Book 17 - The Commodore Read online

  'Now there is the great elegant ship of the world,' said Stephen. 'A seventy-four, I make no doubt?'

  'Well done, Stephen,' cried Jack, and if he had been speaking to any other man he would have clapped him on the back. 'A noble seventy-four she is. And that red swallow-tail burgee is my broad pennant. The Admiral sent his flag-lieutenant particularly desiring me to hoist it, which I took very kindly. One has to have permission, you know.'

  'So she is the Bellona, the chief argosy of your command! Huzzay, huzza! I congratulate you, Jack. Why, I declare, she has a poop, which adds much to her dignity.'

  'And not only dignity but safety too. When you are on the quarterdeck in a hot action with a really malignant enemy firing great guns and small arms, it is a wonderful comfort to have a solid poop behind you.'

  'For my part I prefer to be far, far below. Pray show me the rest of the squadron.'

  'There is Pyramus,' said Jack, moving the glass very slightly until the cross-lines rested on a fine thirty-eight-gun frigate. 'She is like the French Belle Poule, you know. Frank Holden has her now, a fine dashing fellow; but I doubt we shall keep her. There are nasty rumours of her being sent off on a cruise of her own and being replaced by something smaller, older, slower. I am afraid the air is beginning to shimmer down over the harbour and Gosport,' he went on, turning the telescope and guiding it by the finder, 'but if you focus again for your eyesight I think you will make out a ship creeping along by Priddy's Hard. She is the Stately, sixty-four: she was given me when the Terrible, our other seventy-four, was suddenly and very unfairly snatched away; and I am afraid we shall certainly keep her. A sixty-four-gun ship is a very pitiful craft, Stephen; worse in a way than the horrible old Leopard, with a mere fifty. In her we could run from the Dutch seventy-four without a blush, crack on until all sneered again with a clear conscience; but a sixty-four would have to turn and fight or feel dishonoured. Stately's captain, William Duff—you remember Billy Duff in Malta, Stephen?—does all he possibly can, but . . . Alas, the light is going. The sun has dipped. I can just make out the Aurora, twenty-eight, and the Orestes brig, but they are fading, and I shall have to tell you about them when we have had something to eat. You must be cruel sharp-set.'

  'With the blessing I shall see them all tomorrow. I must be aboard early, to attend to my assistants and medical supplies. How many are we in all?'

  'To tell you the truth, Stephen, I do not know. There is so much chopping and changing. We are still a frigate short; it is just possible that we may lose the Pyramus; the sloops and brigs come and go; and the date is perpetually postponed. I should never have insisted on your coming back so soon. After all, I have known the Navy all my life, and never, never, has any squadron put to sea on the date the port admiral or commodore was told in the first place. Nor with the same ships. But now, upon my word, you must and shall be fed. Sophie complains that she saw nothing of you, because of the children's measles—keeps mentioning it. We will drag her from her accounts and sit down comfortably with a dish of muffins. You shall see the squadron by early morning light,before breakfast, if it don't rain; and then we can ride down to Pompey.'

  Stephen had been put to sleep in his usual room, far from children and noise, away in that corner of the house which looked down to the orchard and the bowling-green, and in spite of his long absence it was so familiar to him that when he woke about three he made his way to the window almost as quickly as if dawn had already broken, opened it and walked out on to the balcony. The moon had set: there was barely a star to be seen. The still air was delightfully fresh with falling dew, and a late nightingale, in indifferent voice, was uttering a routine jug-jug far down in Jack's plantations; closer at hand, and more agreeable by far, nightjars churred in the orchard, two of them, or perhaps three, the sound rising and falling, intertwining so that the source could not be made out for sure. There were few birds he preferred to nightjars, but it was not that they had brought him out of bed: he stood leaning on the balcony rail and presently Jack Aubrey, in a summer-house by the bowling-green, began again, playing very gently in the darkness, improvising wholly for himself, dreaming away on his violin with a mastery that Stephen had never heard equalled, though they had played together for years and years.

