Patrick O'Brian - The Yellow Admiral

'Thank you, Mr Harding,' said Jack. 'Make all suitable sail, if you please.'

He returned to the cabin and having sat for a while he reached out for the other letter from Sophie and opened it with a hesitant, almost trembling hand.

The date was a week before that which he had just read, the writing more wholly familiar.

My dearest Jack,

How sorry I am to have sent you off so shabbily, and for a great while I have been meaning to beg pardon for my bad temper - trying to tell you how even a most loving heart - a female heart - can be affected by the ill-humoured Moon: but these things are very hard for a sadly ignorant creature to set down on paper so that the words give any real picture of her feelings, and before I had written anything but odd headings such as Love and Kisses and Forgiveness a letter came from Bath with the most frightful news.

You will certainly remember that Mama lived with a friend called Mrs Morris - the Honourable Mrs Morris - who helped her with the business, and that they had a manservant, a worthless fellow we all disliked when they lived here, particularly your seamen; but he was useful in the business because he understood horse-racing and the laying of odds.

Well, Mrs Morris has run off with him, apparently taking all the money and anything else they could carry and when Mama heard they were married, legally married in a church, she fell down senseless and had to be bled, and she has had fits ever since, laughing and crying. With dear Diana's help I brought her back here -she had almost destroyed their apartment in Pulteney Street and anyhow she was not fit to live there alone -the servants, apart from old Molly, had all left - and I am afraid she behaved dreadfully in the coach - and since the girls are back from school bringing friends with them, the little Nugent children, I have had to put her in your study, so near the necessary room: but do not fear - we have put a bed in the left-hand corner with a wardrobe and a chest of drawers behind it (I cannot tell you how kind dear Mrs Oakes has been) and she will never come near your precious ship-models or surveying instruments.

When you come on leave (and oh may it be soon, my love) and when the holiday girls and their friends are gone, we will move her upstairs; or possibly back to Bath, with a much more suitable companion. She says there is a clergyman who was on the brink of making her an offer.

Dear Jack, please do not worry about having money sent to me for housekeeping; we are very well with what comes from the farm, the dairy, the kitchen-garden and my poultry-yard, but even if it were not for them, Diana absolutely insists on giving us a very handsome rent for her wing of the house and the stabling - such stabling now! Such horses! With the help of the gentleman who lent her the coach she took you and Stephen down in - she has it yet - she pawned that enormous great blue diamond she brought back with her from America - 'Be damned to living on �200 a year,' she cried - and is launching into breeding Arabs again. And although that sad place at Barham is not yet sold, she has taken all Meares' pasture for them. She said it was absurd to keep the Blue Peter as they call it hidden away in a jeweller's case - she could not wear it at our Dorchester assemblies, only in London or Paris - and in any case she would soon have it again, once Stephen's affairs were in order. She looks forward extremely to a coach and six...

Jack laid the paper down, and in a dull, heavy way he wondered how he had come to be so deeply foolish as to leave Amanda's letters in a square cardboard box among his official and business correspondence; a certain liking, a certain gratitude had prevented him from balling them up and throwing them away. There would have been an indecency in doing so, in spite of her extreme silliness. He felt no particular guilt except for this foolishness: by his code a man who was directly challenged must in honesty engage -anything else would be intolerably insulting. Yet had he known of this miserable old woman's prying and her malice he would certainly have played the scrub in Canada. He reflected on Sophie's general attitude towards these matters - her extreme disapproval of any irregularity, any levity in speaking of even a looseness that reached nowhere near as far as criminal conversation - for her looseness in conversation was criminal, almost in the lawyer's sense of the term.

'Sir,' said his first lieutenant, 'forgive me for bursting in on you, but your barge is lowering down. And sir, may I tell you Eleanor and I have a daughter, healthy, pink and cheerful?'

'Give you joy of her with all my heart, William,' said Jack, crushing his hand. 'And Mrs Harding too, of course. I am sure that she will turn out to be a good 'un.'

The ceremony of the side, and the Captain of the Bellona, preceded by a midshipman, stepped into the boat. Bonden shoved off: the bargemen gave way, pulling a fine even stroke across the fifty yards to the Ramillies. The ceremony of the side again, Captain Aubrey piped aboard and kindly greeted by Captain Fanshawe, his senior by a short neck, who led him into the cabin, placed a glass of brandy in his hand and with a curiously embarrassed air said, 'Well, Jack, I hope you had an agreeable post?'

'Not quite what I could have wished, as far as I have looked,' said Jack. 'But perhaps something better may appear. How was yours?'

'A charming letter from Dolly, and quite good news of the children: the rest was mostly bills. But Jack, I am truly sorry to say the cutter also brought me an order from the flag. I am required to acquaint you that on the night you received a pilot from Ramillies and shaped a course for the Raz de Sein two French frigates sailed from Brest with the wind at north-east and are now attacking British and allied merchantmen with great success. This cannot but be attributed to your negligence in not keeping a good lookout since from all appearance the Frenchmen must have crossed your wake. I am therefore to reprimand you severely: and you are hereby severely reprimanded.'

'Yes, sir,' said Jack, without expression. 'Is that all?'

'No,' replied Fanshawe with more expression than he intended and with his eyes on the paper in front of him. 'I am also under orders to require you to proceed off Ushant without the loss of a moment and to report to the flag: there you will be attached to the offshore squadron where it is hoped that other and perhaps sharper eyes will diminish the very grave consequences of such unseamanly negligence.'

A silence. Neither intended to comment on the Admiral's prose.

'Will you dine with me, Jack?' asked Fanshawe in an attempt at an ordinary conversational tone.

'Thank you very much, Billy,' said Jack, 'but without the loss of a moment stands in the way. And between ourselves, my post acquainted me that I have been taken in adultery without a goddamn leg to stand on and that there is the Devil to pay. It destroys a man's appetite, you know.'

'Oh, my dear Jack, I know, I know,' cried Fanshawe with great feeling. 'I know only too well. Come, drink up your brandy and I will see you over the side.'

Coming aboard the Bellona again Jack returned the many salutes, walked into his cabin, where the letters were still strewn over a medley of unopened covers, and sent for the master. 'Mr Woodbine,' he said, 'pray shape a course for Ushant, for wherever the offshore squadron is most likely to be lying at this state of the tide and in the particular wind. Or whatever wind we find out there.'

Indeed, the winds the offshore squadron experienced were generally very much harder than those that blew eastward of Ushant, especially the great south-westers, from whose full force and from whose prodigious seas the inshore ships were protected to some degree by the chain of the Saints, which acted as a not very efficient but still appreciable breakwater; and this was even more evident in the Chenal de la Helle, which Woodbine took that afternoon.