The Ionian Mission. Patrick O’Brian

      It was in no way a parting; there was no sort of violence or ill-will or disagreement about Stephen Maturin’s fading away from the intense social life of Half Moon Street to the dim, foggy lane by the Thames, where he could more easily attend the meetings of the Royal Society, the College of Surgeons, or the entomological or ornithological societies that interested him so very much more than Diana’s card-parties and routs, and where he could more safely carry out some of the delicate business that fell to his lot as a member of the naval intelligence department, business that necessarily had to be kept from the knowledge of his wife. It was not a parting in any sense of unkindness, but a mere geographical separation, one so slight that Stephen usually covered it every morning, walking up through the Green Park to breakfast with his wife, most often in her bedroom, she being a late riser; while he nearly always appeared at her frequent dinner-parties, playing the part of host to admiration, for he could be as smooth and complaisant as the most civilized of her guests so long as he was not required to keep it up too long. In any case Diana’s father and her first husband were serving officers and all her life she had been accustomed to separation. She was always delighted to see her husband and he to see her; they never quarrelled now that all reasons for disagreement were gone; and in fact this was probably the best possible arrangement for a pair with nothing in common but love and friendship, and a series of strange, surprising, shared adventures.

      They never quarrelled, except when Stephen brought up the question of marriage according to the Roman rite, for their wedding had been performed in the brisk naval fashion by the captain of HMS Oedipus, an amiable young man and a fine navigator but no priest; and since Stephen, being of mixed Irish and Catalan parentage, was a Papist he was a bachelor still as far as the Church was concerned. Yet no persuasion, no kind words (and harsh ones he dared not use) could move Diana: she did not reason, but simply and steadily refused. There were times when her obstinacy grieved him, for apart from his own strong feelings on the matter he seemed to make out some obscure superstitious dread of a strange sacrament mingled with the general English dislike of Rome; yet there were also times when it added a certain not wholly disagreeable air of intrigue to the connection. Not that this ever occurred to the eminently respectable Mrs Broad of the Grapes, who liked her house to be just so and who would countenance nothing whatsoever in the roving line, a landlady who would at once turn away any man she suspected of leading out a wench. Mrs Broad had known Dr Maturin for many years; she was thoroughly used to him; and when he told her that he meant to stay at the inn she only stared for a while, amazed that any man born could sleep away from such a ravishing lady; and then accepted it as ‘one of the Doctor’s little ways’ with perfect calm. Some of his little ways had indeed been quite surprising in the past, seeing that they ranged from the quartering of badgers, rescued from a baiting, in her coal-shed to the introduction of separate limbs and even of whole orphans for dissection when they were in good supply towards the end of winter; but she had grown used to them little by little. The Doctor’s ’cello booming through the night and skeletons in every cupboard were nothing now to Mrs Broad; and nothing now could astonish her for long. She also thoroughly approved of Diana, whom she had come to know well during her first startled stay at the inn, where Stephen had brought her when they landed in England. Mrs Broad liked her for her beauty, which she candidly admired, and for her friendliness (‘no airs nor graces, and not above taking a little posset with a person behind the bar’) and for her evident affection for the Doctor. Mrs Maturin was very often at the Grapes, bringing shirts, blue worsted stockings, shoe-buckles, leaving messages, darting in for small sums of money, for although Diana was far richer than Stephen she was even more improvident. It seemed a strange kind of marriage, but Mrs Broad had once seen Mrs Maturin in one of the palace coaches with Lady Jersey – royal footmen up behind – and she had an indistinct notion that Diana was ‘something at Court’, which would naturally prevent her from living like mortals of ordinary flesh and blood.

