Desolation Island (25 page)

Stephen could not reply. It was true that Herapath, though pale, drawn, and even haggard, as though from prolonged and violent labour, had behaved strangely, laughing for no apparent cause, snapping his fingers, smiling secretly, and answering very much at random and even speaking when he was not spoken to - untimely mirth, facetious expressions, a tendency to sing unasked. He changed the subject: 'These boomkin knottings, Jack: just where may they be?'

'The bowsprit netting, where the ghost is?'

'There is nothing more illiberal than the ostentatious correction of an obvious lapsus linguae: of course I meant the bowsprit netting.'

'I will show you,' said Jack, and he led Stephen forward to the head, out on to the bowsprit, to the cap, and set him on the spritsail yard.

'Oh, oh, this is the noble place of the world,' cried he, when he had been carefully turned about: he found himself sitting there, poised high but not too high above the sea, well outside the ship, well beyond her splendid bow-wave, looking back at her from a distance, the leopard perpetually advancing, a gleaming pyramid of sail, and himself as perpetually fleeing backwards over the unbroken water. 'I am enraptured. I could gaze upon this for ever!'

When he could be brought to attend, Jack pointed out the horses - 'A spirited team, indeed!' - and the netting that hung from them.

'So that is the ghost's abode,' said Stephen. 'Had you said a nymph's or even a dryad's, it would have been more appropriate. Now tonight, brother, you must bring me here again, with a couple of blue Bengal lights. I myself have a bottle of holy water. With these I shall lay the ghost: for since the whole thing is stark raving lunacy, it evidently falls within the province of the medical man.'

'At night?' said Jack.

'As soon as it is quite dark,' said Stephen. He glanced at Jack, and said, 'Surely, my dear, you are not so weak as to believe in ghosts?'

'Not at all. I wonder you should make such an uncalled-for suggestion. But it so happens that tonight my time is much taken up; and in any case it occurs to me that since this is a medical matter, as you say yourself, Herapath would be far more suitable in every way.'

When Jack sprang from his cot at dawn, in answer to the rapping on the door, his mind, snatched from a dream of a soft, consenting Mrs Wogan, told him that since the wind had not changed, and since the Leopard had not varied from her course nor touched a sail, it must be that God-damned ghost playing off its humours again. But in a flash, in the two strides that separated his cot from the door, his recollection corrected this, presenting a vivid image of Stephen, his blue lights and his holy water, dowsing the phantom to the satisfaction of all hands, particularly the papists among them (a good third of the

crew) - Mr Fisher's angry cry of Mumbo-Jumbo, Stephen's perhaps unfortunate reply of Venus-Wenus -" the untroubled demeanour of the hands sent into the bowsprit netting a few moments later. 'Good morning, Mr Holles,' he said to the midshipman.

'Good morning, sir. Mr Grant's duty, and there is a ship fine on the larboard bow.'

'Thank you, Mr Holles. I shall be on deck directly.'

Directly it was: trousers alone, and his long hair streaming. He leant far out over the windward rail, and there she lay, almost stern-on, but her masts sufficiently out of line to show all three, her topsails nicking the red rim of the sun as it rose.

'Topgallant halliards,' he cried. 'Windward braces. Clew up, clew up, there. Clap on to the buntlines.' And in an angry aside to the lieutenant, 'For God's sake, Mr Grant, don't you know enough to take in your topgallants in such a case?' Then aloud, very much aloud, 'All hands, all hands to wear ship.'

'The cursed old woman,' he said, as he thrust through the hurrying seamen, the swabs, holystones, and buckets that littered the deck, and ran up to the maintop like a boy. 'A matter of minutes, and he sends to wake me.'

The first thing a cruising captain knew was that if he possibly could he must see and not be seen, or at least see first. That was why there were standing orders aboard the Leopard to double the lookouts and send them aloft before dawn, to take advantage of that precious morning glimpse. If those topgallants had vanished at the moment of the hail, the Leopard might have passed unnoticed. Even as it was the strange sail might not have picked her up, the Leopard being far to the west, where the night still lingered, and a certain haze.

He climbed higher as the Leopard wore smoothly round and steadied - Grant could be trusted to do that, at all events - and he stared at the remote stranger, fading fast as the Leopard stood from her, until he was blinded by the sun. On deck once more he held his hand to his eye, seeing nothing but a blazing orange ball, and said, 'Who first saw her?'

