Book 18 - The Yellow Admiral

by Patrick O'Brian

  A hand plucked his coat: turning and looking down he saw pink Brigid beaming up, with the promise of as much beauty and even more. 'Dear dear Papa' she said, 'how very, very happy I am to see you. I have breeches for riding, do you see, and I would not lose a minute changing them. May I sit next to you?'

  Charlotte and Fanny came and made their bobs, looking stupid and awkward. George bade him welcome with an open happy smile very like his father's. Stephen kissed his old friend Clarissa and with Brigid on his other side he sat down by Sophie. 'You have not just come back from Bellona?' she asked.

  'Not at all. I have been in London and elsewhere this age.'

  'When did you last see Jack?'

  'No memory for dates have I, but it was a great while since.'

  'He had not had any letters from me?'

  'He had not. We all complained most bitterly of the want of post. Yet apart from that he was looking well and cheerful—extremely busy with his patrolling and working up the ship's company. I hope to see him even better in a day or two's time, when I rejoin. I hear he has taken a splendid prize.'

  'We had so hoped you would stay for Christmas,' she cried.

  'No, my dear honey. I only paused in my flight to see you all. At eleven o'clock a post-chaise from Dorchester is coming to take me to Torbay by way of a village whose name escapes me.'

  'Nonsense,' said Diana. 'I shall drive you down as I drove you down before, but this time in our own coach. Sophie, forgive me: I must have the horses readied and put on some decent clothes.' She vanished.

  'Oh I shall come, I shall come, I shall come on the box!' cried Brigid, bouncing as she sat.

  'No you shall not, my dear,' said Stephen. 'Never in life.'

  'Certainly not,' said Sophie. 'There is the dancing-master and Miss Hay.'

  'I shall ask Mama,' said Brigid: and at the door, 'I shall certainly go.'

  Never in life, he had said, and no gentle wheedling in Irish, no tears would move him: added to this there was the monstrous injustice that Padeen, the great traitor, was going, standing up behind in a fine livery Coat. And with Diana gone Sophie was obliged to say, 'Dear Brigid, how sad it would be if your father's last sight of you was tears and an angry, slobbered face. Run away and put yourself in order, brush your hair and find a new handkerchief. Stephen, I am just going to scribble a couple of lines to Jack. Please will you give them to him, with my dear, dear love?'

  She hurried away to her desk, a little satinwood bonheur du jour that had belonged to Jack's mother, and after some hesitation she wrote, 'Dear Jack—may I beg for forgiveness? Oh how I hope you are a better-natured creature than I was. Love S.' She sealed it, not without misgivings about its want of style, dignity, possibly of correctness, and ran back to the steps where everyone was already gazing at the fine dark-green coach with Diana on the box, Stephen beside her, Padeen up behind, and grooms holding the horses' heads.

  Sophie handed up the note; Stephen leaned down and kissed her. 'Let go,' cried Diana, gathering the reins. With the coach in motion Stephen looked back, and indeed his last sight of his daughter was a rain-washed but fairly cheerful face and a clean white handkerchief waving frantically.

  They were silent for a while, with Diana addressing the horses from time to time, individually or as a team: they were Cleveland bays, well matched, usually well-mannered but now a trifle apt to caper, particularly in the village, where people called out greetings, sometimes running alongside to send their duty and dear love and respects to the Captain, and some waving sheets or the like from upper windows. Presently however they were on the high road, climbing to the top of the down that overlooked Woolcombe valley, pulling well and all together: just enough frost to whiten the grass—now on the road itself—and the horses' breath a glorious cloud.

  'How wonderfully smooth it is, this fine green machine,' said Stephen.

  'Yes,' said Diana. 'Handley's made it, and they told me about the new kind of springs they put in: long strips of the best Swedish steel overlapping and sliding upon one another and cased in leather, and fastened to the body by pivoting brass . . .' When she had finished a pretty detailed account of the coach's building, which she had followed with the closest interest, and of the innumerable coats of paint and then of varnish that had been laid on, together with the history of her visit, guided by the invaluable Mr Thomas Handley, to the wheelwright's shop, where among other wonders she saw the shrinking-on of a tyre, she said, 'You would have loved it.'

