The Comélie fired as he spoke and the ball sent up its plume no more than fifty yards astern: she was keeping pace. ‘Come, this is encouraging,’ said Jack. He stayed to see the sun go down, outlining the Frenchman in a brief blaze of glory, and when he went below five minutes later the dusk was already creeping over the sea from the east, while the moon had gained in substance.
‘Sir,’ said Killick at the foot of the companion-ladder, ‘I have moved your night-gear into poor Mr Warren’s cabin. Which Mr Seymour is overjoyed to stay in the midshipmen’s berth until your sleeping-place is set to rights.’ Killick’s face had the wooden expression it always wore when he was either suppressing that which was true or suggesting that which was false and Jack knew perfectly well that his steward had quite unnecessarily forced the arrangement on Seymour and the gunroom – unnecessarily, because it would certainly have been offered.
‘I see: then rouse out a case of the eighty-seven port,’ he said and carried on to the gunroom, where he found all the officers apart from Richardson gathered round a chart on their long table. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I must trespass upon your hospitality for tonight, if I may. The cabin is to remain lit, and if the Cornélie goes on pelting us we must reply, to keep up her spirits.’ The gunroom said they should be very happy; and Jack went on, ‘Mr Fielding, you will forgive me speaking of service matters here, but I will just observe that once we are in the Passage, it would be as well to heave the log every bell: then again hammocks may be piped down for the watches below to get some sleep against tomorrow; and the galley fires may be lit again. And lastly, I shall take the middle watch, turning in after we have had supper – I am obliged to you for your kindness, Mr Seymour.’
Seymour hung his head and searched for an elegant reply, but before he found one Jack said ‘Doctor, may we look at your sick-berth while the fires are lighting?’
‘I tell you what, Stephen,’ he said as they walked along, ‘I know the constraint of having your captain in your bosom -all sitting straight, no belching, no filthy stories – so I have
ordered up a case of our eighty-seven port. I hope you do not mind it?’
‘I mind it very much indeed. Pouring that irreplaceable liquid into my messmates is impious.’
‘But they will appreciate the gesture: it will take some of the stiffness away. I cannot tell you how disagreeable it is, feeling like a killjoy whose going will be a relief. You are luckier than I am in that way. They do not look upon you with any respect. That is to say, not with any undue respect. I mean they have an amazing respect for you, of course; but they do not look upon you as a superior being.’
‘Do they not? They certainly looked upon me as a very disagreeable one this afternoon. I was cursed sullen, snappish and dogged with them all.’
‘You astonish me. Had something put you out?’
‘I had set aside a corpse for opening, an interesting case of the marthambles; I was going to ask your good word as in duty bound, but before I could do some criminal or at least some busy hand had sewn it up and placed it among those you buried.’
‘What a ghoul you are, Stephen, upon my word.’
Supper was a grave but extraordinarily copious meal; and although they had not served together very long they had experienced so many vicissitudes that this might have been a five-year commission, which lessened the no doubt inevitable formality. Seymour, of course, on his first day as a member of the gunroom mess, said nothing, and Stephen was as usual lost in thought; but Fielding and even more Welby felt free to tell quite long anecdotes, and in spite of the Ghoul’s predictions all hands seemed thoroughly to enjoy the 1787 port, possibly to some degree because Killick said ‘I have decanted the eighty-seven, sir: which it was very crusty, being so uncommon old,’ the last words being uncommon loud. A third decanter was passing round when Stephen, raising his voice above the stern-chaser overhead, suddenly asked ‘Would this be a sloop, at all?’
They had heard some pretty strange things from the Doctor,
but none so far beyond all probability, so very far, that for a while there was a complete silence.
‘Do you mean the Nutmeg, Doctor?’ asked Jack at last.
‘Certainly. The Nutmeg, God bless her.’
‘Bless her by all means. But she could not conceivably be a sloop while I have her, you know. Was she under a commander she would be a sloop; but I have the honour to be on the post-captain’s list, and that makes her as much a ship as any three-decker in the service. What put such a wild fancy into your head?’
‘I was contemplating on sloops. A friend of mine wrote a novel and showed it to me for my opinion, as a naval man.’ The gunroom looked down at their plates with a certain fixity of expression. ‘I thought it a very pretty tale, but I did take exception to the hero’s commanding a sloop and taking a French frigate: yet just now it occurred to me that the Cornélie is undoubtedly a frigate; that we, though small, aspire to take her; that perhaps my objection was unfounded, and that sloops do in fact capture frigates.’
‘Oh no,’ they cried, the Doctor was wholly in the right -never in the history of the Royal Navy has any sloop taken any frigate – it would have been flying in the face of nature.
‘But on the other hand,’ said Jack, ‘a post-ship of much the same displacement and broadside weight of metal as a sloop has been known to do it. It is the presence of a post-captain aboard, and his moral superiority, that turns the scale. A glass of wine with you, my dear sir. Now, gentlemen, in a few minutes’ time we shall be mustering the watch, so I shall thank you for a splendid supper, take a look at the sky, and then turn In.’
‘And we must thank you for some splendid wine, sir,’ said Fielding. ‘It will be my standard of excellence whenever I drink port again.’
‘Hear him, hear him,’ said Welby.
On deck the breeze had freshened perceptibly, coming in warm over the rail, one point on the quarter. By the light of the binnacle the log-board showed that their speed had increased to eight knots and three fathoms: and the Cornélie was keeping up. The moon showed her clear, but it was not so brilliant that it hid the light of the battle-lanterns on her forecastle or the suffused glow from the open ports along her side, still less the stab of flame as she let fly with her starboard chaser. Both ships were now well into the Passage. To the south he could see the lights of a fishing-village, just where his chart had set it. The other side was too far off to see clearly, but it heaved up there, silvery in the moonlight with great black shadows.
Eight bells. Seymour relieved Richardson: the watch was mustered and the starbowlines went below to get what sleep they could with the guns banging and growling on the deck above. Fielding had come up to ease Seymour into his first independent watch and he was now in the waist, going through the motions of shipping the frame and its lanterns on the decoy boat, now poised so that it could be lowered down in a moment
– motions that the chosen band, made up of Bonden, two bosun’s mates and a very powerful black sheet-anchor man called Darkie had already performed again and again.
Jack watched them for a while and then walked into the bows with Fielding. ‘I shall be very surprised if the Cornélie don’t pipe down now,’ he said. ‘But in any case I mean to draw ahead another couple of cables’ lengths, to prevent any stray ball doing real harm; though of course she must have our stern-windows clear in sight. I shall give the orders to brace up and ease off the buoy and then turn in. Good night to you.’
‘Good night, sir.’
As Jack was going below the gunfire died away, the Nutmeg having the last word; and as he turned in he saw that he was not to sleep in the dead man’s cot. His own, an unusually long one, had been brought down and slung fore and aft. Killick was in many ways a wretched servant, fractious, mean, overbearing to guests of inferior rank, hopelessly coarse; but in others he was a pearl without a thorn. For a moment Jack passed some other expressions in review, and having reached bricks without price he went to sleep.