‘Stop peering from behind that curtain like a housemaid, Cissy. And lend me your hat, will you?’
‘Why, he is quite splendid now,’ said Cecilia, peering still and puckering the gauze. ‘He has a spotted waistcoat too. Do you remember when he came to dinner in carpet slippers? He really would be almost handsome if he held himself up.’
‘A fine conquest,’ said Mrs Williams, peering too. ‘A penniless naval surgeon, somebody’s natural son, and a Papist. Fie upon you, Cissy, to say such things.’
‘Good morning, Maturin,’ said Diana, coming down the steps. ‘I hope I have not kept you waiting. What a neat cob you have there, upon my word! You never found him in this part of the world.’
‘Good morning, .Villiers. You are late. You are very late.’
‘It is the one advantage there is in being a woman. You do know I am a woman, Maturin?’
‘I am obliged to suppose it, since you affect to have no notion of time – cannot tell what o’clock it is. Though why the trifling accident of sex should induce a sentient being, let alone such an intelligent being as you, to waste half this beautiful clear morning, I cannot conceive. Come, let me help you to mount. Sex – sex. .
‘Hush, Maturin. You must not use words like that here. It was bad enough yesterday.’
‘Yesterday? Oh, yes. But I am not the first man to say that wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas. Far from it. It is a commonplace.’
‘As far as my aunt is concerned you are certainly the first man who ever used such an expression in public.’
They rode up Heberden Down: a still, brilliant morning with a little frost; the creak of leather, the smell of horse, steaming breath. ‘I am not in the least degree interested in women as such,’ said Stephen. ‘Only in persons. There is
Polcary,’ he added, nodding over the valley. ‘That is where I first saw you, on your cousin’s chestnut. Let us ride over there tomorrow. I can show you a remarkable family of particoloured stoats, a congregation of stoats.’
‘I must cry off for tomorrow,’ said Diana. ‘I am so sorry, I have to go to Dover to look after an old gentleman who is not quite right in the head, a sort of cousin.’
‘But you will be back for the ball, sure?’ cried Stephen.
‘Oh, yes. It is all arranged. A Mr Babbington is to take me up on his way. Did not Captain Aubrey tell you?’
‘I was back very late last night, and we hardly spoke this morning. But I must go to Dover myself next week. May I come and beg for a cup of tea?’
‘Indeed you may. Mr Lowndes imagines he is a teapot; he crooks one arm like this for the handle, holds out the other for the spout, and says, “May I have the pleasure of pouring you a cup of tea?” You could not come to a better address. But you also have to go to town again, do you not?’
‘I do. From Monday till Thursday.’
She reined in her horse to a walk, and with a hesitation and a shyness that changed her face entirely, giving it a resemblance to Sophia’s, she said, ‘Maturin, may I beg you to do me a kindness?’
‘Certainly,’ said Stephen, looking straight into her eyes and then quickly away at the sight of the painful emotion in them.
‘You know something of my position here, I believe Would you sell this bit of jewellery for me? I must
have something to wear at the ball.’
‘What must I ask for it?’
‘Would they not make an offer, do you think? If I could get ten pounds, I should be happy.
And if they should give so much, then would you be even kinder and tell Harrison in the Royal Exchange to send me this list immediately? Here is a pattern of the stuff. It could come
by the mail-coach as far as Lewes, and the carrier could pick it up. I must have something to wear.’
Something to wear. Unpicked, taken in, let out, and folded in tissue-paper, it lay in the trunk that stood waiting in Mr Lowndes’s hall on the morning of the fourteenth.
‘Mr Babbington to see you, ma’am,’ said the servant.
Diana hurried into the parlour – her smile faded -she looked again, and lower than she would have thought possible she saw a figure in a three-caped coat that piped, ‘Mrs Villiers, ma’am? Babbington reporting, if you please, ma’am.’
‘Oh, Mr Babbington, good morning. How do you do? Captain Aubrey tells me you will be so very kind as to take me with you to Melbury Lodge. When do you please to start? We must not let your horse take cold. I have only a little trunk – it is ready by the front door.
You will take a glass of wine before we leave, sir? Or I believe you sea-officers like rum?’
‘A tot of rum to keep out the cold would be prime. You will join me, ma’am? It’s uncommon parky, out.’
‘A very little glass of rum, and put a great deal of water in it,’ whispered Diana to the servant. But the girl was too flustered by the presence of a strange dogcart in the courtyard to understand the word ‘water’, and she brought a dark-brown brimming tumbler that Mr Babbington drank off with great composure. Diana’s alarm increased at the sight of the tall, dashing dogcart and the nervous horse, all white of eye and laid-back ears.
‘Where is your groom, sir?’ she asked. ‘Is he in the kitchen?’
‘There ain’t a groom in this crew, ma’am,’ said Babbington, now looking at her with open admiration. ‘I navigate myself. May I give you a leg up? Your foot on this little step and heave away. Now this rug – we make it fast aft, with these beckets. All a-tanto? Let go by the head,’ he called to the gardener, and they dashed out of the forecourt, giving the white-painted post a shrewd knock as
they passed. –
Mr Babbington’s handling of the whip and the reins raised Diana’s dismay to a new pitch; she had been brought up among horse-soldiers, and she had never seen anything like this in her life. She wondered how he could possibly have come all the way from Arundel without a spill. She thought of her trunk behind and when they left the main road, winding along the lanes, sometimes mounting the bank and sometimes shaving the ditch’s edge, she said, ‘It will never do. This young man will have to be taken down.’
The lane ran straight up hill, rising higher and higher, with God knows what breakneck descent the other side. The horse slowed to a walk – the bean-fed horse, as it proved by a thunderous, long, long fart.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said the midshipman in the silence.
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Diana coldly. ‘I thought it was the horse.’ A sideways glance showed that this had settled Babbington’s hash for the moment. ‘Let me show you how we do it in India,’ she said, gathering the reins and taking his whip away from him. But once she had established contact with the horse and had him going steadily along the path he should follow, Diana turned her mind to winning back Mr Babbington’s kindness and good will. Would he explain the blue, the red, and the white squadrons to her? The weather-gage? Tell her about life at sea in general? Surely it must be a very dangerous, demanding service, though of course so highly and so rightly honoured – the country’s safeguard. Could it be true that he had taken part in the famous action with the Cacafuego? Diana could not remember a more striking disparity of forces. Captain Aubrey must be very like Lord Nelson.
‘Oh yes, ma’am!’ cried Babbington. ‘Though I doubt even Nelson could have brought it off so handsome. He is a prodigious man. Though by land, you know, he is quite different.
You would take him for an ordinary person -not the least coldness or distance. He came down to our place to help my uncle in the election, and he was as jolly
as a grig – knocked down a couple of Whigs with his stick. They went down like ninepins –
both of them poachers and Methodies, of course. Oh, it was such fun, and at Melbury he let me and old Pullings choose our horses and ride a race with him. Three times round the paddock and the horse to be ridden upstairs into the library for a guinea a side and a bottle of wine. Oh, we all love him, ma’am, although he’s so taut at sea.’
‘Who won?’
‘Oh, well,’ said Babbington, ‘we all fell off, more or less, at different times. Though I dare say he did it on purpose, not to take our money.’