The Wine-Dark Sea (13 page)

'I have been introduced to Monsieur Cuvier.'

'Yes. And were you not at Madame Roland's soirees from time to time?'

'You are probably thinking of my cousin Domanova. We are often confused.'

'Perhaps so. But tell me, sir, how do you come to have a cousin called Domanova?'

Stephen looked at him with astonishment, and Dutourd, visibly drawing himself in, said, 'Forgive me, sir: I am impertinent.'

'Not at all, sir,' replied Stephen, walking off. His inward voice ran on, 'Is it possible that the animal has recognized me - that he has some notion however vague of what we are about - and that this is in some degree a threat?' Dutourd's was not an easy face to read. Superficially it had the open simplicity of an enthusiast, together with the politeness of his class and nation; these did not of course exclude everyday cunning and duplicity, but there was also something else, a slight insistence in his look, a certain self-confidence, that might mean far deeper implications. 'Shall I never learn to keep my mouth shut?' he muttered, opening the sick-berth door, and aloud, 'God and Mary and Patrick be with you,' in answer to Padeen's greeting. 'Mr Martin, a good morning to you.'

'How these halcyon days go on and on, the one following the other with only a perfect night between,' he said, walking into the cabin. 'We might almost be on dry land. But tell me, Jack, will it never rain at all - hush. I interrupt your calculations, I find.'

'What is twelve sixes?' asked Jack.

'Ninety-two,' said Stephen. 'My shirt is like a cilice with the salt. I should wear it dirty and reasonably soft, but that Killick takes it away - he finds it out with a devilish ingenuity and flings it into the sea-water tub and I am convinced that he adds more salt from the brine-tubs.'

'What is a cilice?'

'It is a penitential garment made of the harshest cloth known to man and worn next the skin by saints, hermits, and the more anxious sinners.'

Jack returned to his figures and Stephen to his disagreeable reflexions. 'What goeth before destruction?' he asked. 'Pride goeth before destruction, that is what. I was so proud of knowing those spars in English, let alone in French, that I could not contain, but must be blabbing like a fool. Hair-shirt, indeed: the Dear knows I deserve one.'

In time Jack put down his pen and said, 'As for rain, there is no hope of it, according to the glass. But I have been casting the prize accounts, as far as I can without figures for the Franklin's specie: a roundish figure, which is some sort of consolation.'

'Very good. To predatory creatures like myself there is something wonderfully fetching about a prize. The very word evokes a smile of concupiscent greed. Speaking of the Franklin reminds me that Dutourd wishes you to know that he would be glad of an invitation to play music with us.'

'So I gather from Martin,' said Jack, 'and I thought it a most uncommon stroke of effrontery. A fellow with wild, bloody, regicide revolutionary ideas, like Tom Paine and Charles Fox and all those wicked fellows at Brooks's and that adulterous cove - I forget his name, but you know who I mean - '

'I do not believe I am acquainted with any adulterers, Jack.'

'Well, never mind. A fellow who roams about the sea attacking our merchantmen with no commission or letter of marque from anyone, next door to a pirate if not actually bound for Execution Dock - be damned if I should invite him if he were a second Tartini, which he ain't - and in any case I disliked him from the start - disliked everything I heard of him. Enthusiasm, democracy, universal benevolence - a pretty state of affairs.'

'He has qualities.'

'Oh yes. He is not shy; and he stood up very well for his own people.'

'Some of ours think highly of him and his ideas.'

'I know they do: we have some hands from Shelmerston, decent men and prime seamen, who are little better than democrats - republicans, if you follow me - and would easily be led astray by a clever political cove with a fine flow of words: but the man-of-war's men, particularly the old Surprises, do not like him. They call him Monsieur Turd, and they will not be won round by smirking and leering and the brotherhood of man: they dislike his notions as much as I do.'

'They are tolerably chimerical, admittedly, and it is surprising that a man of his age and his parts should still entertain them. In 1789 I too had great hopes of my fellows, but now I believe the only point on which Dutourd and I are in agreement is slavery.'

