The fortune of war Read online

  'Oh, indeed? I was not aware. Very good, sir. Capital, upon my word. Quick as an arrow - I shall repeat that.'

  'I dare say you will, and pass it off as your own, too. And if Yorke don't delay, if he don't hang about in the Sunda Strait, whoring after prizes, you should still have

  the monsoon to carry you right across - a famous passage.

  Now give me a quick idea of the state of your ship. Of course, she must be surveyed, but I should like to have a general notion at once. And tell me just how many people you have aboard - you would scarcely credit how hungry I am for men. Ogres ain't in it.'

  There followed a highly technical discussion in which the boor Leopard's shortcomings were candidly exposed - the state of her futtocks, her deplorable knees - a discussion from which it appeared that even if the Admiral had had the guns to arm her, she could hardly bear them, her timbers being so strained, and the rot having spread forward from her stern to so shocking a degree. This discussion, though melancholy, was perfectly amicable: no harsh words were heard until they reached the subject of followers, the officers, young gentlemen, and hands who, by the custom of the service, accompanied a captain from one command to another. With a false air of casualness, the Admiral observed that in view of the exceptional circumstances he proposed retaining them all. 'Though you may take your surgeon with you,' he said. 'In point of fact I have had several orders to send him back by the first ship; and he is to report to Mr Wallis, my political adviser, at once. Yes: you may certainly take him with you, Aubrey; and that is a very great indulgence. I might even stretch a point and allow you a servant, though La Fl�e could certainly supply any number you may need.'

  'Oh, come sir,' cried Jack. 'My lieutenants - and Babbington has followed me since my first command - my midshipmen, and all my bargemen, in one fell sloop? Is this justice, sir?'

  'What sloop, Aubrey?'

  'Why, as to that, sir, I do not mean any specific vessel: it was an allusion to the Bible. But what I mean is, that it is the immemorial custom of the service...'

  'Am I to understand that you are questioning my orders, Mr Aubrey?'

  'Never in life, sir, Heaven forbid. Any written order you choose to honour me with, I shall of course execute at once. But as you know better than I, the immemorial custom of the service is that...'

  Jack and the Admiral had known one another off and on for twenty years; they had spent many evenings together, some of them drunken; their collision therefore had none of the cold venom of a purely official encounter. It was none the less eager for that, however, and presently their voices rose until the maidens in the courtyard could clearly make out the words, even the warm personal reflections, direct on the Admiral's part, slightly veiled on Jack's; and again and again they heard the cry 'the immemorial custom of the service'.

  'You always was a pig-headed, obstinate fellow,' said the Admiral.

  'So my old nurse used to tell me, sir,' said Jack. 'But surely, sir, even a man with no respect for the immemorial customs of the service, an innovator, a man with no regard for the ways of the Navy, would condemn me, was I not to stand by my officers and midshipmen, when they stood by me in a damned uncomfortable situation - was I to let my youngsters go off to captains that do not give a curse for their families or their advancement, and desert a first lieutenant who has followed me since he was a reefer, just when I have a chance of getting him on. One stroke of luck with Acasta, and Babbington is a commander. I appeal to your own practice, sir. The whole service knows very well that Charles Yorke, Belling, and Harry Fisher followed you from ship to ship, and that if they are commanders and post-captains now, it is thanks to you. And I know very well that you have always taken good care of your youngsters. The immemorial custom of the service...'

  'Oh, fuck the immemorial custom of the service,' cried the Admiral: and then, appalled at his own words, he fell silent for a while. He could, of course, give a direct order; though a written order would be an awkward thing to have shown about. But then again, Aubrey was not only in the right, but he was also a captain with a remarkable fighting reputation, a captain who had done so well in prize-money that he was known as Lucky Jack Aubrey, a captain with a handsome estate in Hampshire, a father in Parliament, a man who might end up on the Board of Admiralty, too considerable a man for off-hand treatment: besides, the Admiral liked him; and the Waakzaamheid was a noble feat.

