The Reverse of the Medal (9 page)

They looked out for her, therefore, with more than usual zeal; and they did so in spite of the fact that many of them felt the luck had gone out of the ship. Or if not out of her then out of her captain, which was much the same thing. The belief was strongest among those who had been fishermen or whalers, for time and again they had seen that of two skippers with equal experience and skill, fishing the same waters with the same equipment, one would come home with full holds and the other would not. It was a question of the man's luck, a quality or rather an influence that sometimes set all one way, for good or bad, and sometimes shifted like a tide, but a tide whose ebb and flow obeyed laws that no ordinary men could see. The whalers held most to this belief, but it was also quite strong in a number of others, including some who had served longest in the frigate and who were most attached to her captain - hands who had been man-of-war's men from the beginning. There were varying creeds and some important differences of detailed belief, but broadly speaking luck and unluck were held to have little or nothing to do with virtue or vice, amiability or its reverse. Luck was not a matter of deserts. It was a free gift, like beauty in a very young woman, independent of the person it adorned; though just as beauty could be spoilt by frizzed hair and the like so ill-luck could certainly be provoked by given forms of conduct such as wanton pride, boasting of success, or an impious disregard for custom. Carrying parsons for example was unlucky, and yet here was Mr Martin. Reverend Martin was a good, kindly gent, not at all proud, nor above lending the Doctor a hand in the sick-bay or writing an official letter for a man or learning the boys to read; but he was a parson and there was no denying it. White-handled knives were notoriously unfortunate, and so were cats; yet the voyage had started with both aboard. But such things as these and even graver offences against the old ways of the sea were nothing, nothing at all, in comparison with shipping a Jonah, and a Jonah had been shipped at Gibraltar in the person of Mr Hollom, a thirty-five-year-old master's mate. It might have been supposed that the Jonah's death would have removed the misfortune, but not at all, for a downright curse had fallen on the ship when Homer, the gunner, first killed Hollom and Mrs Homer, they being lovers, on Juan Fernandez, and then hanged himself in his cabin some days later, off the coast of Chile. Some held that the curse had been lifted when the gunner was launched over the side sewed into his hammock with two roundshot at his feet; others did not. To the objection that the Surprise had made a number of recaptures Plaice, the oldest and most respected of the prophets of woe, said Yes, but recaptures, though welcome, were not as who should say prizes, and anyhow the last was taken just inside Admiral Pellew's command, which instantly made the poor unfortunate barky and her poor unfortunate Captain eight thousand dollars the poorer. Eight thousand bleeding dollars! The mind could hardly conceive of such a sum. If that was not a curse, Joseph Plaice would like to know just what a curse was meant to be. Then again, the Doctor, who had never been known to miss his stroke with a knife, saw or trepanning-iron - and here Plaice tapped his skull, where a three-shilling piece, hammered into a dome, covered the neat hole Stephen had made on the outward voyage - had almost certainly lost his last patient, the surgeon of the Irresistible, which not only upset him cruel but was clear proof of a curse: and if proof were wanting they only had to look a little farther aft. What but a most uncommon curse could have brought the Captain's misfortune walking into Ashgrove Cottage itself with the Missus there and perhaps Mother Williams too?

Much of the talk about luck and the frigate's loss of it had been general, with people airing their views in the galley during the first or middle watch after they had been mustered, or in the tops, or quietly on the forecastle during a make and mend; but this particular conversation was confined to men who had served with Jack from his earliest command and who had followed him ashore during the peace and the days when he had no ship. As well-to-do bachelors Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin had staffed Melbury Lodge entirely with seamen, and after Jack's marriage Preserved Killick, his steward, Barret Bonden, his coxswain, Joseph Plaice, Bonden's cousin, and two or three more had moved on with him; they knew exactly what Ashgrove Cottage meant, having swabbed its floors, painted its woodwork and polished its brass as though it were a ship. And of course they knew the entire family, from Mrs Williams, the Captain's mother-in-law, to George, the youngest of his children; but in this context what Ashgrove Cottage meant for all of them, as it did for Jack himself, was Sophia Aubrey.