'Well, as for slavery... it is true that I should not like to be one myself, yet Nelson was in favour of it and he said that the country's shipping would be ruined if the trade were put down. Perhaps it comes more natural if you are black... but come, I remember how you tore that unfortunate scrub Bosville to pieces years ago in Barbados for saying that the slaves liked it - that it was in their masters' interest to treat them kindly - that doing away with slavery would be shutting the gates of mercy on the negroes. Hey, hey! The strongest language I have ever heard you use. I wonder he did not ask for satisfaction.'

'I think I feel more strongly about slavery than anything else, even that vile Buonaparte who is in any case one aspect of it... Bosville... the sanctimonious hypocrite... the silly blackguard with his "gates of mercy", his soul to the Devil - a mercy that includes chains and whips and branding with a hot iron. Satisfaction. I should have given it him with the utmost good will: two ounces of lead or a span of sharp steel; though common ratsbane would have been more appropriate.'

'Why, Stephen, you are in quite a passion.'

'So I am. It is a retrospective passion, sure, but I feel it still. Thinking of that ill-looking flabby ornamented conceited self-complacent ignorant shallow mean-spirited cowardly young shite with absolute power over fifteen hundred blacks makes me fairly tremble even now - it moves me to grossness. I should have kicked him if ladies had not been present.'

'Come in,' called Jack.

'Mr Grainger's duty, sir,' said Norton, 'and the wind is hauling aft. May he set the weather studdingsails?'

'Certainly, Mr Norton, as soon as they will stand. I shall come on deck the moment I have finished these accounts. If the French gentleman is at hand, pray tell him I should like to see him in ten minutes. Compliments, of course."

'Aye aye, sir. Studdingsails as soon as they will stand. Captain's compliments to Monsieur Turd..."

'Dutourd, Mr Norton.'

'Beg pardon, sir. To Monsieur Dutourd and wishes to see him in ten minutes.'

On receiving this message Dutourd thanked the midshipman, looked at Martin with a smile, and began walking up and down from the taffrail to the leeward bow-chaser and back again, looking at his watch at each turn.

'Come in,' cried Jack Aubrey yet again. 'Come in, Monsieur-Mr Dutourd, and sit down. I am casting my prize-money accounts and should be obliged for a statement of the amount of specie, bills of exchange and the like carried in the Franklin: I must also know, of course, where it is kept.'

Dutourd's expression changed to an extraordinary degree, not merely from confident pleasurable anticipation to its opposite but from lively intelligence to a pale stupidity.

Jack went on, 'The money taken from your prizes will be returned to its former owners - I already have sworn statements from the ransomers - and the Franklin's remaining treasure will be shared out among her captors, according to the laws of the sea. Your private purse, like your private property, will be left to you; but its amount is to be written down.' Dutourd's wits had returned to him by now. Jack Aubrey's massive confidence told him that any sort of protest would be worse than useless: indeed, this treatment compared most favourably with the Franklin's, whose prisoners were stripped bare; but the long pause between capture and destitution, so very unlike the instant looting he had seen before, had bred illogical hopes. He managed a look of unconcern, however, and said, 'Vae victis' and produced two keys from an inner pocket. 'I hope you may not find that my former shipmates have been there before you,' he added. 'There were some grasping fellows among them.'

There were some grasping fellows aboard the Surprise too, if men who dearly loved to get their hands upon immediate ringing gold and silver rather than amiable but mute, remote, almost theoretical pieces of paper, are to be called grasping. There had been the sound of chuckling throughout the ship ever since Oracle Killick let it be known 'that the skipper had got round to it at last', and a boat carrying Mr Reade, Mr Adams and Mr Dutourd's servant had pulled across to the Franklin, returning with a heavy chest that came aboard not indeed to cheers, for that would not have been manners, but with great cheerfulness, good will, and anxious care while it hung in the void, and witticisms as it swung inboard, to be lowered as handsomely as a thousand of eggs.

Even until the next day, however, Stephen Maturin remained unaware of all this, for not only had he dined by himself in the cabin, Jack Aubrey being aboard the Franklin, but his mind was almost entirely taken up with cephalopods; and as far as he took notice of the gaiety at all (by no means uncommon in the Surprise, that happy ship) he attributed it to the freshening of the breeze, which was now sending the two ships along at close on five knots with promise of better to come. He had had to make his morning rounds alone, Martin having remained in bed with what he described as a sick headache; Jack's breakfast and Stephen's had for once failed to coincide, and they had exchanged no more than a wave from the sea to the deck before Stephen sat down to his collection. Some of the cephalopods were dried, some were in spirits, one was fresh: having ranged the preserved specimens in due order and checked the labels and above all the spirit level (a necessary precaution at sea, where he had known jars drained dry, even those containing asps and scorpions) he turned to the most interesting and most recent creature, a decapod that had fixed the terrible hooks and suckers of its long arms into the net of salt beef towing over the side to get rid of at least some of the salt before the pieces went into the steep-tub - had fixed them with such obstinate strength that it had been drawn aboard.

