and if proof were wanting they only had to look a little farther aft. What but a most uncommon curse could have brought the Captain’s misfortune walking into Ashgrove Cottage itself with the Missus there and perhaps Mother Williams too?
Much of the talk about luck and the frigate’s loss of it had been general, with people airing their views in the galley during the first or middle watch after they had been mustered, or in the tops, or quietly on the forecastle during a make and mend; but this particular conversation was confined to men who had served with Jack from his earliest command and who had followed him ashore during the peace and the days when he had no ship. As well-to-do bachelors Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin had staffed Melbury Lodge entirely with seamen, and after Jack’s marriage Preserved Killick, his steward, Barret Bonden, his coxswain, Joseph Plaice, Bonden’s cousin, and two or three more had moved on with him; they knew exactly what Ashgrove Cottage meant, having swabbed its floors, painted its woodwork and polished its brass as though it were a ship. And of course they knew the entire family, from Mrs Williams, the Captain’s mother-in-law, to George, the youngest of his children; but in this context what Ashgrove Cottage meant for all of them, as it did for Jack himself, was Sophia Aubrey.
All the men liked her very much indeed; but above all they respected her to an almost religious degree. Sophie was indeed truly respectable, kind and good-looking -much more than good-looking – but since they had never come into close contact with women both amiable and respectable before, they may have set her on an even higher level than was quite right, there being something almost awful in such superiority. They also knew that she was her mother’s daughter (improbable though it seemed) and that Mrs Williams, a short thick dark-haired red-faced passionate woman, was a Tartar, one of those who had made virtue singularly unattractive. Suspected peculation, absence without leave or fancied disrespect would rouse her to a volume of sound that seemed to mark the utmost limits of the female voice; but this was
an illusion, for once unchastity in man or woman came to her attention these bounds were left far, far behind, the remote babbling of some distant brook. To be sure, Sophie never scolded, roared or bawled – no hard words, no turning out of doors, no assurances of eternal damnation – but she was her mother’s daughter in this (though in this alone), that she would have no truck, no truck whatsoever with anything in the roving line. The getting of bastards might be fashionable, but it would not do for Mrs Aubrey.
‘Aye,’ said Bonden, ‘it was a most unlucky stroke, by God. She could not have mistook that figurehead, though coloured somewhat dark. A damned unlucky stroke. You would think you might step aside, like, just once in a while, without having it thrown in your face twenty years later. A damned unlucky stroke. But that don’t mean there is a curse on the ship. No. It only means the Captain’s luck is out for the moment.’
‘You may say what you like, Barret Bonden,’ said Plaice, ‘but I’m older than you, and I say this here barky’s got what we call a . . .’
‘Easy, Joe,’ said Killick. ‘Naming calls, you know.’
‘What?’ asked Joe Plaice, who was rather deaf.
‘Naming calls, Joe,’ said Killick, laying his finger to his lips.
‘Oh,’ said Plaice, recollecting himself. ‘That’s right, mate.’
Yet although Plaice and some others like him were determined to be apprehensive and although everybody knew that the gunner’s ghost haunted the frigate’s wake, the majority
were neither consistent nor glum. They reconciled the irreconcilable perhaps even more easily than landsmen; and in a ship that could not come to good they looked out very eagerly for her next victim, her next success.
Eagerly and cheerfully, for although they were, as Plaice pointed out, eight thousand dollars the poorer
because of the Admiral’s share of the last recapture, there were still the earlier ships, untainted by that vile twelfth, and there were after all the remaining eleven twelfths of the last; so that even allowing for the proctors’ swingeing fees and the other legal expenses it was reckoned that each single-share man would have fifty-three pounds thirteen and eightpence prize-money and an able seaman (nearly all the Surprises were rated able) half as much again, a very charming sum indeed. Yet this did not prevent them from longing for more, much more: the general wish was to have enough money to set up a public house, but in practice scarcely a man was not willing to settle for an additional ten dollars or so, laid down on the capstan-head, with which to kick up Bob’s a-dying if they touched at Fayal or anywhere else in the Azores.
The Azores however were a great way off, and with the curiously unseasonable, baffling light airs and calms that met the Surprise a few days out of Bridgetown, they seemed determined to remain there. For once in his naval career Captain Aubrey did not try to fly in the face of nature: in the light airs he certainly spread noble pyramids of canvas, from skyscrapers to water-sails, but he did not wet them with engine and buckets to gain a few yards in the hour, nor did he lower down the boats to tow the ship during the dead calms.
The frigate proceeded soberly north-eastward, or as nearly north-eastward as the breezes would allow, and her captain soberly walked his quarterdeck, fore and aft, fore and aft, seventeen paces from the windward hances to the taffrail, turn and back again, almost exactly a hundred turns to the mile. To and fro, passing the hen-coops abaft the wheel and the contemplative goat Aspasia, who had lain on this deck in bitter cold and furious wind and who now basked in the sunlight, her eyes closed, her beard nodding. Sometimes he paced off the distance between Portsmouth and Ashgrove Cottage, imagining the white road, the open country and then the woods; but much more often he pondered anxiously about his complex affairs, legal and financial, and about Sophie’s probable attitude towards him now that she had seen Sam. As for the legal side of matters, there was little point in puzzling until he had seen his lawyers; with no word from home he had no more basis for an opinion now than he had had at the beginning of the voyage. As for the financial side, these prizes would bring him in about ten thousand pounds, for which he was most profoundly grateful. It was nothing like enough to clear him of debt if things had gone against him, but it did give him room, plenty of room, to turn around. And as for Sophie, on his more sanguine days he said that she had not the least cause to cut up rough; in those far-off times he had never even seen her, much less made any promise of fidelity. She had no right to complain whatsoever. These anxious reflections about Sophie always rose up through his thoughts about mortgages and the
law, when indeed they did not precede them; for not only was Jack most sincerely attached to his wife, but like his shipmates he found a thoroughly virtuous woman an intimidating object. Just how intimidating might have been calculated from the number of times he repeated the statement about her total lack of grievance, which was sometimes accompanied by the words ‘Perhaps she may even have liked him.’ And as for Mrs Williams, if once she piped up he would simply desire her never to mention the matter again: he would speak very firmly indeed, as to a defaulter, otherwise there would be no peace in the house at all.
Yet these early golden almost windless days were not all passed in anxious thought: very far from it. There were mornings when the ship would lie there mirrored in a perfectly unmoving glossy sea, her sails drooping, heavy with dew, and he would dive from the rail, shattering the reflexion and swimming out and away beyond the incessant necessary din of two hundred men hurrying about their duties or eating their breakfast. There he would float with an infinity of pure sea on either hand and the whole hemisphere of sky above, already full of light; and then the sun would heave up on the eastern rim, turning the sails a brilliant white in quick succession, changing the sea to still another nameless blue, and filling his heart with joy.
And there were many other things that gave him intense satisfaction. Although the Sargasso Sea lay rather more eastward than usual that year, they did pass very slowly through its western tip a little north of the tropic line, and it was wonderfully pleasant to see Stephen and Martin scrabbling about among the mats of weed and its denizens, paddled about in the jolly-boat by the infinitely patient Bonden: pleasanter still to see their shining faces as they came aboard grasping their improbable collections.