Treason's Harbour (5 page)

Malta was a gossiping place, and the news of Captain Aubrey's liaison with Mrs Fielding soon spread through Valletta and even beyond, to the outlying villas where the more settled service people lived. Many officers envied Jack his good fortune, but not unkindly, and he sometimes caught knowing, conniving smiles and veiled congratulatory expressions that he could not make out, he being, in the natural course of events, one of the last to know what was said on these occasions. It would in any case have astonished him, since he had always regarded fellow-sailors' wives as sacred: unless, that is to say, they threw out clear signals to the contrary effect.

He therefore experienced only the inconveniences of the situation; a certain disapproval on the part of a few officers, some wry looks and pursed lips on the part of some naval wives who knew Mrs Aubrey, and the ludicrous persecution that had given rise to the whole tale.

He and Dr Maturin, followed by Killick, were walking along the Strada Reale in the brilliant sunshine when his face clouded and he cried 'Stephen, pray step in here for a moment,' urging his friend into the nearest shop, one kept by Moses Maimonides, a dealer in Murano glass. But it was too late. Jack had barely time to reach the farthest corner before Ponto was upon him, roaring with delight. Ponto was a clumsy great brute at the best of times and now that he wore cloth boots to protect his injured paws he was clumsier still; he scattered two ranges of bottles as he came bounding in, and as he stood there with his fore-paws on Jack's shoulder, eagerly licking his face, his tail, waving from side to side, scattered chandeliers, sweetmeat jars, crystal bells.

It was a horrid scene, a scene repeated as often as three times a day on occasion, the only variety being the kind of shop, tavern, club or mess in which Jack took refuge, and it lasted long enough to do a great deal of damage. In decency Jack could not positively maim the dog, and nothing short of serious injury would answer, for Ponto was thick-witted as well as clumsy. Eventually Killick and Maimonides hauled him backwards into the street, and once there he proudly led Jack up to his mistress, giving an ungainly bound or two, and stepping high, reuniting them with an evident and very public approval that was observed and commented upon once again by a number of sea-officers, land-officers, civilians, and their wives.

'I do hope he has not been a nuisance,' said Mrs Fielding. 'He saw you a hundred yards away, and nothing would stop him, but he must wish you good-day again. He is so grateful. And so am I,' she added, with such an affectionate look that Jack wondered whether it were not perhaps one of these signals. He was the more inclined to think so since he had breakfasted on a pound or two of fresh sardines, which act as an aphrodisiac upon those of a sanguine complexion.

'Not at all, ma'am,' said he. 'I am very happy to see you both once more.' The voices of Killick and the glass-merchant behind him grew shriller and louder - on these occasions Killick paid for the breakage; but he paid not a Maltese grain, not a tenth of a penny too much, insisting upon seeing all the pieces and fitting them together, and then demanding wholesale rates - and he moved Mrs Fielding out of hearing. 'Very happy to see you both,' he repeated, 'but just at this moment may I beg you to hold him in? I am expected at the dockyard, and to tell you the truth I have not a minute to lose. The Doctor here will be delighted to lend you a hand, I am sure.

Expected he was, and not only by the cynical shipwrights labouring at enormous cost upon the worthless Worcester and by those who were not working at all upon the Surprise, which stood, deserted and gunless, perilously shored-up in a pool of stinking mud, but also by what was left of his ship's company. He had started out from England in the Worcester with some six hundred men: on being temporarily transferred to the Surprise he picked two hundred of the best, and with these he had hoped to return to England to take one of the new heavy frigates out to the North American station as soon as this brief parenthesis in the Mediterranean was over. But the Mediterranean fleet was always short of seamen, while in this respect the admirals and senior captains were not so much short of scruples as totally devoid of them; and since the little battle-scarred frigate had gone into dock on her return from the Ionian her crew had dwindled sadly, hands being drafted away on one pretext or another with such naked greed that Jack had to fight hard to keep even his own bargemen and personal followers. The remaining Surprises were lodged in nasty wooden sheds, painted black; and these they made nastier still by instantly caulking all vents and filling the confined space with tobacco-smoke and the human fug they were used to between-decks. Since the ship was in the hands of the dockyard mateys they could devote much of their time to wasting their substance and destroying their health, and this they did in the company of a crowd of women who gathered at the gates, some of them seasoned old warhorses from the time of the Knights but many surprisingly young - squat, thick girls of a kind rarely seen anywhere but in the neighbourhood of naval or military barracks.

