Patrick O'Brian: Desolation island

"Good morning, Charlotte. Good morning, Fanny,"said their father, bending down until his breeches creaked to kiss them. "Why, Fanny, you have a lump on your forehead."

"I'm not Fanny," said Charlotte, scowling. "I'm Charlotte."

"But you are wearing a blue pinafore," said Jack.

"Because Fanny put on mine; and she fetched me a swipe with her slipper, the - swab," said Charlotte, with barely contained passion.

Jack cast an apprehensive look at Mrs Williams and Sophie, but they were still cooing over the baby, and almost at the same moment Bonden brought in the post. lie put it down, a leather bag with Ashgrove Cottage engraved on its brass plate; and the children, their grandmother and their attendants leaving the room at this point, he begged pardon for being late: the fact of the matter was, it was market-day down there. Horses and cattle.

"Crowded, I dare say?"

"Uncommon, sir. But I found Mr Melklejohn and told him you was not attending at the office till Saturday.' Bonden hesitated: Jack gave him a questioning look, and he went on, "The fact of the matter is, Kill" made a purchase, a legal purchase. Which he asked me to tell you first, your honour."

"Aye?" said Jack, unlocking the bag. "A nag, I suppose:

"Well, I wish him Joy of it. He may put it in the old byre."

"Not exactly a nag, sir, though it was in a halter: two legs and a skirt, if I may say so. A wife, sir."

"What in God's name does he want with a wife?" cried

Jack, staring.

"Why, sir," said Bonden, blushing and looking quickly away from Sophie, "I can't rightly say. But he bought one, legal. It seems her bus . band and she did not agree, so he brought her to market in a halter; and Killick, he bought her, legal - laid down the pewter in sight of one and all, and shook hands on It. There was three to chooseon."

"But you cannot possibly sell your wife - treat women like cattle," cried Sophie. "Oh fie, Jack; it is perfectly barbarous."

"It does seem a Iittle strange, but it Is the custom, you know, a very old custom."

"Surely you will never countenance such a wicked thing, Captain Aubrey?"

"Why, as to that, I should not like to go against custom: common law too, for all I know. Not unless there was any constraint - undue influence, as they say. Where would the Navy be without we followed our customs? Let him come in.

"Well, Killick,"he said, when the pair stood before him, ar an ugly slab-sided middle-aged man rendered more awkward than usual by his present bashfulness, the young woman a snapping black-eyed piece, a perfect sailor's delight. "Well, Killick, I trust you are not rushing into matrimony without due consideration? Matrimony is a very serious thing."

"Oh no, sir. I considered of it: I considered of it, why, the best part of twenty minutes. There w as three to choose on, and this here - ' looking fondly at his purchase - 'was the pick of the bunch."

"But, Killick, now I come to think of it, you had a wife in Mahon. She washed my shirts. You must not commit bigamy you know: it is against the law. You certainly had a wife in Mahon."

"Which I had two, your.honour, t'other in Wapping Dock; but they was more in the roving, uncertificated line, if You follow me, sir, not bought legal, the halter put into my hand."

"Well," said Jack, -so I suppose you want to add her to the establishment. You will have to go in front of the parson first, however: cut along to the Rectory."

"Aye aye, sir," said Killick. "Rectory it is."

"Lord, Sophie," said Jack when they were alone once more. "What a coil!" He opened the bag. "One from the Admiralty, another from the Sick and Hurt Board, and one that looks as though it must be from Charles Yorke - yes, that is his seal - for me; and two for Stephen, care of you.

"I wish I could take care of him, poor dear" said Sophie, looking at them. "These are from Diana, too.' She laid them on a side table, to wait with another, addressed in the same bold determined hand to Stephen Maturin, Esqr., MD, and gazed at them in silence.

Diana Villiers was Sophie's cousin, a slightly younger woman, one with a far more dashing style and a blackhaired, dark-blue-eyed beauty that some preferred to Mrs Aubrey's: at a time when Sophie and Jack had been separated, long before their marriage, both Jack and Stephen Maturin had done all they could to win Diana's favours; and in the result Jack very nearly wrecked both his career and his marriage, while Stephen, who had supposed she would marry him at last, had been most cruelly wounded by her departure for America under the protection of a Mr Johnson - so wounded that he had lost much of his taste for life. He had supposed she would marry him, for although his reason told him that a woman of her connections, beauty, pride and ambition could not be an equal match for the illegitimate son of an Irish officer in the service of His Most Catholic Majesty and a Catalan lady, a short, disagreeably plain man whose ostensible status was that of a naval surgeon, no more, his heart was entirely lost to her, and to his infinite cost it had overruled his head.

"Even before we heard she was in England, I knew that something was working on his mind, poor dear Stephen," said Sophie. She would have added her ludicrous proof - a new wig, new coats, a dozen of the finest cambric shirts - but since she loved Stephen as few brothers are ever loved, she could not bear any ridicule to touch him. She said, "Jack, why do you not fin d him a decent servant? At t he worst of times Killick would never have allowed you to go out in a shirt a fortnight old, odd stockings, and that dreadful old coat. Why has he never had a steady, reliable man?"

Jack knew very well why Stephen had never kept a servant for any length of time, never a man who could grow used to his ways, but had contented himself with casual and preferably illiterate Marines or ship's boys or a half witted member of the after-guard: for Dr Maturin, as well as being a naval surgeon, was one of the Admiralty's most highly-valued intelligence agents, and secrecy was essential to the preservation of his life and the lives of his many contacts in the vast area controlled by Buonaparte, to say nothing of the prosecution of his work. This had necessarily come to Jack's knowledge in the course of their service together, but he did not intend to pass it on, even to Sophie, and now he made a reply to the effect that whereas by steady application you might hope to persuade a parcel of pig-headed mules, nothing, no not purchase-upon-purchase, would ever shift Stephen from his chosen path.

"Diana could, by waving her fan," said Sophie: her face was not well-suited for crossness, but now it expressed a variety of cross emotions - indignation for Stephen, displeasure at this renewed complication, and something of the disapproval or even jealousy of a woman with a very modest sexual impulse for one in whom it was quite the reverse - the whole tempered by an unwillingness to think or speak unkindly.

"I dare say she could,"said Jack. "And if she could make him happy again by doing so, I should bless the day. There was a time, you know," he went on, staring out of the window, "when I thought it was my duty as a friend - when I thought I was doing the right thing by him to keep them apart. I thought that she was just plain wicked - devilish - wholly destructive - and that she would be the end of him. But now I don't know: perhaps you should never interfere in such things: too delicate. Yet if you see a fellow walking blindfold into a pit . . . I acted for the best, according to my lights; but it may be that my lights were not of the very brightest kind."

"I am sure you were right," said Sophie, touching his shoulder to comfort him. "After all, she had shown herself to be - well, to be, what shall I say? - a light woman."

"Why, as to that," said Jack, "the older I grow, the less I think of capers of that kind. People differ so, even if they are women. There may be women for whom these things are much as they might be for a man - women for whom going to bed to a man doesn't necessarily signify, don't affect them in the essence, as I might say, and don't make whores of 'em. I beg your pardon, my dear, for using such a word."