The Letter of Marque

by Patrick O'Brian

  At last Diana was inspired to tell Jagiello that his grandmother had called before dinner and to suggest that he should hurry to the big house to prevent her setting out again. Countess Tessin would surely have seen them go by, and the double walk would be too much for her.

  Jagiello thankfully agreed; he had felt in the way from the first few minutes without being able to contrive any plausible reason for taking his leave. But after the first farewells, and at the open hall door itself, Lovisa began to tell Diana about her wedding clothes. She went on and on and on, in Swedish most of the time, and Stephen backed and backed until with a final bow he could disappear upstairs.

  Once again he was astonished at the strength of his draught, and this time it occurred to him that the difference might lie in the opium rather than the menstruum. 'And yet,' he reflected as he walked downstairs, 'I have never heard of any marked variation between the pharmacopoeias of different countries in that respect. Within the range of a few scruples to the ounce, the tincture is the same at a respectable apothecary's in Paris or Dublin, Boston or Barcelona.'

  'Lord, Maturin,' said Diana, 'I thought they would never go. That silly pretty goose was still talking about the embroidery on her gown when Countess Tessin came in sight. But then I did give Jagiello a shove at last and he took her away.'

  'There is much to be said for Jagiello.'

  'Yes. And this time he did not utter a single word against balloons, though he knows very well I mean to go up on Saturday.'

  'This coming Saturday?'

  'Yes. They have begun filling it already.'

  'May I come too?'

  'Of course you may. It is the red balloon this time, so there will be plenty of room in the car. Would you like to see it?' Stephen did not answer until she said 'Would you like to see it?' again. Then he looked up, a little dazed, and replied 'That would be delightful. Do you keep it here?'

  'Oh no, no. It is a vast great thing. But they are filling it at the foundry—they use iron filings and vitriol to make the inflammable air, you know—and you can see it from the tower. Stephen, are you feeling quite well?'

  'A trifle odd, my dear, I must confess; but then I was roused before dawn. I am perfectly capable of running up the tower.'

  'We will take it gently. There is a spy-glass on top of the cupboard behind you.'

  She led the way to a vaulted corridor at the back of the hall and so to the dark tower beyond, far older than the present house. 'Take great care, Stephen,' she called back as she climbed the spiral staircase. 'Keep to the wall side, there is no rail in the middle after half way.'

  Winding and winding in the dim shadows they came to a dwarvish door at the top and crept out into the brilliant light. They were surprisingly high and the whole island lay spread out below them. 'This way,' said Diana, leading him to the eastern parapet: there was the old city of Stockholm about an hour's walk away and rather to one side of it the tall chimneys of industry. Diana had been carrying the Blue Peter; she now wrapped it in a handkerchief, put it in her pocket, and levelled the telescope at the chimneys. 'There,' she said, 'Get the one that is smoking so, move to the left, and there in the yard you see the upper half of a great round red thing. That is my balloon!'

  'God bless it,' said Stephen, handing back the glass.

  'I think we should go down and have a cup of tea,' said Diana, studying his face. 'You look like whitey-brown paper. You go first and I will follow; I know just where to find the bolts.'

  Stephen opened the door, said something indistinct about Saturday and pitched headlong into the void.

  It seemed that in spite of obscure delays and disturbances the ascent had been postponed rather than cancelled; at least if it had been a public performance at all it must have been on a very modest scale, since he could remember no crowd, no noise. He did have confused memories of a tumble, of indeterminate injuries and fuss, which muffled the immediate past, and now they had risen above the clouds—a fairly apt parallel for his passing fogginess of mind—and now they were in the pure upper air with that strangely familiar dark blue above and on either hand unless he looked over the edge of the car and down to the fantastic convolutions and the slowly changing geography of the cloud-world below: all much purer and more intense even than his dream, which he remembered perfectly. And although his dream had heightened colour it had not done so to this miraculous degree; the wickerwork of the car had an infinity of very beautiful shades from dark brown to something lighter than straw, while the ropes that led from the network enveloping the balloon itself had a subtlety all their own. It was as though he had never seen rope before, or as though he had recovered his sight after many years of blindness, and when he looked across at Diana, the perfection of her cheek fairly caught his breath. She was sitting there in a green riding-habit with her hands folded in her lap; she was looking down at her diamond and her eyes were almost closed, the long lashes hiding them.

  They were both of them silent—this was a world of silence—yet he was conscious that they were perfectly in tune and that no amount of talking would make them more so. He reflected upon height, the effect of height: how much was it height alone that gave this much keener sense of life? He retraced his very long climb up the flank of the Maladetta to the highest point he had ever reached on land. A mule in the morning darkness from Benasque, up and up through the forenoon to the highest cow-pasture, wth streams as thick as a barrel gushing straight from the bare rock-face by the path, a pause at the hut and then on by foot, up through vast sweeps of low rhododendron until they gave way to gentians, countless gentians in the short turf, up to the rocky edge of the glacier where a host of tall primulas stood in their perfection, exactly disposed, as though all the king's gardeners had been at work; all these things, together with the troop of fleeing chamois below him and the pair of eagles turning and turning above, had been very clearly perceived in that thin keen air. But not with anything like an equal clarity; and here there was also a difference in kind. During that long day he had been strongly aware of time, if only because he had to avoid being benighted on the mountainside: now there was no time. That is to say, there was succession, in that a gesture or a thought followed its predecessor, but there was no sense of duration. He and Diana might have been floating there for hours or even for days. And then again although the Maladetta was physically dangerous it had nothing of the indefinable threat present in this immensity.

