The Hundred Days (33 page)

‘How very kind you are to tell me all this,
Stephen,’ said Jack. ‘From anyone else I should
scarcely have regarded it, but from you ...’ He threw aside the pen he had been
chewing, walked across the cabin, took up his fiddle and played a wild series
of very rapid ascending trills that vanished quite out of hearing. Then he sat
at his desk and with another pen he quickly drew up several lists, sent for the
gunner and asked him for a state of the ship’s powder and shot. ‘I can tell you
quite exactly after five minutes’ look round the magazines, sir,’ said the
gunner.

‘Very well: then you fill in the figures to top us
up where I have left room, and take them along. Here is a guinea to sweeten the
usual palm for reasonable dispatch. Then there is this, also for the ordnance
wharf.’

‘Blue lights and red,’ murmured the gunner, slowly
going through the list. ‘We do have a few, but it’s as well to be sure they
.are fresh. Then extra-high Congreves: I don’t think I know about them, sir.’

‘They are white star-bursts, and on occasion they
can be very useful. Half a guinea for all the fireworks together would be about
right, I believe?’

‘Oh, very handsome, sir; and I make no doubt I
shall bring them back myself.’

When this interview and a few others that showed
the trend of Captain Aubrey’s mind were over, Stephen said, ‘And I shall be
getting some medical stores: we are sadly short of portable soup; and, since
that unfortunate lingering in Mahon, blue ointment. Tell me, Jack, am I right
in supposing that we shall have four or even five days longer here than you had
wished?’

‘No: you are quite right.’

‘Then shall you wait on Lady Keith?’

‘Of course I shall. And on the
Admiral too.’

‘Please may I come with you?’

‘By all means. Queenie speaks of you so
pleasantly.’ On the day of the visit Stephen went ashore early, bought a new
wig at Barlow’s and searched through the entire market until he found a pot of
lilies-of-the-valley in just-opening bud. Returning he gave Mona and Kevin a
square of chocolate calculated for solid jaws and iron stomachs; yet though
they thanked him prettily they neither ate nor moved but stood gazing up in
something between wonder and alarm. At last Mona said, ‘You have changed your
hair.’

‘Never mind, my dear,’ he replied. ‘It is only a
wig.’ He took it off to show: and both instantly burst into tears.

‘Dear Lady Keith,’ he said as they sat in the
parlour overlooking her fine garden and the Strait, with misty Africa on the far side, ‘do you
remember the first time you ever saw a man without his wig?’

‘No. Papa always took it off when he was teaching
me to swim at Brighton, and I was so much concerned with splashing that I did
not remark the change, or scarcely: a rapid moult indeed, but a perfectly
natural one.’

‘I ask because my two children - children that I
bought in the slave-market at Algiers - a boy and a girl, twins - wept most
bitterly when I took mine off this morning, and could not be comforted.’

‘Poor little souls - there are those damned apes
again: Jack, pray bang on the window, will you? - how old are they?’

‘Just losing their
milk-teeth.
An Algerine corsair took them off the Munster coast and I mean to send
them back to their parents, peasants in a village I know. I hope to find a
King’s ship bound for the Cove of Cork.’

‘There should be no difficulty: I shall ask the
Admiral. But what do you mean to do with them in the mean while?

If you are ordered to sea,
for example?
Ordered to the West Indies?’

‘I had hoped to find a suitable, kindly family, to
keep them until a suitable, kindly man-of-war should carry them home, with a
letter to a priest I know in Cork and a purse to take them to Ballydonegan in
an ass-cart.’

‘Do they speak English?’

‘Very little, and much of that little rather
coarse: but it is wonderful how the infant mind absorbs a language through the
ears.’

‘Well, if you like to entrust them to me, I shall
tell our Scorpion, our chief gardener, to put them up: he has a good wife,
quite a large cottage, and only grown-up children. He speaks English,
Rock-English, and he is a good, decent man. In any case I shall look after
them.’

‘How deeply kind of you, Lady Keith: may I bring
them up later today?’

‘Please do. I shall look forward to seeing them.
But tell me now, Dr Maturin, what did you see on the Barbary Coast, in the way of birds?’

