The Nutmeg of Consolation (19 page)

Jack remained on the quarterdeck until he had the Nutmeg's pace as exactly adjusted to the Corn�e's as possible, and then he called Seymour. 'Mr Seymour,' he said, 'I am giving you an acting order as third lieutenant: I have mentioned it to Mr Fielding. You will arrange matters with him after the ceremony.'

It was expected. Someone had to keep the master's watch, however young. Nevertheless Seymour flushed and said 'Thank you, sir. Thank you very much,' in a tone that showed how moved he was. As he spoke the starboard stern-chaser fired below them: Jack nodded and ran down the smoking companion-ladder to the smoke-filled cabin - the quartering breeze filled the whole space for a minute after each shot - and he found the two gun-crews glaring through the murk, the more fortunate with their heads right out of the port.

The argument faded as he came in, and the gunner said 'We may have hulled her that time, sir.'

'I believe it passed right over,' said Reade, very shrill.

'Mr Reade, pipe down,' said Jack.

'Aye aye, sir. Beg pardon, sir.'

Jack took a telescope and bending he trained it over the great expanse of sea, a long swell with small waves crossing it diagonally, some white horses making the main a deeper blue. The Nutmeg's wake ran out and out, wider than usual because of the turbulence of the hidden buoy; and in a direct prolongation of the line came the Corn�e, throwing a fair bow wave in the very water the Nutmeg had passed through eight minutes before. She had everything she possessed set and drawing and in all likelihood she had very little in the way of spare canvas: perhaps none at all.

It was a difficult position. If he wounded her slightly, reducing her speed by a knot or two, she would probably give up the chase as hopeless: if he did not fire with reasonable accuracy the Frenchman would not believe in his flight. On the other hand, if an unlucky shot slowed the Nutmeg for even a few minutes the Corn�e could put her helm hard over and give her a broadside from those horribly well pointed eighteen-pounders. And an unlucky shot from the Corn�e was more probable than the other way about: her bow-chasers were firing from the forecastle, some eight feet higher than the Nutmeg's upper deck; furthermore they were firing at the Nutmeg's exposed stern, her vulnerable rudder. While these thoughts were racing through his mind he noticed that the frigate was pumping ship, sending a fine spout of water to leeward. 'When she has got rid of all that, perhaps she will come on a little more briskly,' he reflected. Then aloud, 'Mr White, what elevation are you using?'

'Rather better nor six, sir,' said the gunner, who laid the starboard gun while Bonden did the same for Beelzebub.

At this the Corn�e fired at the top of the rise. The ball pitched short but came ranging along the Nutmeg's side in a series of great bounds, the last near enough to send spray aboard.

Jack leant over Beelzebub, his hand on the warm bronze, and as Bonden freed the quoin - the wedge that raised or lowered the barrel - with his handspike, Jack drew it back and back: they understood one another with no more than a grunt and a nod, for the Captain loved to point a gun and they had been through these motions some thousands of times; and when the elevation brought the middle of the Corn�e's fore-topmast yard into the sights he called through the open companion 'Mr Fielding. Mr Fielding, there. Pray see if you can catch the flight of the ball. I am pitching it well up.'

'Aye aye, sir,' replied Fielding, and now Jack laid the gun: 'Muzzle to the right... a trifle more...' the men with the crows heaving it with the utmost delicacy. 'Back a hair's breadth.' With his eyes fixed along the sights he felt for the match. The Nutmeg rose on the swell, and just before the gun was on its mark he stabbed the glowing end down on the priming. A hiss lasting a barely measurable instant of time and then the gun went off, shooting back under him with frightful force and filling the air astern with smoke and shattered wad. His head was already out of the port by the time the breeching checked the gun's recoil with its usual deep satisfying twang and a lucky shift of air allowed him to see the ball for more than a second of its path, a black diminishing blur.

'A little wide of her starboard mizen-chains, sir,' called Fielding.

Jack nodded. Other manoeuvres were possible, such as cracking on and eventually fetching to windward of her, but they were all time-consuming, they all jeopardized his ship and his rendezvous. To be sure, this was a perilous caper, but all things weighed he thought it the best solution. 'Let us keep it up, Mr White,' he said, 'but discreetly: no Guy Fawkes' night blazing away.'

