Читать книгу Desolation Island - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 8
ОглавлениеWhen his post-chaise reached the outskirts of Petersfield, Stephen Maturin opened his bag and drew out a square bottle: he looked at it with an anxious longing, but reflecting that in spite of his present craving, by his own rules the crisis itself was to be faced without allies of any kind, he lowered the glass and flung it out of the window.
The bottle struck a stone rather than the grassy bank, exploding like a small grenade and covering the road with tincture of laudanum: the post-boy turned at the sound, but meeting his passenger’s pale eyes, fixed upon him in a cold, inimical stare, he feigned interest in a passing tilbury, calling out to its driver ‘that the knacker’s yard was only a quarter of a mile along the road, first turning on the left, if he wanted to get rid of his cattle’. At Godalming, however, where the horses were changed, he told his colleague to look out for the cove in the shay: a rum cove that might have a fit on you, or throw up quantities of blood, like the gent at Kingston; and then who would have to clean up the mess? The new post-boy said in that case he would certainly keep an eye on the party; no move should escape him. Yet as they drove along it came to the post-boy that all the vigilance in the world could not prevent the gentleman from throwing up quantities of blood, if so inclined; and he was pleased when Stephen bade him stop at an apothecary’s shop in Guildford – the gentleman was no doubt laying in some physic that would set him up for the rest of the journey.
In fact the gentleman and the apothecary were searching the shelves for a jar with a neck wide enough to admit the hands that Stephen carried in his handkerchief: it was found at last, filled, and topped up with the best rectified spirits of wine; and then Stephen said, ‘While I am here, I might as well take a pint of the alcoholic tincture of laudanum.’ This bottle he slipped into his greatcoat pocket, carrying the jar naked back to the chaise, so that all the post-boy saw was the grey hands with their bluish nails, brilliantly clear in the fine new spirits. He mounted without a word, and his emotion communicating itself to the horses, they flew along the London Road, through Ripley and Kingston, across Putney Heath, through the Vauxhall turnpike, across London Bridge and so to an inn called the Grapes in the liberty of the Savoy, where Stephen always kept a room, at such a pace that the landlady cried out, ‘Oh, Doctor, I never looked for you this hour and more. Your supper is not even put down to the fire! Will you take a bowl of soup, sir, to stay you after your journey? A nice bowl of soup, and then the veal the moment it is enough?’
‘No, Mrs Broad,’ said Stephen. ‘I shall just shift my clothes, and then I must go out again. Lucy, my dear, be so good as to take the small little bag upstairs: I shall carry the jar. Post-boy, here is for your trouble.’
The Grapes were used to Dr Maturin and his ways: one more jar was neither here nor there – indeed it was rather welcome than not, a hanged man’s thumb being one of the luckiest things a house can hold, ten times luckier than the rope itself; and in this case there were two of them. The jar, then, caused no surprise; but Stephen’s reappearance in a fashionable bottle-green coat and powdered hair left them speechless. They looked at him shyly, staring, yet not wishing to stare: he was perfectly unconscious of their gaze, however, and stepped into his hackney-coach without a word.
‘You would not say he was the same gentleman,’ said Mrs Broad.
‘Perhaps he is going to a wedding,’ said Lucy, clutching her bosom. ‘One of them weddings by licence, in a drawing-room.’
‘No doubt there is a lady in the case,’ said Mrs Broad. ‘Who ever saw such a dusty gentleman come out so fine, without there was a lady in the case? Still, I wish I had taken the price-ticket off his cravat. But I did not dare: no, not even after all these years.’
Stephen told the man to set him down in the Hay-market, saying he would walk the rest of the way. He had in fact the best part of an hour to spare, so he walked slowly through St James’s market in the general direction of Hyde Park Corner and took half a dozen turns round St James’s Square. At this end of the town his clothes excited no attention, except from the women who shared the streets with him, a great number of them, in arcades, shop doorways, and porticoes, some of them fierce, angry, scornful creatures with their bosoms laid out, the caterers to special tastes, others so young – mere slips – that it was a wonder they should find customers, even in so huge a city. One assured him she would give him a good breakfast, with sausages, if he came with her; and although he civilly declined her offer on the grounds that he was going to see his sweetheart, the idea of food so spurred his mind that he walked into one of the alleys haunted by footmen behind St James’s Street and bought a mutton-pie off an old lady with a glowing brazier, to eat in his hand as he walked. He moved on, carrying it, until he reached Almack’s, where they were giving a ball: here he paused in the little crowd that was watching the carriages arrive. He took a bite or two, but his appetite, a purely theoretical appetite, was gone. He offered the pie to a tall black dog that belonged to a neighbouring club and that was watching by his side: the dog sniffed it, looked up into his face with an embarrassed air, licked its lips, and turned away. A dwarfish boy said, ‘I’ll eat it for you, governor, if you like.’
‘May it profit you,’ said Stephen, walking off. Through to the Green Park, an expanse lit faintly by the horned moon in which couples could vaguely be seen, and single, waiting figures among the nearer trees. Stephen was not ordinarily a timid man, but the park had seen many murders recently, and tonight he had a greater value for his life than usual: in fact his heart, though admonished and kept down by experience on the one side and prudence (or superstition) on the other, was beating like a boy’s. He cut up to Piccadilly and walked down the hill to Clarges Street.
Number seven was a large house let out in apartments, with a porter common to them all; so when he knocked at the door it opened. ‘Is Mrs Villiers at home?’ he asked in a harsh, formal tone that betrayed the most eager expectation.
‘Mrs Villiers? No, sir. She don’t live here any more,’ said the porter in an absolute, decided, rejecting voice; and he made as though to close the door.
‘In that case,’ said Stephen, walking quickly in, ‘I wish to see the lady of the house.’
