Book 13 - The Thirteen-Gun Salute

by Patrick O'Brian

  The dinner consisted almost entirely of fish, many sorts of fish, all fresh, all remarkably good, accompanied by rice and luke-warm bottled ale. But it might have been boiled beef or bread-and-butter pudding for all the notice Fox and his companions took of it. Like their chief, the Old Buggers were beside themselves with flow of spirits and elation; but unlike him they were extremely noisy and loquacious. At the palace their long training had kept them silent, but now they let themselves go; this was the sort of victory they thoroughly understood, and they celebrated it in their own way, with a flood of words, words that grew louder and louder as the meal progressed, voices often talking together. An odd, unbuttoned meal even in its material aspects, with servants taking things away to pack them—waiting in working clothes—disappearing themselves, leaving the room strangely bare, rather as if they had been bailiff's men.

  'Let us have no ceremony, gentlemen,' Fox had said on walking into the dining-room, and they had sat down as they pleased: the officials were clustered round Fox at the head of the table, the sailors at the foot, with Jack and Stephen at the far end. Four aside, Fox at the head, Welby, rather lost, at the bottom. No ceremony: the civilians took off their coats, loosened their cravats and breeches. They talked openly about the events of the last few days, and Loder was particularly eloquent on the subject of the subtlety of their campaign, the way the information had been conveyed to Hafsa, the success after several failures; their talk became freer still, with a cross-fire of wit about sodomy. Both Jack and Stephen glanced at Fox as the noise increased, but he merely looked down at his colleagues on either side with an amused condescension. It was only when Johnstone cried 'And all the French are buggered too' that he said, 'That will do, Judge,' in an authoritative tone, unheard before.

  Since discretion had flown out of the window, Stephen thought that he too would leave. It was deeply painful to hear all the fundamental rules of intelligence, all the rules of even common good sense disregarded; and the details of this particular intelligence coup, as it might be called, were more painful still. In any case he was determined to take a proper leave of the van Burens and his Chinese friends, whether the ship sailed that day or not: there was no urgency whatsoever about the treaty—the situation had already been dealt with entirely. While he was waiting for the roar of laughter that would cover his retreat he listened to the officials' conversation: their flattery had now become so gross that he wondered how a man of Fox's undoubted parts could swallow it; but the envoy smiled on, only shaking his head gently from time to time. The expected flash came ('peppering for adultery in England would lead to a run on the commodity: a fortune might be made by cornering the market') followed by the expected roar, and with a nod to Jack he slipped out. He passed Loder pissing on the verandah, gave his scarlet robe to one of the Marines on guard and walked off. 'But I am glad, right glad,' he said, 'that Jack knows just how the poor brutes were betrayed, and by whom.' He walked rapidly on, passing a herd of buffaloes, and then he said, 'Such mediocrity at such a level—a judge, members of the legislative council—they order these things better in France.' But honesty made him pause, and he went on 'They would order these things better in an independent Ireland, however.'

  Jack was obliged to stay, though he did not much care for his company nor for the note in Fox's voice when he called down the table, 'Tell me, Aubrey, just when does the tide turn this afternoon? I wish there to be no time lost getting this document home: no time lost or dawdled away.' The matter was offensive; the manner more so; and both Richardson and Elliott looked extremely nervous. Captain Aubrey was not the most long-suffering of men.

  Yet the feast was winding to its end at last, with many a hoot and jibe about the penniless Frenchmen's plight. 'Though now I come to think of it,' said Crabbe, 'since Duplessis does not have to produce his subsidy, he may be able to pay his way home.'

  'If you have no remark more intelligent than that, Crabbe, you had better keep your mouth shut,' said Fox. 'Going home in disgrace is far worse than starving here.'

  'His Excellency is quite right,' said Johnstone. 'Far worse.'

  'Beg pardon, sir,' said Crabbe, sinking his face into his beer.

