Then I go on to put about the snow – merely touch upon the engagement, with a fling about his alacrity – and come to the landing-party. Upon its appearing that the remainder of the convoy had run under the guns of the Almoraira battery it was determined that they should be attempted to be cut out which was happily accomplished, the battery (a square tower mounting four iron twenty-four-pounders) being blown up at twenty-seven minutes after two, the boats having proceeded to the SSW point of the bay. Three tartans that had been hauled up and chained were obliged to be burnt, but the settee was brought out, when she proved to be the Xaloc, loaded with a valuable cargo of quicksilver concealed in sacks of flour. Pretty bald, ain’t it? However, I go on. The zeal and activity of Lieutenant
Dillon, who took his Majesty’s sloop I have the honour to command, in, and kept up an incessant fire on the mole and battery, I am much indebted to. All the officers and men behaved so well that it were insidious to particularize; but I must acknowledge the politeness of Mons. La Hire, of the royal French artillery, who volunteered his services in setting and firing the train to the magazine, and who was somewhat bruised and singed.
Enclosed is a list of the killed and wounded: John Hayter, marine, killed; James Nightingale, seaman, and Thomas
Thompson, seaman, wounded. I have the honour to be, my Lord – and so on. What do you think of it?’
‘Well, it is somewhat clearer than the last,’ said Stephen. ‘Though I fancy invidious might answer better than insidious.’
‘Invidious, of course. I knew there was something not quite shipshape there. Invidious. A capital word: I dare say you spell it with a V?’
The Sophie lay off San Pedro: she had been extraordinarily busy this last week, and she was rapidly perfecting her technique, staying well over the horizon by day, while the military forces of Spain hurried up and down the coast looking for her, and standing in at night to play Old Harry with the little ports and the coast-wise trade in the hours before dawn. It was a dangerous, highly personal way of carrying on; it called for very careful preparation; it made great and continual demands on luck; and it had been remarkably successful. It also made great demands on the Sophie’s people, for when they were in the offing Jack exercised them mercilessly at the guns and James at the still brisker setting of sails. James was as taut an officer as any in the service: he liked a clean ship, action or no action, and there was no cutting-out expedition or dawn skirmishing that did not come back to gleaming decks and resplendent brass. He was particular, as they said; but his zeal for trim paintwork, perfectly-drawing sails, squared yards, clear tops and flemished ropes was, in fact, surpassed by his delight in taking the whole frail beautiful edifice into immediate contact with the King’s enemies, who might wrench it to pieces, shatter, burn or sink it. The Sophie’s people bore up under all this with wonderful spirit, however, a worn, lean and eager crew, filled with precise ideas of what they should do the minute they stepped ashore from the liberty-boat -filled, too, with a tolerably precise notion of the change in relations on the quarter-deck: Dillon’s marked respect and attention to the captain since Almoraira, their walking up and down together and their frequent consultations had not
passed unnoticed; and, of course, the conversation at the
gun-room table, in which the lieutenant spoke in the highest terms of the shore-party’s action, had at once been repeated
throughout the sloop.
‘Unless my adding is out,’ said Jack, looking up from
his paper, ‘we have taken, sunk or burnt twenty-seven times
our own weight since the beginning of the cruise; and had they all been together they could have fired forty-two guns
at us, counting the swivels. That is what the admiral meant by wringing the Spaniard’s tugs; and’ – laughing heartily -‘if it puts a couple of thousand guineas in our pockets, why, so much the better.’
‘May I come in, sir?’ asked the purser, appearing in the open door.
‘Good morning, Mr Ricketts. Come in, come in and sit down. Are those today’s figures?’
‘Yes, sir. You will not be pleased, I am afraid. The second butt in the lower tier was started in the head, and it must have lost close on fifty gallon.’
‘Then we must pray for rain, Mr Ricketts,’ said Jack. But when the purser had gone he turned sadly
to Stephen. ‘I should have been perfectly happy but for that damned water: everything delightful – people
behaving well, charming cruise, no sickness – if only I had
completed our water at Mahon. Even at short allowance we
use half a ton a day, what with all these prisoners and in this heat; the meat has to be soaked and the grog has to be mixed, even if we do wash in sea-water.’ He had wholly set his heart on lying in the sea-lanes off Barcelona, perhaps the busiest convergency in the Mediterranean: that was to
have been the culmination of the cruise. Now he would have to bear away for Minorca, and he was by no means sure of what welcome would be waiting for him there, or what orders; not much of his cruising time was left, and capricious winds or a capricious commandant might swallow it entirely – almost certainly would.
‘If it is fresh water you are wanting, I can show you a
creek not far from here where you may fill all the barrels you choose.’
‘Why did you never tell me?’ cried Jack, shaking him by the hand and looking delighted – a disagreeable sight, for the left side of his face, head and neck was still seared a baboonish red and blue, it shone under Stephen’s medicated grease, and through the grease rose a new frizz of yellow hair; all this, taken with his deep brown, shaved other cheek, gave him a wicked, degenerate, inverted look.
‘You never asked.’
‘Undefended? No batteries?’
‘Never a house, far less a gun. Yet it was inhabited once, for there are the remains of a Roman villa on the top of the promontory, and you can just make out the road beneath the trees and the undergrowth cistus and lentisk. No doubt they used the spring: it is quite considerable, and it may, I conceive, have real medicinal qualities. The country people use it in cases of impotence.’
‘And can you find it, do you think?’
‘Yes,’ said Stephen. He sat for a moment with his head down. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘will you do me a kindness?’
‘With all my heart.’
‘I have a friend who lives some two or three miles inland: I should Like you to land me and pick me up, say, twelve hours later.’
‘Very well,’ said Jack. It was fair enough. ‘Very well,’ he said again, looking aside to hide the knowing grin that would spread over his face. ‘It is the night you would wish to spend ashore, I presume. We will stand in this evening you are sure we shall not be surprised?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘- send the cutter in again a little after sunrise. But what if I am forced off the land? What would you do then?’
‘I should present myself the next morning, or the morning after that – a whole series of mornings, if need be. I must go,’ he said, getting up at the sound of the bell, the still-feeble bell, that his new loblolly boy rang to signify that the
sick might now assemble. ‘I dare not trust that fellow alone with the drugs.’ The sin-eater had discovered a malignance towards his shipmates: he had been found grinding creta alba into their gruel, under the persuasion that it was a far more active substance, far more sinister; and if ill-will had been enough, the sick-bay would have been swept clean days ago.
The cutter, followed by the launch, rowed attentively
in through the warm darkness, with Dillon and Sergeant Quinn keeping watch on the sides of the high wooded inlet; and when the boats were two hundred yards from the cliff the exhalation of the stone-pines, mixed with the scent of the gum-cistus, met them it was like breathing another element.
‘If you row a little more to the right,’ said Stephen, ‘you may avoid the rocks where the crayfish live.’ In spite of the heat he had his black cloak over his shoulders, and sitting huddled there in the stern-sheets he stared into the narrowing cove with a singular intensity, looking deathly pale.
The stream, in times of spate, had formed a little bar,
and upon this the cutter grounded: everybody leapt out to
float it over, and two seamen carried Stephen ashore. They put him down tenderly, well above the high-water mark, adjured him to take care of all them nasty sticks laying about and hurried back for his cloak. Falling and falling, the water had made a basin in the rock at the top of the beach, and here the sailors filled their barrels, while the marines stood guard