All the men liked her very much indeed; but above all they respected her to an almost religious degree. Sophie was indeed truly respectable, kind and good-looking -much more than good-looking - but since they had never come into close contact with women both amiable and respectable before, they may have set her on an even higher level than was quite right, there being something almost awful in such superiority. They also knew that she was her mother's daughter (improbable though it seemed) and that Mrs Williams, a short thick dark-haired red-faced passionate woman, was a Tartar, one of those who had made virtue singularly unattractive. Suspected peculation, absence without leave or fancied disrespect would rouse her to a volume of sound that seemed to mark the utmost limits of the female voice; but this was an illusion, for once unchastity in man or woman came to her attention these bounds were left far, far behind, the remote babbling of some distant brook. To be sure, Sophie never scolded, roared or bawled - no hard words, no turning out of doors, no assurances of eternal damnation - but she was her mother's daughter in this (though in this alone), that she would have no truck, no truck whatsoever with anything in the roving line. The getting of bastards might be fashionable, but it would not do for Mrs Aubrey.

'Aye,' said Bonden, 'it was a most unlucky stroke, by God. She could not have mistook that figurehead, though coloured somewhat dark. A damned unlucky stroke. You would think you might step aside, like, just once in a while, without having it thrown in your face twenty years later. A damned unlucky stroke. But that don't mean there is a curse on the ship. No. It only means the Captain's luck is out for the moment.'

'You may say what you like, Barret Bonden,' said Plaice, 'but I'm older than you, and I say this here barky's got what we call a...'

'Easy, Joe,' said Killick. 'Naming calls, you know.'

'What?' asked Joe Plaice, who was rather deaf.

'Naming calls, Joe,' said Killick, laying his finger to his lips.

'Oh,' said Plaice, recollecting himself. 'That's right, mate.'

Yet although Plaice and some others like him were determined to be apprehensive and although everybody knew that the gunner's ghost haunted the frigate's wake, the majority were neither consistent nor glum. They reconciled the irreconcilable perhaps even more easily than landsmen; and in a ship that could not come to good they looked out very eagerly for her next victim, her next success.

Eagerly and cheerfully, for although they were, as Plaice pointed out, eight thousand dollars the poorer because of the Admiral's share of the last recapture, there were still the earlier ships, untainted by that vile twelfth, and there were after all the remaining eleven twelfths of the last; so that even allowing for the proctors' swingeing fees and the other legal expenses it was reckoned that each single-share man would have fifty-three pounds thirteen and eightpence prize-money and an able seaman (nearly all the Surprises were rated able) half as much again, a very charming sum indeed. Yet this did not prevent them from longing for more, much more: the general wish was to have enough money to set up a public house, but in practice scarcely a man was not willing to settle for an additional ten dollars or so, laid down on the capstan-head, with which to kick up Bob's a-dying if they touched at Fayal or anywhere else in the Azores.

The Azores however were a great way off, and with the curiously unseasonable, baffling light airs and calms that met the Surprise a few days out of Bridgetown, they seemed determined to remain there. For once in his naval career Captain Aubrey did not try to fly in the face of nature: in the light airs he certainly spread noble pyramids of canvas, from skyscrapers to water-sails, but he did not wet them with engine and buckets to gain a few yards in the hour, nor did he lower down the boats to tow the ship during the dead calms. The frigate proceeded soberly north-eastward, or as nearly north-eastward as the breezes would allow, and her captain soberly walked his quarterdeck, fore and aft, fore and aft, seventeen paces from the windward hances to the taffrail, turn and back again, almost exactly a hundred turns to the mile. To and fro, passing the hen-coops abaft the wheel and the contemplative goat Aspasia, who had lain on this deck in bitter cold and furious wind and who now basked in the sunlight, her eyes closed, her beard nodding. Sometimes he paced off the distance between Portsmouth and Ashgrove Cottage, imagining the white road, the open country and then the woods; but much more often he pondered anxiously about his complex affairs, legal and financial, and about Sophie's probable attitude towards him now that she had seen Sam. As for the legal side of matters, there was little point in puzzling until he had seen his lawyers; with no word from home he had no more basis for an opinion now than he had had at the beginning of the voyage. As for the financial side, these prizes would bring him in about ten thousand pounds, for which he was most profoundly grateful. It was nothing like enough to clear him of debt if things had gone against him, but it did give him room, plenty of room, to turn around. And as for Sophie, on his more sanguine days he said that she had not the least cause to cut up rough; in those far-off times he had never even seen her, much less made any promise of fidelity. She had no right to complain whatsoever. These anxious reflections about Sophie always rose up through his thoughts about mortgages and the law, when indeed they did not precede them; for not only was Jack most sincerely attached to his wife, but like his shipmates he found a thoroughly virtuous woman an intimidating object. Just how intimidating might have been calculated from the number of times he repeated the statement about her total lack of grievance, which was sometimes accompanied by the words 'Perhaps she may even have liked him.' And as for Mrs Williams, if once she piped up he would simply desire her never to mention the matter again: he would speak very firmly indeed, as to a defaulter, otherwise there would be no peace in the house at all.

