in the stable yard, and Jack said, 'In point of fact she and Mrs Morris are waiting for you: I said you would be here today, and they are waiting for you. They are in a great taking.'

  'What's amiss?'

  'Their man Briggs played the informer once too often: the hands caught him in Trump's Lane, coming back from the ale-house, and beat him. Black night, no words; only a din like a great puppy being whipped.'

  'Oh Dr Maturin,' cried the three children more or less in unison, as they came running in from a side-walk. 'There you are. You have arrived! Grand-mama posted us by the gazebo to look out for you. She and Mrs Morris beg you to come at once. Briggs was set upon and terribly beaten by the Hampton Blacks . . .'

  'Mr Owen the apothecary has plastered him and says he may live; but we doubt it.'

  'Please may we take you there at once? We were promised fourpence if we took you at once. Papa will look after the horse, will you not, dear Papa?'

  'She is a mare, stupid. An Arab, sir, I believe?'

  Stephen walked in, and when he had endured their clamour, indignation and circumstantial account for some considerable time, he desired the ladies to leave him with the patient. He made his examination: here indeed was a truly swollen, bloated face, and back and buttocks strongly marked with rope's-end and cobbing-board; but no broken bones, no incised or lacerated wounds. Stephen was surprised that a man long accustomed to the race-course should be so upset by these moderate degrees of violence; yet Briggs was quite prostrated—fright almost amounting to terror, dignity shattered, a sense of total outrage, and perhaps something close to abject cowardice. Stephen approved Mr Owen's dressings, prescribed a few harmless comfortable medicines and crossed the passage to where the anxious ladies sat.

  'He needs quietness, a dim light, and undemanding company,' he said. 'If Mrs Morris would be so good as to sit with him, I will explain the treatment to my aunt Williams, since our relationship allows me to use medical terms and expressions that I should be embarrassed to employ in the presence of any other lady.'

  'They have not cut him, have they?' cried Mrs Williams when they were alone. 'I trust that was not what you meant when you said embarrassed.'

  'No, ma'am,' said Stephen. 'You will not have an eunuch on your hands.'

  'I am so glad,' said Mrs Williams. 'I have heard that robbers often do it to people who resist them. They do it out of spite, knowing that gentlemen do so hold to their . . . you understand me.'

  'Is it known who the robbers were?'

  'We are pretty sure, and I am going to lay an information with Sir John Wriothesley, the justice of the peace. At first we half-suspected the seamen he had very properly caused to be admonished, yet Mr Aubrey, Commodore Aubrey, flatly denied it; and he is practically a flag-officer. But then it came out that they had black faces, so it is obviously the gang called the Hampton Blacks, who always blacken their faces when they go out at night to poach the deer. They may very well have known that he often carries considerable sums to and from Bath for us.'

  'Did they take anything?'

  'No. He clung so bravely to his watch and money that they got nothing at all.'

  'Very well. Let him be kept quiet and dosed regularly, and I think I may assert that you will find him as good as ever in seven days' time.'

  'He is in no danger, then?' cried Mrs Williams. 'So I may send and countermand the priest? He will not charge if he is told in time, I am sure. Mr Briggs is a Papist, you know.' Stephen bowed. Mrs Williams said, 'What a relief,' and rang the bell for some madeira for the Doctor.

  As he drank it—Jack always had capital madeira—she said in a musing voice 'Not that I have anything against Papists. Did you ever hear of Mrs Thrale?' Stephen bowed again. 'Well, she married one, after her husband died, a man of somewhat lower rank, and even a foreigner; but now she is received everywhere, I understand.'

  'No doubt. Here is a brief list of the necessary measures and doses, which I desire you will adhere to with the utmost regularity. And now, ma'am, I wish to speak to you of my daughter Brigid. As you are aware, her mental health is delicate; but you probably do not know that its progress has now reached a critical stage at which any shock or setback may prove disastrous. I must therefore beg that for the present your kindly-intended visits to Barham may cease.'

  'Am I not to see my own flesh and blood? My own grand-niece? Believe me, Dr Maturin,' cried Mrs Williams, her voice reaching its metallic, dominant ring, 'these childish, self-willed, stubborn, obstinate fancies are best dealt with firmly: a good shaking, the black hole, bread and water and perhaps the whip answer very well and at no cost: though to be sure you are a physician and everything in that line is free.'

  'I should be sorry to forbid you my house,' said Stephen.

  But Mrs Williams, well launched, carried straight on: 'And let me tell you, sir, that I cannot at all approve of the young person in charge of her at present. Naturally it was my duty to ask her a few questions to satisfy myself of her suitability; but all I got was short answers, unsatisfactory replies. A very repulsive reserve, a confidence and self-sufficiency, a want of submissive respect that quite shocked me. And there are rumours of debts, inquiries in the village, questionable morality . . .'

  'I am perfectly well acquainted with the lady's antecedents,' said Stephen in a more determined voice, 'and I am perfectly well satisfied with Mrs Oakes' qualifications as a person to look after my daughter; so let us have no more of this, if you please.'

  'I ought to be appointed guardian, with a right of inspection when you are away on these interminable voyages. I certainly have a moral right to visit; and a legal one too, I am sure.'

  'I do not agree. And if, as I do not suppose possible now that I have made my views clear, you were so unwise as to commit a trespass, you would not only be ejected by my powerful, dangerous Irish servant, but you would lay yourself open to a most determined prosecution—a prosecution not only for trespass but also for keeping, and having kept, an unlicensed betting office. Furthermore, the least hint of such an indiscretion would infallibly lead to your man Briggs being pressed into the Navy and sent aboard a ship full of common and often violent sailors, none of whom has any reason to love him, a ship bound for the deadly West Indies, or perhaps for Botany Bay.'

  'Sir,' cried George, intercepting him in the garden, 'Papa says would you like to take a quick glance at the squadron while there is still some light on the sea.'

  'I should like it of all things,' said Stephen. 'George, here is a three-shilling piece for thee.'

  'Oh thank you, sir. Thank you very much. We never got our fourpence, but now Amos is just going down to Hampton and I shall go with him and fairly gorge . .
.' His words were lost in the distance.

  'Come in, Stephen,' called Jack from the depths, the very moderate depths, of the observatory. 'I have the glass just so. Mind the cantilever—Oh never touch that sprocket—take care of the eye-piece box, if you please—never mind: I shall pick them up and clean them later—now slide in here and sit square on the stool: square on the stool, there—leave that screw alone, for God's sake—hold on to the turret-casing, if you must hold on. It will be easier when your eyes have grown accustomed to the gloom: gloom for contrast, you understand. There: sit tight. I have shipped cross-wires, as you see—no, get your eye right into the eye-piece, Stephen: what a fellow you are—in point of fact they are stretched threads of spider's web, exactly placed. Ingenious, ain't it? Herschel's sister showed me how to do it. The focus is right for my good eye, but if you find it blurred, turn this screw'—guiding his fingers—'until it is sharp. For the moment there is very little turbulence. The telescope is exactly pointed, so never touch anything else, whatever you do.'

  Stephen squared himself still more, thrust his eye even deeper into the eye-piece, drew several deep breaths, and timidly turned the screw. Instantly the cross-lines showed clear, and at their intersection, broadside on, there was a ship of the line, sharp and distinct, in another world, another though familiar dimension: her topsails were hanging loose to dry and many of her people were over the side on stages, painting ship, but this did not take away from her beauty, nor from the sense of concentrated power. It made a living ship of her, a ship with no collective self-consciousness and anxiety, holding her breath for her portrait or an admiral's inspection.