A young able seaman came running aft, looking nervous, and touched his knuckle to his forehead. 'Well done, Dukes,' said Jack. 'You have damned good eyes.'

He went below to put on more clothes. The morning was brisk, as was to be expected, since the Leopard was now well south of Capricorn and within a day of the cold currents and the vast chilly zone before the westerlies. And as he dressed the thoughts streamed through his mind. By way of data, he had very little: she was a ship, that was certain, though of what force or nature he could not tell. He was almost sure that she had been in the act of shaking a reef out of her topsails: Indiamen and Dutchmen and some Royal Navy captains had a comfortable way of reefing them at sunset. But this year's Indiamen should have reached or passed the Cape two months ago, and any stray or extra ship was most unlikely to have crossed the line so far west as to bring her here. She was not a whaler, of that he was sure. She might be an American for the far east; she might possibly belong to the Royal Navy; but the strongest likelihood was that he had just seen the Waakzaamheid.

'Forewarned is forearmed,' he said to Stephen at breakfast.

'That is a very fine thought,' said Stephen, 'and strikingly original: pray, when did it come to you?'

'Oh very well, very well. But if you had said it in Latin or Greek or Hebrew you would triumph for half an hour together, crowing over those who can only express themselves like plain honest Christians: and yet it would be all one, you know. Should you like to be explained the position to?'

'If you please: the moment I have finished this piece of toast.'

'Here we are, now,' said Jack, pointing to a spot on the hart about two-thirds of the way from South America to the tip of Africa, 'not far from the pitch of the Cape. We shall still have the trade for some time, but very soon, probably today, we shall come into the cold current setting west, where the trade grows weaker - you might find some of your albatrosses even before we get to the variable breezes this side of the true westerlies.'

'I saw a pintado just before I came below.'

'Give you joy, Stephen. And here is the stranger, to windward, as you see. Now if he is the Dutchman, and I am bound to reckon on the worst, he is likely to make all the southing he can, to reach the forties as soon as possible, run well clear of the Cape, and so north and east for the Indies. Even if he were an enterprising fellow, with a well-found, clean ship full of seamen, he would scarcely attempt the Mozambique channel, not with our cruisers off the Mauritius; yet on the other hand... 'Jack went on thinking aloud, much as Dr Maturin might have worked out a diagnosis on the person of a mute colleague, and Stephen's attention wandered. He had a perfect confidence in Jack's ability to solve these problems: if Jack Aubrey could not solve them, nobody could, least of all Stephen Maturin. He secretly read the obituary in an ancient Naval Chronicle that protruded from under the chart - 'On the 19th of July last, on board the Theseus, at Port Royal, Jamaica, Francis Walwin Eves, midshipman. At St Mary's Isle, on the 25th of August, Miss Home, eldest daughter of the late Vice-Admiral Sir George Home, Bart. On the 25th September, at Richmond, the Hon. Captain Carpenter, of the Royal Navy. Suddenly, on the 14th of September, Mr Wm Murray, surgeon of His Majesty's dock-yard, Woolwich' - he remembered Murray, a left-handed man, very able with his knife - 'On the 21st of September, at Rotherhithe, Lieutenant John Griffiths, of the Royal Navy, aged 67.' Yet at the same time he heard Jack musing on the duty of this hypothetical Dutch captain to carry his ship to the Indies unscathed, without dilly-dallying on the way - the wisdom of reefing topsails by night in such circumstances - the advantages of other modes of conduct - and suddenly he was brought up with a guilty start by being told, quite sharply, that 'these neat diagrams of the winds were all very fine and large, but he must not run away with the idea that nature copied books, or that as soon as the trades left off, the westerlies set in: above all in a year like this, when the south-easter did not reach nearly as far beyond the line as they had had a right to expect - there was no telling just what winds they should find a little farther east or south.'

He said, 'No, Jack: certainly not,' and drifted away again - the melancholy fate of the sixty-seven-year-old lieutenant - until he heard the question, 'But is he the Dutchman at all? That is the whole point.'

'Might you not go and look?' he asked.

'You are forgetting that he has the weather-gage of us, and was I to close him now, he would have a good chance of bringing on an action just as he chose.'

