Aub-Mat 08 - The Ionian Mission

by Patrick O'Brian

  PATRICK O’BRIAN

  The Ionian Mission

  W.W. Norton & Company

  New York * London

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Royal Navy of Nelson’s time was much given to music and poetry: no wardroom was complete without half a dozen German flutes and every month the Naval chronicle published several pages of verse by officers on active service or half-pay. These poems presumably show naval talent at its highest, and they provide excellent material for a writer who wishes to show this perhaps unexpected side of the sailor’s life but who feels that his own pastiches cannot possibly give the same impression of authenticity. Yet the somewhat less accomplished pieces that never reached print are even more valuable: I have come across a certain number of them in the library at Greenwich, but to my knowledge there is no mine so rich as the Memoirs of Lieutenant Samuel Walters, R.N, which remained in manuscript until 1949, when the Liverpool University Press published them, admirably edited by Professor Northcote Parkinson, to whom I make all proper ackowledgements for the lines I have borrowed.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Marriage was once represented as a field of battle rather than a bed of roses, and perhaps there are some who may still support this view; but just as Dr Maturin had made a far more unsuitable match than most, so he set about dealing with the situation in a far more compendious, peaceable and efficacious way than the great majority of husbands.

  He had pursued his strikingly beautiful, spirited, fashionable wife for years and years before marrying her in mid-Channel aboard a man-of-war: for so many years indeed that he had become a confirmed bachelor at last, too old a dog to give up his tricks of smoking tobacco in bed, playing his ‘cello at odd untimely moments, dissecting anything that interested him, even in the drawing-room; too old to be taught to shave regularly, to change his linen, or to wash when he did not feel the need - an impossible husband. He was not house-trained; and although he made earnest attempts at the beginning of their marriage he soon perceived that in time the strain must damage their relationship, all the more so since Diana was as intransigent as himself and far more apt to fly into a passion about such things as a pancreas in the drawer of the bedside table or orange marmalade ground into the Aubusson. And then again his deeply-ingrained habits of secrecy (for he was an intelligence-agent as well as a physician) made him even more unsuited for domestic life, which withers in the presence of reserve. He therefore gradually retired to the rooms he had long retained in an old-fashioned comfortable shabby inn called the Grapes, in the liberties of the Savoy, leaving Diana in the handsome modern house in Half Moon Street, a house shining with fresh white paint and new-furnished with elegant but fragile satinwood.

  It was in no way a parting; there was no sort of violence or ill-will or disagreement about Stephen Maturin’s fading away from the intense social life of Half Moon Street to the dim, foggy lane by the Thames, where he could more easily attend the meetings of the Royal Society, the College of Surgeons, or the entomological or ornithological societies that interested him so very much more than Diana’s card-parties and routs, and where he could more safely carry out some of the delicate business that fell to his lot as a member of the naval intelligence department, business that necessarily had to be kept from the knowledge of his wife. It was not a parting in any sense of unkindness, but a mere geographical separation, one so slight that Stephen usually covered it every morning, walking up through the Green Park to breakfast with his wife, most often in her bedroom, she being a late riser; while he nearly always appeared at her frequent dinner-parties, playing the part of host to admiration, for he could be as smooth and complaisant as the most civilized of her guests so long as he was not required to keep it up too long. In any case Diana’s father and her first husband were serving officers and all her life she had been accustomed to separation. She was always delighted to see her husband and he to see her; they never quarrelled now that all reasons for disagreement were gone; and in fact this was probably the best possible arrangement for a pair with nothing in common but love and friendship, and a series of strange, surprising, shared adventures.

