Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

‘Bless you sir,’ said Mrs Armstrong with a jolly wheeze, ‘I been in and out of ships since I was a little maid.’ She took one basket between her teeth, two more under her left arm, and dropped into the boat like a midshipman.

‘That is an excellent woman, sir,’ said the first lieutenant, looking down into the hoveller. ‘She nursed me through a fever in Java when Mr Floris and the Dutch surgeons had given me up.’

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘there were women in the Ark, so I suppose there must be some good in ‘em; but generally speaking I have never known anything but trouble come of shipping them on a voyage - quarrels, discussions, not enough to go round, jealousies. I do not even care for them in port - drunkenness, and a sick-​list as long as your arm. Not that this has the least bearing on Mrs Gunner of course, or the other warrant officers’ wives - still less to Mr Dashwood’s sister. Ah, Stephen, there you are - ‘Simmons withdrew - ‘I was just telling the first lieutenant that you would probably be going ashore. You will take the barge, will you not? Two of the supernumeraries are not to report aboard until the morning, so you will have all the time in the world.’

Stephen looked at him with his strange pale unblinking eyes. Had that old constraint returned, that curious misery? Jack was looking conscious - unnaturally, inappropriately gay: a wretched actor. ‘Shall you not go, Jack?’ he said.

‘No, sir,’ said Jack. ‘I shall stay aboard. Between ourselves,’ he added in a much lower tone, ‘I do not believe I shall ever willingly set foot on shore again: indeed, I have sworn an oath never to risk arrest. But,’ he cried, with that painful, jarring, artificial assumption of levity that Stephen knew so well, ‘I must beg you to get some decent coffee when you go. Killick is no judge. He can tell good wine from bad, as you would expect in a smuggler; but he is no judge of coffee.’

Stephen nodded. ‘I must also buy some issue-​peas,’ he said. ‘I shall call at New Place, and I shall look into the hospital. Have you any messages?’

‘Compliments, of course, best compliments: and my very kindest wishes to Babbington and the other wounded Polychrests - this is for their comforts, if you please. Macdonald, too. Please tell Babbington I am particularly sorry not to be able to visit him - it is quite impossible.’

It was drawing towards evening when Stephen left the hospital: his patients were doing well - one shocking belly-​wound had astonished him by living - and Babbington’s arm was safe; his professional mind was easy and content as he walked up through the town towards New Place. His professional mind: but the whole of the rest of his spirit, feeling out with un-​logical antennae, sensing the immaterial, was in such a state of preparedness that he was not in any way surprised to see the house boarded and shut up.

It seemed that the mad gentleman had been driven away in a coach and four ‘weeks and weeks ago’ or ’some time last month, maybe’ or ‘before we got in the apples’, bowing from the window and laughing fit to burst his sides; and” that the coachman wore a black cockade. The servants followed in the waggon the next day, a week after, some time later, going to a little place in Sussex, to Brighton, to London town. His informants had not noticed the lady these last weeks. Mr Pope, the butler at New Place, was a proud, touch-​me-​not gentleman; all the servants were a stiff London lot, and kept themselves to themselves.

Less downright in his approach than Jack, Stephen opened the simple lock of the garden gate with a piece of wire, and the kitchen door with a Morton’s retractor. He walked composedly up the stairs, through the green-​baize door and into the hail. A tall thirty-​day clock was still going, its weight nearly touching the ground; a solemn tock-​tock that echoed through the hail and followed him up into the drawing-​room. Silence; a perfection of dustsheets, rolled carpets, ranged furniture; rays of light that came through the shutters, motes turning in them; moths; the first delicate cobwebs in unexpected places, such as the carved mantelpiece in the library, where Mr Lowndes had written some lines of Sappho large on the wall in chalk.

‘An elegant hand,’ said Stephen, as he stood to consider it. ‘The moon has set, and the Pleiades; midnight is gone; the how’ wear by, and here I lie alone: alone. Perhaps and here I, Sappho, lie alone, to give the sex. No. The sex is immaterial. It is the same for both.’

Silence; anonymous perfection; unstirring air - never a waft or a movement; silence. The smell of bare boards. A tailboy with its face turned to the wall.

In her room the same trim bare sterility; even the looking-​glass was shrouded. It was not so much severe, for the grey light was too soft, as meaningless. There was no waiting in this silence, no tension of any kind:

the creaking of the boards under his feet contained no threat, no sort of passion: he could have leapt or shrieked without affecting the inhuman vacuum of sense. It was as meaningless as total death, a skull in a dim thicket, the future gone, its past wiped out. He had the strongest feeling of the déjà-​vu that he had ever experienced, and yet it was familiar enough to him, that certain knowledge of the turn of a dream, the sequence of words that would be said by a stranger in a coach and of his reply, the disposition of a room he had never seen, even to the pattern of the paper on its walls.

In the waste-​paper-​basket there were some balled-​up sheets, the only imperfection, apart from the living clock, in this desert of negation, and the only exception to the completeness of his déjà-​vu. ‘What indeed am I looking for?’ he said, and the sound of his voice ran through the open rooms. ‘An out-​of-​date announcement of my death?’ But they were lists in a servant’s hand, quite meaningless, and one paper where a pen had been tried - spluttering lines of ink that might have had a meaning once, but none that could be understood. He tossed them back, stood for a long moment listening to his heart, and walked straight into her dressing-​room. Here he found what he had known he should find: the stark bareness, the pretty satinwood furniture huddled against the wall was of no importance, did not signify; but here, coming from no particular shelf or cupboard, there was the ghost of her scent, now a little stronger, now so tenuous that his most extreme attention could hardly catch it.

‘At least,’ he said, ‘this is not the horror of the last.’

He closed the door with the greatest caution, walked down into the hail; stopped the clock, setting his mark upon the house, and let himself out into the garden. He turned the lock behind him, walked along the leaf-​strewn, already neglected paths, out by the green door and so to the road along the coast. With his hands behind his back and his eyes on this road as it streamed evenly beneath him, watching its flow while there was still any day to see, he followed it until he reached the lights of Deal. Then, remembering that he had left his boat at Dover, he turned and paced the smooth miles back again. ‘It is very well,’ he said. ‘I should have sat in the parlour of an inn, in any case, until I could return and go to bed without any conversation or civilities. This is better by far. I rejoice in this even, sandy road, stretching on and on for ever.’

The morning was rich in such events as the introduction of Mr Floris, the surgeon, his invitation to view the sick-​bay, equipped with his personally-​invented wind-​sail to bring fresh air below, and his flattering eagerness, his flattering deferential eagerness for Dr Maturin’s opinion on Wallace - as clear a case for instant suprapubic cystotomy as Stephen had ever seen; and the appearance of Mrs Miller and her child, bright and early, for the Lively was at single anchor, with the blue peter flying.