  Diana had almost certainly dozed off, and he said nothing; nor did he speak of the high mist that veiled the sky, giving the sun a double halo and producing two fine prismatic sun-dogs. He was in fact surprisingly sleepy himself, and presently he too closed his eyes.

  At the very beginning of his dream he could say 'I am dreaming' but his perception of it faded almost at once and he was filled with as much anxiety as he would have been if he had never had a hint of this being only the disturbance of a sleeping mind. It was clear to him now that they had set off, the wind being favourable, for Spitzbergen, where they would surely fall in with the whalers who congregated there at this time of the year, and where they would view the wonders of the Arctic so well described by Mulgrave, and the northern wall of ice that had barred his way to the Pole. But there had been some disagreement and although at one time a rocky landscape had been seen below they had not made any attempt to descend and now there was nothing in sight but grey ocean stretching from sky to sky.

  Dream within dream; and this dissolved to an unknown room. Diana was there, no longer wearing her riding-habit but a plain grey dress, and Jagiello, together with two men in black coats and bob wigs who were obviously physicians, the one a fool and the other exceptionally intelligent. They spoke to Diana in Swedish, which Jagiello usually translated, her acquaintance with the language being barely enough for ordinary housekeeping; and they discussed the case between themselves in Latin. Soon they were joined by a third, whom they treated with marked deference—he wore the star of an order—and who recommended cupping: the leg, he said, presented
no particular problem; he had seen many fractures of this kind and they had always yielded to Andersen's Basra method, so long as the patient was in a reasonable state of health. Here, to be sure, there was a vicious habit of body, some degree of under-nourishment, and what he would scarcely hesitate to calf incipient melancholia; yet they were to observe that the frame, though spare, was well-knit; and there were still some lingering traces of youth to be made out.

  Stephen watched them for a while as they went through the grave gestures of consultation, part of the gravity being directed at the audience, part at one another; but he was too familiar with this kind of meeting for it to have much interest and presently his attention shifted to his surroundings, and to Diana and Jagiello. The intuition peculiar to dreams told him that this was Diana's room, that this was her bed itself, and that she spent her time on the chaise-longue beside it, looking after him with the utmost tenderness. He also knew that Jagiello had called in the king's physician, the person with the star, who was now saying that when he came to the point of eating solids, the patient should be allowed no beef or mutton, still less any swine's flesh, but rather a hazel-hen, seethed with a very little barley.

  'Hazel-hen,' he thought. 'Never have I seen a hazel-hen; yet if this good man's advice is followed I shall soon incorporate one. I shall be in part a hazel-hen with whatever virtues a hazel-hen may possess.' He reflected upon Finn Mac Coul and his salmon and while he was reflecting there in the twilight, lamps were lit; he was reflecting still when they were put out, all but a single one turned low; and now the chief light in the room came from a fire away on his right hand, a live flickering glow on the ceiling. There had no doubt been discreet farewells, and someone had surely prescribed; but now Diana was alone, sitting on the chaise-longue beside the bed. She laid her hand on the back of his and said very quietly 'Oh Stephen, Stephen, how I wish you could hear me, my dear.'

  But now there was this evil balloon again, and now he was living with time in the sense of duration once more, for he knew with dreadful certainty that they had been rising for hours on end, that they were now rising faster still. And as they soared towards this absolute purity of sky so its imminent threat, half-perceived at first, filled him with a horror beyond anything he had known. Diana was wearing her green coat again and at some point she must have turned up the collar, for now its red underneath made a shocking contrast with the extreme pallor of her face, the pinched white of her nose and the frosted blue of her lips. Her face showed no expression—she was, as it were, completely alone—and as she had done before she held her head down, bowed over her lap, where her hands, now more loosely clasped, held the diamond, very like a sliver of this brilliant sky itself.

  She was breathing still, but only just, as they floated away, always higher and into even more rarefied air; breathing, but only just—a very slight movement indeed. Then even that stopped; her senses were going, going; her head drooped forward, the diamond fell; and he started up, crying 'No, no, no,' in the extremity of passionate refusal.

  'Quiet, Stephen,' she said, taking him in her arms and easing him back in bed. 'Easy, there,' as though she were talking to a horse; and then, as though she were talking to a man, 'You must take care of your poor leg, my dear.'

  He leant on her warmth, slipping back through several realities to this, though without much certainty of its existence. Yet his certainty grew stronger as he lay there through the night, watching the glow of the fire and hearing a clock strike the hours; and sometimes she moved about, putting on more wood, or attending to his squalid needs, and doing so with an efficiency and a tenderness that moved him very deeply: and in these short exchanges his words were relevant and intelligible.

