Читать книгу Treason’s Harbour - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 9

Chapter Two

Malta was a gossiping place, and the news of Captain Aubrey’s liaison with Mrs Fielding soon spread through Valletta and even beyond, to the outlying villas where the more settled service people lived. Many officers envied Jack his good fortune, but not unkindly, and he sometimes caught knowing, conniving smiles and veiled congratulatory expressions that he could not make out, he being, in the natural course of events, one of the last to know what was said on these occasions. It would in any case have astonished him, since he had always regarded fellow-sailors’ wives as sacred: unless, that is to say, they threw out clear signals to the contrary effect.

He therefore experienced only the inconveniences of the situation – a certain disapproval on the part of a few officers, some wry looks and pursed lips on the part of some naval wives who knew Mrs Aubrey, and the ludicrous persecution that had given rise to the whole tale.

He and Dr Maturin, followed by Killick, were walking along the Strada Reale in the brilliant sunshine when his face clouded and he cried, ‘Stephen, pray step in here for a moment,’ urging his friend into the nearest shop, one kept by Moses Maimonides, a dealer in Murano glass. But it was too late. Jack had barely time to reach the farthest corner before Ponto was upon him, roaring with delight. Ponto was a clumsy great brute at the best of times and now that he wore cloth boots to protect his injured paws he was clumsier still; he scattered two ranges of bottles as he came bounding in, and as he stood there with his fore-paws on Jack’s shoulder, eagerly licking his face, his tail, waving from side to side, scattered chandeliers, sweetmeat jars, crystal bells.

It was a horrid scene, a scene repeated as often as three times a day on occasion, the only variety being the kind of shop, tavern, club or mess in which Jack took refuge, and it lasted long enough to do a great deal of damage. In decency Jack could not positively maim the dog, and nothing short of serious injury would answer, for Ponto was thick-witted as well as clumsy. Eventually Killick and Maimonides hauled him backwards into the street, and once there he proudly led Jack up to his mistress, giving an ungainly bound or two, and stepping high, reuniting them with an evident and very public approval that was observed and commented upon once again by a number of sea-officers, land-officers, civilians, and their wives.

‘I do hope he has not been a nuisance,’ said Mrs Fielding. ‘He saw you a hundred yards away, and nothing would stop him, but he must wish you good-day again. He is so grateful. And so am I,’ she added, with such an affectionate look that Jack wondered whether it were not perhaps one of these signals. He was the more inclined to think so since he had breakfasted on a pound or two of fresh sardines, which act as an aphrodisiac upon those of a sanguine complexion.

‘Not at all, ma’am,’ said he. ‘I am very happy to see you both once more.’ The voices of Killick and the glass-merchant behind him grew shriller and louder – on these occasions Killick paid for the breakage; but he paid not a Maltese grain, not a tenth of a penny too much, insisting upon seeing all the pieces and fitting them together, and then demanding wholesale rates – and he moved Mrs Fielding out of hearing. ‘Very happy to see you both,’ he repeated, ‘but just at this moment may I beg you to hold him in? I am expected at the dockyard, and to tell you the truth I have not a minute to lose. The Doctor here will be delighted to lend you a hand, I am sure.’

Expected he was, and not only by the cynical shipwrights labouring at enormous cost upon the worthless Worcester and by those who were not working at all upon the Surprise, which stood, deserted and gunless, perilously shored-up in a pool of stinking mud, but also by what was left of his ship’s company. He had started out from England in the Worcester with some six hundred men: on being temporarily transferred to the Surprise he picked two hundred of the best, and with these he had hoped to return to England to take one of the new heavy frigates out to the North American station as soon as this brief parenthesis in the Mediterranean was over. But the Mediterranean fleet was always short of seamen, while in this respect the admirals and senior captains were not so much short of scruples as totally devoid of them; and since the little battle-scarred frigate had gone into dock on her return from the Ionian her crew had dwindled sadly, hands being drafted away on one pretext or another with such naked greed that Jack had to fight hard to keep even his own bargemen and personal followers. The remaining Surprises were lodged in nasty wooden sheds, painted black; and these they made nastier still by instantly caulking all vents and filling the confined space with tobacco-smoke and the human fug they were used to between-decks. Since the ship was in the hands of the dockyard mateys they could devote much of their time to wasting their substance and destroying their health, and this they did in the company of a crowd of women who gathered at the gates, some of them seasoned old warhorses from the time of the Knights but many surprisingly young – squat, thick girls of a kind rarely seen anywhere but in the neighbourhood of naval or military barracks.

It was this thin crew, dissolute and frowzy, that was waiting for Jack when he had listened with what patience he could command to the lying excuses of those who should have been attending to the frigate and who were not doing so. The seamen were assembled as though for the usual inspection aboard, toeing lines chalked out to represent the seams of Surprise’s deck as accurately as possible, each division under its own officers and midshipmen. The frigate’s Marines had been returned to their barracks as soon as she was docked, so there were no redcoats, no ritual shouting and stamping and presenting arms as Captain Aubrey approached: only William Mowett, her present first lieutenant, who stepped forward, took off his hat and said, in the rather quiet, conversational, unmilitary voice of one afflicted with a severe headache, ‘All present and sober, sir, if you please.’

