‘What a humane regulation,’ said Stephen, looking pleased. ‘Is it often taken advantage of?’
‘Invariably,’ said Jack. ‘It is a universal custom, in the service.’
‘In that case,’ said Stephen, taking the envelope, ‘I shall undoubtedly comply with it: I certainly should not wish to look singular: I am most obliged to you. May I indeed have one of your men? A violoncello is a bulky object: as for the rest there is only a small chest and some books.’
‘Then let us meet again at a quarter past the hour at the steps,’ said Jack. ‘Lose not a moment, I beg, Doctor; for we are extremely pressed. Shannahan, you look after the Doctor and trundle his dunnage along smartly. Bussell, you come along with me.’
As the clock struck the quarter and the note hung up there unresolved, waiting for the half, Jack said, ‘Stow the chest in the fore-sheets. Mr Ricketts, you stow yourself upon the chest. Doctor, you sit down there and nurse the ‘cello. Capital. Shove off. Give way together, and row dry, now.’
They reached the Sophie, propelled Stephen and his belongings up the side – the larboard side, to avoid ceremony and to make sure they got him aboard: they had too low an opinion of landmen to allow him to venture upon even the Sophie’s unaspiring height alone – and Jack led him to the cabin. ‘Mind your head,’ he said. ‘That little den in there is yours: do what you can to make yourself comfortable, pray, and forgive my lack of ceremony. I must go on deck.
‘Mr Dillon,’ he said, ‘is all well?’
‘All’s well, sir. The twelve merchantmen have made their signal.’
‘Very good. Fire a gun for them and make sail, if you please. I believe we shall Just get down the harbour with topgallants, if this fag-end of a breeze still holds; and then, out of the lee of the cape, we may make a respectable offing. So make sail; and by then it will be time to set the watch. A long day, Mr Dillon?’
‘A very long day, sir.’
At one time I thought it would never come to an end.’
Chapter Three
Two bells in the morning watch found the Sophie sailing steadily eastward along the thirty-ninth parallel with the wind just abaft her beam; she was heeling no more than two strakes under her topgallantsails, and she could have set her royals, if the amorphous heap of merchantmen under her lee had not determined to travel very slowly until full daylight, no doubt for fear of tripping over the lines of longitude.
The sky was still grey and it was impossible to say
whether it was clear or covered with very high cloud; but the sea itself already had a nacreous light that belonged more to the day than the darkness, and this light was reflected in the great convexities of the topsails, giving them the lustre of grey pearls
‘Good morning,’ said Jack to the marine sentry at the door
‘Good morning, sir,’ said the sentry, springing to attention
‘Good morning, Mr Dillon’
‘Good morning, sir,’ touching his hat
Jack took in the state of the weather, the trim of the sails and the likelihood of a fair forenoon, he drew deep gusts of the clean air, after the dense fug of his cabin. He turned to the rail, unencumbered by hammocks at this time of day, and looked at the merchantmen they were all there, straggling over not too vast an area of sea, and what be
had taken for a far stern lantern or an uncommonly big top-light was old Saturn, low on the horizon and tangled in their rigging To windward now, and he saw a sleepy line of gulls, squabbling languidly over a ripple on the sea – sardines or anchovies or maybe those little spiny mackerel The sound of the creaking blocks, the gently
straining cordage and sailcloth, the angle of the living deck and the curved line of guns in front of him sent such a jet of happiness through his heart that he almost skipped where he stood.
‘Mr Dillon,’ he said, overcoming a desire to shake his lieutenant by the hand, ‘we shall have to muster the ship’s company after breakfast and make up our minds how we are to watch and quarter them.’
‘Yes, sir: at the moment things are at sixes and sevens, with the new draft unsettled.’
‘At least we have plenty of hands – we could fight both sides easily, which is more than any line of battle ship can say. Though I rather fancy we had the tail end of the draft from the Burford; it seemed to me there was an unnatural proportion of Lord Mayor’s men among them. No old Charlottes, I suppose?’
