The Surgeon's Mate (32 page)

'I made that point, sir; but Wittgenstein, who speaks for them, said weevils were natural, whereas lice were not, being one of the plagues of Egypt, and therefore irreligious. They are afraid for their slops and hammocks, but very much more for their hair. They are extremely unwilling to have to cut off their pigtails, sir, and although they spoke respectfully, I believe they take it very much to heart.'

'Let them be called aft, Mr Hyde said Jack; and Stephen observed, 'They do not distinguish between Pediculus vestimenti, the body-louse, and Pediculus capitis, which infests the hair; their pigtails are in no danger at this stage, if they do not put on Danish hats.'

The hands came aft, the men condemned to wear the lousy clothes looking grim and deeply displeased, the others amused and facetious: Jack took their mood at once, and said, 'Men, I understand you don't like lice. Well, I don't like 'em neither. But this is an urgent business we have in hand: there is no time to ship wash-tubs and boil everything, and to get into Grimsholm you have to look like sloppy-joes, not like man-of-war's men. I am sorry for it, but there is nothing I can do: it is all in the line of duty. And you need not fear for your hair, so long as you do not put on their hats. A very learned gentleman has told me that these are innocent lice: they only go for your body, never for your pigtails. There is Pediculo vestimento, and there is Pediculo capito, two quite different kettles of fish - vestments and caps. It is all in the line of duty, as I say; but it comes under the article of hard-lying, and each man shall have one and fourpence a day extra. What is more, the prisoners have been given new slops, and they will not lie in your hammocks but berth in the hold, on straw. You cannot ask fairer than that.' He knew he had satisfied them; Pediculo capito had turned the scale before ever he came to the hard-lying money. 'Dismiss the hands, Mr Hyde,' he said, 'and let us carry on.' In the cabin once more he said, 'I intend putting Wittgenstein in charge of the Minnie to take her in, together with Klopstock and Haase as his mates. I do not contemplate sending any officers.'

'Oh sir,' said Hyde in a tone of deep distress, 'I had hoped... '

'I know,' said Jack, who understood his feelings perfectly, 'but this is a special case. Her crew must look like common Baltic sailors, and our hands can wear what they please without infringing the rules of war. If they are taken, they are ordinary prisoners. If an officer is taken, disguised, he is shot as a spy.'

'Yes, sir. But I could be in my shirtsleeves, with my uniform coat stowed away, and my commission in its pocket. Sir, you know how hard promotion is to come by nowadays: a man has to jump into the mouth of a cannon and crawl out by the touch-hole, as they say. And even then he is not always noticed.'

Jack hesitated. What Hyde said was perfectly true; and there was a moral obligation on a captain to give his officers their chance, usually in order of seniority. But in addition to the perfectly valid point about uniform there was another he did not choose to mention. Hyde was a decent, conscientious young fellow and very good at the shipkeeping side of his task; but he was no great seaman. His one idea of increasing speed was to pack on more sail, whether it pressed the ship down or not; he put her about in a poking, hesitant fashion; and once his unfortunate confusion of right and left had caused the Ariel to miss stays. If he had been sending an officer at all, Jack would have been far happier with Fenton, a natural-born sailor; but that would be seen as a direct slight. His hesitation did not last long: the issue was clear - no fine feelings must put the enterprise and Stephen's life in hazard. 'I am sorry, Hyde,' he said, 'but you must look upon this as being in the line of duty, like the lice. I am sure you will have some other chance of distinguishing yourself presently.' He was not sure of it at all; he felt that his words carried neither conviction nor comfort; and he was glad when four sail of ships were reported on the starboard beam.

They were far away, just topsails up, but their course was converging with the Ariel's; and until they could be certainly identified he called Wittgenstein and his mates below, solid, middle-aged men with close on a hundred years of service between them. He explained that they were to take the Minnie into Grimsholm, making all possible sail from the pursuing Ariel; they were to wear a Hamburg jack and Danish colours; they were to anchor off this island - showing them the drawing -and then put Dr Maturin ashore. Dr Maturin was to do all the talking, and they were to obey his orders to the letter. They were to speak no English in hearing of the island. They listened attentively, and he was particularly pleased to see how quickly and intelligently they took the point about sailing and behaving like merchant seamen.

He was about to go over all these points a third time when Wittgenstein said a little testily, 'Yes, sir. I understand: I ain't no lubber. And by your good leave I think we ought to go aboard now, promiscuous, to see how she handles.'

