‘Oh, indeed I am. I love Stephen. I am fond of my cousin I am as delighted as a woman can be, who has nothing
ready for a single guest, let alone a regiment, including that Mrs Oakes – nothing whatsoever – you were to have yesterday’s beefsteak pudding again for dinner, and there is nothing else in the house. We shall have to put them in the east wing – there is room enough there, God knows – but it has not been turned out, it has not been touched since Michaelmas.’ She started up, gathering her wits and saying, ‘I shall never be ready in time,’ hurried from the room.
She was not what she called ready when the coach and four, driven in great style by Diana, rolled in a smooth curve across the courtyard and pulled up exactly at the foot of the steps, discharging an improbable number of people; but she was at the open, welcoming door, pale but properly dressed, conscious that the main rooms of the east wing were as spotless as the decks of a man-of-war (and cleaned in much the same hearty fashion), that an unspeakably well-timed gift of venison ensured their dinner, and that the reprieved Jamaica service, the West India merchants’ expression of thanks to Captain Aubrey for ridding them of privateers, would lay it out in splendour.
She received them prettily, kissing Diana and Brigid, dropping that Mrs Oakes quite a deep curtsy and hoping that she saw her well, and then leading them into the blue parlour to drink tea while their baggage was carried away and whilst Jack, Stephen, an aged groom and a stable-boy put the splendid coach and its team of bays in stable and coachhouse.
‘Why, Diana,’ called Jack in his strong voice, coming in
and brushing the oat-dust from his coat, ‘where did you get your magnificent cattle?’
‘I borrowed them from my cousin Cholmondeley,’ said she. ‘We met him in Bath, glum as a gib cat, with a gouty toe that nailed him to his chair – said the horses were bursting for want of exercise – it made him low in his spirits. So I offered to drive them down here. He will send his coachman to take them back on Thursday.’
‘He must have an amazing opinion of your powers,’ said Jack. ‘I once asked him to lend me a perfectly ordinary dog-cart with a perfectly ordinary animal to pull it, just for an hour or so, and he would not.’
‘Jack,’ said Diana, smiling, ‘a thousand repartees come to mind, each wittier than the last, but I shall not utter a single one. This is a very striking case of magnanimity in a poor weak woman who rarely thinks of any repartee until it is far too late to produce it.’
‘Admiral Rodham says that for ship-handling Jack has not his equal in the entire service,’
said Sophie.
Diana looked down without even a hidden smile; and in the silence that followed Stephen watched George and Brigid. The little boy walked round and round her, gazing: sometimes she smiled at him; but sometimes she turned away her head. Eventually he came right up to her, offered her the best part of a biscuit and said, ‘Should not you like to see my dormouse? He is a prodigious fine dormouse, and will let you touch him.’
‘Oh, if you please,’ she said, jumping up at once.
‘Stephen, Diana, dear Mrs Oakes,’ said Jack, ‘I do not believe you have any of you been here before. Should you like to see the house? The library is rather good, and the justice-room; though I am afraid much of the rest was modernized a few years ago.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ cried Sophie, aware of the horrors stuffed into both, and they totally unswept, ‘the light is quite gone, and you really cannot see the panelling when the light is quite gone. Besides, dinner is almost ready, and you must certainly change that disreputable old rat-catcher’s coat.’
Chapter Two
In general Stephen Maturin was a poor sleeper, and since his youth he had turned to a number of allies against the intolerable boredom – and sometimes far, far worse than boredom, he having a most vulnerable heart – of insomnia:
poppy and mandragora being the most obvious, seconded by the inspissated juice of aconite or of henbane, by datura stramonium, creeping skerit, leopard’s bane. But here in the soporific atmosphere of Dorset even three cups of coffee after dinner had not been able to keep him awake: he had nodded over his cards to such an extent that by general agreement Sophie took over his hand and he crept off to bed. Here he awoke at dawn in a state of rosy ease and perfect relaxation, infinitely refreshed. In this blessed posture he lay for some time, luxuriating, collecting himself and the recent past and listening both to Diana’s even breath and to a moderate chorus of birds, all pleased to see the day.
Presently life stirred in his bosom: with infinite precaution he collected the clothes he had strewn about the floor, and carrying his shoes he took them to the closet.
‘Why, Stephen, there you are,’ called Jack from the breakfast-room, hearing him on the stairs. ‘Good morning to you. What an early worm you are to be sure. I trust you slept?
You was quite fagged out.’
‘Wonderfully, I thank you: wonderfully: I do not remember getting into bed, and when I woke I could hardly tell where I was, at all. What a pure joy it is, the awareness of having slept.’
‘I am sure of it,’ said Jack, for whom this was an everyday occurrence. He poured him a cup of coffee and went on, ‘What do you say to taking out a gun and seeing whether we can knock over a rabbit or two? And there might be a snipe in the plashy bottom.’
‘With all my heart.’
‘We can breakfast properly when we come back. But before the women get up let us first have a quick look into the library and the justice-room. I am rather proud of them, and you will not mind a little dust. Or squalor.’
The library was indeed a noble room, running almost the whole width of the first floor, with five bays to the south and an east window; though the early light had scarcely yet strength enough to show more than shadowy ranges of book-cases, all of a kind, panelling, and countless dim spines behind glass, long tables in the middle, wing-chairs by the fireplace, and some rolled-up sacking bundles, Sophie’s shame. ‘My great-grandfather the judge was a prodigious reader,’ said Jack, ‘and so was his great-grandfather – it skips generations, sometimes, like stamina in horses. You must spend a day or two in here, if it comes on to rain.’
‘So must Clarissa Oakes. She has been fairly starved for books.’
‘I had no idea she was a learned lady.’
‘Sure, she has nothing of the bluestocking; but she reads Latin as easily as French, and Greek with no more difficulty than most of us. And she dearly loves a book-room.’
‘Do you suppose she would teach George amo amas amat?’
‘She is a very good-natured woman, in spite of her apparent reserve.’
‘I shall get Sophie to ask her. But for the moment we must jump down to the justice-room and away, or the rabbits will all have gone to ground. I am sorry about this staircase,’ he said as they went down. ‘I had hoped to make it as it was when I was a boy – I did have the panelling put back in my mother’s room – but before the men could get to work on this, funds ran out. Here’ – opening a door – ‘is the justice-room.’
‘It is not a term I know,’ said Stephen, looking at the bare, formal arrangement of a large table set across, with some chairs and benches facing it, the walls clothed in the soberest linenfold oak: no pictures. ‘What happens here?’
‘This is where we deal with the manor’s legal proceedings, court baron, court leet, and so on. And when I am sitting as a justice of the peace, that is my chair behind the table, with the high back. Sitting as a magistrate, if you follow me.’
‘Long, long ago you once told me that you had it in mind to preach a sermon to the ship’s company, there being no chaplain aboard: but even that did not so astonish me as now hearing that you are a judge, my dear; one of the righteous.’
‘Oh,’ said Jack, carelessly, ‘the Aubreys have always been justices of the county, time out of mind. It had nothing at all to do with the righteousness. Mind your step in the doorway: there is a damned awkward plank. No. I regard it as an infernal nuisance, and it has caused a deal of trouble with my preserving neighbours, because I will not come down heavy on poachers – I often knew them as boys. This is the way to the gun-room. Here is a fourteen-gauge Manton that might suit you.’