'Let us not disagree; it must necessarily lead to the destruction of us both,' said Lesueur. 'You shall see Maturin every day of the week if you choose: I only beg you to remember that he is dangerous.'
'Very well,' said Wray, and then rather awkwardly, 'Have you heard from the rue Villars?'
'About paying your card-debts?'
'If you like to put it that way.'
'I am afraid they will not go beyond the initial grant.'
As Wray had predicted, he and Maturin met again aboard the flagship, where it was agreed that Hairabedian was certainly a French agent and that for obvious reasons his friends or colleagues in Valletta had arranged for the stealing of his papers. At the same time the Admiral put forward the suggestion that perhaps Dr Maturin might be seconded to Mr Wray's department to help look for these friends or colleagues; but the suggestion was coldly received by both sides and he did not pursue it. Unofficially they met far more frequently; not indeed every day of the week, but, since luck still ran against him, pretty often. This was not because Stephen's sudden intense desire for gambling was unsatisfied, but rather because his cabin in the Surprise was filled with pots of paint, and his peace aboard destroyed by incessant hammering and vehement cries, while his natural companions were all taken up with wholehearted, purely naval activities, and once he had made his morning rounds at the hospital, he felt obliged to give Wray what part of the afternoon he did not spend in the hills or along the shore with Martin. His evening he usually passed with Mrs Fielding, and it was at her house that he most often saw Jack Aubrey.
The dockyard had indeed made a very fine job of the Surprise's inwards; in their tortuous way they had fulfilled their side of the bargain. But the private agreement had not gone beyond certain clearly-defined structural repairs, and the shipwrights had left her more visible parts in a very horrid state: nor did Jack much care for her trim, the rake of her masts, or the look of her rigging. He felt very strongly that if the ship was to die to the Navy she should do so in style, in great style; besides, there was always the possibility that he might take her into action again before the end. All hands therefore turned to and tended her as she had rarely been tended before: they shifted her massive cables end for end, they roused out her lower tier of casks and restowed the hold to bring her a little by the stern, her favourite trim, they painted her inside and out and scraped her decks; Mr Borrell and his crew cosseted the guns and their furniture, the magazines and the shot; while Mr Hollar, his mates and all the young gentlemen sped about aloft like spiders. For once they were not in a tearing hurry, since the Captain of the Fleet had assured Jack that the Surprise would not be sent to sea until she had her Marines aboard once more and at least 'a reasonable proportion' of the hands that had been taken from her; yet even so her captain and first lieutenant, who had heard a good many official promises in their time, carried the work forward at a good round pace. In principle Jack disliked much in the way of shining ornament, but he felt that this was a special case, and for once in his life he laid out a considerable sum on gold-leaf for the gingerbread work of her stern and he called in the best inn-sign painter in Valletta to attend to her figurehead, an anonymous lady with a splendid bosom. All this was fine, satisfying, seamanlike work—as he told the exhausted midshipmen, it gave them a deeper insight into the nature of a man-of-war than months or even years of simple sailing—and he was at last able to do many of the things that he had always intended to do; but it all had a cruelly bitter taste at times, and he was glad to follow his fiddle, carried by a Maltese supernumerary, to Laura Fielding's musical evenings, there to play or to listen to other playing, sometimes very well indeed.
By now he had grown quite used to the notion that Laura and Stephen were lovers; he did not mind it, though he admired them a little less, but he did think it more than usually unfair that Valletta should still suppose that he, Jack Aubrey, was the happy man. People would say 'If you happen to pass by Mrs Fielding's, pray tell her that . . .' or 'Who will be coming on Tuesday evening?' as though their relationship were an established thing. Of course, a great deal was owing to that vile dog Ponto, who had welcomed him with a vast and noisy demonstration of love in the crowded Strada Reale within ten minutes of his setting foot on shore; but it also had to be admitted that Stephen and Laura were extraordinarily discreet. Nobody seeing Stephen at one of her evening parties would ever suppose that he spent the rest of the night there.
