The Nutmeg of Consolation (41 page)

'Why, Doctor,' he said, his face brightening, 'how happy I am to see you back. You look as gay as a popinjay, as cheerful as if you had found a five-pound note: I hope you brought the poor old barky some good luck at last. God love us, what a week!'

'You look as if you had been through a fleet action, Tom.'

'I may smile again when we sail tomorrow afternoon and when we have sunk the land: but not before. You would think the hands conspired to put us in the wrong, and to give the Surprise a bad name. Drunken seamen, paralytic, brought out by lobsters with kind advice on how to keep them in order. Awkward Bloody Davis locked up for beating two sentries into a jelly and throwing their muskets into the sea - they had tried to stop him taking a girl out in a boat. And Jack Nastyface did bring a girl out: being so thick with the cook he brought her aboard in broad daylight wrapped up like a side of bacon. He kept her in the forepeak and fed her like a fighting-cock through the scuttle; and when he was found he said she was not an ordinary young woman at all - he wanted to marry her, which would make her free, and would the Captain be so kind? By all means says the Captain and then you can take your wages and go ashore with her: the ship don't carry wives. So Jack Nastyface thought better of his bargain: she went ashore alone, and now all the people despise him. And there was another poor devil swam out... several other things. Lord, how I prayed for a party of Marines! The bloody-minded officials had eased off before the Governor came back, but by then the foremost jacks had pretty well destroyed our case and reputation; and although things are smoothed over now and we are tied up alongside again I do not think there is much love lost between ship and shore. I have never known the Captain more worn, nor more apt to grow - well, testy, you might say.' Four bells. 'Now, Doctor,' Pullings went on, 'it is time for me to throw an eye over all; and perhaps for you to put on your breeches.'

'God save you, Tom,' cried Stephen, looking with concern at his pale bony knees, 'I am so glad you noticed it. My mind must have wandered. I should have got the ship a worse name still.'

When Stephen was breeched he sat at his folding desk and wrote to Diana, his pen scratching away at an extraordinary speed, the sheets of paper mounting on his cot.

'If you please, sir,' said Reade at the door, 'the Captain thinks you might like to know that our guests are under way from Government House.'

'Thank you, Mr Reade,' said Stephen. 'I shall be with you as soon as I have finished this paragraph.'

He was on deck just before the first gun of the Governor's salute and he observed with gratification but not much surprise that the half-fledged anxious ship he had last seen was now a serene man-of-war, confident that her yards were squared by lifts and braces to within an eighth of an inch, and that her guests could eat off any part of any one of her decks.

In fact they ate off the full extent of Jack Aubrey's silver, the baize-lined chests being empty but for a pair of broken sugar-tongs; and from behind the Captain's chair Killick surveyed his triumph with whole-hearted delight, a look that sat strangely on a face set in shrewish discontent.

The guests filed in, and Stephen found that he was to sit between Dr Redfern and Firkins, the penal secretary. 'How very glad I am that we are neighbours,' he said to Redfern. 'I was afraid that after our few words on the quarterdeck we should be torn apart.'

'So am I,' said Redfern. 'And when you consider this table, we could easily have been out of earshot. Heavens, I have never seen such magnificence in a frigate, nor such a sweep of cloth.'

'Nor have I,' said Firkins, and in a low tone to Stephen, 'Surely, Captain Aubrey must be a gentleman of very considerable estate?'

'Oh, very considerable indeed,' said Stephen. 'And he also commands I know not how many votes in both the Commons and the Lords: he is much caressed by the Ministry.' He added a few more details to sadden Firkins, but only a few, since his heart was aswim with joy; and he spent most of his meal and nearly all the prolonged port and then coffee drinking in conversation with Redfern. The surgeon was no great naturalist: asked, for example, whether he had seen the platypus he looked doubtful. 'The more modern name is ornithorhynchus,' said Stephen. 'Yes, yes, I know the animal,' said Redfern. 'I have often heard it spoken of - it is not uncommon - and I was trying to remember whether in fact I had seen it or not. Probably not. Here, by the way, it is called the water-mole: the learned names would not be understood.' Yet on the other hand he could tell Stephen a great deal about the behaviour of men to one another in New South Wales and the still more dreadful Norfolk Island, where he had spent some time: the usual but not invariable response to absolute power and the absence of public opinion. So taken up was Stephen with his conversation and with his inner happiness that he scarcely noticed how the party was going; but when he returned from seeing Dr Redfern back to the hospital and giving his opinion on a hydrocele he said to Jack, sitting alone in the reconstituted great cabin and drinking a tankard of barley-water, 'How very well that went off - a most successful dinner.'