‘Yes, sir, we have one – the fellow with no hair and a red handkerchief round his neck. He was a foretopman, but he seems quite dazed and stupid still.’
‘A sad business,’ said Jack shaking his head.
‘Yes,’ said James Dillon, looking into vacancy and seeing a leaping spring of fire in the still air, a first-rate ablaze from truck to waterline, with eight hundred men aboard. ‘You could hear the flames a mile away and more. And sometimes a sheet of fire would lift off and go up into the air by itself, cracking and waving like a huge flag. It was just such a morning as this: a little later in the day, perhaps.’
‘You were there, I collect? Have you any notion of the cause? People talk about an infernal machine taken aboard by an Italian in Boney’s pay.’
‘From all I heard it was some fool who allowed hay to be stowed on the half-deck, close to the tub with the slow-match for the signal-guns. It went up in a blaze and caught the mainsail at once. It was so sudden they could not come to the clew-garnets.’
‘Could you save any of her people?’
‘Yes, a few. We picked up two marines and a quarter-gunner, but he was most miserably burnt. There were very few saved, not much above a hundred, I believe. It was not a creditable business, not at all. Many more should have been brought away, but the boats hung back.’
‘They were thinking of the Boyne, no doubt.’
‘Yes. The Charlotte’s guns were firing as the heat reached them, and everybody knew the magazine might go up at any minute; but even so . . . All the officers I spoke to said the
same thing ~- there was no getting the boats close in. It was the same with my people. I was in a hired cutter, the Dart -,
‘Yes, yes, I know you were,’ said Jack, smiling significantly.
‘- three or four miles down-wind, and we had to sweep to get up But there was no way of inducing them to pull heartily, rope’s end or no. There was not a man or boy who was what you would call shy of gunfire – indeed, they were as well-conducted a set of men as you could wish, for
boarding or for carrying a shore-battery, or for anything you please. And the Charlotte’s guns were not aimed at us, of course – just going off at random. But no, the whole feeling in the cutter was different, quite unlike action or an ugly night on a lee-shore. And there is little to be done with a thoroughly unwilling crew.’
‘No,’ said Jack. ‘There is no forcing a willing mind.’ He was reminded of his conversation with Stephen Maturin, and he added, ‘It is a contradiction in terms’ He might have gone on to say that a crew thoroughly upset in its ways, cut short in the article of sleep, and deprived of its trollops, was not the best of weapons either; but he knew that any remark passed on the deck of a vessel seventy-eight feet three inches long was in the nature of a public statement
Apart from anything else, the quartermaster at the con and the helmsman at the wheel were within arm’s reach. The quartermaster turned the watch-glass, and as the first grains of sand began their tedious journey back into the half
they had just so busily emptied he called ‘George,’ in a low, night-watch voice, and the marine sentry clumped forward to strike three bells.
By now there was no doubt about the sky: it was pure blue from north to south, with no more than a little violet duskiness lingering in the west.
Jack stepped over to the weather-rail, swung himself into the shrouds and ran up the ratlines. ‘This may not look quite dignified, in a captain,’ he reflected, pausing under the loom of the top to see just how much more clearance well-bowsed cross-catharpings might give the yard. ‘Perhaps I had better go up through the lubber’s hole.’ Ever since the invention of those platforms some way up the mast called tops, sailors have made it a point of honour to get into them by an odd, devious route – by clinging to the futtock-shrouds, which run from the catharpings near the top of the mast to the futtock-plates at the outer edge of the top: they cling to them and creep like flies, hanging backward about twenty-five degrees from the vertical, until they reach the rim of the top and so climb upon it, quite ignoring the convenient square hole next to the mast itself, to which the shrouds lead directly as their natural culmination – a straight, safe path with easy steps from the deck to the top. This hole, this lubber’s hole, is as who should say never used, except by those who have never been to sea or persons of great dignity, and when Jack came up through it he gave Jan Jackruski, ordinary seaman, so disagreeable a fright that he uttered a thin scream. ‘I thought you were the house-demon,’ he said, in Polish.