Stephen spent Friday morning writing, coding and decoding; he had rarely worked so fast or so well, and he had the agreeable feeling that he had produced a clear statement of a complex situation. From a moral scruple he had refrained from his habitual dose, and he had spent the greater part of the night in a state of lucid consideration. When he had tied up all the ends, sealed his papers in a double cover and addressed the outer to Captain Dundas, he turned to his diary. ‘This is perhaps the final detachment; and this is perhaps the only way to live – free, surprisingly light and well, no diminution of interest but no commitment:
a liberty I have hardly ever known. Life in its purest form – admirable in every way, only for the fact that it is not living, as I have ever understood the word. How it changes the nature of time! The minutes and the hours stretch out; there is leisure to see the movement of the present. I shall walk out beyond Walmer Castle, by way of the sand-dunes: there is a wilderness of time in that arenaceous world.’
Jack also took a spell at his writing-table, but in the forenoon he was called away to the flagship.
‘I have worn you down a trifle, my spark,’ thought Admiral Harte, looking at him with satisfaction. ‘Captain Aubrey, I have orders for you. You are to look into Chaulieu. Thetis and Andromeda chased a corvette into the harbour. She is believed to be the Fanciulla.
There are also said to be a number of gunboats and prams preparing to move up the coast. You are to take all possible measures, consistent with the safety of your ship, to disable the one and to destroy the others. And the utmost despatch is essential, do you hear me?’
‘Yes, sir. But form’s sake, I must represent to you that the Polychrest needs to be docked, that I am still twenty-three men short of my complement, that she is making eighteen inches of water an hour in a dead calm, and that her leeway renders inshore navigation extremely hazardous.’
‘Stuff, Captain Aubrey: my carpenters say you can perfectly well stay out another month.
As for her leeway, we all make leeway: the French make leeway, but they are not shy of running in and out of Chaulieu.’ In case the hint should not have been clear enough, he repeated his last remark, dwelling on the word shy.
‘Oh, certainly, sir,’ said Jack with real indifference. ‘I spoke, as I say, purely for form’s sake.’
‘I dare say you want your orders in writing?’
‘No, thank you, sir; I believe I shall remember them quite easily.’
Returning to the ship he wondered whether Harte understood the nature of the service he required of the Polychrest – how very like a death-warrant these orders might be: he was not much of a seaman. On the other hand, he had vessels at his command more suitable by far for the intricate passage of the Ras du Point and the inner roads – the Aetna and the Tartarus would do the job admirably. Ignorance and malice in fairly even parts, he decided. Then again, Harte might have relied upon his contesting the order, insisting upon a survey, and so dishing himself: if so, he had chosen the moment well, as far as the Polychrest was concerned. ‘But what does it signify?’ he said, running up the side with a look of cheerful confidence. He gave the necessary orders, and a few minutes later the blue peter broke out at the foretopmasthead, with a gun to call attention to it. Stephen heard the gun, saw the signal, and hurried back to Deal.
There were several other Polychrests ashore- Mr Goodridge, Pullings to see his sweetheart, Babbington with his doting parents, half a dozen liberty-men. He joined them on the shingle, where they were bargaining for a hoveller, and in ten minutes he was back in the pharmaceutical-bilgewater-damp-book smell of his own cabin. He had hardly closed his door before a hundred minute ties began to fasten insensibly on him, drawing him back into the role of a responsible naval surgeon, committed to complex daily life with a hundred other men.
For once the Polychrest cast prettily to larboard and bore away on the height of the tide. A gentle breeze abaft the beam carried her shaving round the South Foreland, and by the time the hands were piped to supper they were in sight of Dover. Stephen came on deck by way of the fore-hatch from the sick-bay, and walked into the bows. As he stepped on to the forecastle the talk stopped dead, and he noticed an odd, sullen, shifty glance from old Plaice and Lakey. He had grown used to reserve from Bonden these last few days, for Bonden was the captain’s coxswain, and he supposed Plaice had caught it by family affection; but it surprised him from Lakey, a noisy man with an open, cheerful heart.
Presently he went below again, and he was busy with Mr Thompson when he heard ‘All hands ’bout ship’ as the Polychrest stood out into the offing. It was generally known that they were bound down-Channel to look into a French port: some said Wimereux, others Boulogne, and some pushed as far as Dieppe; but when
the gun-room sat down to supper the news went about that Chaulieu was their goal.
Stephen had never heard of the place. Smithers (who had recovered his spirits) knew it well: ‘My friend, the Marquis of Dorset, was always there in his yacht, during the peace; and he was for ever begging me to run across with him – “Tis absolutely no more than a day and a night in my cutter,” he would say. “You should come, George -we can’t do without you and your flute.”‘
Mr Goodridge, who looked thoughtful and withdrawn, added nothing to the conversation.
After a discussion of yachts, their astonishing luxury and sailing qualities, it returned to Mr Smithers’s triumphs, his yacht-owning friends, and their touching devotion to him; to the fatigues of the London season, and the difficulty of keeping débutantes at a decent distance. Once again Stephen noticed that all this pleased Parker; that although Parker was a man of respectable family and, in his way, a ‘hard horse’, he encouraged Smithers, listening attentively, and as it were taking something of it to himself. It surprised Stephen, but it did not raise his spirits; and leaning across the table he said privately to the master,
‘I should be obliged, Mr Goodridge, if you would tell me something about this port.’
‘Come with me, then, Doctor,’ said the master. ‘I have the charts spread out in my cabin. It will be easier to explain with these shoals laid down before us.’
‘These, I take it, are sandbanks,’ said Stephen.
‘Just so. And the little figures show the depth at high water and at low: the red is where they are above the surface.’
‘A perilous maze. I did not know that so much sand could congregate in one place.’
‘Why, it is the set of the tides, do you see – they run precious fast round Point Noir and the Prelleys -and these old rivers. In ancient times they must have been much bigger, to have carried down all that silt.’
‘Have you a larger map, to give me a general view?’
‘Just behind you, sir, under Bishop Ussher.’
This was more like the maps he was used to: it showed the Channel coast of France, running almost north and south below Etaples until a little beyond the mouth of the Risle, where it tended away westwards for three or four miles to form a shallow bay, or rather a rounded corner, ending on the west with the lie Saint-Jacques, a little pear-shaped island five hundred yards from the shore, which then resumed its southerly direction and ran off the page in the direction of Abbeville. In the inner angle of this rounded corner, the point where the coast began to run westward, there was a rectangle marked Square Tower, then nothing, not even a hamlet, for a mile westward, until a headland thrust out into the sea for two hundred yards: a star on top of it, and the name Fort de la Convention. Its shape was like that of the island, but in this case the pear had not quite succeeded in dropping off the mainland. These two pears, St Jacques and Convention, were something less than two miles apart, and between them, at the mouth of a modest stream called the Divonne, lay Chaulieu. It had been a considerable port in mediaeval times, but it had silted up; and the notorious banks in the bay had still further discouraged its trade. Yet it had its advantages: the island sheltered it from western gales and the banks from the north; the fierce tides kept its inner and outer roads clear, and for the last few years the French government had been cleaning the harbour, carrying an ambitious breakwater out to protect it from the north-east, and deepening the channels. The work had gone on right through the Peace of Amiens, for Chaulieu revived would be a valuable port for Bonaparte’s invasion-flotilla as it crept up the coast from every port or even fishing-village capable of building a lugger right down to Biarritz – crept up to its assembly-points, Etaples, Boulogne, Wimereux and the rest. There were already over two thousand of these