  'I am very certain that I should,' he replied; and after a decent pause, 'Please may I beg you to relieve my mind?'

  'Of course you may, dear Stephen,' she said, with an affectionate sideways glance: and much, much louder, 'Norman, you God-damned bastard, bear out, bear out d'ye hear me?' Norman heard both her emphatic voice and the crack of her whip not six inches from his ear, and at once ceased boring into his neighbour, an irritating trick he often displayed early in a run.

  'I say this because Brigid is a shatter-brained little creature, as quick as a trout: she was once off my saddle-bow and into a pile of filth one day on the common—soft filth—although I had a hand on her shoulder: she had seen a baby rabbit. So in pure compliment to me, swear and promise and pledge yourself never to let her on to the box of a coach, so tall and the road so hard; purely and simply in compliment to me and my superstitions.'

  'Very well, my dear,' she said in the kindest way, 'and here is my hand upon it'—patting him quickly.

  Now they were on the flat, a broad road with woodland on the left and not a soul upon it: the horses were suppled and warm, eager to run. She encouraged them, leaning forward, calling them by name, whistling, wheeoo, wheeoo, wheeoo, and the smooth coach fairly raced along for two blissful miles before she reined in, laughing, at the foot of the next hill with a series of turns and a high-perched village.

  'This is what coaching should be,' he said, when they were through and on the open, uncrowded road again. 'The weather is perfect, and you, my dear, are the delicate whip of the world.'

  On and on, the hedges flying past, and they baiting where they had baited before, navigating the devilish bridge and its corner at Maiden Oscott with an almost insolent ease; and they slept at the comfortable inn where they had slept last time.

  Here, as the horses were being walked up and down, Stephen talked at length to Padeen about the small farm in the County Clare that had so enraptured him when Stephen promised it as a reward for looking after Brigid and Clarissa in Spain, a rapture that had waxed and waned; it still retained a theoretical existence, but perhaps little more. From this conversation in the twilight, the longest they had had for a great while—a conversation full of the turns and evasions of an Irish person who wishes to say something delicately defined but who would like to do so without giving any hint of offence—Stephen came away with a variety of notions. Did Padeen feel that a wife was an absolutely necessary part of a farm, and did he dread marriage? Was he afraid of being unable to run the holding, having been so long away from the land? Had so many years of servitude done away with his independence? As he sat on an ancient cane-bottomed chair in their chamber, mechanically arranging the horse-hair curls of his wig, a wilder fancy came into his mind: was the poor soul consumed by a hopeless passion for Clarissa Oakes? Although it was not very, very much more remote from possibility than his own for Diana he shook his head and determined to say no more, other than suggesting a tenant to keep the land clean and in heart.

  'Are you never coming to bed?' she called. 'The candle is guttering dreadfully.'

  The next day was a much shorter run and they did it in splendid time, the weather more perfectly late autumn than ever, the horses obviously enjoying themselves, except when Mangold cast a shoe and all hands stood in or about the nearest smithy, surrounded by smoke, the wheeze of the bellows, the flying sparks and the scent of his well-pared hoof.

  Before noon they were on the Torquay strand, gazing out over the bay at the men-of-war: but this time there was no tedious to-and-froin
g, no mounting anxiety. They had not been there five minutes before Stephen, hearing the cry 'Dr Maturin!' looked round straight into the smiling face of Philip Aubrey, Jack's much younger half-brother, now in charge of a boat belonging to the Swallow, an aviso bound for the offshore squadron, from which Stephen could easily reach the Bellona.

  The offer could not be refused, but they parted reluctantly, like lovers, unwilling, forced and constrained, regretting the fair breeze that carried the boat out, out and away.

  Philip and Stephen could not speak freely until the boat reached the aviso, but there Philip commanded a private, roughly triangular space with just room for two, and here, while they regaled on fresh bread and cheese, Philip said, 'I do not like to sound holier than thou nor to speak disrespectfully of my elders, but I must say that poor Jack's mother-in-law does come it pretty high. George—he is my nephew, you know, though I can't make either him or the girls call me uncle—has just started going to that mouldy little school between Folly and Plush run by our parson's brother. Well, the first day he went there the other boys asked him what his father was. "My father is a sea-officer," said George: then, drawing himself up, he went on, "and an adulterer." "How do you know?" they asked. "My grand-mama told me and the girls," said George. I laughed at first—you know how George swells when he is proud—but then I thought it was a miserable God-damned thing to tell children: don't you agree, sir?'

