each commission, which would probably not have happened if he had relied on ship’s schoolmasters.
The man he had at present, Mr Walkinshaw, was better than most; he knew a fair amount about mathematics and navigation, and he was generally sober; but like most of his kind he had very little authority. He messed with the midshipmen in the cockpit, he was little better paid than they, the regulations gave him no status in the ship, and he would have had to be an exceptional man to acquire one by force of character. Mr Walkinshaw had not managed to do so, and his lessons were far quieter, more orderly and useful when the Almighty was present, listening most of the time, interposing on occasion, learning a great deal about the boys.
Today his eyes rested more often on Geoghegan than the others: again he noticed his awkward, cramped left-handed
manner of writing, his modest way of answering a question, his smile when he was told that the answer was right – a smile that would have been enchanting if he had been a girl.
‘He is too pretty for his own good, too pretty by far,’ Jack reflected. ‘He would be an odious little beast was he aware of it. Fortunately he ain’t. Mr Dormer,’ he said to a young gentleman whose attention seemed to be wandering, ‘pray define a logarithm.’
Dormer blushed, straightened himself, and said, ‘A logarithm, sir, is when you raise ten to the power that gives the number you first thought of.’
After a few more answers of this kind Jack desired Mr Walkinshaw to return to his remarks on the principles of spherical trigonometry and leafed through the rough copy of the Bellona’s logbook that his clerk was to write fair later in the day, when the diminished sea might make fair writing more nearly possible.
‘Never say that I am no weather-prophet,’ said Jack as he and Stephen sat down to dinner at a table that no longer required fiddles to keep the plates from one’s lap. ‘And I believe my fog is on its way.’
‘God love you for your words, my dear. I should have been sorely vexed to miss my rendezvous.’
‘Yet it must not be too thick, for although our Brittany pilot knows the bay like his own bed, he has to have a terminus a quo and a terminus ad quem.’ He gave Stephen a satisfied look, and paused; but Stephen’s face, civilly attentive, showed no change whatsoever; and Jack, never one to bear resentment, went on, ‘He is marking Ramillies’s chart at present –
by the way, I asked Ramillies to dinner today – we have an enormous great fat goose – but he begged to be excused. He is taking medicine.’
This meant that at seven bells in the morning watch the Ramillies’s captain had stuffed himself with rhubarb, brimstone, the inspissated juice of figs and any other cathartics that happened to be at hand, so that he would be confined to the seat of ease in his quarter-gallery, groaning and straining, for the greater part of the day, clearly unfit as a guest at a dinner-table.
‘I wonder that a man of Captain Fanshawe’s intelligence, education and taste should persist in that deleterious, superstitious self-torment,’ said Stephen in a tone of real indignation. ‘It is one of the unhappiest legacies of the dark ages
– of mere barbarity.’
‘Oh,’ said Jack, ‘but William Fanshawe has studied health, you know, and he understands more about it than most, I do assure you. He is a great reader, and he has a book by a man called Piggot who was all for the superiority of vegetables over bread, and who maintained that caps were far, far better for you than hats. His arguments, as I recall, were wonderfully convincing – to do with the humours.’
This was not the first time that Stephen had learnt about medicine from sea-officers: as usual, he merely bowed, and at much the same moment the enormous great fat goose came in, Killick bearing it against the swell with a very fixed expression indeed on his face and setting it down without a drop of the abundant grease astray.
When the massive remains of the bird, expertly carved by Stephen, had been sent down to the midshipmen’s berth,
according to the humane naval custom, and when the port was going to and fro, Jack said, ‘I considered your young fellow this morning, and I think we might try. In these cases there is always the danger that if it don’t answer it may do the boy or young man harm: I have known cases. Yet I think here we might try. Do you know the Mozart oboe quartet in F major?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Of course you do, of course you do,’ cried Jack. ‘I was only calling it to mind . . . no, what I mean is that I should love to hear it again: and Paisley is a respectable hand with a viola.
We played it in Funchal with those cheerful Portuguese friars, and again – where?’
‘I forget. But I do remember that the viola broke a string in its most important passage and we were all thrown into a sad confusion – a sudden loss of all cohesion – the ground dropping from beneath one’s feet – anticlimax is far too weak an expression.’
‘Naples. It was off Naples: the oboe was a castrato from the opera and John Hill of the Leviathan played the viola. At least as far as we went. I remember the grief of it – no spare strings. Stephen, may I beg you to ask Paisley whether he would like to study the score?
Coming from me it would be so very like an order; and he is after all your messmate. And do you think you could find out whether the boy would be capable of bearing his part –
whether he would like to try – and if so whether he too would choose to have the score. Do not take it amiss, Stephen, but these things would come so much better from a man who can clap leeches to their temples or rouse out their liver and lights – for their own good, of course – than from a fellow who cannot be contradicted and whose prime function is to command. No. I have put it very badly, I find. Do not be offended, Stephen
– I do not really believe in all this gold lace: I do not really esteem myself another Pompous Pilate or Alexander the Great.’
‘Never in life, my dear. As for young Geoghegan, I understand that chamber-music has been part of his family life
since he was a little boy: and as for the purser, I know that he plays in his parish choir when he is ashore, and that although in the wardroom it is mostly Vauxhall and Ranelagh airs, he is perfectly capable of other things. Now’
– pouring each another glass of wine – ‘pray tell me about this Brittany pilot.’
‘Oh, he is one of the fishermen Calliope picked up when she was rescuing people who were trying to escape after the Vendée fighting – royalists, of course.’
‘Just so. I presume they have been carefully sieved?’
‘Oh, I am sure of it. They have been with us, scattered about the fleet ever since; and I believe that during the peace they brought their families across to Market Jew in Cornwall.
They have the same kind of language, as I am sure you know, and they get along famously with the country people and fishermen. This one is called Yann: the Admiral sent him over some little time ago to mark all our charts. He is marking Ramillies’s now, and he should be with us tomorrow.’
‘So much the better,’ Stephen finished his glass and said, ‘I shall make my rounds now: and if the sea grows even a little more reasonable, I believe we may have some music after supper. And if the rounds do not take long I shall have made my inquiries well before that.’
‘Well, my dear,’ he said, coming in just before their toasted cheese – an invariable supper dish whenever they were within reach of the prime essentials – ‘that was eminently satisfactory. I found the boy by mere chance, and he puzzling over a knot with his sea-daddy – are you acquainted with the expression?’
‘Fairly well. My own sea-daddy, dear old William Parsons, was the best of men – endlessly patient.’
‘So was this one. Again and again he said, “No, sir: right over left and then up through the bight” without any wounding emphasis. And when at last the knot was tied he said that
Nelson could not have done it better – that Mr Geoghegan would make a seaman yet. He then walked off
to stow the rope wherever ropes are stowed and I talked to the boy. Of course he knew the quartet – had played it repeatedly at home, his father with the ‘cello, his uncle Kevin the fiddle and Cousin Patrick the viola – but should be very happy to look over the score again. Mr Paisley was almost as good. He did not absolutely assert that he had borne a part in this particular quartet but he let it be understood that he was intimately familiar with it: and even if he had not been he was, as the skipper himself would testify, so practised a sight-reader that he did not need to study the score before sitting down to it, so long as he had a good light on his music-stand.’