The Nutmeg of Consolation

by Patrick O'Brian

  'They are very well indeed, I believe; and no trouble at all. I have seen nothing of them, almost. They never come on deck until after dark for fear of being seized, but I hear them singing down below.'

  'And what of Paulton? Did you have any news of him while we were away?'

  'Oh yes,' said Jack, his face brightening somewhat. 'He called to take leave some days ago: he has to go back to his cousin's place along the coast, not far from Bird Island. He hoped we would come to see him by boat, or if that were impossible, that you would look in on him during your northern trip. What a very agreeable evening we had with him, upon my word! Such a jovial companion, and such a hand with his violin. How glad I was I insisted upon playing second fiddle: even so, he put me to the blush.'

  News that the ship was moored came below, and presently Stephen said, 'Jack, tomorrow I must wait on Mrs Macquarie and try to make my excuses at last. But before that, before breakfast indeed, I should like to examine you to find whether your plethory is wholly digested, and prescribe physic if it is not.'

  'Very well. But I tell you what it is, Stephen: we sail on the twenty-fourth. Even if the Governor is back by then, which I think very likely, and even if everything then goes more smoothly, which I think possible, I have decided to renounce some of the repairs and to sail with the change of the moon: I am sorry if it cuts your journey short or interferes with your plans.'

  'Not at all. I shall start a little earlier, tomorrow itself, perhaps; and unless we are devoured by some nondescript wild beast or get lost in the worst kind of bush, to which the Labyrinth is child's play and the maze at Hampton Court an inconsiderable toy, we shall be back on the twenty-third. I shall tell Padeen when we pass by Paulton's place.'

  'What now?' called Jack, turning to the door.

  'Here's a damned thing, sir,' cried Pullings. 'The guards at South Point insisted on examining the blue cutter—tried to stop it—Oakes who was in charge said he would blow out the brains of the first man that laid a hand on the gunwale.'

  'Quite right too. The boat was wearing a jack?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'That makes it more monstrous still. I shall report it to the Admiralty; I shall raise it in the House. Hell and death, they will be opening my letters and dispatches next, and sleeping in my cot.'

  Once more Stephen, brushed, dressed, shaved and powdered to the height of Killick's lofty standards, sent in his card, and this time, although Her Excellency was engaged, he was particularly desired to wait: she would be free in five minutes. The five minutes stretched out to ten and the hall door opened to admit his cousin James Fitzgerald, a somewhat worldly priest, nominally a member of the Fathers of the Faith, a Portuguese order. They looked at one another with a cat-like determination not to show surprise but their greeting and their embrace was affectionate: they had after all spent many a happy day running about the Galtee mountains together from the house of a grand-uncle common to both. They now exchanged some family news, worked out just when they had last met, which was also in an ante-room, that of the Patriarch of Lisbon, and then James said 'Stephen, forgive me if I am indiscreet, but I hear you may be going northward, by way of Woolloo-Woolloo, presently.'

  'Do you, Coz?'

  'And if that should be so, may I advise you to take great care? There is a band of absconders, United Irishmen, hard men, living between there and Newcastle, and some of them think you may have changed sides since ninety-eight. You were seen on the deck of an English ship that chased Gough into the Solway Firth: and after he had been hanged some of his friends were transported.'

  'They cannot be men who ever knew me. I was always totally opposed to violence in Ireland, and I deplored the rising. I begged Cousin Edward not to use force. And even now Catholic emancipation and the dissolution of the union—acts of parliament, no more—would deal with the situation. But Buonaparte's tyranny is something new in its kind—far, far more thorough and intelligent—and in this case force is the only remedy. I am willing to help anyone to bring him down; and so, as I know very well, are you and your order. His success would be the ruin of Europe; his help fatal to Ireland. Yet never, never, never in my life have I played the informer.'

  Before Father Fitzgerald could reply a footman came in and said 'Dr Maturin, sir, if you please.'