  'Mrs Williams is no blood-relation of yours, I believe?'

  'No, sir. My grandfather, the General, married again after Jack's mother died: she was called Stanhope. And I come from the second marriage; so when Jack married Sophie Williams, that didn't make her mother any relation of mine.'

  'Then in that case I will tell you that in my considered opinion she is a perfectly odious woman.'

  As though struck down by a judgment the moment he had finished these words, he pitched forward out of his chair on to what little deck was free. Philip plucked him up and raced on to the deck which had been left in charge of an even younger midshipman who in the pride of his heart had committed the vessel to a manoeuvre that, the guys being untimely cast off, resulted in a truly monumental gybe. The aviso did not quite overturn, but the tangle of parted cordage, the sprung boom and the horrid condition of the bowsprit and its gammoning kept the captain (a master's mate), Philip and his companions—happily there were some prime seamen among them—busy most of the rest of the day and of the fine moonlit night.

  The aviso was at least presentable when she raised the topsails of the offshore squadron a little after breakfast—a much enlarged offshore squadron, with at least three more ships of the line as well as frigates, sloops and gun-brigs—and Philip, though pale and drawn, could have passed a not very rigorous muster when he went aboard the Queen Charlotte with Stephen. His last words, in a whisper rendered hoarse by extreme fatigue, were 'You won't tell Jack, sir, I beg.'

  On seeing Dr Maturin the officer of the watch sent word to the first lieutenant, who asked Stephen to come and see Sherman, the flagship's surgeon, in his cabin

  'Dr Maturin, sir, how good of you to come,' said Mr Sherman. 'My assistants and I are deeply concerned about the Admiral, who has often mentioned you, hoping for your return to the squadron, and I should be very much obliged for your opinion He is now so weak that I do not think he could stand going home aboard a small vessel in the gales we are certain to have at this season of the year, and he absolutely refuses to detach a capital ship'

  'I should be happy to see him,' said Stephen.

  'Dr Maturin, how happy I am to see you,' said Lord Stranraer, half rising in his cot. 'Many is the day I have hoped you might return to the squadron.'

  Stephen looked at him with a keen, wholly objective eye, and saw a hag-ridden old man, sick, and like so many patients, dreading the immediate future; a dropsical tendency in spite of some degree of physical collapse; a very, very rapid and irregular pulse, as Sherman had said—though it was clear that the Admiral had no opinion of what Sherman had said and probably an exaggerated notion of Maturin's powers.

  'Pray take off your shirt, my lord,' he said, and helped him to do so. To Mr Sherman, 'Be so good as to ask the officer of the watch to stop any running about on deck: let there be no thumps.' A relative silence ensued and Stephen set about an intensive auscultation of Stranraer's chest, tapping like a woodpecker, watched by Sherman with barely concealed astonishment. Straightening up at last and covering the Admiral with the bedclothes he said, 'This is grave, of course, as you know very well: but I think it looks, and feels, worse than in fact it is. I shall consult with Mr Sherman and his colleagues, and look over the ship's dispensary; and I believe we shall agree upon a course of physic, of natural forms of physic, that will give you relief.'

  The Admiral took his hand and with a look of affectionate regard on a face not accustomed to show affection, thanked him for his care.

  'Clearly,' said Stephen, when he and the surgeons were in the captain's cabin and drinking the captain's madeira, 'the trouble lies essentially with the heart—there is a not inconsiderable hydropericardium—and of course with the mind, as is almost invariably the case where anything but wounds or infections are concerned. First we must reduce this frantic pulse and recall the heart to its duty. What does he take at present?'

  Sherman mentioned a low diet and a few harmless substances and went on, 'But I am sorry to say that we do not enjoy the patient's full confidence, and I have reason to believe that most of our draughts end in the close-stool. It is difficult to discipline an admiral who is also a peer. May I ask you about the oedema that you speak of? It is not at all apparent, or at least not to me.'

