At another time Jack might have replied that Stephen had seen cutters by the score, by the hundred, every time he came into home waters, and very often elsewhere, and that the rig had been carefully explained to him so that he should not confuse a cutter with a sloop; but now he only said, ‘Why, because they go cutting along, you know.
Skilfully handled’ – smiling at young Fitton – ‘they are the fastest craft in the Navy.’
‘Should you like to see over her, Doctor, when it is raining a little less?’ asked Fitton. ‘She is remarkably large and elegant for a cutter – nearly seventy feet long – and although some people might say she wanted headroom, she is much broader in the beam than you would think: twenty-four feet, but for a trifle. Twenty-four feet, sir, I do assure you.’
After supper Jack and the captain of the Nimble fell to a close discussion of the sailing of cutters, both with fore-and-aft and with square rig, in order to get the best out of them by as well as large; and although from time to time they remembered that Stephen was there and tried to make the question clear to him, he soon went to bed. He was in fact quite tired – he had reason to be – but before he went to sleep he reflected for a while on diaries, on the keeping of diaries. The Nimble was now pitching to such an extent that Killick came in and took seven turns about him and his cot to prevent him from being tossed out or being flung against the deck-head, but even without the constriction it would have been impossible to make one of his habitual entries – cryptic entries, because of his strongly-developed sense of privacy, and selective entries, because of his connexion with intelligence.
‘Today I should have recorded no more than the weather, the helleborus foetidus when we stopped to mend a trace, and the handsomely expressed gentlemanly gratitude of the men, the wholly uneducated men, to whom we gave the horses. When first I met Jack I should have been very much more prolix. Or should I? I was terribly low in those days, after the obvious, inevitable failure of the rising, the infamous conduct of so very, very many people, and of course the loss of Mona; to say nothing of the intolerable miseries in France and the destruction of all our sanguine generous youthful hopes. Lord, how a man can change! I remember telling James Dillon, God rest his soul, that I no longer felt loyalty to any nation or any body of men, only to my immediate friends – that Dr Johnson was right in saying that the form of government was of no consequence to the individual – that I should not move a finger to bring about the millennium or independence.
And yet here I am, hurrying through this wicked sea in an attempt however slight at bringing about both, if the defeat of Buonaparte can be considered the one and Catholic emancipation and the dissolution of the union the other. When I am at the Grapes I shall look at the diary of that year and see what in fact I said. Shall I remember the code?’
At breakfast Michael Fitton said, ‘Today, Doctor, if the rain stops, you will see the Nimble in all her glory: she is almost directly before the wind, with topsail and single-reefed square mainsail, and at the last heave she ran off eleven knots and the best part of a fathom.’
‘Yes,’ said Jack, ‘and you will see the extraordinary merits of a running bowsprit.
When she pitches like this’ – the table took on a forward slope of twenty-five degrees, their hands automatically securing the toast – ‘the bowsprit does not stab into the sea and snap off short or at the very least check her way.’
‘How can this be achieved, for all love?’
‘Since a cutter’s bowsprit has no steeve, since it is horizontal, it can be run in on deck,’ they told him kindly, and promised that he should see it directly.
But they were mistaken. The rain continued steadily, sweeping in vast grey swathes from the south-west, over a grey sea mottled here and there with white; and although in the dim afternoon of Thursday Jack dragged him on deck to look at Ushant, a faint white-ringed blur on the starboard bow, he could not be induced to go forward to see the bowsprit nor even to climb a little way up the shrouds to view the remote ships of the Brest blockade; and the next day, when the Nimble was racing up the Channel, the breeze had hauled so far forward that she now wore her fore-and-aft mainsail, foresail and jib; her bowsprit was therefore run out, and it remained run out until the end of their voyage – a most remarkably fine passage that brought them into Portsmouth late on Friday afternoon, quite a warm day for May, and with no more than an intermittent drizzle.
Sir Joseph, whose policy of lying motionless and eating very large quantities of dry bread had worked well after the first horrible hours, set off for London as soon as he had taken tea and muffins at the Crown; he said to Jack, ‘I presume orders will be telegraphed down to Admiral Martin as soon as I have
made my report; and I have little doubt that officially or unofficially I shall see you both early next week.’
They accompanied him to his post-chaise, and as they walked back Stephen said,
‘I have been thinking, brother. Diana will be in a very delicate condition by now, and if we suddenly appear, it may shock her extremely.’
‘Oh,’ said Jack, who had been on the point of sending for horses, ‘I suppose it might. Pen a discreet, diplomatic note hinting that you might be in the neighbourhood presently, and we will send it by Bonden or Killick or both in a chaise.’
‘A chaise, with Bonden and Killick getting out of it, would be sure to cause alarm –
dreadful apprehensions of bad news travelling with such speed and ostentation. A boy on a mule would be much more suitable.’
The boy on a mule set off with a note -My dear, pray do not be alarmed or in any way concerned if you should see us presently: we are both perfectly well and send our love – and the men were about to set off to gaze at the Diane from a discreet distance when they ran into the Port Admiral, a cheerful soul, who insisted on their cracking a bottle: ‘I am seventy-four today; you cannot refuse me.’ A number of other sea-officers were in the hall and he invited them too. Some were very well known to Jack, among them three post-captains; like many other post-captains they made up for their solitary state at sea by being unusually loquacious by land. The Physician of the Fleet was also there, together with one of the medical men from Haslar; and they too were very conversible.
Talk flowed, bottles came and went, time passed, passed. But at length the landlord’s son came and stood by Stephen: ‘Oh, Dr Maturin, sir,’ he said when Stephen paused in his account of the Basrah method of setting broken bones, ‘there is a coach outside with some ladies asking for you’
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ muttered Stephen, darting from the room.
Diana was at the near-side window She leant out and cried, ‘Oh Maturin, my dear, what a monster you are to terrify innocent women like this ‘Inside the coach behind her Sophie’s
voice rose to a high squeak, ‘Is not Jack there? You said Jack would be there.’
Diana opened the door and offered to jump out, but Stephen took her elbows and lifted her down. ‘My dear, you are a fine size,’ he said, kissing her tenderly. ‘Sophie, will you come in and see Jack and Admiral Martin and a number of other sailors? They are drinking port in the Dolphin room.’
‘Oh Stephen,’ called Sophie, ‘pray bring him out and let us all go home together at once. I do not want to lose a minute of him. Nor of you either, dear Stephen.’
‘Sure you are right, for the moments are few: we must be in town on Tuesday, I do believe.’
In fact it was on Sunday evening that a message came from the Port Admiral requiring Captain Aubrey to wait upon the First Lord in Arlington Street at half-past five o’clock the next day. Yet if the reprieve had been longer they could scarcely have said any more, all of them having talked incessantly since the coach started moving back to Ashgrove Cottage from the Crown.
‘Arlington Street,’ said Jack in a hoarse whisper. ‘His private house. I am heartily glad of it. Because had it been the Admiralty I should have been in a fine quandary –