Sober perhaps, at least by naval standards, though some were swaying as they stood and most smelt strongly of the drink – sober perhaps, but unquestionably squalid, reflected Jack as he passed his shipmates in review: familiar faces, some of them known to him ever since his first command or even earlier, and nearly all looking more puffy, blotched, and generally unhealthy than ever before. In the Ionian the Surprise had taken a Frenchman with some chests of silver coin aboard, and rather than wait for the slow process of the prize-court Jack had ordered an immediate sharing-out. It was not strictly legal and it meant that he would be liable for the whole if the prize were not condemned; but it had a piratical directness that encouraged the crew far more than a larger sum in the remote, prudential future, as he knew with absolute certainty. Each man received the equivalent of a quarter’s pay, laid down in Maria Theresa dollars on the capstan-head, and at the time this had caused a great deal of quiet satisfaction; but the sum had evidently not lasted – no sum would ever have outlasted the hands’ appetite for fun ashore – and it was clear that some were already selling their clothes. Jack knew very well that if he were to give the order ‘On end bags’ it would be seen that instead of a well-found crew the Surprise had a pack of threadbare paupers with nothing but their holy shore-going rig (never worn at sea) and only just enough in the way of slops to protect them from the gentlest Mediterranean weather. He had done what he could to keep them occupied, but apart from small-arms exercise for all hands and chipping round-shot there was little they could be set to in the nautical line; and although cricket and expeditions to see the island where St Paul was wrecked, his ship being caught on a lee-shore with a nasty gregale blowing, did something, they could not really compete with the pleasures of the town. ‘Deboshed, improvident fish,’ he muttered, passing down the line with a stern and even righteous expression. And their officers were not much better, either: Mowett and Rowan, the other lieutenant, had both been to the Sappers’ ball, and they had evidently competed in drinking deep by land, just as they competed in versemanship by sea; and both were suffering from the effects. Adams the purser and the two master’s mates, Honey and Maitland, had been to the same party, and the same pall of liverish heaviness hung over them; while Gill, the master, looked ready to hang himself – this however was his usual expression. Indeed, the only cheerful, alert, creditable faces belonged to the frigate’s remaining youngsters, Williamson and Calamy – useless little creatures, but gay and, when they thought of it, attentive to their duty. Pullings, though present, did not count. He no longer belonged to the Surprise and he was attending only as a visitor, an interested spectator; and in any event his face could not be described as wholly cheerful. In spite of the conscious glory of his epaulettes, an accurate observer could make out an underlying loss and anxiety, as though Captain Pullings, a commander without a ship and with little likelihood of a ship, were beginning to realize that a hopeful journey was better than the arrival, that nothing could come up to expectation, and that there was a great deal to be said for old ways, old friends, and one’s old ship.

‘Very well, Mr Mowett,’ said Captain Aubrey when the inspection was over, and then to the general dismay, ‘All hands will now proceed to Gozo in the boats.’ And seeing Pullings looking somewhat disconsolate and lost, he added, ‘Captain Pullings, sir, if you are at leisure you would infinitely oblige me by taking command of the launch.’

‘This will claw some of the jam off their backs,’ he reflected with satisfaction as the boats rounded St Elmo Point and the barge, launch, gig, the two cutters and even the jolly-boat settled down to a long pull against the current and right into the moderate north-west breeze without the least hope of hoisting a sail until they reached Gozo, thirteen unlucky miles away. And even then, thought the seamen, the skipper, in his present sodomitical state of mind, might make them pull right round Gozo, Comino, Cominetto, and the rest of bleeding Malta itself: the bargemen, with their captain looking straight at them as he sat there in the stern-sheets between his coxswain and a youngster, could scarcely express their opinion of his conduct by anything more than a reserved, stony look; nor could the rowers in the other boats really do justice to their sentiments, particularly those seated right aft. But the boats were crowded, the oars were relieved every half hour, and even in the boats commanded by Pullings and the two lieutenants the hands managed to say, or at least utter, a good deal about Captain Aubrey, all of it disrespectful; while in the cutters and the jolly-boat, under the young gentlemen, it was downright mutinous, and Mr Calamy’s voice could be heard at intervals crying, ‘Silence fore and aft – silence, there – I shall report every man in the boat,’ his voice growing shriller at every repetition.

Yet in an hour or so much of the ill-humour was sweated out, and when they came into the smooth water under the lee of Comino they took a speronara in chase, pursuing it with cheers and a mad expenditure of useless energy right into Megiarro Bay and the port of Gozo; there they landed, gasping and exhausted, calling out traditional witticisms to the last boats to reach the shore; and when they heard that their captain had ordered them refreshments in the long vine-covered skittle-alley beside the beach they beamed on him with all their former kindness.