  They never quarrelled, except when Stephen brought up the question of marriage according to the Roman rite, for their wedding had been performed in the brisk naval fashion by the captain of HMS Oedipus, an amiable young man and a fine navigator but no priest; and since Stephen, being of mixed Irish and Catalan parentage, was a Papist he was a bachelor still as far as the Church was concerned. Yet no persuasion, no kind words (and harsh ones he dared not use) could move Diana: she did not reason, but simply and steadily refused. There were times when her obstinacy grieved him, for apart from his own strong feelings on the matter he seemed to make out some obscure superstitious dread of a strange sacrament mingled with the general English dislike of Rome; yet there were also times when it added a certain not wholly disagreeable air of intrigue to the connection. Not that this ever occurred to the eminently respectable Mrs Broad of the Grapes, who liked her house to be just so and who would countenance nothing whatsoever in the roving line, a landlady who would at once turn away any man she suspected of leading out a wench. Mrs Broad had known Dr Maturin for many years; she was thoroughly used to him; and when he told her that he meant to stay at the inn she only stared for a while, amazed that any man born could sleep away from such a ravishing lady; and then accepted it as ‘one of the Doctor’s little ways’ with perfect calm. Some of his little ways had indeed been quite surprising in the past, seeing that they ranged from the quartering of badgers, rescued from a baiting, in her coal-shed to the introduction of separate limbs and even of whole orphans for dissection when they were in good supply towards the end of winter; but she had grown used to them little by little. The Doctor’s ‘cello booming through the night and skeletons in every cupboard were nothing now to Mrs Broad; and nothing now could astonish her for long. She also thoroughly approved of Diana, whom she had come to know well during her first startled stay at the inn, where Stephen had brought her when they landed in England. Mrs Broad liked her for her beauty, which she candidly admired, and for her friendliness (‘no airs nor graces, and not above taking a little posset with a person behind the bar’) and for her evident affection for the Doctor. Mrs Maturin was very often at the Grapes, bringing shirts, blue worsted stockings, shoe-buckles, leaving messages, darting in for small sums of money, for although Diana was far richer than Stephen she was even more improvident. It seemed a strange kind of marriage, but Mrs Broad had once seen Mrs Maturin in one of the palace coaches with Lady Jersey - royal footmen up behind - and she had an indistinct notion that Diana was ‘something at Court’, which would naturally prevent her from living like mortal of ordinary flesh and blood.

  Diana had been there still more often in recent days, because the Doctor was going to sea again with his particular friend Jack Aubrey, a post-captain in the Royal Navy, once known in the service as Lucky Jack Aubrey for his good fortune in taking prizes but now so miserably involved in his affairs that he was glad to accept an unenviable temporary command, the Worcester of seventy-four guns, one of the surviving Forty Thieves, that notorious set of line-of-battle ships built by contract with a degree of dishonesty in their scantlings, knees, fastenings - in their whole construction - that excited comment even in a time of widespread corruption: very strong comment indeed from those who had to take them to sea. She was to carry him to the Mediterranean, to Admiral Thornton’s squadron and the interminable blockade of the French fleet in Toulon. And since Stephen was to go to sea, it was obviously necessary that his sea-chest should be prepared. He had packed it himself on a great many occasions before this and it had always satisfied his modest needs even when he was a great way
from shore, let alone in the Mediterranean, with Malta or Barcelona only a few hundred miles to leeward, according to the wind; but neither Diana nor Mrs Broad could bear his method of tossing things in pell-mell, the more fragile objects wrapped in his stockings, and they both perpetually interfered: tissue-paper, orderly layers of this and that, neatness, even labels.

  The brassbound chest was open now and Dr Maturin was fishing in it, hoping to find his best neckcloth, the frilled white neckcloth the size of a moderate studding-sail that he was to put on for Diana’s farewell dinner. He fished with a surgical retractor, one of the most efficient instruments known to science, but nothing did he find; and when at last the steel claws grated on the bottom he called out, ‘Mrs Broad, Mrs Broad, who has hidden my neckcloth?’

  Mrs Broad walked in without ceremony, the neckcloth over her arm, although Stephen was in his shirt. ‘Why, oh why did you take it away?’ he cried. ‘Have you no bowels, Mrs Broad?’

  ‘Mrs Maturin said it was to be new-starched,’ said Mrs Broad. ‘You would not like to have your frill all limp, I am sure.’

  ‘There is nothing I should like better,’ muttered Stephen, folding it about him.

  ‘And Mrs Maturin says you are to put on your nice new pumps,’ said Mrs Broad. ‘Which I have scratched the soles.’

