Patrick O'Brian - Master & Commander

Captain Harte reappeared on deck. He was seen into his barge with rigid ceremony, in an atmosphere of silent suspicion, much strengthened by the look of stony reserve on Captain Aubrey's face.

The cutter and the launch began watering at once; the jolly-boat carried the purser ashore for stores and the post; bumboats came off with their usual delights; and Mr Watt, together with most of the other Sophies who had survived their wounds, hurried out in the hospital wherry to see what those sods in Malta had done to his rigging.

To these their shipmates cried, 'Do you know what?'

'What, mate?'

'So you don't know what?'

'Tell us, mate.'

'We ain't going to have no more cruise, that's what. We've had it,' says old Whoreson Prick, 'we've had our time.'

'We'm used it up, going to Malta. – Our thirty-seven days! - We convoy that damned lubberly packet down to Gib, that's what we do; and thank you kindly for your efforts in the cruising line. – Cacafuego was not bought in – sold to them bloody Moors for eighteen-pence and a pound of shit, the swiftest bleeding xebec that ever swam. – We come back too slow: "Don't you tell me, sir," says he, "for I knows better." – Nothing in the Gazette about us, and Old Fart never brought Goldilocks his step. – They say she weren't regular and her captain had no commission – all bloody lies. – Oh, if I had his cullions in my hand, wouldn't I serve him out, just? I'd…' At this point they were cut short by a peremptory message from the quarter-deck, delivered by a bosun's mate with a rope's end; but their passionate indignation flowed on in what they meant to be whispers, and if Captain Harte had reappeared at that moment they might have broken out in mutinous riot and flung him in the harbour. They were furious for their victory, furious for themselves and furious for Jack; and they knew perfectly well that their officers' reproaches were totally devoid of conviction; the rope's end might have been a wafting handkerchief; and even the newcomer Dalziel was shocked by their treatment, at least as it was delivered by rumour, eavesdropping, inference, bumboat talk and the absence of the lovely Cacafuego.

In fact, their treatment was even shabbier than rumour had it. The Sophie's commander and her surgeon sat in the cabin amidst a heap of papers, for Stephen Maturin had been helping with some of the paper work as well as writing returns and letters of his own, and now it was three in the morning: the Sophie rocked gently at her moorings, and her tight-packed crew were snorting the long night through (the rare joys of harbour-watch). Jack had not gone ashore at all – had no intention of going ashore; and now the silence, the lack of real motion, the long sitting with pen and ink seemed to insulate them from the world in their illuminated cell; and this made their conversation, which would have been indecent at almost any other time, seem quite ordinary and natural. 'Do you know that fellow Martinez?' asked Jack quietly. 'The man whose house the Hartes have part of?'

'I know of him,' said Stephen. 'He is a speculator, a sort of would-be rich man, the left-handed half.'

'Well, be has got the contract for carrying the mails – a damned job, I'm sure – and has bought that pitiful tub the Ventura to be the packet. She has never sailed six miles in an hour since she was launched and we are to convoy her to the Rock. Fair enough, you say. Yes, but we are to take the sack, put it aboard her when we are just outside the mole and then return back here directly, without landing or communicating with Gibraltar. And I will tell you another thing: he did not forward my official letter by Superb, that was going down the Mediterranean two days after we left, nor by Phoebe, that was going straight home; and I will lay you any odds you choose to mention that it is here, in this greasy sack. What is more, I know as certainly as if I had read it that his covering letter will be full of this fancied irregularity about the Cacafuego's command, this quibble over the officer's status. Ugly hints and delay. That is why there was nothing in the Gazette. No promotion, either: that Admiralty wrapper only held his own orders, in case I should insist upon having them in writing.'

'Sure, his motive is obvious to a child. He hopes to provoke you into an outburst. He hopes you will disobey and ruin your career. I do beg you will not be blinded with anger.'

'Oh, I shan't play the fool,' said Jack, with a somewhat dogged smile. 'But as for provoking me, I confess he has succeeded to admiration. I doubt I could so much as finger a scale, my hand trembles so when I think of it,' he said, picking up his fiddle. And while the fiddle was passing through the two feet of air from the locker to the height of his shoulder, purely self-concerned and personal thoughts presented themselves to his mind, scarcely in succession but as a cluster: these weeks and months of precious seniority slipping away – already Douglas of the Phoebe, Evans on the West Indies station, and a man he did not know called Raitt had been made; they were in the last Gazette and now they were ahead of him on the immutable list of post-captains; he would be junior to them for ever. Time lost; and these disturbing rumours of peace. And a deep, barely acknowledged suspicion, a dread that the whole thing might have gone wrong: no promotion: Lord Keith's warning truly prophetic. He tucked the fiddle under his chin, tightening his mouth and raising his head as he did so: and the tightening of his mouth was enough to release a flood of emotion. His face reddened, his breath heaved deep, his eyes grew larger and, because of the extreme contraction of their pupils, bluer: his mouth tightened still further, and with it his right hand. Pupils contract symmetrically to a diameter of about a tenth part of an inch, noted Stephen on a corner of a page. There was a loud, decided crack, a melancholy confused twanging, and with a ludicrous expression of doubt and wonder and distress, Jack held out his violin, all dislocated and unnatural with its broken neck. 'It snapped,' he cried. 'It snapped.' He fitted the broken ends together with infinite care and held them in place. 'I would not have had it happen for the world,' he said in a low voice. 'I have known this fiddle, man and boy, since I was breeched.'

Indignation at the Sophie's treatment was not confined to the sloop, but naturally it was strongest there, and as the crew heaved the capstan round to unmoor they sang a new song, a song that owed nothing whatever to Mr Mowett's chaste muse.

The cross-legged fifer on the capstan-head lowered his pipe and sang the quiet solo part:

Then the deep cross rhythmical bellow again

James Dillon would never have allowed it, but Mr Daiziel had no notion of any of the allusions and the song went on and on until the cable was all below in tiers, smelling disagreeably of Mahon ooze, and the Sophie was hoisting her jibs and bracing her foretopsailyard round. She dropped down abreast of the Amelia, whom she had not seen since the action with the Cacafuego, and all at once Mr Daiziel observed that the frigate's rigging was full of men, all carrying their hats and facing the Sophie.

'Mr Babbington,' he said in a low voice, in case he should be mistaken, for he had only seen this happen once before, 'tell the captain, with my duty, that I believe Amelia is going to cheer us.'

Jack came blinking on deck as the first cheer roared out, a shattering wave of sound at twenty-five yards' range. Then came the Amelia's bosun's pipe and the next cheer, as precisely timed as her own broadside: and the third. He and his officers stood rigidly with their hats off, and as soon as the last roar had died away over the harbour, echoing back and forth, he called out, 'Three cheers for the Amelia!' and the Sophies, though deep in the working of the sloop, responded like heroes, scarlet with pleasure and the energy needed f or huzzaying proper – huge energy, for they knew what was manners. Then the Amelia, now far astern, called 'One cheer more,' and so piped down.