The Nutmeg of Consolation (12 page)

'No, no, never in life,' said Raffles. 'Such a thing would never occur to him: he is wholly methodical, utterly humourless; a classifier who has nothing to say to values.'

'Lord, Raffles,' cried his wife, coming in, 'what is this very ill smell? Has something died behind the wainscot?'

'My dear,' said the Governor, 'it is this new plant, which is to be named after Dr Maturin.'

'Well,' said Mrs Raffles, 'it is much better to have a flower named after one than a disease or a fracture, I am sure. Think of poor Dr Ward and his dropsy. And certainly this is a prodigious curious plant: but perhaps I might ask Abdul to take it to the potting-shed. Dear Doctor, they tell me your clothes will be quite dry in half an hour; so we shall have an early dinner. You must be starving.'

'The naming of creatures after one's friends or colleagues is a very pretty custom,' observed the Governor, when she had gone. 'And no one ever did it more handsomely than you with Testudo aubreii, that glorious reptile. And speaking of Aubrey reminds me that I have not seen him for days. How does he do?'

'He does very well, I thank you, running about day and night to get his ship to sea with even more than the usual mad naval haste - running about with such zeal that he has scarcely time for meals and none for over-eating, I am happy to say.'

'Does he need any more hands?'

'I think not. There are about 130 of us left, and seeing the Nutmeg will need only small gun-crews - no more than three or four to a carronade, if I do not mistake - he feels that she is quite well-manned. And he is happy with the notion of promoting his carpenter's mate to poor Mr Hadley's place. But as you know he is still short of a purser, a clerk and two or three young gentlemen.'

'As for the purser, my enquiries have not led me to any man I could recommend, but I have an excellent clerk - he was wounded in the leg when we took this place, but he is recovered now and he gets about quite nimbly - and two young gentlemen, who may or may not suit. Do you think Aubrey could dine on Thursday? I could produce my candidates before or after, just as he chooses. And I could ask him, in a general way, about his immediate plans. I think I could do so without indiscretion, because quite apart from my intense curiosity about whether he means to risk an encounter with the Corn�e or to outrun her, I could, by stretching my authority a little, detach a sloop, the Kestrel, to accompany him as far as the Passage, if he wishes. She should be in by the end of the week.'

Stephen said 'Speaking without the least authority - what is that at the window?'

'A tangalung, a Java civet,' said Raffles, opening the casement. 'Come, Tabitha.' And after a pause the pretty creature, striped and spotted, came and sat in his lap, looking at Stephen with a frown.

Stephen lowered his voice respectfully and went on, 'Without the least authority, I think I may assert that no offer could be more unwelcome.'

'Oh, indeed?'

'My impression - and this is only my impression: I betray no confidence, still less any consultation - is that Aubrey means to attempt the Corn�e if he can find her. The presence of the Kestrel could make no difference to the physical outcome of the engagement, since she carries only fourteen pop-guns and is no more capable of setting about a frigate than a frigate is capable of setting about a ship of the line; but it would have a disastrous effect upon the metaphysical result. If Aubrey's attempt should fail, then the Kestrel must be sunk or taken too: the Corn�e would beat two opponents and cover herself with laurels. But if Aubrey's attempt is successful, as God send, then the Corn�e is defeated by the overwhelming odds of two to one, she suffers no disgrace and Aubrey wins no glory For you are to consider that newspapers and the public take very little notice of the relative strength of opposing ships.

Aubrey is much attached to glory?

'Certainly he fairly worships Nelson But I do not think there is any taint of vanity about him, as perhaps there was in his hero. Aubrey's personal triumph however, is a matter of no importance in this hypothetical encounter: the essential aim, which he recognizes with perfect clarity, is to lower French self-esteem, particularly French naval self-esteem. It is, I do assure you, a matter of such importance that I should go to - have been to - surprising lengths...

The nature of these lengths was never revealed: the door opened and the English butler, once a fine plump rosy specimen of his kind but now yellowed and shrunken with Javan ague, announced that His Excellency was served.

'Heavens, Mr Richardson, my dear, what a hullabalboo!' cried Stephen, going aboard the Nutmeg. 'What are all these people about?'