The lady of the house was very willing to see him – she had indeed been hovering behind a curtained glass door in the hall, peering through – but she was by no means so inclined to give him any information. She knew nothing about it: such a thing had never happened in her house before: no such person as a Bow Street officer had ever crossed its threshold. She had always taken the greatest pains to ensure that all the inmates of the house were above suspicion, and she had never countenanced the least irregularity. The whole neighbourhood, the whole congregation of St James’s, all the tradesmen, could testify that Mrs Moon had never allowed the least irregularity. In the following discourse, which dealt with the difficulties of maintaining the highest reputation, it seemed that there was some question of unpaid bills: Stephen said that any inadvertence in this respect would be remedied directly, and that he would take it upon himself to look into any unsettled account. He was Mrs Villiers’ medical adviser – naming himself – and the medical adviser to several members of her family: he was perfectly authorized to do so.
‘Dr Maturin!’ cried Mrs Moon. ‘There is a letter for a gentlemen of that name. I will fetch it.’ She brought a single sheet, folded, sealed, and addressed in that well-known hand, together with a number of bills from her desk, tied in a roll with a piece of ribbon. Stephen put the letter into his pocket and looked at the accounts: he had never suspected Diana of moderation, had never supposed that she would live within her income nor within any other income, but even so some of the items startled him.
‘Ass’s milk,’ he said. ‘Mrs Villiers is not in a consumption, ma’am; and even if she were, which God forbid, here is more ass’s milk than a regiment could drink in a month.’
‘It is not for drinking, sir,’ said Mrs Moon. ‘Some ladies like it to bathe in, for their complexions: not that I ever saw a lady less in need of ass’s milk than Mrs Villiers.’
‘Well, now, ma’am,’ said Stephen after a while, writing down the sums and drawing a line under them, ‘perhaps you will be so good as to give me a brief account of how Mrs Villiers came to leave so abruptly; for the apartments, I know, were taken until Michaelmas.’
Mrs Moon’s account was neither brief nor particularly coherent, but it appeared that a gentleman, accompanied by several strong-looking attendants, had asked for Mrs Villiers; on being told that she could not receive a gentleman unknown to her, he had walked upstairs, ordering the porter to stay where he was in the name of the law – the attendants produced truncheons with little crowns on them, and no one dared move. She would never have known they were Bow Street runners, but for some of them guarding the back door and coming into the kitchen: they had told the servants what they were, and they said the gentleman was a messenger from the Secretary of State’s office, or something like that – something in the government line. High words were heard upstairs, and presently the gentleman and two of the runners led Mrs Villiers and her French waiting-woman down and into a coach; they were very polite, but firm, and they desired Mrs Villiers not to speak to Mrs Moon or anyone else; and they locked her door behind them. Then the gentleman came back with two clerks, and they took away a quantity of papers.
Nobody could tell what to make of it, and then on the Thursday Madam Gratipus, the waiting-woman, suddenly came back and packed up their things. She spoke no English, but Mrs Moon thought she could make out something about America. Most unfortunately Mrs Moon was not at home later that afternoon, when Mrs Villiers came in with a gentleman she called Mr Johnson, an American gentleman, by his old-fashioned, twangling way of speaking through his nose, though very well dressed. It seemed that she was uncommonly cheerful, laughed a great deal, gave a turn about her apartments to see that everything was packed, took a dish of tea, tipped the servants handsomely, left this note for Dr Maturin, and so stepped into a coach and four, never to be seen again. Had said nothing of her destination, and the servants did not like to ask, she being such a high lady and apt to fly out at the least impertinence or liberty, though otherwise esteemed by all – a most open-handed lady.
Stephen thanked her and gave her a draft for the total sum, observing that he never carried so considerable an amount in gold.
‘No, indeed,’ said Mrs Moon. ‘That would be the height of imprudence. Not three days since, and in this very street, a gentleman was robbed of fourteen pounds and his watch, not long after sunset. Shall William call a chair for you, sir, or a coach? It is as black as pitch outside.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Stephen, whose mind was far away.
‘Should you not like a coach, sir? It is as black as pitch outside.’
It was also as black as pitch inside: he knew that the letter in his pocket contained farewells, his dismission, and the ruin of his hopes. ‘I believe not,’ he said, ‘I have only a few steps to go.’
These steps took him to a coffee-house on the corner of Bolton Street; a very few steps, as he had said. Yet what a quantity of thoughts formed in his mind before he pushed the door, sat down, and called for coffee: thoughts, ideas, recollections forming infinitely faster than the words that could, however inadequately, have expressed them and tracing the history of his long connection with Diana Villiers, a relationship made up of a wide variety of miseries interspersed with rare intervals of shining happiness, but one that he had hoped, until tonight, to bring to a successful end. Yet just as his mind had been too cautious to admit full confidence in his success, so now it was unwilling to see the proof of total failure. He placed the letter on the table and stared at it a while: until it was opened, the letter might still contain a rendezvous; it might still be a letter that fulfilled his hopes.
Eventually he broke the seal. ‘Maturin – I am using you abominably once again, although this time it is not altogether my fault. A most unfortunate thing has happened that I am not at leisure to explain; but it appears that a friend of mine has behaved most indiscreetly. So much so, that I have been molested by a gang of wretches, of thief-takers, who searched all my few belongings and my papers, and questioned me for hours on end. What crime I am supposed to have committed, I cannot tell; but now that I am at liberty, I am determined to return to America at once. Mr Johnson is here, and he has seen to the arrangements. I was too hasty in my resentment, I see; I should never have flown back to England like a simple passionate headstrong girl – these legal matters – and they are going better – call for patience and deliberation. I shall not see you again, Stephen. Forgive me, but it would not answer. Think of me kindly, for your friendship is very dear to me. DV.’
In a brief flare of rebellion, anger and frustration he thought of his enormous expense of spirit these last few weeks, of the mounting hope that he had indulged and fostered in spite of his judgement and of their frequently violent disagreements; but the flame died, leaving not so much an active sorrow as a black and wordless desolation.
When he was walking down the street to the coffee-house, his eye, long accustomed to such things, had automatically taken notice of the two men following him. They were still there when he came out, but he was utterly indifferent to their presence. They preserved him, however, from an ugly encounter in the Green Park, where he wandered among the trees in a deep abstraction, his feet slowly guiding him eastwards to his inn, where he sank straight into a sleep as dull and deep as lead.
