Patrick O'Brian: The Hundred Days

Jack nodded with satisfaction and then said, ‘Lord Barmouth has ordered me to send my surgeon and a politico across: they are amazingly gifted linguists and very learned men, but neither has much notion of coming up the side of a ship, and was you to rig a bosun’s chair, I should take it kindly.’

Back in the Surprise he took off his finery, struck his broad pennant, told Harding to follow the flag into Gibraltar, and sent for the log-books. He and Adams were still establishing the bases of his report - obviously with great gaps that only Stephen and Jacob could fill - when they heard the boat’s return, the anxious cries, and the children’s piping ‘We!come aboard, dear Doctors, welcome oh welcome aboard!’

Coming below, Stephen looked attentively at his friend, deep in papers, and said, ‘You are low in your spirits, brother.’

‘Indeed I am. For your own ear alone, I am very much afraid that we are going to be baulked of our galley - pipped on the post - done brown. In my simplicity I told the Commander-in-Chief that she was coming up by the Straits and that I meant to intercept her. I let it be understood, that .I was still acting on the orders given me by Lord Keith; but I fear I may be set aside and the chance given to some more favoured man.’

‘Be easy in your mind, my dear,’ said Stephen in a tone that carried great conviction. ‘Jacob and I have just been talking with the Commander-in-Chief and his politico, then with the politico alone - Matthew Arden, a very intelligent man, very highly influential in Whitehall. The Ministry regard this as an exceptionally important theatre of war and they have sent one of their best brains, a man who has refused high office, very high office indeed. He is also a close friend of Lord Keith’s, who would be mortally offended at heaving his evident wishes set aside. Arden and I have known one another these many years: ,we have never disagreed on any important point, and this time again we got along together exceedingly well. Furthermore, I am happy to say that for all his domineering manner, Lord Barmouth is in awe of Matthew Arden... you are drawing up an account of our little campaign, I see... heavy going, heavy going: I must give you some remarks on Algerine politics and my sojourn in Africa. But I do wish you could have heard how Arden exulted at your doing in the Adriatic, and how he obliged the Commander-in-Chief to acknowledge that the elimination of that particular danger was a most important feat ... No, no, Jack: courageous though Lord Barmouth quite certainly is, I do not believe for a moment that he would dare to use you ill in these circumstances.’

‘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...’