  Like many other sailors Jack Aubrey had long dreamed of lying in his warm bed all night long; yet although he could now do so with a clear conscience he often rose at unChristian hours, particularly if he were moved by strong emotion, and crept from his bedroom in a watch-coat, to walk about the house or into the stables or to pace the bowling-green. Sometimes he took his fiddle with him. He was in fact a better player than Stephen, and now that he was using his precious Guarnieri rather than a robust sea-going fiddle the difference was still more evident: but the Guarnieri did not account for the whole of it, nor anything like. Jack certainly concealed his excellence when they were playing together, keeping to Stephen's mediocre level: this had become perfectly clear when Stephen's hands were at last recovered from the thumb-screws and other implements applied by French counter-intelligence officers in Minorca; but on reflexion Stephen thought it had been the case much earlier, since quite apart from his delicacy at that period, Jack hated showing away.

  Now, in the warm night, there was no one to be comforted, kept in countenance, no one who could scorn him for virtuosity, and he could let himself go entirely; and as the grave and subtle music wound on and on, Stephen once more contemplated on the apparent contradiction between the big, cheerful, florid sea-officer whom most people liked on sight but who would never have been described as subtle or capable of subtlety by any one of them (except perhaps his surviving opponents in battle) and the intricate, reflective music he was now creating. So utterly unlike his limited vocabulary in words, at times verging upon the inarticulate.

  'My hands have now regained the moderate ability they possessed before I was captured,' observed Maturin, 'but his have gone on to a point I never thought he could reach: his hands and his mind. I am amazed. In his own way he is the secret man of the world; but I wish his music were happier.'

  In the early morning light however he was plain Jack Aubrey, and as they walked aver the dew towards his observatory he said, 'If I had not officially appointed Adams my secretary I should ask him to stay here and help Sophie with her papers. The Woolcombe estate is nothing much—poor spewy land, most of it—but it is amazingly troublesome, with some uncommon wicked tenants, poachers to a man, and she tries to look after it all herself, to say nothing of this place, and the infernal income-tax, the poor-rate, the tithes—what is that bird?'

  'It is a shrike, a great grey shrike. Some say wariangle.'

  'Yes. Cousin Edward's keeper calls them that: he showed me a nest when I was a boy. But speaking of tithes, we have a new parson, Mr Hinksey. Do you remember him?'

  'I do not. Unless he was the gentleman I met once or twice in my booksellers, and who was good enough to carry some naval essays down to Sophie.'

  'He was the man that made addresses to her when we were taking poor Mr Stanhope to the East Indies, to Kampong. Mrs Williams thought the world of him: such a gentleman-like parson, with a good living and five or even six hundred a year of his own. He was something at Oxford: a wrangler, perhaps. Do they have wranglers at Oxford, Stephen?'

  'I rather believe it is the other place: at Oxford I think they only have fornicatores, but I may well be mistaken.'

  'Well, it was something creditable, in any event. And she declares the reason he has never married is that Sophie broke his heart, running off to marry me. But now here he is, installed in our rectory these eighteen months at least: ain't it amazing?'

  'I have rarely been more astonished.'

  'I was perfectly prepared to hate him, of course, but he is such an open, friendly, agreeable fellow, a very fair horseman and an uncommon good bat, that I could not succeed. A big, well-built man, six foot odd; and he used to box at college: he has a broken nose.'

  'That is a recommendation, sure.'

>   'Well, it does mean he cannot decently prate away in the evangelical line, like some parsons and some of our blue-light officers with their pious tracts. And he has come over from time to time, when Sophie's mama or Sophie herself was quite at a loss with their sums, which I take very civil. But Lord, how I wander. I was talking about Adams: now as you know very well there is a world of difference between a flag-officer's secretary and a captain's clerk, and having appointed him I cannot in decency ask him to stay ashore and help Sophie; but I shall certainly desire him to look about among his friends in Plymouth and Gosport. Here we are. Stephen, mind the ditch: tread in the middle of the plank. I brought you this roundabout way to show you a creeper I am trying to persuade to turn the pollard into a bower, but it seems to have been swallowed by the nettles. Now let me go in first and re-focus—there is a prodigious difference between a morning and an evening speculum, of course—and then you shall see all the squadron there is to be seen. Some of the brigs and a schooner or two are only to join us off Lisbon. You will not see them in their full detail, with the light coming from the east; but I hope you will get at least some notion.'

