The Letter of Marque (9 page)

'I said it was going to be a dirty night,' said Jack, walking over to the barometer. 'But perhaps it is going to be dirtier than I thought. We had better snug down here as well. Killick, Killick, there.'

'Sir?' said Killick, appearing instantly, with a padded cloth under his arm.

'Strike the Doctor's 'cello and my fiddle down into the bread-room, together with the article."

'Aye aye, sir. The Doctor's 'cello and your fiddle down into the bread-room it is, together with the object.'

Early in their marriage Diana had given Stephen a singularly splendid but nameless example of the cabinet-maker's art and ingenuity: it could be, and generally was, a music-stand, but various levers and flaps turned it into a wash-basin, a small but quite adequate desk, a medicine-chest and a book-case, and it had seven secret drawers or compartments; it also contained an astrolabe, a sundial, a perpetual calendar and a quantity of cut-glass bottles and ivory brushes and combs; but what really pleased Killick was the fact that its hinges, keyhole-scutcheons, door-straps, finger-plates, bottle-stoppers and all other fittings were massive gold. He took idolatrous care of it - the padded cloth was only the innermost of its three rough-weather cases - and he thought his captain's name for it improper, disrespectful and out of place. Object was the appropriate word - a word that had not the remotest connection with chamber-pot but on the contrary with holiness: holy object - and steadily, for years, Killick had tried to impose it.

Jack stood there for some moments, swaying easily with the twisting roll and pitch: his mouth was poised for whistling, yet in fact it was not music at all that ran through his mind but a set of calculations of position, currents, wind-force and the changing barometric pressure, all set against the immediate past and a background of a great many similar patterns in this part of the Atlantic. He put on a pilot-jacket, made his way to the quarterdeck and considered again, this time more instinctively, taking the feel of the wind at the sea directly. The topgallantmasts had already been struck, the hatches battened down, deadlights shipped and the boats on the booms double-griped. He said to Davidge, 'When the larboard watch is called, let the topsails be close-reefed. Call me if there is any change in the wind. Captain Pullings relieves you, I believe?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Then let him know what I have said. Good night to you, Mr Davidge.'

'Good night, sir.'

Back in the cabin he observed, 'This may be the blow I was talking about, when I said that an action or a storm pulled a mixed crew together wonderfully. I wish I may not have spoken like a fool. I wish it may not have been thought I desired a really violent blow."

'My godfather's great-great-grandmother lived at Avila, in a house that I shall show you and Sophie when the war is done; she knew Saint Theresa, and the saint told her that more tears were shed over prayers that were granted than ever were shed over prayers that were refused.'

CHAPTER THREE

It was indeed the prayed-for blow, with the wind backing and strengthening until on the third day it reached the east-northeast, where it blew a hard gale for two watches on end without varying a single point; but then, with the Surprise under a close-reefed foresail and mizen storm-staysail, it began to veer and haul in a most confusing manner, and with even greater force.

At this point, well on in the graveyard watch, past three in the morning and with rain sweeping in almost solid sheets across the deck, Tom Pullings left his cot, put on his oilskins and crept up the ladder to see how Davidge was weathering it. Most of the watch were in the waist, sheltering from the worst of the spray, rain and flying water under the break of the forecastle, but the four men at the wheel and the officer standing behind them with one arm round the mizenmast, had the full choking sweep, and they kept their heads down to be able to breathe. Davidge was an experienced, capable seaman and he had known some monstrous seas in his time, yet even so he answered Pulling's enquiry, roared with cupped hands into his ear, with 'Pretty well, sir, I thank you. But I was thinking of calling the captain. Every time she comes up a trifle the helm gives a kind of judder, as though the tiller-ropes were either slipping on the barrel or growing frayed.'

Pullings shoved in among the men at the wheel - all of them Shelmerstonians as it happened - gripped the spokes, waited for her to come up after a heavy sea had knocked her head to leeward, felt the familiar hesitation, smiled, and called out 'It is only one of her little tricks in this sort of weather. She has always done it. We can let him lie in peace."

