Patrick O'Brian - Master & Commander

Very gently he stretched out his finger and stroked the toad's throat: the toad swelled a little and moved its crossed hands; then sat easy, gazing back.

The sun rose and rose. The night had not been cold at any time, but still the warmth was grateful. Black wheatears that must have a brood not far: one of the smaller eagles in the sky. There was a sloughed snake's skin in the bush Where he pissed, and its eye-covers were perfect, startlingly crystalline.

'What am I to- think of Captain Aubrey's invitation?' he said aloud, in that great emptiness of light and air – all the more vast for the inhabited patch down there and its movement, and the checkered fields behind, fading into pale dun formless hills. 'Was it merely Jack ashore? Yet he was such a pleasant, ingenuous companion.' He smiled at the recollection. 'Still and all, what weight can be attached to? We had dined extremely well: four bottles, or possibly five. I must not expose myself to an affront. He turned it over and over, arguing against his hopes, but coming at last to the conclusion that if he could make his coat passably respectable – and the dust does seem to be getting it off, or at least disguising it, he said – he would call on Mr Florey at the hospital and talk to him, in a general way, about the naval surgeon's calling. He brushed the ants from his wig and settled it on his head: then as he walked down towards the edge of the road – the magenta spikes of gladioli in the taller grass – the recollection of that unlucky name stopped him in his stride. How had he come to forget it so entirely in his sleep? How was it possible that the name James Dillon had not presented itself at once to his waking mind?

'Yet it is true there are hundreds of Dillons,' he reflected. 'And a great many of them are called James, of course.'

'Christe,' hummed James Dillon under his breath, shaving the red-gold bristles off his face in what light could make its way through the scuttle of the Burford's number twelve gunport. 'Christe eleison. Kyrie… 'This was less piety in James Dillon than a way of hoping he should not cut himself; for like so many Papists he was somewhat given to blasphemy. The difficulty of the planes under his nose silenced him, however, and when his upper lip was clean he could not hit the note again. In any case, his mind was too busy to be seeking after an elusive neume, for he was about to report to a new captain, a man upon whom his comfort and ease of mind was to depend, to say nothing of his reputation, career and prospects of advancement.

Stroking his shining smoothness, he hurried out into the ward-room and shouted for a marine. 'Just brush the back of my coat, will you, Curtis? My chest is quite ready, and the bread-sack of books is to go with it,' he said. 'Is the captain on deck?'

'Oh no, sir, no,' said the marine. 'Breakfast only just carrying in this moment. Two hard-boiled eggs and one soft.'

The soft-boiled egg was for Miss Smith, to recruit her from her labours of the night, as both the marine and Mr Dillon knew very well; but the marine's knowing look met with a total lack of response. James Dillon's mouth tightened, and for a fleeting moment as he ran up the ladder to the sudden brilliance of the quarter-deck it wore a positively angry expression. Here he greeted the officer of the watch and the Bu7ford's first lieutenant. 'Good morning.

Good morning to you. My word, you're very fine,' they said.

'There she lies: just beyond the Genйreux.'

His eyes ranged over the busy harbour: the light was so nearly horizontal that all the masts and yards assumed a strange importance, and the little skipping waves sent back a blinding sparkle.

'No, no,' they said. 'Over by the sheer-hulk. The felucca has just masked her. There – now do you see her?'

He did indeed. He had been looking far too high and his gaze had swept right over the Sophie as she lay there, not much above a cable's length away, very low in the water. He leant both hands on the rail and looked at her with unwinking concentration. After a while he borrowed the telescope from the officer of the watch and did the same again, with a most searching minute scrutiny. He could see the gleam of an epaulette, whose wearer could only be her captain and her people were as active as bees just about to swarm. He had been prepared for a little brig, but not be quite such a dwarfish vessel as this. Most fourteen-gun sloops were between two hundred and two hundred and fifty tons in burthen the Sophie could scarcely be more than a deed and fifty.

'I like her little quarter-deck,' said the officer of the Watch. 'She was the Spanish Vencejo, was she not? And as for being rather low, why, anything you look at close to from a seventy-four looks rather low.'

There were three things that everybody knew about the Sophie: one was that unlike almost all other brigs she had a quarter-deck; another was that she had been Spanish; and a third was that she possessed an elm-tree pump on her fo'c'sle, that is to say, a bored-out trunk that communicated directly with the sea and that was used for washing her deck – an insignificant piece of equipment, really, but one so far above her station that no mariner who saw it or heard of this pump ever forgot it.

'Maybe your quarters will be a little cramped,' said the first lieutenant, 'but you will have a quiet, restful time of it, I am sure, convoying the trade up and down the Mediterranean.'

'Well…' said James Dillon, unable to find a brisk retort to this possibly well-intentioned kindness. 'Well… he said with a philosophical shrug. 'You'll let me have a boat, sir? I should like to report as early as I can.'

'A boat? God rot my soul,' cried the first lieutenant, 'I shall be asked for the barge, next thing I know. Passengers in the Burford wait for a bumboat from shore, Mr Dillon; or else they swim.' He stared at James with cold severity until the quartermaster's chuckle betrayed him; for Mr Coffin was a great wag, a wag even before breakfast.

'Dillon, sir, reporting for duty, if you please,' said James taking off his hat in the brilliant sun and displaying a of dark red hair.

'Welcome aboard, Mr Dillon,' said Jack, touching his own, holding out his hand and looking at him with so intense a desire to know what kind of man he was, that his face had an almost forbidding acuity. 'You would be welcome in any case, but even more so this morning: we have a busy day ahead of us. Masthead, there! Any sign of life on the wharf?'

'Nothing yet, sir.'

'The wind is exactly where I want it,' said Jack, looking for the hundredth time at the rare white clouds sailing evenly across the perfect sky. 'But with this rising glass there is no trusting to it.'

'Your coffee's up, sir,' said the steward.

'Thank you, Killick. What is it, Mr Lamb?'

'I haven't no ring-bolts anywheres near big enough, sir,' said the carpenter. 'But there's a heap on 'em at the yard, I know. May I send over?'

'No, Mr Lamb. Don't you go near that yard, to save your life. Double the clench-bolts you have; set up the forge and fashion a serviceable ring. It won't take you half an hour. Now, Mr Dillon, when you have settled in comfortably below, perhaps you will come and drink a cup of coffee with me and I will tell you what I have in mind.'

James hurried below to the three-cornered booth that he was to live in, whipped out of his reporting uniform into trousers and an old blue coat, reappearing while Jack was still blowing thoughtfully upon his cup. 'Sit down, Mr Dillon, sit down,' he cried. 'Push those papers aside. It's a sad brew, I'm afraid, but at least it is wet, that I can promise you. Sugar?'

'If you please, sir,' said young Ricketts, 'the Gйnйreux's cutter is alongside with the men who were drafted off for harbour-duty.'

'All of 'em?'

'All except two, sir, that have been changed.'