'You do not mean to fight the Dutchman, so?'

'Good heavens, no! What a fellow you are, Stephen. Wantonly tackle a seventy-four, with thirty-two and twenty-four-pounders and six hundred men aboard? If the Leopard, half manned and with half the Dutchman's weight of metal, can slip past him to the Cape, then she must do so, with her tail between her legs. Ignominious flight is the order of the day. After the Cape, with a full complement, why, that might be another matter: though it would still be risky, risky... Still, after dinner, with only a few hours of daylight left, I shall edge away and see what I can make of him. He was ten miles off at dawn: he will be fourteen by now, with our wearing and standing on. If I close to within four or five, by crowding sail, in the afternoon watch, then even if he sails eight knots to our seven, he cannot get within range before dark: and there is no moon tonight.' After a long, considering pause he went on, 'Lord, Stephen, how often I think of Tom Pullings. It

is not only that I could leave everything to him, action or no action, knowing he would do what we have always thought right, but I so often wonder how he does.'

'Aye: it is much the same with me. But I believe our solicitude is misplaced. We landed him in a Catholic country.'

'You mean he might be saved?'

'My concern is with his mortal part. What I mean is, that he will be nursed not by the hags of Haslar, but by Franciscans. Nursing is almost everything in these cases, and there is a world of difference between the mercenary and the religious. The good nuns will bear with Tom's nervous, fractious symptoms; he will thrive there, where a common hospital might kill him; and if he should be infected with a slight touch of genuflexion, sure it will do him no great harm in a service where the sense of rank is carried to such Byzantine extremes.'

This should have been the Leopard's washing day, but no clothes-lines were rigged. Instead all hands were turned to chipping shot: the guns, apart from some honeycombing in the upper-deck number seven, were in an order as perfect as very close attention could make them, and Mr Burton had filled large quantities of powder; but deep in their lockers at the bottom of the hold, some of the round-shot had corroded, as usual. They were roused up by the hundred, so many to each gun, and the ship clicked and ticked from stem to stern as the crews carefully tapped off the bosses and flakes of rust, making the balls as round as they could be and then brushing them lightly with galley slush.

It was this noise that Stephen explained to Mrs Wogan as he exercised her in the afternoon watch, she wearing a warm spencer and half-boots, and looking remarkably pink and well, brimming with high spirits. 'Oh, indeed,' said she, 'I imagined the whole ship had run mad, and turned tinker to a man. But pray, sir, why are they so eager to make them round?'

'So that they may fly straight and true, and strike the enemy in his vital parts.'

'Heavens! Is there an enemy about?' cried Mrs Wogan. 'We shall all be murdered in our beds.' She began to laugh, low, and then, unable to contain her mirth, fuller and rounder still. It was not loud, but it carried; and Jack, fixed in the main topgallant crosstrees these last hours, caught its ghost and smiled. He had had the strange sail in his glass much of this time, and he was as nearly certain as could be that she was the Waakzaamheid: the broadsterned, Dutch-built hull was unmistakable. There was just a chance that she might be one of the captured Dutch men-of-war, but it was most unlikely, since she was making as much southing as ever she could, whereas a British ship would be three points off the wind, heading for the Cape. Close-hauled for her southing under a fair spread of canvas; yet for all her topgallants she was not making much above six knots. Something of a slug, therefore, and slower than the Leopard on a wind. Unless unless those bowlines were not as taut as they seemed, and her captain was something of a fox, happy to have the Leopard come up hand over hand.

'On deck, there,' he hailed.

'Sir?' replied Babbington.

'Heave the log, and send me up a pea-jacket, my flask, and a bite.'

'Oh, please, sir, please may I take it up?' whispered Forshaw.

'Silence,' cried Babbington, cracking him on the head with his speaking-trumpet. 'Seven knots and three fathoms, sir.' And then, 'Mr Forshaw, jump to the cabin, tell Killick pea-jacket, flask and bite, and run up to the crosstrees without taking breath, d'ye hear me?'

'Is it the Captain high up there?' asked Mrs Wogan.

'It is, child; and he has been viewing this strange, perhaps this wicked sail, for a great while now.'

'He sounds like the voice of God,' said Mrs Wogan. Her laugh began again, but she choked it back, and went on, 'I must not be disrespectful, however. Is there really going to be a battle?'