Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

one hand scrabbled in vague, disordered motion.

Jack shivered: the heat of walking and of the brief struggle had worn off in this waiting pause, and he wrapped his cloak tighter; it was a raw night, with frost a certainty before dawn. More vain, irritated shaking, rough attempts at revival. ‘Jesus, what a bore,’ he said. At sea there would have been no problem, but here on land it was different - he had a different sense of tidiness ashore -and after a disgusted pause he wrapped the object in his cloak (not from any notion of humanity, but to keep the mud, blood and perhaps worse off his clothes), picked it up and walked off.

Seven stone odd was nothing much for the first hundred yards, nor the second; but the smell of his warmed burden grew unpleasant, and he was pleased to see that he was near the place he had entered the Heath, within sight of his own lit window.

‘Stephen will soon set him right,’ he thought: it was known that Stephen could raise the dead so long as the tide had not changed - had been seen to do it.

But there was no answer to his hail. The candle was low in its socket, with an unsnuffed mushroom of a wick; the fire was almost out; his note still stood propped against the milk jug. Jack put his footpad down, took the candle and looked at him. A grey, emaciated face: eyes almost closed, showing little crescents of white: stubble: blood over one half of it. A puny little narrow-​chested cove, no good to man or beast. ‘I had better leave him alone till Stephen comes,’ he thought. ‘I wonder whether there are any sausages left?’

Hours; the ticking of the clock; the quarter-​chimes from the church; steady mending of the fire, staring at the flame; the fibres quite relaxed - a kind of placid happiness at last.

The first light brought Stephen. He paused in the doorway, looking attentively at the sleeping Jack and at the wild eyes of the footpad, lashed into a windsor chair.

‘Good morning to you, sir,’ he said, with a reserved nod. ‘Good morning, sir. Oh sir, if you please -, ‘Why, Stephen, there you are,’ cried Jack. ‘I was quite anxious for you.’

‘Aye?’ said Stephen, setting a cabbage-​leaf parcel on the table and taking an egg from his pocket and a loaf from his bosom. ‘I have brought a beef-​steak to recruit you for your interview, and what passes for bread in these parts. I strongly urge you to take off your clothes, to sponge yourself all over - the copper will answer admirably -and to lie between sheets for an hour. Rested, shaved, coffee’d, steaked, you will be a different man. I urge the more strongly, because there is a louse crawling up your collar - pediculus vestimenti seeking promotion to p.capitis - and where we see one, we may reasonably assume the hidden presence of a score.’

‘Pah!’ said Jack, flinging off his coat. ‘This is what comes of carrying that lousy villain. Damn you, sir.’

‘I am most deeply sorry, sir: most heartily ashamed,’ said the footpad, hanging his head.

‘You might take a look at him, Stephen,’ said Jack. ‘I gave him a thump on the head. I shall go and light the copper and then turn in. You will give me a call, Stephen?’

‘A shrewd thump,’ said Stephen, mopping and probing. ‘A very shrewd thump, upon my word. Does this hurt?’

‘No more than the rest, sir. It is benevolent in you to trouble with me . . . but, oh sir, if I might have the liberty of my hands? I itch unbearably.’

‘I dare say you do,’ said Stephen, taking the bread-​knife to the knot. ‘You are strangely infested. What are these marks? They are certainly older than last night.’

‘Oh, no more than extravasated blood, sir, under your correction. I tried to take a purse over towards Highgate last week. A person with a wench, which seemed to give me a certain . . . however, he beat me cruelly, and threw me into a pond.’

‘It may be that your talents do not altogether fit you for purse-​taking: certainly your diet does not.’

‘Yet it was my diet, or rather my want of diet, that drove me to the Heath. I have not eaten these five days.’

‘Pray, have you had any success?’ asked Stephen. He broke the egg into the milk, beat it up with sugar and the remaining drops of rum, and began to feed the footpad with a spoon.

‘None, sir. Oh how I thank you: ambrosia. None, sir. A black-​pudding snatched from a boy in Flask Lane was my greatest feat. Nectar. None, sir. Yet I am sure if a man threatened me with a cudgel in the dark and desired me to give him my purse, I should do so at once. But not my victims, sir; they either beat me, or they declare they have no purse, or they pay no attention and walk on while I cry “Stand and deliver” beside them, or they take to abusing me - why do I not work? Am I not ashamed? Perhaps I lack the presence, the resolution; perhaps if I could have afforded a pistol . . . Might I take the liberty of begging for a little bread, sir? A very little piece of bread? There is a tiger in my bowels, if not in my appearance.’

‘You must masticate deliberately. What do you reply to their suggestions?’

‘About work, sir? Why, that I should be very glad to have it, that I should do any work I could find: I am an industrious creature, sir. Might I beg for just another slice? I could have added, that it was work that had been my undoing.’

‘Truly?’

‘Would it be proper to give an account of myself, sir?’

‘A brief account of your undoing would be quite proper.’

‘I used to live in Holywell Street, sir; I was a literary man. There were a great many of us, brought up to no trade or calling, but with a smattering of education and money enough to buy pens and a quire of paper, who commenced author and set up in that part of town. It was surprising how many of us were bastards; my own father was said to have been a judge - indeed, he may well have been: someone sent me to school near Slough for a while. A few had some little originality - I believe I had a real turn for verse to begin with - but it was the lower slopes of Helicon, sir, the sort of author that writes The Universal Directory for Taking Alive Rats or The Unhappy Birth, Wicked Life and Miserable End of that Deceitful Apostle, Judas Iscariot and pamphlets, of course - Thoughts of the Present Crisis, by a Nobleman, or A New Way of Funding the National Debt. For my part, I took to translating for the book sellers.’

‘From what language?’

‘Oh, all languages, sir. If it was oriental or classical, there was sure to be a Frenchman there before us; and as for Italian or Spanish, I could generally puzzle it out in the end. High Dutch, too: I was quite a proficient in the High Dutch by the time I had run through Fleischhacker’s Elegant Diversions and Strumpff’s Nearest Way to Heaven. I did tolerably well, sir, upon the whole, rarely going hungry or without a lodging, for I was neat, sober, punctual, and as I have said, industrious: I always kept my promised day, the printers could read my hand, and I corrected my proofs as soon as they came. But then a bookseller by the name of - but hush, I must name no names - Mr G sent for me and proposed Boursicot’s South Seas. I was very happy to accept, for the market was slow, and I had had to live for a month on The Case of the Druids impartially considered, a little piece in the Ladies’ Repository, and the druids did not run to more than bread and milk. We agreed for half a guinea a sheet; I dared not hold out for more, although it was printed very small, with all the notes set in pearl.’

‘What might that mean in terms of weekly income?’

‘Why, sir, taking the hard places with the smooth, and working twelve hours a day, it might have amounted to as much as five and twenty shillings! I was a cock-​a-​hoop, for next to the Abbé Prévost, Boursicot is the longest collection of voyages in French I know of, the longest work I had ever engaged in; and I thought I had my living for a great while ahead. My credit was good, so I moved downstairs to the two-​pair front, a handsome room, for the sake of the light; I bought some furniture and several books that I should need - some very expensive dictionaries among them.’