Book 17 - The Commodore

by Patrick O'Brian

  But for the Bellona's approach he must have destroyed or taken her. As it was he let fall his courses and raced close-hauled to the end of the southern headland and out to sea beyond it, just saving both masts and sails, and disappeared, steering eastward and increasing sail without the least care for his friends in their secluded cove.

  The reason for this headlong flight appeared a moment later, when two English seventy-fours and a frigate appeared round the northern cape. Jack signalled them to heave to, emphasizing the order with a gun, told Tom to look to the Stately, and if she could be left, to make the best of his way towards the troop-ships' cove, and so dropped into Ringle.

  He went aboard the nearest seventy-four, Royal Oak, which received his shabby, battle-stained and indeed bloody person with all the compliments due to his broad pennant, and with very great enthusiasm. 'Gentlemen, I bring you prizes,' he said. 'There is a cove among that group of islands there'—pointing—'which conceals four French troop carriers and two frigates. I should take them myself, but I have four foot water in the hold and gaining fast, having had a bout with that fellow aground down there—a very determined fighter indeed—and the ship is slow and heavy.'

  They treated him with infinite consideration—of course they would do all he desired—they gave him the most cordial joy of his victory—hoped that his people had not suffered and thanked the Lord they had been ordered from Bere Haven on rumours of gunfire—led him to the cabin—would the Commodore care for a dish of tea? of cocoa? Perhaps gin and hot water, or the whiskey of these parts? All this time they were approaching the cove, and now Jack's frigate captains came aboard, passionate for news, grieved for the Bellona's battered state—she could indeed be seen to be wallowing along, her pumps flinging water wide to leeward.

  One of the French frigates in the cove chanced it. She cut her cable, squeezed through an improbable gap and ran east before the gale with everything she could set, joining the ship of the line in her way back to France. The rest submitted to the overwhelming force: for by this time the Bellona had joined.

  'William,' said Jack Aubrey to Reade in the tender, 'pray run down to the Doctor and tell him that Captain Geary is lending us some hands to pump and seeing us back to Bantry to be patched up, and Warwick is giving poor Stately a tow. Tell him that all is well, and that I hope to ride across and see him in a day or two. It is only a short way across by land—that is how the news of our being here reached Bantry: a boy on an ass to tell them that it was the French at last.'

  The French at last: looked for so long, so long promised. Things now seemed to be going astray somewhat; yet here at least was a great French ship and she filled with people, filled with arms.

  The tide withdrew, farther and unbelievably far, and the French ship settled, her wounded timbers groaning and even breaking under her weight. Most of the prisoners were confined between decks, but some gave the prize-crew a hand with various tasks, and some helped Stephen transfer the wounded to the Sacred Heart hospital behind and above Duniry. Some of the men of the village had been in one or another of the Irish regiments in the French service before the Revolution, and were still fluent in the language; it was they who learnt the purpose of the expedition and the nature of the ship's cargo for sure. The word spread and by the time Stephen came back from the hospital with Father Boyle there was a noisy, threatening crowd by the stranded ship, her landward side now almost dry. An awkward kind of accommodation-ladder had been shipped, and on a platform at its foot stood a guard of the Bellona's Marines, looking both cross and apprehensive, for not only were the men of the village very near to the point of stoning them, but the foreshore had quantities of seaweed, mud, general filth, and the women, who had already loosed their hair, were perfectly capable of flinging it, wrecking their sacred uniforms.

  They made room for Father Boyle and Stephen, the young officer whispering, 'I fear they may try to rush the side.' Half way up the ladder Stephen turned, and speaking in Irish he said, 'Men of Duniry, it is weapons you desire.'

  'It is,' they cried. 'And it is weapons we shall have.'