He was spared the slow waking and reconstruction of the day before by Abel, the boots, thundering at the door with the news that there was a messenger who would take no denial, an official messenger who must put his letter into the Doctor’s hands.
‘Let him come up,’ said Stephen.
It was the briefest note, requesting or rather requiring Stephen’s presence at the Admiralty at half past eight o’clock rather than at the appointed time of four. The tone was unusual.
‘Is there an answer, sir?’ asked the messenger.
‘There is,’ said Stephen, and he wrote it with an equally cold formality: ‘Dr Maturin presents his compliments to Admiral Sievewright, and will wait upon him at half past eight this morning.’
At a quarter to nine the Admiral was still waiting for Dr Maturin and indeed at nine o’clock itself, for Stephen, hurrying across the parade, had met the former chief of naval intelligence, Sir Joseph Blaine, a keen entomologist and a sure friend, who had just come from an early meeting at the Cabinet Office. They had a hasty word, for Stephen was already late, contracted to meet later in the day and so parted, Stephen to keep his appointment, and Sir Joseph to walk in St James’s Park.
‘Hey, hey, Dr Maturin,’ cried the Admiral, as he came into the room, ‘what the Devil is all this? The Home Office people have picked up a couple of trollops that spend their time gathering information, and they have found your name in their papers.’
‘I do not understand you, sir,’ said Stephen, looking coldly at the Admiral. This was the first time he had seen him without the actual head of the department, Mr Warren.
‘Well now,’ said the sailor, ‘I shall not beat about the bush. There are these two women, a Mrs Wogan and a Mrs Villiers: the Secretary of State’s office has had its eye on them for some time, particularly on Wogan – connections with some dubious characters among the royalist Frenchmen over here and with American agents. At last they decided to act, and upon my word it was high time: in Wogan’s house they found some very surprising papers indeed, many of them sent under cover to Villiers and passed on by her; and in Villiers’ lodgings they found a number of letters, including these.’ He opened a folder, and Stephen saw his own handwriting. ‘Well, there you are,’ said the Admiral, having waited in vain for Stephen to speak. ‘I have laid all my cards on the table, fair and square. The Home Office insist upon an explanation. What am I to tell them?’
‘One card is missing,’ said Stephen. ‘How does it come about that the Home Office should apply to you for information? Am I to understand that my character, that the nature of my activities has been divulged to a third party without my knowledge? Against my express understanding with this department? Against all the laws of sound intelligence?’ Stephen’s intelligence work was of prime importance to him: he hated the entire Napoleonic tyranny with a most passionate loathing, and he knew, quite objectively, that he had been able to give it some of the shrewdest blows it had ever received in this line of combat. He also knew the strange diversity of the various British intelligence services and the shocking, amateurish permeability of some of them – an insecurity that might only too easily put an end to his usefulness and his life. What he did not know, however, for his mind was dull that morning, was that the Admiral was lying: Mrs Wogan had possessed herself, among other things, of some naval papers through a junior civil lord of the Admiralty; the Home Office had therefore sent the evidence to the Admiral, and the Admiral it was who required the explanation. His bluff, frank approach had imposed upon the diminished Maturin, who felt a red glow of anger burning up his apathy – rage at the apparent betrayal of his identity. ‘Upon my soul,’ said Stephen in a stronger voice, ‘it is I who must do the insisting. I desire you to tell me directly how it happens that the Secretary of State’s people come to take notice of my name to you.’
The Admiral was puzzled to come off handsomely, and in the hope of drowning the question he adopted a more mollifying tone and said, ‘First let me tell you of the steps that have been taken. All the leaks have been plugged, you may be sure of that. We interrogated the women separately, and Warren soon extracted enough to hang Wogan out of hand. But she has some very respectable, or at least some very influential protectors – she is a remarkably fine woman – and in view of that, and the undesirability of a trial, and her voluntary production of some useful names, we struck a bargain: she pleads guilty to a charge that will mean her being sent over the water, no more. We could have brought any number of capital charges, including attempted murder, since she shot the wig off the messenger’s head, but we decided to play it quiet. As for Villiers, the other one, we have decided not to proceed: her explanation that she regarded the passing-on of the letters as a mere friendly act – that she looked upon ’em as an intrigue on the part of Wogan with a married man – was hard to break down; and then her having become an American citizen raised grave legal difficulties. Government wants no further complications with the Americans at this stage of the war: our pressing of men out of their ships is bad enough, without our pressing their women too. And in fact she may have been innocent. Looking at her, it seemed to me that her plea of helping in an amour was very likely, very much in character. She stood up for herself amazingly, an even finer woman than Wogan, straight as an arrow, glaring at us like a wild cat, flushed with anger, blackguarding the Home Office man like a trooper – lovely bosom trembling, ha, ha! I came in for a couple of broad-sides – wish there had been more – amorous intrigues, ha, ha, ha!’
‘You are impertinent, sir. You forget yourself. I insist upon your answering my question, instead of indulging yourself in this blackguardly manner.’
In the pleasures of his warm and luscious imagination the Admiral had indeed forgotten himself, but these words brought him violently back to the present. He turned pale, and half rising from his seat he cried, ‘Let me remind you, Dr Maturin, that there is such a thing as discipline in this service.’
‘And let me remind you, sir,’ said Stephen, ‘that there is such a thing as respect for one’s word. And furthermore, I have to observe that your manner of speaking of this lady would be gross in a libidinous pot-boy. In your mouth it is offensive to the highest degree. Bread and blood, sir, I have pulled a man’s nose for less. Good day to you, sir: you know where to find me.’ He walked out of the room, collided with a clerk who was in the act of opening the door, and thrust past him into the corridor.
‘Send for a file of Marines,’ roared the Admiral, now scarlet in the face.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the clerk. ‘Here is Sir Joseph, to know whether Dr Maturin is still within. The Marines directly, sir.’
