Jack was obliged to stay, though he did not much care for his company nor for the note in Fox’s voice when he called down the table, ‘Tell me, Aubrey, just when does the tide turn this afternoon? I wish there to be no time lost getting this document home: no time lost or dawdled away.’ The matter was offensive; the manner more so; and both Richardson and
Elliott looked extremely nervous. Captain Aubrey was not the most long-suffering of men.
Yet the feast was winding to its end at last, with many a hoot and jibe about the penniless Frenchmen’s plight. ‘Though now I come to think of it,’ said Crabbe, ‘since Duplessis does not have to produce his subsidy, he may be able to pay his way home.’
‘If you have no remark more intelligent than that, Crabbe, you had better keep your mouth shut,’ said Fox. ‘Going home in disgrace is far worse than starving here.’
‘His Excellency is quite right,’ said Johnstone. ‘Far worse.’ ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said Crabbe, sinking his face into his beer.
A truly glorious dessert of fruit on three battered tin trays covered this awkward moment: and then at last came the decanters, those fingerposts towards an eventual release. They drank the King with a certain return of gravity; and then Fox, taking the silk-bound treaty from Ahmed’s reverential hands, said, ‘I drink to the fruit of our joint efforts: I drink to what I have signed in His Majesty’s name.’
‘Huzzay! Hear him, hear him!’ cried the suite, a confusion of voices in which the sailors joined with a decent zeal.
‘What I drink to,’ cried Loder, standing up and leering at Fox, ‘is to the Bath. The Most Honourable Order of the Bath.’
‘Huzzay, huzzay! Hear him! Bottoms up!’ cried the others, and while Fox looked down in smiling modesty they drank the sentiment.
They huzzayed their way on to knighthood with three times three; and after that they drank ‘Baronetcy, a governorship and five thousand a year on the Civil List.’
Jack looked at Elliott, saw that he was pallid-drunk, caught Richardson’s eye instead, rose and said, ‘You will excuse us now, Excellency. We must go and prepare your way. Mr Richardson will accompany you to the barge in forty-five minutes. Mr Welby, the new pinnace will come for you and your men in half an hour.’
He took the bewildered Elliott by the arm and guided him out. Seymour, at the landing-place, reported the departure of
the big proa and some smaller boats full of servants. Jack told him what to expect, suggested that Bonden should spread sailcloth over the sternsheet cushions, and walked Elliott off round the crater-rim, hailing the ship from his usual point.
‘Mr Fielding,’ he said, looking into the crowded waist, ‘are all the mission’s servants aboard?’
‘All aboard, sir; and the last baggage-boat will shove off in a minute or so.’
‘I am delighted to hear it. The new pinnace for the Marines right away, if you please; then I believe we may unmoor and ride at single anchor – indeed, creep to a kedge, with such quiet water and so little breeze. The envoy and his people should leave the hard in half an hour. Salute, of course, and everything man-of-war fashion. Pray let me know when they put off. I hope to sail with the first of the ebb. I trust to God the Doctor has not wandered off looking for centipedes,’ he added in a lower voice, going below.
He took off his coat and lay on his cot. Killick peered at him through a crack in the door and shook his head sympathetically. The Diane was unmooring, and her captain listened to the familiar sequence, the click of the capstan-pawls, the cries of ‘Light along the messenger, there’, ‘Heave and in sight’ and the rest, but his mind was elsewhere. In most men, in perhaps all he had ever known, victory made them benign, expansive, affable, generous. Fox had been arrogant and hostile. He had also betrayed a meanness
that must always have been subjacent, since its appearance caused no surprise: there had been and there would be no feast for the young gentlemen, the warrant officers, the foremast hands, no drinks, no address, telling the good news and acknowledging their part in the successful voyage. To be sure, it was not a very pretty victory: it scarcely called for the ringing of church bells and bonfires in the street. He regretted his ale; he regretted his port still more; yet even so he dropped off for some minutes and when Reade came with ‘Mr Fielding’s compliments and duty, sir, and the barge has put off: he says the breeze and high water are all you could wish,’ he felt surprisingly fresh.
‘Thank you, Mr Reade,’ he said. ‘I shall be on deck in ten minutes or so.’
He let himself lie in that delicious state of complete relaxation for a while, rose up, plunged his face into water, squared his neckcloth and hair, and put on his coat. Killick instantly appeared, brushed him, arranged his clubbed pigtail and its bow, spread his best epaulettes wide and even.
On deck he saw that the breeze was indeed all he had wished:
it was blowing right across the anchorage, and he had but to back his mizen topsail, make a sternboard with plenty of helm, fill, pluck up the kedge – Fielding had it almost atrip – and let the breeze and the turning tide carry the ship out while it was being run up.
He also saw that everything was exactly as it should be:
yards squared by the lifts and braces, side-boys in white gloves, man-ropes just so, Marines all present, pipe-clayed and correct, officers and young gentlemen square-rigged, Mr Crown and his mates with their silver calls already poised, Mr White with his poker, the glow visible in the long evening shadow of the starboard bulwark.
He gauged the distance from the advancing barge still as rowdy as a boatful of Cockneys going down to Greenwich:
nearer, nearer. ‘Very well, Mr White,’ he said, and the first gun spoke out, followed by the remaining twelve. The barge hooked on; the envoy came aboard followed by his suite looking squalid, frowsty, crapulous, old, and unclean, their coats buttoned to the wrong buttonholes, their hair astray and at least one flap or codpiece blowing in the wind. They were received with rigid, exact formality; and abruptly sobered, they fingered their clothes; Fox looked extremely displeased; the suite glanced uneasily at one another, and they all hurried below.
‘Where is the Doctor?’ asked Jack.
‘He came aboard with the Marines,’ said Fielding, ‘carrying hairy thing. He is in the gunroom, I am afraid.’
‘Lord, what a relief,’ murmured Jack, and in a strong official voice ‘Let us proceed to sea.
As he spoke the Prabang fortress began to boom out a farewell salute; the Diane answered it, and they were still firing, gun for gun, with the smoke drifting away to leeward, as she passed through the channel into the open sea.
‘Mr Warren,’ said Jack, ‘the course will be north-east by east a half east; and that, I trust, will bring us to our rendezvous with the Surprise.’
Chapter 9
The Diane had not run off two degrees of longitude before the old pattern of sea-going life was as firmly settled as if it had never been interrupted. It is true that she ran them off slowly, rarely exceeding five knots and never logging more than a hundred miles from
noon to noon. This was not because she did not try, not because she was too early for her rendezvous:
far from it: at present, with the balmy air coming in one point abaft the beam, she had a magnificent display of canvas spread, with studdingsails aloft and alow, royals and even skyscrapers, and a variety of rarely-set objects on the stays; yet the balmy air was so languid that she only just had steerage-way.
Jack Aubrey, having done all that could be done, paced fore and aft on the windward side of the quarterdeck according to his habit before dinner with his mind perfectly at ease on that point if not on all others; the greater part of a lifetime afloat had convinced him that railing at the weather only spoilt one’s appetite, which was always a pity and which would be even more of a pity today, when he and Stephen, alone for once, were to eat some particularly fine fish, bought from a proa that morning.
‘What is it that you wish me to see?’ asked Stephen, coming up the companion-ladder with his usual precautions, although there was scarcely any movement at all under his feet.
‘You cannot see it from here, because of the awning,’ said Jack. ‘But come with me along the weather gangway, and I will show you something that perhaps you have never seen before.’ They went forward, and some of the hands in the waist nodded and smiled significantly. The Doctor was going to be stunned, amazed, taken aback all standing.