They fired on steadily. Once a ricochet from the Corn�e spoilt the gingerbread-work below the Nutmeg's taffrail, and twice holes appeared in her fore and main courses. Beelzebub was growing hot when Jack noticed Reade standing there with the look of one who has a message to deliver. It was in fact an invitation: since the Captain had missed his dinner, did he choose to take a cold collation in the gunroom?

Jack found that he was exceedingly hungry. At the thought of eating his mouth watered painfully and his stomach gave a twinge. He said 'Yes, with pleasure,' extricated himself from the tight-knit gun-crew, Bonden taking his place, and stepped over to the quarter-gallery to wash his hands. Opening the door with his eyes still fixed on the chaser he very nearly fell headlong into the sea, saving himself only by a violent leaping writhe. 'Make this handle fast to the quarter-piece cleat,' he said. 'The Doctor might come to grief, else.'

The Doctor was already in the gunroom, and he and the other officers welcomed Jack with potted meat, anchovies, hard-boiled eggs and ham, pickled gherkins, onions, mangoes; they were as hospitable as could be, and Welby mixed a bowl of cold arrack punch. Yet with Warren's chair standing there empty it was but a low-spirited meal, and towards the end of it Adams came in with a prayer-book: speaking over the crack and thunder of a stern-chaser's shot and recoil he said in Jack's ear 'I have marked the page with a piece of marline, sir.'

'Thank you, Mr Adams,' said Jack; and having considered for a minute, 'I believe, gentlemen, that our old shipmates will forgive us if we bid them farewell in the simplest way, and in our working clothes.' There was a murmur of agreement, a shifting of chairs, a certain uneasiness about finishing the punch.

Five minutes later, as eight bells struck and then continued with a half-second tolling, Jack took up his station by the drift of the quarterdeck. The chasers were housed and silent; all hands were present. Jack read the grave, beautiful words; the weighted hammocks slid over the side one after another with scarcely a splash, meeting the rise that answered the hollow after the bow-wave.

The Nutmeg had put her helm down a couple of points for this ceremony; and after one unanswered shot the Corn�e, seeing what she was at, fired no more.

When he had closed his book and the people had returned to their duty and the Nutmeg to her course, Jack said to Fielding 'We must give them a leeward gun in acknowledgement.' He told Oakes to see to it, adding 'Aftermost leeward carronade,' so that there should be no mistake: Oakes was still very much shocked by the loss of his friend. He had never seen action before, and it was much better to keep him running about. The Captain and first lieutenant walked aft to the taffrail, and as the gun fired Jack took off his hat. He was reasonably sure that the Frenchman was there on his forecastle; they had seen one another often enough through their telescopes.

'She is still pumping,' observed Fielding.

'So she is,' said Jack absently. 'But by God how the sun has raced across the sky; and there is that goddam moon already.' There she was indeed, discernible in the brilliant sky, pale, lopsided, stupider than usual, twenty degrees above the dark loom of the land in the east, visible this last hour and more. 'At this pace we shall never get her through the Passage before morning. I hope to God she makes more headway when she has cleared her bilges at last.'

'Sir,' said Fielding, 'I believe she is sending something aloft. A skysail.'

They both fixed it with their telescopes. 'It is a pair of sheets,' said Jack. 'A pair of sheets sewn athwartships and folded at the top. Well, damn my eyes: he does not lack good will.' Leaning to the companion he called down 'Avast firing, there.'

'Out,' cried the Marine sentry next to the space ordinarily occupied by the cabin door. He turned the glass and stepped forward to strike two bells.

Like figures on an ancient clock the midshipman of the watch and the quartermaster came from their respective stations to meet at the lee rail, the one carrying log and reel, the other a small sand-glass. The quartermaster heaved the log: the stray line ran out: 'Turn,' he said. The knotted line span off the reel, the midshipman holding the glass to his eye. 'Stop,' said he and the quartermaster checked the line.

'What do you find, Mr Conway?' asked Jack.

'Seven knots and a little better than three fathom, sir, if you please.'

Jack shook his head, went below and said 'Mr White, you may encourage her with a steady fire, shot for shot. But let your balls be a little short. If we are to get her through the Passage before dawn we must not hurt a hair of her head; and it will be nip and tuck even then. Short, but lifelike, do you understand?'