  ‘I cannot walk to Half Moon Street in new pumps,’ said Stephen.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Mrs Broad patiently. ‘You are to go in a chair, like Mrs M said this morning. The men have been waiting in the tap this ten minutes past.’ Her eye wandered to the open chest, as neat as an apple-pie not half an hour ago. ‘Oh, Dr Maturin, fie,’ she cried. ‘Oh fie, Doctor, fie.’

  ‘Oh fie, Stephen,’ said Diana, tweaking his cravat straight, ‘How can you be so intolerably late? Jagiello has been slavering in the drawing-room this last age, and the others will be here any minute.’

  ‘There was a mad bull in Smithfield,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Does one really have to pass through Smithfield to reach Mayfair?’ asked Diana.

  ‘One does not, as you know very well. But I suddenly remembered that I was to call at Bart’s. And listen my dear, you have never been in time in your life, to my certain knowledge; so I beg you will keep your irony for some more suitable occasion.’

  ‘Why, Stephen, you are as furious as a mad bull yourself, I find,’ said Diana, kissing him. ‘And to think that I have bought you such a beautiful present. Come upstairs and look at it: Jagiello can receive any early worms.’ As she passed the drawing-room she called in, ‘Jagiello, pray do the civil for us if anyone should come: we shall not be a minute.’ Jagiello was almost domesticated at Half Moon Street, an absurdly beautiful young man, an exceedingly wealthy Lithuanian now attached to the Swedish embassy: he and Stephen and Jack Aubrey had been imprisoned in France together and they had escaped together, which accounted for an otherwise unlikely close friendship.

  ‘There,’ she said proudly, pointing to her bed, where there stood a gold-mounted dressing-case that was also a canteen and a backgammon-board: little drawers pulled in and out, ingenious slides and folding legs transformed it into a wash-hand-stand, a writing desk, a lectern; and looking-glasses and candle-holders appeared on either side.

  ‘Acushla,’ he said, drawing her close, ‘this is regal splendour - this is imperial magnificence. The Physician of the Fleet has nothing finer. I am so grateful, my dear.’ And grateful, infinitely touched he was: while Diana put the gleaming object through its paces, explaining how it worked and telling him how she had stood over the workmen, bullying them into finishing it in time - oaths, sweet persuasion, promises until she was hoarse, as hoarse as a God-damned crow, Stephen cheri - he reflected on her generosity, her improvidence (rich though she was, she never had any money to spend, and this was far more than even she could afford), and on her ignorance of naval life, of the damp, cramped cupboard that a surgeon lived in at sea, even the surgeon of a seventy-four, a ship of the line: this precious piece of misguided craftsmanship might do very well for a field-officer, a soldier with a baggage-wagon and a dozen orderlies, but for a sailor it would have to be wrapped in waxed canvas and struck down into the driest part of the hold. Or perhaps it might be allowed in the bread-room . . .

  ‘But the shirts, dear Stephen,’ she was saying. ‘I am absolutely desolated about the shirts. I could not get the wretched woman to finish them. There are only a dozen here. But 1 will send the others down by coach. They may catch you in time.’

  ‘God’s love,’ cried Stephen, ‘there is no need, no need at all. A dozen shirts! I have never had so many at one time since I was breeched. And in any case I need no more than two for this voyage. Sure, it is almost over before it is begun.’

  ‘I wish you were back already,’ said Diana in a low voice. ‘I shall miss you so.’ And then, glancing out of the window, ‘There is Anne Trevor’s chariot. You will not mind her coming, Stephen? When she heard that Jagiello was dining here she begged and prayed to be invited, and I had not the heart to say no.’

  ‘Never in life, my dear. I am all for the satisfaction of natural desires, even in Miss Trevor, even in a Judas-haired rack-renting County Kerry absentee landowner with a Scotch Anabaptist vulture by way of an agent, or bailiff. Indeed, we might go so far as to leave them alone for two minutes.’

  ‘It seems a damned odd voyage to me,’ said Diana, frowning at the pile of shirts. ‘You never told me how it all came about. And it is all so sudden.’