The officers walked up to Mocenigo’s, where they found others of their kind, come out to enjoy the glorious day or to visit friends on the island; there were some redcoats too, but in general the services kept apart, the soldiers on the side towards the fort and the sailors occupying the terraces that commanded the sea, with the naval captains gathering on the highest. Jack led Pullings up the steps and introduced him to Ball and Hanmer, post-captains, and to Meares, who was only a commander. A brilliant play upon this name occurred to Jack, but he did not give it voice: not long before this, on learning that an officer’s father was a Canon of Windsor he had flashed out a remark to the effect that no one could be more welcome aboard a ship that prided herself upon her artillery-practice than the son of a gun, only to find the officer receive it coldly, with no more than a pinched, obligatory smile.

‘We were talking about the confidential mission,’ said Ball, when they had sat down again and drinks were ordered.

‘What confidential mission?’ asked Jack.

‘Why, to the Red Sea, of course,’ said Ball.

‘Oh, that,’ said Jack. For some time there had been talk of an operation to be carried out in those uncomfortable waters, partly to diminish the influence of the French, partly to please the Grand Turk, who was at least the nominal ruler of the Arabian shore as far as the Bab el Mandeb and of the Egyptian as far as the dominions of the Negus, and partly to satisfy those English merchants who suffered from the exactions and ill-usage of the Tallal ibn Yahya, who ruled over the small island of Mubara and part of the mainland coast and whose ancestors had levied a toll on all ships that passed within reach and that were neither strong enough to resist nor swift enough to outsail their cumbrous dhows. The practice stopped well short of real piracy, however, and the old sheikh was regarded as a minor local nuisance, no more; but his son, a much more forceful character, had welcomed Buonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, and in Paris he was looked upon as a potentially valuable ally in the campaign that was to drive the English out of India and destroy their trade with the East. He had therefore been provided with some European vessels and with shipwrights who built him a small fleet of galleys; and although the Indian campaign now seemed tolerably remote Tallal was still used to embarrass the Turks whenever their policy became too favourable to England. His increasing influence made both the Sublime Porte and the East India Company most uneasy; furthermore in a recent fit of religious enthusiasm he had forcibly circumcised three English merchants, in retaliation for the forcible baptism of three of his ancestors – his family, the Beni Adi, had lived in Andalusia for seven hundred years, spending most of their time in Seville, where they were known and mentioned with guarded approval by Ibn Khaldun. Yet the merchants in question were not members of the Company but interlopers and three unlicensed foreskins scarcely merited a full-scale campaign: the general idea seemed to be that the Company would lend one of their country ships to the Turkish authorities in the Gulf of Suez, that the Royal Navy should man her, and that the English, in the character of technical advisers, should proceed to Mubara with a body of Turkish troops and a more suitable ruler of the same family and take the sheikh’s galleys away from him. The whole thing was to be done quietly, so as not to offend the Arab rulers farther south and in the Persian gulf – no less than three of Tallal’s wives were from those parts – and it was to be done suddenly, by surprise, so that there should be no resistance.

‘Lowestoffe is to be the man,’ said Ball, ‘and quite right too: he is used to dealing with Turks and Arabs, he is on the spot, and he has no ship. But Lord, to think of him sweating over the desert, ha, ha, ha! They are to walk across to Suez: oh Lord!’ He laughed again, and all the others grinned. Lord Lowestoffe was one of the best-liked men in the Navy, but he was short-legged and exceedingly fat – his red, round, jolly face perpetually shone – and the idea of his marching across a sandy waste under the African sun was irresistibly comic.

‘I feel for him,’ said Jack. ‘He complained of the heat even when we were in the Baltic. He would be much happier on the North American station, where I hope to be very soon. Poor Lowestoffe: I have not seen him this great while.’

‘He has been out of order,’ said Hanmer. ‘I do assure you he looked almost pale when he came to see me the other day, asking about the Red Sea, wanting to know about the winds, shoals, reefs and so on and writing it all down most conscientiously, wheezing like a bulldog, poor fellow.’

‘Are you a Red Sea pilot, sir?’ asked Pullings, speaking for the first time: he asked in all good faith, being interested in the subject, but his wound changed his civil smile into an offensively incredulous leer, and his nervous tone did little to contradict it.

‘I do not suppose my knowledge of those parts can compete with yours, sir,’ said Captain Hanmer. ‘Far from it, no doubt. Yet I do have a certain superficial acquaintance with them, and I did have the honour of leading the squadron all the way from Perim right up to Suez itself when we were turning the French out of the place in the year one.’ Hanmer was much given to strange romantic tales, but he happened to be keeping to the exact truth and this made him more sensitive to disbelief than usual.

‘Oh sir,’ cried Pullings, ‘I have never been there at all – the Indian Ocean, no more – but I have always heard tell that the navigation is uncommon difficult, the tides and currents up at the north end uncommon deceptive, and the heat almost uncommon hot, as one might say; and I should very much like to know more.’

