The Commodore (9 page)

'Well, bloody George,' murmured Fanny, looking at his gooseberry wounds, 'you will cop it if Miss O'Hara sees you. Stand over and I'll wipe you with my handkerchief.'

Charlotte directed her voice into the loft and called 'Mama will be amazingly disappointed if you do not come up, sir.'

By the time Sophie returned with her mother and Mrs Morris, Jack was in the blue chamber, which had a dressingroom that opened off it; and in this dressing-room Killick, with a fanatical glee and without waiting for any man's permission, had laid out the contents of all the tailor's parcels: although in himself he was as dirty, slovenly and sea-bucolic as it was possible to be in the Navy, he delighted in ceremony (for a grand dinner he would sit polishing the silver until three in the morning) and even more in fine uniform. Jack had gratified him much in the first, possessing a fair amount of plate and then having been presented with a truly magnificent dinner-service by the West Indies merchants; but hitherto he had almost always been a disappointment in the second, patching up old coats and breeches, and having them turned when they were too threadbare. (It was true that during most of Killick's servitude Mr Aubrey had been extremely poor and often deep in debt.)

But now the case was altered: superfine broadcloth in every direction; a dazzling abundance of gold lace; white lapels; the new button with a crown over the fouled anchor all agleam; undeniable cocked hats; a variety of magnificent swords and a plain heavy sabre for boarding; two bands of distinction-lace; a star on the gorgeous epaulette, heavy with bullion; white kerseymere waistcoats and breeches; white silk stockings; black shoes with silver buckles.

Having passed through the plain 'undress' stage - pretty splendid, nevertheless - Jack came out of the dressing-room in all the glory of a flag-officer, his hair powdered, the Nile medal gleaming on his lace jabot, and his laced hat adorned with the diamond spray given him by the Grand Turk, a spray that was made to quiver and sparkle by a little clockwork heart. 'Behold the Queen of the May,' he said.

'Oh very fine!' cried the ladies; and even Mrs Williams and her friend, who had been sitting there with pursed lips, disapproving of such expense, were quite melted, adding

'Glorious, superb: superb: superb.'

'Huzzay, huzzay,' cried George. 'Oh, to be an admiral!'

'How I wish Helen Needham could see him,' said Charlotte. 'That would clap a stopper over h�prating about the General and his plume.'

'Fan,' said Sophie, rearranging her husband's neckcloth and smoothing the golden fringe of an epaulette, 'run and ask Miss O'Hara whether she would like to come.'

A clock in the corridor struck the hour, followed by several others at different levels, the last of all being the slow deep chime from the stable-yard. 'God's my life,' cried Jack whipping off his coat and hurrying into the dressing-room. 'Captain Hervey will be here.'

'Oh don't throw it on the floor,' called Sophie. 'And do please, please take care of those stockings as you pull them off. Killick, make him take the stockings off by the band.'

When the men had gone, thundering down the stairs, Jack dressed as a plain country gentleman rather than a sea-going peacock and Killick looking as usual like a lean, cantankerous and out of work ratcatcher, the ladies walked into Sophie's boudoir. Mrs Williams and her friend sat together on an elegant satinwood love-seat with entwined hearts for a back, and Sophie in a low, comfortable elbow-chair with a basket of stockings to be darned beside it.

She rang for tea, but before it came her mother and Mrs Morris had resumed their habitual looks of disapproval. 'What is all this we hear about those extremely expensive garments forming part or indeed parcel of an admiral's uniform? Surely Mr Aubrey cannot be so thoughtless and indiscreet as to assume a rank superior to his own, a flag-rank no less?' The mention of high authority always brought a pious, respectful look to Mrs Williams' face: before it had quite faded she interrupted Sophie's answer with the words 'I remember a great while ago, that he called himself captain when he was really only a commander.'

'Mama,' said Sophie in a stronger voice than was usual with her, 'I believe you mistake: in the service we always call a commander captain out of courtesy; while a commodore of the first class, that is to say a commodore with a captain, a post-captain, under him, in this case Mr Pullings...'

'Yes, yes, honest Tom Pullings,' said Mrs Williams with a condescending smile - is absolutely required, not just by courtesy but by Admiralty rules, to wear the uniform of a rear-admiral. So there,' she added, sotto voce but not altogether unheard, as the tea-tray came in.

