Patrick O'Brian - Desolation island

herself, by means of Herapath. This statement was to have been found among the papers of a dead officer bound for the East Indies. The officer was not named, though of course Martin, who had spent half his life in France and whose mother-tongue was French, was clearly indicated. Copies of the document were to be made for the authorities, and Dr Maturin, knowing that Mr Herapath was fluent in that language, was to ask him to be so good as to help with the work. Stephen was certain that the artless young man would tell his Louisa, and that Mrs Wogan would soon get transcripts out of him, whatever honourable resistance he might put up at first. That she would then laboriously encode them, poor dear, and oblige Herapath to send them from the Cape. Stephen had poisoned many sources of intelligence in his time; but if all went well, this promised to be the prettiest piece of intoxication ever that he had brought about. Such a wealth of material at his disposition! Such utterly convincing details known only to himself, to Sir Joseph, and to a few men in Paris!

"What now?" he said, angrily.

"Come quick, sir," cried a ghastly Marine. "Mr Larkin's murdered our lieutenant."

Stephen caught up his bag, locked his door, and ran to the wardroom. Three officers had pinned Larkin down, and they were tying his arms and legs. A bloody half-pike on the table. Howard lay back in his chair, his mouth and eyes wide open in his white astonished face. Larkin was still Jerking and writhing with convulsive force in delirium tremens, making a hoarse, animal roaring. They overcame his violence and carried him away. Stephen probed the wound, found the aorta severed at the crest of the arch, and observed that death had been almost instantaneous.

The master had got up from the table, they told him, just as Howard began to screw his flute together, had taken a half-pike from the bulkhead, had said, "There's for you, you flute-playing bugger', lunging straight across

between Moore and Benton, and had then fallen roaring on the deck.

"You are strangely quiet," said Mrs Wogan, as they walked upon the gangway an hour or two later. "I have made at least two witty observations, and you have not replied. Surely, Dr Maturin, you should wrap up a little more, in this damp and horrid cold?"

"I am sorry, child, to seem so low," he said, "but a little while ago one of the officers killed another in a drunken fit, the sweetest flute I ever heard. Sometimes I feel that this is indeed an unlucky ship. Many of the men say there is a Jonah aboard."

Some days later (for the Marines insisted upon a proper coffin and a plate for their lieutenant) they buried Howard in 41'15'S., 15'17'E., the Leopard heaving to the strong west wind for the purpose. Once again the log-book recorded 'committed the body of John Condom Howard to the deep' and once again Jack wrote Discharged Dead against his name.

After a melancholy, sober dinner at which Stephen was the only guest, Jack said, "Tomorrow I think we may head north. With common luck we should raise the Table Mountain in three or four days, and then we can get rid of that poor raving maniac."

They had been south of forty degrees since Thursday, and although at this season, the beginning of the austral summer, even the westerlies were not quite to be relied on north of forty-five or even forty-six, they had proved true enough for the Leopard, and together with the current they had carried her over two hundred nautical miles between one noon observation and the next day after day, with never a glimpse of the Waakzaamheid.

"Do you know, I wonder, whether the Americans have a consul at the Cape?" asked Stephen. His document was done; Herapath was copying it; the train was laid.

"I would not swear to it, but most probably they have: any number of their far eastern ships touch there, to say nothing of sealers and the like. Why do you - ' He choked his question short, and said, "What do you say to a turn on deck? The heat of that stove is killing me."

On deck Stephen pointed out one particular albatross among the half dozen following the ship. "That dark fowl is) I conceive, a nondescript species, and not exulans at all: see his cuneate tail. How I should love to visit his breeding grounds! There, you may see his tail again.'Jack gazed politely and said, "Upon my word,"but Stephen saw that the creature's tail was of no very great consequence to him, and said, "So you think we have shaken off the Dutchman? What a persistent fellow he was, to be sure."

"And devilish sly, too. I believe he was in league with the Devil, unless - ' He had been about to say 'Unless we have a witch aboard that communicates with him by a familiar spirit, as many of the hands believe: they say it is your Gipsy' but he disliked being called superstitious and in any case he did not really give much credit to the tale, so he continued, "That is to say, unless he could read my thoughts, and have private notice of the winds into the bargain. Still, this time I like to think we have lurched him good and hearty. By my reckoning he should only go north somewhere about seventy-five or eighty cast, for the south-west monsoon. Indeed, I should be quite confident of it, but for one thing."

"What thing is that, tell?"

"Why, the fact that he knows where we are bound; and that we did claw his boats most cruelly."

"I beg your pardon, sir," said Grant, walking across the deck, "but they send to tell the Doctor that Larkin is at it again.

They need scarcely have sent. The howling welled up from the master's cabin, where he lay bound, filling the quarterdeck in spite of the strong voice of the wind. "I shall be with him directly," said Stephen.

Jack paced on with a melancholy shake of his head. Ten minutes later the lookout haHed. "Sail ho. On deck there: sail ho."

"Where away?" called Jack, all thoughts of Larkin gone.

"Broad on the larboard beam, sir. Topsails on the rise."

Jack nodded to Babbington, who raced up to the masthead with a glass: some moments later his voice came down, spreading relief throughout the attentive, sHent ship. "On deck, sir. A whaler. Steering south and east."

The wardroom steward, pinned to the half-deck by the first awful hall, continued his course; and passing the Marine sentry outside the master's cabin he said, "It's not the Dutchman, mate: only a whaler, God be praised."

On the other side of the door, Stephen said to Herapath, "There. That should calm him. Pray put up the tundish and come along. We will have a dish of tea in my cabin: we have certainly deserved a dish of tea."

Herapath came along, but he would not linger, nor would he drink his tea. He had a great deal of work to do, he said, avoiding Stephen's eye, and must beg to be excused.

"Poor Michad Herapath,"wrote Stephen in his book, "he suffers much. I know the harrow's mark too well ever to mistake it, the harrow directed by a determined woman. Perhaps I shall give him a little of my laudanum, to tide him over till the Cape."

Since her hands were protected from impressment, the whaler was not unwilling to be spoken by a British man-of-war: she was the Three Brothers from London river for the Great South Sea, she said, in answer to the Leopard's 'What ship? What ship is that? Last from the Cape: no, she had not seen a single sail since she cleared False Bay.

"Come aboard and crack a bottle," called Jack over the wind and the grey heaving water. The whaler's words were balm to him; they did away with the lingering, almost superstitious doubt that had kept his eye perpetually

turning to the windward for that white fleck on the horizon that, in spite of all his calculations, would prove to be the devilish Waakzaamheid. It was notorious that whalers had the sharpest eyes of any men afloat: their livelihood depended on seeing the distant spout, often in a torn, tormented, cloud-covered waste of sea, and they always had men up there in their crow's nests, watching with the most constant eagerness: the remotest gleam of topsails could not escape them by day, nor yet by these late moonlit nights.