‘Some way inland there was a vast saline lake
crowded with flamingos and a large variety of waders; vultures all the usual
kinds; the brown-necked raven. Among the mere quadrupeds there were hyenas, of
course, and an elegant leopard. But what would really have pleased you was an
anomalous nuthatch.’

‘Dear me, Maturin,’ cried Lady Keith, who
was particularly attached to nuthatches, ‘anomalous in what respect?’

‘Well, you instantly see that he is a nuthatch,
though an absurdly small one: but then you realize that he has almost no black
on his crown, that his whole mantle is more nearly blue than is quite proper,
that his tail is even shorter than that of other species, and that his voice is
more like that of a wryneck than...’

The description was cut short by the Admiral
bursting in with the cry ‘Oh those hell-damned apes - they are at it again’.
But his indignant voice changed when he saw the visitors. ‘Why, Aubrey! How
very welcome you are - you too, Doctor. Lord how you stirred them up in the Adriatic! Your earlier dispatches
came to me of course; and they gave a great deal of pleasure in Whitehall. And I do hope you will
both give us the pleasure of your company at dinner on Saturday.’

‘Should be very happy, my Lord: but I have not yet
quite finished carrying out your orders. I hope to have done so a little after
the new moon, and then we are entirely at your disposal.’

The sound of a carriage - of another carriage - the
voices of two different sets of callers. Jack and Stephen took their leave and
by good luck they were able to skirt round the newcomers, all gathered in a
knot on the gravel drive exclaiming at the extraordinary coincidence of the
arrival at the very same moment!

They walked back to the town, and as they went
along the quays Stephen noticed the daily Tangier hoy - it might almost have
been called the ferry - rapidly filling with Moors, Gibraltar Jews and some odd
few Spanish merchants. Jacob was among them, in a caftan and a skullcap, wholly
inconspicuous; Stephen made no remark at the time but he was not surprised at
finding a suitably obscure note from his colleague saying that he was crossing
to see some people who might have some quite valuable jewels to sell: but
later, as he and Jack were supping together he said, ‘I believe Jacob is not
officially on the ship’s books?’

‘No: I think he is carried as a supernumerary,
without victuals, wages or tobacco.’

 ‘Who feeds
him, then?’

‘Why, I suppose you do: at any rate everything he
eats or drinks or smokes will be stopped out of your pay to the last halfpenny
and with the utmost rigour.’

‘I find that I have been giving my life’s blood to
a parcel of hard-hearted mercenary rapacious sharks,’ said Stephen with a
rather forced smile.

‘Exactly so. And the children you
bought in Algiers have each a docket on which every dish of
pap is charged against you, together with the earthenware pot they broke. This
is the Navy, after all.’

‘So I do not suppose he would be flogged or put in
irons for absenting himself without formal leave?’

‘No. In such cases we have a punishment known as
keelhauling. But do not let it distress you: the victims often survive - well,
fairly often. But I am so sorry: this really is not the time to be facetious. I
am afraid you must be missing your children cruelly. They were engaging little
creatures. I do beg your pardon.’

‘I miss them, I admit, though Lady Keith was so
very good and kind: in better hands they could not be. But I do miss them, and
when they fully understood my betrayal they howled most pitifully. Yet my grief
was somewhat lessened by their fascination with the apes that gathered round,
by their continuing suspicion of my seriousness and by the cheerful laughter
that reached me when I was quite far away, nearly at the bottom of the hill,
watching two intertwined serpents, rising in the air ‘almost the whole of their
length in an amorous clasp.’

‘Oh sir,’ cried a messenger from Mr Harding,
‘please could the Doctor come and look at Abram White? He has fallen down in a
fit.’

Abram White was in fact quite ill - comatose,
bloated, heavily contused - yet this was not really a question of apoplexy nor
yet of epilepsy. For reasons best known to himself he had brought three
concealed bladders of rum aboard,to drink slowly,
privately, with delectation. But believing himself detected by the ship’s
corporal he had done away with the evidence of his crime by swallowing the
whole pot-full, had choked, and had pitched down the forehatchway. He lay
pallid, insensible, only just breathing, with a barely perceptible pulse.

Yet Stephen, after some years at sea, was quite
used to pallid insensible seamen, and when he had made sure that Abram’s limbs,
spine and skull were unbroken, he pumped him out and had him carried to the
sick-berth. He was perfectly well and going about his duties by the time Jacob
came back. If anyone had noticed his absence it must have been thought official
or medical - a spell at the hospital or the like - for his return excited no
comment at all, particularly as he had again changed his clothes.

