Patrick O'Brian - The surgeon's mate

'Not above a few hundred times,' said Jack. 'We call it the day-blink: it often happens when the breeze lies just so, or dies away - it will clear as soon as the sun is well up. But I am very grateful for having been called aloft before breakfast to see it again. Put your foot here, round the stirrup - you have fouled the stirrup. Your shoe is foul of the mouse. Mr Jagiello, leave that becket alone. Stephen, give me your hand: handsomely, now; handsomely does it.' At this point Stephen dropped abruptly from the yard; not perpendicularly, however, for Jack's powerful arm swung him inwards to the cap, while the shoe continued its free fall to the deck. 'Thank you, Jack,' he said, gasping, as he was settled on the crosstrees with a turn about his middle.

'I am obliged to you. I must have made a false movement.'

'Perhaps you did,' said Jack. 'But what in God's name are you doing up here anyway? Jagiello, leave that becket alone. You know I have begged you both not to go above the top.'

'The fact of the matter is that Mr Jagiello is in an embarrassing position.'

'He will be in kingdom come if he don't leave go that becket. Mr Jagiello, leave go that becket: clap on to the robbens with both hands and come in to the big block in the middle.'

'We could not discuss it on the deck, since the people kept desiring us to move out of the swabbers' way, so we went up to the top; but there again buckets of water were flinging about, so we climbed still higher. He has found a woman in his bed.'

'Just so, just so,' said Jack. 'Mr Fenton, secure the Doctor's shoe.'

'Yes, sir,' said Jagiello, who had worked his way to the backbrace and whose blushing face now peered down at them. 'I found her there when I went to my cabin just now.'

'What had you been doing all night?'

'I had been playing cards in the gunroom with the Catalan officers.'

'And I collect that she is not wanted on the voyage?'

'Oh no, sir: not at all.'

It occurred to Jack that this was a very ridiculous place for a conference of such a nature, with the two landsmen poised in awkward postures between heaven and earth and himself deprived of his breakfast. He called down, 'Mr Fenton, send me up a couple of prime upperyardmen with a snatch-block and line for a whip.'

While they were coming Stephen said in a low voice, 'There: it is almost gone. And yet in its prosaic way this is almost as striking.' The mist, lifting and dissolving with the first rays of the sun, showed 783 vessels all merchantmen except for one frigate, the old Juno, three sloops-of-war and a cutter. 'Never have I had so strong an impression of the vast magnitude of sea-borne trade, of mercantile enterprise, of the interdependence of nations."

'There is Ahus,' said Jack, nodding towards a town, now clear on the shore of the bay. 'The lady will take her breakfast on dry land. Mr Fenton, lower down the gig.'

The topmen came running up, one of them bearing Stephen's shoe: Jack cast a loop round his waist, made all fast, bade him hold on to the knot, called 'Lower handsomely,' and Stephen made his ignominious descent, as he had often done before.

Jagiello followed him, and then Jack: broad grins on the quarterdeck, and a lively air of expectation. 'Now, Mr Jagiello,' said Jack, 'you must signify to the lady that she is to be over the side in two minutes. There is not a moment to be lost.'

'If you please, sir,' said Jagiello, blushing to the eyes, 'I had rather not. It would seem so unkind; and it would take so very long - tears, you know, and reclamations. Perhaps Mr Pellworm would be so infinitely obliging; he knows her, and he speaks the Swedish. Mr Pellworm is a married man.'

'You are acquainted with the lady, Mr Pellworm?'

'From afar, sir, from afar. I have seen the young person from afar. Who has not, that has ever put into Carlscrona and attended the theatre? I may have spoken to her once or twice, just to pass the time of day, as I did when she came aboard, but only when I was with officers, the young person being known to one and all, to all and sundry, sir, as the Gentlemen's Relish; and I hope I know my station. Besides, I am told she is now the Governor's private piece ... a singing harlot of enormous price, in the words of the poet. But if you wish me to turn her ashore, sir, I will speak to her now - speak to her like a Dutch uncle.'

'Ay, pray do, Mr Pellworm,' said Jack. 'A man-of-war is no place for women.'

Pellworm nodded, and he walked off with a heavy tread, composing his face into a severe, determined, and even brutal expression.

A singing harlot she might be, but it was in a singularly harsh and unmusical voice that she addressed the Ariel from over the water as the stolid, reliable, middle-aged forecastle hands rowed her ashore.

'What does she say?' asked Stephen.

'Loins as hot as a goat, Heart as cold as a stcne,' said Pellworm. 'That is poetry too.'

'It is not true. She knows nothing whatever about my loins: has never seen them,' cried Jagiello from his lurking-place on the far side of the mizen-mast. He added, 'I never invited her, and I begged her to go away.'

'If only all these problems could be resolved so easily,' murmured Jack as he watched the Gentlemen's Relish growing smaller and smaller. 'Mr Fenton, we may edge down on the Juno and pick up the gig on the way.'

Stephen glanced at him and at Jagiello. 'Poltroons,' he said to himself, 'Scrubs.' And looking along the deck he noticed that apart from a few grinning ill-conditioned men and boys most of the hands looked ashamed and concerned.

'It is a very curious thing,' said Jack to Stephen over breakfast, 'but I learn that Jagiello went ashore while we were aboard the flag, and he had not been back above half an hour before three young women put off to the ship. Two were the Swedish admiral's daughters - amazingly pretty, says Hyde - and the third was the Relish, who kills at a mile. But what I cannot for the life of me understand is what they see in him. He is a good fellow, to be sure, but he is only a boy; I doubt he shaves once a week, if that. And indeed he is rather more like a girl than anything else.'

'So it seems was Orpheus; but that did not prevent women from tearing him limb from limb. His head, his beardless head, floated down the swift Hebrus, together with his broken lyre, alas.'

'Oh my God, here is the Colonel," said Jack, grasping his cup and a piece of toast and hurrying on deck.

It was here that he spent most of the day, for a thin drizzle succeeded the mist, keeping the Colonel below. And although the convoy was not due to sail until the evening the Juno asked Jack to take up a station ahead of the main body, and moving the Ariel and her transports through this vast crowd of shipping with light and variable airs took a very long time, the more so as many of the merchantmen lay in a curiously haphazard and whimsical fashion, as though their masters could not tell starboard from larboard, hay from straw. The Captain and the Colonel met for dinner, however, when the gunroom invited them to a noble spread and when Jack endured the purgatory of an hour or so of French, mostly, as far as he could tell, about the fine women who had pursued d'Ullastret, regiments of women it seemed, married and unmarried, with some very pathetic cases among them.

The last arrivals joined the convoy from Riga, bringing up a fine breeze from the north-east: the Juno anxiously counted her charges, signalling with scarcely a pause, receiving meaningless or contradictory replies, emphasizing her orders with guns, sending her boats hither and thither to convey her captain's wishes by roaring word of mouth: yet the regulation of even so vast a convoy had an end at last, and eventually the Juno gave the word to weigh. Thousands and thousands of sails appeared, lightening the grey air over the whole spacious bay, and they moved off in three amorphous divisions, gliding gently into the night at the speed of the slowest, an ill-conceived, undermanned, over-insured pink from Cork.