the sea-going phrase, he ‘might bugger off’, taking his ugly black-poxed carcass with him, and his face like an ill-scrubbed hammock.
‘Man the capstan,’ called Jack, as the first drops fell.
They won the stream-anchor with no pain at all, the hands crowding to the bars and thrusting with enormous force; and as soon as it was catted the tide swung the ship’s head inshore. They filled the foretopsails, gliding smoothly over the bar with a fathom to spare.
And as they came in so an aged, aged man with his face in a bandage pushed off, a small boy sculling over the stern.
‘What ship is that?’ he hailed in a high shrill creaking old voice, one hand to his ear.
‘Surprise,’ replied Jack in the silence.
‘Where do you hail from?’
‘Shelmerston: last from Fayal.’
‘Surprise. That’s right: Surprise,’ said the very old man, nodding. ‘Do you have a young fellow named John Somers aboard?’
The silence continued for a moment. John Somers had been drowned off the Horn.
‘Speak up, young Somers,’ said Jack in a low voice.
‘Grandad,’ called John’s brother. ‘I am William. John was John was called to Heaven. I am his younger brother,
Grandad.’
‘William? William? Yes. I know ee,’ said the old man with little or no emotion;
‘How is Mum?’ asked William.
‘Dead and buried this year and more.’
‘Let go the anchor,’ called Jack Aubrey.
While the ship was being made safe and the boats were getting over the side someone asked the boy who he was. ‘Art Compton,’ he said.
‘Then you are my nephew,’ exclaimed Peter Wills. ‘I have a poll parrot for Alice.
How are they all at home, and where is everybody?’
‘They are well enough, I reckon, Uncle Peter. They are all gone off to see Jack Singleton and his mates hanged, over to Worsley. I was left behind to look after Cousin Somers here. Which we drew straws.’
‘Red cutter away,’ cried Jack, and so on through the frigate’s boats. They pulled ashore through the increasing drizzle, and Jack went straight to the Crown, leading the little girls by the hand and knocking until a decrepit caretaking ostler came to open the door.
The rain cleared well before sunset, and with the return of the ordinary people and the Shelmerston whores from the hanging – seven men and a child on one gibbet, a sight that had drawn the whole county – the little town grew more cheerful by far, in spite of the news of more deaths, of some quite unlooked-for births and some frank desertions, more cheerful, with fiddles in most of the inns and ale-houses and visiting from cottage to cottage with presents in a truly wonderful abundance.
But by the time the Crown and all the other houses along the strand were full of noise and light and tumbling anecdote, Jack, having left Sarah and Emily with Mrs Jemmy, a fat, gasping lady, was travelling as fast as a chaise and four could carry him over good roads towards Ashgrove Cottage.
His massive sea-chest was lashed on behind, of course, but his most recent present for Sophie, a suit of the finest Madeira lace, could not bear crushing, and it
travelled on his knee. This caused him to sit rather stiffly, yet even so he went to sleep now and then, the last time after the senior post-boy, having left the main road, asked him for an exact direction. Jack gave it to him, made him repeat it, and dropped off again,as sailors will, in five minutes, wondering whether anyone would still be awake at home.
Half an hour later the sound of hooves changed and died away, the motion ceased and Jack started into full wakefulness, astonished by the blaze of light in his house, or not so much in his house itself as on the other side of the stable-yard into which the chaise had wandered. At one time Jack, in a temporary period of wealth, had launched into the breeding and training of race-horses, of which he considered himself as good a judge as any in the Navy, and this splendid brick-paved yard and the handsome buildings all round dated from that time. The light gleamed from the handsomest of them all, a double coach-house: it poured out into the murky night, with song, laughter and the sound of loud, animated conversation, too loud for the arrival of the chaise to be noticed within.
