The Nutmeg of Consolation (20 page)

The Com�e fired as he spoke and the ball sent up its plume no more than fifty yards astern: she was keeping pace. 'Come, this is encouraging,' said Jack. He stayed to see the sun go down, outlining the Frenchman in a brief blaze of glory, and when he went below five minutes later the dusk was already creeping over the sea from the east, while the moon had gained in substance.

'Sir,' said Killick at the foot of the companion-ladder, 'I have moved your night-gear into poor Mr Warren's cabin. Which Mr Seymour is overjoyed to stay in the midshipmen's berth until your sleeping-place is set to rights.' Killick's face had the wooden expression it always wore when he was either suppressing that which was true or suggesting that which was false and Jack knew perfectly well that his steward had quite unnecessarily forced the arrangement on Seymour and the gunroom - unnecessarily, because it would certainly have been offered.

'I see: then rouse out a case of the eighty-seven port,' he said and carried on to the gunroom, where he found all the officers apart from Richardson gathered round a chart on their long table. 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'I must trespass upon your hospitality for tonight, if I may. The cabin is to remain lit, and if the Corn�e goes on pelting us we must reply, to keep up her spirits.' The gunroom said they should be very happy; and Jack went on, 'Mr Fielding, you will forgive me speaking of service matters here, but I will just observe that once we are in the Passage, it would be as well to heave the log every bell: then again hammocks may be piped down for the watches below to get some sleep against tomorrow; and the galley fires may be lit again. And lastly, I shall take the middle watch, turning in after we have had supper - I am obliged to you for your kindness, Mr Seymour.' Seymour hung his head and searched for an elegant reply, but before he found one Jack said 'Doctor, may we look at your sick-berth while the fires are lighting?'

'I tell you what, Stephen,' he said as they walked along, 'I know the constraint of having your captain in your bosom -all sitting straight, no belching, no filthy stories - so I have ordered up a case of our eighty-seven port. I hope you do not mind it?'

'I mind it very much indeed. Pouring that irreplaceable liquid into my messmates is impious.'

'But they will appreciate the gesture: it will take some of the stiffness away. I cannot tell you how disagreeable it is, feeling like a killjoy whose going will be a relief. You are luckier than I am in that way. They do not look upon you with any respect. That is to say, not with any undue respect. I mean they have an amazing respect for you, of course; but they do not look upon you as a superior being.'

'Do they not? They certainly looked upon me as a very disagreeable one this afternoon. I was cursed sullen, snappish and dogged with them all.'

'You astonish me. Had something put you out?'

'I had set aside a corpse for opening, an interesting case of the marthambles; I was going to ask your good word as in duty bound, but before I could do some criminal or at least some busy hand had sewn it up and placed it among those you buried.'

'What a ghoul you are, Stephen, upon my word.'

Supper was a grave but extraordinarily copious meal; and although they had not served together very long they had experienced so many vicissitudes that this might have been a five-year commission, which lessened the no doubt inevitable formality. Seymour, of course, on his first day as a member of the gunroom mess, said nothing, and Stephen was as usual lost in thought; but Fielding and even more Welby felt free to tell quite long anecdotes, and in spite of the Ghoul's predictions all hands seemed thoroughly to enjoy the 1787 port, possibly to some degree because Killick said 'I have decanted the eighty-seven, sir: which it was very crusty, being so uncommon old,' the last words being uncommon loud. A third decanter was passing round when Stephen, raising his voice above the stern-chaser overhead, suddenly asked 'Would this be a sloop, at all?'

They had heard some pretty strange things from the Doctor, but none so far beyond all probability, so very far, that for a while there was a complete silence.

'Do you mean the Nutmeg, Doctor?' asked Jack at last.

'Certainly. The Nutmeg, God bless her.'

'Bless her by all means. But she could not conceivably be a sloop while I have her, you know. Was she under a commander she would be a sloop; but I have the honour to be on the post-captain's list, and that makes her as much a ship as any three-decker in the service. What put such a wild fancy into your head?'

