Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

Jack eyed it: this was perhaps the most nauseating dose that Stephen had ever yet compounded, so vile that health itself was scarcely worth the price of swallowing it. ‘I can’t get it down without a drink,’ he said.

‘Hold hard,’ cried Killick, putting his head and shoulders out of the window. ‘Post-​boy, ahoy. Pull in at the next public, d’ye hear me, there? Now, sir,’ - as the carriage came to a stop - I’ll just step in and see if the coast is clear.’ Killick had spent little of his life ashore, and most of that little in an amphibious village in the Essex mud; but he was fly; he knew a great deal about landsmen, most of whom were crimps, pickpockets, whores, or officials of the Sick and Hurt Office, and he could tell a gum a mile off. He saw them everywhere. He was the worst possible companion for a weak, reduced, anxious debtor that could well be found, the more so in that his absolute copper bottomed certainty of being a right deep file, no sort or kind of a flat, carried a certain conviction. By way of a ruse de guerre he had somehow acquired a clergyman’s hat, and this, combined with his earrings, his yard of pigtail, his watchet-​blue jacket with brass buttons, his white trousers and low silver-​buckled shoes, succeeded so well that several customers followed him from the tap-​room to gaze while he leaned in and said to Jack, ‘It’s no go, sir. I seen some slang coves in the tap. You’ll have to drink it in the shay. What’ll it be, sir? Dog’s nose? Flip? Come, sir,’ he said, with the authority of the well over the sick in their care, or even out of it, ‘What’ll it be? For down it must go, or it will miss the tide.’ Jack thought he would like a little sherry. ‘Oh no, sir. No wine. The Doctor said, No wine. Porter is more the mark.’ He brought back sherry - had been obliged to call for wine, it being a shay - and a mug of porter; drank the sherry, gave back such change as he saw fit, and watched the bolus go gasping, retching down, helped by the porter. ‘That’s thundering good physic,’ he said. ‘Drive on, mate.’

The next time he woke Jack it was from a deeper sleep. ‘Eh? What’s amiss?’ cried Jack.

‘We’m alongside, sir. We’m there.’

‘Ay. Ay. So we are,’ said Jack, gazing at the familiar doorway, the familiar courtyard, and suddenly coming to life. ‘Very well. Killick, stand off and on, and when you see my signal, drive smartly in and pick me up again.’

He was sure of a fairly kind reception at the Admiralty: the cutting-​out of the Fanciulla had been well spoken of in the service and very well spoken of in the press - it had come at a time when there was little to fill the papers and when people were feeling nervous and low in their spirits about the invasion. The Polychrest could not have chosen a better moment for sinking; nothing could have earned her more praise. The journalists were delighted with the fact that both ships were nominally slops and that the Fanciulla carried almost twice as many men; they did not point out that eighty of the Fanciullas were peaceable Italian conscripts, and they were good enough to number the little guns borne by the transports in the general argument. One gentleman in the Post, particularly dear to Jack’s heart, had spoken of ‘this gallant, nay, amazing feat, carried out by a raw crew, far below its complement and consisting largely of landsmen and boys. It must show the French Emperor the fate that necessarily awaits his invasion flotilla; for if our lion-​hearted tars handle it so roughly when it is skulking behind impenetrable sand-​banks under the cross-​fire of imposing batteries, what may they not do should it ever put to sea?’ There was a good deal more about hearts of oak and honest tars, which had pleased the Fanciullas - the more literate hearts perpetually read it to the rest from the thumbed copies that circulated through the ship - and Jack knew that it would please the Admiralty too: in spite of their lordly station they were as sensitive to loud public praise as common mortals. He knew that this approval would grow after the publication of his official letter, with its grim list of casualties - seventeen dead and twenty-​three wounded - for civilians liked to have sailors’ blood to deplore, and the more a victory cost the more it was esteemed. If only little Parslow could have contrived to get himself knocked on the head it would have been perfect. He also knew something that the papers did not know, but that the Admiralty did: the Fanciulla’s captain had not had the time or the wit to destroy his secret papers, and for the moment the French private signals were private no longer - their codes were broken.

But as he sat there in the waiting-​room thoughts of past misdeeds filled his uneasy mind; anything that Admiral Harte’s malignance could do would have been done; and in fact he had not behaved irreproachably in the Downs. Stephen’s warning had fallen on a raw conscience: and it could only have come through Dundas - Dundas, who was so well placed to know what they thought of his conduct here. If his logs and order-​books were sent for, there would be some things he would find hard to explain away. Those strokes of profound cunning, those little stratagems that had seemed individually so impenetrable, now in the mass took on a sadly imbecile appearance. And how did the Polychrest come to be on the sand-​bank in the first place? Explain that, you infernal lubber. So he was more than usually pleased when Lord Melville rose from behind his desk, shook him warmly by the hand, and cried, ‘Captain Aubrey, I am delighted to see you. I said you would be sure to distinguish yourself, do you recall? I said so in this very room. And now you have done so, sir: the Board is content, pleased, eminently satisfied with its choice of you as commander of the Polychrest, and with your conduct at Chaulieu. I wish you could have done so with less cost: I am afraid you suffered terribly both in your ship’s company and in your person. Tell me,’ he said, looking at Jack’s head, ‘what is the nature of your wounds? Do they. . . do they hurt?’

‘Why, no, my lord, I cannot say they do.’

‘How were they inflicted?’

‘Well, my lord, the one was something that dropped on my head - a piece of mortar-​shell, I imagine; but luckily I was in the water at the time, so it did little damage, only tearing off a handsbreadth of scalp. The other was a sword-​thrust I did not notice at the moment, but it seems it nicked some vessel, and most of my blood ran out before I was aware. Dr Maturin said he did not suppose there was more than three ounces left, and that mostly in my toes.’

‘You are in good hands, I find.’

‘Oh yes, my lord. He clapped a red-​hot iron to the place, brought up the bleeding with a round turn, and set me up directly.’

‘Pray what did he prescribe?’ asked Lord Melville, who was intensely interested in his own body, and so in bodies in general.

‘Soup, my lord. Enormous quantities of soup, and barley-​water, and fish. Physic, of course - a green physic. And porter.’

‘Porter? Is porter good for the blood? I shall try some today. Dr Maturin is a remarkable man.’

‘He is indeed, my lord. Our butcher’s bill would have been far, far longer but for his devotion. The men think the world of him: they have subscribed to present him with a gold-​headed cane.’

‘Good. Good. Very good. Now I have your official letter here, and I see that you mention all your officers with great approval, particularly Pullings, Babbington and Goodridge, the master. By the bye, I hope young Babbington’s wound is not too grave? His father voted with us in the last two divisions, out of compliment to the service.’

‘His arm was broken by a musket-​shot as we boarded, my lord, but he tucked it into his jacket and fought on in a most desperate fashion; and afterwards, as soon as it was dressed, he came on deck again and behaved extremely well.’