But their own battle, the Bellona’s rippling broadsides they had heard so often during the great-gun exercise, did not begin, and tense expectation was drooping even to the point of discontent when, with a wholly different and immediate sharpness, her bow-chasers fired, followed by the foremost guns of her starboard broadside, deep-voiced guns, loud and clear, firing well-spaced, carefully-aimed deliberate long shots.
‘It has started,’ cried Smith, who had seen no action; and as if in reply a spent, harmless round-shot hit the Bellona’s side. Smith gazed at his colleagues with a wild enthusiasm.
‘What is it, Mr Wetherby?’ asked Stephen, seeing the boy come in.
‘Captain’s compliments, sir, if you please, and Aboukir’s surgeon would be most grateful for a hand with his casualties. There is a cutter alongside, if you please to come with me.’
hesitation she wrote, ‘Dear Jack – may I beg for forgiveness? Oh how I hope you are a better-natured creature than I was. Love S.’ She sealed it, not without misgivings about its want of style, dignity, possibly of correctness, and ran back to the steps where everyone was already gazing at the fine dark-green coach with Diana on the box, Stephen beside her, Padeen up behind, and grooms holding the horses’ heads.
Sophie handed up the note; Stephen leaned down and kissed her. ‘Let go,’ cried Diana, gathering the reins. With the coach in motion Stephen looked back, and indeed his last sight of his daughter was a rain-washed but fairly cheerful face and a clean white handkerchief waving frantically.
They were silent for a while, with Diana addressing the horses from time to time, individually or as a team: they were Cleveland bays, well matched, usually well-mannered but now a trifle apt to caper, particularly in the village, where people called out greetings, sometimes running alongside to
send their duty and dear love and respects to the Captain, and some waving sheets or the like from upper windows. Presently however they were on the high road, climbing to the top of the down that overlooked Woolcombe valley, pulling well and all together just enough frost to whiten the grass – now on the road itself – and the horses’ breath a glorious cloud
‘How wonderfully smooth it is, this fine green machine,’ said Stephen.
‘Yes,’ said Diana ‘Handley’s made it, and they told me about the new kind of springs they put in long strips of the best Swedish steel overlapping and sliding upon one another and cased in leather, and fastened to the body by pivoting
• brass…’ When she had finished a pretty detailed account of the coach’s building, which she had followed with the closest interest, and of the innumerable coats of paint and then of varnish that had been laid on, together with the
history of her visit, guided by the invaluable Mr Thomas Handley, to the wheelwright’s shop, where among other wonders she saw the shrinking-on of a tyre, she said, ‘You would have loved it.’
‘We are to expect no more action, I collect?’ asked Stephen: he began filling a basket with instruments, bandages, pledgets, tourniquets, splints, laudanum.
‘Not at present, sir, I am afraid. The Frenchmen are running for home.’
It would have been temerity carried to a criminal pitch if the Frenchmen had not done so, when they were confronted with a resuscitated Aboukir, a largely intact Rarnillies, a thirty-eight-gun frigate, and now two perfectly fresh and untouched two-deckers, particularly as one of the French ships of the line had had seven ports beaten into one and several guns dismounted by the explosion. Yet it was disappointing. ‘Call that an action?’ asked Mr Meares, addressing his mates. ‘I call it a fart in a blind alley. A genteel fart in a blind alley, is what I call it. And after all our hurry and preparation – all hands day and night, then
cartridges filled without so much as a hot dinner, screens shipped, decks sanded and wetted and who for God’s sake needed any more water on a God-damned day like this?’
‘It was disappointing,’ said Jack, as Stephen joined him for what had to pass for breakfast.
‘But there was no help . .
‘Come, sir, if you please,’ said Killick, with a bucket of hot water, soap, towel, dressing-gown. He guided Stephen into the quarter-gallery, leaving him with the words, ‘You know the Captain can’t bear the sight of blood, and there you are soaked, fair soaked, from head to foot and what poor Grimble and I shall do to the floorcioth with all them nasty footprints, I don’t know. Now take off everything, sir, shirt, drawers, stockings and all and throw them into that there bucket. I will keep your coffee hot: his honour will not mind waiting.’
Neither Captain Aubrey nor Dr Maturin was an outstandingly meek or patient man, yet such was Killick’s total conviction, his moral superiority, that the one waited for his longed-for coffee without complaint and the other not only washed obediently but would have shown both hands, front and back, if required.
‘Yes, it was disappointing,’ said Jack. ‘But there was no help for it. The Frenchmen were hopelessly outnumbered, so of course as soon as they made out our full force and as soon as Aboukir had lifted they spread all the sail they could
– unhappily they lost no more than a mizen topmast between them in the action; and that don’t signify, since now they have a leading wind.’
‘They could not be pursued, with this same leading wind, I presume?’
‘Certainly they could be pursued, and by steady fire, yawing now and then for a broadside, we might well knock away a few spars and even conceivably take them, right up in the Goulet, before they reach their friends in the inner bay. But how do you propose to bring them out with the wind in the west, the powerful tide against us too, and the fog lifting with the sun so that we are exposed to the batteries?’
They heard a boat alongside reply ‘Ramillies’ to the sentinel’s hail and Jack hurried on deck to receive Captain Fanshawe. ‘Come and have a cup of coffee,’ he said, and brought him into the cabin. ‘You know Dr Maturin, I believe?’
‘Of course, of course: long since. How do you do, sir? And so you have real coffee? We have been down to grains of barley, roasted and ground, these many weeks. How I should love a single draught of right Arabian mocha. Heavens, Jack, you were a welcome sight, you and poor old Grampus, heaving up out of the murk. I had a horrible feeling it was more Frenchmen coming to join their friends – a rendezvous – and we were in a wretched posture to receive them, with Aboukir hard and fast. . . but, however, now the tables are turned, ha, ha ha – What glorious coffee – Turned as pretty as you could wish.’
‘Turned indeed: and the Doctor wants us to bring them out in triumph’
‘If we had some of those vessels that are said to sail against wind and tide, we might do so,’ said Fanshawe, looking affectionately at Stephen ‘But as we are only simple ships of the line I believe we must return to our dreary blockade,
sending word to the Admiral that Aboukir will probably have to go into Cawsand Bay.’
This they did, patching up the Aboukir as well as the assembled carpenters and sailmakers could manage, although eastwards they heard remote but quite unmistakable and heavy gunfire, borne on the still westerly breeze.
‘No,’ said Fanshawe, ‘our orders are to patrol the bay, which implies preventing the enemy from coming out or getting in and above all from joining forces. If you like I will send Naiad and your tender to see if either of them can find the flag and ask for orders, but that is as far as I can go. Our clear duty, as I see it, is to go up and down this vile bay until we are told to stop.’
‘You always was a pig-headed brute, Billy,’ said Jack; but this was a totally unofficial aside (they were alone in the cabin) and it was taken as such: in point of fact Captain Aubrey and all the rest continued to go up and down that vile bay, blockading the port of Brest and growing steadily hungrier – up and down until a little before two bells in the afternoon watch of Friday, a brisk topsail breeze at southwest, the weather clear, a moderate southern swell, when the Bellona’s masthead and every other masthead belonging to the inshore squadron reported a sail four points on the larboard bow. As they were then heading for St Matthews, the sail was clearly from Ushant: and since she was travelling fast, with a favourable breeze, further details came down at quite short intervals. ‘On deck, there: a three-decker, sir.’ ‘On deck, there: a brig and a ship in her wake – store-ship, I believe.’ ‘On deck there: the Charlotte, sir.’