Patrick O'Brian - The Hundred Days

But Jack Aubrey was a neat creature by temperament and rigorous training, and he had set no more than one foot in the cabin before he saw that order was confounded, that some criminal hand had merged at least three complements into one unmeaning heap, and that this same hand had spread out several manuscript sheets of music, the score of a pavan in C minor.

‘Oh I do beg your pardon, Jack,’ cried Stephen, walking quickly in from the quarter-gallery. ‘I had a sudden thought to be set down - but I trust I have not disturbed anything at all?’

‘Not in the least,’ said Jack. ‘And Stephen, I believe I have solved your problem. I believe I have found you a loblolly-boy you will thoroughly approve of.’

Stephen, concerned though he was with his music - only two bars yet to write, but the magical sound already fading from his inner ear - and filled though he was with a conviction that Jack’s mild ‘not in the least’ concealed an intense irritation, made no reply other than a questioning look. He owed his survival as an intelligence-agent to an acute ear for falsity, and Jack’s last words were certainly quite untrue.

‘Yes,’ Jack went on, ‘together with a draft of hands turned over to the squadron out of Leviathan, refitting, Maggie Cheal and Poll Skeeping have come aboard; and Poll was trained at Haslar. She is up to anything in the way of blood and horrors.’

‘You are speaking of women, brother? You who have always abominated so much as the smell of a skirt aboard ship? The invariable cause of trouble, quarrelling, ill-luck. Wholly out of place in any ship, above all in a man-of-war. I have never seen a woman aboard a man-of-war.’

‘Have you not, my poor Stephen? Did you never see them helping with the guns and passing shot in Bellona?’

‘Never in life. Am I not always shut up in the cockpit during an action?’

‘Very true. But if Jill Travers, for example, the sailmaker’s wife who helped serve number eight, had been wounded, you would have seen her.’

‘But seriously, Jack, are you obliged to take these women aboard? You who have always inveighed against the creatures.’

‘These are not creatures, in the sense of whore-ladies or Portsmouth trollops: oh no. They are usually middle-aged or more, often the wife or widow of a petty or even of a warrant-officer. One or two may have run away like the girl in the ballad, wearing trousers, to be with her Jack when he sailed; but most have used the sea these ten or twenty years, and they look like seamen, only for the skirt and maybe shawl.’

‘And yet I have never seen one, apart from the odd gunner’s wife who looks after the very little fellows: and apart, of course, from that poor unhappy Mrs Homer on Juan Fernandez.’

‘To be sure, they do keep out of the way. They don’t belong to any watch, of course, and they don’t appear at quarters, no, nor anywhere else, except when we rig church.’ At any other time he would have added that for all his botanizing and stuffing curious birds, Stephen was a singularly unobservant cove: he had not even noticed the brilliant flint-locks that now, by grace of Lord Keith, adorned Surprise’s guns, doing away with those potential misfires when the linstock wavered over the touch-hole or was doused by flying spray - misfires that might make those few seconds’ difference between defeat and victory. Yet they blazed with all the splendour of guinea-gold, the pride of the crews, who surreptitiously breathed upon them, wiping off the mist with a silk handkerchief.

‘A loblolly-girl, for all love? I wonder at it, Jack.’

‘Come, come, Stephen: you say a loblolly-boy for an ancient of sixty or even more: it is only a figure of speech, a naval figure of speech. And speaking of figures, Poll’s is very like a round-shot; she is a kind, cheerful, conscientious soul, but she is not likely to stir the amorous propensities of the sick-berth. Besides, she is perfectly used to seamen, and would instantly put them down. Will you at least have a word with her? I said I should mention her name. We were shipmates once, and I can answer for her being kind - no blackguarding, no bawling out orders, not topping it the ship’s corporal; kind, honest, sober, and very tender with the wounded.’

‘Of course I will see her, brother: a kind, honest and sober nurse is a rare and valuable creature, God knows.’

Jack rang the bell and to the answering Killick he said, ‘Tell Poll Skeeping the Doctor will see her directly.’

Poll Skeeping had been at sea, off and on, for twenty years, sometimes under harsh and tyrannical officers; but for her ‘directly’ still allowed latitude enough for putting on a clean apron, changing her cap and finding her character: thus equipped she hurried to the cabin door, knocked and walked in, a little out of breath and obviously nervous. She bobbed to the officers, holding her character to her bosom.

‘Sit down, Poll,’ said Captain Aubrey, waving to a chair. ‘This is Dr Maturin’ who would like to speak to you.’

She thanked him and sat, bolt upright, the envelope of her character held like a shield.

‘Mrs Skeeping,’ said Stephen, ‘I am without a sick-berth attendant, a loblolly-boy, and the Captain tells me that you might like the post.’

‘That was very kind in his honour,’ she said, bowing to Jack. ‘Which I should be happy to be your sick-berth attendant, sir.’

‘May I ask about your experience and professional qualifications? The Captain has already told me that you are kind, conscientious, and tender to the wounded; and indeed one can hardly ask more. But what of amputation, lithotomy, the use of the trephine?’

‘Bless you, sir, my father, God rest his soul’ (crossing herself) ‘was a butcher and horse-knacker in the wholesale line, down Deptford way, and my brothers and me used to play at surgeons in the jointing house: then when I was at Haslar they put me almost straight away into the theatre. So, do you see, sir, I am hardly what could be called squeamish. But may I show you my character, sir? The surgeon of my last ship, a very learned gentleman, tells what I can do better than ever I could manage.’ She passed the somewhat aged cover, and begging Jack’s pardon Stephen broke the seal. The elegant Latin testimonial to Mrs Skeeping’s worth, capabilities, and exceptional sobriety was written in a remarkably familiar hand but one to which he could not give a name until he turned the page and saw the signature of Kevin Teevan, an Ulster Catholic from Cavan, a friend of his student days and yet another Irishman who saw the Napoleonic tyranny as a far greater and more immediate evil than the English government of Ireland.

‘Well,’ he said, patting the letter affectionately, ‘anyone so highly spoken of by Mr Teevan will certainly answer for me; and since I do not yet have an assistant surgeon - he will be coming aboard this afternoon - I will show you the sick-berth myself, if the Captain will excuse us.’

‘There,’ he went on at last, having displayed the neat arrangements of the Surprise, ‘that deals with the ventilation system: no ship of the line can show a better. Now pray tell me how Mr Teevan was when last you saw him.’

‘He was brimming full of joy, sir. A cousin with a practice in some grand part of London and with too many patients, offered him a partnership, and he left Mahon that very evening in Northumberland, going home to pay off and lay up. For that was when we thought it was all over, the pity and woe... that Boney.’

‘The pity and woe indeed,’ said Stephen. ‘But with the blessing we shall soon settle his account.’ And running his eye over the neat shelves of the forward medicine chest, he said, ‘We are short of blue ointment. Do you understand the making of blue ointment, Mrs Skeeping?’