  'Auscultation shows it clearly enough, once I had grown accustomed to his parttcular bodily sounds. It is a very valuable diagnostic tool, little known in England, I believe.'

  'I have never seen it done.'

  'A friend of mine in France called Corvisart has made great progress with the immediate percussion that I was using—post-mortems have provided a most gratifying confirmation of many of his diagnoses. And another French friend with whom I studied, Laënnec, is carrying the method still further.'

  'I heard him lecture in Paris during the peace,' said one of the assistant surgeons, speaking for the first time. 'But since he used the continental pronunciation I could not follow his Latin very well.'

  'For the pulse I should advise digitalis purpurea,' said Stephen. 'Does your chest contain either the tincture or the infusion?'

  'Neither,' replied Sherman. 'After two most unfortunate experiences I declined the use of digitalis altogether as too dangerous by far. My predecessor however left a sealed jar of the dried leaves.'

  'They will answer very well. In the Admiral's case I should exhibit one grain and a quarter, inclosed in a wafer; and if you think fit I will administer it myself, together with twenty-five minims of laudanum. You will not find the pulse diminish sensibly before Thursday evening, but the laudanum will quickly produce a better frame of mind, a readier compliance with medical direction or perhaps in the case of an admiral I should say advice. If the first dose of powdered leaves is well tolerated—if there is no severe vomiting or seeing everything blue (which I do not expect at all) it may be repeated, together with the laudanum, at two-day intervals and if it is at all possible I should like to be informed of his progress. Now, if you agree, I will ask the young gentlemen to put up the doses so that I may administer them directly, for I have patients of my own waiting for me aboard the Bellona.'

  'Sir,' said the other assistant-surgeon with an evident satisfaction that the powerful drug was now to be used and he a witness to its effects, 'I have read Dr Withering on digitalis, and I shall take great pleasure in powdering the leaves exactly to his direction.'

  The flagship's cutter came upon the Bellona off the Black Rocks, lying to with her foretopsail to the mast and her driver just drawing while her captain made a final check of a wreck's depth and bearings. His grim mathematical face broke into a smile; as soon as
the boats were in hail he called, 'Welcome home, Doctor. You will be just in time for dinner.'

  And when they were aboard, with Stephen's sea-chest and small baggage below and proper greetings made—'Which you look prime, sir,' said Killick, looking really quite agreeable, 'almost as if you had been to the Lord Mayor's show,' while Bonden told him that his head was quite healed, 'could be hit with a top-maul and never a word' and himself lively as a parcel of grigs (and this with no hint of that somewhat slurred familiarity that had grieved Stephen earlier, with its suspicion of mental damage)—Jack told him that Captain Fanshawe was coming to dinner, so that he, Stephen, was in great luck, since he could have his share of the last shoulder of mutton in the ship, probably in the whole inshore squadron. 'I am so glad you are here to carve it,' he went on, sitting down and pouring them some sherry. 'There is no worse joint to tackle in public. But tell me, Stephen, how do you do? And how is Diana, if you have seen her again? You look extremely fine, by the way.' They had both changed for the ceremony.

  'Why, I am extremely rich again, and the two tend to go together, you know. I believe I told you that I had mislaid my fortune, but apparently my negligence did not signify: all is well now, and vast wealth improves a man's looks amazingly. So does an eminent London tailor. She is uncommonly well, I thank you; and so is Brigid. They both send their love. And I am charged with this'—drawing a letter from his pocket—'with Sophie's dear love as well.'

  Jack's face changed. 'Did she say that?' he asked sternly.

  'I believe those were her very words: or perhaps dear, dear love.'

  Jack took the letter, muttered 'Forgive me', and retired.

  He came back after a while, taller, straighter, his face glistening. 'Dear Lord, Stephen,' he cried, 'that was the best letter I have ever received. Thank you very, very much.' He shook Stephen's hand, looking down on him with infinite benevolence. 'And admirably well wrote, too—such a delicate hand.' He gazed about, in a confusion of happiness; then plucked his fiddle from its case, tuned it more or less—it had laid long untouched—and dashed off a truly astonishing trill, interrupted by the bosun's calls as Captain Fanshawe was piped aboard.