Jack picked up the suit of lace, which he had been treading on for the last few miles, settled with the post-boys, desired them to carry his chest out of the rain and walked in. A voice cried ‘It’s the Captain’, the cheerful din died quite away apart from a single woman’s voice deaf to anything but its own story, ‘So I says to him “You silly bugger, ain’t you ever seen a girl do a. . .” and a song far in the background ‘Wherever I roam I long and I long and I long for my home.’
Hawker, the groom, came up with a nervous smile and said ‘Welcome home, sir, and please to forgive us this liberty. It was Abel Crawley’s birthday, and all the ladies being away, we thought you would not mind -, He gestured towards Abel Crawley, now seventy-nine to the day, dead-drunk and speechless, apparently dead: he had been a forecastleman in one of Lieutenant Aubrey’s earlier ships, the Arethusa; and indeed nearly all the men present had been Jack’s shipmates at one time or another, and most were incapacitated. Their companions were what would have been expected, the short thick girls or youngish women known as Portsmouth brutes:
the mule-cart that had brought them stood at the far end of the yard.
In the keenness of his disappointment Jack felt inclined to top it the holy Joe for a moment, but he only said ‘Where is Mrs Aubrey?’
‘Why, at Woolcombe, sir, with the children and all the servants apart from Ellen Pratt. And Mrs Williams and her friend Mrs Morris are at the Bath.’
‘Well, tell Ellen to make me supper and get a bed ready.’
‘Sir, not to tell a lie, Ellen is somewhat overtook: but I will grill you a steak directly, and a Welsh rabbit; and Jennings will make you up a bed. Only I am afraid you will have to drink beer, sir: which Mrs Williams locked up the wine-cellar.’
In the morning Jack made his own coffee and ate a number of eggs with toasted bread in the kitchen. He had no heart to look round the shut-up house – it was meaningless without Sophie in it – but he did make a quick tour of his garden – no longer his, alas, but now the child of some alien spade – before walking into the yard. ‘Tell me, Hawker, what horses have we in the stable?’ he asked.
‘Only Abhorson, sir.’
‘What is Abhorson?’
‘A black gelding, sir: sixteen hands, past mark of mouth.’
‘What is he doing here?’
‘He belongs to Mr Briggs, sir, the Honourable Mrs Morris’s manservant. There ain’t no stabling at their place in Bath, so when they are there the nag stays here; when they are here Bnggs rides to Bath every so often.’
‘Is he up to my weight?’
‘Oh yes, sir: a strong, big-boned animal. But today he is full of beans, and may be nappy.’
‘Never mind. How are his shoes?’
‘New all round last week, sir. Which Mrs Williams is very particular about Briggs’s horse,’ said the groom with a curious emphasis. ‘So is the Honourable Mrs Morris too, for that matter.’
‘Very well. Have him at the door in five minutes, will you? And see if you can find me a cloak. We shall have rain before ever I reach Dorset.’
Abhorson was indeed a powerful brute, but with his heavy common head and small eyes he looked neither intelligent nor handsome: he flung away from Jack’s caress and made an irregular crab-like movement so that the groom at his head was towed sideways and Jack, trying to mount, went hop,hop, hop half across the yard before swinging into the saddle. He had not been on a horse since he was in Java, half a world away; but once there, with the leather creaking agreeably under him and his feet well in the stirrups he felt pleasantly at home; and although Abhorson was undoubtedly nappy, inclined to indulge in such capers as tossing his head, snorting very violently and going along in a silly mincing diagonal gait, Jack’s powerful hands and knees had their effect, and by the time the rain or rather the drizzle began they were travelling quite well together through the new plantations. Jack was possessed with admiration at the lovely growth of his trees, far beyond what he had expected and in very beautiful fresh leaf; but this was only the forefront of his mind: all the deeper part that was not taken up with the idea of Woolcombe, the family house he had recently inherited, and with Sophie and the children in it, kept revolving the delightful prospect of his squadron, the Royal Navy’s unattached ships and officers perpetually forming fresh combinations of possibility. ‘But I shall certainly keep the Ringle as my tender,’ he observed aloud.