‘Dr Maturin – Dr Maturin – pooh, pooh – here today and gone tomorrow: he has been away six weeks at least. He cannot oversee the welfare of his child,’ said Mrs Williams. ‘I shall have myself appointed supervisor.’
‘We expect him tomorrow afternoon,’ said Sophie. ‘His bedroom is ready: he is staying here, not at Barham, to be nearer the squadron during these last important days.’
Stephen rode towards Ashgrove Cottage, sombre from his long and unsuccessful journey to the North Country, sombre from his stop at Barham, where he had heard of Mrs Williams’ barbarity; but with a sombreness shot through and through with a brilliant gleam.
In a small square room upstairs at Barham, overlooking the now almost empty stables, Diana had put a good many of his papers and specimens: a dry little room, in which they might be preserved. On the other side of the passage another room, sometimes called-the nursery, held a number of unused dolls, a rocking-horse, hoops, large coloured balls and the like; and as he sat arranging these papers and sheet after sheet of a hortus siccus collected in the East Indies and sent home from Sydney, he heard Padeen’s voice from across the way.
When Padeen was speaking Irish he stammered very much less – hardly at all if he were not nervous – and now he was discoursing as fluently as could be: ‘That’s the better –
bless the good peg – a little higher – oh, the black thief, he missed the stroke – four it is –
now for the five – glorious St Kevin, I have the five itself. . .’
This was usual enough. Padeen alone often talked aloud when he was throwing dice or knuckle-bones or mending a net. Stephen did not so much listen as be aware of the homely, agreeable sound: but abruptly he stiffened. The paper dropped from his hand.
It was exactly as though he had heard a faint childish voice cry ‘Twelve!’ or something very like it. Twelve in Irish, of course. With the utmost caution he stood up and set his door on the jar, with a book either side to prevent it moving.
‘For shame, Breed, honey,’ said Padeen, ‘it is a do dhéag
you must say. Listen, sweetheart, listen again will you now?
A haon, a do, a tri a ceathir, a cuig, a sé, a seacht, a hocht, a naoi, a deich, a haon déag, a do dhéag, with a noise like yia, yia. Now, a haon, a do…’
The little high voice piped ‘A haon, a do. . .’ and so right through to ‘a do dheag,’
which she said with just Padeen’s Munster intonation.
‘There’s a golden lamb, God and Mary and Patrick bless you,’ said Padeen kissing her. ‘Now let you throw the hoop on the four, which will make twelve altogether so it will too:
since eight and four is twelve for evermore.’
The dinner-bell clashed on Stephen’s intensely listening ear with a most shocking effect – a galvanic effect. It scattered his wits strangely, and he had not fully recovered them before the passage outside creaked under Padeen’s step: he was a big man, as tall though perhaps not as broad-shouldered as Jack Aubrey: and it was clear that he was carrying the child – they talked in a murmur, each into the other’s ear.
Dinner was a silent meal, and after a while Clarissa said ‘I should not have told you about Mrs Williams: it has taken your appetite away. But she forced her way into Brigid’s room, crying that a good shake would cure this sort of trouble; and her clamour shocked the child.’
‘Sure, it angered me to hear of her conduct, the strong self-willed unruly shrew; but you were wholly and entirely right to let me know. If you had not done so she might have repeated the intrusion, with all the damage that would ensue:
now I can deal with it.’ He stirred his wine with a fork for some little while; recollected himself, looked attentively at the fork, wiped it on his napkin, laid it square on the table and said ‘No. It was not anger that took my appetite away but delight. I heard Brigid speak clear and plain, talking to Padeen.’
‘Oh I am so glad. But . . .’ she hesitated’.. . did it make sense?’
‘It did indeed.’
‘I have heard them too. So has Nelly. But only when they were quite away by themselves – they were always together, you know – in the hay-loft, or with the hens and the black sow. We thought it was only gibberish, the sort of language that children make up.’
‘It is the pure Irish they speak.’
‘I am so glad,’ said Ciarissa again.
‘Listen,’ said Stephen, ‘I think the balance is exceedingly delicate at this point and I dare not make any move at all – dare not rush blundering in. I must reflect, and consult with colleagues who know much more than I do: there is Dr Willis in Portsmouth. There is the great Dr Liens of Barcelona. For the now, I beg you will take no notice, no notice at all.
Let the flower open.’
Some time later he said ‘How happy I am you told me of that woman. At the present juncture her ignorant violence might wreck, spoil, desecrate . . . I shall cope with her.’
‘I-low shall you do that?’ asked Clanissa after a pause.
‘I am contemplating on the means,’ said Stephen; but the pale, reserved ferocity of his expression faded entirely with the entry of Nelly with the pudding and Padeen with Brigid. She sat there on her high-cushioned chair and as Stephen helped her to gooseberry fool she turned her face to him. He thought he saw a distinct look of acceptance, but he dared not speak directly. It was only when the meal was nearly over that he said, in Irish, ‘Padeen, let you bring the little mare in twelve minutes,’ and the words brought a quick turn of the small fair head, ordinarily immobile, absorbed in an inner world.
The little mare carried him with a long easy stride down the miles of bare upland road, along the turnpike for a while and so to the lane leading up through Jack Aubrey’s plan. tations to the knoll on which he had built his observatory: for Captain Aubrey was not only an officer professionally concerned with celestial navigation but also a disinterested astronomer and, although one would never have suspected it from his honest, open face, a mathematician: a late-developing
mathematician it is true, but one of sufficient eminence to have his papers on nutations and the Jovian satellites published in the Philosophical Transactions and translated in several learned journals on the Continent.
Jack had just closed the door of this building and he was standing on its step contemplating the English Channel when Stephen came in sight, round the last upward curve.
‘Ho, Stephen,’ he hailed, though the distance was not great. ‘Have you come back?
What a splendid fellow you are, upon my sacred honour! True to your day and almost to your hour. I dare say you could not wait to see the squadron – a glorious sight! Although it is nothing like what I promised you in the first place – no squadron ever is. I have been gloating over them this last half hour, ever since Pyramus came in.’ And indeed the slide of the revolving copper dome was pointing directly down at Portsmouth, Spithead and St Helens. ‘Should you like to have a look? It would not be the least trouble…’ He glanced at Stephen’s mount, paused, and in quite another tone he went on ‘But Lord, how I rattle on about my own affairs. Forgive me, Stephen. How do you do? I hope your journey was. . .
‘I am well, I thank you, Jack: and I am happy to see that your head is mended, though you look sadly worn. But my journey did not answer as I could have wished. I had hoped to find Diana; and I did not.. I came upon some of her horses, however: this is one.’
‘I recognized her,’ said Jack, caressing the mare. ‘And I too had hoped…’
‘No. She had sold two mares and a stallion to a man that breeds running horses near Doncaster. He very kindly let me have Lalla here, but he had little notion of Diana’s movements apart from Ripon and Thirsk, where she had friends: she had spoken of Ulster, too, where Frances lives.’
He swung out of the saddle and they walked slowly on towards the stables. ‘But that is of no great account. Do you remember Pratt, the thief-taker?’
‘By God, I should think I do,’ cried Jack: and well he might. Earlier in his career he had been accused of rigging the Stock Exchange, and Pratt, who as the son of a gaoler had spent much of his childhood among thieves and who had improved his knowledge of the underworld by serving with the Bow Street runners before setting up on his own account, had acted for Jack and his lawyers, finding an essential witness in a masterly fashion – masterly but inefficacious since the witness’s face, upon which identification depended, had been as one might say erased.