Leaving by the little green confidential door that gave on to the park, Stephen felt his anger die away as weariness came down on him like a pall, extinguishing the fire and with it all concern. Yet he had not walked eastwards a quarter of a mile before he became aware that his knees and hands were trembling, and that his nerves jangled intolerably, as though they had been flayed: he walked faster, towards the Grapes and the square bottle on his mantelshelf.
Mrs Broad, taking the sun at her door, saw him at the far end of the street; she read his face when he was still quite a long way off, and as he turned in she called out in her fat, cheerful voice, ‘You are just in time for a late breakfast, sir. Now pray go in and sit in the parlour; there is a pure fire, drawing sweet. Your letters are upon the table; Lucy will fetch you the paper; and the coffee will be up this directly minute. You could do with your breakfast today, sir, I am sure, going out so early on an empty stomach, and the streets so damp.’
He made some objection: but no, he might not go upstairs – his room was being turned out – there were pails and brooms that he might trip on in the dark – so there he sat staring at the fire, until the scent of fresh-brewed coffee filled the room, and he turned his chair to the table.
His post consisted of The Syphilitic Preceptor, with the author’s compliments, and the Philosophical Transactions. After two strong cups that quelled the trembling, he automatically ate what Lucy set before him, the whole of his attention being set upon a paper by Humphry Davy on the electricity of the torpedo-fish. ‘How I honour that man,’ he murmured, taking up another chop. And there was that quacksalver Mellowes again, with his pernicious theory that consumption was caused by an excess of oxygen. He read the specious nonsense through, to confound the arguments one by one. ‘Have I not already ate a chop?’ he asked, seeing the chafing-dish renewed.
‘It was only a little one, sir,’ said Lucy, laying another upon his plate. ‘Mrs Broad says there is nothing like a chop for strengthening the blood. But it must be ate up while it’s hot.’ She spoke kindly but firmly, as to one who was not quite exactly: Mrs Broad and she knew that he had eaten nothing on his journey, that he had taken neither supper nor breakfast, and that he had lain in his damp shirt.
Deep in toast and marmalade, he demolished Mellowes root and branch; and noticing the indignation with which his hand had underlined the whole claptrap peroration, he observed, ‘I am not dead.’
‘Sir Joseph Blaine to see you, sir, if you are at leisure,’ said Mrs Broad, pleased that Dr Maturin should have such a respectable friend.
Stephen rose, set a chair at the fireside for Sir Joseph, offered him a cup of coffee, and said, ‘You are come from the Admiral, I collect?’
‘Yes,’ said Sir Joseph. ‘But as a peacemaker, I hope and trust. My dear Maturin, you handled him very severely, did you not?’
‘I did,’ said Stephen. ‘And it will give me all the pleasure in the world to handle him more severely still, whenever he chooses, and on whatever ground. I have been expecting to receive his friends ever since I returned: but perhaps he is such a poltroon as to intend placing me under arrest. It would not surprise me. I heard him call out something to that effect.’
‘In his heated state he might have done anything. He is perhaps more suited for the physical than for the intellectual side of these duties; and as you know, it was never contemplated that he should exercise…’
‘What was Mr Warren thinking of, to leave such an affair to him? I beg pardon for interrupting you.’
‘He is sick! He is most surprisingly sick: you would not recognize him.’
‘What ails Mr Warren?’
‘A most shocking stroke of the palsy. His laundress – he has chambers in the Temple – found him at the bottom of the stairs: no speech left, and his right arm and leg quite paralysed. He was let blood; but they say it was too late, and hold out little hope.’
They were both heartily grieved for Mr Warren, their sound though humdrum colleague: in this immediate context, however, it was apparent to both that his stroke must result in greater power for Admiral Sievewright.
After a pause Sir Joseph said, ‘It was a mercy that I stepped into the Admiralty when I did: I had forgotten to tell you that the Entomologists hold an extraordinary meeting tonight. I found the Admiral in a high-wrought state of passion. I left him quiet, uneasy, and as near to admitting himself in the wrong as it is possible for a man of his rank in the service. I represented to him that in the first place you were a purely voluntary ally, our most valuable ally, and in no way his subordinate in our department; that your entirely unremunerated work, carried out at very great risk to yourself, had enabled us to accomplish wonders – I enumerated a few of ’em, together with some of the injuries you have received. I stated that Mrs Villiers was a lady of the most respectable family and connections, the object of your…’ He hesitated and looked anxiously at Stephen’s expressionless face before continuing, ‘of your respectful admiration for a considerable number of years, and no new acquaintance, as he supposed; that Lord Melville had described you as being worth a ship of the line to us any day of the week, a figure that I had ventured to dispute, on the grounds that no single ship of the line, no, not even a first-rate, could have dealt with the Spanish treasure-frigates in the year four; and that if by his handling of this admittedly difficult affair Sievewright had offended you to such a pitch that we were to be deprived of your services, then I made no sort of doubt that the First Lord would call for a report, and that this report would pass through my hands. For in confidence, I may tell you that my retirement has proved somewhat hypothetical: I attend certain meetings in an advisory capacity, almost every week, and there have been flattering proposals that I should accept an office with remarkably extensive powers: Sievewright is aware of this. He will apologize, if you so desire.’
‘No, no. I have no wish to humiliate him at all: it is always a wretched policy, in any case. But it will be difficult for us to meet with any great appearance of cordiality.’
‘So you do not fly off ? You do not abandon us?’ said Sir Joseph, shaking Stephen by the hand. ‘Well, I am heartily glad of it. It is like you, Maturin.’
‘I do not,’ said Stephen. ‘Yet as you know very well, without there is a perfect understanding, our work cannot be done. How much longer is the Admiral to be with us?’
‘For the best part of a year,’ said Sir Joseph, with the unuttered addition, ‘If I don’t sink him first.’
Stephen nodded, and after a while he said, ‘Certainly I was vexed by his blundering attempt at manipulating me: the guileless sea-dog lulling a suspected double agent by telling him what steps have been taken, for all love! That I should be attempted to be gulled with such sad archaic stuff: it would not have deceived a child of moderate intelligence. He spoke of his own mere motion, did he not? The alleged Home Office was so much primitive naval cunning?’