      Diana had been there still more often in recent days, because the Doctor was going to sea again with his particular friend Jack Aubrey, a post-captain in the Royal Navy, once known in the service as Lucky Jack Aubrey for his good fortune in taking prizes but now so miserably involved in his affairs that he was glad to accept an unenviable temporary command, the Worcester of seventy-four guns, one of the surviving Forty Thieves, that notorious set of line-of-battle ships built by contract with a degree of dishonesty in their scantlings, knees, fastenings – in their whole construction – that excited comment even in a time of widespread corruption: very strong comment indeed from those who had to take them to sea. She was to carry him to the Mediterranean, to Admiral Thornton’s squadron and the interminable blockade of the French fleet in Toulon. And since Stephen was to go to sea, it was obviously necessary that his sea-chest should be prepared. He had packed it himself on a great many occasions before this and it had always satisfied his modest needs even when he was a great way from shore, let alone in the Mediterranean, with Malta or Barcelona only a few hundred miles to leeward, according to the wind; but neither Diana nor Mrs Broad could bear his method of tossing things in pell-mell, the more fragile objects wrapped in his stockings, and they both perpetually interfered: tissue-paper, orderly layers of this and that, neatness, even labels.

      The brassbound chest was open now and Dr Maturin was fishing in it, hoping to find his best neckcloth, the frilled white neckcloth the size of a moderate studding-sail that he was to put on for Diana’s farewell dinner. He fished with a surgical retractor, one of the most efficient instruments known to science, but nothing did he find; and when at last the steel claws grated on the bottom he called out, ‘Mrs Broad, Mrs Broad, who has hidden my neckcloth?’

      Mrs Broad walked in without ceremony, the neckcloth over her arm, although Stephen was in his shirt. ‘Why, oh why did you take it away?’ he cried. ‘Have you no bowels, Mrs Broad?’

      ‘Mrs Maturin said it was to be new-starched,’ said Mrs Broad. ‘You would not like to have your frill all limp, I am sure.’

      ‘There is nothing I should like better,’ muttered Stephen, folding it about him.

      ‘And Mrs Maturin says you are to put on your nice new pumps,’ said Mrs Broad. ‘Which I have scratched the soles.’

      ‘I cannot walk to Half Moon Street in new pumps,’ said Stephen.

      ‘No, sir,’ said Mrs Broad patiently. ‘You are to go in a chair, like Mrs M said this morning. The men have been waiting in the tap this ten minutes past.’ Her eye wandered to the open chest, as neat as an apple-pie not half an hour ago. ‘Oh, Dr Maturin, fie,’ she cried. ‘Oh fie, Doctor, fie.’

      ‘Oh fie, Stephen,’ said Diana, tweaking his cravat straight, ‘How can you be so intolerably late? Jagiello has been slavering in the drawing-room this last age, and the others will be here any minute.’

      ‘There was a mad bull in Smithfield,’ said Stephen.

      ‘Does one really have to pass through Smithfield to reach Mayfair?’ asked Diana.

      ‘One does not, as you know very well. But I suddenly remembered that I was to call at Bart’s. And listen my dear, you have never been in time in your life, to my certain knowledge; so I beg you will keep your irony for some more suitable occasion.’

      ‘Why, Stephen, you are as furious as a mad bull yourself, I find,’ said Diana, kissing him. ‘And to think that I have bought you such a beautiful present. Come upstairs and look at it: Jagiello can receive any early worms.’ As she passed the drawing-room she called in, ‘Jagiello, pray do the civil for us if anyone should come: we shall not be a minute.’ Jagiello was almost domesticated at Half Moon Street, an absurdly beautiful young man, an exceedingly wealthy Lithuanian now attached to the Swedish embassy: he and Stephen and Jack Aubrey had been imprisoned in France together and they had escaped together, which accounted for an otherwise unlikely close friendship.

      ‘There,’ she said proudly, pointing to her bed, where there stood a gold-mounted dressing-case that was also a canteen and a backgammon-board: little drawers pulled in and out, ingenious slides and folding legs transformed it into a wash-hand-stand, a writing desk, a lectern; and looking-glasses and candleholders appeared on either side.

      ‘Acushla,’ he said, drawing her close, ‘this is regal splendour – this is