The Commodore (36 page)

In the morning he rose early, saying 'I shall not shave until after my rounds and breakfast, when I shall have light enough to shave extremely close.' But when his rounds were over - and they were quite long, with several new cases of an intractable rash that he had never seen elsewhere - the light was still extremely poor. On his way up he met Killick, and speaking loud over the curious circumambient noise he asked him both to attend to the wig and to lay out his good satin breeches and a clean shirt, adding that he was about to ask the first lieutenant for a boat in the forenoon.

'No forenoon, no, nor no afternoon today, sir. Which there's a smoke on, and you can't hardly breathe on deck: nor no boat could swim. Harmattan, some say, a right Guinea smoke. You won't want no wig.'

No. And had he worn one he would have lost it. The moment he put his head above the level of the quarterdeck his meagre locks were whipped away to the south-west and he understood that the noise he heard was that of a very curious, very furious, north-east wind, hot, extraordinarily parching dry, and so loaded with red-brown dust that at times one could scarcely see twenty yards beyond the side. But those twenty yards of visible sea were whipped to a continuous chopping froth against the swell.

'Smoke, sir,' said Square at his side. 'But only a little one, over tomorrow or the next day.'

'How I hope you are right,' said Stephen. 'I particularly wish to see Mr Houmouzios,' and as he spoke he felt the red dust gritting between his teeth.

A disappointing day, and quite extraordinarily thirsty: yet it did have some wonders of its own. Jack, who as usual was making what observations were possible - observations of temperature atvarious depths, salinity, humidity of the air and so on for his friend Humboldt - showed Stephen his sea-chest, which had been brought up on to the half-deck so that the joiner might add an additional till or tray, a very stout chest indeed, that had seen and survived almost every kind of weather the world could offer: but the harmattan had split its lid - a broad cleft from one end to the other. 'We are playing the fire-hose on the boats to keep them whole' he observed in a cheerful roar.

Square was right about the duration, however, and Thursday saw a world which, though ravaged, covered with rufous dust feet deep in sheltered places, and generally flattened, was at least quite calm, and a close-shaven Stephen Maturin, neatly dressed, pulled ashore over a filthy, gently heaving sea. Since he was carrying a gift of sun-birds, or rather their skins arranged with the feathers outwards, as beautiful as any bouquet and far more lasting, he took a sedan-chair to Government House, where he would have sent in his name if Mrs Wood had not thrown up a window with a little shriek and called out to ask him how he did.

She would be down in a minute, she said; and so she was, having paused only to change her shoes and put on a singularly becoming cashmere shawl. 'I am so sorry about this odious harmattan,' she said. 'It has utterly destroyed my garden. But perhaps, when we have had some coffee, you might like to look at some dried specimens, and the bones.'

The bones were indeed worth looking at, beautifully arranged, often articulated with a dexterity few could achieve. 'When we were young,' she said, and Stephen smiled, 'Edward and I used still to put the bat among the primates. But now we do not.'

'I am sure you are right,' said Stephen. 'They are very amiable creatures, yet it appears to me that their next of kin are the insectivores.'

'Just so,' cried she. 'You have but to look at their teeth and their hyoids, whatever Linnaeus may say. The primates are much more interesting. Shall we look at them first? The drawers over there and the tall cupboard are all primates: suppose we were to start with the lowest of the order and work up to the pongo. Here' opening the bottom drawer, 'is a common potto. Perodicticus potto.'

'Ah,' said Stephen, delicately taking up the skeletal hand, 'how I have longed to see these phalanges. Do you happen to know whether in life this aborted index-finger had a nail?'

'He had none, poor dear: he seemed quite conscious of it. I often saw him gazing at his hand, looking puzzled.'

'He lived with you, so?'

'Yes. For nearly eighteen months, and how I wish he were living yet. One grows absurdly attached to a potto.'

Stephen examined the bones in silence for some considerable time, particularly the very curious anterior dorsal vertebrae, and at last he said 'Dear Mrs Wood, may I ask you to be very kind to me?'

'Dear Dr Maturin,' she replied, blushing, 'You may ask me anything you like.'