'I was contemplating on sloops. A friend of mine wrote a novel and showed it to me for my opinion, as a naval man.' The gunroom looked down at their plates with a certain fixity of expression. 'I thought it a very pretty tale, but I did take exception to the hero's commanding a sloop and taking a French frigate: yet just now it occurred to me that the Corn�e is undoubtedly a frigate; that we, though small, aspire to take her; that perhaps my objection was unfounded, and that sloops do in fact capture frigates.'

'Oh no,' they cried, the Doctor was wholly in the right -never in the history of the Royal Navy has any sloop taken any frigate - it would have been flying in the face of nature.

'But on the other hand,' said Jack, 'a post-ship of much the same displacement and broadside weight of metal as a sloop has been known to do it. It is the presence of a post-captain aboard, and his moral superiority, that turns the scale. A glass of wine with you, my dear sir. Now, gentlemen, in a few minutes' time we shall be mustering the watch, so I shall thank you for a splendid supper, take a look at the sky, and then turn in.'

'And we must thank you for some splendid wine, sir,' said Fielding. 'It will be my standard of excellence whenever I drink port again.'

'Hear him, hear him,' said Welby.

On deck the breeze had freshened perceptibly, coming in warm over the rail, one point on the quarter. By the light of the binnacle the log-board showed that their speed had increased to eight knots and three fathoms: and the Corn�e was keeping up.

The moon showed her clear, but it was not so brilliant that it hid the light of the battle-lanterns on her forecastle or the suffused glow from the open ports along her side, still less the stab of flame as she let fly with her starboard chaser. Both ships were now well into the Passage. To the south he could see the lights of a fishing-village, just where his chart had set it. The other side was too far off to see clearly, but it heaved up there, silvery in the moonlight with great black shadows.

Eight bells. Seymour relieved Richardson: the watch was mustered and the starbowlines went below to get what sleep they could with the guns banging and growling on the deck above. Fielding had come up to ease Seymour into his first independent watch and he was now in the waist, going through the motions of shipping the frame and its lanterns on the decoy boat, now poised so that it could be lowered down in a moment - motions that the chosen band, made up of Bonden, two bosun's mates and a very powerful black sheet-anchor man called Darkie had already performed again and again.

Jack watched them for a while and then walked into the bows with Fielding. 'I shall be very surprised if the Corn�e don't pipe down now,' he said. 'But in any case I mean to draw ahead another couple of cables' lengths, to prevent any stray ball doing real harm; though of course she must have our stern-windows clear in sight. I shall give the orders to brace up and ease off the buoy and then turn in. Good night to you.'

'Good night, sir.'

As Jack was going below the gunfire died away, the Nutmeg having the last word; and as he turned in he saw that he was not to sleep in the dead man's cot. His own, an unusually long one, had been brought down and slung fore and aft. Killick was in many ways a wretched servant, fractious, mean, overbearing to guests of inferior rank, hopelessly coarse; but in others he was a pearl without a thorn. For a moment Jack passed some other expressions in review, and having reached bricks without price he went to sleep.

The familiar waking to a faint lantern in the darkness and the words 'Close on eight bells, sir.' He woke at once, as he had woken so very often since his boyhood, said 'Thank you, Mr Conway,' and swung out of his cot. Some unsleeping recorder had taken notice of the ship's progress during this time and he was not at all surprised to learn from the run of the water along her side that the Nutmeg had lost speed.

Shirt, trousers and canvas shoes, and he walked quietly out of the dim gunroom. In the moonlit waist he cupped his hands in the scuttle-butt, dashed water into his face and came aft as the sentry went forward to strike eight bells.

'You are a good relief, sir,' said Seymour. 'But I am very sorry to say the breeze has dropped.'

'Nip,' cried Conway, and coming across from the lee rail he reported 'Seven, sir, seven on the knot.'

