‘I will not: though you know very well what the result will be. But, brother, there is a glee radiating from you that was never aroused by prize-money, dearly though you love it.
You would never have heard from the Admiralty, at all?’
‘Oh no. I should not expect anything yet, if ever: we saved a wonderful amount of time on that last leg. No. I have letters from home’ tapping his bosom – ‘and so have you, but from Spain.’
Stephen’s letter was from Avila. Clarissa reported a quiet, agreeable life, a healthy, affectionate and biddable child, now
garrulous and tolerably correct in English, with some Spanish, but preferring the Irish she spoke with Padeen. She was learning her letters quite well, but was puzzled about which hand to write them with. Stephen’s Aunt Petronilla was very kind to Brigid – to them both.
Some of the ladies who lived in the convent had carriages and took them for drives, wrapped in
furs: it was a severe winter, and two of Stephen’s cousins, one coming from Segovia and the other from Madrid, had heard wolves close to the road at noon. She herself was well, mildly
happy, reading as she had not read for years, and she liked the nuns’ singing: sometimes she went with Padeen (who sent
his duty) to the Benedictine church for the plainchant.
Enclosed was a small square piece of paper, not over-clean,
with a drawing of a wolf with teeth and some words that Stephen could not make out until he realized that they were Irish written phonetically: 0 my father fare well Brigid.
He sat in the cabin savouring this and drinking thin lime. juice for some considerable time before Jack came in from the stern-gallery, looking equally happy. He said ‘1 have had sucb delightful letters from Sophie, who sends you her dear love, and I mean to answer them this minute – there is a merchantman on the wing for Southampton.
Stephen, how do you spell peccavi?’
Christine Heatherleigh had quite charmed Dr Maturin: he lay in his cot that night, swinging to the long Atlantic swell and thinking about his afternoon, and he had a startlingly clear visual image of her speaking earnestly about clavicles in primates, her eyes particularly wide open. ‘Can it be that her physical presence has stirred long-dormant emotions in.my let us say bosom?’ he wondered. The answer ‘No. My motives are entirely pure’ came at almost the same moment that another part of his mind was considering the gentle pressure of her hand: kindness? her brother’s friendship? a certain inclination? ‘No,’
he replied again, ‘my motives being entirely pure she feels perfectly safe with me, middle-
aged, ill-formed, wizened from the yellow jack, and can be as free as with her grandfather; or at least an uncle. Yet out of respect for her, and for Government House, I shall desire Killick to unpack, curl and powder my best wig against tomorrow’s visit.’
In the morning he rose early, saying ‘I shall not shave until after my rounds and breakfast, when I shall have light enough to shave extremely close.’ But when his rounds were over – and they were quite long, with several new cases of an intractable rash that he had never seen elsewhere – the light was still extremely poor. On his way up he met Killick, and speaking loud over the curious circumambient noise he asked him both to attend to the wig and to lay out his good satin breeches and a clean shirt, adding that he was about to ask the first lieutenant for a boat in the forenoon.
‘No forenoon, no, nor no afternoon today, sir. Which there’s a smoke on, and you can’t hardly breathe on deck: nor no
boat could swim. Harmattan, some say, a right Guinea smoke. You won’t want no wig.’
No. And had he worn one he would have lost it. The moment he put his head above the level of the quarterdeck his meagre locks were whipped away to the south-west and he understood that the noise he heard was that of a very curious, very furious, north-east wind, hot, extraordinarily parching dry, and so loaded with red-brown dust that at times one could scarcely see twenty yards beyond the side. But those twenty yards of visible sea were whipped to a continuous chopping froth against the swell.
‘Smoke, sir,’ said Square at his side. ‘But only a little one, over tomorrow or the next day.’
‘How I hope you are right,’ said Stephen. ‘I particularly wish to see Mr Houmouzios,’
and as he spoke he felt the red dust gritting between his teeth.