  'If you had those weapons, weapons from the man who has kept the Holy Father close prisoner, and who turned Turk in Cairo, worshipping Mahomet, they would be your bane and your certain death, God between us and evil. Do you not know that the whole barony is raised with the news of their coming, the French? The yeomanry of all West Cork and the County Kerry are afoot, and every man found with a musket from this ship must hang. A full gibbet by nightfall, and never a roof with its thatch unburnt.' Turning to the priest he cried, 'Mors in olla, vir Dei: mors in olla. For God's sake urge them to be quiet, Father dear, or there will be widows by the score tomorrow.' And reverting to Irish he said, 'There was the Prophet Eliseus, as our good Father Boyle will tell you, and he and his disciples were offered a meal in the desert: but someone cried out in a great voice, roaring from his chest, "Do not touch it, oh man of God. There is poison in the pot." Countrymen, that accursed ship would be the deadly pot for you, so it would, were you to touch it, God forbid.' With this he walked up into the prize, leaving them silent.

  Late that night and all next morning the yeomanry, the military and the plain soldiers, with the usual apparatus of triangle, irons and fire, searched Duniry and all the nearby farms and cabins; and nothing did they find but some illicit spirit, which they drank.

  At Mass the next day Stephen was greeted with the respect due to the Lord Lieutenant and perhaps more affection: many a man asked would he do the house the honour of taking a tint; and presents of white pudding, cream and carrageen jelly were left for him at the ship. By now all his most critical surgery had been done; and by now the local medical corps had the remaining patients well in hand. He had time to spare, and to walk about, so when one of the many country gentlemen who had come to gaze at the stranded French battleship called from his dogcart, 'Why, Maturin! What a pleasure to see you! It must be years and years . . . Come into this little shebeen and take a glass of sherry; or should you prefer the poteen—perhaps safer? How do you do? I am truly charmed to hear it, upon my honour. So I am. You are on your way to see Diana, I am sure. I was out with her at the end of March, with Ned Taaffe's hounds. We had a famous day, and killed two foxes. House. House, there: two glasses of sherry, if you please, and a little small dry crust to help them down—there would never be an anchovy, at all?'

  Stephen looked at the pale wine, raised his glass and said, 'God bless you,' with a bow. He took out his elegant watch and laid it in the light, watching the centre second-hand make its full revolution.

  His friend too watched it with close attention. 'You are taking your pulse, I make no doubt?' he said.

  'So I am, too,' said Stephen. 'I have had a variety of emotions recently and I wished to assign a number at least to the general effect, to the physical effect, since quality is not subject to measure. My number is one hundred and seventeen to the minute.'

  'That is the luckiest number in the world, I believe; a prime number, to be divided or multiplied by no other.'

  'You are in the right of it, Stanislas Roche: it is neither too much nor too little. Listen. Will you do me a kindness, now? Will you run me into Bantry in this elegant equipage, till I can hire a horse or a chaise?'

  'I will do better than that, since Bantry is in the wrong direction for at least half the way. I will run you into Drimoleague itself: ain't that handsome in me?'

  'It is fit to be written in letters of gold,' said Stephen absently.

  And absent, painfully so, was his conversation all the way. Fortunately Stanislas had conversation for two: he described his day with Ned Taaffe's hounds—Diana's spirit in negotiating a prodigious number of banks and ditches on a little Arab gelding—every detail of a long chase through the country Stephen had never seen—a chase that ended in some unexpected, surprising manner. 'Ain't you amazed?' asked Stanislas.

  'Deeply amazed,' said Stephen, with the utmost truth; but he was slowly coming out of it, setting things in some kind of
an order, almost entirely grasping the fact that in a few minutes he might see his heart's desire, whatever the consequences. Diana was staying, had long been staying, with Colonel Villiers, an ancient relative—uncle? Half-uncle?—of her first husband, a gentleman of whom Stephen knew nothing except that he had served in India and that he was devoted to fishing.

