Book 19 - The Hundred Days

by Patrick O'Brian

  'How very kind you are to tell me all this, Stephen,' said Jack. 'From anyone else I should scarcely have regarded it, but from you . . .' He threw aside the pen he had been chewing, walked across the cabin, took up his fiddle and played a wild series of very rapid ascending trills that vanished quite out of hearing. Then he sat at his desk and with another pen he quickly drew up several lists, sent for the gunner and asked him for a state of the ship's powder and shot. 'I can tell you quite exactly after five minutes' look round the magazines, sir,' said the gunner.

  'Very well: then you fill in the figures to top us up where I have left room, and take them along. Here is a guinea to sweeten the usual palm for reasonable dispatch. Then there is this, also for the ordnance wharf.'

  'Blue lights and red,' murmured the gunner, slowly going through the list. 'We do have a few, but it's as well to be sure they are fresh. Then extra-high Congreves: I don't think I know about them, sir.'

  'They are white star-bursts, and on occasion they can be very useful. Half a guinea for all the fireworks together would be about right, I believe?'

  'Oh, very handsome, sir; and I make no doubt I shall bring them back myself.'

  When this interview and a few others that showed the trend of Captain Aubrey's mind were over, Stephen said, 'And I shall be getting some medical stores: we are sadly short of portable soup; and, since that unfortunate lingering in Mahon, blue ointment. Tell me, Jack, am I right in supposing that we shall have four or even five days longer here than you had wished?'

  'No: you are quite right.'

  'Then shall you wait on Lady Keith?'

  'Of course I shall. And on the Admiral too.'

  'Please may I come with you?'

  'By all means. Queenie speaks of you so pleasantly.'

  On the day of the visit Stephen went ashore early, bought a new wig at Barlow's and searched through the entire market until he found a pot of lilies-of-the-valley in just-opening bud. Returning he gave Mona and Kevin a square of chocolate calculated for solid jaws and iron stomachs; yet though they thanked him prettily they neither ate nor moved but stood gazing up in something between wonder and alarm. At last Mona said, 'You have changed your hair.'

  'Never mind, my dear,' he replied. 'It is only a wig.' He took it off to show: and both instantly burst into tears.

  'Dear Lady Keith,' he said as they sat in the parlour overlooking her fine garden and the Strait, with misty Africa on the far side, 'do you remember the first time you ever saw a man without his wig?'

  'No. Papa always took it off when he was teaching me to swim at Brighton, and I was so much concerned with splashing that I did not remark the change, or scarcely: a rapid moult indeed, but a perfectly natural one.'

  'I ask because my two children—children that I bought in the slave-market at Algiers—a boy and a girl, twins—wept most bitterly when I took mine off this morning, and could not be comforted.'

  'Poor little souls—there are those damned apes again: Jack, pray bang on the window, will you?—how old are they?'

  'Just losing their milk-teeth. An Algerine corsair took them off the Munster coast and I mean to send them back to their parents, peasants in a village I know. I hope to find a King's ship bound for the Cove of Cork.'

  'There should be no difficulty: I shall ask the Admiral. But what do you mean to do with them in the mean while? If you are ordered to sea, for example? Ordered to the West Indies?'

  'I had hoped to find a suitable, kindly family, to keep them until a suitable, kindly man-of-war should carry them home, with a letter to a priest I know in Cork and a purse to take them to Ballydonegan in an ass-cart.'

  'Do they speak English?'

  'Very little, and much of that little rather coarse: but it is wonderful how the infant mind absorbs a language through the ears.'

  'Well, if you like to entrust them to me, I shall tell our Scorpion, our chief gardener, to put them up: he has a good wife, quite a large cottage, and only grown-up children. He speaks English, Rock-English, and he is a good, decent man. In any case I shall look after them.'

  'How deeply kind of you, Lady Keith: may I bring them up later today?'

  'Please do. I shall look forward to seeing them. But tell me now, Dr Maturin, what did you see on the Barbary Coast, in the way of birds?'