Even at Ashgrove, a tolerably well-run house with a strong tradition of promptness and order, tea entailed a fair amount of turmoil; but in time the older women were quiet at last, absorbed in stirring their sugar, and Sophie was about to make some remark when Mrs Williams, with that prescience sometimes found in mothers, cut her short with the words, 'And what is all this about inquiries being made in the village concerning Barham Down?'

'I now nothing about them, Mama.'

'Briggs heard that there had been a man in the ale-house asking about Barham Down and those that lived there, a man like a lawyer's clerk. And since he had to go there on some business to do with rat-poison he asked the landlord what was afoot; and it appeared that most of these questions were about Mrs Oakes. Not about Diana. It was not a matter of gathering evidence for a criminal conversation case or a divorce with Diana as the guilty party as I thought straight away, but something to do with Mrs Oakes: debts, I have little doubt. But it is also possible that that Mr Wilson the manager had a wife somewhere...'

Sophie had been brought up so straight-laced that she possessed no very exact notion of how babies were made in the first place or born in the second until she learnt from personal and startling experience; and one of the changes in her mother that surprised her most was this strong, almost obsessive and sometimes singularly specific interest - disapproving interest of course - in who went, or wanted to go, to bed with whom: an interest fully shared by Mrs Morris, so that the two of them would go over the details of any fresh trial for crim. con. for an hour or more. She was reflecting on this when she heard her mother say'... so of course I borrowed the gig and called, Briggs driving all the way up that steep, stony road to Barham. She was denied, but I insisted - said I wanted to see the child, my own grand-niece after all, my own flesh and blood. So I was admitted. I thought she was far too expensively dressed for a mere lieutenant's widow, and her cap was outr� I believe she has some pretensions to looks. Well. I questioned her pretty closely, I can tell you - what was her maiden name? Who were her employers in New South Wales? Did she teach the harp? - Nothing so graceful as the harp - When did this curious - I did not say alleged- marriage take place? She was evasive - short, unsatisfactory answers - and when I told her of it, saying I expected more openness, she positively turned me out of the house. But I was not going to be put down like that by a chit worth no more than fifty pounds a year if that and I said I should come back. In Diana's absence I have a right to supervise the bringing-up and welfare of the child. If there is an undesirable connexion in that house, she must be removed. I shall speak to my man of business, and I shall say...'

'You are forgetting, Mama,' said Sophie when the torrent paused, 'you are forgetting that Dr Maturin is his daughter's natural guardian.'

'Dr Maturin - Dr Maturin - pooh, pooh - here today and gone tomorrow: he has been away six weeks at least. He cannot oversee the welfare of his child,' said Mrs Williams. 'I shall have myself appointed supervisor.'

'We expect him tomorrow afternoon,' said Sophie. 'His bedroom is ready: he is staying here, not at Barham, to be nearer the squadron during these last important days.'

Stephen rode towards Ashgrove Cottage, sombre from his long and unsuccessful journey to the North Country, sombre from his stop at Barham, where he had heard of Mrs Williams' barbarity; but with a sombreness shot through and through with a brilliant gleam. In a small square room upstairs at Barham, overlooking the now almost empty stables, Diana had put a good many of his papers and specimens: a dry little room, in which they might be preserved. On the other side of the passage another room, sometimes called- the nursery, held a number of unused dolls, a rocking-horse, hoops, large coloured balls and the like; and as he sat arranging these papers and sheet after sheet of a hortus siccus collected in the East Indies and sent home from Sydney, he heard Padeen's voice from across the way.

When Padeen was speaking Irish he stammered very much less - hardly at all if he were not nervous - and now he was discoursing as fluently as could be: 'That's the better - bless the good peg - a little higher - oh, the black thief, he missed the stroke - four it is - now for the five - glorious St Kevin, I have the five itself...'

This was usual enough. Padeen alone often talked aloud when he was throwing dice or knuckle-bones or mending a net. Stephen did not so much listen as be aware of the homely, agreeable sound: but abruptly he stiffened. The paper dropped from his hand. It was exactly as though he had heard a faint childish voice cry 'Twelve!' or something very like it. Twelve in Irish, of course. With the utmost caution he stood up and set his door on the jar, with a book either side to prevent it moving.

'For shame, Breed, honey,' said Padeen, 'it is a do dh� you must say. Listen, sweetheart, listen again will you now?

