poverty ot want of employment, men who had considerable sums at home and who were setting out on this prodigious voyage for something more – something less definite than gain and more important. With such a multiplicity of characters the ‘more’ was necessarily somewhat shapeless, though some obvious part of it had to do with going far foreign, seeing new countries, cutting capers on Tom Tiddler’s ground
and perhaps picking up gold and silver, sailing in a happy ship, sailing away in war-time from the strong likelihood of eventual impressment and forced service under officers of a very different character – it was not the fighting that the Shelmerstonians disliked, nor even the hard lying and short commons, but the often unnecessarily harsh discipline, the hazing, the starting and sometimes the direct oppression. And although there was not a heart that did not delight in spoil – a sack of doubloons would make any man chuckle – a real and vehement desire for it was rarely a prime ingredient.
There were some men of course whose ‘more’ was eminently clear. Jack Aubrey did not give a damn for money: his sole aim was reinstatement in the service and restoration to the list of post-captains in the Royal Navy, with his former seniority if possible. All this had been semi-officially and conditionally offered after his cutting-out of the Diane; and it had been absolutely promised him after his election to parliament, or rather after his cousin had given him the pocket borough of Milford. But at last, at very long last, Aubrey had grown less sanguine, less confident in promises; his brief acquaintance with the House and his fellow-members had told him a great deal about the fragility of the administration and therefore of its undertakings; he did not for a moment doubt the present First Lord’s word, but he knew that in the event of a change of ministry this word, this purely personal, verbal word, would not necessarily bind Melville’s successor. He also knew – and this was a fresh though not entirely unforeseen development – that the Regent was by no means favourable to him. It arose partly from the fact that the Regent’s naval brother, the Duke of Clarence, was both one of Jack’s most fervent advocates and one of the Regent’s most outspoken critics – the brothers were scarcely on speaking-terms; furthermore several strongly independent Whiggish admirals also said that Aubrey absolutely must be reinstated; and then by way of completing things Jack had made one of his rare adventures into literature. On hearing that in the course of a drawing-room the Regent’s mistress Lady Hertford had been rude to Diana Maturin, his
cousin by marriage and his best friend’s wife, he said angrily and in rather too public a place, ‘Birds of a feather, birds of a feather; fowl in their own nest, all tarred with the same brush. Dryden put it very well, speaking of another great man’s mistresses: he said – he said – I have it. He said false, foolish, old, ill-natured and ill-bred. Aye: there’s no beating Dryden. False, foolish, old, ill-natured and ill-bred – nothing more ill-bred than being uncivil at a levee or a drawing-room.’
It was his former shipmate Mowett who had told him the quotation and it was his present shipmate Maturin who told him that the words had reached the royal ear. Stephen had the news from his friend and close colleague Sir Joseph Blaine, the head of naval intelligence, who added, ‘If we could tell who was in the backgammon room at the time, we might possibly be able to put a name on the worm in the apple.’
A worm in the apple there was. Some time before this two singularly well-placed French agents, Ledward of the Treasury and Wray of the Admiralty, had concocted a charge against Jack Aubrey: with Wray’s intimate knowledge of naval officers’ movements and Ledward’s of the criminal world the accusation was so cleverly framed that it convinced a Guildhall jury and Jack was found guilty of rigging the Stock Exchange, fined, pilloried, and of course struck off the Navy List. The charge was false and its falsity was proved by a discontented enemy agent who betrayed Ledward and his friend, giving unquestionable evidence of their treachery; yet neither had been arrested, and now both were known to be in Paris. Blaine was sure they had been protected by some remarkably influential friend, probably some very high permanent official: this man (or possibly this small group of men), whose identity neither Blaine nor his colleagues could make out in spite of all their pains, was still active, still potentially very dangerous And
•
since at beast part of Wray’s plot had been directed against Aubrey out of personal malevolence, it was almost certainly this shadowy protector’s influence that lay behind the odd official delay and reluctance that had met any proposals in favour of the now obviously innocent Aubrey up until the moment he became a member of parliament.
‘The worm is still with us,’ said Blaine. ‘He must be reasonably conspicuous from his office; it is very probable that he has an unorthodox attachment for Wray; and if very delicate enquiries tell us that a distinguished man with ambiguous tastes – and even the greatest care cannot conceal these things from servants – was in the backgammon room on Friday, why, then, we may pin him at last.’
‘Certainly,’
said
Stephen,
‘if we accept that the only man present willing to carry ill-
natured gossip was the worm in question.’
‘Very true,’ said Blaine. ‘Still, it might give some slight hint or indication. But in any case, I do beg you will urge our friend to be discreet. Tell him that although the First Lord is an honourable man the present complexion of affairs is such that he may be physically incapable of fulfilling his promises; he may be excluded from the Admiralty. Tell Aubrey to be very cautious in his certainties; and tell him to put to sea as soon as ever he can. Tell him that quite apart from obvious considerations there are obscure forces that may do him harm.’
Jack Aubrey had little notion of his friend’s mathematical or astronomical abilities and none whatsoever of his seamanship, while his performance at billiards, tennis or fives, let alone cricket, would have been contemptible if they had not excited such a degree of hopeless compassion; but where physic, a foreign language and political intelligence were concerned, Maturin might have been all the Sibyls rolled into one, together with the Witch of Edmonton, Old Moore, Mother Shipton and even the holy Nautical Almanack, and no sooner had Stephen finished his account with the words ‘It is thought you might be well advised to put to sea quite soon. Not only would it place those concerned before a fait
accompli but it would also – forgive me, brother – prevent you from committing yourself farther in some unguarded moment or in the event of
provocation, ‘ than Jack gave him a piercing look and asked ‘Should I put to sea directly?’
‘I believe so,’ said Stephen.
Jack nodded, turned towards Ashgrove Cottage and hailed ‘The house, ahoy. Ho, Killick, there,’ in a voice that would quite certainly reach across the intervening two hundred yards.
He need not have called out so loud, for after a decent pause Killick stepped from behind the hedge, where he had been listening. How such an awkward, slab-sided creature could have got along by that sparse and dwarvish hedge undetected Stephen could not tell. This newly-planned bowling-green had seemed an ideal place for confidential remarks, the best apart from the inconveniently remote open down; Stephen had chosen it deliberately, but although he was experienced in these things he was not infallible, and once again Killick had done him brown. He consoled himself with reflecting that the
•steward’s eavesdropping was perfectly disinterested – the true miser’s love for coins as coins, not as a means of exchange – and that his loyalty to Jack’s interests (as perceived by Killick) was beyond all question.
‘Killick,’ said Aubrey, ‘sea-chest for tomorrow at dawn; and pass the word for Bonden.’
‘Sea-chest for tomorrow at dawn it is, sir; and Bonden to report to the skittle-alley,’
replied Killick without any change whatsoever in his wooden expression; but when he had gone a little way he stopped, crept back to the hedge again and peered at them for a while through the branches. There were no bowling-greens in the remote estuarine hamlet where Preserved Killick had been born, but there was, there always had been, a skittle-alley; and this was the term he used – used with a steady obstinacy typical of his dogged, thoroughly awkward nature.
And yet, reflected Stephen as they paced up and down as though on a green or at least greenish quarterdeck, Killick was nearly in the right of it: this had no close resemblance to a bowling-green, any more than Jack Aubrey’s rose-garden looked like anything planted by a Christian for his pleasure.