'I too am absurdly attached to a potto,' he said, 'a tailless potto from Old Calabar.'

'An awantibo!' she cried, recovering from her surprise.

Stephen bowed. 'She has been grievously on my mind since we left those parts. I cannot in conscience take her north of the tropic line; I have not the resolution to kill and anatomize her; to abandon her to a local tree in unknown surroundings would go against my heart.'

'Oh how well I understand you,' she said, taking his hand in the kindest manner. 'Leave her with me, and I will look after her with the utmost care, for her sake and for yours; and if she dies, as my dear Potto died, you too shall have her bones.'

Friday's market was more than usually crowded, and Stephen's anxiety to find Houmouzios was more than usually keen: the harmattan had cracked not only the Commodore's sea-chest but a large number of other things aboard the Bellona, including the caddy in which Stephen kept his small remaining store of coca-leaves: the omnivorous, insatiable Guinea cockroaches had swarmed in, fouling what little they could not eat, and already he was feeling the lack. But there were large numbers of sailors and Marines wandering vaguely about; and a large number, a tribe, of tall stout very black men from some region where it was usual to carry broadbladed spears and a shining trident stood at gaze, amazed by their first visit to a town: Square heaved them gently aside with his shoulder, opening a path as through a drove of oxen, Stephen followed him, and there at last, beyond a snakecharmer, he saw the familiar canopied stall, the dreadful great bald dog, and, huzzay, Houmouzios. Socrates was already present, so Houmouzios left him in charge and carried Stephen back to the house at once. At their first greeting he said that he had received the Brazilian leaves, but it was not until the door was closed behind them that he spoke of three messages that had arrived for Dr Maturin.

Stephen thanked him cordially for his trouble, paid for the leaves, put the messages in his pocket and said 'You have been very kind to me: allow me to suggest the purchase of East India stock as soon as it drops below a hundred and sixteen.'

They parted on excellent terms, and Stephen, with Square carrying the little sack, set off for the strand, the boat, the ship, and the privacy of his cabin and his decoding book; but they had not gone a furlong before the road was blocked by a turbulent mass of seamen, many already drunk, all fighting or about to fight or bawling encouragement at those who were engaged - hands from the Thames and the Stately having a dust up. Happily a group of moderately sober Bellonas came by, some of them Stephen's old shipmates, and they, forming close about the pair and roaring 'Make a lane, there' ran them briskly through unharmed.

Once aboard Stephen hurried below, locked the door and opened the messages in the order of their sending. They were all, of course, from Blaine's office. The code was so familiar that he could almost have done without the key, and the first two were comforting though unremarkable: the French plan was following its course: there had been two unimportant changes of command in minor vessels and one ship substituted for another of equal force. The third, however, stated that a requisition in the Netherlands had provided faster, better, more efficient transports and that the whole operation might be advanced by a week or ten days and that a third line-of-battle ship, the C�r, 74, coming from America might join the French squadron in 42�20'N, 18�3oW: there might however be a reduction in the number of French frigates. The message ended with the hope that this might not reach Stephen too late, and it enclosed a fourth sheet written by Blaine himself according to the formula they used for private, personal communication. Stephen recognized the hand, he recognized the shape of the sequences, but he could not make the message out at all, though he was almost certain that one group was the combination Sir Joseph used for Diana's name. He ran clean through the book, a book that he knew backwards in any case; but there was no evident solution.

He put the personal message aside for further study and went in search of Jack, who was in the master's day-cabin with Tom, all three gazing very anxiously at the chronometers, which no longer agreed, harmattan, drought and dust having presumably deranged one or both. In some ways Jack was very quick: one glance at Stephen's face and he was in the great cabin in a moment: he listened in silence, and then said 'Thank God we heard in time. I shall get under way as soon as possible. Pray see to your medical stores at once.' He summoned Tom: 'Tom, we must be under way in twelve hours, on the first of the ebb. We are short-handed and with so many men ashore, hard to find and bring off, we shall be in real difficulties: send the boats to the last-come merchantmen and press all you can. Stores are fairly good, apart from the gunner's, but watering will take place at once. No liberty, of course. Throw out one signal for all captains and another for the powder-hoys. All Marines to round up stragglers and I shall ask the Governor to use his troops.'