  'Dr Maturin,' said Mrs Macquarie, 'I am so very sorry to have kept you waiting. Poor Colonel MacPherson was with me in such a state of anxiety.' She looked as though she were going to say more, but changing her mind she asked Maturin to sit down and went on, 'Well, and so you have been travelling about in the bush. I hope you liked it.'

  'It was an exceedingly interesting experience, ma'am; we survived, thanks to an intelligent black, and we brought back an ass-load of specimens that will keep us busy for the next twelvemonth and more. But before I say anything else, allow me to make my most humble apologies for the behaviour of those wicked little girls. It was a truly wretched return for your kindness, and I blush at the recollection.'

  'It did not altogether surprise me, I must confess. They were as wild as young hawks, poor little things: and even before they lost their heads, bit the matron, broke the window and climbed down the outside of the house—how they managed not to break their legs as well I cannot tell—they said they did not like the company of girls; they far preferred being with men. Should you like to try again, perhaps?'

  'No, ma'am, though I thank you very heartily. I do not think it would answer; and in any case the ship's company would rise upon me. My solution, since I cannot restore them to their native island, now deserted, is to wrap them in wool and keep them below in the high southern latitudes, and in London to confide them to the care of an excellent motherly woman I have known these many years, who keeps an inn in the Liberties of the Savoy, and who keeps it delightfully warm.'

  They spoke of Mrs Broad's qualities and of the numbers of tropical blacks who became acclimatized to London; and then Mrs Macquarie said 'Dr Maturin, may I speak to you quite unofficially about this present unhappy state of affairs? My husband will be back at last in a few days and it would distress him even more than it distresses me: I should so like to make relations just a little better before he returns, if I possibly can. I am aware there has always been rivalry between the Army and the Navy here—you know the reasons better than I, since you were here in Admiral Bligh's time—but poor Colonel MacPherson is a newcomer, a stranger to it all, and is much concerned at having his letters returned as improperly addressed. As for the contents, he leaves that to the civilians; but he is a great stickler for forms, and it was with tears in his eyes that he showed me this cover, begging me to tell him if I could see the least impropriety in the direction.'

  Stephen cocked his eye at the cover and said 'Well, ma'am, I believe it is usual to add MP to the address of an officer who is also a member, to say nothing of FRS for one who belongs to the Royal Society and JP if he is also a magistrate. But Captain Aubrey is not in the least punctilious and he would never have taken the slightest notice of the omissions if he had not been incensed by what looks very like ill-will, deliberate delay and frustration on the part of certain officials. He met it before, when his ship put in just after Governor Bligh's disagreement with Mr Macarthur and his friends.'

  'Is Captain Aubrey a member of parliament?' cried Mrs Macquarie, startled into foolishness. Then recovering herself she uttered a low gurgling laugh and said 'Oh, oh: there will be some red ears among the civilians: they dread a question in Parliament worse than damnation.'

  When Stephen rose to take his leave she asked him whether he would dine informally tomorrow—Dr Redfern would be there and both he and she would like Mr Maturin's opinion of their projected hospital.

  'Alas, ma'am,' said Stephen, 'at crack of dawn I am engaged to ride away towards the forests of the Hunter river, the home, I am told, of the carpet snake, and many a curious bird.'

  'Pray take great care not to get lost,' she said, giving him her hand. 'Almost everybody goes there by sea. And do let us know
when you are back: I should like you to meet my husband, who is a great naturalist.'

  In spite of Mrs Macquarie's warning they got lost on their first afternoon. The fairly broad track—for they were not yet beyond the range of scattered settlements—having led over an almost bare sandstone rise which gave them a view of lagoons, a complexity of lagoons, sloped gently down through scrub and scattered trees; and on the right hand they heard a full-throated liquid note of what could only be a lyre-bird, a fairly distant lyre-bird.

  'Do you know,' said Stephen, 'that no competent anatomist has ever examined one?'

  'I know it well,' said Martin, his eye gleaming.

