Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

‘By God,’ cried Jack, laying his hand on Stephen’s bosom. ‘I never told you. One of the Miss Lambs wrote to her family - her letter is in the paper - I am mentioned by name - and that fornicating brute of an attorney will have his men out after me. I shall muffle myself up and slouch my hat, and perhaps we may stand ourselves a coach once we get well into the town.’

‘Do you have to go? Is it worth running the risk of a sponging-​house and the King’s Bench for an evening’s diversion?’

‘Yes. Lord Melville will be there; and I must see Queenie. Even if I did not love her so, I have to keep all my naval interest in play - there will be the admiral and half a dozen other great men. Come. I can explain as we walk. The rout-​cake there is famous, too -,

‘I hear the squeaking of a pipistrelle! Hark! Stand still. There, there again! So late in the year; it is a prodigy.’

‘Does it mean good luck?’ asked Jack, cocking his ear for the sound.

‘A capital omen, I dare say. But shall we go on now? Gather just a little headway, perhaps?’

They reached Upper Brook Street at the height of the flood - flambeaux, links, a tide of carriages waiting to set down at number three and a counter-​current trying to reach number eight, where Mrs Darner was receiving her friends, a dense crowd on the pavements to see the guests and pass remarks upon their clothes, officious unnecessary barefoot boys opening doors or springing up behind, darting and hooting among the horses in a spirit of fun, wonderfully tedious to the anxious or despondent. Jack had meant to fly straight from the coach up the steps, but slow groups of fools, either coming on foot or abandoning their carriages at the corner of Grosvenor Square, clustered like summer bees in the entrance and blocked the way.

He sat there on the edge of his seat, watching for a gap. Arrest for debt was very common - he had always been aware of it - had had several friends carried off to sponging-​houses, from which they wrote the most piteous appeals - but it had never happened to him personally and his knowledge of the process and of the law was vague. Sundays were safe, he was sure, and perhaps the King’s birthday; he knew that peers could not be seized, that some places such as the Savoy and Whitefriars were sanctuaries, and he hoped that Lord Keith’s house might therefore share these qualities: his longing eyes were fixed upon the open door, the lights within.

‘Come on, governor,’ cried the driver.

‘Mind the step, your honour,’ said a boy, holding the door.

‘Come on, slow-​arse,’ shouted the coachman behind. ‘You ain’t going to plant a tree, are you?’

There was no help for it. Jack stepped out on to the pavement and stood by Stephen in the scarcely-​moving throng, hitching his cloak even higher round his face.

‘It’s the Emperor of Morocco,’ said a light brightly-​painted whore.

‘It’s the Polish giant from Astley’s.’

‘Show us your face, sweetheart.’

‘Hold your head up, cock.’

Some thought he was a foreigner, French dog of a Turk, others Old Moore, or Mother Shipton in disguise. He shuffled wretchedly towards the lighted doors, and when a hand clapped down on his shoulder he turned with a ferocity that pleased the crowd more than anything they had seen hitherto, except for Miss Rankin treading on her petticoat and coming down full length. ‘Aubrey!

Jack Aubrey!’ cried Dundas, his old shipmate Heneage Dundas. ‘I recognized your back at once - should have recognized you anywhere. How do you do? You have a touch of fever, I dare say? Dr Maturin, how do you do? Are you going in here? So am I, ha, ha, ha. How do you get along?’ Dundas had recently been made post into the Franchise, 36; he loved the world in general, and his cheerful, affectionate flow of talk carried them across the pavement, up the steps and into the hall.

The gathering had a strong naval flavour, but Lady Keith was also a political hostess and the friend of a great many interesting people: Jack left Stephen in conversation with a gentleman who had discovered the adamantine boron and moved through the great drawing-​room, through the less crowded gallery and to a little domed room with a buffet in it: Constantia wine, little pies, rout-​cakes, more Constantia. Here Lady Keith found him; she was leading a big man in a sky-​blue coat with silver buttons and she said, ‘Jack, dear, may I introduce Mr Canning? Captain Aubrey, of the Navy.’

Jack liked the hook of this man at once, and during the first meaningless civilities this feeling grew: Canning was a broad-​shouldered fellow, and although he was not quite so tall as Jack, his way of holding his small round head up and tilted back, with his chin in the air, made him look bigger, more commanding. He wore his own hair - what there was left of it: short tight curls round a shining calvity, though he was in his thirties, no more - and he looked like one of the fatter, more jovial Roman emperors; a humorous, good-​natured face, but one that conveyed an impression of great latent strength. ‘An ugly customer to have against you,’ thought Jack, earnestly recommending ‘one of these voluptuous little pies’ and a glass of Constantia.

Mr Canning was a Bristol merchant. The news quite astonished Jack. He had never met a merchant before, out of the way of business. A few bankers and money-​men, yes; and a poor thin bloodless set of creatures they seemed- a lower order; but it was impossible to feel superior to Mr Canning. ‘I am so particularly happy to be introduced to you, Captain Aubrey,’ he said, quickly eating two more little pies, ‘because I have known you by reputation for years and because I was reading about you in the paper only yesterday. I wrote you a letter to express my sense of your action with the Cacafuego back in ‘01, and I very nearly posted it: indeed I should have done so, with the least excuse of a nodding acquaintance or a common friend. But it would have been too great a liberty in a complete stranger, alas; and after all, what does my praise amount to? The mere noise of uninformed admiration.’

Jack made the noises of acknowledgment. ‘Too kind- an excellent crew - the Spaniard was unlucky in his dispositions.’

‘And yet not so wholly uninformed, neither,’ went on Canning. ‘I fitted out some privateers in the last war, and I took a cruise in one as far as Goree and in another to Bermuda, so I have at least some notion of the sea. No conceivable comparison, of course; but some slight notion of what such an action means.’

‘Was you ever in the Service, sir?’ asked Jack.

‘I? Why, no. I am a Jew,’ said Canning, with a look of deep amusement.

‘Oh,’ said Jack. ‘Ah?’ He turned, going through the motions of blowing his nose, saw Lord Melville looking at him from the doorway, bowed and called out ‘Good evening.’

‘And this war I have fitted out seven, with the eighth on the stocks. Now, sir, this brings me to the Bellone, of Bordeaux. She snapped up two of my merchantmen the moment war broke out again, and she took the Nereid, my heaviest privateer - eighteen twelve-​pounders - the cruise before she took you and your Indiaman. She is a splendid sailer, sir, is she not?’

‘Prodigious, sir, prodigious. Close-​hauled, with light airs, she ran away from the Blanche as easy as kiss my hand: and spilling her wind by way of a ruse, she still made six knots for Blanche’s four, though close-​hauled is Blanche’s best point of sailing. Very well handled, too: her captain was a former King’s officer.’

‘Yes. Dumanoir - Dumanoir de Plessy. I have her draught,’ said Canning, leaning over the buffet, fairly ablaze with overflowing life and enthusiasm, ‘and I am building my eighth on her lines exactly.’