Patrick O'Brian - The Letter of Marque

For occasions of this kind Sir Joseph hired men-servants from Gunter's, and the splendid butler had announced nine gentlemen before calling out 'Dr Maturin and Mr Aubrey.' The gathering looked eagerly at the door, and there, next to Maturin's slight form, they saw an exceptionally tall, broad-shouldered man, thin in his black coat, pale and severe. Part of the pallor and severity was caused by extreme hunger - Jack's stomach was used to the naval dinner time, several hours before that of fashionable London - but his wounds had their effect upon his colour too, while almost the whole of his severity was an armour against the least hint of disrespect.

Blaine hurried forward with his congratulations, his thanks for this visit and his anxious hope that Mr Aubrey's wounds did not cause him very great inconvenience - would he like a leg-rest at table? He was followed, sooner than etiquette allowed, by a round pink man in a cherry-coloured coat whose face fairly radiated goodwill and friendliness. 'You will not remember me, sir," he said with a particularly engaging bow, 'but I had the honour of meeting you once at the bedside of my nephew William - my sister Babbington's boy - when he was hurt during that glorious action of yours in the year four - one of your glorious actions in the year four. My name was Gardner until the other day. Now it is Meyrick.'

'I remember it perfectly, my lord,' said Jack. 'William and I were speaking of you not a fortnight ago. May I offer my best congratulations?'

'Not at all, not at all,' cried Lord Meyrick. 'The boot is on the other foot entirely. Being shifted from one House to another is not to be compared with cutting out a frigate, I believe.' He said several other most obliging things, and although his words were mostly drowned by the greetings of the men Jack already knew and by Sir Joseph's introduction to the rest, their evident sincerity could not but please. None of the other guests quite came up to Lord Meyrick - they lacked his complete simplicity - yet their cordial, unfeigned congratulations would have satisfied a man with a far higher notion of his deserts than Aubrey. His reserve and severity - never natural to him until these last months - quite vanished; and the change was made all the quicker by Sir Joseph's sherry, which spread an amiable glow in his pinched, abstemious belly.

Babbington's uncle absolutely insisted upon giving him precedence, and Jack sat at Blaine's right hand in a pleasant state of mind and a lively anticipation of the turtle soup that his practised nose had long since detected. The Bishop said grace; the promise became reality, green calipash and amber calipee swimming in their juice; and after some moments Jack said to Blaine, 'These classical fellows may prate about ambrosia till they go black in the face, but they did not know what they were talking about. They never ate turtle soup.'

'Are there no turtles in the Mediterranean, sir? You astonish me.'

'Oh yes, there are turtles, but only loggerheads and the sort they make tortoiseshell of. The true turtle, from the ambrosian point of view, is the green one; and to find her, you must go to the West Indies or Ascension Island.'

'Ascension Island!' cried Lord Meyrick. 'What vistoes that calls to mind! What oceans of vast eternity! In my youth I longed to travel, sir; I longed to view the Great Wall of China, the deadly Upas Tree, the flux and reflux of the fabled Nile, the crocodile in tears; but in crossing to Calais I found it would not answer. My frame would not bear the motion. I waited in that vile town until a day of total calm, a true halcyon day, and then I was rowed gently back, still half dead and far gone in melancholy. Since then I have travelled, fought, suffered, survived and conquered solely in the person of William. Such things he tells me, sir! How you and he, in the Sophie of fourteen guns, took the Cacafuego of thirty-two...' And so he went on, with an accurate account of Aubrey's battles - and Aubrey had been unusually favoured in the way of action -until the two country gentlemen on the other side of the table gazed at Jack with renewed respect, even wonder, for it was in fact a most uncommon record, and one told with complete sincerity.

'Mr Aubrey,' murmured Blaine, interrupting the flow just where the Surprise was sinking a Turk in the Ionian, 'I believe the Bishop means to drink to you.'