'Aye aye, sir. Short but lifelike it is,' replied the gunner. It was clear that he was not at all pleased.

'Mr Fielding,' said Jack, returning to the quarterdeck, 'when I have had a word with Chips I am going aloft. If that skysail should bring the Corn�e up a trifle, and if her shot should come aboard, you may draw away.'

The carpenter and his crew were busy in the waist, making a framework very like the outline of the Nutmeg's stern windows, an essential part of Jack's plan to deceive the Corn�e when the moon had set. 'How are you coming along, Mr Walker?' he asked.

'Pretty well, sir, I thank you; but I doubt the boat may be horrid unhandy.'

'Never fret for that, Chips,' said Jack. 'If all goes well she will not have to swim above half an hour.'

'If all goes well,' he repeated inwardly, mounting to the foretop and so on without a pause to the crosstrees and a little way out on the yard. Sitting there he had a perfect view of the eastern half of the sky, clear and perfect and evidently domed, with a clear and perfect sea stretching half way to the horizon, where, on a line as straight as a meridian, it changed from a light-hearted, white-flecked blue to that troubled shade seen in the autumn Mediterranean that Stephen used to call wine-dark. Beyond this line, on either side, rose high land, dark, stretching away out of sight to the south-east and tending to converge: the mouth of the Salibabu Passage. It was still a great way off at this gentle rate of sailing; and from the position of the damn-fool moon he could tell that the sun, hidden by the main topsail, was already far down in the west.

'No doubt we shall have a stronger breeze in the Passage,' he said, 'it being funnel-shaped. But even so there is the tide to reckon with. It will be a damned near-run thing.' He called an order down to the deck that altered the Nutmeg's course half a point, so that she should keep to the southern shore. This would be necessary for the eventual turn, but for the time being his aim was to avoid the full force of the tide, which would start flowing westwards in a few hours' time.

When he was at sea, when the present and the immediate future were so much with him, and above all in even so slight an action as this, Jack Aubrey spent little time dwelling on the past; but now his spirit was oppressed. Quite against his own intellectual judgment he was, like so many seamen, a superstitious creature: he did not like the dark land, the ill-coloured sea ahead, with its hard bar; and as well as grieving him, young Miller's death had confirmed many an irrational notion.

He sat there some considerable time: twice he felt the yard move under him as it was braced a little more truly to the wind; and throughout his meditation the guns continued, though with less zeal on the Nutmeg's side, the intervals growing longer.

Time passed: orders, hammering in the waist, the noises of a ship running with no great urgency: the steady pitch and roll, magnified up here, but not so much as to break in upon his thoughts.

Three bells below him. Some more or less autonomous part of his mind said 'Three bells in the first dog-watch', and at the words a sort of moderate cheerfulness returned. They reminded him of Stephen Maturin's reply to the question 'Why is it called a dog-watch': his instant 'Because it is curtailed,' which Jack thought the wittiest thing he had ever heard in his life. He valued it extremely and he often, perhaps too often, told the story, though the heavier gentlemen in company and even sometimes naval wives had to be reminded that dog-watches were made considerably shorter than the rest. Curtailed. Cur-tailed.

The reply had been made many years ago, but it had improved with age, and now it made him smile as he swung off the yard, seized a shifting backstay, slid easily down it and dropped on to the forecastle. Walking along the gangway to the quarterdeck he noticed two new holes in the main studdingsail, and he saw Fielding and the bosun busy with tackles to hoist out the decoy-boat in the fullness of time.

'How are we doing, Mr Richardson?' he asked, looking beyond him at the distant Corn�e.

'Just eight knots at two bells, sir: she was gaining on us, and she hit the larboard stern-gallery again; so I hauled the sheets aft.'

'Damn that stern-gallery. I had fitted a new basin. A new china basin, most uncommon genteel.'

'Yes, sir. Should you like another heave, sir?'

'No. It is almost the end of the watch.' What little haze there was in the western sky was beginning to flush - a very delicate gold and pink - and the sun was scarcely his own width from the sea. Jack looked keenly over the side and at the wake: he was almost certain of another fathom, but the wish could so easily be farther than the thought, and he said 'Well, perhaps. It is so much easier to be sure of the glass when there is light.'

'Eight knots and just one fathom, sir, if you please,' said Reade, the midshipman of the watch, some moments later.