Book 20 - Blue At The Mizzen

by Patrick O'Brian

'Certainly. One can see that particular ethos come into being: and what has struck me quite forcibly is that it differs from ship to ship.'

  'Ethos is not a Christian word, brother.'

  'I beg pardon: I should have said something like tribal sense of right conduct but for the fact that sea-officers usually employ tribal to signify a group of black or red men created only for the comic or picturesque effect—I mean, leaving slavery aside. However, since nothing else occurs to my wine-fuddled mind, let us go on with tribal, using tribal in the noble sense of Boadicea's Iceni.'

  'I have no objection whatsoever.'

  Stephen bowed and went on. 'This tribal nature, which is of course most obvious towards the end of a long commission, may be likened to that which one senses in London clubs. No one could mistake an habitual member of Boodle's for an habitual member of Black's. It is not necessarily a question of better or worse. The Bactrian camel with two bunches is a valuable creature: the Arabian with but one is also a valuable creature.'

  'I should not deny it for a moment—though I could wish that Black's did not have what some people might call an almost Whiggish complexion—but my real point is that in peace-time everything becomes much more difficult. You cannot distinguish yourself; and although as a captain it is your obvious duty to do your best for the people under your command, how can it be done? Getting a ship at all, when so many are being paid-off, is a near impossibility, like . . .' He searched for the word.

  'Making a mountain out of a molehill?'

  'Even worse, Stephen, even worse. These three young fellows who came aboard were able to do so only because they have very highly influential fathers; two of whom were my old shipmates anyhow. And boys, youths, with very highly influential fathers have to be handled with tongs: above all in peace-time . . . No, I don't mean for myself, Stephen—I shall tell you about that on Sunday—but if any of the lieutenants or the master or any of the warrant-officers comes down on them heavy, it might cost him very dear. I have known it: some miserable little scrub writes to his mother, "Mr Blank boxed my ears so cruelly in the middle watch that I can hardly see out of my right eye at all." And if Father Scrub votes for the ministry and knows someone in Whitehall, in peace-time Mr Blank may whistle for a ship until Kingdom Come.'

  Jack Aubrey could never have been described as enthusiastically evangelical, but he did possess a sort of disseminated piety, sometimes expressing itself in mere superstition, sometimes in a very powerful singing of his favourite psalms, and sometimes in little private rites, such as keeping presents or good news for Sundays.

  Sunday, and a very welcome pause from the hellish beating of mauls and square-headed mallets in the forepeak. Wantage, who knew Funchal through and through and who was recovering some of his self-possession with the familiar life of the Royal Navy going on all around him, had told Harding of the best eating-house in the town, and there the first lieutenant was entertaining Reade of the Ringle, Whewell, Candish and Woodbine of the gun-room, and the two master's mates, Daniel and Wantage. He had hoped to invite Jack and Stephen too, but his servant, sounding Killick first, had learnt that the Captain and the Doctor were engaged to eat a young wild boar, roasted according to the Madeiran fashion, in the hills.

  'Please tell the Senhor that I have never eaten better porco in my life,' said Jack, holding up a bare white bone. Jack had a variety of little imbecilities, but none irritated Stephen more than his way of tossing in the odd word or two of a foreign language.

  'Oh mind your breeches, sir,' cried Killick, interposing a napkin, a napkin too late. 'There: now you've gone and done it.'

  'Never mind,' said Jack, and he tossed the bone into the glowing embers. 'What now?' he called, addressing a nervous horse-borne midshipman on the edge of the picnic dell.

  'If you please, sir, Mr Somers thought you might like to know that a packet is come in from Gibraltar.'

  'Thank you, Mr Wells. Ride back and tell him that we are just about to take our leave.'

  A packet it was, and a fine fat one too, with English letters of various degrees of antiquity, a great parcel of dockets for Mr Candish the purser, post for the cabin, gun-room and midshipmen's berth, and two waxed sailcloth rolls for Dr Maturin.

