Post captain Page 2

  Polcary Down and the cold sky over it; a searching air from the north breathing over the water-​meadows, up across the plough, up and up to this great sweep of open turf, the down, with the covert called Rumbold’s Gorse sprawling on the lower edge of it. A score of red-​coated figures dotted round the Gorse, and far away below them on the middle slope a ploughman standing at the end of his furrow, motionless behind his team of Sussex oxen, gazing up as Mr Savile’s hounds worked their way through the furze and the brown remnants of the bracken. Slow work; uncertain, patchy scent; and the foxhunters had plenty of time to drink from their flasks, blow on their hands, and look out over the landscape below them -the river winding through its patchwork of fields, the towers or steeples of Hither, Middle, Nether and Savile Champflower, the six or seven big houses scattered along the valley, the whale-​backed downs one behind the other, and far away the lead-​coloured sea.

  It was a small field, and almost everyone there knew everyone else: half a dozen farmers, some private gentlemen from the Champflowers and the outlying parishes, two militia officers from the dwindling camp at Rainsford, Mr Burton, who had come out in spite of his streaming cold in the hope of catching a glimpse of Mrs St John, and Dr

  Vining, with his hat pinned to his wig and both tied under his chin with a handkerchief. He had been led astray early in his rounds - he could not resist the sound of the horn - and his conscience had been troubling him ever since the scent had faded and died. From time to time he looked over the miles of frigid air between the covert and Mapes Court, where Mrs Williams was waiting for him. ‘There is nothing wrong with her,’ he observed. ‘My physic will do no good; but in Christian decency I should call. And indeed I shall, unless they find again before I can tell a hundred.’ He put his finger upon his pulse and began to count. At ninety he paused, looking about for some reprieve, and on the far side of the covert he saw a figure he did not know. ‘That is the medical man they have been telling me about, no doubt,’ he said. ‘It would be the civil thing to go over and say a word to him. A rum-​looking cove. Dear me, a very rum-​looking cove.’

  The rum-​looking cove was sprawling upon a mule, an unusual sight in an English hunting-​field; and quite apart from the mule there was a strange air about him

  his slate-​coloured small-​clothes, his pale face, his pale eyes and even paler close-​cropped skull (his hat and wig were tied to his saddle), and the way he bit into a hunk of bread rubbed with garlic. He was calling out in a loud tone to his companion, in whom Dr Vining recognized the new tenant of Melbury Lodge. ‘I tell you what it is, Jack,’ he was saying, ‘I tell you what it is. .

  ‘You sir - you on the mule,’ cried old Mr Savile’s furious voice. ‘Will you let the God-​damned dogs get on with their work? Hey? Hey? Is this a God-​damned coffee-​house? I appeal to you, is this an infernal debating society?’

  Captain Aubrey pursed his lips demurely and pushed his horse over the twenty yards that separated them. ‘Tell me later, Stephen,’ he said in a low voice, leading his friend round the covert out of the master’s sight. ‘Tell me later, when they have found their fox.’

  The demure look did not sit naturally upon Jack Aubrey’s face, which in this weather was as red as his coat, and as soon as they were round the corner, under the lee of a wind-​blown thorn, his usual expectant cheerfulness returned, and he looked eagerly up into the furze, where an occasional heave and rustle showed the pack in motion.

  ‘Looking for a fox, are they?’ said Stephen Maturin, as though hippogriffs were the more usual quarry in England, and he relapsed into a brown study, munching slowly upon his bread.

  The wind breathed up the long hillside; remote clouds passed evenly across the sky. Now and then Jack’s big hunter brought his ears to bear; this was a recent purchase, a strongly-​built bay, quite up to Jack’s sixteen stone. But it did not much care for hunting, and then like so many geldings it spent much of its time mourning for its lost stones: a discontented horse. If the moods that succeeded one another in its head had taken the form of words they would have run, ‘Too heavy - sits too far forward when we go over a fence - have carried him far enough for one day - shall have him off presently, see if I don’t. I smell a mare! A mare! Oh!’ Its flaring nostrils quivered, and it stamped.

