Patrick O'Brian: The Truelove

This certain knowledge had been with him ever since the Gazette printed the words Captain John Aubrey, Royal Navy, is restored to the List with his former rank and seniority and is appointed to the Diane of thirty-two guns, filling his massive frame with a deep abiding happiness; and now he had another, more immediate reason for joy, his friend having made this astonishing recovery. 'Then why am I so cursed snappish?' he asked.

Five bells. Little Reade, the midshipman of the watch, skipped aft to the rail, followed by the quartermaster with the log-ship and reel. The log splashed down, the stray-line ran gently astern; 'Turn' said the quartermaster in a hoarse tobacco-chewing whisper, and Reade held the twenty-eight second glass to his eye. 'Stop,' he cried at last, clear and shrill, and the quartermaster wheezed 'Three one and a half, mate.'

Reade gave his captain an arch look, but seeing his grim, closed expression he walked forward and said to Davidge 'Three knots one and a half fathoms, sir, if you please,' directing his voice aft and speaking rather loud.

The wake span out, rather faster now than Jack had foretold - hence the arch look. 'Cross in the morning and bloody-minded with it, like an old and ill-conditioned man. It is discreditable in the last degree,' he said, and his thoughts ran on.

Profound attachment to Stephen Maturin did not preclude profound dissatisfaction at times: even lasting dissatisfaction. For a quick and efficient refitting of the ship, good relations with the colonial administration had been of the first importance; but in that very strongly anti-Irish and anti-Catholic atmosphere (Botany Bay had been filled with United Irishmen after the '97 rising) the presence of Stephen, irascible, more or less Irish and entirely Catholic, rendered them impossible. Or to put it more fairly not just his presence but the fact that he had resented an insult after a Government House dinner on his very first day in the penal colony - blood all over the bath-stoned steps. Jack had had to endure weeks of official obstruction and harassment - the vexatious searching the ship for convicts trying to escape, the stopping of her boats, the arrest of mildly drunken liberty-men ashore - and it was only when the Governor returned that Jack had been able to put a stop to all this by promising him that the Surprise should carry no absconder from Port Jackson.

Stephen, poor fellow, could not really be blamed for the misfortunes of his birth, nor for having resented so very gross an insult; but he could be blamed, and Jack did blame him, for having, without the least consultation, planned the escape of his former servant Padeen Colman, equally Popish and even more Irish (virtually monoglot), whose sentence of death for robbing an apothecary of the laudanum to which, as Stephen's loblolly-boy, he had become addicted, had been commuted to transportation to New South Wales. The matter had been presented to Jack when he was exhausted with work and last-minute preparations, frustrated beyond description by a light froward conscienceless woman, liverish from official dinners in the extreme heat; and their difference of opinion was so strong that it endangered their friendship. The escape did in fact take place in the confusion that followed Maturin's encounter with the platypus and Padeen was now on board: it took place with the consent of Padeen's master and of the entire crew; and it could be said that Captain Aubrey's word was unbroken, since the absconder came not from Port Jackson but from Woolloo-Woolloo, a day's journey to the north. Yet for his own part Jack dismissed this as a mere quibble; and in any event he felt that he had been manipulated, which he disliked extremely.

That was not the only time he had been manipulated, either. Throughout the voyage from Batavia to Sydney Jack Aubrey had been chaste: necessarily so, given the absence of anyone to be unchaste with. And throughout his anxious, frustrating negotiations in Sydney he had been chaste, because of total exhaustion by the end of the day. But after Governor Macquarie's return all this changed. At several official and unofficial gatherings he met Selina Wesley, a fine plump young woman with a prominent bosom, an indifferent reputation and a roving eye. Twice they were neighbours at dinner, twice at supper-parties; she had naval connexions, an extensive knowledge of the world, and a very free way of speaking; they got along famously. She had no patience with Romish monks or nuns, she said; celibacy was great nonsense - quite unnatural; and when during the interval in an evening concert given in some gardens outside Sydney she asked him to walk with her down to the tree-fern dell he found himself in such a boyish state of desire that his voice was scarcely at his command. She took his arm and they moved discreetly out of the lantern-light, walked behind a summer-house and down the path. 'We have escaped Mrs Macarthur's eye,' she said with a gurgle of laughter, and her grasp tightened for a moment.

Down through the tree-ferns, down; and at the bottom a man stepped out of the shadows. 'There you are, Kendrick,' cried Mrs Wesley. 'I was not sure I should find you. Thank you so much, Captain Aubrey. You will find your way back easily enough, I am sure, steering by the stars. Kendrick, Captain Aubrey was so kind as to give me his arm down the path in the dark.'

He had other causes for discontent, such as the faint and even dead contrary airs that had kept Bird Island in sight for so long and then the curious falsity of the trade wind that obliged the ship to beat up close-hauled day after day, wearing every four hours. Other causes, some of them trivial: he had taken only two midshipmen from the Nutmeg into the Surprise, two for whom he felt a particular responsibility; and both of them were extremely irritating. Reade, a pretty boy who had lost an arm in their battle against sea Dyaks, was over-indulged by the Surprises and was now much above himself; while Oakes, his companion, a hairy youth of seventeen or eighteen, went about singing in a most unofficer-like manner -a kind of bull-calf joy. Jack skipped over the matter of Nathaniel Martin, the Reverend Nathaniel Martin, an unbeneficed clergyman, a well-read man and an eager natural philosopher who had joined the Surprise as assistant surgeon to see the world in Maturin's company. It was impossible to dislike Martin, a deeply respectable man, though his playing of the viola would never have recommended him anywhere; yet Jack could not love him either. Martin was of course a more suitable companion for Stephen in certain respects, but it seemed to Jack that he took up altogether too much of his time, prating away about primates in the mizen-top or endlessly turning over his collections of beetles and mummified toads in the gunroom. Jack passed quickly on - he did not choose to dwell on the subject - and came to the strange, unaccountable behaviour of the frigate's people. Obviously they were not like a Royal Navy crew, being much more talkative, independent, undeferential, partners rather than subordinates; but Jack did not dislike that at all; he was used to it, and he had thought he knew them intimately well from his cruises with them as a privateer and from this long run from Salibabu to New South Wales. Yet something seemed to have happened to them in Sydney. Now they were fuller of mirth than before; now they had private expressions that caused gales of laughter in the forecastle; and now he often saw them look at him with a knowing smile. In any other ship this might have meant mischief, but here even the officers had something of the same oddness. At times even Tom Pullings, whom he had known since his first command, seemed to be watching him with a considering eye, hesitant, quizzical.

Causes for discontent, vexations, of course he had them; and none rankled like that caper in the tree-ferns nor came more insistently into his humiliated mind, so full of unsatisfied desire. Yet all these put together, he thought, could not account for this growing crossness, this waking up ready to be displeased, this incipient ill-humour - anything likely to set it off. He had never felt like this when he was young - had never been made game of by a young woman either.