Sir Joseph sighed and nodded.
‘Of course,’ said Stephen, ‘a moment’s reflection would have told me that. I cannot conceive how my wits came to desert me so. But the Dear knows they have been wandering these many days … that unpardonable error with Gomez’s reports.’
Stephen had left them in a hackney-coach, as Sir Joseph knew very well: the classic lapse of an over-tired, overworked agent. ‘They were recovered within twenty-four hours, the seals unbroken,’ he said. ‘No harm was done. But it is true that you are not in form. I told poor Warren that the Vigo trip was too much for any man, immediately after Paris. My dear Maturin, you are knocked up: you must forgive me for saying so, but you are quite knocked up. As a friend I see you better than you see yourself. Your face has fallen away; your eyes are sunk; you are a wretched colour. I do beg you will seek advice.’
‘Certainly my health is but indifferent,’ said Stephen, tapping his liver. ‘I should never have flown out upon the Admiral had I been in the full possession of my faculties. I am engaged upon a course of physic that allows me to carry on from day to day, but it is a Judas-draught, and although I can stop the moment I please, it may play me an ugly trick. I suspect it of having clouded my judgement in a case where I lost my patient, and that weighs upon me cruelly.’ Stephen very rarely confided in any man, but he had a great liking and respect for Sir Joseph, and now, in his pain, he said, ‘Tell me, Blaine, just how far was Diana Villiers involved in this affair? You know the importance I attach … you know the nature of my concern.’
‘I wish with all my heart I could make a clear-cut reply; but in all honesty I can give you no more than my impression. I think Mrs Wogan did impose upon her to a large extent; but Mrs Villiers is no fool, and a clandestine correspondence rarely assumes the form of foolscap documents forty pages long. And then the precipitate departure – chaise and four all night and day to Bristol – a six-oared boat and the rowers promised twenty pounds a head to overtake the Sans Souci lying windbound in Lundy Roads – gives some colour to the notion of an uneasy conscience. Yet I am inclined to think that the haste was the fact of Mr Johnson, moved by a purely personal motive. Not that as an American he might not also be interested in information of value to his own country: though we have not established any connection whatsoever between him and Mrs Wogan, apart from this perhaps fortuitous common acquaintance with Mrs Villiers and, of course, a common interest in America. But at all events it is the United States that have benefited from these activities, not France. Mrs Wogan was their Aphra Behn. Their Aphra Behn,’ he repeated, finding no response.
‘Aphra Behn, the lewd woman that wrote plays in the last age?’ said Stephen at last.
‘No, no: there you are out for once, Maturin,’ said Sir Joseph with great satisfaction. ‘You have fallen into the vulgar error. As to her morals, I have nothing to say, but she was first and foremost an intelligence agent. I had some of her Antwerp reports in my hands not a week since, when we were looking through the Privy Council files, and they were brilliant, Maturin, brilliant. For intelligence, there is nothing like a keen-witted, handsome woman. She told us that De Ruyter was coming to burn our ships. It is true that we did nothing about it, and that the ships were burnt; but the report itself was a masterpiece of precision. Yes, yes.’
In the long pause that followed Stephen considered Sir Joseph as he sat there musing by the fire, his fine, kindly face, more like that of a country gentleman than of an official who had spent most of his life behind a desk, set in an amiable expression; and it occurred to him that somewhere in that keen, capacious mind a thought was forming: ‘If Maturin is in fact reaching the end of his usefulness, we had better get him out of the way before he makes some costly mistake.’ The thought would no doubt be tempered with genuine regard, friendship, and humanity, even by gratitude; it would probably contain a clause to the effect that Maturin might yet recover, and that in his powers, his connections, and his unrivalled knowledge of the situation in his own particular sphere might be put to service; but as things stood, with regard to many factors, including the position of the Admiralty, the thought even without any qualification, would be a reasonable and indeed proper thought in the official part of Sir Joseph’s mind. A well-run intelligence service must have its system of dealing with those who were past their best or who had fallen by the wayside and who yet knew too much: a knacker’s yard run with more or less brutality according to the nature of the chief; or at least a temporary limbo.
Sir Joseph felt the pale eye upon him, and it was with a certain uneasiness that he returned to Aphra Behn. ‘Yes. She was a brilliant agent, brilliant. And we might call Mrs Wogan the Behn of Philadelphia. She too turns an elegant verse, and she writes a pretty play; letters are as good a shield as natural philosophy, perhaps even better. But unlike Mrs Behn she has been caught, and she is to be packed off on the first ship bound for New Holland, lucky not to be hanged. I never like to see a woman hanged, do you, Maturin? But I was forgetting – all is grist to your grisly mill, and you have your female subjects too. She is not to be hanged, because the D of C, as our Admiral would put it, has made interest for her: it seems they were bed-fellows not long since. For the same reason she is to be treated with certain égards – a corner to herself aboard, perhaps a woman, and no servitude when she arrives at Botany Bay, there to spend the rest of her days. Botany Bay! What a goal for a naturalist, if not for an adventuress! Maturin, you need, you deserve, a break, a holiday to set you up. Why do not you accompany this ship? To keep your hand in, you can plumb the lady’s mind; it contains a vast deal more than was revealed to us, of that I am very sure, and what she has to say may resolve your doubts about Mrs Villiers. To make my suggestion more tempting, I may observe that the ship in question is to be commanded by your friend Aubrey, though he don’t yet know this part of his duty. The Leopard, for the Leopard is her name, was already under orders for Botany Bay to deal with the unfortunate Mr Bligh, of whose predicament you are aware; when she has done this, and has delivered Mrs Wogan, together with some people we shall add as a blind, she is to join our force in the East Indies, where, with your spirits quite recovered, you will be of the utmost service. Pray do consider of it, Maturin.’
Stephen’s longing, temporarily allayed by food, had returned with even greater force. He left the parlour for his bedroom and his draught, and returning he said, ‘Your Mrs Wogan, now: you speak of her as a second Aphra Behn, and therefore as a woman of shining parts.’