A disappointing day, and quite extraordinarily thirsty: yet it did have some wonders of its own. Jack, who as usual was making what observations were possible –
observations of temperature atvarious depths, salinity, humidity of the air and so on for his friend Humboldt – showed Stephen his sea-chest, which had been brought up on to the half-deck so that the joiner might add an additional till or tray, a very stout chest indeed, that had seen and survived almost every kind of weather the world could offer: but the harmattan had split its lid – a broad cleft from one end to the other. ‘We are playing the fire-hose on the boats to keep them whole’ he observed in a cheerful roar.
Square was right about the duration, however, and Thursday saw a world which, though ravaged, covered with rufous dust feet deep in sheltered places, and generally flattened, was at least quite calm, and a close-shaven Stephen Maturin, neatly dressed, pulled ashore over a filthy, gently heaving sea. Since he was carrying a gift of sun-birds, or rather their skins arranged with the feathers outwards, as beautiful as any bou quet and far more lasting, he took a sedan-chair to Government House, where he would have sent in his name if Mrs Wood had not thrown up a window with a little shriek and called out to ask him how he did.
She would be down in a minute, she said; and so she was, having paused only to change her shoes and put on a singularly becoming cashmere shawl. ‘I am so sorry about this odious harmattan,’ she said. ‘It has utterly destroyed my garden. But perhaps, when we have had some coffee, you might like to look at some dried specimens, and the bones.’
The bones were indeed worth looking at, beautifully arranged, often articulated with a dexterity few could achieve. ‘When we were young,’ she said, and Stephen smiled,
‘Edward and I used still to put the bat among the primates. But now we do not.’
‘I am sure you are right,’ said Stephen. ‘They are very amiable creatures, yet it appears to me that their next of kin are the insectivores.’
‘Just so,’ cried she. ‘You have but to look at their teeth and their hyoids, whatever Linnaeus may say. The primates are much more interesting. Shall we look at them first?
The drawers over there and the tall cupboard are all primates: suppose we were to start with the lowest of the order and work up to the pongo. Here’
opening the bottom drawer, ‘is a common potto. Perodicticus potto.’
‘Ah,’ said Stephen, delicately taking up the skeletal hand, ‘how I have longed to see these phalanges. Do you happen to know whether in life this aborted index-finger had a nail?’
‘He had none, poor dear: he seemed quite conscious of it. I often saw him gazing at his hand, looking puzzled.’
‘He lived with you, so?’
‘Yes. For nearly eighteen months, and how I wish he were living yet. One grows absurdly attached to a potto.’
Stephen examined the bones in silence for some considerable time, particularly the very curious anterior dorsal vertebrae, and at last he said ‘Dear Mrs Wood, may I ask you to be very kind to me?’
‘Dear Dr Maturin,’ she replied, blushing, ‘You may ask me anything you like.’
‘I too am absurdly attached to a potto,’ he said, ‘a tailless potto from Old Calabar.’
‘An awantibo!’ she cried, recovering from her surprise.
Stephen bowed. ‘She has been grievously on my mind since
we left those parts. I cannot in conscience take her north of the tropic line; I have not the resolution to kill and anatomize her; to abandon her to a local tree in unknown surroundings would go against my heart.’
‘Oh how well I understand you,’ she said, taking his hand in the kindest manner.
‘Leave her with me, and I will look after her with the utmost care, for her sake and for yours; and if she dies, as my dear Potto died, you too shall have her bones.’
Friday’s market was more than usually crowded, and Stephen’s anxiety to find Houmouzios was more than usually keen: the harmattan had cracked not only the Commodore’s
sea-chest but a large number of other things aboard the Bellona, including the caddy in which Stephen kept his small remaining store of coca-leaves: the omnivorous, insatiable Guinea cockroaches had swarmed in, fouling what little they could not eat, and already he was feeling the lack. But there were large numbers of sailors and Marines wandering vaguely about; and a large number, a tribe, of tall stout very black men from some region where it was usual to carry broadbladed spears and a shining trident stood at gaze, amazed by their first visit to a town: Square heaved them gently aside with his shoulder, opening a path as through a drove of oxen, Stephen followed him, and there at last, beyond a snakecharmer, he saw the familiar canopied stall, the dreadful great bald dog, and, huzzay, Houmouzios. Socrates was already present, so Houmouzios left him In charge and carried