‘Don’t you wish you may succeed? Ha, ha, ha! Bonden, there. Bonden, the Doctor has saved our bacon again – has saved our bacon – so take three more hands and a stout spar to the lightning-struck tree by the cricket-pitch as quick as ever you like. Now, sir?’ –
turning to Stephen.
‘Now, sir, prepare to be amazed. There is a vast junk with empty holds lying off the north side of the island: the children had come ashore to collect edible birds’ nests. I believe the vessel will come round as soon as the wind serves, and I think it likely that its owner and captain will carry us back to Batavia. That boy in splints is his son. And I have draughts on Shao Yen, a Batavia banker he must necessarily know, draughts that will certainly pay our passage; and if his demands are not exorbitant they will leave enough over for some modest vessel that may still enable us to keep our rendezvous in New South Wales or even before.’
‘Oh Stephen,’ cried Jack, ‘what a glorious thought!’ He beat his hands together, as he did when he was very deeply moved, and then said ‘He had better not be exorbitant . . . By God, to keep our rendezvous . . . With this wind we should be in Batavia in three days at the most; and if Raffles can help us to something that will swim at something better than five knots we have time in hand for a much earlier rendezvous. Time and to spare. Lord, how providential that you happened to be by when the poor boy broke his leg.’
‘Perhaps hurt it would be more exact. I will not absolutely certify the fracture.’
‘But he has splints on.’
‘In such cases one cannot be too careful. How pleasantly the breeze is freshening.’
‘If your junk is at all weatherly – and I am sure she is a wonderfully weatherly craft – it should bring her round by the afternoon. Just how big is she? I mean,’ he added, seeing the look of deep stupidity in Stephen’s face, ‘what does she displace? What is her tonnage? What does she weigh?’
‘Oh, I cannot tell. Shall we say ten thousand tons?’
‘What a fellow you are, Stephen,’ cried Jack. ‘The Surprise don’t gauge six hundred. How does your blessed junk compare with her?’
‘Dear Surprise,’ said Stephen, and then recollecting himself, ‘I do not let on to be an expert in nautical affairs, you know; but I think the junk, though not so long as the Surprise, is distinctly fatter, and swims higher in the sea. I am fully persuaded that there is room for everybody, sitting close, and for what possessions we may have left.’
‘If you please, sir,’ said Killick, ‘dinner is on table.’
‘Killick,’ said Jack, smiling on him in a way that Killick would have found incomprehensible if he had not been listening attentively, ‘we have not put all our wine into the common pool yet, have we?’
‘Oh no, sir. Which there is grog for all hands today.’
‘Then rouse out a couple of bottles of the Haut Brion with the long cork, the eighty-nine: and tell my cook to knock up something to stay the little girls’ hunger till the gazelle comes in.’ To Stephen he said ‘The Haut Brion should go well with the Dublin horse, ha, ha, ha!
Ain’t I a rattle? You smoked it, Stephen, did you not? No reflexion upon your country of course, God bless it – mere lightness of heart.’ Chuckling he drew the cork, passed Stephen a glass, raised his own and said ‘Here is to your glorious, glorious junk, the timeliest junk that ever yet was seen.’
The glorious junk appeared round the point before the end of the second bottle and began beating up for the anchorage. ‘Before we drink our coffee I shall just look at that dressing,’
said Stephen. ‘Mr Macmillan,’ he called in the hospital-tent, ‘be so good as to give me two elegant splints and white bandage galore.’
They unwound the strips of jacket and swabbed the scratch
quite clean. ‘Something of a sprain do I see, sir,’ said Macmillan, ‘and a considerable tumescence about the external malleolus; but where is the break? Why the splint?’
‘It may exist only in the form of an imperceptible crack,’ said Stephen, ‘but we must bind it up with as much care and attention as if it were a compound fracture of the most untoward kind; and we shall anoint it with hog’s lard mixed with Cambodian bole.’
