The Reverse of the Medal (6 page)

'I do not. It is a frail constitution there, much fretted with acrimony and discontent and domestic misfortune. Let us go and look at Captain Palmer.'

By this time the court-martial had decided against the request of three of the prisoners to have their cases tried separately; the charges against each had been read with all the necessary but wearisome legal repetition; and the machine that would grind slowly on until they were hanged by the neck was now in full motion.

There had been little dispute about identity. The description of all the Hermione mutineers had been circulated to every naval station: 'George Norris, gunner's mate, aged 28 years, five feet eight inches, sallow complexion, long black hair, slender build, has lost the use of the upper joint to his forefinger of the right hand, tattooed with a star under his left breast and a garter round his right leg with the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense. Has been wounded in one of his arms with a musket-ball.' 'John Pope, armourer, aged 40 years, five feet six inches, fair complexion, grey hair, strong made, much pitted with smallpox, a heart tattooed on his right arm.' 'William Strachey, aged 17 years, five feet three inches, fair complexion, long dark hair, strong made, has got his name tattooed on his right arm, dated 12 December.' There was no arguing with such evidence and although a few men asserted that they had shipped under a purser's name to avoid debt or a bastardy order and that an indictment using a pseudonym was invalid, this carried no weight, a naval court-martial having no use for quibbles that might have answered at the Old Bailey; and most of the accused acknowledged their identity. But so far none had acknowledged his guilt: the blame lay elsewhere, they said, and some of them did not scruple to say just where it lay, and to name the active mutineers. At present Aaron Mitchell was arguing passionately that as a boy of sixteen he could not have held out against the violent fury of two hundred men - that it would have been death to oppose them, and utterly useless - that he had wholly abominated the handing-over of the ship to the Spaniards, but that he was wholly powerless to prevent it.

There was a good deal of truth in what he said, thought Jack: it would have called for extraordinary moral strength and courage in a young fellow to withstand the determination of full-grown men, some of them fierce and bloody-minded brutes, who had been goaded beyond all endurance. Beyond all limits: Hugh Pigot, with the enormous powers of the captain of a man-of-war, had turned the Hermione into a hell afloat. The evening before the mutiny, the crew were reefing topsails: he roared out that the last man off the mizentopsail yard was to he flogged. Pigot's floggings were so dreaded that the two hands farthest out, at the weather and lee earings, on the yardarm itself, leapt over the inner men to reach the backstays or shrouds, their downward path, missed their hold and fell to the quarterdeck. When Pigot was told by those who picked them up that they were dead he replied 'Throw the lubbers overboard.'

Yes, but most unhappily Mitchell's was the usual line of defence, and every repetition weakened it disastrously. For the fact remained that the mutineers killed not only Pigot but also the first, second and third lieutenants, the purser, the surgeon, the captain's clerk, the Marine officer, the bosun, and the young midshipman, Sir William's cousin; and the ship had been handed over to the enemy.

The surviving carpenter and gunner spoke of no seaman being shouted at or hustled or wounded, far less killed, for opposing the mutineers. Yet man after man said that he had had nothing to do with it, that he had been overborne, that he had begged them for God's sake to consider what they were about, but in vain. Some of the more articulate spoke surprisingly well; some others were of the familiar sea-lawyer kind who used legal terms and harried the witnesses, telling them th remember they were on oath and that perjury was death in this world and hell everlasting in the next; but most, intimidated by their surroundings and dispirited by their long imprisonment, made little more than dull, mechanical, obstinate denials, denials of everything. Yet they nearly all stood up for themselves; they nearly all tried to defend their lives with what skill and intelligence they possessed, although they must have known that there was very little hope.

In fact there was none. The court was dead against them and the case had been decided long before ever the sitting began. Quite apart from the abhorrence that this particular mutiny aroused, the evidence against the men was overwhelming; and to make doubly sure two of them had been allowed to turn informer and peach on the rest, their lives being promised them. Yet still the men resisted, struggling in the midst of accusations and counter-accusations, as though the court's decision could really be affected by what they did.