'I am glad you think so. I found it devilish heavy going -worked like a horse - and I was afraid other people thought so too.'

'Not at all, at all: never in life, my dear. Jack, before coming aboard today I met a man from the Madras ship, ha, ha, ha! Oh, but before I forget, is this south-east breeze to be relied on?'

'Lord, yes. It has been blowing these ten days together, and the glass has never moved.'

'Then please may I have a cutter early in the morning, and may I be picked up off Bird Island?'

'Of course,' said Jack, waving his empty tankard. 'And should you like some of this? Barley water.'

'If you please,' said Stephen.

'Killick. Killick, there,' called Jack, and when he came, 'Two more cans of barley-water, Killick; and let Bonden know the Doctor wants the blue cutter at three bells in the morning watch.'

'Two cans and three bells it is, sir,' said Killick, aiming for the door. 'Two cans, three bells.' He struck the jamb a shrewd blow - he was usually drunk after a dinner-party - but he got through upright.

'What do you expect to find on Bird Island?'

'No doubt there are petrels; but I do not think of landing there, alas, with so little time to spare.'

'Then what are you going for?'

'Am I not to pick up Padeen?'

'Of course you are not to pick up Padeen.'

'But Jack, I told you I should warn him. I told you before Martin and I set off, when you said we were to sail on the twenty-fourth. I have warned him, and he will be waiting there on the strand.'

'I certainly did not understand anything of the kind. Stephen, I have had endless trouble with convicts trying to escape. The officials have harassed and badgered me for that reason among others and have stinted my stores, supplies and repairs, and to avoid anything really ugly I had to warp out into the bay, which delayed everything still farther. When the Governor came back I went to see him and stated the case as fairly as I could: he admitted that searching the ship without my consent was improper and asked whether I desired an apology. I said no, but that if he would give me an undertaking that nothing of the kind would happen again, I for my part should undertake that no convict would leave Sydney Cove in my ship, and so leave the matter there. He agreed, and we warped in.'

'We are speaking of a shipmate, Jack. I am committed.'

'So am I. In any case, how can you ask the captain of a King's ship to do such a thing? I will make every possible representation in Padeen's favour, but I will not countenance a convict's escape. I have turned several away already.'

'Is that what I am to say to Padeen?'

'My hands are tied. I have given the Governor my word. It would be said that I was abusing my authority as a post-captain and my immunity as a member.'

Stephen looked at him for some time, weighing the value of any reply: the look conveyed or was thought to convey something of pity and contempt and it stung Jack extremely. He said, 'You have brought this on yourself.'

Stephen turned, and seeing Killick with the tankards he took one, said 'Thankee, Killick,' and carried it below.

Davidge was sitting in the gunroom; he told him that Martin was down among the specimens, putting the bird-skins into the brine-tub, and he went on 'What a wretched dinner that was, upon my word. I am sure that Jack Nastyface, being so disgruntled, poured salt in by the ladle; and any gate the civilians were like a set of funeral mutes. I tried as hard as I could, but they would not be pleased. I dare say it was the same at your end of the table. No wonder you look hipped.'

'Martin,' said Stephen when he reached the store-room and the smell of feathers, 'it appears that there has been a misunderstanding and that I may not take Padeen aboard. I am not quite sure what I shall do. However, the boat will be ready at three bells in the morning watch. Would you care to come with me? I ask, because at dinner Dr Redfern told me that the colonial name for the platypus is water-mole, which I did not know when your friend Paulton told us that water-moles lived in the Woolloo-Woolloo stream. This might be your last chance of seeing one.'

'Thank you very much,' said Martin, looking into his face by the lantern-light and quickly turning away. 'I shall be ready at three bells.'

Stephen asked for a hand to get at his chest, took out a fair sum in gold and notes, locked it again, gave Martin the key and said 'If I should not return to the ship tomorrow will you be so good as to have this sent to my wife?'

