Clarissa Oakes (2 page)

   'Every rope an-end.' The cry was automatic, perfunctory, and superfluous: for having put the ship about (with rather more conversation than was usual in a regular man-of-war but even more neatly than in most) the Surprises, in the nature of things, were rapidly coiling down the running rigging, braces and bowlines, just as they had done thousands of times before. Yet without the cry something would have been missing, some minute part of that naval ritual which did so uphold sea-going life.

   'Sea-going life: none better,' reflected Jack; and certainly at this point in time he had something like the cream of it, with a good, tolerably well-found ship (for the returning Governor had done all he could in the few days left), an excellent crew of former Royal Navy hands, privateersmen and smugglers, professional from clew to earing, with his course set for Easter Island, and many thousand miles of blue-water sailing before him. Above all there was his restoration to the list, and though the
Surprise
was no longer in the full sense a King's ship both her future as a yacht and his as a sea-officer were as nearly assured as anything could be on such a fickle element. In all likelihood he would be offered a command as soon as he came home: not a frigate alas, since he was now so senior, but probably a ship of the line. Possibly a small detached squadron, as commodore. In any event a flag, being a matter of seniority and survival rather than merit, was not so very far distant; and the fact that he was member of parliament for Milport (a rotten borough, in the gift of his cousin Edward) meant that independently of his deserts this flag would almost certainly be hoisted at sea, for rotten borough or not, a vote was a vote.

   This certain knowledge had been with him ever since the Gazette printed the words
Captain John Aubrey, Royal Navy, is restored to the List with his former rank and seniority and is appointed to the Diane of thirty-two guns
, filling his massive frame with a deep abiding happiness; and now he had another, more immediate reason for joy, his friend having made this astonishing recovery. 'Then why am I so cursed snappish?' he asked.

   Five bells. Little Reade, the midshipman of the watch, skipped aft to the rail, followed by the quartermaster with the log-ship and reel. The log splashed down, the stray-line ran gently astern; 'Turn' said the quartermaster in a hoarse tobacco-chewing whisper, and Reade held the twenty-eight second glass to his eye. 'Stop,' he cried at last, clear and shrill, and the quartermaster wheezed 'Three one and a half, mate.'

   Reade gave his captain an arch look, but seeing his grim, closed expression he walked forward and said to Davidge 'Three knots one and a half fathoms, sir, if you please,' directing his voice aft and speaking rather loud.

   The wake span out, rather faster now than Jack had foretold—hence the arch look. 'Cross in the morning and bloody-minded with it, like an old and ill-conditioned man. It is discreditable in the last degree,' he said, and his thoughts ran on.

   Profound attachment to Stephen Maturin did not preclude profound dissatisfaction at times: even lasting dissatisfaction. For a quick and efficient refitting of the ship, good relations with the colonial administration had been of the first importance; but in that very strongly anti-Irish and anti-Catholic atmosphere (Botany Bay had been filled with United Irishmen after the '97 rising) the presence of Stephen, irascible, more or less Irish and entirely Catholic, rendered them impossible. Or to put it more fairly not just his presence but the fact that he had resented an insult after a Government House dinner on his very first day in the penal colony—blood all over the bath-stoned steps. Jack had had to endure weeks of official obstruction and harassment—the vexatious searching the ship for convicts trying to escape, the stopping of her boats, the arrest of mildly drunken liberty-men ashore—and it was only when the Governor returned that Jack had been able to put a stop to all this by promising him that the
Surprise
should carry no absconder from Port Jackson.

   Stephen, poor fellow, could not really be blamed for the misfortunes of his birth, nor for having resented so very gross an insult; but he could be blamed, and Jack did blame him, for having, without the least consultation, planned the escape of his former servant Padeen Colman, equally Popish and even more Irish (virtually monoglot), whose sentence of death for robbing an apothecary of the laudanum to which, as Stephen's loblolly-boy, he had become addicted, had been commuted to transportation to New South Wales. The matter had been presented to Jack when he was exhausted with work and last-minute preparations, frustrated beyond description by a light forward conscienceless woman, liverish from official dinners in the extreme heat; and their difference of opinion was so strong that it endangered their friendship. The escape did in fact take place in the confusion that followed Maturin's encounter with the platypus and Padeen was now on board: it took place with the consent of Padeen's master and of the entire crew; and it could be said that Captain Aubrey's word was unbroken, since the absconder came not from Port Jackson but from Woolloo-Woolloo, a day's journey to the north. Yet for his own part Jack dismissed this as a mere quibble; and in any event he felt that he had been manipulated, which he disliked extremely.

