The Nutmeg of Consolation (36 page)

And indeed Stephen had not been sitting in the cabin five minutes before there was Adams at the door. 'Well, sir,' he said, 'I have carried out your commission. I came away from Mr Painter not ten minutes ago, and on my way down I saw poor Jemmy Ducks, his face running with tears. I hope nothing dreadful has happened, Doctor?'

'We took the girls to the orphanage.'

'What, in a country like this? Well,' - recollecting himself -'I am sure you know best, sir. Excuse me, if you please. So as I was saying, I saw Mr Painter, as you told me, and he was most obliging; he found me nearly all the present assignments, records and particulars directly. But I am afraid you will not be best pleased with some of what I have to report.' He brought out the lists, each pinned to a sheaf of papers, and laid them on the table. 'Now as for Slade's friends,' he said, 'all is tolerably well. Mrs Smailes was assigned to a man who had served his time, an emancipist as they say here, and who had settled on reasonable good land near the Hawkesbury river; and he married her. Three of the others are on ticket of leave, and work in fishing boats. Only one, Harry Fell, absconded and joined the whalers. Here are the directions of the others.' He handed Stephen a neat clerkly sheet, names and addresses underlined with red ink, and turned to the next. 'As for Bonden's list, I fear the news is not so good. Two never arrived, having died on the voyage; one died here of natural causes; one absconded and either died of want in the bush or was speared by the Aborigines; and two were sent to Norfolk Island.'

'Where is that?'

'Far out in the ocean, a thousand miles, I believe. A penal station that was meant to terrify the convicts here into submission. They were so ill-used that they are not in their right minds any more. For the rest, some are still assigned servants and some are ticket-of-leave men. Here are their particulars. But as for Colman, sir, I am sorry to say he has had a very bad time of it. He would keep trying to escape. Last time it was with three other Irishmen: one of them had heard that if you walked north far enough you came to a river, neither very wide nor very deep, and the-other side there was China, where the people were kind and where you could find an Indiaman to take you home. They were taken by Aborigines, almost dead from hunger and thirst, and brought back for a reward. One of them died from his flogging. Colman survived his - two hundred lashes at twice - and he was to have been sent to a penal colony only Dr Redfern intervened - said it would be his death - and he is to be assigned to an estate along the Parramatta together with half a dozen more. Mr Painter tells me it is reckoned a little better than a penal colony but not much, since the station belongs to a Mr Marsden, a clergyman they call Parson Rapine, who loves having his people flogged, particularly Irish papists. Mr Painter did not think he would last out a year.'

'Where is Colman now?'

'In the hospital at Dawes Point, sir, the northern arm of this cove here.'

'When is he to be assigned?'

'Oh, any time this next few weeks. The clerks see to it as they have leisure.'

'Who is Dr Redfern?'

'Why, sir, our Dr Redfern. Dr Redfern of the Nore. But you would not remember, sir, being, if you will allow me, too young in the service. The Captain would remember him.'

'I know there was a mutiny at the Nore in ninety-seven, following the trouble at Spithead.'

'Yes. Well, Dr Redfern told the mutineers to stick closer together, to be more united; and for that the court-martial sentenced him to hang. But after a while he was sent here, and presently he was given a free pardon: Captain King that was. I served under him in Achilles. They like him here - has the best practice in Sydney - but most of all the convicts. He always has a kind word for a sick convict; always spends much of his day at the hospital.'

'Thank you, Mr Adams. I am very much obliged to you for taking so much trouble, and I am sure no one else could have taken it to such effect. These are delicate negotiations, and a false note may prove fatal.' Adams smiled and bowed, but he did not deny it, and Stephen went on, 'And I am heartily glad that there is such a man as Dr Redfern here. Have you ever seen such a place?'

'No, sir, I have not; nor ever expect to, this side Hell. Now here, sir, is an account of my disbursements, and here .'

'Pray put it up, Mr Adams, and add this' - passing a johannes-'to whatever may be left, so that if you do not find it disagreeable you may treat Painter and his more respectable colleagues to the best dinner Sydney can afford. Such allies are not to be neglected.'

When Martin came back to the ship that evening he was carrying a wrapper that held John Paulton's hope if not of fame and fortune then at least of escape, a passage home to a world he knew and freedom to swim in the full tide of human existence.