  No man would ordinarily have associated Jack Aubrey with the idea of fuss; yet this was a special case. He had made the telescope, grinding seven mirrors before achieving the present masterpiece; he had invented the improved mounting as well as the singularly exact finder; and in this single instance he did fuss, trying to make it perform miracles, urging the sun to shed a diffused and even illumination, uttering otiose explanations.

  Stephen disregarded his friend's anxious prattle, most of it deeply technical, dealing with diffraction, aberration and virtual images, and gazed upon the successive remote and silent visions as they appeared in the eyepiece.

  First the splendid Bellona, in profile: some of her people were still washing the forecastle and all that was to be seen of the upper deck, while the afterguard and waisters flogged the poop and quarterdeck dry. 'Seventy-four guns, of course,' said Jack, 'a broadside weight of metal of nine hundred and twenty-six pounds: twenty-eight thirty-six pounders on the gundeck, twenty-eight eighteen pounders on the upper deck, two long twelves as chasers and six short, with ten thirty-two-pound carronades and four little ones for the poop.'

  'That makes seventy-eight guns.'

  'For shame, Stephen. Surely you must recall that we only make a notional reckoning for the carronades, when we count them in at all.'

  'I beg pardon.'

  'She is a Chatham ship: one thousand six hundred and fifteen tons, gundeck a hundred and sixty-eight foot, beam forty-six foot nine; and she has a depth of nineteen foot nine in the hold, which I call really comfortable. With six months' stores she draws twenty-two foot nine, abaft. Less afore, of course.'

  'When was she built?'

  'In 1760,' said Jack in a somewhat unwilling, defensive voice. 'But you would not call her an old ship. Victory was laid down a year before, and she is pretty spry, I believe. She answered tolerably well at Trafalgar, they say. Besides, the Bellona was doubled and braced in the year five, and she is if anything better than new. Far better, with everything well shaken into position.'

  'I beg pardon.'

  'She was always an uncommonly weatherly ship—I remember her well in the West Indies when I was a boy—rolls easy, makes nine and even ten knots close-hauled on a brisk topgallant breeze, steers easy, wears quick, lies to perfectly well under maincourse and mizzen staysail, fore-reaching prodigiously all the while—amazing great wash.'

  'I rejoice to hear it. Pray state the number of her crew.'

  'The establishment is five hundred and ninety: I should think we are within a score or two of it, and I have great hopes of a draft from the Nore on Monday. But that is Tom's concern, you know; I only have to worry with the paper-work, the Admiralty, the Navy Board, the Port Admiral and the other captains belonging to the squadron. Now let me show you our other line-of-battle ship.' A little wheel turned: masts, yards, loose sails, rigging and stretches of pale gleaming water shot sideways through Stephen's field of vision: a sudden trembling halt, and there, as sharp, firm and distinct as Jack or any other telescope-maker could have wished, swam another two-decker, not sideways this time but seen from four points on her starboard bow, a three-quarter view that showed her exactly-squared yards to great advantage. Her sides were painted black and her gun-ports a fine clear blue, while above them ran a line of the same colour, a combination that gave Stephen's heart a strange wrench, it being so much favoured by Diana.

  'That is Stately, the sixty-four,' said Jack. 'She was inflicted upon us when they took the Terrible away, as shabby a piece of favouritism and jobbery as the service has ever known.'

  'Her captain is clearly a man of taste, however,' said Stephen.