Yet these early golden almost windless days were not all passed in anxious thought: very far from it. There were mornings when the ship would lie there mirrored in a perfectly unmoving glossy sea, her sails drooping, heavy with dew, and he would dive from the rail, shattering the reflexion and swimming out and away beyond the incessant necessary din of two hundred men hurrying about their duties or eating their breakfast. There he would float with an infinity of pure sea on either hand and the whole hemisphere of sky above, already full of light; and then the sun would heave up on the eastern rim, turning the sails a brilliant white in quick succession, changing the sea to still another nameless blue, and filling his heart with joy.

And there were many other things that gave him intense satisfaction. Although the Sargasso Sea lay rather more eastward than usual that year, they did pass very slowly through its western tip a little north of the tropic line, and it was wonderfully pleasant to see Stephen and Martin scrabbling about among the mats of weed and its denizens, paddled about in the jolly-boat by the infinitely patient Bonden: pleasanter still to see their shining faces as they came aboard grasping their improbable collections.

He was pleased with his young gentlemen too. Circumstances had compelled him, much against his will, to take no less than six squeakers, some of them first-voyagers, of no use to man or beast. But he always had been a conscientious captain, and these being all sons of sea-officers he had determined to do his best for them: he had not only shipped a schoolmaster, but he had made sure that his schoolmaster, who was also the chaplain, could teach them Latin and Greek. He had suffered much from his own lack of education and he wished these boys to be literate creatures, to whom the difference between an ablative absolute and a prolative infinitive was as evident as that between a ship and a brig; he therefore supported Mr Martin's efforts with encouragement of his own, sometimes delivered with the victim seized to a gun, his bottom bare, but more often taking the form of sumptuous breakfasts in the Captain's cabin or suet puddings sent below. The results were not perhaps quite all that might have been hoped for, since practical seamanship in often trying conditions had to take precedence, and it did not seem probable that a Bentley or a Porson would burst upon an astonished world from the midshipmen's berth in HMS Surprise; yet even so Jack could truthfully swear that the frigate had the most accomplished berth in the entire service. Often during the middle watch he would come on deck and call the reefer on duty over to join his pacing, desiring him at the same time to decline a Latin noun or conjugate a verb in Greek.

'They are decent youngsters,' he said. 'They are reasonably well based in simple navigation, and they have a tolerable notion of seamanship, particularly Calamy and Williamson, who are such old hands. And with all this Latin and Greek - why, their own families would hardly recognize them.' This was no doubt true, for in addition to the Latin and Greek they had learnt much about the nature of the high southern latitudes, extreme cold, short commons, and the early stages of scurvy. In the course of learning Boyle had had three ribs stove in; Calamy had gone bald, and although he now had some downy hair it was not very beautiful; Williamson had lost some toes and the tips of both ears from frost-bite; Howard seemed permanently stunted, and want of teeth made him look very old, while Blakeney and Webber had suddenly shot up, all awkwardness, ankles, wrists and broken voices. They were also familiar with violent death, adultery and self-murder; but the knowledge did not seem to oppress them; they remained vapid, cheerful, very apt to race about the higher rigging like apes at play, to lie late in bed in the morning, and to neglect their duty at the least hint of fun elsewhere.