Jack looked down the table and there indeed was the Bishop smiling at him and holding up his glass. 'A glass of wine with you, Mr Aubrey,' he called.

'With the utmost pleasure, my lord,' replied Jack, bowing. 'I drink to your very great happiness.'

This was followed by several more glasses with other gentlemen, and Stephen, half way down the table on the other side, observed that the colour was coming back into Jack's face: perhaps rather more colour than he could have wished. A little later he also observed that his friend had launched into anecdote. Jack Aubrey's anecdotes were rarely successful - his talent did not lie that way - but he knew his role as a guest and now with a candid look of pleasure at his immediate neighbours he began, 'There was a bishop in our part of the country when I was a boy, the bishop before Dr Taylor; and when he was first appointed he made a tour of his command - of his diocese. He went everywhere, and when he came to Trotton he could hardly make out that such a scattered place - just a few fishermen's huts along the shore, you know - could be a parish. He said to Parson West, an excellent fisherman himself, by the way; he taught me to sniggle for eels. He asked Parson West ..." Jack frowned slightly and Stephen clasped his hands. This was the point where the anecdote might so easily break down again, an unhappy echo of the word place appearing as plaice in the bishop's question. 'He asked Parson West, "Have you many souls here?'"

Stephen relaxed.

'And Parson West replied, "No, my lord; only flounders, I am afraid."'

Jack Aubrey, pleased at the kind reception of his tale, pleased at having got it all out in one piece, and pleased at having fulfilled his social duties for some time to come, applied himself to his excellent mutton, and the talk flowed round him. Someone at the Bishop's end spoke of the curious French ignorance of English titles and ways, and one of the Whitehall men said 'Yes. When Andreossy was here as Bonaparte's envoy he wrote to my chief as Sir Williamson, Esquire. But he did worse than that; he intrigued with the wife of one of our colleagues, a Frenchwoman. And having heard that the Devonshires were in a very sad way, he sent her to the Duchess with a plain downright barefaced offer of ten thousand pounds for Cabinet secrets. The Duchess told Fox.'

'It is ignorance that will lose the French this war,' said his neighbour. 'They began by cutting off poor Lavoisier's head, observing that the Republic did not need men of science.'

'How can you speak of French ignorance, when you compare their attitude towards balloons with ours?' cried the man opposite him. 'Surely you must recall that from the beginning they had an aerostatic corps and that they won the battle of Fleurus almost entirely because of the accurate information derived from balloons poised at an immense height over the enemy? His numbers, his dispositions, his movements were all open to view. But what do we do about balloons? Nothing.'

'The Royal Society decided against them,' said the Bishop. 'I particularly remember the reply when the King offered to pay for some trials, because I was in the closet when it came: "No good whatsoever can be expected from such experiments" said the Society.'

'A part of the Society,' said one of the Fellows sharply. 'A very small part of the Society, a committee largely made up of mathematicians and antiquaries.'

The other Fellows present disagreed with this and with each other; but Aubrey and Maturin, though much attached to the Society, were often abroad; they had little knowledge of its often passionate internal politics and less interest; neither took any part in the discussion. Stephen devoted his whole attention to his right-hand neighbour, who had made an ascent, and a glorious ascent, at the time of the first enthusiasm before the war. He was too young and foolish, he said, to have recorded any of the technical details, but he did still retain that first vivid sense of astonishment awe wonder and delight when, after a slow, grey and anxious passage through mist, the balloon rose up into the sunlight: all below them and on every hand there were pure white mountains of cloud with billowing crests and pinnacles, and above a vast sky of a darker, far darker, purer blue than he had ever seen on earth. A totally different world, and one without any sound. The balloon rose faster in the sun - they could see their shadow on the sea of cloud -faster and faster. 'Dear Lord,' he said, 'I can see it now; how I wish I could describe it. That whole enormous jewel above, the extraordinary world below, and our fleeting trace upon it - the strangest feeling of intrusion.'