  'Forgive me,' said Stephen, and as he went he heard orders given for the general distribution. It was long before he came back: his first roll had contained some curious feathers of an unidentified nocturnal bird, probably cousin to the red-necked nightjar, and a particularly agreeable note from Sierra Leone, written before Christine Wood had received his letter; and the second was a coded message from Jacob, written according to a system they rarely used—a system in which Jacob had clearly lost his way, for although the first section spoke of certain Chileans and their arrangements (apparently with some anxiety), the second, third and fourth could not be induced to yield any meaning at all, whatever combinations were applied to them.

  The attempt at decoding took much time and spirit, and well before he abandoned all hope the ship was alive with steps and voices once more, sounds that died as the letters were read; yet when he walked into the cabin he found Jack still smiling over his post. 'There you are, Stephen,' he cried. 'I do hope your letters were as pleasant as mine? I had a very agreeable foretaste on Friday, and I meant to keep it for today: but here is a confirmation,' holding up a sheet—'so I shall contain no longer. You remember that dear man Lawrence?'

  'Faith, I shall not soon forget him. He did his profession infinite credit.' Mr Lawrence was the barrister who had done his utmost to defend Jack Aubrey when he was charged with rigging the Stock Exchange—a completely false charge brought by those who profited by the fraud and a trial conducted on political motives by one of the most prejudiced and unscrupulous judges to have sat on the English bench. Lawrence had worked extremely hard to save his innocent client, and his failure to do so had marked him deeply.

  'He did indeed. We often dine together when I am in town; and long ago, oh very long ago, before ever we went to Java and New South Wales, he happened to say that a nephew of his who had worked for years with Arthur Young had set up as an agricultural consultant and agent, but found it difficult to get a start. "I am the man for him," I said, and I told him about the little estate my cousin left me.'

  'The place with a glorious spread of fritillaries in the water-meadows and the borough you represent in Parliament?'

  'Just so. I have nothing against fritillaries: but I do assure you, Stephen, that with their sodden fields, the few farms and small-holdings produce nothing whatsoever except the ten or eleven electors and their families and just enough for them to eat. Every Lammas they send me a petition begging to be forgiven their rent this year, and please may they have twelve loads of stone for Old Hog Lane? It is an estate that costs me half a guinea for every snipe I have shot there: not that I have ever gone down much—it is far away, over vile roads, and there is no pleasure in looking at those barren fields and those coarse rank pastures. My cousin only bought the place because of the parliamentary seat. Indeed, the borough may be rotten, but the land is very much worse. Killick,' he called, barely raising his voice at all.

  'Sir?' replied Killick, almost immediately.

  'Light along a pot of coffee, will you?'

  After a pause, Jack went on, 'One really should keep a log-book, you know; a diary: after some years it is difficult to put your ideas in order. At least, that is what I find. Well, the nephew—his name is Leicester, by the way: John Leicester—went down and reported that things were bad, very bad, but not incurable, and given the lie of the land, draining would answer very well. It would take time, it would take years; but most of the tenants would give their labour according to a scheme he had devised which would allow them time for their farming, and there would be no great outlay of money. So since at that time there had been some elegant prizes I told him to carry on: but there were to be no evictions, no distraints . . .'

  'Pot of coffee, sir,' said Killick.

  'Where was I? Told him to carry
on, which he did; and we sailed away. I almost entirely forgot it . . . to be sure, Leicester, who was acting as agent as well, did send annual reports, but with so many things happening I am afraid I neglected them until last year, when he paid in rents of I think nearly forty pounds; and this year he spoke of the likelihood of a really abundant wheat harvest, ha, ha! However, I did not mention it, for fear of ill-luck: but today I have the truly welcome news that he has given the tenants a Lammas dinner of roast beef and plum pudding, at which they drank my health, and that he had placed £450 to my credit at the bank. £450, Stephen! More than my pay as a post-captain. There: that was my good news.'

  'And very good, very welcome news it is, my dear. I give you joy with all my heart. There you are . . . I am very glad of it.'

  So he was; but Jack, though not preternaturally sharp, detected the uneasiness, not so much in Stephen's expression as in a kind of particular tension in his attitude, and he said, 'Forgive me, Stephen, for boring you with all this personal and rather commonplace talk about money—you are uneasy.'

