‘What are you doing here?’ asked Sophie, and her voice, like her expression, might have been her mother’s.
‘Bellona is in dock for repairs,’ said Jack, ‘and I have come to spend a few days at home.’
‘Not with my good will,’ she replied.
‘But above all I have come to ask your pardon, to say I am very sorry indeed, and to beg you will forgive me.’
The door behind Sophie opened a little. ‘Not with my good will,’ she repeated mechanically. ‘I should not have been here, but the Admiral will not leave before his term.’
She put her hand to a falling swag of hair and speaking in a hurried voice she said, ‘Here –
look here – all these are her letters – your mistress’s letters – and here is the ring you gave me before God’s altar, before God’s altar – and you come here to this house…’
‘Oh, Sophie, my dear,’ he said gently, coming a little nearer and looking her in the face.
Mrs Williams opened the door. He clapped it to and shot the bolt. She could be heard scrabbling the other side.
‘Oh, come, Sophie,’ he said again. But she cried oUt that he should never have come here
– it was most improper, most indelicate – and that he must go away at once. Some of this was less than coherent, but there was no mistaking the vehemence of resentment.
He fell back and said, ‘Is that indeed all you have to say to me, Sophie?’
‘Yes it is,’ she cried, ‘and I never want to see you again.’
‘Then be damned to you for a hard ill-natured and pitiless unforgiving shrew,’ he said, anger rising at last, and he walked out, leaving her bowed over the miserable letters, utterly appalled by his words and by her own.
Chapter Seven
Two days after the dark of the moon Jack Aubrey, worn thin with his ceaseless efforts to make the dockyard work double tides, brought his ship with her sullen crew, bloated, blotch-faced, dissipated and bleary-eyed after so long in port, within sight of the offshore squadron.
He made his number and he was called aboard the flagship at once. The Captain of the Fleet received him with the words, ‘Well, you have had a fine run ashore, Aubrey, upon my word: and I see the yard did you proud in the article of spars. But I am sorry to tell you that the Admiral is far from well, very far from well; and I understand you are to see his secretary.’
Mr Craddock, like most secretaries to admirals with an important command, was a discreet, capable, middle-aged man, thoroughly used to dealing with diplomatic and official correspondence and with matters to do with intelligence. He said that although Lord Stranraer had indeed received Captain Aubrey’s letter and report sent by the Ringle, he had seen fit, because of confidential information received, to detain the tender for a certain period and to send her ta the place of rendezvous some time earlier than the appointed date. The Ringle had not yet reported back to the squadron and it was not impossible that Dr Maturin, perhaps carrying important. dispatches or information, might have directed Mr Reade to take advantage of the very favourable breeze to carry him to the Downs.
Captain Aubrey bowed, hoped that the Admiral was at least tolerably comfortable, and wondered whether he had made any observation on the Bellona’s parting company or on the taking of a prize.
‘Those are matters quite outside my province,’ said the secretary in an impersonal tone.
‘But I am sure that Captain Calvert will have directions for your immediate proceedings.’
He had, of course, and although he too declined to be
drawn about the Bellona’s inability to make out the signal
to tack, he did say, ‘As far as the prize is concerned – and
I give you joy of her, I am sure: she sounds a genuine stunner
– he is perhaps the only flag-officer in the service who would have been totally unmoved. He is not interested in money.’ Jack had heard this before: it formed part of the Admiral’s
reputation. Certainly he had an ample fortune, and at sea he lived very quietly, entertaining no more than was,strictly necessary: yet this did not square with his passion for inclosing larger and larger tracts of common land, fens, and open pasture.
Pending Lord Stranraer’s recovery – and as Craddock said, they longed for the return of Dr Maturin, in whom the Admiral had so much confidence – Jack was returned to the inshore squadron. Even at this late stage of the war, with Wellington well north of the Pyrenees, established on the Garonne and ready to push north, there was always the possibility of the French fleet, seizing the opportunity of a brisk north-east wind, breaking out of Brest, conceivably defeating Stranraer’s divided force in two separate battles, and, if this coincided with one of Buonaparte’s astonishing recoveries by land, reversing the whole course of the war:
or
at any rate of ending it for themselves in a blaze of glory. In the meanwhile Captain Aubrey was to resume his
patrolling under Captain Fanshawe’s orders, but at the same time he was to pay particular attention to the surveying of stated parts of the coast and above all to the fixing of the position and depth of a number cif submerged rocks, such as that upon which the Magnificent was lost, totally lost, in
1804.
A man could scarcely have been much lower in the spirits than Jack Aubrey: yet it was striking to see how he plunged back mto life at sea, a hard life particularly at this season and in Brest Bay, but one with a set pattern he had known from boyhood, and one in which he had a task that gave him deep satisfaction. He had always liked surveying, and now he gave himself up to his submarine rocks with a conviction that settling their bearings was an absolute good. ‘Perhaps Stranraer feels the same about inclosure,’ he reflected, squaring himself in the boat and peering through the rain-misted sights of his azimuth compass at the buoys tossing five fathoms above the top of that cruel rock the Buffalo. ‘Mr Mannering, note 137°E.’
In most commissions the midshipmen’s berth yielded a boy or two who really liked navigation, sea-mathematics, and who began, with unconcealed delight, to seize the
underlying principles: Mannering was the most recent, with the same zeal, earnestness and growing enthusiasm.
He was a comfort to Jack: so, on a very different scale, was the appearance of the Ringle, beating steadily into the usual sou’wester. Very soon a telescope made it apparent that Stephen was not on board – Jack had hardly expected him – but he did take pleasure in Reade’s account of their splendid run up to the Downs: eight or nine knots most of the time, with points of an estimated fourteen when the tide was with them – never a dull moment – the Doctor in his highest form.
The splendid run had brought the Doctor ashore so soon, and the mail-coach had whirled him up to London at such a pace that there was time to leave a note for Sir Joseph at the Admiralty begging that they might sup together at their club that evening: and this a full two days and a half before he had thought it possible.
He took a room at the club, the only one available, a little cheese-shaped affair from which, if one chose to stand up very straight and peer over the parapet, one could look down into Mrs Abbott’s well-known bawdy-house; but Stephen was really more concerned with coping with his shabby clothes as well as he could do with a nail-brush, while his dirty shirt was concealed by a black neckcloth carefully
spread over all. A couple of stitches of surgical neatness fixed it in place and he went down into the hall, with its fine hospitable fire.
Sir Joseph hardly kept him waiting at all. ‘How very glad I am to see you, Stephen,’ he cried. ‘By Warren’s computation you were already a thousand miles from here, with the distance growing every day.’
‘So I should have been, by our arrangements. But I learnt something of real consequence, and since I had no carrier pigeon at hand, I thought I should bring it myself. What a heavenly smell!’
‘It is frying onions. The kitchen door is being repaired.’
‘Frying onions, frying bacon, sardines grilling over vinecuttings, the scent of coffee – these things oh how they stir my animal desires! I had no dinner.’
‘Then let us sup at once – my dear Golding, how do you do?’ – this to a passing member in court dress – ‘What shall you eat?’
‘Steak and kidney pudding, without the shadow of a doubt: I slaver at the very words. And you?’