Here a singularly prolonged and vivid series of lightning flashes lit up the low black clouds and the streaming ship; an enormous thunder-clap roared out almost within hand's reach; and the wind turned without the slightest warning, filling her staysail crack-full and bringing the Surprise four points up, heading straight into a very high sea with far greater speed. Her first plunge sent her entire forecastle deep under green water. The whole ship pitched at such an angle and with such force that Jack, dead asleep in his hanging cot after thirty-six hours on deck, was dashed violently against the beams overhead.

'I doubt she will ever rise again,' said Pullings to himself: and the glow of the binnacle lights showed the same grave expectation of the end on the faces of the men at the wheel. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly: the bowsprit and part of the forecastle heaved up as dark as a whale in the white turmoil: the enormous body of water filling the waist surged aft, flooding the quarterdeck and bursting the cabin bulkhead inwards. In the almost continual lightning the men of the watch could be made out clinging in bunches to the life-lines that had long since been stretched fore and aft between the guns; and before the water had poured from the quarterdeck scuppers Jack Aubrey was seen swarming up the ladder in his nightshirt.

'Does she steer?' he cried, and without waiting for the answer he took the wheel. The subtle current of vibrations between the thrust of successive waves on the rudder told him that all was well - his ship was answering as she had always answered. But as he peered down at the compass his blood dripping over the glass turned the binnacle light red.

'You are hurt, sir,' said Pullings.

'Damn that,' said Jack, heaving on the wheel to spill the wind. 'Haul up the foresail. Forward, there, look alive. Man the fore clew-garnets.'

This was in fact the last of the storm's more outrageous freaks. At the change of the watch the wind, returning to the east-northeast, whipped the clouds off the moon, showing a tolerably dismal sight - jib-boom, spritsail yard and bumpkins carried away, bowsprit and foreyard sprung, and spanker-boom broken, together with a great deal of cordage - dismal, but by no means desperate: no hands had been lost, little water had got in below, and although the cabin was bare, damp, austere and, with the loss of its bulkhead, stripped of all privacy, by breakfast-time the ship was making a creditable five knots under topsails alone in a moderate, slackening gale, the galley fires were in full action, and Killick had recovered his coffee-mill from the bilges, where some irrational blast had hurled it when the carpenter's mate went below to attend to the well.

Jack Aubrey had a bloody bandage round his head, obscuring one eye; he usually wore his long yellow hair neatly plaited and clubbed with a broad ribbon behind his neck, but so far he had not had time to wash the pints of clotted blood out of it and the stiffened locks stood out in all direction, giving him a most inhuman look; yet he was pleased with the way the ship's company had behaved - no moaning over short commons, though biscuit and cheese and small beer had been their fare for three days, no hanging back when they were required to go aloft, no skulking below, no wry looks - and his remaining eye had a benevolent expression. 'It is a remarkable fact,' he observed at breakfast, 'that in the course of many years at sea, I have never yet come across an incompetent carpenter. Bosuns, yes: because they often top it the tyrant and turn the hands awkward. Even gunners, who cannot always be brought to accept the slightest change. But not carpenters: they seem to have their trade born in them. Our Mr Bentley has almost finished the larboard bumpkin, and the bowsprit is already fished; we can - what the devil are they hallooing about in the waist?' Bending and looking forward under the long overhang of the quarterdeck, he saw the men who had been set to repair the gripes all standing up and shouting to the lookout at the masthead.

'I beg pardon for not knocking, sir,' said Pullings, running in, 'but there is nothing to knock on. A sail, sir, hull-down to leeward.'

'Hull-down? Then in that case we have time to finish our coffee,' said Jack. 'Sit down, Tom, and let me pour you a cup. It tastes a little odd, but at least it is hot and wet."

'Hot and wet it is, sir,' said Pullings, and to Maturin, 'I am afraid you must have had quite a tiresome night of it, Doctor. Your cabin is a rare old shambles, if I may use the expression.'

'At one time I was deeply uneasy, I will admit,' said Stephen. 'It appeared to me through my dreams that some criminal hand had left the door open, and that I should be exposed to the falling damps. But then I perceived that there was no door, at all, and composed my mind to sleep.'