It was this thin crew, dissolute and frowzy, that was waiting for Jack when he had listened with what patience he could command to the lying excuses of those who should have been attending to the frigate and who were not doing so. The seamen were assembled as though for the usual inspection aboard, toeing lines chalked out to represent the seams of Surprise's deck as accurately as possible, each division under its own officers and midshipmen. The frigate's Marines had been returned to their barracks as soon as she was docked, so there were no redcoats, no ritual shouting and stamping and presenting arms as Captain Aubrey approached: only William Mowett, her present first lieutenant, who stepped forward, took off his hat and said, in the rather quiet, conversational, unmilitary voice of one afflicted with a severe headache, 'All present and sober, sir, if you please.'

Sober perhaps, at least by naval standards, though some were swaying as they stood and most smelt strongly of the drink - sober perhaps, but unquestionably squalid, reflected Jack as he passed his shipmates in review: familiar faces, some of them known to him ever since his first command or even earlier, and nearly all looking more puffy, blotched, and generally unhealthy than ever before. In the Ionian the Surprise had taken a Frenchman with some chests of silver coin aboard, and rather than wait for the slow process of the prize-court Jack had ordered an immediate sharing-out. It was not strictly legal and it meant that he would be liable for the whole if the prize were not condemned; but it had a piractical directness that encouraged the crew far more than a larger sum in the remote, prudential future, as he knew with absolute certainty. Each man received the equivalent of a quarter's pay, laid down in Maria Theresa dollars on the capstan-head, and at the time this had caused a great deal of quiet satisfaction; but the sum had evidently not lasted - no sum would ever have outlasted the hands' appetite for fun ashore, and it was clear that some were already selling their clothes. Jack knew very well that if he were to give the order 'On end bags' it would be seen that instead of a well-found crew the Surprise had a pack of threadbare paupers with nothing but their holy shore-going rig (never worn at sea) and only just enough in the way of slops to protect them from the gentlest Mediterranean weather. He had done what he could to keep them occupied, but apart from small-arms exercise for all hands and chipping roundshot there was little they could be set to in the nautical line; and although cricket and expeditions to see the island where St Paul was wrecked, his ship being caught on a lee-shore with a nasty gregale blowing, did something, they could not really compete with the pleasures of the town. 'Deboshed, improvident fish,' he muttered, passing down the line with a stern and even righteous expression. And their officers were not much better, either: Mowett and Rowan, the other lieutenant, had both been to the Sappers' ball, and they had evidently competed in drinking deep by land, just as they competed in versemanship by sea; and both were suffering from the effects. Adams the purser and the two master's mates, Honey and Maitland, had been to the same party, and the same pall of liverish heaviness hung over them; while Gill, the master, looked ready to hang himself - this however was his usual expression. Indeed, the only cheerful, alert, creditable faces belonged to the frigate's remaining youngsters, Williamson and Calamy -useless little creatures, but gay and, when they thought of it, attentive to their duty. Pullings, though present, did not count. He no longer belonged to the Surprise and he was attending only as a visitor, an interested spectator; and in any event his face could not be described as wholly cheerful. In spite of the conscious glory of his epaulettes, an accurate observer could make out an underlying loss and anxiety, as though Captain Pullings, a commander without a ship and with little likelihood of a ship, were beginning to realize that a hopeful journey was better than the arrival, that nothing could come up to expectation, and that there was a great deal to be said for old ways, old friends, and one's old ship.

'Very well, Mr Mowett,' said Captain Aubrey when the inspection was over, and then to the general dismay, 'All hands will now proceed to Gozo in the boats.' And seeing Pullings looking somewhat disconsolate and lost, he added, 'Captain Pullings, sir, if you are at leisure you would infinitely oblige me by taking command of the launch.'

