Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

‘If you please, my lord: I should be most grateful.’

‘Very good. Then let us make it so. No - no thanks, I beg,’ he said, holding up his hand and looking Jack in the eye. ‘This is no plum: I wish it were. But you have a broadside weight of metal greater than many a frigate. Given the opportunity, I am sure you will distinguish yourself, and the Board will be happy to make you post as soon as there is fresh occasion. Now as to officers and followers, I shall be glad to fall in with your wishes as far as possible. Your first lieutenant is already appointed: Mr Parker, recommended by the Duke of Clarence.’

‘I should be happy to have my surgeon and Thomas Pullings, my lord, master’s mate in the Sophie: he passed for lieutenant in ‘01.’

‘You wish him to be made?’

‘If you please, my lord.’ It was a good deal to ask, and he might have to sacrifice the rest of his patronage; but as he felt the balance of this interview, he could risk it.

‘Very well. What else?’

‘If I might have two of the midshipmen, my lord?’

‘Two? Yes. . . I think so. You mentioned your surgeon. Who was he?’

‘Dr Maturin, my lord.’

‘Dr Maturin?’ said Lord Melville, looking up.

‘Yes, my lord: you may have seen him at Lady Keith’s. He is my particular friend.’

‘Aye,’ said Lord Melville, looking down. ‘I mind him. Weel, Sir Evan will send you your orders by the messenger today. Or should you rather wait while they are writing out?’

A few hundred yards from the Admiralty, in St James’s Park, Dr Maturin and Miss Williams paced the gravel by the ornamental pond. ‘It never ceases to amaze me,’ said

Stephen, ‘when I see these ducks. Cots - any man can swallow cots, those deeply vulgar birds, and even the half-​domesticated mallard. But the high-​bred pintail, the scaup, the goldeneye! I have crept on my belly in the freezing bog to catch a glimpse of them a furlong off, only to see them lift and away before I had them in my glass; and yet here they are in the heart of a roaring modern city, swimming about as cool as you please, eating bread! Not taken, not pinioned, but straight in from the high northern latitudes! I am amazed.’

Sophia looked earnestly at the birds and said that she too found it truly astonishing. ‘Poor coots,’ she added, ‘they always seem so cross. So that is the Admiralty?’

‘Yes. And I dare say Jack knows his fate by now. He will be behind one of those tall windows on the left.’

‘It is a noble building,’ said Sophia. ‘Perhaps we might see it a little closer to? To see it in its true proportions. Diana said he was looking quite thin, and not at all well. Diminished, was what she said.’

‘He has aged, maybe,’ said Stephen. ‘But he still eats for six; and although I should no longer call him grossly obese, he is far too fat. I wish I could say the same for you, my dear.’ Sophia had indeed grown thinner; it suited her in that it took away that last hint of childishness and brought out the hidden strength of her features; but at the same time her removed, mysterious, sleepy look had disappeared, and now she was a young woman wide awake- an adult. ‘If you had seen him last night at Lady Keith’s, you would not have worried. To be sure, he lost the rest of his ear in the Indiaman - but that was nothing.

‘His ear!’ cried Sophia, turning white and coming to a dead halt in the middle of the Parade.

‘You are standing in a puddle, my dear. Let me lead you to dry land. Yes, his ear, his right ear, or what there was left of it. But it was nothing. I sewed it on again; and as I say, if you had seen him last night, you would have been easy in your mind.’

‘What a good friend you are to him, Dr Maturin. His other friends are so grateful to you.’

‘I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.’

‘What a providence it is that he has you by: I am afraid he sometimes hazards himself very thoughtlessly.’

‘He does, too.’

‘Yet I do not think I could have borne to see him. I was very unkind to him when last we met.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘It is dreadful to be unkind: one keeps remembering it.’ Stephen looked at her with deep affection: she was a lovely creature, unhappy, with a line across that broad forehead; but he said nothing.

Clocks all over Westminster began to tell the hour, and Sophie cried, ‘Oh, we are shockingly late. I promised Mama - she will be so anxious. Come, let us run.’

He gave her his arm and they hurried across the park, Stephen guiding her, for her eyes were dim with tears and every three steps she glanced over her shoulder to look at the windows of the Admiralty.

These windows, for the most part, belonged to the official apartments of the Lords Commissioners; those which sheltered Jack were on the far side of the building, so placed that he could see the courtyard. He was, in fact, in the waiting-​room, where he had spent many an anxious, weary hour in the course of his career, and where he had now been waiting since his interview long enough to count a hundred and twenty-​three men and two women walk in or out of the archway. A good many other officers shared the room with him, the company changing as the day wore on; but none of them were waiting, as he was waiting, with their appointment and their orders crackling in their bosoms - his was as strange a case of waiting as the porters had ever seen, and it excited their curiosity.

His was an absurd position. In one pocket he had this beautiful document requesting and requiring him to repair on board His Majesty’s sloop Polychrest, and in the other a flaccid purse with a clipped groat in it and no more, all the rest having gone in customary presents. The Polychrest meant safety, or so he believed, and the Portsmouth mail left at eleven o’clock that night; but he would have to get from Whitehall to Lombard Street without being taken; he would have to traverse London, a conspicuous uniformed figure. In any case he must communicate with Stephen, who expected him at the cottage. Yet he dared not leave the Admiralty: if he were taken at this stage he would hang himself out of mere fury, and he had already had a most unpleasant fright when he was crossing the hall from the Secretary’s office and a porter told him that ‘a little cove in black and a scrub wig had been asking for him by name.’

‘Send him about his business, will you? Is Tom here?’

‘Oh, no, sir. Tom’s not on duty till Sunday night. a shifty little cove in black, sir.’

For the last forty minutes he had seen this slight black vaguely legal figure crossing and recrossing the passage into Whitehall, peering into coaches as they stopped and even mounting on the step: once he had seen him talking with two burly great fellows, Irish chairmen or bailiff’s men dressed as chairmen - a common disguise for bums.

Jack was not in good odour with the porters that day; he had not produced a shower of gold, not as who should say a shower; but they had a smell of the truth and they naturally took his part against the civil power. When one came in with fresh coals he quietly observed, ‘Your little chap with the cauliflower car is still hanging about outside the arch, sir.’

‘Cauliflower ear’ - had he heard that before how happy he would have been! He darted to the window, and after some minutes of peering he said, ‘Be a good fellow and desire him to step into the hall. I will see him at once.’

Mr Scriven, the literary man, came across the courtyard; he was looking old and tired; his ear was hideously swollen. ‘Sir,’ he said in a voice that quavered with anxiety, ‘Dr Maturin bids me tell you that all was well in Seething Lane, and he hopes you will join him at the Grapes, by the Savoy, if you are not bespoke. I am to fetch a coach into the court. I have been trying to do my errand, sir . . . I hope…’