   That was not the only time he had been manipulated, either. Throughout the voyage from Batavia to Sydney Jack Aubrey had been chaste: necessarily so, given the absence of anyone to be unchaste with. And throughout his anxious, frustrating negotiations in Sydney he had been chaste, because of total exhaustion by the end of the day. But after Governor Macquarie's return all this changed. At several official and unofficial gatherings he met Selina Wesley, a fine plump young woman with a prominent bosom, an indifferent reputation and a roving eye. Twice they were neighbours at dinner, twice at supper-parties; she had naval connexions, an extensive knowledge of the world, and a very free way of speaking; they got along famously. She had no patience with Romish monks or nuns, she said; celibacy was great nonsense—quite unnatural; and when during the interval in an evening concert given in some gardens outside Sydney she asked him to walk with her down to the tree-fern dell he found himself in such a boyish state of desire that his voice was scarcely at his command. She took his arm and they moved discreetly out of the lantern-light, walked behind a summer-house and down the path. 'We have escaped Mrs Macarthur's eye,' she said with a gurgle of laughter, and her grasp tightened for a moment.

   Down through the tree-ferns, down; and at the bottom a man stepped out of the shadows. 'There you are, Kendrick,' cried Mrs Wesley. 'I was not sure I should find you. Thank you so much, Captain Aubrey. You will find your way back easily enough, I am sure, steering by the stars. Kendrick, Captain Aubrey was so kind as to give me his arm down the path in the dark.'

   He had other causes for discontent, such as the faint and even dead contrary airs that had kept Bird Island in sight for so long and then the curious falsity of the trade wind that obliged the ship to beat up close-hauled day after day, wearing every four hours. Other causes, some of them trivial: he had taken only two midshipmen from the
Nutmeg
into the
Surprise
, two for whom he felt a particular responsibility; and both of them were extremely irritating. Reade, a pretty boy who had lost an arm in their battle against sea Dyaks, was over-indulged by the Surprises and was now much above himself; while Oakes, his companion, a hairy youth of seventeen or eighteen, went about singing in a most unofficer-like manner—a kind of bull-calf joy. Jack skipped over the matter of Nathaniel Martin, the Reverend Nathaniel Martin, an unbeneficed clergyman, a well-read man and an eager natural philosopher who had joined the
Surprise
as assistant surgeon to see the world in Maturin's company. It was impossible to dislike Martin, a deeply respectable man, though his playing of the viola would never have recommended him anywhere; yet Jack could not love him either. Martin was of course a more suitable companion for Stephen in certain respects, but it seemed to Jack that he took up altogether too much of his time, prating away about primates in the mizzen-top or endlessly turning over his collections of beetles and mummified toads in the gun-room. Jack passed quickly on—he did not choose to dwell on the subject—and came to the strange, unaccountable behaviour of the frigate's people. Obviously they were not like a Royal Navy crew, being much more talkative, independent, undeferential, partners rather than subordinates; but Jack did not dislike that at all; he was used to it, and he had thought he knew them intimately well from his cruises with them as a privateer and from this long run from Salibabu to New South Wales. Yet something seemed to have happened to them in Sydney. Now they were fuller of mirth than before; now they had private expressions that caused gales of laughter in the forecastle; and now he often saw them look at him with a knowing smile. In any other ship this might have meant mischief, but here even the officers had something of the same oddness. At times even Tom Pullings, whom he had known since his first command, seemed to be watching him with a considering eye, hesitant, quizzical.

   Causes for discontent, vexations, of course he had them; and none rankled like that caper in the tree-ferns nor came more insistently into his humiliated mind, so full of unsatisfied desire. Yet all these put together, he thought, could not account for this growing crossness, this waking up ready to be displeased, this incipient ill-humour—anything likely to set it off. He had never felt like this when he was young—had never been made game of by a young woman either.