Jack saw them pull across with their chosen band in their lousy coats, and he saw how quickly they threw off years of discipline, lounging about the deck, talking, leaning on the rail, chewing their quids and spitting, scratching themselves, hanging up their clothes here and there. The Minnie had never been what the Navy would have called a neat ship; now she looked thoroughly low.

By this time the Ariel and the four ships in the northwest had exchanged numbers; as Jack had supposed, they were the transports, escorted by Aeolus. 'It is damnably like counting your chickens,' he thought, looking at the troop-carriers far over the water and then southward towards the point where Grimsholm should heave up in time. 'I hope to God it may not bring ill-luck.'

Seven bells in the forenoon watch had struck some while ago, and the sand in the half-hour glass had nearly run its course. In spite of the general sense of impending crisis - for all hands knew very well what the Ariel was about - the ship was filled with the liveliest anticipation of dinner; yet their usual cheerfulness at this hour was somewhat dampened by the knowledge that they were carrying a corpse, that unlucky thing. The young Frenchman had lost the number of his mess, and the sailmaker had been sent for to sew him into a hammock, with two round-shot at his feet.

The officers took their noonday observation with particular care, a good observation that showed Grimsholm somewhat nearer than dead-reckoning would have it. The glass was turned, the bell struck, and the hands were piped to their longed-for meal: by the time it was finished the island would have nicked the clear sky; shortly after that Stephen would go aboard the Minnie, and the apparent chase would begin.

'Would it be improper to suggest our dining now?' he asked.

'Not at all,' said Jack. 'I will give the word at once." He bent to the cabin skylight and hailed the astonished steward: 'Dinner on the table in seven minutes. Caviare and the Swedish bread, omelettes, beef-steaks, the ham, what is left of the cold goose-pie, and rouse out a bottle of champagne and two of the burgundy with the yellow seal.'

In seven minutes they sat down, Jack having given orders that he should be told as soon as Grimsholm came in sight. 'I have never eaten enough caviare,' said Stephen, helping himself again. 'Where did it come from?'

'The Czar sent it to Sir James, and he passed a barrel on to us. Rum stuff. I dare say it was caviare to the Admiral too.' This was his only small attempt at wit throughout the meal: and a little caviare was almost all he ate. His stomach was closed, and he could not even drink with relish.

Stephen on the other hand downed his omelette and a pound of steak, finished the cold goose-pie and cut a slice of ham in what would ordinarily have been a very festive way for him. But the feast was no feast. The atmosphere was entirely wrong. They were polite to one another, and there was almost no real contact; it was as though Stephen were already gone, removed to another plane.

It was only when they were drinking their port and Stephen said how he wished they might have some music - in former voyages together they had played innumerable 'cello and violin duets, often in trying circumstances - that their old relationship came back to life. 'We might try a glee,' said Jack with a poor smile, but at that point a midshipman came to say, with the master's duty, that Grimsholm was sighted from the masthead.

'It is nearly time,' said Jack. 'We must be chasing long before they see us.' He reached for the decanter, filled their glasses, and raised his, saying 'Here's my dear love to you, Stephen, and - ' the glass dropped from his hand and broke. 'Jesus,' he said in a low voice, appalled.

'Never mind it, never mind it,' said Stephen, mopping his breeches. 'Now listen, Jack, will you? There are just three things I must say before I go aboard the Minnie. If I succeed I shall hoist the Catalan flag. You know the Catalan flag, I am sure.'

'I am ashamed to say I do not.'

'It is yellow, with four bloody stripes down it. And if you see it - when you see it - you must send to the transports, which will obviously be out of sight of the island, to tell them to come in, and you must come in yourself at once, flying the same flag in some place of honourable distinction. I suppose we have one?'

'Oh, the sailmaker will run up half a dozen - yellow jack with strips of the spare pennant.'

'Just so. And I beg, Jack, that you will salute the fortress with all the guns proper for such a place, or even more; and that you will receive the commanding officer with the ceremony due to a nobleman.'

'If he comes with you, Stephen, he shall have a royal salute.'

Stephen crossed the lane of water and they saw him hauled aboard the Minnie. The Ariel signalled to the remote Aeolus to haul her wind, backed her topsails to give the Minnie two miles start, and at last the long hours of chase began.