Hanmer looked more attentively at Pullings’ face, saw the perfect candour beneath the wound, and said, ‘Well, sir, the navigation is uncommon difficult, to be sure, especially if you come in, as we had to come in, through the devilish eastern channel round Perim, which is only two miles wide and nowhere more than sixteen fathom deep in the fairway, with never a buoy, never a buoy from one end to the other; but that is nothing to the excessive hellfire heat, the excessive hellfire humid heat – perpetual God-damned sun, no refreshment in the breeze, tar dripping from the rigging, pitch bubbling from the seams, hands running mad, washing never dry. Meares here,’ – nodding towards his neighbour – ‘very nearly went out of his wits, and was obliged to be dipped in the sea twice an hour: dipped in an iron basket, because of the sharks.’ Hanmer gave Meares a thoughtful look, and reflecting that although he had been in a sad way he was still perfectly capable of detecting any deviation from the truth, continued his plain, factual account. Jack, listening with what attention he could spare from his tankard of iced lemonade heightened with marsala, heard of coral reefs running out as much as twenty miles on the east coast but keeping closer inshore in the northern waters, of the volcanic islands, the dangerous shoals in the latitude of Hodeida, the prevailing north and north-west winds in the hither regions, the sand-storms in the Gulf of Suez and the wind called the Egyptian. He was glad that Hanmer was not vapouring away about sea-serpents and phoenixes – in spite of years and years of practice Hanmer was still a most indifferent liar, and his want of skill was often embarrassing – but he was sorry to hear so much loose talk about what was meant to be kept quiet – Stephen had always preached a tomb-like discretion – and in any case he felt that Hanmer was going on far, far too long. He was now talking about the Red Sea sharks.

‘Most sharks are gammon,’ said Jack in one of the rare pauses. ‘They look fierce and throw out their chests, but it is all my eye and Betty Martin, you know, all cry and no wool. I dived plump on to an enormous hammerhead off the Morocco coast – just south of the Timgad shoal, to be exact – and all he did was to ask my pardon and hurry away. Most sharks are gammon.’

‘Not in the Red Sea they ain’t,’ said Hanmer. ‘I had a ship’s boy called Thwaites, a little stunted fellow from the Marine Society, and he was sitting in the lee mainchains, trying to keep cool by trailing his feet in the water: the ship heeled a strake or two with a puff of wind and a shark had his legs off at the knee before you could say knife.’

This struck a chord in the mind of Captain Ball, whose attention had wandered long ago. ‘I am going to have such a fish for dinner,’ he cried. ‘They showed him to me when I arrived – a lupo. Very like a bass, but more so. Aubrey, you and Captain Pullings must share him; he is quite big enough for three.’

‘You are very good, Ball, and indeed there is nothing like a lupo,’ said Jack, ‘but for my part I must hurry away. I am going to wait on Admiral Hartley, and it will be strange if he don’t make me stay to dinner.’

Captain Hartley, as he was then, was not perhaps the most estimable of naval characters, but he had been kind to Jack as a midshipman, and he had particularly mentioned his name, with strong commendation, in his dispatch when the Fortitude’s boats cut out a Spanish corvette from under the guns of San Felipe. He had also been one of the examining captains on that dread Wednesday when Mr Midshipman Aubrey presented himself together with many others at Somerset House, furnished with a paper falsely certifying that he was nineteen years of age, and with others from his various captains stating with perfect truth that he had served the requisite six years at sea and that he could hand, reef and steer, work his tides and take double altitudes; and it was Captain Hartley who spoke up when Jack, already so flustered by a malignant hungry ill-tempered mathematical captain that he could hardly tell latitude from longitude, was brought up all standing by the sudden, unfair, and totally unexpected question ‘How does it come about that Captain Douglas disrated you, turned you out of the midshipmen’s berth and sent you forward to serve as a common foremast-hand when you was in Resolution at the Cape?’ Jack was horribly puzzled to find an answer that should make him seem reasonably innocent while at the same time it did not reflect upon his then commanding officer; he called upon his intelligence (for his usual candour did not seem appropriate on this occasion) and upon all the subtlety he possessed, but he called in vain, and he was infinitely relieved to hear Captain Hartley say, ‘Oh, it was only a question of a girl hidden in the cable-tier, nothing to do with his seamanship at all: Douglas told me when I took him on to my own quarterdeck. Now, Mr Aubrey, let us suppose you are in command of a transport: she is in ballast, light and crank, heading south under topgallantsails, the breeze due west, and a sudden squall lays her on her beam-ends. How do you deal with the situation without cutting away her masts?’

Mr Aubrey dealt with the situation by veering away a good scope of hawser, made fast to water-stops such as spars and hen-coops, from the lee quarter and then hauling upon it until the ship wore, with a last hearty heave by all hands to bring the wind on to what had been her lee quarter, when she must infallibly right herself and save her hawser too.