  'Oh well, a fig for it, anyhow,' he said at last. 'What a sullen, dogged fellow you are to be sure, Aubrey. Come, fill up your glass. It might get a little common good nature into you. You may have your mids for all I care, and your first lieutenant too; for I dare say that if you formed them, they would wrangle with their captain on his own quarterdeck, every time he desired one of them to put the ship about. You remind me of that old Sodomite.'

  'Sodomite, sir?' cried Jack.

  'Yes. You who are so fond of quoting the Bible, you must know who I mean. The man who wrangled with the Lord about Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham, that's the name! Beat the Lord down from fifty to five and twenty and then to ten. You shall have Babbington and your mids and your surgeon, maybe even your coxswain, but let us hear no more about your bargemen. It is great nonsense and presumption on your part and anyhow there ain't room for another soul in La Fl�e, so that's an end on it. Now tell me, among your remaining people, can you scrape together a decent eleven for a game of cricket? The squadron is playing ship against ship, for a hundred pound a side.'

  'I believe I could, sir,' said Jack, smiling: in the very instant the Admiral uttered the word, he resolved a minute problem that had been nagging some remote corner of his mind - what was that absurdly familiar sound that came from the spreading lawn behind the house? Answer: it was the crack of bat meeting ball. 'I believe I could, sir. And, sir, I believe you mentioned mail for the Leopard?'

  The Admiral's political adviser was a man of singular importance, for the British government had a mind to add the whole of the Dutch East Indies to the possessions of the Crown, and not only did the local rulers have to be persuaded to love King George, but the well-entrenched Dutch and French systems of influence and intelligence had to be counteracted and, if possible, eradicated; but he lived in a small, obscure house and he assumed no state at all, not half as much as the Admiral's secretary; and he dressed his subfusc person in a snuff-coloured coat, his only concession to the climate being a pair of nankin pantaloons, once white. His was a difficult task; yet since the Honourable East India Company had a great interest in eliminating their Dutch rivals, and since several members of the cabinet were holders of the Company's stock, he was at least well supplied with money. Indeed, he was sitting upon one of several chests crammed with small silver ingots, the most convenient currency in those parts, when his visitor was announced.

  'Maturin!' cried the politico, whipping off his green spectacles and grasping the doctor's hand. 'Maturin! By God, I am glad to see you. We had given you up for dead. How do you do? Achmet!' - clapping his hands - 'Coffee.'

  'Wallis,' said Maturin, 'I am happy to find you here. How is your penis?' At their last meeting he had carried out an operation on his colleague in political and military intelligence, who wished to pass for a Jew: the operation, on an adult, had proved by no means so trifling as he or Walls had supposed, and Stephen had long been haunted by thoughts of gangrene.

  Mr Wallis's delighted smile changed to gravity; a look of sincere self-commiseration came over his face, and he said that it had come along pretty well, but he feared it would never be quite the member it was. He related his symptoms in detail while the scent of coffee grew, pervading the little dirty room; but when the coffee itself appeared, in a brass pot on a brass tray, he broke off and said, 'Oh, Maturin, I am a mere weak monster, prattling about myself. Pray tell me of your voyage, your shockingly prolonged and I fear most arduous voyage - so prolonged that we had almost abandoned hope, and Sir Joseph's letters, from ecstatic, grew anxious, and at last melancholy to a degree.'

  'Sir Joseph is in the
saddle again, I collect?'

  'More firmly than before; and with even wider powers,' said Wallis, and they exchanged a smile. Sir Joseph Blame had been the very able chief of naval intelligence; they both knew of the subtle manoeuvres that had caused his premature retirement, and of the even more subtle, far more intelligent manoeuvres that had brought him back.

