‘If he does not object,’ said Stephen, ‘I should very much like to read it, when my mind is at rest. But Martin my mind is not at rest. You know my concern for Padeen.’
‘Of course I do, and I share it. I was there, you recall, when first he came aboard, poor dear fellow, and I have liked him ever since. You have news of him?’
‘I have. Adams went to the man John Paulton told us about,
and this is the record he was given.’ He handed the paper. It looked something like a business account, with amounts carried forward from one column to another, but the numbers were those of lashes, days of close confinement in the black hole, the weight of punishment-irons and their duration.
‘Oh my God,’ said Martin, grasping its full significance.
‘Two hundred lashes. . . it is utterly inhuman.’
‘This is an utterly inhuman place. The social contract is destroyed; and the damage that must do to people much under the rank of saint is incalculable,’ said Stephen. ‘But listen, Martin, he is soon to be assigned to the flogging parson I met at Government House, and the clerk, an old experienced hand, a ticket-of-leave man, says he will not survive that regimen above a year. Now my impression is that Mr Paulton told us that the clerks could change an assignment – that Painter himself had sent valuable farm servants rather than ignorant townspeople to Woolloo-Woolloo, presumably for a douceur.’
‘That is my impression too.’
‘He was quite right about information. Painter was obliging, quick and efficient. So what I very earnestly beg you will do is to go back to Mr Paulton tomorrow, put Padeen’s case candidly before him and ask first whether Painter is indeed capable of changing the assignment and secondly whether he
–
your friend – would agree to receive Padeen at WoolbooWoolloo when he returns to take charge.’
‘Of course: I shall go as soon as he is likely to be up. Do you mean to see Padeen?’
‘I am turning the question in my mind. Inclination says yes, obviously: caution says no, for fear of an outbreak on his part, for fear of attracting attention to what must pass unnoticed.
But caution I know is an old woman at times; and I am still undecided.’
He lay undecided much of the night, sometimes reading Paulton’s MS, sometimes reflecting on the wisest course, so that he was still watching the flame of his candle, guttering now, when there was something of a hullabaloo on deck: scuffling, running feet, a confusion of voices and then Mr
Bulkeley’s distinct cry, far forward, ‘Come out of that, you goddam sods.’
But the ship in port, with her standing rigging being replaced, a variety of repairs in course and her decks all ahoo, was relaxed in appearance and in discipline, and a noise of this kind did not disturb his mind; he continued to watch the flame until it expired. Sleep, faintly pierced by the sound of bells.
‘Good morning, Tom,’ he said, coming out of his cabin at the accustomed number.
‘Good morning, Doctor,’ said Pullings, the only man at table. ‘Did you hear the roaring in the middle watch?’
‘Fairly well. A bloodless frolic, I trust?’
‘Only by the grace of God. It was your little girls: they came running aboard and startled the harbour-watch about three bells. They called out for Jemmy Ducks, but he being dead drunk and insensible they whipped up into the foretop and when Oakes and the rest of the watch tried to catch them they flung down the top-maul, which very nearly did him in, together with anything else they could lay their hands on. And they kept roaring out that they would not leave the ship.’
‘I did hear the bosun call them goddam sods, but it never occurred to me that he could mean Sarah and Emily.’
‘Then they threw off their white frocks and drawers and went up to the cross-trees, where you could not see them in the dark night, they being so very black. They are still there, like kittens that have climbed a tree and cannot tell how to get down again. We have spread a splinter-netting to catch them in case they fall.’
Stephen digested this, drank his gunroom coffee – nothing like as good as Killick’s – and asked ‘Has Mr Martin gone ashore?’
‘Yes. He went very early, I believe: Davidge heard him singing out for hot water as soon as it was light.’
‘Steward,’ called Stephen. ‘Pray bring more toast. Soft-tack is a delight, do you not find?’
‘Oh Lord, yes. When you have been five months on ship’s bread you can hardly have enough of it. But Doctor, what about your little girls?’
‘What about them indeed? The marmalade, if you please.’
‘Since Jemmy Ducks is still unsteady and not much of a topman at the best of times, do you think Bonden should jump up to the crosstrees? He is a rare one for going aloft, and they know him very well.’
‘Oh, as for that, hunger and thirst will bring them down. I am certainly not going to scale ladders trembling in the wind, as I have done in my youth, only to see the little cat skip down of its own accord when I was within hand’s reach at last. Let no one take any notice of them, nor look up.’
In the event it was neither hunger nor thirst that brought them down but a mounting urgency. Through the earlier part of the forenoon watch they often cried out that they would not come down, that they would stay in the ship for ever, and that the girls in the orphanage were an ill-looking pack of swabs. But after a while they fell silent. They had been very strictly trained to cleanliness aboard; their lively sense of the sacred and perhaps of taboo was concerned; and it was with a voice of great earnestness that Emily called ‘On deck, there. I want to go to the head. So does Sal. We can’t wait.’
The ship’s company looked at Stephen, who replied ‘Come down, then. And when you have been to the head, you are to go straight to your hammocks. We shall not turn you ashore.’
Shortly after this Martin returned, and since there were – people busy all over the after part of the ship Stephen suggested
that they should walk to Dawes Point and view the hospital. ‘I found John at home,’
said Martin as soon as they were on the wharf, ‘and I laid the matter before him, clearly and I think fairly. I said that Padeen was your sick-berth attendant; that because of very severe pain he had been treated with laudanum; that because of inadvertence he had access to the bottle and that without any great moral obliquity he dosed himself, became a confirmed opium-eater; that when you were away in the Baltic, or rather when the ship was on her way back, he was deprived of his supply, and being unable to explain himself, with his defect of speech and rudimentary English, he robbed a Scotch apothecary’s shop, for which he was condemned to death, transportation being substituted for the gallows at Captain Aubrey’s instance. I added that I had always found him a good and unusually gentle man, very much devoted to you; and I said that as an Irish Catholic he was likely to suffer extremely in the hands of such a man as Marsden. John listened with close attention and he emphatically agreed with my last point. I then asked your other questions. Oh, as for the change, said he, that was only a matter of half a guinea in the right place, and that he for his part was more than willing to make Padeen’s life less horrible. “But,” he went on, “this poor fellow has been repeatedly punished for absconding.
Has Dr Maturin reflected that if he should escape from here, my position for the next year would be intolerable?”
‘The next year?’ asked Stephen.
‘Yes, since in his present condition John cannot afford to take ship and carry the manuscript back to London himself. He is obliged to send it; and as the voyage takes four or live months each way, while he still has to finish the book and the publisher must be allowed some time to read it and arrange terms with the friend who acts for John, a year seems quite a modest estimate. So he asked whether you would guarantee that Padeen does not escape for that period.’
Stephen reflected for a hundred yards, sometimes gazing at the shabby, disgraceful building on the point, though his mind did not stray from its search for what might lie behind Paulton’s words and Martin’s presentation of them. Abscond was the word almost always used in New South Wales: here it was escape. But where one had to proceed by half-tone and nuance, where one wished to reach a tacit agreement, it was folly to call for exact definition.