Stephen sat on an old kitchen chair by the mizenmast, out of the way; he had a satchel of papers on his lap, and he looked steadily forward at Grimsholm, fine on the larboard bow and growing larger. There was no point in preparing a careful, ordered statement; everything would depend on the first moments, on the presence or absence of French officers, on his reception; and from that point on it would be an improvisation, a cadenza. He whistled the Montserrat Salve Regina, embroidering the theme.

From the Ariel's bows Jack could see him plainly over the clear grey sea, even without his glass, a black figure sitting there. All too plainly: with this fine breeze well abaft the beam the Ariel had been overhauling the Minnie faster than was right this last half hour. 'Let her go and veer away,' he said, and the spritsail course, its clews stopped, dropped into the sea over her blind quarter, acting as a drogue. It checked her speed, but not to obviously; she still gained a little, and ten minutes later he said to the gunner, 'Very well, Mr Nuttall, I think we may open fire. You know what to do. Take great care, Mr Nuttall.'

'Never you fear, sir,' said the gunner. 'I filled all our rotten old white grain: she's in no danger.'

He fired. The ball pitched two hundred yards short and fifty yards wide. The Minnie responded with a foretopgallant weather-studdingsail.

'It must look right, though,' said Jack.

'Never you fear, sir,' said the gunner again. 'Just you wait till the gun warms up.'

The gun warmed up, the guns indeed, for the Ariel kept giving a slight yaw to bring first one chaser then the other into action, increasing her rate of fire but diminishing her speed; the carefully-chosen round-shot cut up the water so close to the Minnie that once or twice the spray came aboard her. It was pretty practice, but it did not give the more experienced seamen in the Ariel as much satisfaction as the sailing of the ship - the perpetual slight rising of sheets, the over-press of somewhat unbalanced sails, all the hundred capers her captain had learnt in the oceans of the world, everything to give the impression of great eagerness and of the utmost haste, without in fact gaining very much. The stroke that gave most pleasure was his order to set the main-royal, a risky sail in such a breeze even with sound spars.

'You are forgetting, sir,' said Mr Hyde. 'The mast is sprung.'

'I have that in mind, Mr Hyde,' said Jack. 'Away aloft.

Mast, sail and yard carried away after the first minute, a most spectacular sight from the land. And all the while Grimsholm came nearer, with the whole broad range of mainland shore that it guarded, miles of shoal-free coast with perfect landing-places for an army, quite apart from the river-port of Schweinau: for some time now the higher batteries had been in view, with the smoke wafting from their hot-shot furnaces, and in the transparent evening air good eyes could make out the red of the tricolour at the flagstaff.

Nearer still lay the ill-defined limit of the battery's range of accurate fire. Wittgenstein evidently thought he was close to it, for he had already broken out the Hamburg jack.

If the ruse had taken, if the watchers on that hill had been deceived, the Minnie would pass the invisible frontier unharmed: if not she would probably be damaged, possibly sunk. In his telescope Jack could see the artillery-men busy about their batteries, and the smoke from the furnaces had increased.

'Surely to God they can reach this far?' he said to himself, standing there on the forecastle with his hands clasped behind his back. 'Forty-two pounders, and with all that height

Closer, closer still. And at last the long-expected flashes, the jetting smoke, and then the roar, deeper than the guns of any ship. 'Cast off the drag-sail. Stand by the starboard guns,' he cried; and as he spoke the shot pitched, well-grouped and in a deadly true line, a cable's length beyond the Ariel. Beyond the Ariel, by God. 'Hard a-weather,' he cried. 'Fire as they bear.'

The Ariel turned on her heel so fast that the broadside went off as one gun: it should have been a harmless discharge for carronades at this range, but one freakish ricochet went home, piercing the Minnie's mizen topsail. Jack had not time to notice that, however; he was wholly taken up with manoeuvring his ship out of the shocking fire that opened upon her. They had lured him in, well within the limit, and now the sea spurted white on either hand. Had he not had a fine brisk breeze and a handy crew he must have been severely mauled, if not sunk, by the tons of red-hot iron they flung at him with such appalling accuracy. As it was his sails were much tattered, a fire had started in the starboard head, one cutter had been destroyed and the foretopgallantmast wounded before he ran out of range. When he was quite sure that the upper batteries were not playing fox, but were in fact unable to reach him, he brought the Ariel to the wind, told Hyde to set about knotting and splicing and bending new sails, and ran up to the maintop.