Jack listened to them with a grave, attentive expression, his spirits sinking steadily as the hours passed by. On his left hand sat Captain Goole, the president of the court, and on his right a grey-headed commander; beyond Goole there was Berry of the Jason and beyond him a young man named Painter, recently promoted commander and given the Victor sloop. They sat, a solid bench of blue and gold, all with much the same grave, self-contained look, and before them, at a table covered with papers, Stone, the deputy judge-advocate, helped by his clerks, directed the game. For a game it was, an odious game; and like most games it had intricate rules, one of which was that the accused should be allowed to have their say, should be allowed to cross-question the witnesses and address the court, so that the performance should have all the appearance of a fair, impartial trial. There was something very deeply unpleasant in playing a part in this solemn farce, something horribly indecent about being in the judgment seat and watching the others in their hopeless struggle. Jack could not lay his hand on his heart and swear that in young Mitchell's place he would have risked his life for the infamous Pigot: there were probably several men who had in fact been swept along in terrified neutrality, but it was utterly impossible to say who they were, and in any case those who had turned King's evidence swore that there was not one of the accused who had not taken up arms. How he wished he had knocked them all on the head in hot blood: how he wished that his duty did not require him to sit here in righteous squalor.

Not that the squalor was all on the safe, well-dressed, well-fed side of the table either; the thin, prison-hulk-pale, dirty, ragged, long-haired, unshaved prisoners, grotesque in front of their immaculate scarlet guard of Marines, had now in many cases abandoned themselves to naked lying and to throwing the blame wherever they thought it might stick. Of course it was infinitely more understandable on that side of the room, but that made it none the prettier. Jack had seen the strong mutual loyalty of seamen break down before now. He had seen men in overcrowded boats pulling away from a sinking ship thrust their swimming shipmates back and even cut off their fingers as they clung to the gunwale. This was much the same kind of spectacle.

By the time the court adjourned for a late dinner his spirits were very low indeed, all the more so because it was now apparent that the trial was going to last some time.

Stephen Maturin's were not much higher. Captain Palmer of the Norfolk had been suffering from a quartan ague and melancholia ever since the far South Sea: and since Butcher's medicine-chest had gone down with the ship, Stephen had prescribed for him, at first with considerable success. The ague and its sequelae had slowly yielded to Jesuits' bark and sassafras, but since their eastward rounding of the Horn the melancholia had grown steadily worse.

'He will cut his throat if he is not watched,' observed Butcher as they walked away.

'I am afraid so,' said Stephen. 'Yet the tincture of laudanum seemed to be having a radical effect. flow I wish I could come at the leaves of coca, the Peruvian shrub. That would stir the desponding wretched mind far beyond our milk-and-water belle-bore.'

Here they were interrupted by the coming of the boat, and Stephen returned to the Surprise. Her captain had come aboard without ceremony, hooking on to the larboard chains only a few minutes before, and be gave Stephen a hand over the side.

'Have you had dinner?' he asked, for the gunroom hour was long passed.

'Dinner? Perhaps not,' said Stephen. 'No, I have certainly not had dinner.'

'Then come and take a bite with me: though God knows,' he added, leading the way into the cabin, 'there is nothing like a court-martial for cutting one's appetite.'

'It wants seventeen minutes of the hour, sir,' said Killick, with a surly look, as though he had been found in fault. 'Which you said four o'clock, it being a court-martial day.'

'Never mind,' said Jack. 'Tell the cook to stir his stumps, and bring some sherry while we are waiting.'

They did not have to wait long. Jack's cook was from the East Indies; he was accustomed to be flayed if he did not feed his employers promptly, and before the second glass of sherry was out a fish soup filled the cabin with the scent of saffron, lobster, crab, bonito, mussels, clams, and a wide variety of small coral fishes - fishes, that is to say, from the coral reef.

It was a splendid soup, one that they would ordinarily have taken up to the last drop; but this time they sent it away almost untouched. 'Did you ask the Admiral about Mr Barrow and Mr Wray?' asked Stephen, when the steak and kidney pudding had been set on the table.

'Yes, I did,' said Jack, 'and he told me that the position was unchanged.'