'Has the Captain returned?' he asked.

'He has not. He sent to tell me he was sleeping at Parramatta. Come below and sit down; and presently we will have supper together. There is no one in the gunroom. That is your friend's book, I make no doubt?'

'Well, these are the first three volumes - I must not dirty them or crumple the pages for my life - and all but the last chapter of the fourth. Poor fellow, he is in such pains for his ending, and I fear he will never bring it off without some encouragement. His cousin thinks all fiction immoral. And really, you know, Maturin, this cousin is not quite the thing. Not only is all fiction disapproved, as being false, tantamount to a pack of lies, but neither pepper nor salt is permitted in the kitchen or on the table, as exciting the senses. And poor John is obliged to carry his fiddle out of earshot before he even tunes the strings. Furthermore, the cousin allows him no actual money - but I am being indiscreet. He invites us to dine on Sunday and suggests that we might play some piece familiar to us all, such as the Mozart D minor quartet we were talking about. I pass this invitation on with no small diffidence, since I know my playing is at the best indifferent.'

'Not at all, not at all. We are none of us Tartinis. Your sense of time is quite admirable; and if you have a fault, which I do not assert, it is that you might sometimes tune a quarter of a tone or less on the sharp side. But my ear is far from perfect: a pitch-pipe or a tuning-fork would have infinitely more authority.'

'How I hope it is good,' said Martin, looking anxiously at the novel. 'False commendation can never have the weight of heartfelt praise. I do not dislike the first page. May I read it to you?'

'If you please.'

'Marriage has many virtues,' said Edmund, 'and one not often remarked upon by bachelors is that it helps to persuade a man that he is neither omniscient nor even infallible. A husband has but to utter a wish for it to be denied, countered, crossed, contradicted; or to hear the word But, followed by a pause, a very short pause in general, while the reasons that this wish should not be observed are marshalled - it is misconceived, contrary to his best interests, contrary to his real desires.'

'So I have very often heard you say, Mr Vernon,' said his wife. 'But you do not consider that a wife is commonly less well educated, usually poorer and always physically weaker than her husband; and that without she assert her existence she is in danger of being wholly engulfed.'

'If he does not object,' said Stephen, 'I should very much like to read it, when my mind is at rest. But Martin my mind is not at rest. You know my concern for Padeen.'

'Of course I do, and I share it. I was there, you recall, when first he came aboard, poor dear fellow, and I have liked him ever since. You have news of him?'

'I have. Adams went to the man John Paulton told us about, and this is the record he was given.' He handed the paper. It looked something like a business account, with amounts carried forward from one column to another, but the numbers were those of lashes, days of close confinement in the black hole, the weight of punishment-irons and their duration.

'Oh my God,' said Martin, grasping its full significance.

'Two hundred lashes... it is utterly inhuman.'

'This is an utterly inhuman place. The social contract is destroyed; and the damage that must do to people much under the rank of saint is incalculable,' said Stephen. 'But listen,

Martin, he is soon to be assigned to the flogging parson I met at Government House, and the clerk, an old experienced hand, a ticket-of-leave man, says he will not survive that regimen above a year. Now my impression is that Mr Paulton told us that the clerks could change an assignment - that Painter himself had sent valuable farm servants rather than ignorant townspeople to Woolloo-Woolloo, presumably for a douceur.'

'That is my impression too.'

'He was quite right about information. Painter was obliging, quick and efficient. So what I very earnestly beg you will do is to go back to Mr Paulton tomorrow, put Padeen's case

candidly before him and ask first whether Painter is indeed capable of changing the assignment and secondly whether he-your friend - would agree to receive Padeen at WoolbooWoolloo when he returns to take charge.'

'Of course: I shall go as soon as he is likely to be up. Do you mean to see Padeen?'

'I am turning the question in my mind. Inclination says yes, obviously: caution says no, for fear of an outbreak on his part, for fear of attracting attention to what must pass unnoticed.

But caution I know is an old woman at times; and I am still undecided.'

He lay undecided much of the night, sometimes reading Paulton's MS, sometimes reflecting on the wisest course, so that he was still watching the flame of his candle, guttering now, when there was something of a hullabaloo on deck: scuffling, running feet, a confusion of voices and then Mr Bulkeley's distinct cry, far forward, 'Come out of that, you goddam sods.'