  'Some way inland there was a vast saline lake crowded with flamingos and a large variety of waders; vultures all the usual kinds; the brown-necked raven. Among the mere quadrupeds there were hyenas, of course, and an elegant leopard. But what would really have pleased you was an anomalous nuthatch.'

  'Dear me, Maturin,' cried Lady Keith, who was particularly attached to nuthatches, 'anomalous in what respect?'

  'Well, you instantly see that he is a nuthatch, though an absurdly small one: but then you realize that he has almost no black on his crown, that his whole mantle is more nearly blue than is quite proper, that his tail is even shorter than that of other species, and that his voice is more like that of a wryneck than . . .'

  The description was cut short by the Admiral bursting in with the cry 'Oh those hell-damned apes—they are at it again'. But his indignant voice changed when he saw the visitors. 'Why, Aubrey! How very welcome you are—you too, Doctor. Lord how you stirred them up in the Adriatic! Your earlier dispatches came to me of course; and they gave a great deal of pleasure in Whitehall. And I do hope you will both give us the pleasure of your company at dinner on Saturday.'

  'Should be very happy, my Lord: but I have not yet quite finished carrying out your orders. I hope to have done so a little after the new moon, and then we are entirely at your disposal.'

  The sound of a carriage—of another carriage—the voices of two different sets of callers. Jack and Stephen took their leave and by good luck they were able to skirt round the newcomers, all gathered in a knot on the gravel drive exclaiming at the extraordinary coincidence of the arrival at the very same moment!

  They walked back to the town, and as they went along the quays Stephen noticed the daily Tangier hoy—it might almost have been called the ferry—rapidly filling with Moors, Gibraltar Jews and some odd few Spanish merchants. Jacob was among them, in a caftan and a skullcap, wholly inconspicuous; Stephen made no remark at the time but he was not surprised at finding a suitably obscure note from his colleague saying that he was crossing to see some people who might have some quite valuable jewels to sell: but later, as he and Jack were supping together he said, 'I believe Jacob is not officially on the ship's books?'

  'No: I think he is carried as a supernumerary, without victuals, wages or tobacco.'

  'Who feeds him, then?'

  'Why, I suppose you do: at any rate everything he eats or drinks or smokes will be stopped out of your pay to the last halfpenny and with the utmost rigour.'

  'I find that I have been giving my life's blood to a parcel of hard-hearted mercenary rapacious sharks,' said Stephen with a rather forced smile.

  'Exactly so. And the children you bought in Algiers have each a docket on which every dish of pap is charged against you, together with the earthenware pot they broke. This is the Navy, after all.'

  'So I do not suppose he would be flogged or put in irons for absenting himself without formal leave?'

  'No. In such cases we have a punishment known as keelhauling. But do not let it distress you: the victims often survive—well, fairly often. But I am so sorry: this really is not the time to be facetious. I am afraid you must be missing your children cruelly. They were engaging little creatures. I do beg your pardon.'

  'I miss them, I admit, though Lady Keith was so very good and kind: in better hands they could not be. But I do miss them, and when they fully understood my betrayal they howled most pitifully. Yet my grief was somewhat lessened by their fascination with the apes that gathered round, by their continuing suspicion of my seriousness and by the cheerful laughter that reached me when I was quite far away, nearly at the bottom of the hill, watching two intertwined serpents, rising in the air almost the whole of the
ir length in an amorous clasp.'

  'Oh sir,' cried a messenger from Mr Harding, 'please could the Doctor come and look at Abram White? He has fallen down in a fit.'

  Abram White was in fact quite ill—comatose, bloated, heavily contused—yet this was not really a question of apoplexy nor yet of epilepsy. For reasons best known to himself he had brought three concealed bladders of rum aboard, to drink slowly, privately, with delectation. But believing himself detected by the ship's corporal he had done away with the evidence of his crime by swallowing the whole pot-full, had choked, and had pitched down the forehatchway. He lay pallid, insensible, only just breathing, with a barely perceptible pulse.

