The Yellow Admiral (20 page)

Yet Thursday came at last, a blessed Thursday, a make-and-mend day when the mist cleared, a decent breeze blew from the north-east and the youngsters sat in the sun on the forecastle with their sea-daddies showing them how to darn their stockings or mend torn clothes or tie the simple knots and learn the elements of splicing - a Thursday on which the lookout at the masthead hailed 'On deck, there. A ship's topsails right to leeward.'

Presently most of those who felt they could be spared below were aloft with telescopes and after a while it was found that she was the Ramillies, now lying to and presumably watching some suspect sail northwards along the Passage du Four, out of sight from the Bellona. No sooner was this agreed to by all than a second vessel was seen, a cutter coming from the direction of Ushant, beyond the Black Rocks; and then even a third, the heavy frigate Doris. After such loneliness the bay seemed positively crowded. The Ramillies was a right welcome sight to all hands and particularly to Jack: her captain, Billy Fanshawe, was an old friend of his. So indeed was the Doris; but what really delighted every man aboard, including those who could neither read nor write, was the identification of the cutter as one belonging to the flagship and employed for distribution of the mail throughout the squadron under Admiral Stranraer's command.

The Doris, out in the offing, had altered course to intercept the cutter well before the Bellona and she had her letters first, although Harding, who had left his wife expecting her first child, spread an unreasonable amount of canvas. Yet quite soon the Bellonas' grim, discontented looks gave way to tense and happy anticipation: the cutter came neatly alongside, seized the net dangling from a whip to the mainyard, put a fine round mailsack into it and sped off towards the distant Ramillies.

The sack was carried hotfoot to the great cabin, where Jack, the first lieutenant and the clerk sorted it: from the cabin it filtered down, first to the wardroom, then by way of the clerk to the warrant-officers and petty officers and then by way of the midshipmen to the ratings of their particular divisions.

Jack's mail obviously stayed where it was, and as soon as the cabin-door had closed behind Harding and the clerk he seized the first on the pile, a letter addressed, and badly addressed, in that most familiar of hands. They had parted on indifferent terms and he opened it with the liveliest expectation of all their affection being fully restored, smiling as he did so. The letter was dated from Woolcombe on the fourteenth: with these northerly winds it had taken no more than five days.

Mr Aubrey,

It is with a deepest, the very deepest concern, that I must tell you I have been shown unanswerable proof of your infidelity, In open contempt of your promise before God's altar you lay with a woman called Amanda Smith in Canada and got her with child. Deny it if you can. I have the proofs and I mean to take advice. In the mean time I shall give the Admiral notice to leave my house at Ashgrove and return there with the children.

Then came some tear-blotted and scratched-out lines. The obviously composed and recopied letter now abandoned its original and improvised, grew far less coherent, far less legible. He had just made out the words 'you left her bed and came into mine' when he was called on deck.

'Sir,' said Harding, 'you asked me to tell you if Ramillies gave any sign of life. This last minute she has thrown out our number and Captain repair aboard. I have acknowledged and given word to ready your barge.'

'Thank you, Mr Harding,' said Jack. 'Make all suitable sail, if you please.'

He returned to the cabin and having sat for a while he reached out for the other letter from Sophie and opened it with a hesitant, almost trembling hand.

The date was a week before that which he had just read, the writing more wholly familiar.

My dearest Jack,

How sorry I am to have sent you off so shabbily, and for a great while I have been meaning to beg pardon for my bad temper - trying to tell you how even a most loving heart - a female heart - can be affected by the ill-humoured Moon: but these things are very hard for a sadly ignorant creature to set down on paper so that the words give any real picture of her feelings, and before I had written anything but odd headings such as Love and Kisses and Forgiveness a letter came from Bath with the most frightful news.

You will certainly remember that Mama lived with a friend called Mrs Morris - the Honourable Mrs Morris - who helped her with the business, and that they had a manservant, a worthless fellow we all disliked when they lived here, particularly your seamen; but he was useful in the business because he understood horse-racing and the laying of odds.

