Patrick O'Brian: The Letter of Marque

Stephen gazed at his watch. Martin, an authority on the thick-kneed curlew, would forgive him for being late in such a cause; but Jack Aubrey had a naval regard for time - he was absurdly particular about punctuality to the very minute, and the idea of facing a Jack Aubrey seven feet tall and full of barely-contained wrath at having been kept waiting two whole hours, a hundred and twenty minutes, made Stephen hesitate; but not for very long. 'I shall hire a post-chaise at Polton Episcopi,' he said inwardly, 'a chaise and four, and thus make up the time.'

The Marquess of Granby, Polton's only inn, had a bench along its outer wall, facing the afternoon sun; and on this bench, framed by a climbing rose on the one hand and a honeysuckle on the other, dozed Nathaniel Martin. Swallows, whose half-built nests were taking form in the eaves above, dropped little balls of mud on him from time to time, and he had been there so long that his left shoulder had a liberal coating. He was just aware of the tiny impact, of the sound of wings and the tumbling, hurried swallow-song, as well as the remoter thorough-bass of a field full of cows beyond the Marquess's horsepond; but he did not fully wake to the world until he heard the cry 'Shipmate, ahoy!'

'Oh my dear Maturin," he exclaimed, 'how happy I am to see you! But' - looking again - 'I trust no accident has occurred?' For Maturin's face, ordinarily an unwholesome yellow, was now entirely suffused with an unwholesome pink; it was also covered with dust, in which the sweat, as it ran down, had made distinct tracks or runnels.

'Never in life, soul. I am so concerned, indeed so truly distressed, that you should have had to wait: pray forgive me." He sat down, breathing fast. 'But will I tell what it is that kept me?'

'Pray do,' said Martin, and directing his voice in at the window, 'Landlord, a can of ale for the gentleman, if you please: a pint of the coolest ale that ever you can draw.'

'You will scarcely believe me, but peering through the long grass at the edge of a dell and we in the dell looking outwards you understand, I have seen a bustard sitting on her eggs not a hundred yards away. With the gentleman's perspective-glass I could see her eye, which is a bright yellowish brown. And then when we had been there a while she stood up, walked off to join two monstrous tall cocks and a bird of the year and vanished over the slope, so that we could go and look at her nest without fear. And, Martin, I absolutely heard the chicks in those beautiful great eggs calling peep-peep peep-peep, like a distant bosun, upon my word and honour.'

Martin clasped his hands, but before he could utter more than an inarticulate cry of wonder and admiration the ale arrived and Stephen went on, 'Landlord, pray have a post-chaise put to, to carry us to Shelmerston as soon as I have drunk up this capital ale: for I suppose the carrier is gone long since.'

'Bless you, sir,' said the landlord, laughing at such simplicity, 'there ain't no shay in Polton Episcopi, nor never has been. Oh dear me, no. And Joe Carrier, he will be at Wakeley's by now.

'Well then, a couple of horses, or a man with a gig, or a tax-cart.'

'Sir, you are forgetting it is market-day over to Plashett. There is not a mortal gig nor tax-cart in the village. Nor I doubt no horse; though Waites's mule might carry two, and the farrier dosed him last night. I will ask my wife, Anthony Waites being her cousin, as you might say."

A pause, in which a woman's voice could be heard calling down the stairs 'What do they want to go to Shelmerston for?' and the landlord came back with the satisfied expression of one whose worst fears have been realized. 'No, gentlemen,' he said. 'Not the least hope of a horse; and Waites's mule is dead.'

They walked in silence for a while, and then Stephen said, 'Still and all, it is only a matter of a few hours.'

'There is also the question of the tide," observed Martin.

'Lord, Lord, I was forgetting the tide,' said Stephen. 'And sailors do make such a point of it.' A quarter of a mile later he said, 'I am afraid my recent notes may not have given you quite all the information you might have wished.' This was eminently true. Stephen Maturin had been so long and so intimately concerned with intelligence, naval and political, and his life had so long depended on secrecy that he was most unwilling to commit anything to writing; and in any event he was a most indifferent correspondent. Martin said 'Not at all,' and Stephen went on-

'If I had had any good news for you, believe me, I should have brought it out with great joy directly; but I am obliged to tell you that your pamphlet, your very able pamphlet, enveighing against whoredom and flogging in the service, makes it virtually impossible that you should ever be offered a naval chaplaincy again. This I heard in Whitehall itself, I grieve to say.'

'So Admiral Caley told my wife a few days ago,' said Martin with a sigh. 'He said he wondered at my temerity. Yet I did think it my duty to make some kind of a protest.'

'Sure, it was a courageous thing to do,' said Stephen. 'Now I will turn to Mr Aubrey. You followed his trial and condemnation, I believe?'

'Yes, I did; and with the utmost indignation. I wrote to him twice, but destroyed both the letters, fearing to intrude and hurt with untimely sympathy. It was a very gross miscarriage of justice. Mr Aubrey could no more have conceived a fraud on the Stock Exchange than I: rather less so, indeed, he having so very little knowledge of the world of commerce, let alone finance.'

'And you know he was dismissed from the service?'

'It cannot be true!' cried Martin, standing there motionless. A cart plodded by, the driver staring at them open-mouthed and eventually turning bodily round so that he might stare longer.

'His name was removed from the post-captains' list the Friday after.'

'It must have gone near killing him,' said Martin, looking aside to conceal his emotion. 'The service meant everything to Mr Aubrey. So brave and honourable, and to be turned away...'

'Indeed it killed his joy in living,' said Stephen. They moved on slowly, and he said 'But he has great fortitude; and he has an admirable wife -'

'Oh, what a present comfort a wife is to a man!' exclaimed Martin, a smile breaking through the unaffected gravity of his expression.

Stephen's wife, Diana, was not a present comfort to him but a pain at his heart, sometimes dull, sometimes almost insupportably acute, never wholly absent; he said composedly, 'There is much to be said for marriage. And they have these children, too. I have hopes for him, particularly as when he was removed from the service so also was his ship. His friends have bought the Surprise; she has been fitted out as a private man-of-war, and he commands her.'

'Good Heavens, Maturin, the Surprise a privateer? Of course I knew she was to be sold out of the service, but I had no notion of ... I had supposed that privateers were little disreputable half-piratical affairs of ten or twelve guns at the most, luggers and brigs and the like.'

'To be sure the most part of those that ply their trade in the Channel are of that description, but there are foreign-going private men-of-war of much greater consequence. In the nineties there was a Frenchman of fifty guns, that wrought terrible havoc on the eastern trade; and you can scarcely have forgotten the prodigious fast-sailing ship that we chased day after day and so very nearly caught when we were coming back from Barbados - she carried thirty-two guns.'

'Of course, of course: the Spartan. But she was from America, was she not?'

'What then?'

'The country is so vast that one has an indistinct notion of everything being on a larger scale, even the privateers."

'Listen, Martin,' said Stephen, after a slight pause. 'Will I tell you something?'