‘Sir, sir, oh sir, if you please,’ called a shrill boy, purple in the face from running, ‘the Admiral’s compliments and desires you will hand this to Dr Maturin.’
‘My compliments and duty to the Admiral,’ said Jack,
taking the letter and passing it to Stephen, ‘and you may tell him that his orders have been carried out.’
They walked down the steps to the waiting boat, and as they walked Stephen turned the letter over and over, looking thoughtful. ‘Do not mind me, I beg,’ said Jack; but already bow-oar, an old seaman who knew Stephen well, was at hand to ensure that he cleared the gunwale with one firm stride.
Bonden shoved off the moment the Commodore was settled, cried ‘Give way,’ and the launch weaved through the mêlée with never a bump until he brought it alongside with his usual perfection.
In the cabin Stephen said, ‘Jack, I fear I have been so indiscreet as to ask Mr Wright to dine aboard without consulting you. I particularly wish to hear his view on the action of water flowing the whole length of the horn you so very kindly gave me long ago, upon the nature of the turbulence set up by the whorls or convolutions, and upon the effect of the more delicate ascending spirals.’
‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Jack. ‘I should very much like to hear him: no man more.
Although I have been waterborne most of my days, I am sadly ignorant of hydrostatics except in a pragmatic, rule-of-thumb kind of fashion. We could invite Jacob too, and have some music. I know that Mr Wright, like some of the other mathematical Fellows, delight’s in a fugue. Oh, and Stephen, let me go back to John Daniel, Wantage’s replacement: he is so prodigiously shabby it would be cruel to introduce him to the berth. He is a poor, short, bent, meagre, ill-looking little creature, very like. . . that is to say, you are the only grown person aboard whose clothes would fit him. You shall have them back of course, as soon as he can whip up something to appear on the quarterdeck in.’
‘Killick,’ called Stephen, barely raising his voice, since he knew that their valuable common servant was listening behind the door – Killick had something of a cold in his chest and his heavy breathing could have been heard at a far greater distance.
‘Killick, be so good as to bring a respectable white shirt, the blue coat whose button you were replacing, a neck-cloth, a pair of duck trousers, stockings, shoes – buckled shoes –
and a handkerchief.’
Killick opened his mouth: but to Captain Aubrey’s astonishment he shut it again, paused, said, ‘Aye-aye, sir: respectable white shirt it is, the blue coat, neck-cloth, ducks, stockings, buckled shoes, wipe,’ and hurried away. Stephen was not surprised: it was but another example of that singular deference that attended not only his state but also that of men condemned to death. ‘Jack, pray tell me about your master’s mate,’ he said.
‘His name is John Daniel, and he comes from Leominster, where his father was a bookseller in a small way of business:
he had a fair amount of education in his father’s shop and at the town school. But Mr Woodbine, whose family lived there, tells me that it was not a reading town at all, and with trade declining, the customers did not pay their bills. The shop was in a sad way, getting worse and worse, and to preserve his father from being carried off to the debtors’ prison, young Daniel took the bounty and went aboard the receiving ship at Pompey. He was drafted with such a hopeless set of quota-men to Arethusa that he was the only one who could write his name. Nicholls, Edward Nicholls, who was first of Arethusa, looked at him without much love
– no seaman, too feeble to haul, no handicraft, and he was about to rate him landman and waister when he happened to ask him what he thought he could do that might be useful
aboard a ship. Daniel said he had studied the mathematics and that he could cast accounts. Nicholls set him a few questions, saw that he was telling the truth, and said that if Daniel wrote a neat hand, he could be of some help to the purser or the captain’s clerk and perhaps the master. This he did to their satisfaction, but once they were clear of the Channel purser and clerk had little employment for him and
he spent most of his time with the master, Oakhurst. You remember Oakhurst, Stephen? He was in Euryalus off Brest, a great lunarian. He dined with us once, and cried out against those ignorant idle swabs who would depend on chronometers.’
‘I remember him as a somewhat passionate, even an irascible companion.’
‘Yes. But he was kind to Daniel, who was entranced with the whole idea of navigation – the celestial clock – the circling stars – the planets among them – the moon –
and who, being lent an old quadrant, perpetually took altitudes or measured the distances between the moon and various stars. He was a young man who delighted in the beauty of mathematics:
who delighted in number itself. . . Furthermore, when Arethusa’s people were all turned over into Inflexible, he was rated ordinary and, being small and light, he was stationed in the maintop.’
‘He must have found that very hard.’
‘I am sure he did, and I cannot imagine what the premier was about – to be sure, they were cruel short-handed, yet even so .. . But, however, he survived it. He had been at sea for some time, turning out whenever all hands was piped and he was used to the ways of the Navy: he was not a stranger, but a well-liked man surrounded with shipmates, and they helped him. After a year or so of this – for he was a quick learner – he had a fair notion of sailing a ship as well as navigating her. But he was very happy when Inflexible went into dock for repair and Oakhurst asked his captain to rate Daniel master’s mate in the old Behemoth. And then, of course, like most men-of-war Behemoth was paid off in the peace; and after a while on the shore – anything for a berth – he joined a privateer fitting out to pursue and take pirates on the Barbary coast, but in no way suited for the task. One of the first pirates they met, a Tangerine, so battered her that she only just reached Oran, where she grounded and bilged. A Genoese tartan let him work his passage back to Mahon, where he hoped he might find someone he knew, but they stripped him of all he possessed. He had barely a shirt to his back when I saw him sitting under the arcades. But now returning to our dinner, I shall have a word with my cook; and if Mr Wright agrees, we could play him the Zelenka fugue that the three of us ran through again on Sunday – a most uncommon piece.’
The frigate’s dinner for Mr Wright was surprisingly successful: the captain’s cook, with all the delights of Minorca at hand, had put himself out, and they ate nobly, drinking a great deal of a light local red from Fornells and then some ancient Madeira; but what particularly pleased Stephen was the way in which the great engineer, ordinarily a difficult guest and apt to be sullen, took to Jack Aubrey and even more to Jacob. They had a lively discussion on the local varieties of modern Greek and the curious versions of Turkish that had come into being among the subject nations of the immense Turkish empire. ‘I was a fair hand with Homer at school,’ said Wright, holding up his glass, ‘- athesphatos oinos, by the way – but when I was desired to build the wharves and breakwater at Hyla I found to my dismay that my Greek was no good to me, no good at all, and I was obliged to employ
a dragoman at every turn. No doubt you, sir, were better prepared for the Eastern Mediterranean?’
‘Why, sir, it was not so much prescience or virtue on my part as the pure good fortune of having spent my tender years – the years when a language flows into your mind with no intellectual effort – among Turks, Greeks and people speaking many varieties of Arabic and Berber as well as the archaic Hebrew of the Beni Mzab Jews. My people were jewel-merchants, based mostly in the Levant but travelling very widely indeed, even to Mogador on the Atlantic coast on the one hand and Baghdad on the other.’
‘Surely, Doctor,’ said Jack, ‘it must be a perilous business, rambling about mountains and deserts with a parcel of jewels in your pocket or your saddle-bag? I mean quite apart from the wild beasts – lions ravening for their prey –