‘Perhaps I was going a little far: I should have added qualifications for time and place. The Americans’ intelligence is but an infant plant – you will remember the ingenuous young man that came with their Mr Jay – and native shrewdness, even where it exists, is no substitute for some hundred years of practice. Yet even so, this young woman had been well tutored; she knew what questions to ask, and she learnt many of the answers. I was surprised to find that there was no French connection: none, at least, that we could fix upon. But my comparison really does not hold, for whereas the Mrs Behn I meet in our files shows a most remarkable sagacity, and a grasp of the situation that would do honour to any politician, Mrs Wogan seems to me a somewhat simple lady at bottom, relying upon intuition and dash whenever she is required to go beyond her plain instruction, rather than upon any considerable fund of knowledge.’
‘Please to describe her.’
‘She is between twenty-five and thirty, but she still retains her bloom: black hair, blue eyes: about five foot eight, but looks taller, since she stands so straight – magnificent carriage of her head. A slight but undeniable figure; though these things, you know, can be improved by stuffing. A thoroughly genteel air, nothing bold or flaunting. Writes like a cat, with every third word underlined, and cannot spell. Speaks excellent French, however, and sits a horse to admiration: no other education that can be detected.’
‘You might almost be describing Mrs Villiers,’ said Stephen, with a painful smile.
‘Yes, indeed. I was so struck by the likeness that I wondered whether there might be some relationship; but it appears there is none. The details of her birth escape my mind for the moment, but they are all in the files and I shall see that you have them. No relationship, I believe; yet there is indeed a striking resemblance.’ He might have added that in Mrs Wogan’s case too there was a hopeless lover, a young man who hung on the borders of her life; a young man so peripheral that he had been set free. Those who took him up found no hint of guilty knowledge, and it was thought better to let him go: Sir Joseph retained only a recollection of the deep unhappiness and the somewhat unusual name of Michael Herapath. ‘Yet when I speak of her apparent simplicity,’ he went on, ‘I may be one of that numerous company of men who have been deceived by women. There is more in this than we know at present, and the skein is well worth the untangling. As I say, it would keep your hand in, Maturin, and it might even yield a jewel. Pray do consider of it.’
During his journey down to Hampshire Stephen turned it over in his mind, but only with the surface of his mind, the rest being taken up with longing, with a continuous, painful evocation of Diana’s person, voice, and movement, a statement of her moral imperfections, her levity and her extravagance; then with a keener longing still, and an absurd tenderness. As for Sir Joseph’s proposition, he did not care one way or another and in any case he knew that there was little choice – virtually none for him. He would go, and if past experience were still a guide, the naturalist within would revive in time. He would make vast collections; huge areas would open to his view; his heart would beat again at the sight of new species, new genera of plants, birds, and quadrupeds; and the Indies might provide some of those encounters with the enemy that wiped out everything but the extreme excitement of the contest. But was past experience still a guide? The stimulation of London and of all his meetings there died away as he travelled, and it was succeeded by an indifference greater than he had ever known.
In this grey state of mind he arrived at Ashgrove Cottage, and there, since his indifference did not extend to his friends’ concerns, he was instantly aware that something was amiss. His welcome was as kind as ever he could have wished, but Jack’s weather- and war-beaten face was even redder than usual; he was rather larger than life and taller, and there were traces of recent storms in their constrained behaviour to one another. Stephen was not very much surprised to learn that the new filly had shown a strange inability to run faster than others after the first three furlongs, and that she was given to crib-biting, jibbing, kicking, rearing, and windsucking; nor that a gang of Kimber’s workmen had stoned his buzzard’s nest; nor that Kimber himself was in disfavour for having made an unexpected and very costly revision of his estimates; but he was quite startled when Jack took him aside and told him that he was in a most hellfire rage with the Admiralty – was about to throw up the service – his flag be damned. He was used to their blackguardly ways – had suffered from them ever since he had first worn the curse of God – but had never supposed they would presume to use him so – had never supposed they could be such – so as to tell him, without a moment’s warning, that Leopard was to be used for transportation.
‘To a landsman,’ said Stephen, ‘this might seem a ship’s prime function, its true raison d’être.’
‘No, no; what I mean is transportation –’ cried Jack.
‘So I had understood.’
‘– the transportation of convicts. Convicts, Stephen! God’s my life! I am sent a letter in a damned crabbed hand, telling me that I am to expect a tender from the hulks – the hulks, in the name of all that’s pure – with a score or so of assorted murderers that I am to receive aboard and carry to Botany Bay. Orders are sending to the Yard for the building of a cage in the forepeak, and accommodation for their keepers. By God, Stephen, to expect an officer of my seniority to turn his ship into a transport, and to play the turnkey! I am writing them such a letter! You must help me to some epithets, Stephen. And what really angers me is, that Sophie doesn’t seem able to grasp how monstrous their conduct is. I tell her it is a most improper proposal, but I wonder at their effrontery, and that I shall stick to Ajax, the new seventy-four, a fine ship, with no flash Newgate cullies lurking in the hold. But no. She sighs; says I know best, of course; and then five minutes later there she is, crying up the Leopard, and what a delightful, interesting voyage it would be, and so comfortable, with all my old shipmates and followers. Anyone would think she wished me away – out of the country as soon as possible. For Leopard’s orders are advanced, and she sails on Saturday sennight.’
‘To an impartial mind, it is a little strange to see your dignity so offended by a score of prisoners. You, who have so willingly stuffed your holds with French and Spanish prisoners, to take such exception to a few of your own countrymen, whom you have always rated much higher than any foreigner, and who in any case would never be brought into contact with you, being under the conduct of proper persons.’
‘They are completely different. Prisoners of war and gaol-birds are completely different.’