He found Stephen counting glass-hard slabs of
portable soup and he said, ‘I do hope my sudden disappearance did not prove
inconvenient? I had sudden word of a friend the other side of the water.’

‘Not in the least. I hope the voyage was worth the
displacement?’

‘You shall judge for yourself: on the other side
their notions of security are contemptible and I have my information from no
less than three concordant sources.’ They were speaking French, as they
generally did when there was anything of a medical, private or confidential
nature; but now, even so, he lowered his voice: ‘The Arzila galley is at
present in Tangier, loaded, very heavily manned and as heavily armed as a
galley can be: two twenty-four pounders in the bows and two in the stern, with
a fair amount of musketry when she proceeds under sail. The guns are said to be
particularly fine - brass, very exactly bored, with truly spherical and
accurate round-shot. Yahya ben Khaled, who is in command, means to pass the
Strait, unless there is a very strong’east wind in his teeth, on Friday night,
a night of complete darkness, to make straight for Durazzo, deliver his gold -
he has given his parents, wives and children as sureties - take his tenth part
and return, using his great strength against all the merchantmen he finds.’

‘It is a bold stroke.’

‘Indeed it is. Murad Reis is very well known for
his bold strokes, his bold and almost invariably successful bold strokes. He
always helps Fate as much as ever he can, and this time he has hired two
smaller galleys to act as decoys, one sailing close to the African shore and
one in midchannel, while he, lying under Tarifa, makes his dash along the
European side.’

‘Amos,’ said Stephen, ‘I am inexpressibly gratified
by your news. Will you come and repeat it all to Captain Aubrey?’

‘Certainly.’

Jack listened to him gravely, his face gradually
assuming the look of an eagle, one of the larger eagles, that sees its prey at no great distance.

‘Dr Jacob,’ he said, shaking his hand, ‘I thank you
very heartily indeed for this piece of intelligence - this matchless piece of
intelligence, as I believe I may call it. So if the wind has anything of west
in it, Murad Reis sails on Friday, lies under Tarifa until I presume the turn
of the tide a little after midnight and so makes his attempt.
Clearly we must be ready for him.’ He reflected. ‘And there is this to be
said,’ he went on. ‘If there is so much indiscreet talk in Tangier, and if an
account of it can come over so quickly, we must suppose that any indiscretion
on our part may go over to the other side of the Strait with the same speed. Now
I shall stop all shore-leave, of course; and since by tomorrow morning we shall
have all our supplies, the only thing that could betray our intention of
sailing is the carrying of our sick ashore. I am ashamed to say that I do not
immediately call the sick-list to mind.’

‘Oh, as to that,’ said Stephen, ‘we only have a
couple of obstinate poxes and a hernia, and those I can hand over the rail to
my old friend Walker of Polyphemus late on Friday evening.’

‘Very good, very good indeed: so by the time any fool
chooses to blab, we shall with God’s grace be well out at sea.’

Chapter Ten

Captain Aubrey and his officers spent that
afternoon going along the Strait in Ringle, very carefully surveying and in places
sounding as they went; and at one point, far to the westward, they met two
heavy frigates, Acasta and Lavinia, with whom they exchanged numbers: both had
obviously suffered much from the weather, and both were still pumping without a
pause - strong, thick jets flying to leeward.

Out and along the Strait, the familiar skyline
memorized even more firmly, and back in the late afternoon: and speaking
privately to Stephen in the cabin, Jack said, ‘Now that it belongs to the past,
Jacob’s piece of intelligence, so whole and perfect, seems to me to be too good
to be true.’

‘Whole and perfect, to be
sure.
But I believe it to be true. Jacob and Arden are the only two men in this
matter of intelligence for whom I would lay my head on the block.’

‘In that case, dear Stephen, I shall shift my
clothes, pull across to the flag and either ask for an interview or leave this
note.’ He passed it and Stephen read Captain Aubrey presents his respectful
compliments to Lord Barmouth and on account of very recent intelligence most
urgently begs leave to sail this evening: he takes the liberty of adding that
his political adviser is wholly of the same mind.