‘I believe they do, ma’am,’ whispered Reade, smiling at her, ‘but not until we have drunk the King; and, you know, we drink him sitting down.’
‘I hope I shall hold out till then,’ she said; and in fact she was still upright, steady, hardly flushed at all and by no means too talkative (which could not be said for her husband) when the port came round and Jack, with a formal cough, said ‘Mr Pullings, the King.’
‘Madam and gentlemen,’ said Pullings, ‘the King.’
‘Well, sir,’ said Clarissa Oakes, turning to Jack when she had done her loyal duty, ‘that was a delightful dinner, and now I shall leave you to your wine; but before I go may I too give a toast? To the dear Surprise, and may she long continue to astonish the King’s enemies.”
Chapter Three
After this quite brilliant occasion Clarissa Harvill or rather Oakes faded from Stephen Maturin’s immediate attention. He saw her of course every fine day – and the Surprise sailed north-north-east through a series of very fine, indeed heart-lifting days until she reached the calms of the equator – sitting well aft on the leeward side of the quarterdeck, taking the air, or sometimes on the forecastle, where the little girls taught her games with string, cradles far beyond the reach of any European cat; but although he saw her and nodded and spoke, this was a time when he was very much taken up with his intelligence work, and even more so with trying to decipher Diana’s letters and make out what underlay their sparsity, brevity and sometimes incoherence. He loved his wife very dearly, and he was perfectly prepared to love his unseen daughter with an equal warmth of affection; but he could not really get at either through the veil of words. Diana had never been much of a correspondent, usually limiting herself to times of arrival or departure or names of guests invited, with brief statements of her health – ‘quite well’ or ‘cracked a rib when Tomboy came down at Dray ton’s oxer’. But her notes or letters had always been perfectly straightforward: there had never been this lack of real communication – these lists of horses and their pedigrees and qualities that filled paper and told him nothing: very little about Brigid after a short account of her birth – ‘most unpleasant; an agonizing bore; I am glad it is over’ – apart from the names of unsatisfactory nurses and the words ‘She seems rather stupid. Do not expect too much.’ Unlike Sophie Diana did not number her letters, nor did she always date them with anything more than the day of the week, so although there were not a great many of them he found it impossible to arrange the series in any convincing order; and often when he should have been decoding the long reports from Sir Joseph Blaine, who looked after naval intelligence, he found himself rearranging the sequence, so that Diana’s ambiguous phrases took on a different meaning. Two or three things were clear, however: that she was not very happy; that she and Sophie had disagreed about entertainments, Sophie and her mother maintaining that two women whose naval husbands were away at sea should go out very little, certainly not to assemblies where there was dancing, and should receive even less – only immediate family and very old friends. And that Diana was spending a good deal of time at Barham Down, the big remote house with extensive grazing and high down-land she had bought
for her Arabians, rather than at Ashgrove Cottage, driving herself to and fro in her new green coach.
He had hoped that having a baby would make a fundamental change in Diana. The hope had not been held with much conviction, but on the other hand he had never thought that she would be quite so indifferent a mother as she appeared in these letters, these curiously disturbing letters.
They were worrying in what they said and perhaps more so in their silences; and Jack’s behaviour made him uneasy too. Ordinarily when letters came from home they read pieces out to one another: Jack did so still, telling him about the children, the garden and the plantations; but there was a constraint -almost nothing about Barham Down or indeed Diana herself – and it was not at all the same frank and open interchange.
As Jack worked his way systematically through Sophie’s letters he found that her very strong reluctance to say anything unpleasant gradually diminished, and by the time he read the last he knew that the baby ‘was perhaps a little strange’ and that Diana was drinking heavily. But he had also been told with great force that he must not say anything; that Sophie might be quite mistaken about Brigid – babies often looked strange at first and turned out charming later – and that Diana might be entirely different once she had Stephen at home again. In any case it would be pointless and wicked to put poor dear Stephen on a rack for the rest of the voyage and Sophie knew that Jack would not say anything at all.
This was bad. But there had been an area of silence between Jack and his friend years ago, and about Diana too, before Stephen and she were married. On the other hand, from their very first days at sea together, there had never been anything that Jack had had to keep from him in the line of naval warfare: intelligence and action complemented one another and Captain Aubrey had often been officially told in so many words to consult with Dr Maturin and seek his advice. This time however his orders made no mention of Stephen at all: was the omission deliberate or did it arise merely from the fact that they originated in Sydney rather than Whitehall? The second was the probable answer, since the occasion for the orders, the trouble in Moahu, had only just arisen; but there was a faint possibility that Sydney, informed by Whitehall, might know as much about Dr Maturin’s views on colonialization, muscular ‘protection’, and the government of one nation by another as did Jack, who had so often heard him speaking of ‘that busy meddling fool Columbus and that infernal Borgia Pope’, of ‘the infamous Alexander’, ‘that scoundrel Julius Caesar” and now worst of all ‘the scelerate Buonaparte’. It seemed to him that he was now bound to offend Stephen either by asking him to collaborate in what might look very like annexation or to wound him by an evident neglect. Some infinitely welcome compromise might present itself in time, but for the moment it was a worrying position; and this was not Jack Aubrey’s only source of worry either. Not long since, he had succeeded to two inheritances, the first on his father’s death, which brought him the much-encumbered Wool-hampton estate, and the second on that of his very aged cousin Edward Norton, whose much more considerable possessions included the borough of Milport, which Jack represented in Parliament (there were only seventeen electors, all of whom had been Cousin Edward’s tenants). And inheritance, above all the inheritance of land, brought with it a mass of legal procedures to be followed, duties to be paid, oaths to be sworn: Jack had always been aware of the fact and he had always said ‘Fortunately
there is Mr Withers to deal with the whole thing’. Mr Withers being the Dorchester attorney, the family’s man of business, who had looked after both estates ever since Jack was a midshipman.
But while Jack was on the high seas – in the Straits of Macassar, to be exact – Mr Withers died, and his successor could think of nothing wiser to do than to send a great mass of papers, asking for instructions on scores or even hundreds of such matters as enclosures, mineral rights, and the disputed successions to Parsley Meadows, which had been in Chancery these twelve years, matters of which Jack knew nothing but which he was now trying to reduce to order with the help of his clerk Adams in spite of the contradictions at every turn, missing documents, vouchers, receipts.
‘At least,’ he said, coming into Stephen’s cabin with a sheet of papers, ‘I have the particulars of the advowsons I told you about some time ago. But tell me, is Martin an idoneous person?’
‘Idoneous for what?’
‘Oh, just idoneous. Two of the livings, if you can call them livings, are vacant; and this letter says I am required to present an idoneous person.’
‘As far as benefices are concerned no one could be more idoneous, fitting or suitable than Martin, since he is an Anglican clergyman.’
‘That makes him idoneous, does it? I was not aware. Well, here are the particulars of those in my gift: Fenny Horkell and Up Hellions are the vacant ones, and they should have been filled before this; but since I am on active service the Bishop has to wait until I can send home. They are in the same diocese, in spite of being so far apart. I am afraid neither could be called anything remotely like a plum, but Fenny Horkell has a decent house, built by a wealthy parson forty years ago for the sake of the fishing, which I know Martin would enjoy: it has sixty acres of glebe, poor plashy stuff, but it has the Test flowing through from one end to the other; yet the tithe only amounts to £47.15.0, although there are 356 parishioners. The next, Up Hellions, is rather better, with £160 a year and 36