'Good night to you both,' said Jack; and as the wheel, the con, the lookout posts and the guns changed hands he retired to the taffrail. Away on the larboard quarter now, well out in the channel, there lay the Corn�e, a little farther, a little dimmer. The moon, passing through a veil of cloud, was near her height: high water would come well after her southing and in any case the Alkmaar had stated as a known fact that it was three hours later here than at Nil Desperandum; yet even so the flood would have been setting west for some time now. With the log-board by a stern-lantern he added up the figures for the last four hours' progress. Thirty-one sea-miles. It was not what he could have wished, but it was not very bad: the issue was still open. This present watch, the graveyard watch, was the decisive period, for it was now that the tide would have its say. He had of course asked about the Passage as soon as he heard that the Corn�e was likely to take it, and he had learnt that unlike some parts of the Pacific it had two high tides in a lunar day, the first no great matter, the second, that which the Nutmeg was to stem throughout his watch, stronger. But just how much stronger no one in Batavia could tell him. Of course it depended on the age of the moon, and in her present gibbous state she would not be exerting her full influence nor anything like it. From all their calculations and from what little they had in the way of observations from Dalrymple, Horsburgh and others he and the master (an excellent navigator) had decided that at this point in the lunar month they could expect a westward current of two and a half knots; and in his plan he had allowed for rather more than three.

Few things are harder than judging relative movement by night on an unknown coast with little in the way of marked features. By now most of the few scattered villages had put out their lights, and the difficulty of locating them was increased by the glowing remains of fires lit to clear scrub and forest earlier in the day.

Bell after bell the midshipman of the watch reported seven knots, seven and two fathoms, seven and one fathom, while every hour the carpenter or one of his mates stated the depth of water in the well: never more than six inches. And throughout this time Jack Aubrey examined the shore with his night-glass, trying to find a bearing that would give him some notion of the current's speed. A vain attempt: for this some near, clear, fixed point was required.

At just after three bells the fixed point appeared; and not one fixed point but four: four anchored fishing-boats strung out in a line two cables' lengths away on the starboard bow, all with flaring lights to attract the fish. 'Mr Oakes,' he called, 'bring log-board, chalk, half-minute glass and a lantern.'

He hurried along the gangway and as the first boat came abeam he called, 'Turn', followed it with his azimuth compass until Oakes cried 'Out' and so read off the difference. The same with the second, third and fourth boats, all far enough apart for his mind to reach an approximate, shocking solution of the triangles.

He went below and worked them out carefully. They were even worse than he had supposed: the tide was flowing at five and a half knots and when the moon was farther west it would flow faster still. The ship's speed with regard to the land was two miles an hour less than he had counted on. The tide would flow six hours in all, setting the far end of the Passage twelve miles farther off, and by the time they reached it the sun would be well up in the sky.

No, it would not do. For conscience' sake he ran through his calculations again, but they only confirmed the first and second workings and his feeling of extreme disappointment.

Back on deck he reduced speed for the second time. The Com�e, out there in the stronger current, was falling behind; and although he was no longer sure of what he should do he did not wish to lose touch with her. He leaned over the taffrail, watching the moonlit and slightly phosphorescent wake stream away: clearly there was now no hope whatsoever of carrying out his plan, and for some time he was lost in melancholy, even very bitter, reflexions. For some considerable time, while the muted life of a man-of-war by night went on behind him: the quiet voice of the quartermaster at the con, the replies of the helmsman, the murmur of the watch under the break of the forecastle and of the gun-crews below him, the striking of the bell, followed by 'All's well, forecastle lookout', all's well from all the stations right round the ship.

But his naturally sanguine temperament had recovered somewhat before five bells, the dead hour of the night, and he greeted Stephen cheerfully enough: 'There you are, Stephen. How happy I am to see you.'

'I am sorry to be so late. Sleep overcame me, luxurious sleep.'

'I suppose you wished to see the occultation of Menkar.'

'Not at all. I had intended to come and sit with you: for as I understand it there is to be no battle until after the moon has set.'

'Come, I take that very kindly in you, brother. But I am deeply sorry and indeed ashamed to tell you that there is to be no battle at all, at least not for a great while and not in the form I had hoped for. The Corn�e is such a very dull sailer, such an infernal slug, and I made such a stupid mistake about the flow of the tide that it is quite impossible we should be through the Passage before daylight.'