  They left the track and rode gently through the brush towards the often-repeated note until they came to an acacia, where they nodded, silently dismounted, tethered the horses and the ass—they had brought him too, their journey being advanced—and walked as quietly as they could into the bush, Stephen carrying the fowling-piece, for Martin, with only one eye and an unduly tender heart, was not a reliable shot. As quietly as they could: but the bush was close-set, dry, littered with dead horny leaves, twigs, branches; and it grew deeper. They were within fifty yards of the voice when it stopped in mid-phrase; they waited, poised, a good ten minutes, and they were turning disappointed resigned faces to one another when two other birds began. To approach the nearest they had to creep, for not only had the brush changed to yet another kind of eucalypt, but the ground had also grown rocky. Still, they were experienced bird-creepers, and now, with infinite pains and accompanied (they being in the shade) by innumerable mosquitoes, they did get close enough to the bird to hear him chuckling to himself between his calls, and scratching the ground. And when at last they came out into the little bald place with a mound in the middle where he had been doing so they found his marks and his droppings. This was their nearest approach to success; and after the seventh bird they decided that so late in the day it was folly to go farther from their horses. They would return to the acacia where they were tethered.

  'But surely this is not the way?' cried Martin. 'We had the great lagoon directly before us when we left the road.'

  'I have the compass,' said Stephen. 'The compass cannot lie.'

  After a while the compass, or their interpretation of it, led them through a prickly shrub they had never seen before and whose botanical nature they could not determine: they were following what seemed to be a path made by the repeated passage of some animal when Martin stopped abruptly: turning he said 'Here is a dead man.'

  He was an escaping convict, and he had been speared a week or ten days before. At least they laid a symbolic branch over him before they walked on, forced to make some detours because of stretches of impenetrable bush, but still rising and hoping for more open country.

  It was when the sun was as low as their hearts and they stood there in doubt with lyre-birds calling on either hand that they heard the ass's howl not a quarter of a mile behind them. In their agitation they had managed to cross the track without seeing it, and once they were on it again the whole landscape fell into place, direction was obvious, and the great lagoon lay where it ought to lie in relation to the rest.

  They woke to the sweetest dawn—day in the east, still night in the west and a sky between them varying by imperceptible degrees from violet to the purest aquamarine. Dew had fallen and the still air was full of scents unknown to the rest of the world. The horses moved companionably about, smelling gently of horse; the ass was still asleep.

  Smoke rising straight: the smell of coffee. 'Have you ever known a more blessed day?' asked Martin.

  'I have not,' said Stephen. 'Even this uninviting landscape is transfigured.'

  A lyre-bird called on the hillside within twenty yards and while their cups were still poIsed it flew right over their heads, a long-tailed pheasant-like creature, and pitched in the brush beyond. The horses brought their ears to bear. The ass woke up.

  'Should you like to pursue him?' asked Stephen.

  'No,' said Martin. 'We have seen one now, and if we want to dissect one, Paulton will I am sure oblige us with a specimen. They send dogs in to flush them and shoot them as they rise. I am of opinion that we should never deviate from the track and devote all our time to the waders. There must be hosts of them on the lagoons, together with what ducks the country can afford; and as Paulton said, the track skirts the whole series.'

  There were indeed hosts of waders on the shore, long-legged birds stalking about in the water, short-legged ones racing about on the mud, formations a thousand strong wheeling all together with a flash of wings, and everywhere those fluting marsh- and shore-bird cries, often the same as those they had both heard in their boyhood and uttered by birds if not of quite the very species then wonderfully like—greenshanks, stilts, avocets, plovers of every kind. 'And there is an oyster-catcher,' said Martin. 'I cannot tell you, Maturin, how happy I am to be lying here on the saltwort in the sun, watching that oystercatcher through my glass.'

  'He is so like ours that I am puzzled to say just where the difference lies,' said Stephen. 'But he is certainly not quite our bird.'

  'Why,' said Martin, 'he has no white on his primaries.'

  'Of course,' said Stephen. 'And his bill is surely longer by an inch.'

  'Yet I believe it is not the difference that makes me so happy; but rather the similarity!'