  'Here we are,' said Stanislas, pulling up. 'We have made splendid time. Be a good fellow and open the gate, will you? There is almost never anyone in the lodge. Oh, but before I forget, as a King's officer you must put on half-mourning. I was in Bantry this morning, as I told you, looking at the Bellona and the Stately—they had put some sort of a mast into her, the Stately, I mean—and to my concern I saw a flag flying at half-mast on it. I sent over to ask whether it meant the gallant Captain Duff had been killed. No, said they; he had only lost a leg. The flag—which indeed was general, as I saw when I looked at the other men-of-war—was because of the death of a royal, or near enough, the Duke of Habachtsthal, who owned Rossnacreena Castle, Lord Lieutenant of the county, and who had cut his throat in London last Thursday—the news was just come over.'

  This added an amazement, not indeed of the same stunning importance, but not inconsiderable by any other standard on earth: with that man dead, there would be no difficulty about pardons for Padeen and Clarissa: and Stephen's own fortune would be safe anywhere. He could give Diana a golden crown, if she should like one.

  'Stanislas,' said Stephen from the roadside, 'I will not open the gate. I will say farewell here, and thank you as kindly as ever can be. I have not seen Diana this terrible long while, and thousands of miles of sea; and I wish to find her alone.'

  'Certainly, certainly. I quite understand. And she too will be amazed.'

  'God bless, now, Stanislas.'

  He passed through the wicket into a fine broad court, somewhat marred by a twenty-foot stretch of tall grey stone wall fallen into it and the skeleton of a two-ton sloop shored up by the central fountain. Beyond the court the house spread in the brilliant sun before him had two low wings, a three-storey centre with a classical portico and a fine flight of steps, many of them whole.

  He had almost reached them—there was a curious liverwort growing between the joints—when the door itself opened and Diana's voice called, 'Are you the bread?'

  'I am not,' said Stephen.

  She emerged from the darkness, shading her eyes, cried, 'Stephen, my love, is it you?' flew down the steps, missed the last and plunged into his arms, tears running fast.

  They sat there, pressed close, and she said, 'You have the wildest way of suddenly appearing when my mind is filled with your name and even your image. But Stephen my dear you are so yellow and thin. Do they feed you at all? Have you been ill? You are on leave, I am sure. You must stay here a great while and the Colonel will fill you out with salmon, smoked eels and trout—he will be in before dinner. Lord, I am so happy to see you, my dear. Come now and rest; it is destroyed you are looking. Come up to my bed.'

  'Must I come to your bed?'

  'Of course you must come to my bed: and you are never to leave it again. Stephen, you must never go to sea any more.'

  The Winning Post

  at Last

  ALAN JUDD

  SOMETIMES THINGS come together as they should. They recently have for the novelist and biographer, Patrick O’Brian; within a week of the announcement in the Birthday Honours of his CBE for services to literature, he became the first ever winner of the £10,000 Heywood Hill Literary Prize.

  World-wide publishing success already threatens to lionise this energetic and very private octogenarian, but it was clear at the prize-giving that the pleasures of literary recognition do something to render tolerable the passing inconveniences of fame. They do something, too, to make up for decades of unremitting endeavour, for early years of poverty and for numbers of good books written blind—that is, without the comforting assurance of a reading public. It has been a long haul for O’Brian.

  Ill-health and parental death resulted in a peripatetic Anglo—Irish childhood, while an education that unusually combined rigour and breadth fed the autodidact in him. Fluency in French, Spanish and Catalan found him useful employment in Intelligence during the Second World War, on which subject he remains firmly discreet, and also led to his marriage to Mary, mother of Count Nikolai Tolstoy. After the war they settled in Wales, then partly for health reasons moved to the coastal village near the Franco-Spanish border where they have lived ever since.

  It was easier to be poor in a warm climate.

  There was never any question for O’Brian that he should—must—write, and never any wavering or compromise in Mary’s essential support. Short stories, reviews, translations and early novels appeared, outstanding amongst which was Testimonies, an intense and obsessional love story set in rural Wales and now published by HarperCollins. For years, how ever, it was the translations from French into English—Papillon, for instance, and all of de Beauvoir—that kept the wolf from the door. Luck helped; Picasso was a neighbour and became a friend, which subsequently led O’Brian to write a vivid and perceptive biography of him, still acknowledged in Spain (and by the late Lord Clark) as the best.