  A truly glorious dessert of fruit on three battered tin trays covered this awkward moment: and then at last came the decanters, those fingerposts towards an eventual release. They drank the King with a certain return of gravity; and then Fox, taking the silk-bound treaty from Ahmed's reverential hands, said, 'I drink to the fruit of our joint efforts: I drink to what I have signed in His Majesty's name.'

  'Huzzay! Hear him, hear him!' cried the suite, a confusion of voices in which the sailors joined with a decent zeal.

  'What I drink to,' cried Loder, standing up and leering at Fox, 'is to the Bath. The Most Honourable Order of the Bath.'

  'Huzzay, huzzay! Hear him! Bottoms up!' cried the others, and while Fox looked down in smiling modesty they drank the sentiment.

  They huzzayed their way on to knighthood with three times three; and after that they drank 'Baronetcy, a governorship and five thousand a year on the Civil List.'

  Jack looked at Elliott, saw that he was pallid-drunk, caught Richardson's eye instead, rose and said, 'You will excuse us now, Excellency. We must go and prepare your way. Mr Richardson will accompany you to the barge in forty-five minutes. Mr Welby, the new pinnace will come for you and your men in half an hour.'

  He took the bewildered Elliott by the arm and guided him out. Seymour, at the landing-place, reported the departure of the big proa and some smaller boats full of servants. Jack told him what to expect, suggested that Bonden should spread sailcloth over the sternsheet cushions, and walked Elliott off round the crater-rim, hailing the ship from his usual point.

  'Mr Fielding,' he said, looking into the crowded waist, 'are all the mission's servants aboard?'

  'All aboard, sir; and the last baggage-boat will shove off in a minute or so.'

  'I am delighted to hear it. The new pinnace for the Marines right away, if you please; then I believe we may unmoor and ride at single anchor—indeed, creep to a kedge, with such quiet water and so little breeze. The envoy and his people should leave the hard in half an hour. Salute, of course, and everything man-of-war fashion. Pray let me know when they put off. I hope to sail with the first of the ebb. I trust to God the Doctor has not wandered off looking for centipedes,' he added in a lower voice, going below.

  He took off his coat and lay on his cot. Killick peered at him through a crack in the door and shook his head sympathetically. The Diane was unmooring, and her captain listened to the familiar sequence, the click of the capstan-pawls, the cries of 'Light along the messenger, there', 'Heave and in sight' and the rest, but his mind was elsewhere. In most men, in perhaps all he had ever known, victory made them benign, expansive, affable, generous. Fox had been arrogant and hostile. He had also betrayed a meanness that must always have been subjacent, since its appearance caused no surprise: there had been and there would be no feast for the young gentlemen, the warrant officers, the foremast hands, no drinks, no address, telling the good news and acknowledging their part in the successful voyage. To be sure, it was not a very pretty victory: it scarcely called for the ringing of church bells and bonfires in the street. He regretted his ale; he regretted his port still more; yet even so he dropped off for some minutes and when Reade came with 'Mr Fielding's compliments and duty, sir, and the barge has put off: he says the breeze and high water are all you could wish,' he felt surprisingly fresh.

  'Thank you, Mr Reade,' he said. 'I shall be on deck in ten minutes or so.'

  He let himself lie in that delicious state of complete relaxation for a while, rose up, plunged his face into water, squared his neckcloth and hair, and put on his coat. Killick instantly appeared, brushed him, arranged his clubbed pigtail and its bow, spread his best epaulettes wide and even.

  On deck he saw that the breeze was indeed all he had wished: it was blowing right across the anchorage, and he had but to back his mizzen topsail, m
ake a sternboard with plenty of helm, fill, pluck up the kedge—Fielding had it almost atrip—and let the breeze and the turning tide carry the ship out while it was being run up.