With Sarah and Emily standing in opposite corners of the cabin and holding the squid's arms just so, Stephen snipped, drew, and described, dissecting out various processes for preservation: there was alas no possibility of keeping the entire animal even if he had possessed a jar large enough, since it was Mr Vidal's property, he having detached it from the beef at the cost of some cruel wounds (a spiteful decapod) and having promised it to the gunroom cook for today's feast, this Friday being the day when, on the other side of the world, Shelmerston, forgetting all differences of creed, lit bonfires and danced round them singing a chant whose meaning was now lost but which as late as Leland's time was clearly in honour of the goddess Frig; and even today the words retained such power that as Stephen well knew no Shelmerstonian born and bred would willingly omit them.

The little girls were usually as good and silent as could be on these occasions, but now the coming of the feast and the arrival of the prize-money overcame Sarah's discretion and she said, 'Jemmy Ducks says Monsieur Turd's nose is sadly out of joint. He kicked Jean Potin's arse. Jean Potin is his servant.'

'Hush, my dear,' said Stephen. 'I am counting the suckers. And you are not to say Monsieur Turd: nor arse.'

Emily prized Stephen's attention and approval more than her immortal soul: though an affectionate child, she would betray her best friend to obtain it and now she called out from her corner, 'She is always saying Monsieur Turd. Mr Grainger checked her for saying it only yesterday: he declared it was wicked to speak so of such a benevolent gentleman."

'Heave that tentacle taut,' said Stephen. 'Never mind your pinafores.' He knew the squid's destination and he was working fast, with great concentration. Yet well before the description was complete there was a gunroom cook's mate begging his pardon, but so horny an old bugger, if his honour would excuse the word, needed a good hour in the pot: his honour sighed, quickly removed one last ganglion and sat back. 'Thank you, my dears,' he said to the little girls. 'Give Nicholson a hand with the longer arms. And Sarah, before you go, pass me the frigate-bird, will you, now?'

He was pretty well acquainted with frigate-birds, as any man who had sailed so far in tropical waters must be, and he had skinned quite a number, distinguishing three or perhaps four closely-allied species and making careful descriptions of their plumage; but he had never thoroughly dissected one. This he now settled himself to do, meaning first to examine the flight muscles, for in their lofty soaring the frigate-birds were perhaps even more remarkable than the albatrosses: and he had scarcely laid bare the breast before he had a premonition that he might be on the verge of the finest anatomical study of his career.

The bird, naturally enough, possessed a wishbone: yet from the very first it had seemed extraordinarily, unnaturally, firm under his touch. As his scalpel worked delicately down towards the keel of the breastbone, a spatula easing the muscles aside, he was perfectly deaf to the ring of coins and the powerful voices on the other side of the bulkhead - Captain Aubrey, the two oldest forecastle hands (rather hard of hearing), and Mr Adams telling over the treasure of the Franklin, converting it into Spanish dollars and reckoning the shares - and to those on the quarterdeck: an extraordinary number of hands had found tasks that kept them within earshot of the open companion, and they kept up a murmured commentary upon the amounts, proven-ence and rates of exchange of the coins handled below, showing a wonderful grasp of the European and American system, switching from Dutch rixdollars to Hanover ducats with as much ease as from Barcelona pistoles to Portuguese joes, Venice sequins or Jamaica guineas. The murmur, the remarkably strong murmer, ceased when hands were piped to dinner, but the telling in the great cabin continued, while Stephen, without a thought for anything else, steadily exposed the upper thorax of the frigate-bird.

He had not quite bared all the essentials by the time Killick and Padeen came in fairly skipping with impatience to say that the gunroom was assembling - the feast was almost under way. He submitted to their attentions and hurried below properly dressed, fairly clean, with his wig straight on his head and a look of shining delight still on his face.