'Good morning, sir,' said Richardson. 'They are rattling down the shrouds.'

'Well, God be between them and evil,' said Stephen. 'It looks horribly dangerous to me. Would himself be in the ship?'

He was in the cabin, taking his ease with a pot of coffee after an exceedingly hard morning that had begun in the darkness: he looked pale, worn, but contented.

'I should never have believed that so much could be done in three days,' said Stephen, looking around, 'for it is absolutely no more since I was here. The cabin is almost the same as our old one - clean, trim, comfortable; and these neat little carronades leave one so much more room, what joy. Raffles asks us to dine on Thursday, here in Batavia: he has a clerk for you whom he guarantees and two midshipmen whom he does not. No honest purser, I am afraid.'

'Thursday?' said Jack, his face falling. 'I had reckoned on warping out for the powder-hoy tomorrow forenoon, getting our livestock in during slack water. and sailing on the evening tide.'

'I know that tomorrow he has a council-meeting and then a great dinner for a score of potentates at Buitenzorg.'

'Of course he is very much taken up,' said Jack; and having reflected he went on, 'Thursday means the loss of a couple of days. Yet it would make me most uneasy not to do the civil thing by the Governor; he has been so uncommon obliging. But I tell you what it is, Stephen: was you to see him before Thursday and beg him not to trouble with his clerk and the reefers, but just tell a secretary to give them a note for me, how very much better that would be. He and Mrs Raffles would not have a couple of awkward louts on their hands and I could get a much better notion of their capabilities. Do you know why they were discharged?'

'Drunkenness, fornication and sloth were their undoing; and they were not so much discharged as abandoned. They left their disorderly house at about noon, made their staggering, crapulous way to the strand, and found that the squadron had sailed at dawn. They have been living in squalor ever since; for although the Governor has taken some little indirect notice of them, it does not appear that their friends have relieved them in any way, possibly for want of time rather than of inclination. It does after all take an eternity for an Indiaman to come and go.'

Jack gazed at the South China Sea for a while - brilliant sun and countless small craft moving busily under it, but a greenish tinge to the water, with a rain-charged cloudbank rising a handsbreadth from the horizon in the south - and then pouring Stephen another cup he said 'As for the purser, I can do without. Poor Blyth had an intelligent, reasonably honest steward and a knowing Jack-in-the-dust: and in any case Captain Cook was his own purser. I should most cordially welcome a good clerk however; it would wound my heart to lose all our records as you suggested - my observations for Humboldt were to some extent combined with them - and a clever man used to ship's books could perhaps disentangle the confusion Besides, there was the awful case of Macintosh - you remember Macintosh took the Sibylle 36 in a running fight right down the Channel - who tried the same solution when he went ashore in the Cyclades and lost half his papers. He took the remaining half, wrapped it up in a sheet of lead on which he wrote S - the Navy Board, f - the Admiralty, b - the Sick and hurt" and dropped it overboard A week later a Greek sponge-diver brought it to the flagship in perfect condition and asked for a reward.'

'He counted his chickens without reckoning with his host,' said Stephen.

'Yes. As for the reefers, I shall look at them of course; but an unrecommended reefer, and an oldster at that... I had been thinking of young Conway of the foretop; but it is an awkward thing coming through the hawse-hole in your own ship giving orders to men who were your messmates yesterday, quite apart from joining a midshipmen's berth full of people who were your superiors. And then again my promotions have often been unlucky. The quarterdeck is a damned unhealthy place in action, you know.'

'Little do I know of battle,'said Stephen, 'but I had imagined that the midshipmen were with their gun-crews or in the tops with the small-arms men.'

'So they are, most of them; but there are always some on the quarterdeck with the captain and first lieutenant - aides de camp, as you might say.'