Immediately after breakfast the Surprise sent up her top-gallantmasts. It had soon become apparent that the chase was of no great consequence, but even so Jack began methodically spreading his canvas until she threw a fine bow-wave and the water sang down her side in a long curve, drawing a wake as straight and urgent as though she had been in pursuit of the Manilla galleon. She had the wind on her starboard quarter and now she could just bear weather studdingsails alow. This was the first time Jack had really driven her since they left Shelmerston; the first time the new hands had seen what she was capable of. The speed pleased every man aboard, and not only the speed, but the ship's gallantry - the way she took the seas under her bow and tossed them aside. Although the wind was more moderate, it now blew across the current and the remaining swell, cutting it up in an ugly fashion; yet she ran through the short, uneven seas as sweetly as ever a ship could run, and when the log was heaved at four bells in the forenoon watch, taking ten knots clean off the reel, there was a universal cheer.

There was very little likelihood of trouble, but even so Jack had the hands piped early to dinner, watch by watch; and most of them soon returned eating what they could carry, in order to miss nothing. The chase had early been seen to be a crippled fore-and-aft vessel, and the probability of her being Babbington's schooner grew stronger the nearer she came. Her foremast was sound and she had foresail, foretopsail and a fine array of jibs, while her people were working extremely hard on a jury-mainmast. But it was no use: even if they did manage to set a mainsail on it, they must be overhauled quite soon. Uninjured and beating into the wind she had outsailed- the Tartarus; but crippled and above all sailing large she was no sort of match for the Surprise.

'So that is a schooner," said Martin, as they watched her from the forecastle. 'How can you tell?'

'It has two masts. The second is now being attempted to be erected.'

'But brigs, ketches, bilanders, galliots and doggers also have two masts. What is the difference?'

'Curlews and whimbrels have a general similarity, and both have two wings; yet to any but the most superficial observer there is an evident difference.'

'There is the difference of size, eye-stripe and voice.'

'Bating the voice, much the same applies to these two-masted vessels. The accustomed eye,' said Stephen, not without a certain complacency, 'at once distinguishes the equivalent of eye-stripes, wing-bars and semi-palmated feet.'

'Perhaps I shall come to it in time,' said Martin. 'But there are also luggers, bean-cods and herring-busses.' And having considered this for a while he went on 'Yet surely it is very curious that apart from some pilchard-boats off the Lizard and the two men-of-war this should be the first vessel we have seen in such a length of days? I remember the chops of the Channel as being crowded with shipping - vast convoys, sometimes stretching over miles, and separate ships or small groups on their own.'

'I believe,' said Maturin, 'that to the mariner paths are stretched across the ocean according to wind and weather: these he follows with as little thought or concern as a Christian might walk down Sackville Street, cross Carlisle Bridge, pass Trinity College and so come to Stephen's Green, that haunt of dryads, each more elegant than the last. Captain Aubrey, on the other hand, has taken care to avoid these paths; as do, indeed, the smugglers whom that disagreeable cutter was looking for. I have little doubt that the vessel over there, the schooner, is one of them.'

In this Dr Maturin was mistaken: certainly the schooner was built for speed, and she might very well have carried contraband; but an even more discerning eye would have seen that while even now her small crew was furiously labouring with backstays and a maintopsail yard, another body of men and three women were clustered at the taffrail, waving and calling out - the very picture of a retaken prize, or rather a prize about to be retaken.

The Surprise swept closer and ranged alongside, taking the wind out of the schooner's sails: she fired a gun to windward and the schooner struck her colours.

'Shipmates,' said Jack Aubrey in a strong voice. 'You all know the terms of our agreement: if any man should so far forget himself as to rob any prisoner or ill-use him, or pillage the schooner, he will be turned out of the ship. Lower down the blue cutter.'

Yet the schooner, the Merlin, proved not to be a retaken prize at all; nor, whatever her captain - a French-speaking American from Louisiana - might say, was she an independent privateer: from the enormously prolix yet concordant testimony of the released prisoners it became apparent that she was the consort of a much more formidable ship, the Spartan, fitted out by a Franco-American consortium to prey on the West Indian trade of the Allies.