A little later he left the Navy Office with a beaming face and another certificate, a beautiful paper that said he had been found fit to serve as a lieutenant; and it was in this rank that he shipped with Captain Hartley during a commission in the West Indies, a commission cut short by the captain’s elevation to flag-rank. Although Hartley was not a popular man in the service, being an odd combination of profligacy and avarice – the mistresses he sailed with were of the cheapest kind, and they were turned off in foreign ports with no great regard for their convenience, while his rare dinners were sad, shabby affairs – they got along quite well together, partly because they were used to one another, partly because they were both keenly interested in gunnery, and partly because Jack pulled Hartley out of the water when his gig overturned off St Kitts. Jack was a powerful swimmer and he had saved a surprising number of sailors: those few who had had time to realize how disagreeable it was to drown and how much the world they were leaving still had to offer were sometimes touchingly grateful: but most were so taken up with gasping and calling out and suffocating, sinking and rising, that they had no leisure for reflection; and those who, like Captain Hartley, were snatched directly from the sea would often maintain that they could have managed perfectly well by themselves – meaning, it is to be presumed, that they would suddenly have learnt how to swim or to walk upon the water. Yet however grudging their reactions might be, Jack nearly always retained a private fondness for those he had rescued, even the most bitterly ungrateful; and Hartley was by no means one of these.

Jack was thinking of him quite affectionately as he walked inland along the white, dusty road among the olive-trees: they had not met for many years, although Jack had quite often been able to carry barrels of wine and crates of books and furniture for him, dropping them at the nearest port, nor had Jack seen his house in Gozo; but he had a clear picture of the Admiral in his mind’s eye, and he looked forward to their meeting. It was an unfrequented road: one ox-cart, one ass, one peasant in the last half hour. Unfrequented by men, that is to say; but in the olive-trees on either hand the cicadas kept up a metallic strident din, sometimes rising to such a pitch that conversation would have been difficult had he not been alone; and once he left the small fields and the groves, walking over stony, goat-grazing country, the highway was very much used by reptiles. Small dun lizards flickered in the scorched grass at the edge and big green ones as long as his forearm scuttled away at his approach, while occasional serpents brought him up all standing: he had an ignorant, superstitious horror of snakes. On a walk of this kind in the Mediterranean islands he usually saw tortoises, which he did not dislike at all – far from it – but they seemed rare on Gozo, and it was not until he had been going for some time that he heard a curious tock-tock-tock and he saw a small one running, positively running across the road, perched high on its legs; it was being pursued by a larger tortoise, who, catching it up, butted it three times in quick succession: it was the clap of the shells that produced the tock-tock-tock. ‘Tyranny,’ said Jack, meaning to intervene: but either the last blows had subdued the smaller tortoise – a female – or she felt that she had shown all the reluctance that was called for; in any case she stopped. The male covered her, and maintaining himself precariously on her domed back with his ancient folded leathery legs he raised his face to the sun, stretched up his neck, opened his mouth wide and uttered the strangest dying cry.

‘Bless me,’ said Jack, ‘I had no notion … how I wish Stephen were here.’ Unwilling to disturb them, he fetched a cast quite round the pair and walked on, trying to recall some lines of Shakespeare that had to do not exactly with tortoises but with wrens until he reached a wayside shrine dedicated to St Sebastian, the martyr’s blood recently renewed with startling brilliance and profusion. Beyond the shrine there was a high stone wall, partly fallen, with an ornate wrought-iron gate, once gilded, leaning unhinged against the masonry. ‘This must be it,’ he said, calling his directions to mind.

‘But perhaps I am mistaken,’ he said some minutes later. The drive, the arid sort of park or rather enclosed scrubland on either side and the gaunt yellow house in sight ahead were unlike anything he could remotely connect with the Navy. He had seen the same kind of nonchalance in Ireland – the overgrown paths, the shutters hanging half off their hinges, the broken window-panes – but in Ireland it had usually been veiled by gentle rain, and softened by moss. Here the sun beat down from a cloudless wind-swept sky; there was nothing green apart from a few dusty holm-oaks, and the sawing of the countless cicadas made it all harsher still, harsher by far. ‘That fellow will tell me,’ he observed.

The gaunt yellow house was built around a court; an arched gateway led into it, and against the left-hand pillar leant a man, half-groom, half-peasant, picking his nose. ‘Pray does Admiral Hartley live here?’ asked Jack.