  Stephen Maturin supped his scalding coffee, the right Mocha berry, brought back from Arabia Felix in the pilgrim dhows, and considered. He was naturally a reserved and even a secretive man: his illegitimate birth (his father was an Irish officer in the service of His Most Catholic Majesty, his mother a Catalan lady) had to do with this; his activities in the cause of the liberation of Ireland had more; and his voluntary, gratuitous alliance with naval intelligence, undertaken with the sole aim of helping to defeat Bonaparte, whom he loathed with all his heart as a vile tyrant, a wicked cruel vulgar man, a destroyer of freedom and of nations, and as a betrayer of all that was good in the Revolution, had even more. Yet the power of keeping his mouth shut was innate: so perhaps was the integrity that made him one of the Admiralty's most valued secret agents, particularly in Catalonia - a calling very well disguised by his also being an active naval surgeon, as well as a natural philosopher of international renown, one whose name was familiar to all those who cared deeply about the extinct solitaire of Rodriguez (close cousin to the dodo), the great land tortoise Testudo aubreii of the Indian Ocean, or the habits of the African aardvark. Excellent agent though he was, he was burdened with a heart, a loving heart that had very nearly broken for a woman named Diana Villiers: she had preferred an American to him - a natural preference, since Mr Johnson was a fine upstanding witty intelligent man, and very rich, whereas Stephen was a plain bastard at the best, sallow with odd pale eyes, sparse hair and meagre limbs, and rather poor. In his distress. Maturin had made mistakes in both his callings - mistakes that might have been attributed to over-indulgence in the tincture of laudanum to which he was at that time addicted - and when it so happened that Louisa Wogan, an American acquaintance of Diana Villiers, was taken up for spying and sentenced to transportation, Stephen Maturin was required to go with her, as surgeon of the Leopard. The mission was of no importance compared with some he had undertaken, and at the time it seemed clear that Sir Joseph was merely putting him out of the way. Yet his connection with Mrs Wogan had taken a curious turn... How much should he tell Wallis? How much did Wallis already know?

  'You used the word ecstatic in alluding to Sir Joseph's letters, I believe?' he said. 'A warm expression.'

  This was a signal for Wallis to display his hand if he wished the game to continue on a reasonably candid level; he did so at once. 'None too warm, Maturin, I assure you,' said he, reaching for a file. 'Upon receiving your communication from the Brazils, from Recife, he wrote to say that you had brought off a splendid coup, that you had extracted all the information the lady possessed in far less time than he had expected; that he had a tolerably complete picture of the Americans' organization; and that he would endeavour to bring you back from the Cape by a despatch sent in the first ship bound for that station, but that even if that could not be accomplished, he should count the time of your absence well spent. This was already strong language from Sir Joseph, but it was nothing in comparison of the panegyric he wrote when your papers reached him from the Cape.'

  'So the boats survived?'

  'One boat. The launch, conducted by a Mr Grant, who delivered your papers to the naval officer commanding.'

  'Were they damaged, at all? I was up to my knees when I wrote them.'

  'There were water-stains, and there were blood-stains - Mr Grant had trouble with his people - but except for two sheets they were entirely legible. Sir Joseph extracted the main lines for my benefit, together of course with all that was relevant to the situation here. At the same time he sent you this letter,' - handing it to Maturin - 'and desired me to look upon you as an exemplar in deceiving and dividing the enemy. I was, said he, to emulate your proceedings, as far as it was possible in this sphere. Other despatches followed, each with a letter for you: their tone, as I said, changed to anxiety and, as time went on, almost to despair, but they always had the same tenor - you were to return at once, to exploit the confusion caused in the French services to the utmost, and to renew your activities in Catalonia. I have a condensed report for you, on the present situation there.'

  Wallis was an old, tried colleague, with no vices but the parsimony, meanness, and cold lechery so usual in intelligence; it was clear that he was acquainted with nearly all the essentials; it was also clear that as Stephen Maturin had very nearly perished on the outward voyage, he might quite well perish entirely homeward-bound. The sea was a treacherous element; a ship but a frail conveyance -fragilis ratis - tossed by the billows at their whim, and subject to every wind that blew. It was as well that Wallis should know.