A haon, a do, a tri a ceathir, a cuig, a s�a seacht, a hocht, a naoi, a deich, a haon d�, a do dh�, with a noise like yia, yia. Now, a haon, a do...'

The little high voice piped 'A haon, a do...' and so right through to 'a do dheag,' which she said with just Padeen's Munster intonation.

'There's a golden lamb, God and Mary and Patrick bless you,' said Padeen kissing her. 'Now let you throw the hoop on the four, which will make twelve altogether so it will too: since eight and four is twelve for evermore.'

The dinner-bell clashed on Stephen's intensely listening ear with a most shocking effect - a galvanic effect. It scattered his wits strangely, and he had not fully recovered them before the passage outside creaked under Padeen's step: he was a big man, as tall though perhaps not as broad-shouldered as Jack Aubrey: and it was clear that he was carrying the child - they talked in a murmur, each into the other's ear.

Dinner was a silent meal, and after a while Clarissa said 'I should not have told you about Mrs Williams: it has taken your appetite away. But she forced her way into Brigid's room, crying that a good shake would cure this sort of trouble; and her clamour shocked the child.'

'Sure, it angered me to hear of her conduct, the strong self-willed unruly shrew; but you were wholly and entirely right to let me know. If you had not done so she might have repeated the intrusion, with all the damage that would ensue: now I can deal with it.' He stirred his wine with a fork for some little while; recollected himself, looked attentively at the fork, wiped it on his napkin, laid it square on the table and said 'No. It was not anger that took my appetite away but delight. I heard Brigid speak clear and plain, talking to Padeen.'

'Oh I am so glad. But...' she hesitated'.. . did it make sense?'

'It did indeed.'

'I have heard them too. So has Nelly. But only when they were quite away by themselves - they were always together, you know - in the hay-loft, or with the hens and the black sow. We thought it was only gibberish, the sort of language that children make up.'

'It is the pure Irish they speak.'

'I am so glad,' said Ciarissa again.

'Listen,' said Stephen, 'I think the balance is exceedingly delicate at this point and I dare not make any move at all - dare not rush blundering in. I must reflect, and consult with colleagues who know much more than I do: there is Dr Willis in Portsmouth. There is the great Dr Liens of Barcelona. For the now, I beg you will take no notice, no notice at all. Let the flower open.'

Some time later he said 'How happy I am you told me of that woman. At the present juncture her ignorant violence might wreck, spoil, desecrate... I shall cope with her.'

'How shall you do that?' asked Clanissa after a pause.

'I am contemplating on the means,' said Stephen; but the pale, reserved ferocity of his expression faded entirely with the entry of Nelly with the pudding and Padeen with Brigid. She sat there on her high-cushioned chair and as Stephen helped her to gooseberry fool she turned her face to him. He thought he saw a distinct look of acceptance, but he dared not speak directly. It was only when the meal was nearly over that he said, in Irish, 'Padeen, let you bring the little mare in twelve minutes,' and the words brought a quick turn of the small fair head, ordinarily immobile, absorbed in an inner world.

The little mare carried him with a long easy stride down the miles of bare upland road, along the turnpike for a while and so to the lane leading up through Jack Aubrey's plan. tations to the knoll on which he had built his observatory: for Captain Aubrey was not only an officer professionally concerned with celestial navigation but also a disinterested astronomer and, although one would never have suspected it from his honest, open face, a mathematician: a late-developing mathematician it is true, but one of sufficient eminence to have his papers on nutations and the Jovian satellites published in the Philosophical Transactions and translated in several learned journals on the Continent.

Jack had just closed the door of this building and he was standing on its step contemplating the English Channel when Stephen came in sight, round the last upward curve.

'Ho, Stephen,' he hailed, though the distance was not great. 'Have you come back? What a splendid fellow you are, upon my sacred honour! True to your day and almost to your hour. I dare say you could not wait to see the squadron - a glorious sight! Although it is nothing like what I promised you in the first place - no squadron ever is. I have been gloating over them this last half hour, ever since Pyramus came in.' And indeed the slide of the revolving copper dome was pointing directly down at Portsmouth, Spithead and St Helens. 'Should you like to have a look? It would not be the least trouble...' He glanced at Stephen's mount, paused, and in quite another tone he went on 'But Lord, how I rattle on about my own affairs. Forgive me, Stephen. How do you do? I hope your journey was...