‘Captain Pomfret,’ said Jack before he left the ship, ‘I can foresee a very great deal of great-gun exercise, morning and afternoon, as well as at quarters: the team must know their pieces through and through, so that they never have to think, as I am sure you are very well aware.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Pomfret, trying to master his distress. ‘The only thing I can advance is that we are cruelly short-handed, and the people have not been together long.’
‘You have enough right seamen to man your pinnace and launch?’
‘Yes,
sir.’
‘Then let your first lieutenant and the second when he joins – I know the Admiral means to let you have an excellent young man – take them out in the middle watch and lie off Cape Spartel till dawn. If they do not press a score of hands out of the passing merchantmen who have not yet heard the
news I shall be amazed. But above all keep your people hard at it, the young gentlemen especially – idle young dogs, sauntering about with their hands in their pockets
– hard at it: yet do not blackguard them. Praise if ever you can; you will find it answer wonderfully. Next week you may fire live – nothing pleases them more, once they are used to the din.’
Returning to harbour, Jack visited the other ships and vessels of his squadron, requiring each to beat to quarters and at least to cast loose their guns. The exactness of the coiled muzzle-lashing, made fast to the eye-bolt above the port-lid, the seizing of the mid-breeching to the pommelion, the neat arrangement of the sponge, handspike, powderhorn, priming-wire, bed, quoin, train-tackle, shot and all the rest told a knowing eye a great deal about the gun-crew and even more about the midshipman of the sub-division.
The Dover, still actively reconverting herself, was in rather a sad way, but not very discreditably so; the others would do at a push, and the little Briseis, one of that numerous class called coffin-brigs from their tendency to turn over and sink, was positively brilliant.
He told her captain so, and the hands within earshot visibly swelled with satisfaction.
Back to Surprise and her great cabin, familiar, elegant, but in spite of its conventional name not really spacious enough for all the administrative work he had to do.
There were no more than six ships or vessels in the squadron, but their books and papers already overflowed the Commodore’s desk: not much more than a thousand men were concerned, but all those of real importance in the running of the squadron had to be entered on separate slips together with what comments he had so far been able to make on their abilities; and to house these slips he had called upon his joiner to make temporary tray-like wings to his desk, so that eventually he should have all the elements at his disposal laid out, to be rearranged according to the tasks the squadron might be called to undertake. In these quite exceptional circumstances, with no settled ships’ companies apart from those in Surprise and to some extent Briseis, he would have an equally exceptional free hand.
But Jack Aubrey was a neat creature by temperament and rigorous training, and he had set no more than one foot in the cabin before he saw that order was confounded, that some criminal hand had merged at least three complements into one unmeaning heap,
and that this same hand had spread out several manuscript sheets of music, the score of a pavan in C minor.
‘Oh I do beg your pardon, Jack,’ cried Stephen, walking quickly in from the quarter-gallery. ‘I had a sudden thought to be set down – but I trust I have not disturbed anything at all?’
‘Not in the least,’ said Jack. ‘And Stephen, I believe I have solved your problem. I believe I have found you a loblolly-boy you will thoroughly approve of.’
Stephen, concerned though he was with his music – only two bars yet to write, but the magical sound already fading from his inner ear – and filled though he was with a conviction that Jack’s mild ‘not in the least’ concealed an intense irritation, made no reply other than a questioning look. He owed his survival as an intelligence-agent to an acute ear for falsity, and Jack’s last words were certainly quite untrue.
‘Yes,’ Jack went on, ‘together with a draft of hands turned over to the squadron out of Leviathan, refitting, Maggie Cheal and Poll Skeeping have come aboard; and Poll was trained at Haslar. She is up to anything in the way of blood and horrors.’
‘You are speaking of women, brother? You who have always abominated so much as the smell of a skirt aboard ship? The invariable cause of trouble, quarrelling, ill-luck.
Wholly out of place in any ship, above all in a man-of-war. I have never seen a woman aboard a man-of-war.’
‘Have you not, my poor Stephen? Did you never see them helping with the guns and passing shot in Bellona?’
‘Never in life. Am I not always shut up in the cockpit during an action?’
‘Very true. But if Jill Travers, for example, the sailmaker’s wife who helped serve number eight, had been wounded, you would have seen her.’
‘But seriously, Jack, are you obliged to take these women aboard? You who have always inveighed against the creatures.’
‘These are not creatures, in the sense of whore-ladies or Portsmouth trollops: oh no. They are usually middle-aged or more, often the wife or widow of a petty or even of a warrant-officer. One or two may have run away like the girl in the ballad, wearing trousers, to be with her Jack when he sailed; but most have used the sea these ten or twenty years, and they look like seamen, only for the skirt and maybe shawl.’
‘And yet I have never seen one, apart from the odd gunner’s wife who looks after the very little fellows: and apart, of course, from that poor unhappy Mrs Homer on Juan Fernandez.’
‘To be sure, they do keep out of the way. They don’t belong to any watch, of course, and they don’t appear at quarters, no, nor anywhere else, except when we rig church.’ At any other time he would have added that for all his botanizing and stuffing curious birds, Stephen was a singularly unobservant cove: he had not even noticed the brilliant flint-locks that now, by grace of Lord Keith, adorned Surprise’s guns, doing away with those potential misfires when the linstock wavered over the touch-hole or was doused by flying spray – misfires that might make those few seconds’ difference between defeat and victory. Yet they blazed with all the splendour of guinea-gold, the pride of the crews, who surreptitiously breathed upon them, wiping off the mist with a silk handkerchief.
‘A loblolly-girl, for all love? I wonder at it, Jack.’
‘Come, come, Stephen: you say a loblolly-boy for an
ancient of sixty or even more: it is only a figure of speech, a naval figure of speech. And speaking of figures, Poll’s is very like a round-shot; she is a kind, cheerful, conscientious soul, but she is not likely to stir the amorous propensities of the sick-berth. Besides, she is perfectly used to seamen, and would instantly put them down. Will you at least have a word with her? I said I should mention her name. We were shipmates once, and I can answer for her being kind
– no blackguarding, no bawling out orders, not topping it the ship’s corporal; kind, honest, sober, and very tender with the wounded.’
‘Of course I will see her, brother: a kind, honest and sober nurse is a rare and valuable creature, God knows.’
Jack rang the bell and to the answering Killick he said, ‘Tell Poll Skeeping the Doctor will see her directly.’
Poll Skeeping had been at sea, off and on, for twenty years, sometimes under harsh and tyrannical officers; but for her ‘directly’ still allowed latitude enough for putting on a clean apron, changing her cap and finding her character: thus equipped she hurried to the cabin door, knocked and walked in, a little out of breath and obviously nervous. She bobbed to the officers, holding her character to her bosom.
‘Sit down, Poll,’ said Captain Aubrey, waving to a chair. ‘This is Dr Maturin’ who would like to speak to you.’
She thanked him and sat, bolt upright, the envelope of her character held like a shield.
‘Mrs Skeeping,’ said Stephen, ‘I am without a sick-berth attendant, a loblolly-boy, and the Captain tells me that you might like the post.’
‘That was very kind in his honour,’ she said, bowing to Jack. ‘Which I should be happy to be your sick-berth attendant, sir.’
‘May I ask about your experience and professional qualifications? The Captain has already told me that you are kind, conscientious, and tender to the wounded; and indeed one