was hope.
–
‘She would make a perfect cartel, for example,’ he reflected on Tuesday, sitting alone in the great cabin of the Despatch as she ran fast up the Channel with the wind at west-south-west. ‘Far, far better than this wallowing tub. She has everything to recommend her, beauty, speed, grace; at ten miles you cannot mistake her. Such waste – the pity of it all.
But if I go on like this, battering my head against a brick wall, I shall go out of my mind –
run melancholy mad.’
He did go on thinking about her however, and the more objective part of his mind offered the reflexion that although there was something to be said for speed, recognizability was no virtue in a cartel, or at least not in the particular cartels that plied between France and England this war. Since Buonaparte had decreed that there should be no exchange of prisoners these were scarcely cartels at all in the usual sense; nor had they much evident reason for existing. Yet to and fro they went, sometimes carrying envoys from one side or another with proposals or counterproposals, sometimes eminent natural philosophers such as Sir Humphry Davy or Dr Maturin, invited to address one or another of the academies in Paris or the Institut itself, sometimes objects to do with science or natural history captured by the Royal Navy and sent back by the Royal Society, to whom the Admiralty submitted them, and sometimes (though far more rarely) specimens travelling the other way, but always carrying the newspapers from either side and elegantly dressed dolls to show London just how fashions were developing in France. Discretion was their prime virtue, and on occasion their passengers spent the voyage in different cabins, being landed separately by night. This time the Despatch, met by a pilot-boat in Calais road, lay at an empty wharf until four in the morning, when Jack, dozing in a hammock slung in Tennant’s dining-cabin, heard three sets of people come aboard at half-hour intervals.
He was reasonably familiar with the ways of a cartel,
because he and Stephen had travelled in the Despatch’s predecessor on one of the rare occasions when the convention was abused: they had been prisoners in France and Talleyrand had engineered their escape so that Stephen, whom he knew to be an intelligence-agent, might take his private proposals for betraying Buonaparte to the English government and the French court in exile at Hartwell. He was therefore not at all surprised when Tennant asked him to stay below while the other passengers disembarked in a secluded part of Dover harbour, far from the traffic of the port – far too from the customs office, through which Jack would have to pass. It did not matter as far as duty was concerned, since his valise had nothing customable in it, but it did mean that the people before him would probably take up all the places on the London coach, both inside and out, and possibly all the post-chaises too: in the present decayed state of the town there were very few.
‘Come and have dinner with me at the Ship,’ said Jack, as the Despatch tied up at the customs wharf and sent a brow across. ‘Prodgers has a damned good table d’hôte.’
‘Thankee, Jack,’ said Tennant, ‘but I must run straight up to Harwich on this tide.’
Jack was not altogether sorry for it. Harry Tennant was a prime fish, but he would go on and on about the Surprise’s miserable fate – doomed to be firewood – no hope of reprieve in these cases – oh the cruel waste – the dispersal of such a fine ship’s company – Jack’s officers probably on the beach for good – never get another ship
– Tennant’s uncle Coleman fit to hang himself when his Phoebe went to the knacker’s yard
– it certainly hastened his death.
‘Carry your bag for you, sir?’ piped a voice at his elbow, and looking down he saw to his astonishment not a little confident blackguard barefoot boy of the usual knowing kind but a nervous little girl in a pinafore, her face blushing under its dirt. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘To the Ship. You take one handle and I will take the other. Clap on tight, now.’
She clapped on with both hands, he lengthened his arm and bent his knees, and so they made their uneasy way up through the town. Her name was Margaret, she said; her brother Abel usually carried the gentlemen’s bags, but a horse trod on his foot last Friday; the other great boys were quite kind, and would let her have his place till he was better. At the Ship he gave her a shilling, and her face dropped. ‘That’s a shilling,’ he said. ‘Han’t you ever seen a shilling?’ She shook her head. ‘It’s twelve pennies,’ he said, looking at his change. ‘You know what a tizzy is, I dare say?’
‘Oh yes. Everybody knows what a tizzy is,’ said Margaret rather scornfully.
‘Well, here are two of ’em. Because twice six is twelve, do you see.’
The child yielded up the unknown shilling, solemnly received the familiar sixpences one after another, and all at once her face beamed out like the sun coming from behind a cloud.
Jack walked into the dining-room: he was sharp-set, being used to the old-fashioned naval meal-times, but a waiter said ‘Not for half an hour yet, sir. Would you like something to drink in the snug while you are waiting?’
‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I should like a pint of sherry, but let me have it here, by the fire, and then I shall not lose a minute when dinner is put on the table. I am so sharp-set I could eat an ox. But first, can you get me a place on the London coach, inside or out?’
‘Oh no, sir. They was all took half an hour ago.’
‘What about a post-chaise, then?’
‘Why, sir, what with things being so stack, we don’t do ’em any more. But Jacob here,’
nodding towards the only bearded waiter Jack had ever seen in a Christian country, ‘will step across to the Union or the Royal, and see what
they have in their yards: he has already been there for another gent.’
‘Aye, pray let him do that,’ said Jack, ‘and he shall have half a crown for his pains.’
‘On reflexion,’ he said to himself, drinking a first contemplative glass of sherry, ‘he is not quite a waiter, either. He is no doubt an hostler that helps in the dining-room from time to time; and is therefore entitled to a beard.’
Dinner came in at last, immediately pursued by a troop of hungry gentlemen; the first of these, a lean, clever-looking man in a fine black coat with gold buttons, took a chair next to Jack and at once troubled him for the bread; he began to eat it with something as near avidity as good manners would allow, but said no more:
a reserved gentleman, perhaps a chancery lawyer with a pretty good practice, or something of that kind. On the other side of the table sat a middle-aged merchant with his broad-brimmed hat squarely on his head who eyed Jack first through his spectacles and then without them until he had finished the broth and herb-pudding with which the meal began and then said ‘Friend, hast ever a leathern convenience?’
‘I am sorry, sir,’ said Jack, ‘but I do not even know what a leathern convenience is.’
‘Why, I thought thee was a Friend, from thy dress, with no sinful pride.’ Jack was indeed dressed very simply – his civilian clothes had suffered cruelly under both tropics and even more between them – but he had not supposed he was quite so sinless as to be remarked upon. ‘A leathern convenience,’ went on the merchant, ‘is what the profane call a machine drawn by an horse: a chaise.’
‘Well, sir,’ said Jack, ‘I have no convenience yet, but I hope to have one soon.’
The hope was scarcely uttered before it was dashed. The bearded servant, passing a dish of parsnips between Jack and his black-coated neighbour, said to the latter,
‘The Royal’s shay will be waiting for you after dinner, sir, in our yard, just behind.’ And to Jack, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but that was the last one. There ain’t another in the town.’ Yet even while he was speaking, the Quaker’s neighbour, a flash, auctioneer-looking fellow, cried
‘That’s all goddam humbug, Jacob. I spoke for the Royal’s shay first. It’s mine.’
‘I think not,’ said Jack’s neighbour coldly. ‘I have already paid for the first stage.’
‘Nonsense,’ said the flash-looking fellow. ‘It’s mine, I tell you. And what’s more,’ –
addressing the Quaker -‘I’ll give you a lift, old Square-toes.’ He started up and hurried out of the room, calling ‘Jacob, Jacob!’
This made something of a scene, and people stared, but with the eager satisfaction of hunger up and down the table and the inn-keeper’s steady carving, sending along more beef, more mutton, more roast pork with a little crackling, calm soon returned, and with it more rational, connected thought. There were few men who relished wit more than Jack Aubrey, either in himself or others, and he was turning parsnips, butter and soft words