  'Well, I am no judge of taste: I am not a dilletanto. But if the Nelson checker was good enough for the great man himself, it is good enough for me.' Jack paused. 'And I tell you what, Stephen: I do not like saying anything behind anyone's back, but you are a medico, and that makes it different—you will understand. As you know, I hate the way sodomites are hanged or flogged round the fleet, and I like Duff: but you must not do it with the young foremast jacks, or discipline goes by the board. Duff is a pretty good seaman, and he does his best, but the Stately had taken all night to tow to her berth. And in any case, there really is an old ship for you: she may not have been launched until eighty-two, but she was on the Brest blockade for years and years, which wore her out before her time—those frightful south-westers lasting for weeks on end, with tremendous seas—and she has neither been doubled nor braced. She is now about as seaworthy as the Ark after Noah left her high and dry on the top of Ararat: perhaps the slowest of her miserable class, sagging to leeward so as to make even a midland ploughboy stare. Yet since we have to live with her, I will tell you she gauges one thousand three hundred and seventy tons: a hundred and fifty-nine foot six inches on the gundeck with a beam of forty-four foot four: she carries twenty-six twenty-four pounders, twenty-six eighteen-pounders, six nine-pounders and sixteen mixed carronades, a broadside of only seven hundred and ninety-two pounds against the Terrible's thousand odd; and if she can manage to fire two in five minutes it is looked upon as a wonder. Let us look at something more cheerful.' Again the rushing blur. 'Oh,' cried Jack in a much happier voice, 'I had not expected her so soon. You recognize her, of course?' Stephen made no reply. 'The Nimble cutter, in which that good young fellow Michael Fitton brought us home from the Groyne. But I must not linger on her. Now here, look, is our prime jewel Pyramus, a really modern thirty-six-gun eighteen-pounder frigate, nine hundred and twenty tons, a hundred and forty-one foot on the gundeck, thirty-eight foot five beam, broadside weight of metal four hundred and sixty-seven pounds, crew of two hundred and fifty-nine in capital order, long together, thoroughly used to their captain, that fine, taut spirited fellow Frank Holden, and to their officers, some of whom have sailed with us.' He gazed at the ship with great approval, and then moved on. 'This is Aurora, our second frigate,' he said. 'Another antique, I am afraid: she was laid down in 1771 and she only carries twenty-four nine-pounders, as they did in those days, but I have an affection for her because of the Surprise, not that she is anything like so fast or weatherly or comfortable. Five hundred and ninety-six tons, a hundred and twenty foot six on the gundeck, and she probably has a hundred and fifty of her hundred and ninety-six complement by now: Francis Howard has her, the Grecian—but you know him perfectly well: we met off Lesbos. Now beyond her, towards St Helens, lie the Camilla, twenty, just a rated ship, Orestes, a brig-rigged sloop, and some other craft. I will tell you about them as we ride down, and indeed show you when we are there. But for now I should think you have had enough.'

  'Not at all,' said Stephen, rising from his intolerably cramped position. 'It is a far more imposing command than I had imagined, and far more glorious.'

  'It is, ain't it?' said Jack, guiding him out of the observatory. 'Even without the Terrible and in spite of our old crock
s it is a very fine squadron. I am as proud as Pontius Pilate. But, you know, it is a shocking responsibility. In Mauritius I had the Admiral behind me, even though he was rather far behind: here I shall be entirely alone.'

  Sophie met them on their way up to the house. She was in strikingly good looks, but at the same time her expression was uneasy: she called out one of the reasons for this while they were still at some distance: Mama and Mrs Morris had gone back to Bath, taking Briggs with them; she had let them have the coach, but Bentley would bring it back as soon as the horses were rested. This was a far more decided action than Stephen had ever known her take; yet she did not seem to think it of much consequence. It was not the disposal of a coach and a pair of horses that was disturbing her mind, still less the absence of her mother.

  'Oh,' cried Jack, with no more than a nod at the news, 'oh the smell of bacon and coffee: and even'—opening the door—'of toasted soft-tack. There is no finer beginning to a day. And kippered herrings too!'

  They sat down, just the three of them, in the breakfast parlour, the pleasantest room in the house, and part of the original Ashgrove Cottage as it was before Jack Aubrey, during those spates of gold that sometimes reached the more fortunate commanders in that prize-taking war, had thrown out wings, stable-blocks, the double coach-house, bow-windows here and there, the corner balcony, and a row of cottages for old shipmates: just the three of them, for although the children were much loved and cherished they ate with Miss O'Hara, sitting quite straight, never touching the backs of their chairs, and speaking only when they were spoken to.

  The fine plump kippers were soon dispatched, the first coffee-pot had been emptied, and Jack was silently engaged with his eggs and bacon, listening with half an ear to Stephen's minute and circumstantial account of the Madras fashion of making kedgeree, when Killick made his courtly entrance, jerked his chin in the direction of the Commodore and said 'Which the Port Admiral's flag-lieutenant is come, and begs the favour. I told Awkward Davies to take his horse to the stable and put him in the welwet saloon.' Velvet had strong connotations of wealth and for Killick so had the word saloon; and since the front morning-room contained one velvet-covered chair and a few cushions nothing could induce him to call it anything else: only commissioned officers were ushered in.