‘Of course, of course, he is innocent: that must make a vast great difference. Not that I should have cared if he had rigged the market ten times over: everybody does it. I know Mr Wray made a great deal at the same time. But oh, Dr Maturin, pray sit down. Where are my wits? What would Charles think of me? Pray take a glass of madeira.’
‘Thank you, ma’am, but I must away. I am bound for the Marshalsea itself.’
‘Then please, please give him my most respectful -no, most affectionate compliments, and to Mrs Aubrey
my best love. And if there is anything I can possibly do
–
children, or looking after cats . . .’
As they came out of the boudoir the front door opened. Two chairmen supported Wray up the steps; two footmen took him over with practised hands; and as they propelled him across the hail he turned his blotched face towards Stephen and said
‘A beaten wife and a cuckold swain
Have jointly cursed the marriage chain.’
At the Marshalsea Stephen found it difficult to make his way through the naval side because of the number of sailors gathered there, most of them talking at the same time and all of them exceedingly angry. Even the most gin-sodden and nearly demented still retained a very high notion of the service, and the idea of a sea-officer, a post captain, standing in the pillory was an intolerable outrage, an’ insult to the whole Navy. Stephen was obliged to hear a petition read out and to put his name to it before he could go on.
The prisoners had left the skittle-ground below Jack’s building empty, out of deference to his feelings, which they would scarcely have done if he had been sentenced to be hanged; and Killick was sitting on the bottom step, looking stunned, as though his world had been destroyed.
As he went up the stairs, Stephen heard Jack’s fiddle:
it was a severe fugue, played with uncommon strength and austerity; and when, having waited for the full close, Stephen tapped and opened the door, he was met with a fierce, cold glare. ‘I beg pardon, Jack,’ he said, ‘I thought you said Come in.’
‘Oh,’ cried Jack, his face relaxing, ‘I took you for -I am very happy to see you, Stephen. Sit down: Sophie has just stepped out to buy some chops.’ He collected himself, laid down his fiddle and bow, and turning his massive form squarely to Maturin he said, not without
a certain constraint and formality, ‘She told me about Surprise. I am exceedingly grateful for your offer and I should of course be delighted to command her as a private ship of war.
But Stephen, I do not quite understand. Can you indeed fit her out, as well as buying her?
For once I have paid my fine -,
‘An iniquitous fine.’
‘Aye, but whining will do no good. Once I have paid my fine and my losses on the market, I shall be of no use; and fitting out a ship for even a short cruise is far, far more costly than you can imagine.’
‘Brother, I told you I had inherited from my godfather.’
‘Yes. I remember you mentioned it when first we came home. But – forgive me for prying into your affairs, Stephen – I had imagined it was a little bequest for books, a mourning-ring, a keepsake, the usual kind of thing from one’s godfather: and very handsome too I am sure.’
‘It was in fact very much more than that, so very much more that we need not look attentively at each penny before we spend it. We shall carry on our private war in style.’
Stephen stood up to peer out of the window at the evening sky, and now, looking back into the room, he saw Jack in the full north light, sitting as though for his portrait. He seemed broader than before, heavier, profoundly grave of course, and somewhat leonine; but beneath the unmoved gravity Stephen perceived a wound that was hardly affected by the news of the Surprise; and in the hope of easing it to some degree he added ‘And in the strictest confidence, my dear, I may tell you that our war will not be entirely private either.
You know something of my activities; and at intervals of harrying the enemy’s commerce I may have errands of that kind to run.’ Jack took the point; he expressed his pleasure with a polite inclination of his head and the appearance of a smile; and the pain remained unaffected. Stephen continued, ‘This damned spiteful pillory, brother. It is of no essential importance to an innocent man, but it is
hound to be unpleasant, like a toothache: I have given YOU many a draught for the toothache, so I have, and here is one’ – taking a small bottle from his pocket -‘that will make the pillory pass like little more than a dream: disagreeable, but only faintly disagreeable, and at a distance. I have often used it myself, with great effect.’
‘Thankee, Stephen,’ said Jack, setting the bottle on the mantelshelf. Stephen saw that he had no intention of taking it, and that the underlying pain was quite untouched. For to Jack Aubrey the fact of no longer belonging to the Navy counted more than a thousand pillories, the loss of fortune, loss of rank, and loss of future. It was in a way a loss of being, and to those who knew him well it gave his eyes, his whole face, the strangest look.
He still had this detached grey expression on the following Wednesday, as he stood in a bare dirty room on the south side of Cornhill waiting to be led out to the pillory.
The sheriff’s men and the constables in charge of him were all clustered together at the window: they were intensely nervous and they kept up a continual flow of talk.
‘It did ought to have been done days ago, right after the sentence. The news has had time to go down to the Land’s End and up to John o’ Groats.’
‘And every fucking port in the kingdom: Chatham, Sheerness, Portsmouth, Plymouth. . .’
‘Sweeting’s Alley is quite blocked up.’
‘So is Castle Alley, and more is coming in. They ought to have sent for the soldiers long ago.’
‘We have four constables, four scavengers and one beadle in the ward. What can we do with such a crowd?’
‘If we get out of this alive, I shall take my wife and children down to live the other side of Epping.’
‘They keep pouring up from the river. There are the chaps from the press-tender itself, with their bloody cutlasses and bludgeons, Christ have mercy.’
‘They are blocking each side of the Change with carts. God help us.’
‘Why don’t he give the word? Why don’t Mr Essex give the word? They are growing outrageous down there. We shall all be scragged.’
Saint Paul’s and the City churches had tolled twelve some five or ten minutes ago and the crowd in Cornhill was becoming impatient. ‘Eight bells,’ cried some. ‘Eight bells, there.
Turn the glass and strike the bell.’
‘Bring him out, bring him out, bring him out and let’s have a look at him,’ shouted the leader of another group. He was the leader of a band hired by some disappointed stock-jobbers, and like his fellows he carried a bag of stones. Bonden turned sharp upon him and said ‘What are you doing here, mate?’
‘I’ve come to see the fun.’
‘Then just you go and see the fun at Hockley in the Hole, that’s where, cully. Because why? Because this is for seamen only, do you see. Seamen only, not landsmen.’
The man looked at Bonden, and at the many closed, dead-serious, lowering faces behind him; brown, tough, often earringed, often pigtailed; he looked at his own people, a pale and weedy crew, and with hardly a pause he said ‘Well, I don’t care. Have it your own way, sailor.’
Davis, a very big, ugly, dangerous man who had sailed with Jack in many commissions, had an even shorter way of dealing with Wray’s gang of genuine bruisers, who stood out most surprisingly in their flash clothes and low-crowned hats among the now almost solid naval mass – most of the citizens, even the apprentices and the street-boys hawking pails of filth had withdrawn beyond the barrier or to neighbouring buildings. Davis, with his four uglier brothers and a dumb Negro bosun’s mate, went straight to them and in a thick voice, choking with fury, said ‘Bugger off.’ He watched them go and then shouldered his brutal way through his shipmates to where Stephen was standing by the steps of the pillory with the
few pugilists his thief-taker had managed to engage – men equally conspicuous. To them he said ‘And you bugger off too. We mean you no harm, gents, but you bugger off too.’