Patrick O'Brian - The surgeon's mate

Stephen was indifferent to the City's mood, but otherwise he abounded in Sir Joseph's sense: he did not possess his chief's wealth of immediate, detailed information, but he had helped in the drawing-up of too many fallacious documents to have been deceived by much of what he had read, and he knew very well that the situation was critical, that the alliance against Buonaparte was fragile in the extreme, and that with both sides exhausted a single victory, well followed-up on the part of the French might mean a wholly disastrous end to the war and the establishment of tyranny for generations to come. Sir Joseph was preaching to the converted, and Stephen regretted his remark: he regretted it all the more because with the years Sir Joseph's tendency to prolixity had grown. He was being prolix now, about the Stock Exchange.

'I do not suppose,' he said, 'there are many things that men think about with such deep, careful, zealous attention as money, and the Stock Exchange is an infallible index of their thoughts, the collective thoughts of a large number of intelligent, informed men who have a great deal to lose and win. Even this Heaven-sent victory of yours, and Wellington's at Vitoria, have scarcely moved the City to anything more than bonfires and illuminations and patriotic addresses. These gentlemen know that we cannot go on alone much longer, and at the first stroke of ill-fortune our allies will desert us, as they have so often deserted us before. No, sir: if I were half as sanguine about Napoleon's downfall as you, I should go down into the City tomorrow and make my fortune.'

'How would you do that, for all love?'

'Why, I should buy Government stock, India stock, and any sound commercial shares whose value depends on foreign trade: I should buy them at their present dirt-cheap rate, and then as soon as Buonaparte was knocked on the head, or peace was declared, I should sell them at a perfectly enormous profit. Perfectly enormous, my dear sir. Any man with foreknowledge could do the same: any man who could command a considerable sum, or whose credit was good for a considerable sum, could make his fortune. It would be much like betting on a horse-race if you knew the winner in advance. That is how fortunes are made on the Stock Exchange; although I must confess that the issues concerned are rarely so great.'

'You astonish me,' said Stephen. 'I know nothing of these things.'

'I never supposed you did,' said Sir Joseph, smiling at him affectionately. 'Allow me to pour you a little wine. But, however,' he went on, 'I shall not make my fortune, alas, for the very good reason that I thoroughly agree with the gentlemen in the City: I believe they are perfectly right. Napoleon is still a very great commander, and although he got into a sad pickle in Moscow, he has astonishing powers of recovery. He has just shown us what he can do at Luetzen - Berlin is in the greatest peril at this very moment. I dread another of his sudden brilliant strokes, dividing the allies and destroying them piecemeal: he has done it again and again, and he still has something like a quarter of a million men in Germany, all living off the country; and fresh divisions are being trained in France. And in any case, his fleet is quite untouched. There they lie in the Scheldt and in Brest and Toulon -do you know, Maturin, that there are no less than one and twenty ships of the line and ten heavy frigates in Toulon alone? - beautiful, well-equipped, well-manned ships that we try to blockade with old worn-out squadrons, crazy with keeping the sea in all weathers right round the year. No, no, Maturin: take the Stock Exchange for your barometer, and rest assured that there is a great deal of work for us to do before Boney is brought down.'

'Then let us drink to his ultimate confusion,' said Stephen.

'Confusion to Boney,' said Blaine, savouring his port. After a moment he continued, 'Only a little while ago the First Lord and I were lamenting your absence most bitterly. Although the Mediterranean is your natural field, had you been here we should have begged you to accept a peculiarly suitable mission in the Baltic. There is an island there, a very strongly fortified island mounting a great number of heavy guns, that is held by a Catalan brigade in the French service, a remnant of the great Spanish garrisons that were placed all along the Pomeranian shore until the rising. They have been led to believe that their presence is of the first importance for the independence of their country, a necessary condition for Catalan autonomy. What misrepresentations, what downright lying was used to convince them of such transparent humbug I cannot tell, but there they are, in defiance of all common sense and historical fact; and they are likely to be a cruel thorn in our side, if operations in the north follow their probable course - we have great hopes of the King of Saxony: Napoleon is not alone in having unreliable allies,' observed Sir Joseph in an aside. Then returning to his Catalans he said, 'They have been kept in the strictest isolation - easy enough on an island, after all, ha, ha - and it appears that they have no idea of the happenings in the outside world except for what the French choose to tell them. And when a man of your intelligence, at a distance from the theatre of war, can form what you will allow me to call so erroneous and superficial view of the position, I wonder less at their conviction that Napoleon is carrying all before him and that he will restore their country to its pristine independence: or at their determination to blow his enemies, to blow us, out of the water if our men-of-war and transports work down the coast from Memel and Danzig, supplying the armies and landing behind the enemy's lines, as we hope to do.'

'Are they a coherent political body, a single organization? Did they form a unified movement in Catalonia? What were their aims, with regard to Madrid?'

'There you have me,' said Sir Joseph. 'I could have given you a tolerably exact account some days ago, but this wonderful new haul,' - patting Johnson's papers -'has driven the details out of my mind. My memory is not what it was: the files are at the office. But I do remember very clearly that the First Lord held this up as one of the most striking instances of a situation where five minutes of explanation, eclaircissement, persuasion, call it what you like, could do more than a powerful squadron, with all the loss of life and ships and treasure an action may entail, and that with no guarantee of success against such a fortress, in such dangerous waters: an action not unlike a somewhat smaller Copenhagen, without the benefit of surprise and without the presence of a Nelson. Five minutes of plain, truthful statement would open their deluded eyes, and save a very costly, bloody, and uncertain battle. Of course, very, very few men could do it: the emissary would have to be a man they knew and trusted and believed, and your name instantly occurred to both of us. You would have been the perfect choice. And I am sure, from your previous form, that you would not only have convinced them, but that you would have induced them to turn their guns against the French.'

'Much would depend on the leaders, in such a case,' said Stephen. There were many currents in the general Catalan movement for autonomy, many shades of opinion, many separate organizations, each with its own chief, sometimes bitterly opposed to one another. He knew nearly all of them, some from his childhood; many were friends he had worked with, and although others seemed to him wrong-headed they were men he respected; but some he did not trust at all.

'Yes,' said Blaine. 'Certainly. I wish ...but you shall have all the details tomorrow, as soon as I can consult the files. Obviously, you will have to know them; yet I hope and trust that the knowledge will be of no more than historical importance - that the mission will have been successfully accomplished in the next week or so, if indeed it has not already been settled. Since we could not lay our hands on you, and since speed was essential, we confided it to Ponsich."