‘The deprivation of liberty is still the same: the subhuman almost servile status. We have both been prisoners of war, and prisoners for debt. We have both sailed with a number of men guilty of the most atrocious crimes. For my part, I have not found my dignity much affected. You, however, are to be the only judge of that; yet I will observe, Jack, that a bird in the hand waits for no man, as you so often say yourself, and that the Ajax is at present little more than a naked keel. Who knows, by the time she floats her occupation may be gone. She may sail on mere visits of courtesy, saluting the French colours with a blank discharge and a friendly cheer.’
‘You do not mean there is danger of peace?’ cried Jack, turning quick. ‘That is to say, I mean the blessings of peace are very capital, nothing finer – but one likes to be warned.’
‘I do not. I know nothing about it. I only put it to you that the Ajax will not swim for another six months at the least; that there is something to be said for making hay when no clouds obscure the sun; and that it is your rolling stone that gets the worm.’
‘Yes, yes; very true,’ said Jack gravely. ‘But that brings me to another point. Six months would be very useful to me in the mining line, to get things in train, you understand. But far more important than that … you remember warning me about the Wrays?’
Stephen nodded.
‘I could hardly credit it at the time, but you were right. I went to Craddock’s while you were away: the judge was standing by, and only Andrew Wray, Carroll, Jenyns, and a couple of their friends from Winchester sat down. I watched very close, after what you had said, and although I could not make out what they were at, I saw that every time Wray drummed his fingers that way he has, I lost. I waited half a dozen times to make sure: the sixth time round there was a very pretty penny on the table, and the signals were uncommon clear. I imitated them, by way of taking notice of it to Wray, and told him I did not choose to play on those terms. “I do not understand you, sir,” says he, and I believe he was on the point of making some fling about fellows that did not love to lose, but thought better of it. I told him I should explain more clearly whenever he wished: though upon my word I should have been hard put to it to tell who was receiving his signals. It might have been any man there. I should be sorry if it had been Carroll: I like him. But I must say he looked tolerably green about the gills. They all looked tolerably green about the gills, if it comes to that; but not a man jack of ’em spoke up when I asked whether any other gentleman wished to make an observation. It was an unpleasant moment, and I took it very friendly in Heneage Dundas to come quick across the room and stand by me. A damned unpleasant moment.’
So Stephen Maturin imagined: but his imagination, though lively, fell far short of the full unpleasantness – Jack Aubrey’s furious anger at finding himself a flat, a cony, a pigeon to be plucked, not to mention his honest rage at losing a very large sum of money: the silence in that big room, filled with men of considerable rank and standing, when one of the most influential among them was openly, and in a very powerful voice, accused of cheating at cards. The silence in which many, having taken in the whole gravity of the situation, looked discreetly away; and which was broken by artificial conversation as Jack and Dundas walked out.
‘Now Wray is on a tour of the dockyards, looking into corrupt practices, and he will not be back for some considerable time. I did not hear from him before he left, which is strange; but he cannot possibly sit down under this, and I do not wish to be out of the country when he returns. I do not wish to have the look of running off.’
‘Wray will not fight you,’ said Stephen. ‘If he let twelve hours go by after such an affront, he will not fight. He will have his satisfaction some other way.’
‘I am of your way of thinking: but I do not choose to let him whitewash himself by saying that I am not to be found.’
‘Oh come, now, Jack, this is carrying it too far by a very long way, so it is. The world in general knows that service orders take precedence over everything else: such an affair may certainly stand over for a year or more. We both know cases of the kind, and the absent man in no way reflected upon at all.’
‘Even so, I had much rather give him all the time he needs for his tour and his…’
The arrival of Admiral Snape and Captain Hallowell to eat their mutton with the Aubreys cut the conversation short, but it was not a great while before Stephen was on the subject once again. Sophie had whispered him to join her early, and as the three sailors were intent upon fighting St Vincent over again, shot by shot, it was not at all difficult for him to come away to the drawing-room while they were setting nutshells up in line of battle, and to come away with the certainty of a long, quiet interval before him.
Sophie began by declaring that there was nothing on earth so wicked, barbarous, and unChristian as the fighting of duels; and they would be just as wicked even if the man who was in the wrong always lost, which was not the case. She spoke of young Mr Butler of the Calliope, who was entirely innocent by all accounts, and who died of his wounds not a twelvemonth since; and Jane Butler, who had nursed him with all the love in the world, was left with two small children, and not a penny to feed them with. Nothing, nothing, she said, clasping her hands and gazing at Stephen with huge liquid eyes, could prevent Jack from standing up and being shot at or stabbed; so it was their absolute duty to make him go away in the Leopard. The ship could not be back for a great while, and in that time the whole thing would have blown over; or that wretched Mr Wray would have been brought to a better state of mind; or perhaps … She hesitated, and Stephen said, ‘Or someone might knock him on the head first. It is not impossible; he frequents horse-racing men and card-players and he lives far above his income. The salary attached to his posts does not exceed six or seven hundred pounds a year and it does not appear that he has any estate, yet his turn-out is that of a wealthy man. But after this, no one will feel inclined to play cards with him for anything but love, which makes such an event more unlikely than I could wish. On the other hand, I am intimately persuaded that Wray is not a fighting man. A fellow who will stomach such words for twelve hours will stomach them for twelve years, and digest them at last in his unlovely tomb. Honey, you have no need to trouble your mind, upon my soul.’
Sophie could not share Stephen’s intimate persuasion. ‘Why did Jack have to say those words?’ she cried. ‘Why could he not just have walked away? He ought to have thought of his children.’ And once again she urged her arguments against duelling, this time with an even greater vehemence, as though Stephen, in spite of his steady assurance that he was of the same opinion entirely, needed convincing; as though convincing Stephen would in some way help her cause. With any other person he would have been sadly bored, since for want of fresh arguments on this well-handled theme she was obliged to reiterate those that had served abler minds this last hundred years; but he loved her much, her beauty and her real distress moved him deeply, and he listened without the least impatience, nodding gravely. Then, after a pause for breath (for she habitually spoke with a charming volubility, like a swallow in a barn, and now her words tumbled upon one another in a most surprising flow) she threw him out by saying, ‘Then, dear Stephen, since you are of the same mind with me, you must persuade him. You are so very much cleverer than I am, that you will find arguments quite out of my reach – you will certainly persuade him. He thinks the world of your intelligence.’