  Looking round Jack saw that there were newcomers in the field. A young woman and a groom came hurrying up the side of the plough, the groom mounted on a cob and the young woman on a pretty little high-​bred chestnut mare. When they reached the post and rail dividing the field from the down the groom cantered on to open a gate, but the girl set her horse at the rail and skipped neatly over it, just as a whimpering and then a bellowing roar inside the covert gave promise of great things.

  The noise died away: a young hound came out and started into the open. Stephen Maturin moved from behind the close-​woven thorn to follow the flight of a falcon overhead, and at the sight of the mule the chestnut mare began to caper, flashing her white stockings and tossing her head.

  ‘Get over, you - ,’ said the girl, in her pure clear young voice. Jack had never heard a girl say - before, and he turned to look at her with a particular interest. She was busy coping with the mare’s excitement, but after a moment she caught his eye and frowned. He looked away, smiling, for she was the prettiest thing - indeed, beautiful, with her heightened colour and her fine straight back, sitting her horse with the unconscious grace of a midshipman at the tiller in a lively sea. She had black hair and blue eyes; a certain ram-​you-​damn-​you air that was slightly comic and more than a little touching in so slim a creature. She was wearing a shabby blue habit with white cuffs and lapels, like a naval lieutenant’s coat, and on top of it all a dashing tricorne with a tight curl of ostrich-​feather. In some ingenious way, probably by the use of combs, she had drawn up her hair under this hat so as to leave one ear exposed; and this perfect ear, as Jack observed when the mare came crabwise towards him, was as pink as.. .

  ‘There is that fox of theirs,’ remarked Stephen, in a conversational tone. ‘There is that fox we hear so much about. Though indeed, it is a vixen, sure.’

  Slipping quickly along a fold in the ground the leaf-​coloured fox went slanting down across them towards the plough. The horses’ ears and the mule’s followed it, cocked like so many semaphores. When the fox was well clear Jack rose in his stirrups, held up his hat and holla’d it away in a high-​seas roar that brought the huntsman tearing round, his horn going twang-​twang-​twang, and hounds racing from the furze at all points. They hit the scent in the sheltered hollow and they were away with a splendid cry. They poured through the fence; they were half-​way across the unploughed stubble, a close-​packed body - such music - and the huntsman was right up there with them. The field came thundering round the covert: someone had the gate open and in a moment there was an eager crowd jostling to get through, for it was a devilish unpleasant downhill leap just here. Jack held hard, not choosing to thrust his first time out in a strange country, but his heart was beating to quarters, double-​time, and he had already worked out the line he would follow once the press had thinned.

  Jack was the keenest of fox-​hunters: he loved everything about the chase, from the first sound of the horn to the rancid smell of the torn fox, but in spite of a few unwelcome spells without a ship, he had spent two thirds of his life at sea - his skill was not all he thought it was.

  The gate was still jammed - there would be no chance of getting through it before the pack was in the next field. Jack wheeled his horse, called out, ‘Come on, Stephen,’ and put it at the rail. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the chestnut flash between his friend and the crowd in the gate. As his horse rose Jack screwed round to see how the girl would get over, and the gelding instantly felt this change of balance. It took the rail flying high and fast, landed with its head low, and with a cunning twist of its shoulder and an upward thrust from behind it unseated its rider.

  He did not fall at once. It was a slow, ignominious glide down that slippery near shoulder, with a fistful of mane in his right hand; but the horse was the master of the situation now, and in twenty yards the saddle was empty.

  The horse’s satisfaction did not last, however. Jack’s boot was wedged in his near stirrup; it would not come free, and here was his heavy person jerking and thumping along at the gelding’s side, roaring and swearing horribly. The horse began to grow alarmed - to lose its head - to snort - to stare wildly - and to run faster and faster across those dark, flint-​strewn, unforgiving furrows.

  The ploughman left his oxen and came lumbering up the hill, waving his goad; a tall young man in a green coat, a foot-​follower, called out ‘Whoa there, whoa there,’ and ran towards the horse with his arms spread wide; the mule, the last of the vanishing field, turned and raced back to cut the gelding off, swarming along in its inhuman way, very close to the ground. It outran the men, crossed the gelding’s path, stood firm and took the shock: like a hero Stephen flung himself off, seized the reins and clung there until Green Coat and the ploughman came pounding up.

