Once again her voice changed entirely to a waking tone.
‘Certainly I know it,’ said Stephen. ‘Do I not stay at Black’s every time I am in London?’
‘So you are a member of Black’s?’
Stephen bowed.
‘I used to work on the other side of the road, or rather beyond the other side of the road, behind Button’s. Yes, at Mother Abbott’s. But I always had a kindness for Black’s because
it was a member that begged me off when I was to be hanged. Did you ever go to Mother Abbott’s?’
‘I have sometimes walked across and drunk tea with herself while my friends went upstairs.”
‘Then you know the parlour on the right. That was where I worked, keeping the accounts: one of the few things the nuns taught me, apart from French, was keeping accounts neatly and accurately: there or in one of the little rooms beyond, keeping men company while they waited for their girl. Or sometimes they came in just to talk, being lonely. Mother Abbott was very kind to me. She taught me how to dress and undress and she let me have clothes on credit; but she never made me do anything I did not choose to do, and it was not until much later that I obliged as they say, when we were short-handed and the girls were very busy.’
‘Forgive me,’ said Stephen, leaning forward, seizing a small orthopterous insect and putting it into a collecting-box.
‘It is an odd thing, living in a brothel,’ said Clarissa, ‘and it has a certain likeness to being at sea: you live a particular life, with your own community, but it is not the life of the world in general and you tend to lose touch with the world in general’s ideas and language – all sorts of things like that, so that when you go out you are as much a stranger as a sailor is on shore. Not that I had much notion of the world in general anyhow, the ordinary normal adult world, never having really seen it. I tried to make it out by novels and plays, but that was not much use: they all went on to such an extent about physical love, as though everything revolved about it, whereas for me it was not much more important than blowing my nose – chastity or unchastity neither here nor there – absurd to make fidelity a matter of private parts: grotesque. I took no pleasure in it, except in giving a little when I happened to like the man – I had some agreeable clients – or felt sorry for him. It was sometimes from them that I tried to find out what the world in general really thought. Obviously on the face of it Mother Abbott’s customers belonged to the less rigid side, but they reflected the rest and I did learn a certain amount from them. There was one lonely man who used to come and sit with me for hours and tell me about his greyhounds: he was part of a menage a trois; his wife and mistress were great friends; he had children by both; and the mistress, who was a widow, had children of her own. And they all lived together in one house, a vast great house in Piccadilly. Yet he and they and everyone about him were received everywhere, prodigiously respected. So where is the truth of all this outcry against adultery? Is it all hypocritical? I am still puzzled. It is true that he was very grand when he had his clothes on: the blue ribbon is the Garter, is it not? So perhaps . . .’
They both raised their heads at the sound of a shot. ‘That will be Martin and Dr Falconer,’
said Stephen.
‘Oh dear,’ said Clarissa. ‘I hope they do not come this way. I have so loved talking to you that it would be a pity to spoil it with how-d’ye-do’s. But Lord how I have burdened you with my confidences! I have nearly talked the sun down. Perhaps we should be going back to the ship.’
‘If you will give me your shoes, I will put them into my bag. You cannot wear them with that blister.’
As they walked down towards the sea, talking in a desultory way of the brothel’s inhabitants, of their customs and the customers’ sometimes very curious, occasionally
touching ways, he said, after a while, ‘Did you ever come across two men who were often there together, the one called Ledward, and the other Wray?’
‘Oh yes: I had their names in my books many a time. But that was more on the boys’ side: the girls were only called in when there was something quite special – chains and leather, you know. Surely, surely they were not friends of yours?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Yet surprisingly enough they did know some quite agreeable people. I remember one very grand person who used to join in their more curious parties. He had the blue ribbon too.
But he never acknowledged them in public. Twice I saw them pass one another in St James’s Street and twice at Ranelagh with not so much as a nod on his part, and they never even moved their hats, although he was a duke.’
‘Did he have a limp, at all?’
‘A slight one. He wore a boot to disguise it. Dear me, how hoarse I am – I have absolutely talked myself hoarse. I have not talked like this to anyone, ever. I wish I may not have been indiscreet as well as intolerably boring. You are such a dear to have listened to me; but I am afraid I have ruined your day.’
Chapter Seven
For many years Stephen Maturin, as an intelligence agent chiefly concerned with naval affairs, had been harassed, worried and deeply distressed by the activities of highly-placed, well-informed men, admirers of Napoleon, who from inside the English administration sent information to France. Their messages usually had to do with the movement of ships, and they had caused the loss of several men-of-war, the failure of attacks whose success depended on surprise, the interception of convoys with the capture of sometimes half the merchantmen, and (which wounded Stephen and his chief Sir Joseph Blaine even more intimately) the taking of British agents in all the unfortunate countries forming part of Buonaparte’s shoddy empire.
With the help of a man belonging to one of the French intelligence-services, sick of his trade and fearing betrayal, Stephen and Sir Joseph had discovered the identity of two of these traitors: Andrew Wray, the acting Second Secretary of the Admiralty, and his friend Ledward, an important Treasury official; but the arrest was bungled; the pursuit lacked zeal; and they both escaped to France. Clearly they were protected by someone more highly placed by far, someone of their own way of thinking. Stephen had dealt with Ledward and Wray when the creatures went to Pulo Prabang, part of a mission designed to bring about the alliance between the Sultan and France, whilst Stephen was the political adviser to a mission with the contrary intent. He had indeed dissected them. Yet their protector, or possibly protectors, had still not been found, and after a discreet pause the flow of information had begun again, less ample, less purely naval, equally dangerous.
He squared to his writing-desk in the great cabin, the only place where he could conveniently spread out his copy, his code-books and his dispatches. ‘My dear Joseph,’
he wrote in their first, private code, the code each knew by heart, ‘how I wish, O how I wish, that this, the first of writing, may reach you by the whaler Daisy bound for Sydney, and then by the most expeditious means (India and then overland?) the Governor has at
his disposal. I believe the million-to-one chance has served us. Pray think of a duke, well at Court, with the Garter though lame of a leg and with curious ways . . . Come in.”
‘Which it’s all hands, sir, if you please,’ said Killick.
‘Compliments to the Captain and beg to be excused,’ said Stephen, darting a reptilian look at him.
All hands. Of course, that was the pipe he had heard some minutes before.’. . . with curious ways. Before he was a duke, before he had become attached to the ministry, before he was a Privy Councillor and before he had the Garter, I saw him in Holland . . .
Come in.’
It was the little girls, smiling and bobbing, dressed in new frocks with blue bows on their sleeves. ‘You said you would like to see us when we were ready,” said Sarah.
‘And very fine you are too,’ said Stephen. ‘Turn round, will you?’ They slowly revolved, holding their arms well away from their stiff skirts. ‘The elegant frocks of the world, so they are. But Emily, my dear, what is that in your cheek?’