‘Alas, my dear,’ said Stephen, sighing, ‘even if he did, which I must beg leave to doubt, in this matter intelligence is neither here nor there. Jack is no more of a fighting man than’ – he was on the point of saying ‘than I’, but having a regard for truth when he was speaking to Sophie he said, ‘than your parson here. He has too much sense. But since men have agreed, this past age and more, to exclude from their society those who refuse a challenge, his views have nothing to do with it. His hands are tied. Custom is everything, above all in the Army and the Navy. If he were to refuse, that would be the end of his career; and he could never live in comfort with himself.’
‘So to live comfortably, he must let himself be killed. Oh, what a world you men have made of it, Stephen,’ she said, groping for her handkerchief.
‘Sophie, treasure, you are being womanish; you are being a blockhead. You will allow yourself to weep presently, at this foolish rate of going on. You are to consider, that very few rencounters result in so much as a scratch, if that. No, no: a great many of them are made up by a trifling redefinition of the words exchanged, or so managed by the seconds that they end with a few passes in the empty air, or a pistol barely charged at all. Yet still, I do think that Jack should be out of the way. I do think that he should go aboard this Leopard, sail off to the far side of the world, and stay there for a considerable time.’
‘Do you, Stephen?’ said Sophie, eagerly searching his face.
‘I do so. He is behaving as I have seen so many sailors behave when they are ashore with a pocket full of guineas; and presently he too will be on his scuppers, as we say in the Navy. Running-horses, cards, building, and even God forbid silver-mining. All that lacks is a navigation-canal at ten thousand pound a mile, and the perpetual motion.’
‘Oh, how glad I am that you have said this,’ cried Sophie. ‘I have been longing and longing to open my mind to you, but how can a woman possibly say anything about her husband’s conduct, even to his best friend? But now you have spoken, I may reply, may I not, without being disloyal? I am not disloyal, Stephen, not in my least, most secret thought, but it breaks my heart to see him flinging his fortune to the winds, earned so hard, with such dreadful wounds – to see his dear open confiding trustful nature imposed upon by vulgar card-sharpers and horse-racing men and projectors – it is like deceiving a child. And I hope it is not mercenary or interested in me when I say I must think of my babies. The girls have their portions, but how long they will last I cannot tell; and as for George … One thing that Mama did teach me was keeping accounts, and when we were poor I kept them to the farthing, so proud and happy when we could round the quarter clear of debt. Now it is very hard to see plain, with so many vast payments in and out and with so many strange gaps, but at least I do know that there is much, much more out than in, and it cannot go on. I am quite terrified, sometimes. And sometimes,’ she added in a low voice, ‘I have an even more terrifying thought: that he is not really happy on shore, and that he plunges into one wild extravagant scheme after another to escape from a dull life in the country; and from a dull wife too, perhaps. I do so want him to be happy. I have tried to learn astronomy, like that Miss Herschel he is always talking about, and who treats me as though I were a child; but it is no use – I still cannot understand why Venus changes shape.’
‘These are mere whimsies, my dear, vapours, megrims,’ said Stephen, darting a covert glance at her, ‘and I see you must be let an ounce or two of blood. But for the rest, I believe you are right: Jack must go away, grow used to himself as a man of means, and learn to swim on an even keel when he is ashore again.’
There was no hint of unhappiness in the voice that came booming along the passage as Jack shepherded his flushed and vinous guests through the builders’ ladders towards the drawing-room; but there was a touch of petulance and even doggedness to be heard some hours later when, pulling his nightcap firmly over his ears and tying the tapes, he replied, ‘Sweetheart, nothing on earth will induce me to accept the Leopard on those terms, so you might as well save your breath to cool your porridge.’
‘What porridge?’
‘Why, porridge – burgoo. It is what people say, when they mean to give you a hint that it is no use carping on the same string. Besides, there is a parcel of women to be sent into her, and you know very well that I have always abhorred women. Women aboard, that is to say. They cause nothing but trouble and strife. Sophie, do you mean to blow out the candle? Moths are coming in.’
‘I am sure you are right, my dear, and I shall never for a moment presume to set my opinion against yours, above all in anything to do with the service.’ Sophie was well acquainted with her husband’s power of going instantly to sleep and of staying asleep whatever the circumstances, and at this point, taking particular care of the carpet, she flung down the candlestick, sconce, and extinguisher. Jack leapt out of bed, put all to rights, and she continued, ‘But there is just one thing that I must say, because with all this hurry and unpleasantness, and the Fencibles, and the builders, you may not have seen it quite as I do. There is Stephen to be considered, and his sad disappointment.’
‘But Stephen cried off in the first place. Heart-broken, said he, but he almost certainly could not come: and never a word has he said since he returned.’
‘Heart-broken he is, I am very sure: he does not say so, but it is as clear as the day that Diana has wounded him again. You had but to look at his poor face when he came back from town. My dear, we owe Stephen a great deal. A voyage to Botany Bay would do him all the good in the world. The peace and the quiet and all those new creatures to keep his mind from dwelling on her. Do but imagine him brooding for months and months in some horrid lodgings, until the Ajax is launched – he would mope away, and eat himself up with misery.’
‘Lord, Sophie, perhaps there may be something in what you say. I was so taken up with this damned business of Kimber and the Leopard and my letter to the Admiralty that I hardly considered – of course, I saw he looked hipped, and I supposed she had played him some vile trick. But he never gave me so much as a hint of it; he never said, “My affairs don’t run as smooth as I could wish, in a certain quarter, so I will go with you in the Leopard”, “Jack, I could do with a change of climate, I could do with a tropical climate”. I should have smoked that instantly.’
‘Stephen is far too delicate. Once he had seen that you had changed your mind about the ship, he would never mention his own concerns. But if you had heard him speak of wombats – oh, just in passing, and not with any sense of ill-usage – it would have brought tears to your eyes. Oh, Jack, he is so very low.’