Wray certainly did not. Quite early in this period he made scarcely-veiled laughing allusion to 'your friend Aubrey's good fortunes that we hear so much about.' But as the days went by he was less and less inclined to laugh about anything at all. He had not come to the end of his run of bad luck and by now he had lost so much that Stephen could not in decency deny him his continually-repeated revenge, though at present the game bored him sadly. Although Wray had had a great deal of practice he was not a very good player; he could be deceived by a sudden change from stolid defence to risky attack; and his own attempts at deceit, which went little beyond slight hesitations and faint looks of disgust, were tolerably transparent. But above all he held no cards and Stephen had such good ones that the game grew duller still. Furthermore an anxious, unlucky Wray was by no means such an amusing companion as he had been before. As they became better acquainted Stephen found that Wray was more of a rake than he had supposed, that he attached an excessive importance to money, and that he was not overburdened with principles; a clever man, to be sure, but one with little bottom. Wray did not attempt to correct fortune, however: some question of irregularity at cards had at one time attached to his name, and no man in Wray's position could afford a second accusation.
They usually played at the officers' club or in their green arbour, and it was in this arbour that they met for what had been agreed upon as their final session. For some time Wray had been waiting for a remittance, and being short of cash—Stephen had taken it all—he settled his losses with promissory notes. They played now for the entire debt, Stephen caring little for the issue, so long as he could get away in plenty of time to visit a cave full of bats with Martin and Pullings.
Wray lost again, and even more emphatically than before. He spent some while over his score and his calculations, and with preparing what he had to say. Looking up with a particularly artificial smile he said that he was very much concerned to have to tell Dr Maturin that because of recent losses in the City his remittance had not come and he was unable to clear accounts with him; he regretted it extremely; but at least he could offer some kind of solution—he would give his note of hand for the whole sum now, and in the course of the next few days he would have a deed of annuity on his wife's estate drawn up, payments at the usual rate being sent to Maturin's banking-house every quarter until Mrs Wray inherited, when the principle would be cleared off without the slightest difficulty: everybody knew the Admiral had come into a noble fortune, entailed as to nine tenths.
'I see,' said Stephen. He was not pleased. They had been playing for ready money, and it was perfectly immoral in Wray to have embarked upon their last game when he could not put cash down if he lost. Stephen had not particularly wanted this sum of money once his gambling fever was over, but having risked his own in perfectly good faith, he had certainly earned it.
Wray was aware of his feelings. 'Is there anything I can do to sugar this pill? I have a certain amount of influence on patronage, as you know.'
'I think you will admit that the pill you propose calls for a world of sugar,' said Stephen. Wray admitted it entirely, and Stephen went on, 'I heard a very ugly rumour at the club this morning: it was said that the Blackwater, though long promised to Captain Aubrey, had been given to a Captain Irby. Is this true?'
'Yes,' said Wray, after a moment's hesitation. 'His parliamentary interest required it.'
'In that case,' said Stephen, 'I shall look to you to provide Aubrey with a similar vessel. You know his fighting-record, his just claims, and his desire for a heavy frigate on the North American s
tation.'
'Certainly,' said Wray.
'Secondly I should like a sea-going command for Captain Pullings, and thirdly your general benevolence with regard to the Reverend Mr Martin, and a helping hand if ever he should require a transfer from one ship to another.'
'Very well,' said Wray, noting down the names. 'I shall do what I can. As you know, sloops are in very short supply—there are twice as many commanders as there are ships for them to command—but I shall do what I can. As for the chaplain, there will be no difficulty: he may go wherever he wishes.' He put his notebook back in his pocket and called for more coffee. When it came he said 'I am very much obliged to you for your forbearance, Maturin, indeed I am. I do not think you will be kept waiting very long, however. My father-in-law is sixty-seven and he is far from well.' Admiral Harte had a dropsical tendency, it appeared, and although the actuaries' table of expectation of life gave him nearly eight years he was unlikely to last half that time. In his agitation Wray spoke with such a want of common hypocrisy that Stephen scarcely knew how to reply. He observed that some physicians were treating dropsy with a new preparation of digitalis, but that for his own part he should be very cautious in exhibiting so potentially dangerous a drug. The conversation continued on these lines for some little while, and Stephen had the impression that any dose that might diminish the Admiral's expectation of life still further would be heartily welcome; but before Wray could commit himself on that point Pullings and Martin came to take Stephen to the cave.