But the ship in port, with her standing rigging being replaced, a variety of repairs in course and her decks all ahoo, was relaxed in appearance and in discipline, and a noise of this kind did not disturb his mind; he continued to watch the flame until it expired. Sleep, faintly pierced by the sound of bells.

'Good morning, Tom,' he said, coming out of his cabin at the accustomed number.

'Good morning, Doctor,' said Pullings, the only man at table. 'Did you hear the roaring in the middle watch?'

'Fairly well. A bloodless frolic, I trust?'

'Only by the grace of God. It was your little girls: they came running aboard and startled the harbour-watch about three bells. They called out for Jemmy Ducks, but he being dead drunk and insensible they whipped up into the foretop and when Oakes and the rest of the watch tried to catch them they flung down the top-maul, which very nearly did him in, together with anything else they could lay their hands on. And they kept roaring out that they would not leave the ship.'

'I did hear the bosun call them goddam sods, but it never occurred to me that he could mean Sarah and Emily.'

'Then they threw off their white frocks and drawers and went up to the cross-trees, where you could not see them in the dark night, they being so very black. They are still there, like kittens that have climbed a tree and cannot tell how to get down again. We have spread a splinter-netting to catch them in case they fall.'

Stephen digested this, drank his gunroom coffee - nothing like as good as Killick's - and asked 'Has Mr Martin gone ashore?'

'Yes. He went very early, I believe: Davidge heard him singing out for hot water as soon as it was light.'

'Steward,' called Stephen. 'Pray bring more toast. Soft-tack is a delight, do you not find?'

'Oh Lord, yes. When you have been five months on ship's bread you can hardly have enough of it. But Doctor, what about your little girls?'

'What about them indeed? The marmalade, if you please.'

'Since Jemmy Ducks is still unsteady and not much of a topman at the best of times, do you think Bonden should jump up to the crosstrees? He is a rare one for going aloft, and they know him very well.'

'Oh, as for that, hunger and thirst will bring them down. I am certainly not going to scale ladders trembling in the wind, as I have done in my youth, only to see the little cat skip down of its own accord when I was within hand's reach at last. Let no one take any notice of them, nor look up.'

In the event it was neither hunger nor thirst that brought them down but a mounting urgency. Through the earlier part of the forenoon watch they often cried out that they would not come down, that they would stay in the ship for ever, and that the girls in the orphanage were an ill-looking pack of swabs. But after a while they fell silent. They had been very strictly trained to cleanliness aboard; their lively sense of the sacred and perhaps of taboo was concerned; and it was with a voice of great earnestness that Emily called 'On deck, there. I want to go to the head. So does Sal. We can't wait.'

The ship's company looked at Stephen, who replied 'Come down, then. And when you have been to the head, you are to go straight to your hammocks. We shall not turn you ashore.'

Shortly after this Martin returned, and since there were - people busy all over the after part of the ship Stephen suggested that they should walk to Dawes Point and view the hospital. 'I found John at home,' said Martin as soon as they were on the wharf, 'and I laid the matter before him, clearly and I think fairly. I said that Padeen was your sick-berth attendant; that because of very severe pain he had been treated with laudanum; that because of inadvertence he had access to the bottle and that without any great moral obliquity he dosed himself, became a confirmed opium-eater; that when you were away in the Baltic, or rather when the ship was on her way back, he was deprived of his supply, and being unable to explain himself, with his defect of speech and rudimentary English, he robbed a Scotch apothecary's shop, for which he was condemned to death, transportation being substituted for the gallows at Captain Aubrey's instance. I added that I had always found him a good and unusually gentle man, very much devoted to you; and I said that as an Irish Catholic he was likely to suffer extremely in the hands of such a man as Marsden. John listened with close attention and he emphatically agreed with my last point. I then asked your other questions. Oh, as for the change, said he, that was only a matter of half a guinea in the right place, and that he for his part was more than willing to make Padeen's life less horrible. "But," he went on, "this poor fellow has been repeatedly punished for absconding. Has Dr Maturin reflected that if he should escape from here, my position for the next year would be intolerable?"