Returning to his coffee he observed that Jack Aubrey, light-hearted though he was, had not overlooked the necessity for a show of strength: the earthwork was bristling with armed men, all clearly visible from the junk.
Li Po came up the hill therefore with a submissive, deprecating air, accompanied only by a youth carrying a contemptible box of dried litchis and a canister of discreditable green tea: Li Po begged the learned physician’s acceptance of these worthless articles – mere shadowy tokens of his respectful gratitude -and might he see his son?
The little boy could not have played his part better. He moaned, groaned, rolled his eyes with anguish, spoke in a faint and dying voice, and shrunk petulantly from his father’s caressing hand.
‘Never mind,’ said Stephen. ‘His suffering will be less once we are afloat; I shall attend him every day and when I remove these bandages in Batavia you will find his leg perfectly whole.’
Chapter Three
When the Diane ran on to her uncharted reef she was carrying the British envoy to the Sultan of Pulo Prabang back to Batavia, the first stage in his journey home: Mr Fox had been successful in negotiating a treaty of friendship with the Sultan in spite of active French competition, and since he was extremely eager to carry it to London he and most of his suite set out in the frigate’s pinnace with an officer and crew to sail the remaining two hundred miles in what appeared to be favourable weather. At the same time he left a fully authenticated, signed and sealed duplicate with his private secretary, David Edwards, both as a reasonable precaution and as a means of getting rid of him: Mr Fox had taken against the young man and did not wish for his company during the long voyage from Batavia to England.
But the pinnace had been overtaken by the same typhoon that shattered the grounded Diane; and with the envoy and the original lost this duplicate took on an entirely different importance, and the penniless cheerful sanguine young man, much in need of some settled employment, built great hopes upon it. If he were to appear in Whitehall and say to the minister, ‘Here, sir, is the treaty with the Sultan of Prabang’, or ‘Sir, I have the honour of bringing you the treaty concluded between His Majesty and the Sultan of Prabang’
surely it must lead to something? Not indeed to the knighthood or baronetcy that Fox had expected, but surely to some little place under Government – attaché in one of the smaller, more remote legations, or Deputy Harbinger to the Board of Green Cloth? He was an honourable creature and he had no knowledge of the poisonous letter that Fox had enclosed with the duplicate, a letter that spoke ill of practically everyone aboard the Diane, particularly his secretary; but Stephen, who as an intelligence-
agent was obliged to live by a different code, was well acquainted with its contents.
Edwards, bound by duty, a lingering affection for his chief, decent interest and everything that was proper had enveloped the treaty in linen, waxed silk and an outer case: he always carried it in his bosom, and now as he and Stephen stood side by side on the lofty poop of Li Po’s junk, gazing astern, he tapped his chest, which gave out an answering hollow, cardboardy sound, and said, ‘Sometimes it appears to me that this document is under a curse. It has been wrecked and very nearby sunk; it has been attacked by Dyaks and very nearly burnt; and now it is in grave danger of being seized by pirates, to the utter annihilation of all our efforts.’
‘Sure, this is a sight calculated to freeze a man’s blood in his veins,’ replied Stephen, looking at the wicked proa tearing along in their wake, close-hauled to the south-west breeze, both its outriggers skimming white on the sea: wicked, in that it was certainly a pirate and much faster than the junk, but not very dangerous, in that it was small, containing no more than fifty men squeezed tight and possessing not a single gun. ‘Yet even so, I think they will sheer away , as Captain Aubrey would put it, as soon as he and Mr Welby have ranged the Marines along the side. In any event, Mai-mai, who has more experience of sea-Dyaks and of pirates in general than any twelve of us, assures me that this is only a low Karimata proa. She wonders at its assurance, since this is Wan Da’s territory. When he is neither hunting nor on duty at the palace he sails up and down the strait and to and fro in it, levying tribute on all those who have accepted his protection and sinking or burning the rest.’