  In 1969 O’Brian published Master and Commander, the first of a series of novels—‘tales’, he modestly calls them—set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Although he thought there might be others he no more anticipated that the series would extend to seventeen (so far—the eighteenth is on the way) than that it would ensure his place in the literary pantheon. Indeed, despite early support from such as Mary Renault, T. J. Binyon and John Bayley, the books were not an immediate sensation and actually went out of print in America.

  Gradually, however, word-of-mouth, astute publishing, literary merit and—dare one say it?—sheer readability have combined to produce during the last five years a rare tidal wave of literary recognition and commercial success. Sales are now over the million, translations are into nineteen languages, British Library has published its first bibliography of a living author (with an introduction by William Waldegrave), the University of Indiana is buying the manuscripts and forming an O’ Brian study centre, a ship is being built in Chile to the specification of that most often sailed by O’Brian’s heroes, his American publishers (Norton) issue a regular newsletter and in the Cayman Isles there is a dining club called the Patrick O’Brian Widows, formed by ladies whose husbands are addicted. Better known admirers include people as diverse as Iris Murdoch and Max Hastings, Antonia Byatt and Charlton Heston.

  Master and Commander begins in Port Mahon where the impoverished Lieutenant Jack Aubrey and the impoverished physician, Stephen Maturin, meet and fall out at a concert. Next morning, in the euphora of a longed-for but unexpected promotion to command, Jack offers Stephen a place as ship’s surgeon, so beginning a friendship that will surely prove one of the most enduring and endearing in our literature. They are quite different: Jack is English, beefy, cheerful and generous, a fool ashore but a genius afloat; Stephen is Irish—Catalan, moody, subtle, brilliant, a passionate naturalist (O’Brian is also the biographer of Sir Joseph Banks) and a determined spy against Napoleon. They are united by sympathy, respect, acknowledgement of difference, a sense of fairness and justice and affection. All this is suggested more in the spaces between words than expressed directly, except when they make music together. In the portrayal of this friendship we learn something of all friendship, just as in the series as a whole we learn of loyalty and betrayal, love and mutability, interest and humour.

  These novels are neither Forester nor Marryat, though O’Brian pays the respect due to both. There is adventure and there are battles. The historic furniture and vernacular you can trust absolutely because O’Brian is so steeped in his period but there is also something of his heroine, Jane Austen. He writes with her irony, humour and moral toughness, almost as she might have written of the adventures of her naval brothers. Above all, they are accessible novels, so well written that you settle
into each as into a warm bath, knowing you are in good, considerate hands. In evoking so vividly what it was like to be alive then, O’Brian shows by reflection elements of what it is to be alive now, and of how we should live. He achieves that simultaneous dislocation and bridging that is the essence of all imaginative art and is what distinguishes it from everything else.

  The Heywood Hill Literary Prize was the suggestion of the Duke of Devonshire, a director of the bookshop. The judges were John Saumarez Smith, Mark Amory and Roy Jenkins. It is awarded not for somebody’s latest work, but for a ‘lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of books’ and could easily have gone to a publisher such as Rupert Hart-Davis or the late Jock Murray. For an author to win it his or her books must have held up well over a period of years among the customers of Heywood Hill; in the words of John Saumarez Smith, ‘we wanted to strike a blow for reading’.

  There is a feeling that one or two well-known prize-giving bodies have lost sight of what they think of as the reading aspect of books.

  O’Brian was handed his award by another admirer, Tom Stoppard, amidst the bucolic elegance of a large mixed crowd on the lawn at Chatsworth. The sun shone, the bands played cheerfully, the literati were littered about and the gliterati glittered—though not as brightly as the chains adorning the assembled mayors of Derbyshire. The RAF laid on a timely unintended fly-past, the Chatsworth dogs proved that if you’re handsome enough you can scrounge any number of free lunches and at the end a lady danced extempore upon a table.