'Of course,' said Martin.

'I do not think I have ever felt such strong and conflicting emotions in my life,' he reflected, walking out of Sydney on the Parramatta road. His intention was to diminish their force by walking far and fast: physical weariness, he had found before, could do away with subsidiary aspects, such as in this case mere exasperation, and after some hours the right course of action would appear. Yet in the hours he walked now nothing of the kind took place. His mind perpetually dropped the problem and flew back to his happiness, his present and future happiness. He walked a great way in the darkness, and that part of his mind which was free to be astonished was astonished by the number of nocturnal animals he heard and occasionally saw in the faint moonlight, and they so near the settlement: phalangers, bandicoots, a koala, wombats. 'As for Jack,' he said, 'his hero Nelson would not have acted so: but Nelson was not a righteous man; he had no sudden rush of virtue to the head. Middle age has come upon Jack Aubrey at last, the creature. I never thought it would.' He said this without rancour, as one stating a fact; but he also said 'One of the great advantages of wealth is that you are not obliged to eat toads. You can do what you think right.'

The question of what he thought right in these circumstances was not solved by the time the moon set and he turned back. His consideration of the problem was often interrupted by actions of grace, one of which, a plain-chant thanksgiving he had often heard at Montserrat before the French sacked, desecrated and destroyed the monastery, took him a mile and a half to sing. It was not solved by the time he reached the ship, footsore and wet from a shower out of the south-east; nor yet when after a troubled waking night he heard Bonden's discreet voice in his ear, telling him the cutter was alongside.

Joy revived, and sorrow with it. He dressed, tiptoed into the gunroom not to wake the other officers, murmured a good morning to Martin, and drank a cup of coffee.

The cutter's masts were already stepped; and as he made his way down into it Stephen noticed with satisfaction that the crew were all old shipmates, men-of-war's men. Bonden, who had no notion of the Doctor's common sense, whatever his book-learning might be, nor of Mr Martin's, had provided boat-cloaks against the keen night air; and he said 'Now where away, sir, if you please?'

'Do you know Bird Island?'

'Yes, sir: saw it as we were coming in, and Captain Pullings took a fix on it.'

'Well now, before that island there is a point, two or three miles to the south; and south again of that point, on the flat coast there is the entrance to a lagoon, marked by a flagstaff and a cairn. That is where we must go. How long do you think it will take?'

'With this breeze on the quarter, sir, we should be there by noon, easy. Shove off afore, Joe.'

By the time they had sailed down the long harbour dawn was just beginning to break, a dawn so pure and exquisite that even Joe Plaice, who had seen ten thousand of them at sea, looked at it with mild approval, and Martin clasped his hands. Stephen saw nothing of it: he was asleep, wrapped in the boat-cloak. The cutter passed the headlands, met the wide-spaced waves of the open sea, made a little offing close-hauled and then steered north-east, which changed the boat's motion to a corkscrew roll of the kind that may make even hardened seamen uneasy if they have been ashore for some while. Stephen slept on: he slept on when the surface ripple caused by the changing tide brought spray sweeping diagonally across. Martin arranged the cloak to cover Stephen's head, and seeing that he was not easily to be woken said to Bonden in a low tone, 'We are going at a fine pace.'

'Yes, sir,' said Bonden. 'We shall have time and to spare, and I should stand off the shore to keep the Doctor a little drier, only I am afraid of missing the flagstaff.'

'Do you think we are near?' asked Stephen, suddenly awake.

'Well, sir, I reckon we can't be a great way off.'

'Then as soon as we raise Bird Island I shall watch the shore with my glass; and as for getting wet, the sun will soon dry us. It is much higher than I had expected, and exceptionally warm.'

So they sailed on, the hands forward talking quietly, the boat all alive with the breeze, the sun climbing until cool spray was welcome and cloaks were laid aside.

'There is your island, sir,' said Bonden; and on the rise Stephen saw it clear, nicking the horizon beyond the point.

'So it is,' he said, and both he and Martin took out their telescopes. Steadily the low sandy coast filed by; and presently they agreed that this part or that might be familiar. Yet from the sea one dune or even one clump of stunted trees looks very like another and there was no certainty until once again, and with something of the same relief, they saw the flagstaff and its cairn.