The man did not answer, but gave him a sly, knowing look and slipped inside the door. Jack heard him speaking to a woman: it was Italian, not Maltese, that they were talking, and he caught the words ‘officer – pension – take care’. He was conscious of being looked at through a small window, and presently the woman came out, a hard-faced slattern in a dirty white dress. She had assumed a genteel expression, and in quite good English she said, ‘Yes, this was the Admiral’s palace – was the gentleman come on official business?’ Jack explained that he was there as a friend, and he was surprised to see disbelief in her small, close-set eyes: she retained her smile however and asked him to walk in; she would tell the Admiral he was there. He was led up dim stairs and shown into a splendid room: splendid, that is to say, in its proportions, its pale green marble floor with white bands, its lofty carved plaster ceiling, and its chimney-piece, which enclosed a hearth larger than many of the cabins Lieutenant Aubrey had lived in; less so in its furniture, which amounted to a couple of upright chairs with leather seats and backs, looking lost in all that light-filled space, and a little round table. There seemed to be nothing else at all, but when Jack, having reached the middle window in a noble flight of seven, turned towards the fireplace he found himself looking straight at the likeness of his former captain at the age of thirty-five or forty, a brilliant portrait, wonderfully fresh and clear. He contemplated it, standing there with his hands behind his back; and the minutes dropped by in the silence. He did not know the artist: it was not Beechey, nor Lawrence, nor Abbott, nor any of the usual painters of the Navy; probably not an Englishman at all. But a very able fellow in any case: he had caught Hartley’s strong, masterful, dominating air exactly, and his energy; but, reflected Jack after a long communing with the portrait, he had certainly not liked his sitter. There was a cold hardness in that painted face, and although the portrait was truthful enough in its way it took no account of Hartley’s good nature – rarely expressed, to be sure, but real enough upon occasion. The picture was not unlike a statement made by an enemy: and Jack remembered how a brother-officer had said that even Hartley’s undoubted courage had a grasping quality about it, that he attacked the enemy in a state of furious indignation and personal hatred, as though the other side were trying to do him out of some advantage – prize-money, praise, employment.

He was reflecting upon this and upon the true function of painting when the door opened and a very cruel caricature of the portrait walked in. Admiral Hartley was wearing an old yellow dressing-gown, its front stained with snuff, loose pantaloons, and down-at-heel shoes by way of slippers; the bones of his nose and jaw had grown and his face was much bigger; it had lost its fierce distinction, its authority, and of course its weather-beaten tan; it was ugly and even ludicrous; and its large clay-pale surface now expressed no more than a settled commonplace sour discontent. He looked at Jack with an inhuman absence of interest or pleasure and asked him why he had come. Jack said that being in Gozo he thought he would pay his respects to his former captain and ask whether he had any commands for Valletta. The Admiral made no clear reply and they stood there with Jack’s voice echoing in the empty room as he spoke of the weather for the last few days, the changes in Valletta, and his hopes of a breeze for tomorrow.

‘Well, sit down for a minute,’ said Admiral Hartley: and then, making an effort, he asked whether Aubrey had a ship at present. But without waiting for a reply he said, ‘What’s o’clock? It is time for my goat’s milk. Always late, these buggers. It is essential that I should have my goat’s milk regular,’ and he looked eagerly at the door.

‘I hope you keep well, sir, in this climate?’ said Jack. ‘It is reckoned very healthy, I believe.’

‘There ain’t no such thing as health when you’re old,’ said the Admiral. ‘Health to what end?’

The milk came in, brought by a man-servant remarkably like the woman Jack had seen, apart from the blue-black stubble of a five-days beard. ‘Where is the signora?’ asked Hartley. ‘Coming,’ said the servant; and indeed she appeared in the doorway as he left, carrying a tray with a wine-bottle and some biscuits and a glass upon it: she had changed her dirty white dress for another, perceptibly cleaner and cut remarkably low. Jack saw Hartley’s dead face come to life: yet in spite of his animation his first words were a protest – ‘Aubrey don’t want wine at this time of day.’

Before anything could be decided on this point a bawling broke out in the courtyard and the Admiral and the woman hurried over to look out. He fondled her bosom, but she brushed him off and began shouting through the window in a flawed metallic voice that must have carried a mile and a half. This went on for some time. Jack had not much more penetration than the next man yet it was perfectly evident to him that Hartley had fallen unlucky; but that mixed with his obvious lechery there was what might be called love or infatuation or at any rate a strong attachment.

‘A splendid temperament,’ said the Admiral when she had run out of the room to carry on the argument at close quarters. ‘You can always tell a fine spirited girl by the jut of her bum.’ There was a slight flush on his face and in a much more human tone he said, ‘Pour yourself a glass of wine and then one for me – I’ll hob and nob with you. They don’t let me drink anything but milk, you know.’ A pause in which he took snuff from a screw of paper, and he said, ‘I go over to Valletta now and then to see about my half-pay; I was there not a fortnight ago and Brocas mentioned your name. Yes, yes: I remember perfectly well. He talked about you. It seems you still have not learnt to keep your breeches on. So much the better. Play the man while you still can, I always say. I wish I had not lost so many opportunities in the past; I could weep blood when I think of some of them – splendid women. Play the man while you can; you are a gelding long enough in your grave. And some of us are geldings before we get there,’ he added, with something between a laugh and a sob.

As Jack walked back towards the sea the heat was greater, the glare of the white road more blinding, and the harsh clamour of the cicadas louder still. He had rarely been so sad. The black thoughts flooded in, one upon another: Admiral Hartley, of course; and the perpetual rushing passage of time; inevitable decay; the most unimaginable evil of impotence … Instinctively he jerked back as something shot past his face like a block hurtling from high aloft in action: it struck the stony ground just in front of his feet and burst apart – a tortoise, probably one of the amorous reptiles of a little while ago, since this was the very place. And looking up he saw the huge dark bird that had dropped it: the bird looked down at him, circling, circling as it stared. ‘Good Lord above,’ he said. ‘Good Lord above…’ And after a moment’s consideration, ‘How I wish Stephen had been here.’