'This will claw some of the jam off their backs, he reflected with satisfaction as the boats rounded St Elmo Point and the barge, launch, gig, the two cutters and even the jolly-boat settled down to a long pull against the current and right into the moderate north-west breeze without the least hope of hoisting a sail until they reached Gozo, thirteen unlucky miles away. And even then, thought the seamen, the skipper, in his present sodomitical state of mind, might make them pull right round Gozo, Comino, Cominetto, and the rest of bleeding Malta itself: the bargemen, with their captain looking straight at them as he sat there in the stern-sheets between his coxswain and a youngster, could scarcely express their opinion of his conduct by anything more than a reserved, stony look; nor could the rowers in the other boats really do justice to their sentiments, particularly those seated right aft. But the boats were crowded, the oars were relieved every half hour, and even in the boats commanded by Pullings and the two lieutenants the hands managed to say, or at least utter, a good deal about Captain Aubrey, all of it disrespectful; while in the cutters and the jolly-boat, under the young gentlemen, it was downright mutinous, and Mr. Calamy's voice could be heard at intervals crying 'Silence fore and aft - silence, there - I shall report every man in the boat', his voice growing shriller at every repetition.

Yet in an hour or so much of the ill-humour was sweated out, and when they came into the smooth water under the lee of Comino they took a speronara in chase, pursuing it with cheers and a mad expenditure of useless energy right into Megiarro Bay and the port of Gozo; there they landed, gasping and exhausted, calling out traditional witticisms to the last boats to reach the shore; and when they heard that their captain had ordered them refreshments in the long vine-covered skittle-alley beside the beach they beamed on him with all their former kindness.

The officers walked up to Mocenigo's, where they found others of their kind, come out to enjoy the glorious day or to visit friends on the island; there were some redcoats too, but in general the services kept apart, the soldiers on the side towards the fort and the sailors occupying the terraces that commanded the sea, with the naval captains gathering on the highest. Jack led Pullings up the steps and introduced him to Ball and Hanmer, post-captains, and to Meares, who was only a commander. A brilliant play upon this name occurred to Jack, but he did not give it voice: not long before this, on learning that an officer's father was a Canon of Windsor he had flashed out a remark to the effect that no one could be more welcome aboard a ship that prided herself upon her artillery-practice than the son of a gun, only to find the officer receive it coldly, with no more than a pinched, obligatory smile.

'We were talking about the confidential mission,' said Ball, when they had sat down again and drinks were ordered.

'What confidential mission?' asked Jack.

'Why, to the Red Sea, of course,' said Ball.

'Oh, that,' said Jack. For some time there had been talk of an operation to be carried out in those uncomfortable waters, partly to diminish the influence of the French, partly to please the Grand Turk, who was at least the nominal ruler of the Arabian shore as far as the Bab el Mandeb and of the Egyptian as far as the dominions of the Negus, and partly to satisfy those English merchants who suffered from the exactions and ill-usage of the Tallal ibn Yahya, who ruled over the small island of Mubara and part of the mainland coast and whose ancestors had levied a toll on all ships that passed within reach and that were neither strong enough to resist nor swift enough to outsail their cumbrous dhows. The practice stopped well short of real piracy, however, and the old sheikh was regarded as a minor local nuisance, no more; but his son, a much more forceful character, had welcomed Buonaparte's invasion of Egypt, and in Paris he was looked upon as a potentially valuable ally in the campaign that was to drive the English out of India and destroy their trade with the East.

He had therefore been provided with some European vessels and with shipwrights who built him a small fleet of galleys; and although the Indian campaign now seemed tolerably remote Tallal was still used to embarrass the Turks whenever their policy became too favourable to England. His increasing influence made both the Sublime Porte and the East India Company most uneasy; furthermore in a recent fit of religious enthusiasm he had forcibly circumcised three English merchants, in retaliation for the forcible baptism of three of his ancestors - his family, the Beni Adi, had lived in Andalusia for seven hundred years, spending most of their time in Seville, where they were known and mentioned with guarded approval by Ibn Khaldun. Yet the merchants in question were not members of the Company but interlopers and three unlicensed foreskins scarcely merited a full-scale campaign: the general idea seemed to be that the Company would lend one of their country ships to the Turkish authorities in the Gulf of Suez, that the Royal Navy should man her, and that the English, in the character of technical advisers, should proceed to Mubara with a body of Turkish troops and a more suitable ruler of the same family and take the sheikh's galleys away from him. The whole thing was to be done quietly, so as not to offend the Arab rulers farther south and in the Persian gulf - no less than three of Tallal's wives were from those parts, and it was to be done suddenly, by surprise, so that there should be no resistance.