  Yet Stephen, after some years at sea, was quite used to pallid insensible seamen, and when he had made sure that Abram's limbs, spine and skull were unbroken, he pumped him out and had him carried to the sick-berth. He was perfectly well and going about his duties by the time Jacob came back. If anyone had noticed his absence it must have been thought official or medical—a spell at the hospital or the like—for his return excited no comment at all, particularly as he had again changed his clothes.

  He found Stephen counting glass-hard slabs of portable soup and he said, 'I do hope my sudden disappearance did not prove inconvenient? I had sudden word of a friend the other side of the water.'

  'Not in the least. I hope the voyage was worth the displacement?'

  'You shall judge for yourself: on the other side their notions of security are contemptible and I have my information from no less than three concordant sources.' They were speaking French, as they generally did when there was anything of a medical, private or confidential nature; but now, even so, he lowered his voice: 'The Arzila galley is at present in Tangier, loaded, very heavily manned and as heavily armed as a galley can be: two twenty-four pounders in the bows and two in the stern, with a fair amount of musketry when she proceeds under sail. The guns are said to be particularly fine—brass, very exactly bored, with truly spherical and accurate round-shot. Yahya ben Khaled, who is in command, means to pass the Strait, unless there is a very strong east wind in his teeth, on Friday night, a night of complete darkness, to make straight for Durazzo, deliver his gold—he has given his parents, wives and children as sureties—take his tenth part and return, using his great strength against all the merchantmen he finds.'

  'It is a bold stroke.'

  'Indeed it is. Murad Reis is very well known for his bold strokes, his bold and almost invariably successful bold strokes. He always helps Fate as much as ever he can, and this time he has hired two smaller galleys to act as decoys, one sailing close to the African shore and one in mid-channel, while he, lying under Tarifa, makes his dash along the European side.'

  'Amos,' said Stephen, 'I am inexpressibly gratified by your news. Will you come and repeat it all to Captain Aubrey?'

  'Certainly.'

  Jack listened to him gravely, his face gradually assuming the look of an eagle, one of the larger eagles, that sees its prey at no great distance.

  'Dr Jacob,' he said, shaking his hand, 'I thank you very heartily indeed for this piece of intelligence—this matchless piece of intelligence, as I believe I may call it. So if the wind has anything of west in it, Murad Reis sails on Friday, lies under Tarifa until I presume the turn of the tide a little after midnight and so makes his attempt. Clearly we must be ready for him.' He reflected. 'And there is this to be said,' he went on. 'If there is so much indiscreet talk in Tangier, and if an account of it can come over so quickly, we must suppose that any indiscretion on our part may go over to the other side of the Strait with the same speed. Now I shall stop all shore-leave, of course; and since by tomorrow morning we shall have all our supplies, the only thing that could betray our intention of sailing is the carrying of our sick ashore. I am ashamed to say that I do not immediately call the sick-list to mind.'

  'Oh, as to that,' said Stephen, 'we only have a couple of obstinate poxes and a hernia, and those I can hand over the rail to my old friend Walker of Polyphemus late on Friday evening.'

  'Very good, very good indeed: so by the time any fool chooses to blab, we shall with God's grace be well out at sea.'

  Chapter Ten

  Captain Aubrey and his officers spent that afternoon going along the Strait in Ringle, very carefully surveying and in places sounding as they went; and at one point, far to the westward, they met two heavy frigates, Acasta and Lavinia, with whom they exchanged numbers: both had obviously suffered much from the weather, and both were still pumping without a pause—strong, thick jets flying to leeward.

  Out and along the Strait, the familiar skyline memorized even more firmly, and back in the late afternoon: and speaking privately to Stephen in the cabin, Jack said, 'Now that it belongs to the past, Jacob's piece of intelligence, so whole and perfect, seems to me to be too good to be true.'

  'Whole and perfect, to be sure. But I believe it to be true. Jacob and Arden are the only two men in this matter of intelligence for whom I would lay my head on the block.'

