Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

‘A bill,’ said Jack, putting it aside. ‘Oh yes you have, though. I quite forgot. Here in my pocket. I happened to see Diana Villiers yesterday and she gave me this note to deliver - said such handsome things about you, Stephen. We said what a capital shipmate you were, and what a hand with a ‘cello and a knife. She thinks the world of you…’

Perhaps: the note was kind, in its way.

My dear Stephen,

How shabbily you treat your friends - all these days without a sign of life. It is true I was horribly disagreeable when last you did me the pleasure of calling. Please forgive me. It was the east wind, or original sin, or the full moon, or something of that kind. But I have found some curious Indian butterflies - just their wings - in a book that belonged to my father. If you are not too tired, or bespoke, perhaps you might like to come and see them this evening.

D.V.

..not that there is any virtue in that. I asked her over to play with us on Thursday; she knows our trio well, although she only plays by ear. However since you must go, I will send Killick to make our excuses.’

‘Perhaps I may not leave so soon. Let us see what next week brings; the sheep are covered with wool, after all; and there is always the chapel for the bats.’

The road, pale in the darkness, Stephen riding deliberately along it, reciting an imagined dialogue. He rode up to the door, then tethered his mule to a ring, and he was about to knock when Diana opened to him.

‘Good night, Villiers,’ he said. ‘I thank you for your note.’

‘I love the way you say good night, Stephen,’ she said, smiling. She was obviously in spirits, certainly in high good looks. ‘Are you not amazed to see me here?’

‘Moderately so.’

‘All the servants are out. How formal you are, coming to the front door! I am so happy to see you. Come into my lair. I have spread out my butterflies for you.’

Stephen took off his shoes, sat deliberately on a small chair and said, ‘I have come to pay my adieux. I leave the country very soon - next week, I believe.’

‘Oh, Stephen. . . and will you abandon your friends? What will poor Aubrey do? Surely you cannot leave him now? He seems so very low. And what shall I do? I shall have no one to talk to, no one to misuse.’

‘Will you not?’

‘Have I made you very unhappy, Stephen?’

‘You have treated me like a dog at times, Villiers.’

‘Oh, my dear. I am so very sorry. I shall never be unkind again. And so you really mean to go? Oh, dear. But friends kiss when they say good-​bye. Come and just pretend to look at my butterflies - I put them out so prettily - and give me a kiss, and then you shall go.’

‘I am pitifully weak with you, Diana, as you know very well,’ he said. ‘I came slowly over Polcary, rehearsing the words in which I should tell you I had come to break, and

that I was happy to do so in kindness and friendship, with no bitter words to remember. I cannot do so, I find.’

‘Break? Oh dear me, that is a word we must never use.’

‘Never.’

Yet the word appeared five days later in his diary. ‘I am required to deceive JA, and although I am not unaccustomed to deception, this is painful to me. He endeavours to delude me too, of course, but out of a consideration for what he conceives to be my view of right conduct of his relationship with Sophia. He has a singularly open and truthful nature and his efforts are ineffectual, though persistent. She is right: I cannot go away with him in his present difficulties. Why does she increase them? Mere vice? In another age I should have said diabolic possession, and it is a persuasive answer even now - one day herself and none so charming, the next cold, cruel, full of hurt. Yet by force of repetition words that wounded me bitterly not long ago have lost their full effect; the closed door is no longer death; my determination to break grows stronger: it is becoming more than an intellectual determination. I have neither remarked this myself nor found it in any author, but a small temptation, almost an un-​temptation, can be more dominant than a great one. I am not strongly tempted to go to Mapes; I am not strongly tempted to drink up the laudanum whose drops I count so superstitiously each night. Four hundred drops at present, my bottled tranquillity. Yet I do so. Killick,’ he said, with the veiled dangerous look of a man interrupted at secret work, ‘what have you to say to me? You are confused, disturbed in your mind. You have been drinking.’

Killick stepped closer, and leaning on Stephen’s chair he whispered. ‘There’s some ugly articles below, sir, asking for the Captain. A black beetle in a scrub wig and a couple of milling coves, prize-​fighters. Awkward buggers in little round hats, and I see one of ‘em shove a staff under his coat. Bums. Sheriff’s officers.’

Stephen nodded. ‘I will deal with them in the kitchen. No, the breakfast-​room: it looks on to the lawn. Pack the Captain’s sea-​chest and my small valise. Give me those letters of his. Put the mule to the little cart and drive to the end of Foxdene lane with our dunnage.’

‘Aye aye, sir. Pack, mule and cart, and Foxdene it is.’

Leaving the bums grim and wooden in the breakfast-​room, Stephen smiled with pleasure: here at last was a concrete situation. He knew where he should find them within a mile or two; but he did not know what it would cost him when, having toiled up the chalky slope in the sun, he met their expressions of cold anger, resentment, and hostility.

‘Good morning, now,’ he said, taking off his hat. Diana gave him a distant nod and a look that pierced him cruelly. ‘You seem to have had a hot walk, Dr Maturin. How eager you must be to see -’

‘You will forgive me if I say a word to Captain Aubrey, ma’am,’ he said, with a look as cold as her own, and he led the cob aside. ‘Jack, they have come to arrest you for debt. We must cross to France tonight and so to Spain. Your chest and the little cart will be at the end of Foxdene lane by now. You shall stay with me at my house: it falls out very well. We may catch the Folkestone packet if we drive hard.’ He turned, bowed to Diana, and set off down the hill.

The drum of hooves, Diana’s voice calling, ‘Ride on, Aubrey. Ride on, I say. I must speak to Maturin,’ and she reined in beside him. ‘I must speak to you, Maturin. Stephen, would you leave and not say goodbye to me?’

‘Will you not let me go, Diana?’ he said, looking up, his eyes filling with tears.

‘No, no, no,’ she cried. ‘You must not leave me - go, yes go to France - but write to me, write to me, and come back.’ She gripped him hard with her small hand, and she was away, the turf flying behind her horse.

‘Not Folkestone,’ said Jack, guiding the mule through the grassy lanes. ‘Dover. Seymour has the Amethyst; he carries the imperial ambassador across tonight. He will give us a passage - he and I were shipmates in the Marlborough. Once aboard a King’s ship and we can tell the tipstaff to go to hell.’

Five miles later he said, ‘Stephen, do you know what that letter was you brought me? The small one, wafered?’

‘I do not.’

‘It was from Sophie. A direct letter, sent straight to me, do you hear? She says there have been reports of this Adams fellow and his pretensions, that might have given her friends uneasiness. That there was nothing to it - all God-​damned flummery - had scarcely seen him above a dozen times, though he was always closeted with Mama. She speaks of you. Sends you her very kind regards and would be so happy to see you in Bath; the weather there is charming. Christ, Stephen, I have never been so down. Fortune gone, career too maybe, and now this.’

‘I cannot tell you what a relief it is,’ he said, bending to see whether the Amethyst’s forestaysail were drawing, ‘to be at sea. It is so clear and simple. I do not mean just escaping from the bums; I mean all the complications of life on shore. I do not think I am well suited to the land.’