Patrick O'Brian - The Letter of Marque

'Oh tell us about it, Doctor, if you please,' cried Roke,- his face shining with sudden reflected glory, and the other sailors drew their chairs nearer. 'A fifty-gun ship to sink a seventy-four!'

'You must understand that I was below, and that although I heard the gunfire I saw nothing of it: all I can tell you is what I was told by those that took part.' They did not mind at all; they listened greedily, pressing him for exact details, requiring him to repeat various episodes so that they should get it just so; for the Leopard, though now at some removes from her state of grace, was still their ship. That was the great point. They were polite about Jack Aubrey's recent feats -indignant at his ill-usage too - but all that was on a different plane and quite remote: it was the Leopard, the tangible Leopard, that really mattered.

In the next few days he told the tale, or particular actions in it, again and again; sometimes in the captain's cabin, where he was invited to dine and where he pointed out the exact places where the stern-chasers had been made fast and where traces could still be seen, sometimes on the quarterdeck, where his hearers put him right if he made the slightest change of epithet or order; and all this while the breeze held true, running them north-north-east as fast as they could wish. Faster than ever Stephen wished. He saw his first northern birds - eider in the Skager Rack - with a sinking heart. A kindly western shift wafted them down the Cattegat and right through the Belt. Never a pause until a broken foretopmast checked them a little north of Gland; from then on their progress was slow and they lost all hope of an excellent run, which caused a great deal of cursing and irritation; yet their progress could not be too slow for him, and these hours of dawdling were a relief from his continually mounting tension.

But for all that on Thursday morning, when the Surprise heaved in sight, he went aboard her directly.

He had come on deck unusually early, having had a poor night and having been unable to bear another comic sneeze in the wardroom. His colleague, the present surgeon of the Leopard, was not a bad young man, but he had come by the notion that it was droll to exaggerate the sound of a sneeze; by now it had grown perfectly habitual, and every time he made this din, which was quite often, he would gaze round the table to share the fun.

Stephen was early on deck, therefore, and he found the captain and most of his officers peering anxiously at a vessel to windward, hull up on the starboard quarter.

'She has no pennant,' said the captain. 'She cannot be a man-of-war.'

"No. She is a privateer for sure, an American privateer," said the master.

'If only you had got the topmast up last night we might have run in to Vestervik. There is no hope now: look at her feather.'

A very fine feather it was: with topgallants and weather studdingsails abroad she was making better than ten knots, and her bows threw the white water wide on either side.

During their mutual reproaches - for the master naturally returned the captain's blame - the pleasant young mate, whose name was Francis, borrowed Roke's telescope. He stared long and hard, and then with a worried face he passed the glass to Stephen.

'Comfort yourself, Mr Francis,' said Stephen when he had made triply sure. 'That is the Surprise, commanded by Mr Aubrey. He was to meet me in Stockholm. Captain Worlidge, may I beg you to lie to and hang out a flag to show that we should like to communicate with her? She will take me in to Stockholm, and that will be a great saving of time.'

He had acquired great authority as the oldest Leopard of them all; he now spoke with staggering assurance; and the alternative was so worthless that Worlidge said he was always ready to oblige a King's officer, and the Leopard laid her main topsail to the mast.

No one could have looked at the new Member for Milport's face without his heart lifting: it was not that Jack Aubrey's was exultant or filled with obvious pleasure - indeed for some time after they had lain close to the Leopard it was clouded - but it possessed a shining inner life, a harmony of its own, and the strange almost paralytic deadness that had hung over it in repose these last months was now quite gone. His had been a naturally cheerful countenance until all joy was driven out of it, a fine ruddy face whose lines and creases had been formed by laughter and smiling; now it was essentially the same again, ruddier if anything, and lit by eyes that seemed an even brighter blue.

Stephen felt his sadness and near-desperation recede, almost vanish, as they talked and talked about Cousin Edward Norton's extraordinarily handsome conduct, and about the House of Commons, where they agreed that Jack's wisest course would be silence except in the case of overwhelming conviction on a naval point, and a general but by no means unconditional support of the Ministry: or at least of Lord Melville. Then, having heard a fairly detailed account of the Leopard's grounding, Jack, together with Pullings and Martin, showed Stephen the new Manilla rigging and the slightly greater rake they had given the foremast. 'I believe she gains an extra fathom of line,' said Jack.

'Sure, she is going as fast as a horse at a good round trot,' said Stephen, looking over the side at the swift smooth run of the sea, dipping to show the ship's copper amidships; and as he spoke he realized that each hour was bringing him some ten miles nearer Stockholm and that tomorrow would probably see him ashore.

'I should not trust this wind, though," said Pullings. 'It has been veering all this watch, and I doubt the studdingsails stand until eight bells.'

This view of the present racing along to become the future grew in Stephen's mind as they ate their dinner, and by the time they had said everything that could be said about parliament, Ashgrove, Woolcombe, the children, Philip Aubrey and the Surprise's new iron water-tanks, his mind tended to stray away. In spite of the very profound satisfaction of seeing the old Jack Aubrey on the other side of the table, his anxiety was welling up again.

Jack knew why Stephen had come into the Baltic, of course, and towards the end of the meal he saw that his friend was looking both wretchedly ill and ten years older; but this was ground he could not possibly venture upon unasked, and after a long, awkward silence - most unusual with them - it occurred to him that he must not return to his own affairs, that he had already been far too self-centred and unfeeling. He therefore called for another pot of coffee and spoke about Standish and music. 'Since we met,' he said, 'I am glad to say the ship has acquired a purser. He is not at all experienced - has never been to sea, and Sophie helps him with his sums - but he is a gentlemanlike fellow, a friend of Martin's, and he plays an amazingly fine fiddle.'

Standish was of a naval family, though not an eminent one - his father had died a lieutenant - and he had always wanted to go to sea; but his friends were very much against it and in deference to their wishes he had studied "for the Church, in which a cousin could provide for him. His studies however were more in the boating and classical line than the theological and it never occurred to him to read the Thirty-Nine Articles with close attention before he was required to subscribe to them. He then found with great concern that he could not conscientiously do so; and that without doing so he could not become a parson. In these circumstances he was at liberty to go to sea, the only thing he really wanted to do; but of course he was now far too old to make his first appearance on the quarterdeck of any man-of-war. The only way into the Navy was as a purser, and in spite of his inexperience - most pursers started quite young as captain's clerks - an old shipmate of his father's would have used his influence with the Navy Board to have him appointed: but a purser of even a sixth rate had to put up a verifiable bond for four hundred pounds, and Standish, having disobliged his family, did not possess four hundred pence.