The gunner’s wife said she had never seen the like: all she could suggest was somewhere to hang their clothes, and a pincushion.’
The cabin resembled a cross between a brothel and an undertaker’s parlour, but Stephen only said that he agreed with Mrs Armstrong and suggested that it might be a little less like a state funeral if the tubs were not quite so rigidly arranged about each cot. ‘I have your plates,’ he said, holding out a green-baize parcel.
‘Oh, thank you, thank you, Stephen. What a good fellow you are. Here’s elegance, damn my eyes. How they shine! Oh, oh,’ his face fell. ‘Stephen, I do not like to seem ungrateful, but I did say hawser-laid, you know. The border was to be hawser-laid.’
‘Well, and did I not say, “Let there be a hawser about the periphery” and did he not say, the shopman, God’s curse upon him, the thief, “Here, sir, is as pretty a hawser as Lord Viscount Nelson himself could desire”?’
‘And so it is. A capital hawser. But surely my dear Stephen, you must be aware, after all this time at sea, that a hawser is cable-laid, not hawser-laid?’
‘I am not. And I absolutely decline to hear more of the matter. A hawser not hawser-laid –
what stuff. I badger the silversmith early and late, and we are to be told that hawsers are not hawser-laid. No, no. The wine is drawn, it must be drunk. The frog has neither feathers nor wool, and yet she sings. You will have to sail up to the Downs, eating the bread of affliction off your cable-laid baubles, and wetting it with the tears of misery; and I may tell you, sir, that you will eat it without me. Essential business calls me away. I shall put up at the Grapes, when I am in
London: I hope to be there well before Michaelmas. Pray send me a line. Good day to you, now: God bless.’
The grapes were home in Catalonia when Dr Maturin left the Abbot of Montserrat. All through the country as he rode his swift-trotting mule westwards, the vineyards had their familiar shattered, raped appearance; in the villages the streets ran purple-red with lees and the hot air was heavy with fermentation – an early year, an auspicious year. Melons everywhere, ten for a realillo, figs drying all round Lérida, oranges bronze on the trees.
Then a more decided autumn in Aragon; and throughout the green Basque country rain,
solid rain day after day, pursuing him even to the dark lonely beach where he stood waiting
for the boat, the drops running off his sodden cloak and vanishing into the shingle underfoot.
The surge and grind of waves withdrawing, then at last the sound of careful oars and a low call through the rain:
‘Abraham and his seed for ever.’
‘Wilkes and liberty,’ said Stephen.
‘Let go the kedge, Tom.’ Splashes, a thump; and then, very close to him, ‘Are you there?
Let me give you a back, sir. Why, you are all wet.’
‘It is on account of the rain.’
Rain pouring off the deck of the lugger; rain flattening the waves the whole length of the Channel; rain pelting down in the streets of London, overflowing from the Admiralty’s gutter.
‘How it rains,’ said the young gentleman in a flowered dressing-gown and nightcap who received him. ‘May I take your cloak, sir, and spread it by the fire?’
‘You are very good, sir, but since Sir Joseph is not in the way, I believe I shall go straight to my inn. I have been travelling hard.’
‘I am infinitely concerned, sir, that both the First Lord and Sir Joseph should be at Windsor, but I will send a messenger at once, if you are quite sure that Admiral Knowles will not do.’
‘This is essentially a political decision, as I take it. It would be better to wait until tomorrow, though by God the matter presses.’
‘They should have started back tonight, I know: and from the orders Sir Joseph left with me, I am sure I should not do wrong to invite you to breakfast with him – to come to his official apartment as early as you think fit.’
The Grapes were fast asleep, shuttered, dark, and so unwilling to reply that they might all have died of the plague. He had a despairing vision of never being fed again, of passing the night in the hackney-coach or a bagnio. ‘Perhaps we had better try the Hummums,’ he said wearily.
‘I’ll just give ’em one more knock,’ said the coachman, ‘the stiff-necked bloody set of dormice.’ He rattled his whip against the shutters with righteous venom, and at last life spoke in the dripping void, asking ‘who it was?’
‘It’s a gent as wants to come in out of the rain,’ said the coachman. ‘He ain’t no bleeding mermaid, he says.’
‘Why, it’s you, Dr Maturin,’ cried Mrs Broad, opening the door with many a creak and gasp
‘Come in There’s been a fire in your room since Tuesday God preserve you, sir, how wet you are Let me take your cloak – it weighs a ton’
‘Mrs Broad,’ said Stephen, yielding it with a sigh, ‘pray be so kind as to give me an egg and a glass of wine. I am faint with hunger.’
Enveloped in a flannel garment, the property of the late Mr Broad, he gazed at his skin: it was thick, pale, sodden, lifeless; where it had had his shirt or drawers about it, as upon his
belly, it showed a greyish-blue tinge, elsewhere the indigo of his stockings and the snuff-coloured dye of his coat had soaked so deep that his penknife reached blood before the end of it.
‘Here’s your egg, sir,’ said Mrs Broad, ‘with a nice piece of gammon. And here are some letters come for you.’
He sat by the fire, devouring his food, with the letters balanced on his knee. Jack’s strong hand, remarkably neat. Sophie’s round, disconnected script: yet the down-strokes had determination in them.
‘This will be all blotted with tears,’ ran Sophie’s, ‘for although I shall try to make them fall to one side of my writing-desk, I am afraid some will drop on the paper, there are so many of them.’ They had, indeed; the surface of the letter was mottled and uneven. ‘Most of them are tears of pure undiluted happiness, for Captain Aubrey and I have come to an understanding – we are never to marry anyone else, ever! It is not a secret engagement, which would be very wrong; but it is so like one, that I fear my conscience must have grown sadly elastic. I am sure
you can see the difference, even if no one else can. low happy I am! And how very, very kind you have been to me. . . ”Yes yes, my dear,’ said Stephen, skipping some prettily-detailed expressions of gratitude, some particularly obliging remarks, and a highly-detailed account of the interesting occasion when, becalmed off the Isle of Wight on a Saturday evening ‘so warm and balmy, with the dear sailors singing on the forecastle and dancing to the squeaky fiddle, and Cecilia being shown the stars by Mr Dredge of the Marines’, they came to their understanding in the cabin, ‘yes, yes. Come to the point, I beg. Let us hear about these other tears.’
The point came on the back of page three. Mrs Williams had flown into a horrid passion on their return – had wondered what Admiral Haddock could possibly have been thinking about – was amazed that her daughter could so have exposed herself with a man known to be in difficulties – a fortune-hunter, no doubt – had Sophia no conception of her sacred duty to her mother – to a mother who had made such endless sacrifices? – Had she no idea of religion? Mrs Williams insisted upon an instant cessation of intercourse; and if that man had the impudence to call, he should be shown the door – not that Mrs Williams imagined he dared show his face on land. It was very well to go and capture this little French ship and get his name in the newspapers, but a man’s first duty was to his creditors and his bank-account. Mrs Williams’s head was not to be turned by these tales: none of her family had ever had their names in the newspapers, she thanked God, except for the announcement of their marriage in The Times. What kind of a husband would such a man make, always wandering off into foreign parts whenever the whim took him, and attacking people in that rash way? Some folk might cry up her precious Lord Nelson, but did Sophie wish to share poor Lady Nelson’s fate? Did she know what a mistress meant?
In any case, what did they know of Captain Aubrey? He might very well have liaisons in every port, and a large quantity of natural children. Mrs Williams was very far from well.