They rode into the courtyard, and George and Brigid came running out to meet them, both telling Stephen that there was a dead bat in the farther stable; they had covered it with hay; and please, please would he stuff it for them?
Jack walked in alone, Padeen taking care of the horses. Sophie was in the hall, looking pretty; they kissed, and she asked him how the ship was coming on. ‘What they have done is very, very good,’ said Jack, ‘and when the ship is ready she will be as strong as a Greenland whaler, and as tight: perfect for the southern ice. But they have still not advanced beyond the midship riders – I will show you on the model – and now they are at a stand for some knees that were promised last month; while their foreman Essex has given his foot a shocking great gash with an adze. Poor young Seppings confounds himself in apologies and I am sure he does all he can; but when we shall sail, the dear Lord alone can tell. Next time, sweetheart, you must come with me, and see what female charm can do. Diana will drive us over, if you don’t choose to ride.’
Yet the charm of even three women together – for Clarissa had come too – all dressed for the occasion, could not advance the work at a pace that would allow delivery before the end of the year; and since the Woolcombe estate was almost entirely made up of holdings let to tenant farmers, with only enough pasture for the horses and cows kept in hand, and since there was little fishing within reach and no shooting at this season, Jack was deprived of the usual country gentleman’s pursuits; and he might have run melancholy mad had it not been for his duty as justice of the peace, the company of his wife, his friends, his children, a large inherited acquaintance, and his old love astronomy.
Somewhat richer now (though not at all indecently) he caused a really efficient little observatory to be built and installed his telescopes.
The big, spreading old house lived at the steady pace it had been accustomed to for so many generations, a mild but continuous activity. Stephen, with the help of Padeen and old Harding’s grandson Will, established a pretty exhaustive census of the nesting birds, particularly of the waders round the mere; Sophie, and often Diana, paid or received the necessary calls; while at all times Diana trained, exercised and took care of her Arabs; Clarissa taught George and Brigid Latin verbally, as well as French, and read enormously, disturbing the dust of ages; and always there were familiar faces at hand, in the house, in the stables, in the village and all over the countryside. And at home, if anyone should forget his duty, there was always Killick to tell him of it; while the very frequent disagreements between Bonden and Mnason on the boundaries between a coxswain’s rights and those of a butler prevented domestic harmony from becoming monotonous or cloying.
Then – Jack still attending at Poole each week – after a kindly harvest, autumn came round, and Jack and Stephen shot a fair number of Woolcombe partridges, some pheasants almost certainly from Captain Griffiths’ stock (the house was shut up and the keepers dismissed), wood-pigeons, rabbits, hares and the odd quail.
In November Mr Colvin’s hounds met a large field at Woolcombe House, including Diana, Jack and Stephen; and from this time until the hard frosts came all three went out at least once a week, rarely having a blank day, and on occasion some glorious runs. And when the hard frosts did come they brought remarkable quantities of wigeon and pintail and even three great northern divers to glorify the mere. Yet all these delights – very intense for those whose taste lay that way and whose frames could stand the strain –
never kept Jack long from Seppings’ yard. Occasionally Stephen, Surprise’s nominal owner, went with him to be shown the progress, however slow; but once the divers were on the mere and an almost certain snowy owl, there was no tearing him from his carefully-constructed hides.
Yet one day a little after Christmas, the northern birds’ innate sense having told them that they might now return to their dreary wastes and the snowy owl having proved a myth, Stephen rode out to meet his returning friend, finding him on the road he always took, just this side of Southam. This he did with the greater zeal as Jack had been away since Monday, seeing friends in Portsmouth who might help him to some copper, still in absurdly short supply.
‘Well met,’ he cried from a few yards off; and then, quite close, ‘Why Jack, art sick? Art mad?’
‘No,’ said Jack. ‘Only cold, and low in my spirits. I passed through Portsmouth, as I told you I should, and there on Common Hard, just by the Ship, I saw Lord Keith going down to his barge. I stood aside, of course, pulled off my hat and stood there, smiling like a simpleton. He looked right past me: no change of expression whatsoever. It was the coldest, cruellest cut a man i so admired. By God, that shows how the wind is blowing: no wonder I look yellower still.’
‘Was Lady Keith there?’
‘Queenie? Yes: an even older friend. She was leaning on her woman’s arm, all wrapped up in a fur pelisse and picking her way: though it is true she might have been watching her step, on that surface. I like to think so, anyhow: an even older friend – she almost brought me up, as I think I told you. I dared not call out.’
‘The Admiral is for the Mediterranean, I believe?’
‘Yes. In Royal Sovereign.
‘What a load of responsibility – what details – things to remember! Lord Keith must be close on seventy.’
‘Yes. I see what you mean and I hope you are right. However, let me tell you something more cheerful: Seppings finishes the hull – as pretty as cabinet-work – next week. And the copper is in hand, two thousand odd sheets of it and seventeen hundredweight of countersunk nails, together with ten reams of paper to go under the plates. He thinks he can promise delivery in the first or second week in February.’
‘I am glad of that,’ said Stephen, ‘because I have heard from our Chilean friends. They will be in Funchal by the end of the month, or in the first days of March.’
‘It can be very delightful in Madeira by March. I long to show the children oranges and lemons.’
‘Custard apples.’
‘Pineapples and bananas.’
‘And Madeira has a wren of its own, which I have never seen; far less its eggs.’
‘If we are to sail in the second week of February,’ said Jack, ‘I must go to Shelmerston again quite soon and recruit some of the best old Surprises. Even though we cannot offer them much in the way of prizes, with this American peace, I still think we can have our choice, so many ships having been paid off, and the merchantmen not wanting to take any more fresh hands until trade has revived.’
The second week in February took on an enormous importance. George and Brigid studied the calendar and neglected their lessons to such a degree that Clarissa, who very rarely used a harsh word where they were concerned, said that they were a couple of shatter-brained ninnies, only fit for the stable-bucket. All Sophie’s and much of Diana’s energy was taken up with preparations – clothes for the cool part of the voyage and for the warmth expected in Madeira, the proper regulations of the house and the poultry-yard in their absence, a thousand things without a name. Happily Sophie now had a housekeeper, an old acquaintance from the village
called Mrs Flower; she was a widow, and before her marriage she had been in service, having started in the still-room at Woolcombe House itself, in Jack’s mother’s time; but even so, such a hurry of mind once the date of departure was set! And then such
indescribable confusion, near-panic, when Captain Aubrey returned from Poole, said cheerfully, ‘Well, there we are: Harding, Somers and Whewell would be very happy to come. The last coat of blacking on the yards is dry, the shrouds are rattled down, stores and water are aboard, we have a leading wind, with a steady glass; and we can go aboard tomorrow.’
They did not go aboard quite tomorrow, but very nearly; and it was a pale, nervously exhausted Sophie who sat nodding in the coach opposite Clarissa as they approached Poole. Indeed, she was positively asleep, with her mouth open, when they came in sight of the Surprise. George and Brigid were good, kind children, on the whole, and seeing that she had dropped off they kept quiet; but at the view of the Surprise Brigid put her hand gently on her knee and whispered, ‘There she is.’