Patrick O'Brian - The Yellow Admiral

Sophie handed up the note; Stephen leaned down and kissed her. 'Let go,' cried Diana, gathering the reins. With the coach in motion Stephen looked back, and indeed his last sight of his daughter was a rain-washed but fairly cheerful face and a clean white handkerchief waving frantically.

They were silent for a while, with Diana addressing the horses from time to time, individually or as a team: they were Cleveland bays, well matched, usually well-mannered but now a trifle apt to caper, particularly in the village, where people called out greetings, sometimes running alongside to send their duty and dear love and respects to the Captain, and some waving sheets or the like from upper windows. Presently however they were on the high road, climbing to the top of the down that overlooked Woolcombe valley, pulling well and all together just enough frost to whiten the grass - now on the road itself - and the horses' breath a glorious cloud.'

'How wonderfully smooth it is, this fine green machine,' said Stephen.

'Yes,' said Diana 'Handley's made it, and they told me about the new kind of springs they put in long strips of the best Swedish steel overlapping and sliding upon one another and cased in leather, and fastened to the body by pivoting brass...' When she had finished a pretty detailed account of the coach's building, which she had followed with the closest interest, and of the innumerable coats of paint and then of varnish that had been laid on, together with the history of her visit, guided by the invaluable Mr Thomas Handley, to the wheelwright's shop, where among other wonders she saw the shrinking-on of a tyre, she said, 'You would have loved it.'

'I am very certain that I should,' he replied; and after a decent pause, 'Please may I beg you to relieve my mind?'

'Of course you may, dear Stephen,' she said, with an affectionate sideways glance: and much, much louder, 'Norman, you God-damned bastard, bear out, bear out d'ye hear me?' Norman heard both her emphatic voice and the crack of her whip not six inches from his ear, and at once ceased boring into his neighbour, an irritating trick he often displayed early in a run.

'I say this because Brigid is a shatter-brained little creature, as quick as a trout: she was once off my saddle-bow and into a pile of filth one day on the common - soft filth - although I had a hand on her shoulder: she had seen a baby rabbit. So in pure compliment to me, swear and promise and pledge yourself never to let her on to the box of a coach, so tall and the road so hard; purely and simply in compliment to me and my superstitions.'

'Very well, my dear,' she said in the kindest way, 'and here is my hand upon it' - patting him quickly.

Now they were on the flat, a broad road with woodland on the left and not a soul upon it: the horses were suppled and warm, eager to run. She encouraged them, leaning forward, calling them by name, whistling, wheeoo, wheeoo, wheeoo, and the smooth coach fairly raced along for two blissful miles before she reined in, laughing, at the foot of the next hill with a series of turns and a high-perched village.

'This is what coaching should be,' he said, when they were through and on the open, uncrowded road again. 'The weather is perfect, and you, my dear, are the delicate whip of the world.'

On and on, the hedges flying past, and they baiting where they had baited before, navigating the devilish bridge and its corner at Maiden Oscott with an almost insolent ease; and they slept at the comfortable inn where they had slept last time.

Here, as the horses were being walked up and down, Stephen talked at length to Padeen about the small farm in the County Clare that had so enraptured him when Stephen promised it as a reward for looking after Brigid and Clarissa in Spain, a rapture that had waxed and waned; it still retained a theoretical existence, but perhaps little more. From this conversation in the twilight, the longest they had had for a great while - a conversation full of the turns and evasions of an Irish person who wishes to say something delicately defined but who would like to do so without giving any hint of offence - Stephen came away with a variety of notions. Did Padeen feel that a wife was an absolutely necessary part of a farm, and did he dread marriage? Was he afraid of being unable to run the holding, having been so long away from the land? Had so many years of servitude done away with his independence? As he sat on an ancient cane-bottomed chair in their chamber, mechanically arranging the horsehair curls of his wig, a wilder fancy came into his mind: was the poor soul consumed by a hopeless passion for Clarissa Oakes? Although it was not very, very much more remote from possibility than his own for Diana he shook his head and determined to say no more, other than suggesting a tenant to keep the land clean and in heart.

'Are you never coming to bed?' she called. 'The candle is guttering dreadfully.'

The next day was a much shorter run and they did it in splendid time, the weather more perfectly late autumn than ever, the horses obviously enjoying themselves, except when Mangold cast a shoe and all hands stood in or about the nearest smithy, surrounded by smoke, the wheeze of the bellows, the flying sparks and the scent of his well-pared hoof.

Before noon they were on the Torquay strand, gazing out over the bay at the men-of-war: but this time there was no tedious to-and-froing, no mounting anxiety. They had not been there five minutes before Stephen, hearing the cry 'Dr Maturin!' looked round straight into the smiling face of Philip Aubrey, Jack's much younger half-brother, now in charge of a boat belonging to the Swallow, an aviso bound for the offshore squadron, from which Stephen could easily reach the Bellona.

The offer could not be refused, but they parted reluctantly, like lovers, unwilling, forced and constrained, regretting the fair breeze that carried the boat out, out and away.

Philip and Stephen could not speak freely until the boat reached the aviso, but there Philip commanded a private, roughly triangular space with just room for two, and here, while they regaled on fresh bread and cheese, Philip said, 'I do not like to sound holier than thou nor to speak disrespectfully of my elders, but I must say that poor Jack's mother-in-law does come it pretty high. George - he is my nephew, you know, though I can't make either him or the girls call me uncle - has just started going to that mouldy little school between Folly and Plush run by our parson's brother. Well, the first day he went there the other boys asked him what his father was. "My father is a sea-officer," said George: then, drawing himself up, he went on, "and an adulterer." "How do you know?" they asked. "My grand-mama told me and the girls," said George. I laughed at first - you know how George swells when he is proud - but then I thought it was a miserable God-damned thing to tell children: don't you agree, sir?'

'Mrs Williams is no blood-relation of yours, I believe?'

'No, sir. My grandfather, the General, married again after Jack's mother died: she was called Stanhope. And I come from the second marriage; so when Jack married Sophie Williams, that didn't make her mother any relation of mine.'

'Then in that case I will tell you that in my considered opinion she is a perfectly odious woman.'

As though struck down by a judgment the moment he had finished these words, he pitched forward out of his chair on to what little deck was free. Philip plucked him up and raced on to the deck which had been left in charge of an even younger midshipman who in the pride of his heart had committed the vessel to a manoeuvre that, the guys being untimely cast off, resulted in a truly monumental gybe. The aviso did not quite overturn, but the tangle of parted cordage, the sprung boom and the horrid condition of the bowsprit and its gammoning kept the captain (a master's mate), Philip and his companions - happily there were some prime seamen among them - busy most of the rest of the day and of the fine moonlit night.