  'No. You mistake: I was not in the least degree bored, weary, inattentive. And if I am at all uneasy, it is from another cause. Jack, tell me how long will these repairs take before you can sail?'

  'With two saint's days coming and the vast amount of work to be done in so many of the shipwrights' own houses, eight or nine days.'

  'Then I must beg for Ringle to carry me to England. And if she could sail tonight how happy I should be.'

  It was at once clear to Jack that the request and the Gibraltar packet were connected: he asked no questions but passed the word for Mr Reade, and when he came, said, 'William, how soon can you be under way?'

  'In twenty minutes, sir, if I may sail without my carpenter.'

  'You have his mate aboard?'

  'No. He is aboard you, sir.'

  'Then I shall send him over directly. Good-bye to you, William: you have the breeze as fair as ever you could wish.'

  Almost all voyages, from that of Noah's Ark to the sending of the ships to Troy, have been marked by interminable delays, with false starts and turning wind and tide; perhaps the schooner Ringle was too slim and slight to count as a worthy adversary, because she gently sailed her anchor out of the ground and then bore away a little east of north with a wind that allowed her to spread every sail she possessed, other than those reserved for foul or very foul weather.

  It was indeed almost perfect sailing, the captain rarely leaving the deck, and all hands (a select body by now) perfectly ready to clap on to any rope or line that showed the least inclination to heave slack and recall it to the most rigid sense of its duty—anything for an extra eighth part of a knot.

  Most of this time Stephen spent in his low triangular berth, vainly applying various formulae to Jacob's meaningless groups of seven: he did however share his meal with William Reade, who reminded him of a wonderful run they had made racing up the Channel and reaching the Nore just in time for the first stirring of the flood tide that swept them up to the Pool in some period of time so wonderfully short that Reade had had the record signed and witnessed by several eminent hands.

  'How I hope we may do the same this time, sir,' he said.

  'I hope so, indeed,' said Stephen.

  But alas for their hopes: the Channel, awkward as ever, had had enough of south-west breezes in all their variety, and now indulged itself in strong rain from the north and north-east, combined with adverse tides that ran with great force long after their legal time. It was a worn ship's company that set Dr Maturin ashore in the Pool of London, comforted only by the thought that they should now lie snug at harbour-watch, with sailors' pleasures a short biscuit-toss away—would lie snug until orders came down from Whitehall.

  Whitehall, and the noble screen before the Admiralty, with appropriate mythological figures adorning its higher part, and an undeniably shabby Pool of London cab drawn up outside, with an equally shabby figure standing by it, slowly sorting English from Irish, Spanish and Moorish coins to pay the deeply suspicious driver, who had got down from his seat with the reins over one arm to make sure that his rum cove of a fare did not scarper.

  Stephen's extraordinarily rapid departure had caught Killick at a disadvantage: with Grimble, his mate, he was entertaining two ladies of Funchal to a light collation, and the Doctor went over the side into Ringle's boat confident (as far as he thought of it at all) that his sea-chest was in its usual perfect order. During the voyage from Madeira Stephen had not seen fit to dive into the chest lower than the till which held a primitive sponge, a case of razors, brush and comb, and an increasingly dubious towel. The rest of the time he spent wrestling with his code or urging the vessel up-Channel with all the moral force at his disposition.

  But when Ringle was alongside at the Pool and a ship's boy had brought the cab, the best he could find, Stephen thought it time to put on fine clothes for his official call. There were no fine clothes: no clean shirts, even; no neck-clothes, drawers, silk (or cotton) stockings: no silver-buckled shoes. Everything, everything, had been taken away for a thorough overhaul. And the Admiralty's under-porter, peering through his hatch, said, 'There's a rum cove a-paying off a nasty Tower Hamlets cab, Mr Simpson. Shall I tell him to go round to the tradesmen's entrance?'

  Simpson peered over his shoulder for a while, watching with narrowed eyes, while the last groats were counted out: he elbowed his assistant aside, and when the rum cove came to the hatch, greeted him with a civil 'Good afternoon, sir.'