Stephen and his assistants and the potto in her darkened cage went ashore through intense activity: while his young men did all that was needed at the apothecary's, Stephen hurried to Mrs Wood with his charge and took his leave - his forced unwilling leave, as he observed - strangely moved. No young woman could have been kinder.

Back on board he saw the powder-hoys cast off, and in the waist the resigned merchant sailors being assigned to their watch and station. Within eleven and a half hours of Jack's emphatic order the blue peter broke out at the foretopmast head: one or two boats and some frantic canoes came racing through the moderate surf; and at the twelfth hour the squadron stood out to sea in a perfect line, steering west-north-west with a full topsail breeze just abaft the beam and the band of the Aurora playing loud and clear:

Come cheer up my lads, 'tis to glory we steer

To add something new to this wonderful year:

To honour we call you, not press you like slaves,

For who are so free as we sons of the waves?

Chapter Ten

Commodore Aubrey stood on the main topgallant crosstrees of the Bellona, about a hundred and forty feet above the broad grey sea: they were a frail support for a man of his weight and with even this moderate roll and pitch his sixteen or seventeen stone moved continually through a series of irregular swooping curves that might have puzzled an ape, the roll alone swinging him seventy-five feet; but although he was conscious of the starboard watch bending a heavy-weather topsail to the yard below him (the glass was dropping steadily), he was unaware of the movement, the varying centrifugal forces, or the wind howling round his ears, and he stood there as naturally as at home he would have stood on the small landing at the top of the Ashgrove Cottage stairs. He gazed steadily into the north-east, where he could see the Laurel's topsails clear above the horizon, fifteen miles away while the Laurel's lookout commanded a horizon still farther off, where the Ringle was lying, at the limit of fair-weather communication: but never a hint of a signal did the Laurel show. Slinging his telescope and changing the arm that held him to the topgallant shrouds, he pivoted to scan the south-west ocean. Here the expected cloud-bank obscured much of the lower sky, but he could still make out the white flash of the Orestes brig, herself in touch with the Nimble cutter, three leagues beyond. At the moment, therefore, he was at the centre of a circle fifty miles across in which no vessel could move unseen; but presently his far-off ships and smallcraft would be moving closer, the sun would set among the south-west clouds, and the night, with almost certain dirty weather, would set in. No moon.

He had been here, with his whole squadron in tolerable shape after an often difficult run from Sierra Leone, some forty degrees of latitude away, eight days before the earliest date that naval intelligence had given for the meeting of the French squadron with their seventy-four, their line-of-battle ship from the west, in 42�20'N, 18�3o'W, and during these eight days, with fairly kind winds and clear weather, he had cruised slowly north-east till noon and south-west till sunset each side of centre. Nothing had he seen except for a recent outward-bound Bristol merchantman which had met with never a sail since the chops of the Channel and which was in this out-of-the-way corner of the sea because of a wicked American privateer schooner that was playing Old Harry farther south. But these eight days had had seven nights between them, and an eighth was just at hand.

Another glance into the north-east, and he saw that the Laurel was already steering for the squadron, close-hauled on the larboard tack. Another, and much longer, south-west, for that was the vital quarter: if he did not intercept that seventy-four, and if the French commander knew how to handle his ship, the squadron so heavily outnumbered faced disgrace.

He turned, slung his glass again and made his way down,heavy with care. Stephen heard him talking to Tom Pullings in the coach, covered his code-book and the innumerable variations of Blaine's message that he had worked out, shifting numbers, letters, combinations in the hope of finding his old friend's initial mistake and so making sense of his sheet: so far, after many days of the closest application, he had only reached a firmer conviction that the group he half-recognized at first did in fact refer to Diana. He locked his desk-top, wiped the anxiety off his face, and returned to the great cabin.

When Jack came in he found him sitting before a tray of bird's skins and labels. Stephen looked up, and after a moment said 'To a tormented mind there is nothing, I believe, more irritating than comfort. Apart from anything else it often implies superior wisdom in the comforter. But I am very sorry for your trouble, my dear.'