  The oxen, left staring half-​way along their furrow, were so moved by all this excitement that they came very nearly to the point of cutting a caper on their own. But before they had made up their minds it was over. The ploughman was leading the shamefaced horse to the side of the field, while the other two propped raw bones and bloody head between them, listening gravely to his explanations. The mule walked behind. Mapes Court was an entirely feminine household - not a man in it, apart from the butler and the groom. Mrs Williams was a woman, in the natural course of things; but she was a woman so emphatically, so totally a woman, that she was almost devoid of any private character. A vulgar woman, too, although her family, which was of some importance in the neighbourh
ood, had been settled there since Dutch William’s time.

  It was difficult to see any connection, any family likeness, between her and her daughters and her niece, who made up the rest of the family. Indeed, it was not much of a house for family likeness: the dim portraits might have been bought at various auctions, and although the three daughters had been brought up together, with the same people around them, in the same atmosphere of genteel money-​worship, position-​worship and suffused indignation - an indignation that did not require any object for its existence, but that could always find one in a short space of time; a housemaid wearing silver buckles on Sunday would bring on a full week’s flow - they were as different in their minds as they were in their looks.

  Sophia, the eldest, was a tall girl with wide-​set grey eyes, a broad, smooth forehead, and a wonderful sweetness of expression - soft fair hair, inclining to gold: an exquisite skin. She was a reserved creature, living much in an inward dream whose nature she did not communicate to anyone. Perhaps it was her mother’s unprincipled rectitude that had given her this early disgust for adult life; but whether or no, she seemed very young for her twenty-​seven years. There was nothing in the least degree affected or kittenish about this: rather a kind of ethereal quality - the quality of a sacrificial object. Iphigeneia before the letter. Her looks were very much admired; she was always elegant, and when she was in looks she was quite lovely. She spoke little, in company or out, but she was capable of a sudden dart of sharpness, of a remark that showed much more intelligence and reflection than would have been expected from her rudimentary education and her very quiet provincial life. These remarks had a much greater force, coming from an amiable, pliant, and as it were sleepy reserve, and before now they had startled men who did not know her well - men who had been prating away happily with the conscious superiority of their sex. They dimly grasped an underlying strength, and they connected it with her occasional expression of secret amusement, the relish of something that she did not choose to share.

  Cecilia was more nearly her mother’s daughter: a little goose with a round face and china-​blue eyes, devoted to ornament and to crimping her yellow hair, shallow and. foolish almost to simplicity, but happy, full of cheerful noise, and not yet at all ill-​natured. She dearly loved the company of men, men of any size or shape. Her younger sister Frances did not: she was indifferent to their admiration - a long-​legged nymph, still given to whistling and shying stones at the squirrels in the walnut-​tree. Here was all the pitilessness of youth intact; and she was perfectly entrancing, as a spectacle. She had her cousin Diana’s black hair and great dark blue misty pools of eyes, but she was as unlike her sisters as though they belonged to another sex. All they had in common was youthful grace, a good deal of gaiety, splendid health, and ten thousand pounds apiece. -

  With these attractions it was strange that none of them should have married, particularly as the marriage-​bed was never far from Mrs Williams’s mind. But the paucity of men, of eligible bachelors, in the neighbourhood, the disrupting effects of ten years of war, and Sophia’s reluctance (she had had several offers) explained a great deal; the rest could be accounted for by Mrs Williams’s avidity for a good marriage settlement, and by an unwillingness on the part of the local gentlemen to have her as a mother-​in-​law.