  They had known one another these many years, but their relations had never called for tenderness on her side and he would have said that it formed no part of her character: courage, spirit and determination, yes, but nothing nearer tenderness than generosity and good nature. He was weak, having been much battered in his physical and metaphysical fall and having eaten nothing since, weak and somewhat maudlin, and reflecting upon this new dimension he wept silently in the darkness.

  In the morning he heard her stir and said 'Diana, joy, are you awake?'

  She came over, looked into his face, kissed him and said 'You are in your right wits still, sweetheart, thanks be. I was so afraid you would slip back into your nightmares about the balloon.'

  'Did I talk a great deal?'

  'Yes you did, my poor lamb—there was no comforting you—it was oh so distressing. And oh so long.'

  'Hours, was it?'

  'Days, Stephen.'

  He considered this, and the violent stabs of pain in his leg. 'Listen,' he said, 'would there be any coffee in the house? And a piece of biscuit, maybe? I raven. And tell, did the bottle in my pocket survive?'

  'No. It broke. It nearly killed you—a most frightful gash in your side.'

  When she had gone he looked at his leg, deep in plaster according to the Basra method, and under the bandage round his belly. The broken glass must have gone very near the peritoneum. 'Were I in a still weaker state I should look upon that as an omen, an awful warning,' he said.

  They had finished their breakfast and they were talking companionably when Dr Mersennius, the most intelligent of the medical men, came to ask how the patient did and to dress his wound. Stephen mentioned the pain in his leg.

  'I trust you will not ask me to prescribe laudanum, colleague,' said Mersennius, looking him in the eye. 'I have known cases where a few minims, taken after a very massive dose, accidental or otherwise, have caused extreme and lasting mental distress, allied to that which you have just suffered but more durable, leading on occasion to lunacy and death.'

  'Have you any reason to suppose that I had taken laudanum?'

  'Your pupils, of course; and the apothecary's label was still on the broken glass. A wise physician would no more add a drop of laudanum to an already overcharged body than a gunner would take a naked light into a powder-magazine.'

  'Many medical men use the tincture against pain and emotional disturbance.'

  'Certainly. But in this case I am persuaded that we should be well advised to bear the pain and deal with the agitation by exhibiting a moderate dose of hellebore.'

  Stephen felt inclined to congratulate Mersennius on his fortitude, but he did not and they parted on civil terms. Within the limits of his information Mersennius was right; he obviously thought that his patient was addicted to laudanum, and he had no means of knowing, as Stephen knew, that this frequent and indeed habitual use was not true addiction, but just the right side of it. The boundary was difficult to define and he did not blame Mersennius for his mistake, the less so as his body was at this moment feeling more than a hint of that craving which was the mark of a man who had gone too far. Yet the present unsteady emotional state must be taken in hand. The pain he could bear, but he would never forgive himself if he were to weep at Diana or behave weakly.

  Diana came back. 'He is so pleased with you, and with your wound,' she said. 'But he says I am not to give you any laudanum.'

  'I know. He thinks it might do harm in this case: he may be right.'

  'And Jagiello asks whether you would like his man to come and shave you, and then whether you would feel strong enough to see him.'

  'Should be very happy; how kind in Jagiello. Diana, my dear, please may I have that little parcel I brought with me?'

  'The leaves that make you feel clever and witty? Stephen, are you quite sure they will not do you any harm?'

  'Never in life, my dearest soul. The Peruvians and their neighbours chew coca day and night; it is as usual as tobacco.'

  By the time Jagiello's valet had shaved him, Stephen's mouth was already tingling pleasantly from his quid of coca; by the time Jagiello had paid him a short but most cordial visit, the leaves had entirely taken away his sense of taste—a small price to pay for the calming and strengthening of his mind. The loss of taste could hardly have come at
a better moment, for after Stephen had been contemplating the coca's undoubted action on his leg for some time, Diana brought a bottle of physic, sent by Mersennius—a spectacularly disagreeable emulsion.

  Nor could the consolidation of his mind, now firmly seated on its base, because three days later, three days of an unabated tenderness that had bound him to her more than ever before, Diana came in at the stroke of ten with bottle and spoon, and having dosed him she fidgeted strangely about the room before settling at last on the chaise-longue. 'Maturin,' she said in an embarrassed voice, 'what happened to my wits the day we met I cannot tell. I have never been clever at remembering years or history or the order things happened in, but really this goes beyond all . . . It was only as I was running downstairs just now that a flash of common sense burst upon me and said "Why, Diana, you damned fool, it might have been his answer." '

  Stephen did not like to seem to understand at once; he shifted the ball of coca-leaves into his cheek, considered for a moment, and said 'The letter I gave Wray was an answer to one of yours in which you were not quite pleased—in which you desired me to explain rumours that I was flaunting up and down the Mediterranean with a red-haired Italian mistress.'