'That cave, my dear,' he said to Laura as they settled down to a midnight feast in his room, 'that cave is one of the wonders of the universe. I absolutely saw every species of Mediterranean bat, and two that I suspect of being African; but they were somewhat shy, and retired to a crevice beyond the reach of Pullings' rope. A monstrous fine cave indeed! In the more favoured places there was two foot of their dung upon the floor, with a large number of bones and mummified specimens. I shall carry you there on Friday.'
'Not on Friday you will not,' said Laura, spreading his bread with red mullet roe.
'Do not tell me you are superstitious, for shame!'
'I am, though. I should not spit in a wolf's eye-for the world. But it is not that. On Friday you will be far away. Oh, how I shall miss you!'
'Are you prepared to reveal the source of your information?'
'Mrs Colonel Rhodes told me that a party of Marines were going aboard the Surprise on Thursday to sail the next day, and her brother, who commands them, is much put out, because he had an engagement on Saturday. And the port-captain's daughter said it was decided that the Surprise was to take the Adriatic convoy.'
'Thank you, my dear,' said Stephen. 'I am happy to know it.' And after some reflection he said, 'It would seem natural that our farewell embraces should produce something unusually substantial for your foreign gentleman.' He went into his bedroom, chose carefully among the poisoned gifts he had prepared with such loving pains, and picked out a small dirty-white sheepskin pocketbook with a clasp. 'There, my friend,' he said to himself, 'with the blessing that should confound your knavish tricks for quite a while.'
Chapter Nine
The surgeon's cabin in HMS Surprise would have been a dark, cramped triangle, like a slice of cake, if its sharp end had not been cut off, which made it into a dark, cramped quadrilateral. It was so low that a moderately tall man would have struck his head on the deck above if he had stood upright, and it did not possess a single right-angle in its entire construction; but Dr Maturin was rather short, and although he was reasonably fond of right-angles he was fonder still of a place that did not have to be stripped bare every time the ship cleared for action, as the Surprise did every evening, a place where his books and specimens could remain undisturbed. As for the want of room, long use and his friend the carpenter's ingenuity in the matter of folding cot and table and of lockers built in unlikely places dealt with that to some degree; and as for the darkness, Stephen had devoted a very small fraction of his preposterous winnings—the winnings he had actually received, in elegant Bank of England notes—to the lining of all free surfaces with sheets of best Venetian looking-glass, which increased the light that filtered down to such an extent that it allowed him to read and write without a candle. He was writing now, and to his wife, his feet wedged against one stanchion and the back of his chair against another, for the frigate was behaving in a very skittish manner as she beat up against a short head-sea: the letter had begun the day before, when the Surprise, steering for Santa Maura, where two ships of her convoy were to be left, had been forced away by stress of weather, forced away almost to Ithaca. 'To Ithaca itself, upon my word of honour. But would any amount of pleading on my part or on the part of all the literate members of the ship's company induce that animal to bear away for the sacred spot? It would not. Certainly he had heard of Homer, and had indeed looked into Mr Pope's version of his tale; but for aught he could make out, the fellow was no seaman. Admittedly Ulysses had no chronometer, and probably no sextant neither; but with no more than log, lead and lookout an officer-like commander would have found his way home from Troy a d——d sight quicker than that. Hanging about in port and philandering, that was what it amounted to, the vice of navies from the time of Noah to that of Nelson. And as for that tale of all his foremast hands being turned into swine, so that he could not win his anchor or make sail, why, he might tell that to the Marines. Besides, he behaved like a very mere scrub to Queen Dido—though on second thought perhaps that was the other cove, the pious Anchises. But it was all one: they were six of one and half a dozen of the other, neither seamen nor gentlemen, and both of 'em God d——d bores into the bargain. For his part he far preferred what Mowett and Rowan wrote; that was poetry a man could get his teeth into, and it was sound seamanship too; in any case he was here to conduct his convoy into Santa Maura, not to gape at curiosities.'