'Thank you for remembering,' said Stephen, pushing the soft white crust with a spoon. 'I wish this pudding may be cooked.' He expressed no opinion about the news, but in fact he was rather pleased. Although the ailing Mr Barrow was still nominally the Second Secretary of the Admiralty his work had been done for some considerable time by Andrew Wray, a youngish well-connected man who had gained a reputation for ability at the Treasury. Stephen had met him long before Wray had anything to do with the Navy - he was an acquaintance of Jack's -but he had come to know him well only when Wray, as acting Second Secretary, came out to Malta to deal with corruption in the dockyard and a much more serious affair of treachery in the island's administration, in which some highly-placed man seemed to be giving one of the French intelligence services secret information of the first importance. Yet it was not this that had brought them together; at the time it had seemed to Stephen that Wray, a newcomer to this highly-specialized and very dangerous work, did not enjoy the full confidence of Stephen's own chief, Sir Joseph Blain, the head of naval intelligence, who naturally enough preferred his agents to give proof of their powers and above all of their discretion before entrusting them with the lives of a whole network of men. These reticences were very usual in intelligence and counter-espionage, where a man might be admitted to the hall, but might wait there five years before reaching the inner closet. So although Stephen and Wray were on friendly terms and although they listened to music and played cards together - extraordinarily unfortunate cards for Wray, who now owed Stephen a small fortune, and not so small either - Stephen had not seen fit to speak of his own work in the Mediterranean or to mention his connection with Sir Joseph until the very last moment, when he had no choice about it. Quite independently he had identified the traitor and his French colleague, yet no sooner did he possess this precious information than he was obliged to leave the island. He therefore sent post-haste to Wray, who was in Sicily, telling him everything he knew (and thereby of course revealing his own identity) so that Wray might wipe out the whole organization. Unhappily, although the traitor had been seized, the chief French agent had escaped, perhaps because of Wray's inexperience. Stephen heard of all this in Gibraltar, just before setting off on the voyage that took him to the South Seas; and although he did not see Wray, who was returning to England overland, he took advantage of Wray's offer to carry a letter home. In undermining the French intelligence agents in Malta Stephen had made use of a very good-looking Italian lady; he had often been seen with her, and she had sailed with him in the Surprise as far as Gibraltar. It was generally supposed that she was his mistress. Word of all this had reached Diana, an unusually passionate, impulsive woman; she had written to him in unusually passionate, impulsive terms and his letter was designed to do away with her resentment of what she saw not as immoral conduct (she had no particular objection to immoral conduct) but as an intolerable public affront. Most unhappily his letter, in the nature of things, could not be wholly candid; it could not tell the whole truth, and he relied upon Wray's spoken word, or rather his tone of voice, to convey the essential underlying truth that he... could not write. He also wanted to hear every last detail of the Maltese plot and the facts behind the traitor's curious suicide, and these would be much more valuable coming straight from Wray than filtered through Mr Barrow, that inexhaustible bag of foolish self-complacent words, or even through Sir Joseph; for although Sir Joseph (for whom Stephen had collected a large number of beetles and some butterflies) was ten times the size of Wray, a man of great sagacity and immense experience, he had not been there, on the spot, in Malta. Besides, even if Wray was not in Sir Joseph's class he was still sharp, quick, perceptive and clever. Perhaps rather too clever: certainly too much given to high living and playing for high stakes. Stephen did not dislike him; he had found Wray something of a bore towards the end of his stay in Valletta, when he would insist on playing cards, losing steadily more and more until at last he was unable to pay and was obliged to ask for Stephen's forbearance, but Stephen did like his deep love for music and the way he had brought about (or at least brought out) the promotion of Tom Pullings, Jack Aubrey's first lieutenant, in spite of a rather ugly disagreement between Aubrey and Wray some years before - a disagreement whose exact details were unknown to Stephen but one that might have left ill-feeling in a malignant mind.

As for Wray's promises about helping Jack to a heavy frigate on the North American station and Pullings to a sea-going command by way of gratitude for this forbearance, Stephen was not so simple as to look upon them as wholly binding contracts; but even so they were as well to have.