  This happiness, which inhabited both of them, received something of a check when the path, which had run by three successive bodies of water without ambiguity, divided into two equally faint arms on the grassy slope of a hill that separated the third body from the fourth, a grassy slope with a spring. They dismounted to let the horses drink and graze, and to consider the interminable complexity of shining water that stretched away and away before them under the vast bowl of sky, with clouds sailing across it on the south-east trade. They could come to no satisfactory conclusion: giving the horses their heads in the hope that instinct would succeed where reason failed did not answer—the horses gazed at them with patient, stupid faces and waited to be told where to go: the ass remained perfectly indifferent—so it was decided by the toss of a coin that they should take the right-hand arm. And after all, they said, even if it should die away, as paths so often did, so long as they kept down to the water's edge they could not get lost in the dreadful bush, since there was no bush down there; and so long as they kept generally northward, along the coast, they must necessarily come to Woolloo-Woolloo. Eased in their minds, they gathered several of the more unusual plants (the habitat was in itself most exceptional), some beetles and the almost perfect skeleton of a bandicoot, and rode on, startling a group of kangaroos when they came round the shoulder of the slope.

  The theory on which they proceeded was sound, but it did not make quite enough allowance for the winding of the shores along which they travelled nor for the fact that many of the lagoons were not lagoons at all but deep and many-branched inlets of the sea. The path of course disappeared on an outcrop of bare sandstone, never to be found again—'Could it have been made by kangaroos?' they wondered—but they carried on happily enough, plagued by mosquitoes early and late but enchanted by the birds, until both food and time began to run out.

  An incautious kangaroo, up-wind in a misty dawn, an ancient tall grey kangaroo, perhaps senile, provided food of a sort; but nothing could provide them with time and when at last they found Woolloo-Woolloo, which they did from the seaward side of the lagoon, recognizing it with immense relief (their theory justified—ignominious death averted) by the cairn and flagpost that Paulton had described, and Bird Island just showing in the north, they could not stay more than that night with him in spite of his pleas, still less press on to the forests of the Hunter valley.

  'My dear sir,' said Stephen, 'you are very good, but we have almost outstayed our leave. I have promised Captain Aubrey to be back on the twenty-third, and with our horses in their present state and the ass so slow we must start very early tomorrow. If you would do me a kindness, you would s
ee us on our way until even a very stupid fellow cannot miss the track.'

  'Of course I will,' said Paulton, and he went on, 'Your cattle are being rubbed down and pampered at this moment by two dealers from Newmarket itself, great hands at preparing a horse.'

  Observing his discretion, Stephen said 'May I ask you to show me the fruit-trees you have in front of the house?'

  In the orchard, where some apple-trees were growing in a strange left-handed fashion, filled with incongruous cicadas and still bewildered by the reversal of the seasons, Paulton said 'I wish I were capable of expressing my sense of your kindness in this matter of my tale: it means freedom for me.'

  'You expressed yourself very handsomely in your letter,' said Stephen, 'far more handsomely indeed than ever could be looked for: and I beg you will say no more, but rather tell me of Padeen Colman.'

  'I think you will be pleased with him,' said Paulton with a smile. 'He came skin and bone, though that good man Redfern had almost healed his back—he came, by the way, labelled Patrick Walsh, which is I take it the registry clerks' way of covering their traces and confusing the issues to a hopeless degree—and he has been eating ever since. I have let it be known that he is infectious and I have put him by himself in the lamb-pasture hut. If you had come up the stream from the lagoon you would have seen it. May I lead you there now?'

  'If you please.'

  The meadow was true meadow, the largest stretch of grass that Stephen had seen in New South Wales; it was scattered with thick lambs, some of whom still gambolled heavily, and in the middle stood a cabin built of sods and thatched with reeds, the roof held down against the wind by stone-weighted lines. The reeds came from the beds at the far end of the meadow, where the stream ran into the lagoon, forming the little bay where the settlement's produce was shipped to Sydney. In front of the cabin sat Padeen, singing about Conn Céad Cathach to two young Aborigines, standing there tall and thin before him.