Well, Mrs Morris has run off with him, apparently taking all the money and anything else they could carry and when Mama heard they were married, legally married in a church, she fell down senseless and had to be bled, and she has had fits ever since, laughing and crying. With dear Diana's help I brought her back here -she had almost destroyed their apartment in Pulteney Street and anyhow she was not fit to live there alone -the servants, apart from old Molly, had all left - and I am afraid she behaved dreadfully in the coach - and since the girls are back from school bringing friends with them, the little Nugent children, I have had to put her in your study, so near the necessary room: but do not fear - we have put a bed in the left-hand corner with a wardrobe and a chest of drawers behind it (I cannot tell you how kind dear Mrs Oakes has been) and she will never come near your precious ship-models or surveying instruments.

When you come on leave (and oh may it be soon, my love) and when the holiday girls and their friends are gone, we will move her upstairs; or possibly back to Bath, with a much more suitable companion. She says there is a clergyman who was on the brink of making her an offer.

Dear Jack, please do not worry about having money sent to me for housekeeping; we are very well with what comes from the farm, the dairy, the kitchen-garden and my poultry-yard, but even if it were not for them, Diana absolutely insists on giving us a very handsome rent for her wing of the house and the stabling - such stabling now! Such horses! With the help of the gentleman who lent her the coach she took you and Stephen down in - she has it yet - she pawned that enormous great blue diamond she brought back with her from America - 'Be damned to living on �200 a year,' she cried - and is launching into breeding Arabs again. And although that sad place at Barham is not yet sold, she has taken all Meares' pasture for them. She said it was absurd to keep the Blue Peter as they call it hidden away in a jeweller's case - she could not wear it at our Dorchester assemblies, only in London or Paris - and in any case she would soon have it again, once Stephen's affairs were in order. She looks forward extremely to a coach and six...

Jack laid the paper down, and in a dull, heavy way he wondered how he had come to be so deeply foolish as to leave Amanda's letters in a square cardboard box among his official and business correspondence; a certain liking, a certain gratitude had prevented him from balling them up and throwing them away. There would have been an indecency in doing so, in spite of her extreme silliness. He felt no particular guilt except for this foolishness: by his code a man who was directly challenged must in honesty engage -anything else would be intolerably insulting. Yet had he known of this miserable old woman's prying and her malice he would certainly have played the scrub in Canada. He reflected on Sophie's general attitude towards these matters - her extreme disapproval of any irregularity, any levity in speaking of even a looseness that reached nowhere near as far as criminal conversation - for her looseness in conversation was criminal, almost in the lawyer's sense of the term.

'Sir,' said his first lieutenant, 'forgive me for bursting in on you, but your barge is lowering down. And sir, may I tell you Eleanor and I have a daughter, healthy, pink and cheerful?'

'Give you joy of her with all my heart, William,' said Jack, crushing his hand. 'And Mrs Harding too, of course. I am sure that she will turn out to be a good 'un.'

The ceremony of the side, and the Captain of the Bellona, preceded by a midshipman, stepped into the boat. Bonden shoved off: the bargemen gave way, pulling a fine even stroke across the fifty yards to the Ramillies. The ceremony of the side again, Captain Aubrey piped aboard and kindly greeted by Captain Fanshawe, his senior by a short neck, who led him into the cabin, placed a glass of brandy in his hand and with a curiously embarrassed air said, 'Well, Jack, I hope you had an agreeable post?'

'Not quite what I could have wished, as far as I have looked,' said Jack. 'But perhaps something better may appear. How was yours?'

'A charming letter from Dolly, and quite good news of the children: the rest was mostly bills. But Jack, I am truly sorry to say the cutter also brought me an order from the flag. I am required to acquaint you that on the night you received a pilot from Ramillies and shaped a course for the Raz de Sein two French frigates sailed from Brest with the wind at north-east and are now attacking British and allied merchantmen with great success. This cannot but be attributed to your negligence in not keeping a good lookout since from all appearance the Frenchmen must have crossed your wake. I am therefore to reprimand you severely: and you are hereby severely reprimanded.'

'Yes, sir,' said Jack, without expression. 'Is that all?'

