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

‘It is for me, my dear. Jack said I was to be firm

- Jack loves firmness of character. He said that Lord Nelson. . .’

Far, far over the still and almost freezing air came the sound of a horn on Polcary Down. They both turned to the window. ‘Did they kill their fox, I wonder, now?’ said Stephen. ‘If Jack were home, he would know, the animal.’

‘Oh, I am so glad he is not out there on that wicked great bay,’ said Sophia. ‘It always managed to get him off, and I was always afraid he would break his leg, like young Mr Savile. Stephen, will you help me draw the curtain?’

‘I low she has grown up,’ said Stephen privately. And aloud, as he looked out of the window, holding the cord in one hand, ‘What is the name of that tree? The slim exotic, standing Ofl the lawn?’

‘We call it the pagoda-​tree. It is not a real pagoda-​tree, but that is what we call it. My uncle Palmer, the traveller, planted it; and he said it was very like.’

As soon as she had spoken Sophia regretted it - she regretted it even before the sentence was out, for she knew where the word might lead Stephen’s mind.

These uneasy intuitions are so often right: to anyone who had the least connection with India the pagoda-​tree must necessarily be associated with those parts. Pagodas were small gold coins resembling its leaves, and shaking the pagoda-​tree meant making an Indian fortune, becoming a nabob - a usual expression. Both Sophia and Stephen were concerned with India, because Diana Villiers was said to be there, with her lover and indeed keeper Richard Canning. Diana was Sophia’s cousin, once her rival for the affections of Jack Aubrey, and at the same time the object of Stephen’s eager, desperate pursuit - a dashing young woman of surprising charms and undaunted firmness of character, who had been very much part of their lives until her elopement with Mr Canning. She was the black sheep of the family, of course, the scabbed ewe, and in principle her name was never mentioned at Mapes; yet it was surprising how much they knew about her movements and how great a place she occupied in their thoughts.

The newspapers had told them a great deal, for Mr Canning was something of a public figure, a wealthy man with interests in shipping and in the East India Company, in politics (he and his relations owned three rotten boroughs, appointing members to sit for them, since they could not sit themselves, being Jews), and in the social world, Mr Canning having friends among the Prince of Wales’s set. And rumour, making its way from the next county, where his cousins the Goldsmids lived, had told them more. But even so, they had nothing like the information that Stephen Maturin possessed, for in spite of his unworldly appearance and his unfeigned devotion to natural philosophy, he had wide-​reaching contacts and great skill in using them. He knew the name of the East Indiaman in which Mrs Villiers had sailed, the position of her cabin, the names of her two maids, their relations and background (one was French, with a soldier brother taken early in the war and now imprisoned at Norman Cross). He knew the number of bills she had left unpaid, and their amount; he knew a great deal about the storm that had raged so violently in the Canning, Goldsmid and Mocatta families, and that was still raging, for Mrs Canning (a Goldsmid by birth) had no notion of a plurality of wives, and she called upon all her relations to defend her with a furious, untiring zeal - a storm that had induced Canning to leave for India, with an official mission connected with the French establishments on the Malabar coast, a rare place for gathering pagodas.

Sophia was right: these were indeed the thoughts that flooded into Stephen’s mind at the name of that unlucky tree - these and a great many more, as he sat silently by the glow of the fire. Not that they had far to travel; they hovered most of the time at no great distance, ready to appear in the morning when he woke, wondering why he was so oppressed with grief; and when they were not immediately present their place was marked by a physical pain in his midriff, in an area that he could cover with the palm of his hand.

In a secret drawer of his desk, making it difficult to open or close, lay docketed reports headed Villiers, Diana, widow of Charles Villiers, late of Bombay, Esquire, and Canning, Richard, of Park Street and Coluber House, co.

Bristol. These two were as carefully documented as any pair of State suspects working for Bonaparte’s intelligence services; and although much of this mass of paper had come from benevolent sources, a good deal of it had been acquired in the ordinary way of business, and it had cost a mint of money. Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover even clearer.

‘Why do I gather all these wounds?’ he wondered. ‘With what motive? To be sure, in war any accession of intelligence is an advance: and I may call this a private war. Is it to persuade myself that I am fighting still, although I have been beaten out of the field? Rational enough, but no doubt false - too glib it is.’ He uttered these remarks in Catalan, for being something of a polyglot he had a way of suiting his train of thought to the language that matched it best - his mother was a Catalan, his father an Irish officer, and Catalan, English, French, Castilian came to him as naturally as breathing, without preference, except for subject.

‘How I wish I had held my tongue,’ thought Sophie. She looked anxiously at Stephen as he sat there, bent and staring into the red cavern under the log. ‘Poor dear thing,’ she thought, ‘how very much he is in need of darning -how very much he needs someone to look after him. He really is not fit to wander about the world alone; it is so hard to unworldly people. How could she have been so cruel? It was like hitting a child. A child. How little learning does for a man - he knows almost nothing:

he had but to say “Pray be so good as to marry me” last summer and she would have cried “Oh yes, if you please”. I told him so. Not that she would ever have made him happy, the . . .’ Bitch was the word that struggled to make itself heard; but it struggled in vain. ‘I shall never love that pagoda-​tree again. We were so pleasant together, and now it is as though the fire had gone out it will go out, too, unless I put another log on. And it is quite dark.’ Her hand went out towards the bell-​pull to ring for candles, wavered, and returned to her lap. ‘It is terrible how people suffer,’ she thought. ‘How lucky I am:

sometimes it terrifies me. Dearest Jack. . . ‘her inner eye filled with a brilliant image of Jack Aubrey, tall, straight, cheerful, overflowing with life and direct open affection, his yellow hair falling over his post-​captain’s epaulette and his high-​coloured weather-​beaten face stretched in an intensely amused laugh: she could see the wicked scar that ran from the angle of his jaw right up into his scalp, every detail of his uniform, his Nile medal, and the heavy, curved sword the Patriotic Fund had given him for sinking the Bellone. His bright blue eyes almost vanished when he laughed - all you saw were shining slits, even bluer in the scarlet flush of mirth. Never was there anyone with whom she had had such fun - no one had ever laughed like that.

The vision was shattered by the opening of the door and a flood of light from the haIl: the squat thick form of Mrs Williams stood there, black in the doorway, and her loud voice cried, ‘What, what is this? Sitting alone in the dark?’ hcr eyes darted from the one to the other to confirm the suspicions that had been growing in her mind ever since the silence had fallen between them - a silence of which she was perfectly aware, as she had been sitting in the library close to a cupboard in the panelling: