leg so trim, and to sew up John Lakey’s private parts so neat; as well as all the rest; he being, so to speak, on leave – a visitor, like.”‘
‘It is handsome,’ said Jack. ‘It is very handsome, I agree.
We’ll need a kind of gammoning here, Mr Watt, until the carpenter can attend to the cap.
Hawsers bowsed as tight as can be, and God help us if we have to strike topmasts.’
They saw to half a dozen other points and Jack climbed down, paused to count his convoy
– very close and orderly now after its fright – and went below. As he let himself sink on to the long cushioned locker he found that he was in the act of saying ‘Carry three,’ for his mind was busily working out three eighths of £3,500 – it had now fixed upon this sum as the worth of the Dorthe Engelbrechtsdatter. For three-eighths (less one of them for the admiral) was to be his share of the proceeds. Nor was his the only mind to be busy with figures, by any means, for every other man on the Sophie’s books was entitled to share –
Dillon and the master, an eighth between them; the surgeon (if the Sophie had officially borne one on her books), bosun, carpenter and master’s mates, another eighth; then the midshipmen, the inferior warrant officers and the marine sergeant another eighth, while the rest of the ship’s company shared the remaining quarter. And it was wonderful to see how briskly minds not given to abstract thought rattled these figures, these symbols, up and down, coming out with the acting yeoman of the sheets’ share correct to the nearest farthing. He reached for a pencil to do the sum properly, felt ashamed, pushed it aside, hesitated, took it up again and wrote the figures very small, diagonally upon the corner of a leaf, thrusting the paper quickly from him at a knock on the door. It was the still-moist carpenter, coming to report the shot-holes plugged, and no more than eighteen inches of water in the well, ‘which is less nor half what I expected, with that nasty rough stroke the galley give us, firing from so low down’. He paused, giving Jack an odd, sideways-looking glance.
‘Well, that’s capital, Mr Lamb,’ said Jack, after a moment.
But the carpenter did not stir; he stood there dripping on the painted sailcloth squares, making a little pool at last.
Then he burst out, ‘Which, if it is true about the cat, and the poor Norwegians dumped overboard – perhaps wounded, too, which makes you right mad, as being mere cruelty –
what harm would they do if battened down? Howsoever, the warrant officers of the Sophie would wish the gentleman’ -jerking his head towards the night-cabin, Stephen Maturin’s temporary dwelling-place – ‘cut in on their share, fair do’s, as a mark of – as an acknowledgement of – his conduct considered very handsome by all hands.’
‘If you please, sir,’ said Babbington, ‘the cat’s signalling.’
On the quarter-deck Jack saw that Dillon had run up a motley hoist – obviously all the Dorthe Engelbrechtsdauer possessed – stating, among other things, that he had the plague aboard and that he was about to sail.
‘Hands to wear ship,’ he called. And when the Sophie had run down to within a cable’s length of the convoy he hailed, ‘Cat ahoy!’
‘Sir,’ came Dillon’s voice over the intervening sea, ‘you will be pleased to hear the Norwegians are all safe.’
‘What?’
‘The – Norwegians – are – all – safe.’ The two vessels came closer. ‘They hid in a secret place in the forepeak -in the forepeak,’ went on Dillon.
‘Oh, – their forepeak,’ muttered the quartermaster at the wheel; for the Sophie was all ears
– a very religious hush.
‘Full and by!’ cried Jack angrily, as the topsails shivered under the influence of the quartermaster’s emotion. ‘Keep her full and by.’
‘Full and by it is, sir.’
‘And the master says,’ continued the distant voice, ‘could we send a surgeon aboard, because one of his men hurt his toe hurrying down the ladder.’
‘Tell the master, from me,’ cried Jack, in a voice that reached almost to Cagliari, his face purple with effort and furious indignation, ‘tell the master that he can take his man’s toe and – with it.’
He stumped below, £875 the poorer, and looking thoroughly sour and disagreeable.
