Patrick O'Brian: The surgeon's mate

'Cousin Diana,' said Jack Aubrey, 'should you like to go ashore? I will hail Tenedos for her captain's gig.'

'Thank you, Jack,' said she, 'but I had rather wait for Stephen. He will not be long." She was sitting on a small green brass-studded trunk, the only thing she had brought with her in their hurried flight from Boston, and she was gazing out at Halifax over a shattered nine-pounder gun. Jack stood by her and gazed too, one foot on the carriage; but he gazed with no more than the shallowest surface of his attention, while the rest of his mind floated free. His whole being was suffused with deep happiness, for although this victory was none of his, he was a sea-officer through and through, wholly identified with the Royal Navy from his childhood, and the successive defeats of the last year had weighed upon him so that he had been hardly able to bear it. Now the burden was gone: the two ships had met in equal fight; the Royal Navy had won; the universe was restored to its true foundations; the stars had resumed their natural march; and as soon as he reached England there was every likelihood that he should have a command, the Acasta of forty guns, that would help to make their march' more natural still. Then again, as soon as he was ashore he would run to the post for his letters: he had not heard from Sophie, his wife and Diana's first cousin, all the time he had been a prisoner of war in Boston, and he longed to hear from her, longed to hear how the children did, longed to hear of his horses, the garden, the house ... yet beneath all this there was a point, and more than a point, of anxiety. Although he was an unusually rich commander, an officer who had made more prize-money than most captains of his seniority -more indeed than many admirals - he had left his affairs in a highly complicated state, and their unravelling depended upon the honesty of a man whom neither Sophie nor his friend Maturin trusted at all. This man, a Mr Kimber, had promised Jack that the disused lead-mines on his land could be made to produce not only more lead but also a surprising amount of silver by a process known to Mr Kimber alone, thereby yielding a very handsome return indeed upon the initial outlay; yet the last letters that Captain Aubrey had ever received from his wife, far away in the East Indies, before he was captured by the Americans on his return voyage to England, had spoken not of yield, not of profit, but of obscure unauthorized doings on the part of Kimber, of very heavy new investments in roads, mining-equipment, a steam-engine, deep-sunk shafts ...He longed to have this clarified; and he was tolerably confident that it would be clarified, for whereas Sophie and Stephen Maturin understood nothing of business, Jack had based his opinion upon solid facts and figures, not mere intuition: in any case, he had a far greater knowledge of the world than either of them. But more than that he longed to hear of his children, his twin daughters and his little son: George would be talking by now, and the want of news had been one of the hardest things to bear during his captivity; for not a single letter had come through. And most of all he wanted to see Sophie's hand and to hear her voice at one remove: her last letters, dated before the American war, had reached him in Java and he had read them until they cracked at the folds, had read them again and again until they, with almost all his other possessions, had been lost at sea. Since then, no word. From a hundred and ten degrees of east longitude to sixty degrees west, almost half the world, and never a word. It was the sailor's lot, he knew, with the packets and all other forms of transport so uncertain, but even so he had felt ill-used at times.

Ill-used by fate in general rather than by Sophie. Their marriage, firmly rooted in very deep affection and mutual respect, was far better than most; and although one of its aspects was not altogether satisfactory for a man of Jack Aubrey's strong animal spirits, and although it might be said that Sophie was somewhat possessive, somewhat given to jealousy, she was nevertheless an integral part of his being. She was no more faultless than he was himself, and indeed there were moments when he found his own faults easier to excuse than hers; but all this was quite forgotten as his inner eye contemplated the parcel of letters that he would find waiting for him over the smooth water there in Halifax.

'Tell me, Jack,' said Diana, 'did Sophie have a hard time of it, with her last baby?'

'Hey?' cried Jack, brought back from a great way off. 'A hard time of it with George? I hope not, by - I hope not, indeed, She did not mention it at all. I was in Mauritius at the time. But I believe it can be very bad.'

'So they tell me,' said Diana: and after a pause, 'Here is Stephen.'

A few minutes later the boat was alongside, and they made their farewells to the Shannon rather than her people, for they would all meet again on shore in the course of the festivities that would follow the victory - the Admiral had already spoken of a ball. Diana refused Wallis's offer of a bosun's chair and ran down after Stephen as lithe and nimble as a boy, while the boat's crew stared woodenly out into the offing, lest they should see her legs; but she did call out to beg that those on deck might take great care of her trunk. 'It is my all, you know, my little all,' she said, smiling up into Mr Wallis's enchanted face. They made a curious group there in the stern-sheets as the boat pulled for the shore, a group bound together by strong, intricate relationships; for not only had the two men competed for her liking in the past so that it had very nearly broken their friendship, but Diana had been the great love of Stephen's life, his prime illusion. She had thrown him over in India in favour of an American, a very wealthy man called Johnson, whose company she found increasingly unpleasant on their arrival in the States and, after the declaration of war, quite intolerable. It was when Maturin reached Boston as a prisoner of war that they came together again and that he found that although he still admired her spirit and beauty, it was as though his heart were numb. What changes in her or in himself had brought this about he could not tell for sure; but he did know that unless his heart could feel again the mainspring of his life was gone. However, they had escaped together, reaching the Shannon in a boat; and they were engaged to be married, an engagement that Stephen felt to be her due, if only as a means of recovering her nationality, and one that to his astonishment she seemed to welcome, although up until this time he had thought her the most intuitively perceptive woman of his acquaintance. Indeed, but for the battle they would already have been man and wife by the law of England if not by that of the Catholic church (for Maturin was a Papist), since Philip Broke had been about to exercise his powers as a captain and marry them at sea, and Diana would have been a British subject once more, instead of a paper American.

Yet in spite of these currents of feeling beneath the surface they talked very cheerfully and calmly all the way to the landing-place and up to the Admiral's house, where they parted like old friends, Jack to report to the Commissioner and then to see about his post and their lodgings, and Stephen to an unnamed destination with a sailcloth parcel under his arm, his only baggage, while Diana remained with the short-legged, good-natured Lady Harriet Colpoys.

Stephen did not name his destination, but if they had reflected neither of his companions would have had much difficulty in guessing it. In the course of their long service together it had necessarily come to Captain Aubrey's knowledge that although Dr Maturin was certainly an eminent medical man who chose to sail as a ship's surgeon for the opportunities of making discoveries in natural philosophy (his chief passion, second only to the overthrow of Buonaparte), he was also one of the Admiralty's most prized intelligence agents; while immediately before their escape Diana had seen him remove the papers that his parcel contained from the rooms that she and Mr Johnson occupied in Boston, explaining his action by the statement that they would interest an intelligence officer he happened to know in Halifax.