  He also saw that everything was exactly as it should be: yards squared by the lifts and braces, side-boys in white gloves, man-ropes just so, Marines all present, pipe-clayed and correct, officers and young gentlemen square-rigged, Mr Crown and his mates with their silver calls already poised, Mr White with his poker, the glow visible in the long evening shadow of the starboard bulwark.

  He gauged the distance from the advancing barge still as rowdy as a boatful of Cockneys going down to Greenwich: nearer, nearer. 'Very well, Mr White,' he said, and the first gun spoke out, followed by the remaining twelve. The barge hooked on; the envoy came aboard followed by his suite looking squalid, frowsty, crapulous, old, and unclean, their coats buttoned to the wrong buttonholes, their hair astray and at least one flap or codpiece blowing in the wind. They were received with rigid, exact formality; and abruptly sobered, they fingered their clothes; Fox looked extremely displeased; the suite glanced uneasily at one another, and they all hurried below.

  'Where is the Doctor?' asked Jack.

  'He came aboard with the Marines,' said Fielding, 'carrying a hairy thing. He is in the gun-room, I am afraid.'

  'Lord, what a relief,' murmured Jack, and in a strong official voice 'Let us proceed to sea.'

  As he spoke the Prabang fortress began to boom out a farewell salute; the Diane answered it, and they were still firing, gun for gun, with the smoke drifting away to leeward, as she passed through the channel into the open sea.

  'Mr Warren,' said Jack, 'the course will be north-east by east a half east; and that, I trust, will bring us to our rendezvous with the Surprise.'

  Chapter Nine

  The Diane had not run off two degrees of longitude before the old pattern of sea-going life was as firmly settled as if it had never been interrupted. It is true that she ran them off slowly, rarely exceeding five knots and never logging more than a hundred miles from noon to noon. This was not because she did not try, not because she was too early for her rendezvous: far from it: at present, with the balmy air coming in one point abaft the beam, she had a magnificent display of canvas spread, with studdingsails aloft and alow, royals and even skyscrapers, and a variety of rarely-set objects on the stays; yet the balmy air was so languid that she only just had steerage-way.

  Jack Aubrey, having done all that could be done, paced fore and aft on the windward side of the quarterdeck according to his habit before dinner with his mind perfectly at ease on that point if not on all others; the greater part of a lifetime afloat had convinced him that railing at the weather only spoilt one's appetite, which was always a pity and which would be even more of a pity today, when he and Stephen, alone for once, were to eat some particularly fine fish, bought from a proa that morning.

  'What is it that you wish me to see?' asked Stephen, coming up the companion-ladder with his usual precautions, although there was scarcely any movement at all under his feet.

  'You cannot see it from here, because of the awning,' said Jack. 'But come with me along the weather gangway, and I will show you something that perhaps you have never seen before.' They went forward, and some of the hands in the waist nodded and smiled significantly. The Doctor was going to be stunned, amazed, taken aback all standing. 'There,' said Jack, pointing upwards. 'Abaft the topsailyard, right up against the trestletrees. Have you ever seen that before?'

  'The thing like a tablecloth pulled out at one corner?' asked Stephen, who could be sadly disappointing on occasion.

  'Well, it is a mizzen topgallant staysail,' said Jack, who had expected little more. 'You can tell your grandchildren you saw one.' They walked back to the quarterdeck and resumed the pacing; Jack accommodating his long-legged stride to keep in step.

  'As I understand it,' said Stephen, 'we keep our appointment with Tom Pullings off the False Natunas and then drop Fox in Java to take an Indiaman home; but is it not a strangely roundabout way, as if one should go from Dublin to Cork by way of Athlone?'

  'Yes. His Excellency was good enough to point that out to me yesterday—perhaps he showed you the same map-—and I will make the same reply to you as I did to him: as the prevailing winds lie at this season, it is quicker to go back to Batavia by the False Natunas than by the Banka Strait. And then' (lowering his voice) 'which is more to my purpose though not perhaps to his, there is our rendezvous.'