This, however, was not an expression that his features wore easily, or for long; and when he stepped into the cutter to go aboard the admiral in Genoa roads his face was quite restored to its natural cheerfulness. It was rather grave, of course, for a visit to the formidable Lord Keith, Admiral of the Blue and Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, was no laughing matter. His gravity, as be sat there in the stern-sheets, very carefully washed, shaved and dressed, affected his coxswain and the cutter’s crew, and they rowed soberly along, keeping their eyes primly inboard. Yet even so they were going to reach the flagship too early, and Jack, looking at his watch, desired them to pull round the Audacious and lie on their oars. From here he could see the whole bay, with five ships of the line and four frigates two or three miles from the land, and inshore of them a swarm of gunboats and mortar-vessels; they were steadily bombarding the noble city that rose steeply in a sweeping curve at the head of the bay – lying there in a cloud of smoke of their own making, lobbing bombs into the close-packed buildings on the far side of the distant mole. The boats were small in the distance; the houses, churches and palaces were smaller still (though quite distinct in that sweet transparent air), like toys; but the continuous rumbling of the fire, and the deeper reply of the French artillery on shore, was strangely close at hand, real and menacing.
The necessary ten minutes passed; the Sophie’s cutter approached the flag-ship; and in answer to the hail of Boat ahoy the coxswain answered Sophie, meaning that her captain was aboard. Jack went up the side in due form, saluted the quarter-deck, shook hands with Captain Louis and was shown to the admiral’s cabin.
He had every reason to be pleased with himself he had taken his convoy to Cagliari without loss; he had
brought up another to Leghorn; and he was here at exactly the appointed time, in spite of calms off Monte Cristo – but for all that he was remarkably nervous, and his mind was so
full of Lord Keith that when he saw no admiral in that beautiful great light-filled cabin but only a well-rounded young woman with her back to thç window, he gaped like any carp.
‘Jacky, dear,’ said the young woman, ‘how beautiful you are, all dressed up. Let me put your neck-cloth straight, La, Jackie, you look as frightened as if I -were a Frenchman.’
‘Queeney! Old Queeney!’ cried Jack, squeezing her and giving her a most affectionate smacking kiss.
‘God damn and blast – a luggit corpis sweenie,’ cried a furious Scotch voice, and the admiral walked in from the quarter-gallery. Lord Keith was a tall grey man with a fine leonine head, and his eyes shot blazing sparks of rage.
‘This is the young man I told you about, Admiral,’ said Queeney, patting poor pale Jack’s black stock into place and waving a ring at him. ‘I used to give him his bath and take him into my bed when he had bad dreams.’
This might not have been thought the very best possible recommendation to a newly-married admiral of close on sixty, but it seemed to answer. ‘Oh,’ said the admiral. ‘Yes. I was forgetting. Forgive me. I have such a power of captains, and some of them are very mere rakes. .
‘”And some of them are very mere rakes,” says he, piercing me through and through with that damned cold eye of his,’ said Jack, filling Stephen’s glass and spreading himself comfortably along the locker. ‘And I was morally certain that he recognized me from the only three times we were in company – and each time worse than the last. The first was at the Cape, in the old Reso, when I was a midshipman:
he was Captain Elphinstone then. He came aboard just two minutes after Captain Douglas had turned me before the mast and said, “What’s yon wee snotty bairn a-greeting at?”
And Captain Douglas said, “That wretched boy is a perfect young whoremonger; I have turned him before the mast, to learn him his duty.”‘
‘Is that a more convenient place to learn it?’ said Stephen.
‘Well, it is easier for them to teach you deference,’ said Jack, smiling, ‘for they can seize you to a grating at the gangway and flog the liver and lights out of you with the cat. It means disrating a midshipman – degrading him, so that he is no longer what we call a young gentleman but a common sailor. He becomes a common sailor; he berths and messes with them; and he can be knocked about by anyone with a cane or a starter in his hand, as well as being flogged. I never thought he would really do it, although he had threatened me with it often enough; for he was a friend of my father’s and I thought he had a kindness for me -which indeed he did. But, however, he carried it out, and there I was, turned before the mast: and he kept me there six months before rating me midshipman again. I was grateful to him in the end, because I came to understand the lower deck through and through – they were wonderfully kind to me, on the whole. But at the time I bawled like a calf – wept like any girl, ha, ha, ha.’