Most skills were to be found in a man-of-war – the Surprise’s Sethians, for example, with only the armourer and a carpenter’s mate to help them, had run themselves up a new meeting-house in what was understood to be the Babylonian taste, with a chain of great gilded S’s on each of its marble walls – but in the present case gardening did not seem to be one of them. Certainly fine scything was not. The green was covered with crescent-shaped pecks where the ill-directed blade had plunged into the sward: some of the pecks were bald with a yellow surround, others were bald entirely; and their presence had apparently encouraged all the moles of the neighbourhood to throw up their mounds beside them.
It was the most superficial part of his mind that made these reflexions: below there was a mixture of surprise and consternation, largely wordless. Surprise because although he thought he knew Jack Aubrey very well he had clearly under-estimated the
measureless importance he attached to every aspect of this voyage. Consternation because he had not meant to be taken literally. This ‘sea-chest for tomorrow at dawn’
would be exceedingly inconvenient to Stephen – he had a great deal of business to attend to before sailing, more than he could comfortably do even in the five or six days allotted –
but he had so phrased his words, particularly the discourse that preceded the direct warning, that he could think of no way of going back on them with any sort of consistency.
In any case, his invention was at a particularly low ebb; so was his memory – if he had recalled that the frigate was already fully victualled for her great voyage he would have been less oracular. He was in a thoroughly bad state of mind and temper, dissatisfied with the people in his banking-house, dissatisfied with the universities in which he meant to endow chairs of comparative anatomy; he was hungry; and he was cross with his wife, who had said in her clear ringing voice, ‘I will tell you what, Maturin, if this baby of ours has anything like the discontented, bilious, liverish expression you have brought down from town, it shall be changed out of hand for something more cheerful from the Foundling Hospital.’
Of course in theory he could say ‘The ship will not sail until I am ready’, for absurdly enough he was her owner; but here theory was so utterly remote from any conceivable practice, the relations between Aubrey and himself being what they were, that he never dwelt on it; and in his hurry of spirits and the muddled thinking caused by illtemper he hit upon nothing else before Bonden came at the double and the Goat’s and the George’s post-chaises were bespoke, express messengers sent off to Shelmerston, London and Plymouth; and even if Maturin had spoken with the tongues of angels it was now too late for him to recant with any decency at all.
‘Lord, Stephen,’ said Jack, cocking his ear towards the clock-tower in the stable-yard, a fine great yard now filled with Diana’s Arabians, ‘we must go and shift ourselves.
Dinner will be ready in half an hour.’
‘Oh for all love,’ cried Stephen with a most unusual jet of ill-humour, ‘must our lives be ruled by bells on land as well as by sea?’
‘Dear Stephen,’ said Jack, looking down on him kindly, though with a little surprise,
‘this is Liberty Hall, you know. If you had rather take a cold pork pie and a bottle of wine into the summer-house, do not feel the least constraint. For my own part, I do not choose to disoblige Sophie, who means to put on a prodigious fine gown: I believe it is our wedding-day, Or perhaps her mother’s. And in any case Edward Smith is coming.’
As it happened Stephen did not choose to disoblige Diana either. They had recently had a larger number of disputes than usual, including a quite furious battle about Barham Down. The place was too large and far too remote for a woman living by herself; the grass was by no means suitable for a stud-farm she had seen the aftermath from the meadows: poor thin stuff. And the hard pocked surface of the gallops would knock delicate hooves to pieces. She would be far better off staying with Sophie and using Jack’s unoccupied downs – such grass, second only to the Curragh of Kildare. This led on to the inadvisability of her riding at all while she was pregnant and
to her reply ‘My God, Maturin, how you do go on. Anyone would think I was a prize heifer. You are turning this baby into an infernal bore.’
He regretted their disagreements extremely, particularly since they had grown more
– not so much more acrimonious or vehement as more spirited since their real marriage, their marriage in a church. During their former cohabitation they had quarrelled, of course; but very mildly – never a raised voice nor an oath, no broken furniture at all or even plates.
Their marriage however had coincided with Stephen’s giving up his long-established and habitual taking of opium, and although he was a physician it was only at this point that he fully realized what a very soothing effect his draught had had upon him, how very much it had calmed his body as well as his mind, and what a shamefully inadequate husband it had made him, particularly for a woman like Diana. The change in his behaviour, the very decided change (for when undulled by laudanum he was of an ardent temperament) had added an almost entirely new and almost entirely beneficent depth to their connexion; and although it was in all likelihood the cause of the heat with which they now argued, each preserving an imperilled independence, it was quite certainly the cause of this baby. When Stephen had first heard that foetal heart beat, his own had stopped dead and then turnedover. He was filled with a joy he had never known before, and with a kind of adoration for Diana.
The association of ideas led him to say, when they were half-way to the house,
‘Jack, in my hurry I had almost forgot to tell you that I had two letters from Sam and two about him, all delivered from the same Lisbon packet. In both he sends you his most respectful and affectionate greetings -‘Jack’s face flushed with pleasure ‘- and I believe his affairs are in a most promising way.’
‘I am delighted, delighted to hear it,’ said Jack. ‘He is a dear good boy.’ Sam Panda, as tall as Aubrey and even broader, was Jack’s natural son, as black as polished ebony yet absurdly recognizable – the same carriage, the same big man’s gentle-ness, even the same features, transposed to another key. He had been brought up by Irish missionary priests in South Africa, and he was now in minor orders; he was unusually intelligent and from the merely temporal point of view he had a brilliant career before him, if only a dispensation would allow him to be ordained priest, for without one no bastard could advance much higher than an exorcist. Stephen had taken a great liking to him at their first meeting in the West Indies, and he had been using his influence in Rome and elsewhere. ‘Indeed,’ Stephen went on, his vexation of spirit diminishing as he spoke, ‘I believe all that is needed now is the good word of the Patriarch, which I trust I may obtain when we touch at Lisbon.’
‘Patriarch?’ cried Jack, laughing loud. ‘Is there really a Patriarch in Lisbon? A living Patriarch?’
‘Of course there is a Patriarch. How do you suppose the Portuguese church could get along without a Patriarch? Even your quite recent sects find what they call bishops and indeed archbishops forsooth necessary. Every schoolboy knows that there are and always have been Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, the Indies, Venice, and, as I say, of Lisbon.’
‘You astonish me, Stephen. I had always imagined that patriarchs were very, very old gentlemen in ancient times, with beards to their knees and long robes – Abraham, Methusalem, Anchises and so on. But you have Patriarchs actually walking about, ha, ha, ha!’ He laughed with such good humour and amusement that it was impossible to preserve a sullen or dogged expression. ‘Forgive me, Stephen. I am only an ignorant sailorman, you know, and mean no disrespect – Patriarchs, oh Lord!’ They reached the
gravel drive and with a graver look he said, but not nearly so loud, ‘I am amazingly glad at what you tell me about Sam. He does so deserve to get on, with all his studying, his Latin and Greek and I dare say theology too
– yet none of your bookworms neither – he must weigh a good seventeen stone and as strong as an ox. And his letters to me are so amiable and discreet – diplomatic, if you know what I