  'Well, I am content. There is, I presume, a convenient harbour in the False Natunas? And, by the way, why False? Are the inhabitants unusually treacherous?'

  'Oh no. There is no harbour. That is only a sea-going expression, a hyperbole, as I believe you would say: they are only a parcel of uninhabited rocks, like the Dry Salvages. It is understood that we cruise for a week in their latitude or in fact a trifle south of it. Their longitude has not yet been fixed with any certainty, but as you know we can be reasonably sure of our latitude; and so we cruise along it, a glass at every masthead, and at night we may lie to, with a lantern in each top. As for their being false . . .'

  The ship's bell stopped him in mid-stride, mid-sentence, and together they hurried below, their mouths watering steadily.

  '. . . as for their being false,' said Jack, after a long and busy pause, 'that arose when the Dutch were first making their conquests in these parts. The master of some ship bound for the real Natunas but who was sadly out in his dead-reckoning, raised them one foggy morning and cried, "I have made the perfect landfall! Ain't I the cheese!" The Dutch cheese of course, ha, ha, ha! But, however, when the mist lifted they proved to be these mere God-damned barren rocks, looming large in the thick weather; so he put them down in his chart as the False Natunas. The South China Sea is full of places like that, imperfectly fixed, mistaken for one another; and vast areas outside the Indiamen's track are not charted at all—just hearsay of islands, reefs and shoals picked up from proas or junks that can only give the vaguest of bearings for the places they are talking about.'

  'I am sure you are right. Yet it does seem strange to a landsman. These are populated waters: at this very moment I can see . . .' He was looking out of the stern-window, his eyes narrowed against the brilliance of the day. '. . . six, no, seven vessels: two junks, one large proa, four small things with outriggers paddling fast, whether fishermen or pirates on a modest scale I cannot tell.'

  'It is just as occasion offers, I believe. In the South China Sea, by all accounts, the rule is to take anything you can overcome, and avoid or trade with anything you cannot.'

  'I am afraid it was much the same with us until very recently. I have read strange accounts of Maelsechlinn the Wise, son of Erc, and he the kindest of men by land. But these are populated waters, as I was saying, and the Chinese who sail them belong to a very highly civilized, literate community, while the Malays are by no means ignorant of letters, as we know very well. Why, then, do we swim in this cloud of uncertainty?'

  'Because junks never draw more than a few feet of water—they are flat bottomed—and proas even less. Whereas a ship the line, a seventy-four, draws twenty-two or twenty-three; even our light draught aft is close on fourteen foot, and with stores and all very much more: I am never happy unless we have at least four fathoms under our keel even in smooth weather. A shoal that a junk would scarcely notice, much less mark down, might rip our bottom out as easy as kiss my hand. These are the very words I shall use when I explain sailing in uncharted waters elsewhere, after dinner,' he said with the significant look that often passed between them in this sounding-box of a divided cabin.

  Stephen nodded, put his perfectly clean skeleton on to the dish in the middle, took another Java sea-perch, looked at Jack's unseemly heap of bones, and observed, 'You have to be a Papist to eat fish, I find. Pray tell me how you arrange private meetings at sea, half the world apart.'

  'They cannot be at all precise, at such a distance, but it is remarkable how often they answer. The usual th
ing is to give three or four cruising-grounds, always if possible near some island where a message can be left after the agreed cruising-time is over; and then if circumstances call for it we set a final rendezvous where one or the other can lie at anchor until a stated time. Ours is Sydney Cove.'

  'So if we should not meet this time, we have another chance?'

  'I will not deceive you, Stephen: we do have another chance. In fact we have three other chances—a week each side of the next two full moons, and then of course in New South Wales.'

  'What joy. I long to see the Surprise and all our friends again—I long to tell Martin of my dear ape, my tarsier, that rarest of primates, my enormous beetle, whole unknown genera of orchids. What is amiss, brother? Have you a flogging to deal with?'