‘Very well: then you fill in the figures to top us up where I have left room, and take them along. Here is a guinea to sweeten the usual palm for reasonable dispatch. Then there is this, also for the ordnance wharf.’
‘Blue lights and red,’ murmured the gunner, slowly going through the list. ‘We do have a few, but it’s as well to be sure they .are fresh. Then extra-high Congreves: I don’t think I know about them, sir.’
‘They are white star-bursts, and on occasion they can be very useful. Half a guinea for all the fireworks together would be about right, I believe?’
‘Oh, very handsome, sir; and I make no doubt I shall bring them back myself.’
When this interview and a few others that showed the trend of Captain Aubrey’s mind were over, Stephen said, ‘And I shall be getting some medical stores: we are sadly short of portable soup; and, since that unfortunate lingering in Mahon, blue ointment. Tell me, Jack, am I right in supposing that we shall have four or even five days longer here than you had wished?’
‘No: you are quite right.’
‘Then shall you wait on Lady Keith?’
‘Of course I shall. And on the Admiral too.’
‘Please may I come with you?’
‘By all means. Queenie speaks of you so pleasantly.’ On the day of the visit Stephen went ashore early, bought a new wig at Barlow’s and searched through the entire market until he found a pot of lilies-of-the-valley in just-opening bud. Returning he gave Mona and Kevin a square of chocolate calculated for solid jaws and iron stomachs; yet though they thanked him prettily they neither ate nor moved but stood gazing up in something between wonder and alarm. At last Mona said, ‘You have changed your hair.’
‘Never mind, my dear,’ he replied. ‘It is only a wig.’ He took it off to show: and both instantly burst into tears.
‘Dear Lady Keith,’ he said as they sat in the parlour overlooking her fine garden and the Strait, with misty Africa on the far side, ‘do you remember the first time you ever saw a man without his wig?’
‘No. Papa always took it off when he was teaching me to swim at Brighton, and I was so much concerned with splashing that I did not remark the change, or scarcely: a rapid moult indeed, but a perfectly natural one.’
‘I ask because my two children – children that I bought in the slave-market at Algiers
– a boy and a girl, twins – wept most bitterly when I took mine off this morning, and could not be comforted.’
‘Poor little souls – there are those damned apes again:
Jack, pray bang on the window, will you? – how old are they?’
‘Just losing their milk-teeth. An Algerine corsair took them off the Munster coast and I mean to send them back to their parents, peasants in a village I know. I hope to find a King’s ship bound for the Cove of Cork.’
‘There should be no difficulty: I shall ask the Admiral.
But what do you mean to do with them in the mean while?
If you are ordered to sea, for example? Ordered to the West
Indies?’
‘I had hoped to find a suitable, kindly family, to keep them until a suitable, kindly man-of-war should carry them home, with a letter to a priest I know in Cork and a purse to take them to Ballydonegan in an ass-cart.’
‘Do they speak English?’
‘Very little, and much of that little rather coarse: but it is wonderful how the infant mind absorbs a language through the ears.’
‘Well, if you like to entrust them to me, I shall tell our Scorpion, our chief gardener, to put them up: he has a good wife, quite a large cottage, and only grown-up children. He speaks English, Rock-English, and he is a good, decent man. In any case I shall look after them.’
‘How deeply kind of you, Lady Keith: may I bring them up later today?’
‘Please do. I shall look forward to seeing them. But tell me now, Dr Maturin, what did you see on the Barbary Coast, in the way of birds?’
‘Some way inland there was a vast saline lake crowded with flamingos and a large variety of waders; vultures all the usual kinds; the brown-necked raven. Among the mere quadrupeds there were hyenas, of course, and an elegant leopard. But what would really have pleased you was an anomalous nuthatch.’
‘Dear me, Maturin,’ cried Lady Keith, who was particularly attached to nuthatches,
‘anomalous in what respect?’
‘Well, you instantly see that he is a nuthatch, though an absurdly small one: but then you realize that he has almost no black on his crown, that his whole mantle is more nearly blue than is quite proper, that his tail is even shorter than that of other species, and that his voice is more like that of a wryneck than . .
The description was cut short by the Admiral bursting in with the cry ‘Oh those hell-damned apes – they are at it again’. But his indignant voice changed when he saw the visitors. ‘Why, Aubrey! How very welcome you are – you too, Doctor. Lord how you stirred them up in the Adriatic! Your earlier dispatches came to me of course; and they gave a great deal of pleasure in Whitehall. And I do hope you will both give us the pleasure of your company at dinner on Saturday.’
‘Should be very happy, my Lord: but I have not yet quite finished carrying out your orders. I hope to have done so a little after the new moon, and then we are entirely at your disposal.’
The sound of a carriage – of another carriage – the voices of two different sets of callers. Jack and Stephen took their leave and by good luck they were able to skirt round the newcomers, all gathered in a knot on the gravel drive exclaiming at the extraordinary coincidence of the arrival at the very same moment!
They walked back to the town, and as they went along the quays Stephen noticed the daily Tangier hoy – it might almost have been called the ferry – rapidly filling with Moors, Gibraltar Jews and some odd few Spanish merchants. Jacob was among them, in
a caftan and a skullcap, wholly inconspicuous; Stephen made no remark at the time but he was not surprised at finding a suitably obscure note from his colleague saying that he was crossing to see some people who might have some quite valuable jewels to sell: but later, as he and Jack were supping together he said, ‘I believe Jacob is not officially on the ship’s books?’
‘No: I think he is carried as a supernumerary, without victuals, wages or tobacco.’
‘Who feeds him, then?’
‘Why, I suppose you do: at any rate everything he eats or drinks or smokes will be stopped out of your pay to the last halfpenny and with the utmost rigour.’
‘I find that I have been giving my life’s blood to a parcel of hard-hearted mercenary rapacious sharks,’ said Stephen with a rather forced smile.
‘Exactly so. And the children you bought in Algiers have each a docket on which every dish of pap is charged against you, together with the earthenware pot they broke.
This is the Navy, after all.’
‘So I do not suppose he would be flogged or put in irons for absenting himself without formal leave?’
‘No. In such cases we have a punishment known as keelhauling. But do not let it distress you: the victims often survive – well, fairly often. But I am so sorry: this really is not the time to be facetious. I am afraid you must be missing your children cruelly. They were engaging little creatures. I do beg your pardon.’
‘I miss them, I admit, though Lady Keith was so very good and kind: in better hands they could not be. But I do miss them, and when they fully understood my betrayal they howled most pitifully. Yet my grief was somewhat lessened by their fascination with the apes that gathered round, by their continuing suspicion of my seriousness and by the cheerful laughter that reached me when I was quite far away, nearly at the bottom of the hill, watching two intertwined serpents, rising in the air ‘almost the whole of their length in an amorous clasp.’
‘Oh sir,’ cried a messenger from Mr Harding, ‘please could the Doctor come and look at Abram White? He has fallen down in a fit.’
Abram White was in fact quite ill – comatose, bloated, heavily contused – yet this was not really a question of apoplexy nor yet of epilepsy. For reasons best known to himself he had brought three concealed bladders of rum aboard,to drink slowly, privately, with delectation. But believing himself detected by the ship’s corporal he had done away with the evidence of his crime by swallowing the whole pot-full, had choked, and had pitched down the forehatchway. He lay pallid, insensible, only just breathing, with a barely perceptible pulse.