  'In that case, dear Stephen, I shall shift my clothes, pull across to the flag and either ask for an interview or leave this note.' He passed it and Stephen read Captain Aubrey presents his respectful compliments to Lord Barmouth and on account of very recent intelligence most urgently begs leave to sail this evening: he takes the liberty of adding that his political adviser is wholly of the same mind.

  'Very well put, Jack,' he said.

  Jack smiled and called, 'Killick. Killick, there. Plain coat, decent breeches; and tell Bonden I shall need the barge directly.'

  The barge received him and took him across the smooth water to the flag, where, in reply to the hail, Bonden called 'Surprise'. After the formalities of the reception of a post-captain Jack said, 'I am sorry to trouble you again, Holden, but I must either see the Admiral or have this note conveyed to him.'

  Moments later the flag-lieutenant returned, begged Captain Aubrey to come this way, and brought him to the great cabin, where Lord Barmouth, looking ten years younger, received him with a cordiality he had never known before, though the Admiral had always been known as a temperamental man, moving from one extreme to another. 'As for this note,' said the Commander-in-Chief, 'how happy do you feel about your source of intelligence?'

  'Happy enough to stake my life upon it, my Lord,' said Jack. 'And Dr Maturin is of the same opinion.'

  'Then you shall certainly go. But Aubrey, I had no idea that you were a childhood friend of my wife's—indeed some sort of a cousin. Acasta came in this afternoon, bringing her at last, in blooming health in spite of the weather—she is a splendid sailor—and as she had a package for Lady Keith we went straight over to their place. They very kindly kept us to dinner—just an impromptu scratch dinner, the four of us—and I do not know how your name arose but it very soon became apparent that both the women had known you ever since you were breeched and even before: they had followed you from ship to ship in the Gazette and the Navy List, and when they put a foot wrong, as in the date of your appointment to Sophie, Lord Keith put them right. In the end it was decided that we should ask the Keiths and you and Dr Maturin—Lord Keith has the highest opinion of him—to dine with us aboard the flag tomorrow. But I fear this request of yours may put it out of your power.'

  'I am afraid it does, my Lord; but I am very sensible of your goodness, and I am sure Maturin will say the same.'

  The Admiral bent his head, and went on, 'Now as to the request, do you feel entirely confident of your agent's intelligence?'

  'Entirely so, my Lord: should commit my ship and myself to the hilt; and Maturin agrees.'

  'And the occasion is urgent?'

  'It could not be more so, my Lord.'

  'You must go, then. But Lady Barmouth and I will be very happy to see you both and the Keiths on your return.' He rang the bell and told his steward to bring the old, old, very old brandy. When it came he filled their glasses and drank 'to Surprise and her success'.

  'This is famous brandy, upon
my word,' said Jack; and after a pause he went on with a certain embarrassment, 'I never had the honour of serving under Admiral Horton and being very often out of England I never heard either of his marriage or his death.'

  'He married Isobel Carrington just after he was given his flag.'

  'Isobel Carrington!' cried Jack. 'Of course I should have thought of her when you spoke of Queenie and her. Isobel and Queenie! Lord, those names bring back such delightfully happy memories! I shall very much look forward to paying my respects to Lady Barmouth. And I thank you most heartily for your permission to sail, my Lord.'

  The Commander-in-Chief gave him his hand and they parted on better terms than Jack would have believed possible.

  Aboard Surprise again, and in ordinary working clothes, he called for the carpenter and said, 'All things considered, Chips, which do you think our fastest, most weatherly boat?'

  'Oh, the blue cutter, sir, without a doubt: the blue cutter, with Mr Daniel at the helm. He can coax her an extra half-point nearer the wind, and an extra half knot.'

  'Very good: pray run an eye over her, and if anything is wanting let Mr Harding know: the gunner will give you some blue and red lights and some star-bursts.' Then directing his voice over the still water he called, 'Ringle: Mr. Reade, we shall be moving out into the Strait very soon, so if you have any women aboard they had better go ashore directly. And when we are well clear of the mole, I should like to have a word with you.'