  'Listen,' he said, and Wallis leant his best ear forward, his face expressive of the most intense interest and curiosity. 'Now the beginning of it you know, the arrest of Wogan with Admiralty papers in her possession?' Wallis nodded. 'She was an agent of no great importance, but a loyal, well-plucked one, not to be bought; and naturally she did her best to let her chief know how she had left the situation - who was compromised and who was not. It so happened that she had a lover aboard, a compatriot, an ingenuous scholarly young man by the name of Herapath, who had stowed himself away to be with her. She used him to convey her information: I intercepted it, at Recife. That was my first communication. At the beginning of the voyage I had an assistant called Martin, a Channel-Islander brought up in France: he died, and it occurred to me that with his antecedents he made a very convincing secret agent. I therefore fabricated a general statement of the position, purporting to have belonged to him and dealing with our intelligence in Europe, with references to the United States and to a separate document covering the East Indies. I did not possess enough information to make an East Indian report convincing to an expert, so I did not attempt it; but I flatter myself that my analysis of the European situation, and my passing remarks about the United States, would persuade even so sceptical a man as Durand-Ruel. I need scarcely tell you, my dear Wallis, that my paper contained details of double agents, of bribes, of sources of information in the various French ministries and those of their allies - indeed, it was calculated to confound their politics, to put their best men out of action, and to ruin their mutual confidence. This document was found among the dead officer's effects; it aroused suspicion; copies were to be made for the authorities at the Cape, to be sent home. Herapath and I were the only men aboard conversant with French; my time was taken up, and the task therefore fell to Herapath, who had become my assistant. I was convinced that he would tell his mistress and that Wogan's empire over him was such that in spite of his honourable reluctance, of his scruples, a copy would pass to her and that she would send it to America from the Cape. The copy did pass, and she encoded it -I have the key to their code, by the way - but we did not touch at the Cape, since at that time we were being pursued by a Dutch vessel of superior force. I comforted myself with the reflection that she would certainly contrive to send it from Botany Bay, and that the loss of those months, though infinitely regrettable, was not disastrous, since until there was a state of open, declared war between the United States and England, we could not be quite certain that the Americans would pass the information on to their French allies, or at least to their French co-belligerents. Though indeed it was probable, even in peace-time, that the usual good offices would convey the essence if not the entirety, in an informal way. Their Mr Fox sees a great deal of Durand-Ruel. But tell me, has this war been declared?'

  'Not by our latest advices. Though I cannot see how it can be long delayed, if Government pursues its present course. We are strangling their trade, as well as abducting and abusing their seamen.'

  'An absurd, unnecessary, immoral, blundering course,' said Stephen angrily. 'And apart from all other considerations
a war would lead to a deeply stupid dispersal of our force and efforts. Can Government really mean to give that scoundrel Bonaparte a respite, merely to recover a few alleged deserters - who, by definition, are unwilling to serve - and to gratify an old ignoble spite? It is stark staring madness. But I wander. Mrs Wogan was to send the document from Botany Bay: excellent, had she ever reached that settlement. She did not. Our ship struck upon a mountain of ice and very nearly sank: some of the people went away in boats, and to these I entrusted what I could copy of my statement, so that in the event of their reaching the Cape, Sir Joseph should have some notion of what was afoot, and take his measures accordingly. That was my second communication. At the time I had little doubt that Captain Aubrey would bring us through; but I must say that the delay was a torment to my heart. You may imagine my delight, therefore, when an American whaler put in to the island where we had taken refuge - Desolation Island, a place that I shall not attempt to describe - such birds, such seals, such lichens, Wallis! It was a Paradise to me. An American whaler, homeward-bound for Nantucket. With infinite pains I induced Herapath and Wogan to go aboard this vessel, carrying the report, and to sail away. The wear of spirit, as Herapath wavered between love and honour, you cannot easily conceive, Wallis; nor the extreme difficulty of concealing my manipulation of him from his mistress. And even then, the zeal of my captain very nearly defeated me: this whaler, clearly recognizable on the horizon, appeared early one morning before I was about, and it was only by representing to him that I should certainly hang myself from the mainyard-spritsail-gubbins or something of that sort if he did not desist that I persuaded him to resume our course for New Holland, that interesting continent. When we lost sight of her, the whaler was speeding, all sails abroad, in the general direction of America; and before now, I trust, Louisa Wogan will have presented her poisoned gift with the most perfect, and wholly convincing, conviction of good faith.'