Then, feeling that he was exposing his friend rather too much (for the animal in question was of course the captain of the Surprise) he laid the sheet aside and wrote 'Jack Aubrey has faults and to spare, the Dear knows: he thinks a sailor's highest aim is to carry his ship from A to B in the shortest possible time, losing not a minute, so that life is a kind of perpetually harassing race, and only yesterday he was doggedly, mechanically stubborn in his refusal to turn a little way aside so that we might view Ithaca. Yet on the other hand (and this is my real point) he is capable of a most surprising degree of magnanimity and self-command when the occasion calls for it: a much higher degree than you might suppose from his impatience over trifles. Of this I had an instance the day after we left Valletta. Among other passengers we are carrying a Major Pollock, and at dinner this gentleman happened to observe that his brother, a lieutenant in the Navy, was amazingly proud of his new ship the Blackwater, and that he made no doubt but she should prove a match for any of the heavy Americans. "Are you sure he said the Blackwater, sir?" asked Jack, surprised, as well he might be, since as you know he has been promised the vessel ever since its keel was laid down and has wholly relied upon taking it to the North American station as soon as this short spell in the Mediterranean was over. "Quite sure, sir," replies the soldier. "I had a letter from him with the last mail that came in, the very morning I came aboard. It was dated from the Blackwater in the Cove of Cork, and he said he hoped to be in Nova Scotia before it reached me, since there was a fine northeaster blowing and Captain Irby was a great one for cracking on." "Then let us drink to his health," says Jack. "The Blackwater and all who sail in her." In the evening, when we were alone in the great cabin and I made some allusion to the broken promise, all he said was, "Yes. It is a d——d heavy blow; but whining don't help. Let us get on with our music." '
It was indeed a very heavy blow, and when Jack woke in the morning and the recollection came flooding into his mind, the brilliant day darkened. He had counted upon the Blackwater with absolute certainty; he had counted upon continuing employment at sea, a matter of the first importance to him now that his affairs
on shore were in such a lamentable state; and not only that, he had relied upon being able to take his officers and his followers with him, and with any luck almost the whole of the Surprise's crew. Now all this was at an end. The whole efficient, smoothly-working organization—all the makings of a happy ship and a deadly fighting-machine—must be dispersed: and in all likelihood he must be thrown on the beach. Furthermore, since Mr Croker, the First Secretary, had used him badly, even dishonourably, he would almost certainly look upon the name of Aubrey with disfavour in the future.
A very heavy blow indeed, but few would have guessed it, watching him tell Major Pollock how the Surprise and her allies had turned the French out of Marga when last she was in these waters. The frigate, with the remaining convoy under her lee—a well-behaved convoy, keeping exactly to station in these dangerous waters—had stood well in to the southern side of Cape Stavro, a great headland that jutted far out into the Ionian Sea, and now they were abreast of the walled town nestling at the foot of its tall cliffs and straggling some way up them in rock-hewn terraces. 'There is the citadel, do you see,' he said, pointing over the pale green, white-flecked sea, 'to the right of the green-domed church and above it. And down by the mole there are the two tiers of batteries that guard the entrance to the harbour.'
The soldier gave Marga a long, knowing look through the telescope. 'I should have thought it was perfectly impregnable from the sea,' he said at last. 'Those flanking batteries alone would surely sink a fleet.'
'That was my impression,' said Jack. 'So we set about it another way. If you follow the line of the wall behind the citadel you will see a square tower, about a quarter of the way up the cliff.'