‘If I may come with you, I too have a message to leave in the town,’ murmured Stephen.
The message was a deeply cryptic note for Dr. Jacob, begging him to send any word he had gathered on the presence or absence of Chileans: and if either was of any consequence, to come to Funchal himself.
He left this in the discreet, capacious bosom of the woman of the house, and he was walking back to the waterside when he heard a voice cry ‘Dr. Maturin!’ and turning he saw Lady Barmouth, accompanied by Mr. Wright and followed by a maid.
After greeting made, Mr. Wright said, ‘This falls very well. By your leave, Lady Barmouth, I shall resign you to Dr. Maturin and hurry off to the Surveyor.’ With this he did indeed literally hurry away, his handkerchief falling from his pocket.
‘Dear me, what an old savage,’ said Isobel mildly. ‘Pepita!’ she cried in Spanish, ‘the gentleman has lost his handkerchief- pick it up and catch him, for the love of God. Dear Dr. Maturin, I am so happy to see you: and please may I get you to give me a sorbet at Bomba’s just over there? I die of thirst.’
‘And I am happy to see you, Lady Barmouth,’ said Stephen as he offered his arm, ‘yours indeed was the name I was revolving in my mind.’
‘How pleasant. In what connection, pray?’ ‘I was wondering whether the shortness of our acquaintance would bar my calling to take leave: sure, it might be thought presumptuous.’
‘It would certainly never be thought presumptuous, my dear Doctor: but why in Heaven’s name should you think of taking leave? I had thought we were sure of you for a great while yet.’
‘Alas, I understand that we are to sail rather late this evening, if the breeze lies as Captain Aubrey could wish. He is making his farewells to the Keiths at present, and I am sure he will have done all that is proper at headquarters.’
‘When I was not at home.’ She reflected and said, ‘I should be sorry not to say good-bye: Jack Aubrey and I are very old friends. Perhaps I shall meet him as he comes down.
Come, Pepita. Dear Dr. Maturin, thank you very much for my delicious sorbet: do not move, I beg.’
He did move, but only to stand as she walked off, followed by her maid – walked off with just that lithe pace he had had in mind.
It was the same, the very same step he recognized that night, when at last the breeze came true and Surprise, filling her fore and main topsails, glided along the outside of the mole, her lanterns faintly lighting the veiled figures upon it, one of them discreetly waving –
a sight so usual on the quay of partings as to excite no attention among the odd, scattered, immobile fishermen.
For the next few days they had some very sweet sailing on a warm, moderate breeze whose only fault was that it varied from west-north-west to north-north-west, so that at times they were close-hauled and at times they were fetching, but always with a fine array of headsails: very sweet sailing had they not been in a hurry. But the more or less clandestine work on the frigate’s bows had not fully restored her windward qualities – quite outstanding until that vile collision – and again and again Ringle, who in any case was schooner-rigged, had to ease her sheets or even take in sail not to shoot ahead – discreet manoeuvres, but never unnoticed, never unresented by the Surprises. Yet in spite of these drawbacks and the comparative slowness, upon the whole this was a happy time, a kind of homecoming and the restoration of what even to Maturin seemed the good and natural life, with its immutable regularity (whatever the weather might say), its steady though not very appetizing nourishment, the association with men who, if not brilliant company, were almost all sound, solid, professional seamen and far more agreeable than any mere chance gathering of the same size.
With all its disadvantages of close quarters, lack of privacy, and desperate shortage of post, to say nothing of books, newspapers, magazines, it was indeed a return to order, to that unquestioned order so absent in life, above all urban life ashore. In a very little while they might have been back in a sea-going monastic order – monastic, but for the shocking prevalence of pox in its dismal varieties that kept Stephen, and at a certain remove his loblolly girl, so busy.
How quickly the old train of life, ruled by bells and pipes, the swabbing of decks, by quarters, lights out, the cry of sentinels and all the rest came back – all the rest including an excellent appetite, particularly among the young, who, when invited to the captain’s breakfast-table (which often happened if they had had the morning watch) would eat four eggs without a blush and then finish whatever happened to be in the bacon-dish. Good appetites, together with a longing for a change of diet and, among the older seamen, a dread of running out of stores, so that now, when they had scarcely sunk the high land behind Rabat, they cheered the foretopmast look-out when he hailed the quarterdeck with the news of a body of tunny-fishers standing along the Moroccan coast; and when the
Captain altered course to meet the boats even the grizzled old fo’c’sle hands capered like lambs on a summer’s green.
Here the Surprise bought a fine great fish, still quivering, hoisted him aboard, cut him up on the fo’c’sle, carried the massive pieces to the galley in tubs, washed the red blood off the deck, swabbed and flogged it dry, and ate an improbable amount for dinner. A very great deal: yet even so, the wind veering northerly, they were still eating him for supper the next day, officers, men, boys, and the few women they were allowed, such as Poll Skeeping and Maggie Tyler the bosun’s wife’s sister, eating him steadily with active pleasure and what little Gibraltar beer they still had aboard, when the cry came down from the starving masthead: ‘On deck, there, on deck. Land very fine on the starboard bow.
Sort of reddish, like,’ he added in an undertone.
‘I believe that must be our landfall almost to the minute,’ said Jack, looking at his watch with great satisfaction. A brief-lived satisfaction, however, for when they cut their meal short, carrying coffee up on to the quarterdeck, they found the whole gunroom and most of the midshipmen’s berth already there. On seeing their Captain, the officers cast a guilty look aft and sidled forward along the starboard gangway. Only Harding, as in duty bound, remained. ‘It may not be as bad as it looks, sir,’ he said.
It did indeed look bad: very bad. The ‘sort of reddish’ was now a great crimson blaze all along that part of the town where ships were built, including Coelho’s famous yard: a great blaze with huge flames soaring and even cracking off to soar alone.
The ebbing tide and falling wind kept the frigate well off shore until first light, when it was already apparent that the fire was growing sullen. At slack water the breeze revived a little and they stood on, pumps and fire-hoses ready. But it was clear that the townsmen had the upper hand, and there was nothing that strangers could do but keep out of the way until ordinary life resumed; if, indeed, it ever did. There was scarcely a man aboard Surprise who had not seen a dockyard, a ship-building yard, ablaze, together with all its stores of timber, its rigging-lofts and all the vessels on the stocks: but this outdid anything the Adriatic or the Aegean had had to offer on their last campaign.
After a silent breakfast, with all hands gazing at the blackened ruins and the vessels burnt to the water-line, with smoke still rising over all, they approached the good holding-ground where they usually checked their way with a kedge in order to salute the castle handsomely, broadside on.
The castle already had its colours flying, still, as Jack noticed with the British next to the Portuguese; but the gunners within, presumably exhausted from their night’s labours, could not gather their wits to return the civility for close on five minutes; and during this time a small, dirty, unofficial boat put off and pulled for the frigate. A very thin young man, in what could still just be described as naval uniform, came up the side, and taking off his hat to Captain Aubrey, said in a fluting, intensely nervous voice, ‘Wantage, sir: come aboard, if you please.’
‘Mr. Wantage,’ said Jack, looking attentively into his face, in part familiar, yet strangely altered. ‘There is an R against your name.’ The young man, a master’s mate, had not responded to the ship’s repeated signals, and she had left Funchal without him. It was known among his shipmates that he was much attached to a shepherdess in the hills, and his absence was attributed to this liaison.