  Whether Mrs Williams liked her daughters at all was doubtful: she loved them, of course, and had sacrificed everything for them’, but there was not much room in her composition for liking - it was too much taken up with being right (Hast thou considered my servant Mrs Williams, that there is none like her in the earth, a perfect and an upright woman?), with being tired, and with being ill-​used. Dr Vining, who had known her all her life and who had seen her children into the world, said that she did not; but even he, who cordially disliked her, admitted that she truly, whole-​heartedly loved their interest. She might damp all their enthusiasms, drizzle grey disapproval from one year’s end to another, and spoil even birthdays with bravely-​supported headaches, but she would fight parents, trustees and lawyers like a tigress for ‘an adequate provision’. Yet still she had three unmarried daughters, and it was something of a comfort to her to be able to attribute this to their being overshadowed by her niece. Indeed, this niece, Diana Villiers, was as good-​looking in her way as Sophia. But how unlike these two ways were: Diana with her straight back and high-​held head seemed quite tall, but when she stood next to her cousin, she came no higher than her ear, they both had natural grace in an eminent degree, but whereas Sophia’s was a willowy, almost languorous flowing perfection of movement, Diana’s had a quick, flashing rhythm - on those rare occasions when there was a ball within twenty miles of Mapes she danced superbly; and by candlelight her complexion was almost as good as Sophia’s.

  Mrs Villiers was a widow: she had been born, in the same year as Sophia, but what a different life she had led; at fifteen, after her mother’s death, she had gone out to India to keep house for her expensive, raffish father, and she had lived there in splendid style even after her marriage to a penniless young man, her father’s aide-​dc-​camp, for he had moved into their rambling great palace, where the addition of a husband and an extra score of servants passed unnoticed. It had been a foolish marriage on the emotional plane - both too passionate, strong, self-​willed, and opposed in every way to do anything but tear one another to pieces - but from the worldly point of view there was a great deal to be said for it. It did bring her a handsome husband, and it might have brought her

  a deer-​park and ten thousand a year as well, for not only was Charles Villiers well-​connected (one sickly life between him and a great estate) but he was intelligent, cultivated, unscrupulous and active - particularly gifted on the political side: the very man to make a brilliant career in India. A second Clive, maybe, and wealthy by the age of thirty-​odd. But they were both killed in the same engagement against Tippoo Sahib, her father owing three lakhs of rupees and her husband nearly half that sum.

  The Company allowed Diana her passage home and fifty pounds a year until she should remarry. She came back to England with a wardrobe of tropical clothes, a certain knowledge of the world, and almost nothing else. She came back, in effect, to the schoolroom, or something very like it. For she at once realized that her aunt meant to clamp down on her, to allow her no chance of queering her daughters’ pitch; and as she had no money and nowhere else to go she determined to fit into this small slow world of the English countryside, with its fixed notions and its strange morality.

  She was willing, she was obliged, to accept a protectorate, and from the beginning she resolved to be meek, cautious and retiring; she knew that other women would regard her as a menace, and she meant to give them no provocation. But her theory and her practice were sometimes at odds, and in any case Mrs Williams’s idea of a protectorate was much more like a total annexation. She was afraid of Diana, and dared not push her too far, but she never gave up trying to gain a moral superiority, and it was striking to see how this essentially stupid woman, unhampered by any principle or by any sense of honour, managed to plant her needle where it hurt most.

  This had been going on for years, and Diana’s clandestine or at least unavowed excursions with Mr Savile’s hounds had a purpose beyond satisfying her delight in riding. Returning now she met her cousin Cecilia in the hail, hurrying to look at her new bonnet in the pier-​glass between the breakfast-​room windows.

  ‘Thou looks’t like Antichrist in that lewd hat,’ she said in a sombre voice, for the hounds had lost their fox and the only tolerable-​looking man had vanished.

  ‘Oh! Oh!’ cried Cecilia, ‘what a shocking thing to say! It’s blasphemy, I’m sure. I declare I’ve never had such a shocking thing said to me since Jemmy Blagrove called me that rude word. I shall tell Mama.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Cissy. It’s a quotation - literature - the Bible.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I think it’s very shocking. You are covered with mud, Di. Oh, you took my tricorne. Oh, what an ill-​natured thing you are - I am sure you spoilt the feather. I shall tell Mama.’ She snatched the hat, but finding it unhurt she softened and went on, ‘Well: and so you had a dirty ride. You went along Gallipot Lane, I suppose. Did you see anything of the hunt? They were over there on Polcary all the morning with their horrid howling and yowling.’