HMS Surprise. Patrick O’Brian

was right: these were indeed the thoughts that flooded into Stephen’s mind at the name of that unlucky tree – these and a great many more, as he sat silently by the glow of the fire. Not that they had far to travel; they hovered most of the time at no great distance, ready to appear in the morning when he woke, wondering why he was so oppressed with grief; and when they were not immediately present their place was marked by a physical pain in his midriff, in an area that he could cover with the palm of his hand.

      In a secret drawer of his desk, making it difficult to open or close, lay docketed reports headed Villiers, Diana, widow of Charles Villiers, late of Bombay, Esquire, and Canning, Richard, of Park Street and Coluber House, co. Bristol. These two were as carefully documented as any pair of State suspects working for Bonaparte’s intelligence services; and although much of this mass of paper had come from benevolent sources, a good deal of it had been acquired in the ordinary way of business, and it had cost a mint of money. Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover even clearer.

      ‘Why do I gather all these wounds?’ he wondered. ‘With what motive? To be sure, in war any accession of intelligence is an advance: and I may call this a private war. Is it to persuade myself that I am fighting still, although I have been beaten out of the field? Rational enough, but no doubt false – too glib it is.’ He uttered these remarks in Catalan, for being something of a polyglot he had a way of suiting his train of thought to the language that matched it best – his mother was a Catalan, his father an Irish officer, and Catalan, English, French, Castilian came to him as naturally as breathing, without preference, except for subject.

      ‘How I wish I had held my tongue,’ thought Sophie. She looked anxiously at Stephen as he sat there, bent and staring into the red cavern under the log. ‘Poor dear thing,’ she thought, ‘how very much he is in need of darning – how very much he needs someone to look after him. He really is not fit to wander about the world alone; it is so hard to unworldly people. How could she have been so cruel? It was like hitting a child. A child. How little learning does for a man – he knows almost nothing: he had but to say “Pray be so good as to marry me” last summer and she would have cried “Oh yes, if you please”. I told him so. Not that she would ever have made him happy, the…’ Bitch was the word that struggled to make itself heard; but it struggled in vain. ‘I shall never love that pagoda-tree again. We were so pleasant together, and now it is as though the fire had gone out … it will go out, too, unless I put another log on. And it is quite dark.’ Her hand went out towards the bell-pull to ring for candles, wavered, and returned to her lap. ‘It is terrible how people suffer,’ she thought. ‘How lucky I am: sometimes it terrifies me. Dearest Jack…’ Her inner eye filled with a brilliant image of Jack Aubrey, tall, straight, cheerful, overflowing with life and direct open affection, his yellow hair falling over his post-captain’s epaulette and his high-coloured weather-beaten face stretched in an intensely amused laugh: she could see the wicked scar that ran from the angle of his jaw right up into his scalp, every detail of his uniform, his Nile medal, and the heavy, curved sword the Patriotic Fund had given him for sinking the Bellone. His bright blue eyes almost vanished when he laughed – all you saw were shining slits, even bluer in the scarlet flush of mirth. Never was there anyone with whom she had had such fun – no one had ever laughed like that.