'No,' replied Fanshawe with more expression than he intended and with his eyes on the paper in front of him. 'I am also under orders to require you to proceed off Ushant without the loss of a moment and to report to the flag: there you will be attached to the offshore squadron where it is hoped that other and perhaps sharper eyes will diminish the very grave consequences of such unseamanly negligence.'

A silence. Neither intended to comment on the Admiral's prose.

'Will you dine with me, Jack?' asked Fanshawe in an attempt at an ordinary conversational tone.

'Thank you very much, Billy,' said Jack, 'but without the loss of a moment stands in the way. And between ourselves, my post acquainted me that I have been taken in adultery without a goddamn leg to stand on and that there is the Devil to pay. It destroys a man's appetite, you know.'

'Oh, my dear Jack, I know, I know,' cried Fanshawe with great feeling. 'I know only too well. Come, drink up your brandy and I will see you over the side.'

Coming aboard the Bellona again Jack returned the many salutes, walked into his cabin, where the letters were still strewn over a medley of unopened covers, and sent for the master. 'Mr Woodbine,' he said, 'pray shape a course for Ushant, for wherever the offshore squadron is most likely to be lying at this state of the tide and in the particular wind. Or whatever wind we find out there.'

Indeed, the winds the offshore squadron experienced were generally very much harder than those that blew eastward of Ushant, especially the great south-westers, from whose full force and from whose prodigious seas the inshore ships were protected to some degree by the chain of the Saints, which acted as a not very efficient but still appreciable breakwater; and this was even more evident in the Chenal de la Helle, which Woodbine took that afternoon.

They made good progress, and although the topsails had to be double-reefed on reaching the wholly unprotected Passage de Fromveur it was clear that the wind was diminishing. On the other hand, the monstrous sea it had worked up on the far side of the island was if anything greater still, in spite of the heavy rain, by the time they reached the squadron, lying-to off the Stiff Bay in the north-east; and when Jack, in response to the flagship's Captain repair aboard, made his way down into his wildly heaving barge he missed his footing for once and with his boat-cloak flying about his ears he fell plump into the water swirling about the boat's bottom. Much more water joined it on the way across, and it was a damp Jack Aubrey that stood waiting for his interview with the Admiral aboard the Charlotte. A long wait; and although Charles Morton, her captain, was civil enough Jack knew perfectly well that a man who was very much out of favour, who had just received a reprimand, a severe reprimand, was a dangerously infectious leper, above all in a ship governed by Stranraer; and he inflicted neither his remarks nor his presence on any of the officers about him.

When he was taken into the Admiral's cabin he found that the Captain of the Fleet was also present, sitting at Stranraer's side behind a long table set athwartship, with the Admiral's secretary and a clerk at the larboard end. 'Good evening, my lord,' he said. 'Good evening, sir.'

'Good evening, Captain Aubrey,' said the Admiral. 'Sit down. Now what have you to say about these French frigates you allowed to slip past you?'

'I have only to say that I very much regret any Frenchman should have got out of Brest.'

'Then you admit they went by?'

'I must have expressed myself badly, my lord. I expressed nothing but regret at what is said to have taken place: I acknowledged no sort of responsibility.'

'Where was your ship at sunset on the twenty-seventh?'

'Two cables north of the Men Glas, my lord, waiting for the tide.'

'Then how do you explain the fact that two frigates could leave the Goulet de Brest, run out by the Iroise and be seen a league north of the Ile de Sein three quarters of an hour later without they passed astern of you, almost within hail, certainly in sight?'

'I do not explain it at all, my lord. But I will assert that there was a lookout at each masthead and of course on the fo'c'sle, able seamen of known reliability.'

'So you deny the possibility of the Frenchman's getting past unseen?'

'I do not deny it. The weather was uncommon thick at times that afternoon and night - the pilot had to feel his way along past the Basse Vieille by the flash of surf - and it is not impossible that she passed unseen. What I do deny is the possibility of her doing so through the fault or negligence of any of my people.'

'So you Blaine it all on the weather, do you?'

'If Blaine there should be, I should certainly lay it on the fog, my lord.'