  ‘In the crisis of a war naval orders are apt to be sudden. But I am just as pleased: I have some business to deal with in Barcelona, as you know: I should have travelled to the Mediterranean in any case, Jack or no Jack.” This was true as far as it went; but Stephen had not seen fit to explain the full nature of his business in Barcelona, nor did he now say that he also had a rendezvous with French royalists no great way from Toulon, a rendezvous with some gentlemen who were heartily sick of Buonaparte, a rendezvous that might lead to great things.

  ‘But it was understood that Jack was to have the Blackwater and take her to the North American station as soon as she was ready,’ said Diana. ‘He ought never to have been shoved into a temporary command in that rotten old Worcester. A man of his seniority, with his fighting record, ought to have been knighted long ago and given a decent ship, perhaps a squadron of his own. Sophie is perfectly furious: so is Admiral Berkeley, and Heneage Dundas, and all his service friends.’ Diana was well informed about Captain Aubrey’s affairs, he being married to her cousin Sophie and an old friend into the bargain; but she was not quite as well informed as Stephen, who now said, ‘You are aware of Jack’s predicament, of course?”

  ‘Of course I am, Stephen. Pray do not be an ass.’ Of course she was: all Captain Aubrey’s acquaintance knew that on coming ashore with his pockets full of French and Spanish gold he had fallen an even easier prey to the landsharks than most sailors, as being of a more trusting, sanguine disposition. He had made a disastrous plunge into the arms of a more than usually rapacious shark and he was now deep in law-suits, with the possibility of ruin at the end of them.

  ‘I am speaking more of the most recent phase. It seems that he forgot the discretion his legal advisers urged him to observe, and it seems to them that an absence from the country is now essential for a while. I forget the details -mayhem, attorneys flying out of a two-pair-of-stairs window, glass damaged to the extent of several pounds, clerks put in fear of their lives, blasphemous words, a breach of the King’s peace. That is why things are so sudden. And that is why he accepted this command. It is no more than a parenthesis in his career.’

  ‘He will come back for the Black-water then, when she is ready? Sophie will be so happy.’

  ‘Why, as to that, my dear, as to that . . .’ Stephen hesitated; and then, overcoming the passion for reserve that among other things made him so unsuitable a husband, he said, ‘The fact of the matter is that he had very great difficulty in getting even this command: his friends were obliged to make the most press
ing representations to those in power, reminding them of services rendered, of promises made by the late First Lord; and even with all that he might never have had it if Captain - if a friend had not very handsomely stood aside. There is some hindrance, some personal grudge in the Admiralty itself; and in spite of his record he may be disappointed of the Blackwater, although he has been fitting her out so long. The parenthesis may close only to find him on shore, eating his heart out for so much as a rowing-boat that flies the King’s flag.’

  ‘I suppose it is his shocking old father,’ said Diana.

  General Aubrey was an opposition member of Parliament, a vehement enthusiastic loquacious Radical, a sad handicap to any son serving the Crown, whose ministers controlled appointment and promotion.

  ‘Sure, that has something to do with the matter,’ said Stephen. ‘But there is more to it than that, I believe. Do you know a man called Andrew Wray?’

  ‘Wray of the Treasury? Oh yes. One sees him everywhere: I was obliged to dance with him at Lucy Carrington’s ball the day you went off to your old reptiles, and he was at the Thurlows’ dinner. Listen: there is another carriage: it must be Admiral Faithorne. He is always as regular as a clock. Stephen, we are behaving abominably. We must go down. Why do you ask about that scrub Wray?’

  ‘You think him a scrub?’

  ‘Certainly I do. Too clever by half, like so many of those Treasury fellows, and an infernal blackguard as well - he treated Harriet Fanshaw so shabbily you would not believe it. A scrub for all his pretty ways, and a coxcomb: I would not touch him with a barge-pole.’

  ‘He is now acting as second secretary to the Admiralty during Sir John Barrow’s illness. But he was in the Treasury some time ago, when Jack told him he cheated at cards, told him quite openly, in his candid naval way, in Willis’s rooms.’