      The vision was shattered by the opening of the door and a flood of light from the hall: the squat thick form of Mrs Williams stood there, black in the doorway, and her loud voice cried, ‘What, what is this? Sitting alone in the dark?’ Her eyes darted from the one to the other to confirm the suspicions that had been growing in her mind ever since the silence had fallen between them – a silence of which she was perfectly aware, as she had been sitting in the library close to a cupboard in the panelling: when this cupboard door was open, one could not help hearing what was said in the small drawing-room. But their immobility, their civil, surprised faces turned towards her, convinced Mrs Williams of her mistake and she said with a laugh, ‘A lady and gentleman sitting alone in the dark – it would never have done in my time, la! The gentlemen of the family would have called upon Dr Maturin for an explanation. Where is Cecilia? She ought to have been keeping you company. In the dark … but I dare say you were thinking of the candles, Sophie. Good girl. You would not credit, Doctor,’ she said, turning towards her guest with a polite look; for although Dr Maturin was scarcely to be compared with his friend Captain Aubrey, he was known to be the possessor of a marble bath and of a castle in Spain – a castle in Spain! – and he might very well do for her younger daughter: had Cecilia been sitting in the dark with Dr Maturin she would never have burst in. ‘You would not credit how candles have risen. No doubt Cecilia would have had the same idea. All my daughters have been brought up with a strict sense of economy, Dr Maturin; there is no waste in this house. However, if it had been Cecilia in the dark with a beau, that would never have done; the game would not have been worth the candle, ahem! No, sir, you would never believe how wax has gone up since the beginning of the war. Sometimes I am tempted to turn to tallow; but poor though we are, I cannot bring myself to it – at least not in the public rooms. However, I have two candles burning in the library, and you shall have one: John need not light the sconces in here. I was obliged to have two, Dr Maturin, for I have been sitting with my man of business all this time – nearly all this time. The writings and the contracts and the settlements are so very long and complicated, and I am an infant in these matters.’ The infant’s estate ran far beyond the parish boundaries, and tenants’ babies as far away as Starveacre, on being told ‘Mrs Williams will come for you’, would fall mute with horror. ‘But Mr Wilbraham throws out some pretty severe reflections on us all for our dilatoriness, as he calls it, though I am sure it is not our fault, with Captain A so far away.’

      She bustled away for the candle, pursing her mouth. These negotiations were drawing out in length, not from any petulance on the part of Mr Wilbraham, but because of Mrs Williams’s iron determination not to part with her daughter’s virginity or her ten thousand pounds until an ‘adequate provision’, a binding marriage-settlement, had been signed, sealed, and above all, the hard cash delivered. It was this that was hanging fire so strangely: Jack had agreed to all the conditions, however rapacious; he had tied up his property, pay, prospects and future prize-money for the benefit of his widow and any offspring of this union for ever, in the most liberal way, as though he had been a pauper; but still the actual money did not appear, and not a step would Mrs Williams move until it was in her hands, not in promises, but in minted gold or its copper-bottomed, Bank of England guaranteed equivalent.

      ‘There,’ she said, coming back and looking sharply at the log which Sophia had put on the fire. ‘One will be enough, will it not, unless you wish to read? But I dare say you still have plenty to talk about.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Sophia, when they were alone again. ‘There is something I should like to ask you. I have been meaning to draw you aside ever since you came … It is dreadful to be so ignorant, and I would not have Captain Aubrey know it for the world; and I cannot ask my mother. But with you it is quite different.’

      ‘One may say anything at all to a medical man,’ said Stephen, and a look of professional, anonymous gravity came over his face, partly overlaying its look of strong personal affection.

      ‘A medical man?’ cried Sophia. ‘Oh, yes. Of course: certainly. But what I really meant, dear Stephen, was this war. It has been going on for ever now, apart from that short break. Going on for ever – and oh how I wish it would stop – for years and years, as long as I can remember; but I am afraid I have not always paid as much attention as I should. Of course, I do know it is the French who are so wicked; but there are all these people who keep coming and going – the Austrians, the Spaniards, the Russians. Pray, are the Russians a good thing now? It would be very shocking – treason no doubt – to put the wrong people in my prayers. And there are all those Italians, and the poor dear Pope: and only the very day before he left, Jack mentioned Pappenburg – he had hoisted the flag of Pappenburg, by way of a ruse de guerre; so Pappenburg must be a country. I was despicably false, and only nodded, looking as wise as I could, and said, “Ah, Pappenburg.” I am so afraid he will think me ignorant: which of course I am, but I cannot bear him to know it. I am sure there are quantities of young women who know where Pappenburg is, and Batavia, and this Ligurian