  To this Stephen replied, 'And a good afternoon to you, to be sure. I do not appear to have a visiting-card about me, but if Sir Joseph is in the way, please be so good as to let him know that Dr Maturin would be glad of a word at his earliest convenience.'

  'Certainly, sir: I am not quite sure, of course, but I believe he is in. Should you care to wait, sir? Harler, show the gentleman into the inner waiting-room, and carry his chest.'

  Chapter Three

  'My dear Stephen, how happy I am to see you,' cried Sir Joseph, clasping his hand most affectionately. 'Tell me, have you eaten yet? Shall we hurry over to the club and call for broiled chops? But no . . .' he said, on consideration. 'No. I have a little room here, and you may wish to speak without informing all the nation?'

  'A little small private room would suit admirably. But please, dear Joseph, may a messenger be sent round to the Grapes, in the Liberties of the Savoy, to tell them of my presence here? Not only shall I stay there, which Mrs Broad and the little girls do not yet know, for I am come straight from the Pool, but there at least I have some respectable clothes—I keep a room there permanently, you know. I am not what would ordinarily be called a dressy man, as you are aware; but I should not have presented myself here in the utmost degree of squalor . . .'

  'No, no . . .'

  '. . . had it not been a matter of some urgency. Though,' he murmured, looking at his cuff, 'this was quite a good shirt, some years ago. Of some urgency,' he resumed, and plucking the undeciphered message from his pocket he laid it on the desk, smoothing the paper flat.

  'I cannot make it out offhand,' said Sir Joseph. 'What were you using?'

  'Ajax with one shift,' said Stephen. 'It worked perfectly for the first page.'

  'I cannot make it out at all, though I know Ajax with a shift quite well.' Blaine rang a bell and said, 'Ask Mr Hepworth to step this way.'

  Mr Hepworth glanced at Stephen with discreet curiosity and quickly looked down. Sir Joseph said to him, 'Mr Hepworth, be so good as to take this away and determine the system upon which it was based. Will it take you more than half an hour?'

  'I hope not, Sir Joseph; I think I see some familiar combinations.'

  'Then please to send the title and a transcript to my little room.'

  The tension was too great for either of them to eat chops with any real appetite, and they abandoned their meal entirely when Mr Hepworth came back, looking grave and carrying his transcript. 'The gentleman who encoded this, sir,' he said, 'was using the new boo
k: and both book and code being unfamiliar he turned over a whole gathering, taking it for the direct continuation of Ajax three. It looks very like: I have known this happen before, when the encoder was hurried, or uneasy in his mind.'

  'Thank you, Mr Hepworth,' said Blaine, and when the door had closed he went on, 'shall we read together? I am afraid our forecast was all too accurate.'

  They thrust their chops away—already congealed—and Blaine pulled his chair round to sit next to Stephen. They read intently, and from these short, nervous passages they learnt that an important and reasonably well-supplied body of Chileans had entered into contact with Sir David Lindsay, formerly of the Royal Navy, a most enterprising officer, who had undertaken to come out and command their naval forces. The informant gave particulars of his sources, and although Blaine murmured a few names aloud—known allies or conceivably agents—he was perfectly mute about Bernardo O'Higgins and José San Martín, with whom Stephen had been so intimately well acquainted during his attempt, his very nearly successful attempt, to induce the Peruvians to declare themselves independent of Spain. Some of the names Stephen saw with pleasure—the names of the sources rather than those of the committee—the latter with distaste, anger, and sometimes distrust and once again, once again he realised the fragility of these movements for liberation—so many who wished to be leaders, so few to follow.

  When they had finished, Blaine said, 'No wonder Dr Jacob strayed into the wrong code. We had indeed some remote notion of this possibility, but none whatsoever of its imminence . . . come in.'

  'I beg pardon, Sir Joseph,' said Hepworth. 'I just thought you would like to know that the same signal is coming through by semaphore.'

  'Thank you, Mr Hepwrorth. What is its source?'

  'Hebe, sir; in Plymouth.'

  There was a silence, and then Stephen said, 'The name of Sir David Lindsay has a familiar ring, a naval ring, but I cannot connect it with any particular event.'