Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

An ensign and his flimsy little wench came in, hesitated on seeing Jack, and settled in the far corner, slapping and pushing each other for want of words. The woman of the house brought candles and asked whether he should like anything more; he looked out of the window at the gathering twilight and said no - what did he owe her, and for the men in the tap?

‘One and nine pence,’ said the woman; and while he felt in his pockets she stared him full in the face with an open, ignorant, suspicious, avid curiosity, her eyes screwed close and her upper lip drawn back over her three yellow teeth. She did not like the cloak he wore over his uniform; she did not like the sobriety of his men, nor the way they kept themselves to themselves; again, gentlemen as were gentlemen called for wine, not beer; he had made no response to Betty’s advances nor to her own modest proposal of accommodation; she wanted no pouffes in her house, and she should rather have his room than his company.

He looked into the tap, told Bonden to wait for him at the boat, and walked out by the back way, straight into a company of whores and soldiers. Two of the whores were fighting there in the alley, tearing one another’s hair and clothes, but the rest were cheerful enough, and two of the women called to him, coming alongside to whisper their talents, their prices, and their clean bill of health.

He walked up to New Place. The demure look that accompanied the ‘not at home’ had convinced him that he should see Diana’s light. A faint glow between the drawn curtains up there: he checked it twice, walking up and down the road, and then fetched a long cast round the houses to reach a lane that led behind New Place. The palings of the wilderness were no great obstacle, but the walled inner garden needed his cloak over the broken glass on top and then a most determined run and leap. Down in the garden the noise of the sea was suddenly cut off -a total, listening silence and the falling dew as he stood there amongst the crown imperials. Gradually the silence listened less; there were sounds inside the house - talking from various windows, somebody locking doors, closing the lower shutters. Then a quick heavy thudding on the path, the deep wuff-​wuff of dog Fred, the mastiff, who was free of the garden and the yard by night, and who slept in the summerhouse. But dog Fred was a mute creature; he knew Captain Aubrey - thrust his wet nose into his hand -and said no more. He was not altogether easy in his mind, however, and when at last Jack gained the mossy path he followed him to the house, grumbling, pushing the back of his knees. Jack took off his coat, folded it on the ground, and then his sword: Fred at once lay on the coat, guarding both it and the sword.

For months and months past a builder had been replacing the roof-​tiles of New Place; his improvised crane, with its pulley, projecting from the parapet and its rope hung there still, hooked to a bucket. Jack quickly made the ends fast, tried it, took the strain, and swung himself up. Up, hand over hand, past the library, where Mr Lowndes was writing at his desk, past a window giving on to the stairs, up to the parapet. From this point it was only a few steps to Diana’s window, but half-​way up, before ever he reached the parapet, he had recognized Canning’s great delighted laugh, a crowing noise that rose from a deep bass, a particular laugh, that could not be mistaken. For all that he went the whole way, until he was there, sitting on the parapet with a sharp-​angled view of all of the room that mattered. For three deep breaths he might have burst through: it was extraordinarily vivid, the lit room, the faces, their expressions picked out by the candlelight, their intense life and their unconsciousness of a third person. Then shame, unhappiness, extreme weariness put out the rest, extinguished it utterly. No rage, no fire: all gone, and nothing to take their place. He moved some paces off to hear and see no more, and after a while he reached out to the end of the crane for the rope; automatically he frapped the two strands, took a sailor’s grip on it, swung himself out into the darkness, and went down, down and down, pursued by that intensely amused laughter.

Stephen spent Friday morning writing, coding and decoding; he had rarely worked so fast or so well, and he had the agreeable feeling that he had produced a clear statement of a complex situation. From a moral scruple he had refrained from his habitual dose, and he had spent the greater part of the night in a state of lucid consideration. When he had tied up all the ends, sealed his papers in a double cover and addressed the outer to Captain Dundas, he turned to his diary. ‘This is perhaps the final detachment; and this is perhaps the only way to live - free, surprisingly light and well, no diminution of interest but no commitment: a liberty I have hardly ever known. Life in its purest form - admirable in every way, only for the fact that it is not living, as I have ever understood the word. How it changes the nature of time! The minutes and the hours stretch out; there is leisure to see the movement of the present. I shall walk out beyond Walmer Castle, by way of the sand-​dunes: there is a wilderness of time in that arenaceous world.’

Jack also took a spell at his writing-​table, but in the forenoon he was called away to the flagship.

‘I have worn you down a trifle, my spark,’ thought Admiral Harte, looking at him with satisfaction. ‘Captain Aubrey, I have orders for you. You are to look into Chaulieu. Thetis and Andromeda chased a corvette into the harbour. She is believed to be the Fanciulla. There are also said to be a number of gunboats and prams preparing to move up the coast. You are to take all possible measures, consistent with the safety of your ship, to disable the one and to destroy the others. And the utmost despatch is essential, do you hear me?’

‘Yes, sir. But form’s sake, I must represent to you that the Polychrest needs to be docked, that I am still twenty-​three men short of my complement, that she is making eighteen inches of water an hour in a dead calm, and that her leeway renders inshore navigation extremely hazardous.’

‘Stuff, Captain Aubrey: my carpenters say you can perfectly well stay out another month. As for her leeway, we all make leeway: the French make leeway, but they are not shy of running in and out of Chaulieu.’ In case the hint should not have been clear enough, he repeated his last remark, dwelling on the word shy.

‘Oh, certainly, sir,’ said Jack with real indifference. ‘I spoke, as I say, purely for form’s sake.’

‘I dare say you want your orders in writing?’

‘No, thank you, sir; I believe I shall remember them quite easily.’

Returning to the ship he wondered whether Harte understood the nature of the service he required of the Polychrest - how very like a death-​warrant these orders might be: he was not much of a seaman. On the other hand, he had vessels at his command more suitable by far for the intricate passage of the Ras du Point and the inner roads - the Aetna and the Tartarus would do the job admirably. Ignorance and malice in fairly even parts,

he decided. Then again, Harte might have relied upon his contesting the order, insisting upon a survey, and so dishing himself: if so, he had chosen the moment well, as far as the Polychrest was concerned. ‘But what does it signify?’ he said, running up the side with a look of cheerful confidence. He gave the necessary orders, and a few minutes later the blue peter broke out at the foretopmasthead, with a gun to call attention to it. Stephen heard the gun, saw the signal, and hurried back to Deal.

There were several other Polychrests ashore- Mr Goodridge, Pullings to see his sweetheart, Babbington with his doting parents, half a dozen liberty-​men. He joined them on the shingle, where they were bargaining for a hoveller, and in ten minutes he was back in the pharmaceutical-​bilgewater-​damp-​book smell of his own cabin. He had hardly closed his door before a hundred minute ties began to fasten insensibly on him, drawing him back into the role of a responsible naval surgeon, committed to complex daily life with a hundred other men.