   'Perhaps I shall ask Stephen for a blue pill,' he said. 'For a couple of blue pills. I have not been to the head this age.'

   He walked forward, the windward side of the quarterdeck emptying at his approach; and as he passed the wheel both the quartermaster at the con and the helmsman turned their heads to look at him. The
Surprise
instantly came up half a point, the windward leaches of the topsails gave a warning flutter and Jack roared 'Mind your helm, you infernal lubbers. What in Hell's name do you mean by leering at me like a couple of moonsick cowherds? Mind your helm, d'ye hear me there? Mr Davidge, no grog for Krantz or Webber today.'

   The quarterdeck looked suitably shocked and grave, but as Jack went down the companion-ladder towards the cabin he heard a gale of laughter from the forecastle. Stephen was still playing and Jack walked in on tiptoe, with a finger to his lips, making those gestures that people use to show that they are immaterial beings, silent, invisible. Stephen nodded to him in an absent way, brought his phrase to a full close and said 'You have come below, I find.'

   'Yes,' said Jack. 'Not to put too fine a point on it, I have. I know this is not your time for such things, but I should like to consult you if I may.'

   'By all means. I was only working out a few foolish variations on a worthless theme. If what you have to say is of an intimate nature at all let us close the skylight and sit upon the locker at the back.' Most consultations shortly after a ship had left port were for venereal diseases: some seamen were ashamed of their malady, some were not: in general the officers preferred their state not to be known.

   'It is not really of an intimate nature,' said Jack, closing the companion nevertheless and sitting on the stern-window locker. 'But I am most damnably hipped . . . cross even in the morning and much ill-used. Is there a medicine for good temper and general benevolence? A delight in one's blessings? I had thought of a blue pill, with perhaps a touch of rhubarb.'

   'Show me your tongue,' said Stephen; and then, shaking his head, 'Lie flat on your back.' After a while he said 'As I thought, it is your liver that is the peccant part; or at least the most peccant of your parts. It is turgid, readily palpable. I have disliked your liver for some time now. Dr Redfern disliked your liver. You have the bilious facies to a marked degree: the whites of the eyes a dirty yellow, greyish-purple half-moons below them, a look of settled discontent. Of course, as I have told you these many years, you eat too much, you drink too much, and you do not take enough exercise. And this bout I have noticed that although the water has been charmingly smooth ever since we left New South Wales, although the boat has rarely exceeded a walking pace, and although we have been attended by no sharks, no sharks at all, in spite of Martin's sedulous watch and mine, you have abandoned your sea-bathing.'

   'Mr Harris said it was bad in my particular case: he said it closed the pores, and would throw the yellow bile upon the black.'

   'Who is Mr Harris?'

   'He is a man with singular powers, recommended to me by Colonel Graham when you were away on your tour of the bush. He gives you nothing but what grows in his own garden or in the countryside, and he rubs your spine with a certain oil; he has performed some wonderful cures, and he is very much cried up in Sydney.'

   Stephen made no comment. He had seen too many quite well educated people run after men with singular powers to cry out, to argue or even to feel anything but a faint despair. 'I shall bleed you,' he said, 'and mix a gentle cholagogue. And since we are now quite clear of New South Wales and of your thaumaturge's territory, I advise you to resume both your sea-bathing and your practice of climbing briskly to the topmost pinnacle.'

   'Very well. But you do not mean me to take medicine today, Stephen? Tomorrow is divisions, you remember.'

   Stephen knew that for Jack Aubrey, as for so many other captains and admirals of his acquaintance, taking medicine meant swallowing improbable quantities of calomel, sulphur, Turkey rhubarb (often added to their own surgeon's prescription) and spending the whole of the next day on the seat of ease, gasping, straining, sweating, ruining their lower alimentary tract. 'I do not,' he said. 'It is only a mixture, to be followed by a series of comfortable enemata.'

   Jack watched the steady flow of his blood into the bowl: he cleared his throat and said 'I suppose you have patients with, well, desires?'