Stephen Maturin was in fact sitting on a bench in the abbey church of St Simon’s, listening to the monks singing vespers. He too was dinnerless, but in this case it was voluntary and prudential, a penance for lusting after Laura Fielding and (he hoped) a means of reducing his concupiscence: to begin with his pagan stomach had cried out against this treatment, and indeed it had gone on grumbling until the end of the first antiphon. Yet for some time now Stephen had been in what might almost have been called a state of grace, stomach, break-back bench, carnal desire all forgotten, he being wafted along on the rise and fall of the ancient, intimately familiar plainchant.

During their stay in Valletta the French had been more than usually unkind to the monastery: not only had they taken away all its treasure and sold off its cloister but they had wantonly broken the armorial stained-glass windows (which had been replaced with cane matting) and had stripped the walls of the exceptionally fine marble, lapis lazuli and malachite that covered them. Yet this was not without its advantages. The acoustics were much improved, and as they stood there among the dim, bare stone or brick arches the choir-monks might have been chanting in a far older church, a church more suited to their singing than the florid Renaissance building the French had found. Their abbot was a very aged man; he had known the last three Grand Masters, he had seen the coming of the French and then of the English, and now his frail but true old voice drifted through the half-ruined aisles pure, impersonal, quite detached from worldly things; and his monks followed him, their song rising and falling like the swell of a gentle sea.

There were few people in the church and those few could hardly be seen except when they moved past the candles in the side-chapels, most of them being women, whose black, tent-like faldettas merged with the shadows; but when at the end of the service Stephen turned by the holy-water stoup near the door to pay his respects to the altar, he noticed a man sitting near one of the pillars, dabbing his eyes with his handkerchief. His face was lit by a shaft of light from a small high opening on to the secularized cloister, and as he turned Stephen recognized Andrew Wray.

The doorway was filled with very slowly moving, eagerly talking women, and Stephen was obliged to stand there. Wray’s presence surprised him: the penal laws were not what they had been, but even so the acting Second Secretary of the Admiralty could not possibly be a Catholic; and although Stephen had caught sight of Wray at concerts in London from time to time it had never occurred to him that love of music rather than of fashionable company might have brought him. Yet the Secretary’s emotion was genuine enough; even when he had composed himself and was walking towards the door his face was grave and deeply moved. The women heaved the leather curtain to one side, the door opened, letting them out and a beam of sunlight in. Wray took no notice of the holy water, nor of the altar – a further proof that he was no Papist. He glanced at Stephen. His expression changed to one of urbane civility and he said, ‘Dr Maturin, is it not? How do you do, sir? My name is Wray. We met at Lady Jersey’s, and I have the honour of being acquainted with Mrs Maturin. I saw her, indeed, a little before I sailed.’

They talked for a while, blinking in the brilliant sun and speaking of Diana – very well, when seen at the Opera in the Columptons’ box – and of common acquaintances, and then Wray suggested a pot of chocolate in an elegant pastry-cook’s on the other side of the square.

‘I go to St Simon’s as often as I can,’ he said as they sat down at a green table in the arbour behind the shop. ‘Do you take a delight in plainchant, sir?’

‘I do indeed, sir,’ said Stephen, ‘provided it be devoid of sweetness or brilliancy or striving for effect, and exactly phrased – no grace-notes, no passing-notes, no showing away.’

‘Exactly so,’ cried Wray, ‘and no new-fangled melismata either. Angelic simplicity – that is the heart of the matter. And these worthy monks have the secret of it.’

They talked about modes, agreeing that in general they preferred the Ambrosian to the plagal, and Wray said, ‘I was at one of their Masses the other day, when they sang the Mixolydian Agnus; and I must confess that the old gentleman’s dona nobis pacem moved me almost to tears.’

‘Peace,’ said Stephen. ‘Shall we ever see it again, in our time?’

‘I doubt it, with the Emperor in his present form.’

‘It is true that I am just come from a church,’ said Stephen, ‘but even so I could wish to see that tyrant Buonaparte doubly damned to all eternity and back, the dog.’

Wray laughed and said, ‘I remember a Frenchman who acknowledged all sorts of very grave faults in Buonaparte, including tyranny, as you so rightly say, and even worse a total ignorance of French grammar, usage and manners, but who nevertheless supported him with all his might. His argument was this: the arts alone distinguish men from the brutes and make life almost bearable – the arts flourish only in time of peace – universal rule is a prerequisite for universal peace – and here as I recall he quoted Gibbon on the happiness of living in the age of the Antonines, concluding that in effect the absolute Roman emperor, even Marcus Aurelius, was a tyrant, if only in posse, but that the pax romana was worth the potential exercise of this tyranny. As my Frenchman saw it, Napoleon was the only man or rather demi-god capable of imposing a universal empire, so on humanitarian and artistic grounds he fought in the Garde impériale.’