On Wednesday the Nutmeg sailed out into the bay, picked up the Dutch moorings the Diane had used, and underwent a very severe examination by her captain, her master and her mate of the hold. Neither in the yard nor alongside the powderhoy had they been able to get far away enough to judge her trim as they could wish, but now they had all the room in the world, and all three were agreed that she was a little by the stern. The laying of the ballast and the stowing of the hold was an exceedingly laborious, highly-skilled process; it had been completed even to the installation of the livestock, so that the familiar smell of swine now rose from the fore hatchway and wafted along the decks; and to undo it all would have led not perhaps to mutiny but quite certainly to muttering. Fortunately Mr Warren, who was well acquainted with the Captain's devotion to trim and to sailing his ship as fast as ever she could go, had so arranged the hoses that he was able to shift some tons of water to and fro along the ground-tier. 'I think half a strake will do it, sir,' he said.

Jack nodded, and filling his lungs he called 'Mr Fielding: pray start pumping forward.'

'What a voice our Captain has,' said Stephen, walking to the boat with Welby. 'It carries a vast distance; yet you are to remark that it has none of the hoarseness or metallic quality we find in auctioneers, politicians, shrews.'

'There is a bird in my part of England we call a mire-drum or bull of the bog that is almost as good. You can hear him a good three miles off on a calm evening. But I dare say you know all about that, Doctor.'

'Oh sir. Sir, if you please,' called a voice from behind - a youth running along the quay and panting as he called. 'If you are going to Nutmeg, please would you take us with you? We have a note for the Captain.'

'How do you mean, we?' asked Welby, frowning.

'There is my friend too, sir, just the other side of the bridge. The heel of his shoe came away again.'

'Then let him take off the other shoe and carry them both in his hand,' said Welby. 'And at the double. We cannot wait here all night.'

'Come on, Miller, come on,' cried the youth in a shout that cracked in the middle. 'Carry your shoes in your hand. The gentlemen cannot wait here all night.'

Stephen considered them as the boat pulled out across the calm water. They were pale, sallow youths, all elbows and knees (What is the English for age ingrat? he wondered); they were thin and underfed, and although they had obviously taken great pains with their appearance and their remaining shabby outgrown clothes they were barely presentable. Indeed, their very care had done them disservice, for they were neither of them practised, expert shavers and both were at the pimply stage the gashes and excoriations had turned ordinarily plain adolescent faces into something quite repulsive. They were pitiful as the lost and anxious young are pitiful but they did not seem to Stephen particulaly interesting youths until one of them, catching his piercing gaze just before the boat touched, said in a low voice 'I am afraid we must seem rather squalid, sir.' He said it shyly but with a direct look and an evident confidence in Stephen's good will that touched him Not at all, at all,' he said, and as he went up the side I wonder what Jack will make of them. I hope he will find they are seamen. Otherwise they must take to the loom or the plough.

A friendly hand pulled him up the last step and he saw Fielding smiling down upon him There you are, Doctor,' he said The Captain desired me to let you know that he is in the cabin with a surprise.

Smiles again in the cabin, perfectly easy on Jack's fine red face, diffident on that of his neighbour, a small man, standing behind a great array of papers. 'There you are, Doctor,' cried Jack, 'and here is an old shipmate of ours.'

'Mr Adams,' said Stephen, shaking his hand, 'it gives me great pleasure to see you again; and I wish you joy of your recovery.'

'Mr Adams swears he can sort out all this chaos, deal with the necessary replacements and provide us with a full set - we shall preserve everything, and we shall be able to pass our accounts!'

'I have every confidence in Mr Adams' thaumaturgical powers,' said Stephen, speaking with the utmost sincerity, for Adams had been captain's clerk and secretary in the Lively when Jack was her temporary commander and he was renowned throughout the Mediterranean for his ability: troubled pursers from other ships came privately aboard for his advice, and many a captain's dispatch owed its clear, accurate account of a complex action to his pen. He could have been a purser himself long ago, but he disliked the candle-counting side; and in any case it was easier for a captain's clerk to take part in cutting-out expeditions, which were his particular delight.

'I should have waited on you as you came in,' said Adams, 'but I was drinking the waters at Barbarlang and never knew you were here till Tuesday, when the Governor sent to let me know, bless him.'

When three bells struck and there was a slight pause Stephen cried 'But I have quite forgot those unhappy youths. Our boat carried them out, bearing the Governor's or rather a secretary's note, and they are still waiting on the - waiting outside.'

'I shall see them presently,' said Jack.