Patrick O'Brian - The Yellow Admiral

'I shall of course do everything in my power.'

'Many thanks. He has been much on my mind. A pearl of an agent - totally unmercenary - polyglot - a natural philosopher with innumerable contacts among the learned abroad - a man with a profession that introduced him everywhere - a physician is welcome everywhere - and a Catholic, which is such a recommendation in the greater part of the world.'

'A Roman and trustworthy?' asked Needham, with another worldly look.

'Yes, sir,' said Blaine, touching a private bell under the desk with his foot. 'And in the very first place I should have said that he utterly abhors all tyranny - Buonaparte's above any.'

The door opened. Carling glided in, and bending respectfully over Sir Joseph he said, 'I do beg your pardon, sir, but the First Lord particularly desires a word.'

'Is it urgent?'

'I am afraid so, Sir Joseph.'

'Mr Needham, sir, I must crave your indulgence,' said Blaine, rising with something of an effort. 'But fortunately we have reached a natural term in our most interesting and valuable conversation. May I hope to hear from you in due course?'

'Certainly, sir: without fail. Tomorrow at the latest.'

Stephen was still in Sir Joseph's mind as he walked back to his house in Shepherd Market - a walk much insisted upon by Dr Maturin, who distrusted both the colour of Blaine's face and the eminently palpable state of his liver. Stephen was one of the few men Sir Joseph cordially liked; it was true that they had many tastes in common - music, entomology, the Royal Society, excellent wine, and they both hated Napoleon - but there was also that particular sympathy and mutual respect which transformed such - he hesitated for the word - shared interests, inclinations, traits, characteristics - into something of another order entirely. At the corner of St James's Street the usual crossing-sweeper was waiting to see him across Piccadilly with a waving broom: 'Thank you, Charles,' he said, handing him his weekly fourpence. On the other side, by the White Horse, a man was carefully extracting a woman from a carriage, a very handsome woman indeed; and as Blaine walked along Half Moon Street he found that he was reflecting on Stephen's marriage. Stephen had married a woman more handsome by far, the kind of woman Blaine loved to gaze upon - the kind he would have loved to marry had he met her and had he possessed the courage, the presence, and the fortune. How Maturin, who possessed even less presence and at that time no fortune whatsoever, had presumed so far he could not tell... yet again and again she had made him bitterly unhappy, he said inwardly; and as his feet carried him towards his own doorstep the words 'Handsome is as handsome does' crossed his mind, although he was very fond of Diana, and greatly admired her spirit.

Musing, he walked with his head bowed. The three wellworn steps came within his field of vision; he was conscious of a slight form standing at his door itself, and then of Stephen's face smiling down at him. 'Oh, oh!' he cried in a voice more like that of a startled ewe than of the Director of Naval Intelligence. 'Stephen, your name was in my mouth. You are as welcome as the first Red Admiral in spring. How do you do, my dear sir? How do you do? Walk in, if you please, and tell me how you do.'

Stephen walked in, shepherded with a surprising amount of fuss - surprising in so reserved and phlegmatic a man as Sir Joseph - .along that familiar corridor to the even more familiar, comfortable, book-lined, Turkey-carpeted room in which they had so often sat. A cheerful fire was already burning, and Sir Joseph at once stirred it to a still livelier blaze. Turning, he shook Stephen's hand again. 'What may I offer you?' he asked. 'A dish of tea? No, you despise tea. Coffee? A glass of Sillery? No? I will not be importunate.

You look wonderfully well, if I may be so personal. Wonderfully well. And I had been seeing you in a Spanish prison, pale, unshaved, thin, ragged, verminous.' He felt the force of Stephen's pale, questioning eye and went on, 'That reptile Dutourd reached Spain and denounced you. Gonzalez, who knew something of your activities in Catalonia, believed him, sequestered your treasure in Corunna and gave orders that you were to be taken up the moment you came to gather it. This I learned from Wall and other wholly reliable sources a week after you had left. You cannot imagine the efforts I made to warn you or the quantities of coca-leaves I devoured to keep my wits active... and now to see you sitting there, apparently perfectly well and quite unmoved, almost makes me feel ill-used, indignant. Though in parenthesis I must thank you yet again for those blessed leaves: I have a reliable supply from an apothecary in Greek Street. May I offer you a quid?'

'You are very good, but were I to indulge, the insensibility about my pharynx would persist until early supper-time, a meal I particularly wish to enjoy. And then I wish to sleep tonight.'

A pause, and Blaine said, 'I will not be so indiscreet as to ask whether you had other and earlier sources of information.'

'I had not,' said Stephen, whose mind was yet to grasp the full extent and all the implications of Sir Joseph's news. 'Faith, I had not. My safety, our safety, depended, under Providence, Saint Patrick, Stephen the Protomartyr, and Saint Brendan, solely upon my own ineptitude, my own gross ineptitude: I might even say inefficiency. Will I tell you about it?'

'If you would be so good,' said Blaine, moving his chair closer.

'It does me no credit at all, at all: but since you have been to such pains I owe you an account, however bald and inadequate. We landed on a sweet calm day, and Diana having recovered from what slight remains of the seasickness still hung about her, we took coach and travelled westward along the coast. There was a good inn at Laredo, where we ate some hundreds of new-run infant eels two inches long and took our ease; and when we were arranging our baggage for the next stage in a fine new carriage that was to take us all the way, Diana, a far better traveller than I - a more orderly mind where packing is concerned - suggested that I should make sure that everything was in place for our arrival at Corunna. Proper clothes for waiting on the governor, hair-powder, my best wig, and above all the elaborately signed and countersigned acknowledgement that the Bank of the Holy Ghost and of Commerce had received the specified number of chests containing the stated weight of gold and would deliver it up on the production of this document. Everything was in place - satin breeches, redheeled shoes, powder, silver-hilted sword - everything but this infernal piece of paper. I blush to own it,' said Maturin, his sallow face in fact changing colour as a pinkness rose from his lower cheeks to his forehead, disappearing under his wig, a physical bob, 'I am ashamed to say it, but I could not find the wretched thing.'

Against all his principles Blaine cried out, 'You will never tell me you lost the bank's receipt for all that gold, Stephen? Lost it? I beg your pardon...'

Stephen shook his head. 'I turned over innumerable other sheets - ornithological notes I had brought for a friend, the Archdeacon of Gijon, and many, many others - turned them again, formed them into heaps, sorted the heaps - Joseph, the tongue of angels could not tell you the degree of frustration. And I had not the face to attempt the impossible task of persuading the Holy Ghost and Commerce to yield that treasure on my mere unsupported word.'

'No, indeed,' said Blaine, deeply shocked.

'The Dear knows, and you know, that it was in fact all for the best,' said Stephen, 'yet I was very near cursing the day. But, however, I did not quite do so, because in the course of the night an inner voice said, as distinctly as the small beast in the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, "Poor worm: think on Latham", and my mind was at ease directly - I slept until sunrise, waking with the name Latham still in my ears.'