A host of very passionate objections rose in Stephen’s bosom; but he had long since ceased opening himself to any but intimate friends and now he only smiled, saying ‘Sure, it is a point of view.’

‘But in any event,’ said Wray, ‘it is clearly our duty to hamstring the universal empire, if I may use the expression. For my own part’ – lowering his voice and leaning over the table – ‘I have a somewhat delicate task in hand at present, and I should be grateful for your advice – the Admiral said I might apply to you. As soon as he comes in there will be a general meeting, and perhaps you would be so good as to attend.’

Stephen said that he was entirely at Mr Wray’s service: a number of clocks striking near at hand and far reminded him that he was already late for his appointment with Laura Fielding, and springing up he took his leave.

Wray watched Stephen hurry across the square and disappear down the busy street; then he returned to the church, quite empty at this hour, looked at the arrangement of the candles in the chapel dedicated to Saint Rocco and walked round to the south aisle, where a small door, usually locked but now only latched, let him into the secularized cloister. It was filled with barrels of one kind and another, and a passage in the far corner led to a warehouse, also filled with barrels: among them stood Lesueur with a pen and a book in his hand and an inkhorn in his buttonhole.

‘You have been a very long time, Mr Wray,’ he said. ‘It is a wonder the candles had not gone out.’

‘Yes. I was talking to a man I met in the church.’

‘So I am told. And what did you have to say to Dr Maturin?’

‘We were talking about plainchant. Why do you ask?’

‘You know he is an agent?’

‘Working for whom?’

‘For you, of course. For the Admiralty.’

‘I have heard of his being consulted: I know that reports have been submitted to him because of his knowledge of the political position in Catalonia, and that he has advised the Admiral’s secretary on Spanish affairs. But as for his being an agent … no, I should certainly never think of him as an agent. His name does not appear in the list of orders for payment.’

‘You do not know that he is the man who killed Dubreuil and Pontet-Canet in Boston and who almost wiped out Joliot’s organization through false information planted in the ministry of war – the man who ruined our cooperation with the Americans?’

‘Not I, by God,’ cried Wray.

‘Then it is clear that Sir Blaine has not been open with you. It may be his native cunning or it may be that someone, somewhere, has smelt a rat: you must look to your lines of communication, my friend.’

‘I have the lists of payments almost by heart,’ said Wray, ‘and I can absolutely assert that Maturin’s name is not on any of them.’

‘I am sure you are right,’ said Lesueur. ‘He is an idealist, like you, and that is what makes him so dangerous. However, it is just as well that you did not know; you would never have been able to talk to him so naturally. If any rats have been smelt, and if he knows about it, he is likely to dismiss them. Have you spoken to him about your mission?’

‘I made a general reference to it, and desired him to attend the meeting when the Commander-in-Chief arrives.’

‘Very good. But you would be well advised to keep your distance: treat him as a political consultant, an expert witness, no more. Apart from the ordinary surveillance, I have an agent working on him. He certainly has a private network of informants, some of them in France, and the name of even one might lead us to the rest and so to Paris … But he is a difficult, coriaceous animal and if this agent does not succeed quite soon, success is improbable, and I shall have to ask you to find some plausible manner of putting him out of the way, without compromising my position here.’

‘I see,’ said Wray. He considered for a while and then observed, ‘That can be arranged. If nothing else offers before, the Dey of Mascara will certainly deal with the situation. Indeed,’ he added after a moment’s reflection, ‘I believe the Dey can be used to the greatest advantage. He can be used to kill two birds with one stone, as we say.’

Lesueur looked at him thoughtfully, and after a pause said, ‘Pray count the barrels on your side of the pillar. I cannot see them all from here.’

‘Twenty-eight,’ said Wray.

‘Thank you.’ Lesueur noted it down in his book. ‘I get seven francs fifty back on each, which is appreciable.’

While he multiplied these figures to his own satisfaction Wray was visibly formulating his next words. When they came they had the awkward lack of spontaneity of a prepared speech and something more of righteous indignation than the occasion warranted. ‘You spoke of my being an idealist just now,’ he said, ‘and so I am. No sum could purchase my support: no sum did purchase my support. But I cannot live on ideals alone. Until my wife inherits I have only a very limited income, and while I am here I am forced to keep up my position. Sir Hildebrand and all those who can make a good thing out of the dockyard and the victualling play for very high stakes, and I am obliged to follow suit.’

‘You drew a large addition to your usual … grant-in-aid before leaving London,’ said Lesueur. ‘You cannot expect the rue Villars to pay your gambling debts.’

‘I certainly can when they are incurred for a reason of this kind,’ said Wray.

‘I will put it to my chief,’ said Lesueur, ‘but I can promise nothing. Yet surely,’ he said with a burst of impatience, ‘surely you can win these men’s confidence without playing high? It seems to me very poor practice.’

‘With these men it is essential,’ said Wray doggedly.