Patrick O'Brian - H.M.S. Surprise

Half past three in the morning; a strong north-​easter howling among the chimney-​pots of Bath; the sky clear, and a lop-​sided moon peering down into the Paragon. The door of number seven opened just enough to let Sophie out and then slammed with a most horrid crash, drawing the attention of a group of drunken soldiers, who instantly gave tongue. Sophie walked with a great air of resolution and purpose towards the corner, seeing with despair no sign of a coach - nothing but a row of doorways stretching on for ever under the moon, quite unearthly, strange, inhuman, deserted, and inimical. Steps behind her, overtaking - faster and faster; a low cry, ‘It’s me, miss, Bonden,’ and in a moment they were round the corner, climbing into the old leather smell of the first of two post-​chaises drawn up at a discreet distance from the house. The postboys’ red jackets looked black in the moon.

Her heart was going so fast that she could hardly speak for five minutes. ‘How strange it is at night,’ she said when they were climbing out of the town. ‘As though everyone were dead. Look at the river - it is perfectly black. I have never been out at this time before.’

‘No, my dear, I do not suppose you have,’ said Stephen.

‘Is it like this every night?’

‘It is sweeter sometimes - this cursed wind blows warm in other latitudes - but always at night the old world comes into its own. Hark there, now. Do you hear her? She must be in the woods above the church.’ The hellish shrieking of a vixen it was, enough to chill the blood of an apostle; but Sophie was busy peering at Stephen in the faint moonlight, plucking his garments. ‘Why,’ she cried, ‘you have come out without even so much as your dreadful torn old greatcoat. Oh, Stephen, how can you be so abandoned? Let me wrap you in my cloak; it is lined with fur.’

Stephen eagerly resisted the cloak, explaining that once the skin had a certain degree of protection, once it was protected from dissipating its natural heat by a given depth of integument, then all other covering was not only superfluous but harmful.

‘The case is not the same with a horseman, however,’ he said. ‘I strongly recommended Thomas Pullings to place a sheet of oiled silk between his waistcoat and his shirt before setting out; the mere motion of the horse, independently of the velocity of the wind, would carry away the emanent cushion of warmth, could it pierce so far. In a reasonably-​constructed coach, on the other hand, we need fear nothing of the kind. Shelter from the wind is everything; the contented Eskimo, sheltered in his house of snow, laughs at the tempest, and passes his long winter’s night in hospitable glee. A reasonably-​constructed carriage, I say: I should never advise you to career over the steppes of Tartary in a tarantass with your bosom bare to the winds, or covered only with a cotton shift. Nor yet a jaunting-​car.’

Sophia promised that she should never do so; and wrapped in this capacious cloak they once again calculated the distance from London to Bath, Pullings’s speed in going up, Jack’s in coming down. ‘You must make up your mind not to be disappointed, my dear,’ said Stephen. ‘The likelihood of his keeping - not the appointment, but rather the suggestion that I threw out, is very slight. Think of the accidents in a hundred miles of road, the possibility, nay the likelihood, of his falling off - the horse flinging him down and breaking its knees, the dangers of travel, such as footpads, highwaymen . . . but hush, I must not alarm you.’

The post-​chaises had slowed to little more than a walk. ‘We must be near the Cross,’ said Stephen, looking out of the window. Here the road mounted between trees - the white ribbon was lost in long patches of total darkness. Into the trees, whistling and sighing in the north-​easter; and there, in one of the pools of light among them, stood a horseman. The postboy caught sight of him at the same moment, reined in, and called back to the chaise behind, ‘It’s Butcher Jeffrey, Tom. Shall ee turn around?’

‘There’s two more of un behind us, terrible great murdering devils. Do ee bide still, Amos, and be meek. Mind master’s horses, and tip ‘em the civil.’

The quick determined clip of hooves, and Sophia whispered, ‘Don’t shoot, Stephen.’

Glancing back from the open window, Stephen said, ‘My dear, I have no intention of shooting. I have -,

But now here was the horse pulled up at the window, its hot breath steaming in, and a great dark form leaning low over its withers, shutting out the moonlight and filling the chaise with the civilest murmur in the world, ‘I beg your pardon, sir, for troubling you -,

‘Spare me,’ cried Stephen. ‘Take all I have - take this young woman - but spare me, spare me!’

‘I knew it was you, Jack,’ said Sophia, clasping his hand. ‘I knew directly. Oh, I am so glad to see you, my dear!’

‘I will give you half an hour,’ said Stephen. ‘Not a moment more: this young woman must be back in her warm bed before cock-​crow.’

He walked back to the other chaise, where Killick, with infinite satisfaction, was telling Bonden of their departure from London - a hearse as far as Putney, with Mr Pullings in a mourning-​coach behind, bums by the score on either side of the road, pulling their hats off and bowing respectful. ‘I wouldn’t a missed it, I wouldn’t a missed it, no, not for a bosun’s warrant.’

Stephen paced up and down; he sat in the chaise; he paced up and down - conversed with Pullings on the young man’s Indian voyages, listened greedily to his account of the prostrating heat of the Hooghly anchorages, the stifling country behind, the unforgivable sun, the heat beating even from the moon by night. ‘If I do not reach a warm climate soon,’ he observed, ‘you may bury me, and say, “He, of mere misery, perished away.” He pressed the button of his repeater, and in a lull of the wind the little silvery bell struck four and then three for the quarters. Not a sound from the chaise ahead; but as he stood, irresolute, the door opened, Jack handed Sophia out and cried, ‘Bonden, back to the Paragon in t’other coach with Miss Williams. Come down by the mail. Sophie, my dear, jump in. God bless you.’

‘God bless and keep you, Jack. Make Stephen wrap himself in the cloak. And remember, for ever and ever

- whatever they say, for ever and ever and ever.’

The sun beat down from its noon-​day height upon Bombay, imposing a silence upon that teeming city, so that even in the deepest bazaars the steady beat of the surf could be heard - the panting of the Indian Ocean, dull ochre under a sky too hot to be blue, a sky waiting for the south-​west monsoon; and at the same moment far, far to the westward, far over Africa and beyond, it heaved up to the horizon and sent a fiery dart to strike the limp royals and topgallants of the Surprise as she lay becalmed on the oily swell a little north of the line and some thirty degrees west of Greenwich.

The blaze of light moved down to the topsails, to the courses, shone upon the snowy deck, and it was day. Suddenly the whole of the east was day: the sun lit the sky to the zenith and for a moment the night could be seen over the starboard bow, fleeting away towards America. Mars, setting a handsbreadth above the western rim, went out abruptly; the entire bowl of the sky grew brilliant and the dark sea returned to its daily blue, deep blue.

‘By your leave, sir,’ cried the captain of the afterguard, bending over Dr Maturin and shouting into the bag that covered his head. ‘If you please, now.’

‘What is it?’ asked Stephen at last, with a bestial snarl.

‘Nigh on four bells, sir.’

‘Well, what of it? Sunday morning, surely to God, and you would be at your holystoning?’ The bag, worn against the moon-​pall, stifled his words but not the whining tone of a man jerked from total relaxation and an erotic dream. The frigate was stifling between-​decks; she was more than ordinarily overcrowded with Mr Stanhope and his suite; and he had slept on deck, walked upon by each changing watch.