Patrick O'Brian - The surgeon's mate

The officers took their noonday observation with particular care, a good observation that showed Grimsholm somewhat nearer than dead-reckoning would have it. The glass was turned, the bell struck, and the hands were piped to their longed-for meal: by the time it was finished the island would have nicked the clear sky; shortly after that Stephen would go aboard the Minnie, and the apparent chase would begin.

'Would it be improper to suggest our dining now?' he asked.

'Not at all,' said Jack. 'I will give the word at once." He bent to the cabin skylight and hailed the astonished steward: 'Dinner on the table in seven minutes. Caviare and the Swedish bread, omelettes, beef-steaks, the ham, what is left of the cold goose-pie, and rouse out a bottle of champagne and two of the burgundy with the yellow seal.'

In seven minutes they sat down, Jack having given orders that he should be told as soon as Grimsholm came in sight. 'I have never eaten enough caviare,' said Stephen, helping himself again. 'Where did it come from?'

'The Czar sent it to Sir James, and he passed a barrel on to us. Rum stuff. I dare say it was caviare to the Admiral too.' This was his only small attempt at wit throughout the meal: and a little caviare was almost all he ate. His stomach was closed, and he could not even drink with relish.

Stephen on the other hand downed his omelette and a pound of steak, finished the cold goose-pie and cut a slice of ham in what would ordinarily have been a very festive way for him. But the feast was no feast. The atmosphere was entirely wrong. They were polite to one another, and there was almost no real contact; it was as though Stephen were already gone, removed to another plane.

It was only when they were drinking their port and Stephen said how he wished they might have some music - in former voyages together they had played innumerable 'cello and violin duets, often in trying circumstances - that their old relationship came back to life. 'We might try a glee,' said Jack with a poor smile, but at that point a midshipman came to say, with the master's duty, that Grimsholm was sighted from the masthead.

'It is nearly time,' said Jack. 'We must be chasing long before they see us.' He reached for the decanter, filled their glasses, and raised his, saying 'Here's my dear love to you, Stephen, and - ' the glass dropped from his hand and broke. 'Jesus,' he said in a low voice, appalled.

'Never mind it, never mind it,' said Stephen, mopping his breeches. 'Now listen, Jack, will you? There are just three things I must say before I go aboard the Minnie. If I succeed I shall hoist the Catalan flag. You know the Catalan flag, I am sure.'

'I am ashamed to say I do not.'

'It is yellow, with four bloody stripes down it. And if you see it - when you see it - you must send to the transports, which will obviously be out of sight of the island, to tell them to come in, and you must come in yourself at once, flying the same flag in some place of honourable distinction. I suppose we have one?'

'Oh, the sailmaker will run up half a dozen - yellow jack with strips of the spare pennant.'

'Just so. And I beg, Jack, that you will salute the fortress with all the guns proper for such a place, or even more; and that you will receive the commanding officer with the ceremony due to a nobleman.'

'If he comes with you, Stephen, he shall have a royal salute.'

Stephen crossed the lane of water and they saw him hauled aboard the Minnie. The Ariel signalled to the remote Aeolus to haul her wind, backed her topsails to give the Minnie two miles start, and at last the long hours of chase began.

Stephen sat on an old kitchen chair by the mizenmast, out of the way; he had a satchel of papers on his lap, and he looked steadily forward at Grimsholm, fine on the larboard bow and growing larger. There was no point in preparing a careful, ordered statement; everything would depend on the first moments, on the presence or absence of French officers, on his reception; and from that point on it would be an improvisation, a cadenza. He whistled the Montserrat Salve Regina, embroidering the theme.

From the Ariel's bows Jack could see him plainly over the clear grey sea, even without his glass, a black figure sitting there. All too plainly: with this fine breeze well abaft the beam the Ariel had been overhauling the Minnie faster than was right this last half hour. 'Let her go and veer away,' he said, and the spritsail course, its clews stopped, dropped into the sea over her blind quarter, acting as a drogue. It checked her speed, but not to obviously; she still gained a little, and ten minutes later he said to the gunner, 'Very well, Mr Nuttall, I think we may open fire. You know what to do. Take great care, Mr Nuttall.'

'Never you fear, sir,' said the gunner. 'I filled all our rotten old white grain: she's in no danger.'

He fired. The ball pitched two hundred yards short and fifty yards wide. The Minnie responded with a foretopgallant weather-studdingsail.

'It must look right, though,' said Jack.

'Never you fear, sir,' said the gunner again. 'Just you wait till the gun warms up.'

The gun warmed up, the guns indeed, for the Ariel kept giving a slight yaw to bring first one chaser then the other into action, increasing her rate of fire but diminishing her speed; the carefully-chosen round-shot cut up the water so close to the Minnie that once or twice the spray came aboard her. It was pretty practice, but it did not give the more experienced seamen in the Ariel as much satisfaction as the sailing of the ship - the perpetual slight rising of sheets, the over-press of somewhat unbalanced sails, all the hundred capers her captain had learnt in the oceans of the world, everything to give the impression of great eagerness and of the utmost haste, without in fact gaining very much. The stroke that gave most pleasure was his order to set the main-royal, a risky sail in such a breeze even with sound spars.

'You are forgetting, sir,' said Mr Hyde. 'The mast is sprung.'

'I have that in mind, Mr Hyde,' said Jack. 'Away aloft.

Mast, sail and yard carried away after the first minute, a most spectacular sight from the land. And all the while Grimsholm came nearer, with the whole broad range of mainland shore that it guarded, miles of shoal-free coast with perfect landing-places for an army, quite apart from the river-port of Schweinau: for some time now the higher batteries had been in view, with the smoke wafting from their hot-shot furnaces, and in the transparent evening air good eyes could make out the red of the tricolour at the flagstaff.

Nearer still lay the ill-defined limit of the battery's range of accurate fire. Wittgenstein evidently thought he was close to it, for he had already broken out the Hamburg jack.

If the ruse had taken, if the watchers on that hill had been deceived, the Minnie would pass the invisible frontier unharmed: if not she would probably be damaged, possibly sunk. In his telescope Jack could see the artillery-men busy about their batteries, and the smoke from the furnaces had increased.

'Surely to God they can reach this far?' he said to himself, standing there on the forecastle with his hands clasped behind his back. 'Forty-two pounders, and with all that height

Closer, closer still. And at last the long-expected flashes, the jetting smoke, and then the roar, deeper than the guns of any ship. 'Cast off the drag-sail. Stand by the starboard guns,' he cried; and as he spoke the shot pitched, well-grouped and in a deadly true line, a cable's length beyond the Ariel. Beyond the Ariel, by God. 'Hard a-weather,' he cried. 'Fire as they bear.'

The Ariel turned on her heel so fast that the broadside went off as one gun: it should have been a harmless discharge for carronades at this range, but one freakish ricochet went home, piercing the Minnie's mizen topsail. Jack had not time to notice that, however; he was wholly taken up with manoeuvring his ship out of the shocking fire that opened upon her. They had lured him in, well within the limit, and now the sea spurted white on either hand. Had he not had a fine brisk breeze and a handy crew he must have been severely mauled, if not sunk, by the tons of red-hot iron they flung at him with such appalling accuracy. As it was his sails were much tattered, a fire had started in the starboard head, one cutter had been destroyed and the foretopgallantmast wounded before he ran out of range. When he was quite sure that the upper batteries were not playing fox, but were in fact unable to reach him, he brought the Ariel to the wind, told Hyde to set about knotting and splicing and bending new sails, and ran up to the maintop.