The Ionian Mission. Patrick O’Brian

own heart, he too being wholly devoted to the overthrow of Buonaparte, using his highly-specialized weapons with singular efficiency. And although the ceremony was spoilt by an ugly scene when the butler removed the cat, they did at last move into the dining-room, where they sat down to as good a meal as London could offer, for in spite of her sylph-like form Diana was rather greedy and in addition to an educated taste in wine she possessed an excellent cook. His talents had on this occasion been directed to the preparation of all Stephen’s favourite dishes.

      ‘May I help you to some of these truffles, ma’am?’ said he to his right-hand neighbour, a dowager whose influential countenance had helped to re-establish Diana’s reputation, damaged by ill-judged connections in India and the United States and only partially restored by her marriage.

      ‘Alas, I dare not,’ she said. ‘But it would give me great pleasure to see you do so. If you will take an old woman’s advice, you will eat up all the truffles that come your way, while your innards can still withstand ’em.’

      ‘Then I believe I shall,’ said Stephen, plunging a spoon into the pyramid. ‘It will be long before I see another. Tomorrow, with the blessing, I shall be aboard ship, and then hard tack, salt-horse, dried peas and small beer must be my lot: at least until that Buonaparte is brought down.’

      ‘Let us drink to his confusion,’ said the dowager, raising her glass. The whole table drank to his confusion, and then at due intervals to Dr Maturin’s return, to his very happy return, to the Royal Navy, to one another, and then standing – a point of some difficulty to Miss Trevor, who was obliged to cling to Jagiello’s arm – to the King. In the midst of all this cheerfulness, of this excellent claret, burgundy and port, Stephen looked anxiously at the clock, a handsome French cartel on the wall behind Mr Nathan’s head: he was to take the Portsmouth mail, and he had a mortal horror of missing coaches. To his distress he saw that the hands had not moved since the lobster bisque; like most of the clocks in Diana’s house the cartel had stopped, and he knew that decency forbade even a surreptitious glance at his watch. Yet although he and Diana lived lives more independent than most married pairs they were very, very close in other respects: she caught his look and called down the table ‘Eat your pudding in peace, my dear; Jagiello has borrowed his ambassador’s coach, and he is very kindly driving us down.’

      Shortly after this she and the other women withdrew. Jagiello moved up the table to the dowager’s place and Stephen said to him, ‘You are a good-hearted soul, my dear, so you are. Now I shall see Diana for the best part of another twelve hours; and I shall not have to fret my mind over that infernal mail-coach.’

      ‘Mrs Maturin tried to make me promise that she should drive,’ said Jagiello, ‘and I have given my word that she should, once the sun was up, subject to your approval.’ He sounded uneasy.

      ‘And did she submit to your condition?’ said Stephen, smiling. ‘That was kind. But you need not be concerned: she drives prodigiously well, and would send a team of camels through a needle’s eye at a brisk round trot.’

      ‘Oh,’ cried Jagiello, ‘how I admire a woman that can ride and drive, that understands horse!’ And he went on at some length about Mrs Maturin’s shining parts, which had needed only a thorough understanding of horses to be quite complete.

      Stephen was aware of Nathan’s amused, benign, cynical face on the far side of the table, smiling at Jagiello’s enthusiasm: there was something about Jagiello that made people smile, he reflected – his youth, his cheerfulness, his abounding health, his beauty, perhaps his simplicity. ‘None of these qualities are mine, or ever have been,’ he said to himself. ‘Are the Jagiellos conscious of their happiness? Probably not. Fortunatos nimium …’ A yearning for coffee spurred his vitals, and seeing that the decanters had made their last round untouched by his pink and somewhat stertorous guests he said aloud, ‘Perhaps, gentlemen, we might join the ladies.’

      Jagiello’s offer of the coach had come as a surprise, and the other carriages had been ordered early so that Dr Maturin should be able to make his farewells and reach the Portsmouth coach with half an hour to spare. The carriages therefore appeared at half past ten and rolled away, leaving Stephen, Diana, and Jagiello with a delightful sense of holiday, of free, unexpected, unmortgaged time. Nathan was also left behind, partly because he had come on foot from his house just round the corner and partly because he wished to speak to Diana about money. She had brought some magnificent jewels back from India and the United States, many of which she never wore; and in the present state of war, with Napoleon’s astonishing, horrifying victories over the Austrians and Prussians, their value had increased immensely. Nathan wanted her to take advantage of the fact and to put some of the rubies (‘vulgar great things, much too big, like raspberry tarts’ she said) into a select list of deeply depressed British stocks, a drug on the market – an investment that would yield splendid returns in the event of an Allied victory at last. However, he only smiled and bowed when she suggested that they should take the remains of the bombe glacée into the billiard-room and there eat it while they played. ‘Because in any case Stephen must say goodbye to his olive-tree,’ she observed. Hers was perhaps the only billiard-room in Half Moon Street to possess an olive: the room had been built out over the garden behind, and Stephen, prising up a flagstone by a convenient window, had set a rooted cutting from a tree growing in his own land of Catalonia, itself the descendant of one in the grove of Academe. He sat by it now, showing Nathan the five new leaves and the almost certain promise of a sixth. With another husband Nathan might have spoken about these stocks and shares; but Stephen would have nothing whatsoever to do with his wife’s fortune – he left it entirely to her.

      ‘Come, Stephen,’ said she, putting down her cue. ‘I have left you such a pretty position.’

      Dr Maturin addressing himself to a shattered leg with a saw in his hand was a bold, deft, determined operator; his gestures were rapid, sure, precise. But billiards was not his game. Although his theory was sound enough his practice was contemptible. Now, having studied the possibilities at length, he gave his ball a hesitant poke, watched it roll deliberately into the top right-hand pocket without touching any of the others, and returned to his olive-tree. The other players belonged to a different world entirely: Nathan gathered the balls into a corner, nursing them in a long series of almost imperceptible cannons and breaking them only to leave his opponent in a most uncomfortable situation; Jagiello accomplished some surprising feats at the top of the table with a spot-stroke; but Diana favoured a more dashing game by far, delighting in the losing hazard. She walked round the table with a predatory gleam in her eye, sending the balls streaking up and down with a ringing crack. At one point, when she had already made a break of thirty-seven and needed only three to win, the balls were awkwardly placed in the middle. She hoisted her slim person on to the edge of the table and she was about to reach right out with her whole length poised over the baize when Stephen called, ‘Take the rest to it, my dear; take the long rest, for all love.’ There was a strong possibility that she was with child, and he did not like the position at all.

      ‘Bah,’ said she, lowering her cue to her outstretched hand: she glared along it, her eyes narrowed, the tip of her tongue showing from the corner of her mouth; she paused, and then with a strong smooth stroke sent the red straight into the bottom right-hand pocket while her own ball shot into that on the left. She slipped off the table with such a lithe, easy grace and such an open delighted triumph that Stephen’s heart stopped for a beat and the other men looked at her with the utmost fondness.

      ‘Captain Jagiello’s coach,’ said the butler.

      As far as real battlefields and beds of roses were concerned, Captain Aubrey was far better acquainted with the first, partly because of his profession, which, with enormous intervals of delay, often cold and always wet, brought him into violent conflict with the King’s enemies, to say nothing of the Admiralty, the Navy Board, and bloody-minded superiors and subordinates, and partly because he was a wretched gardener. For all his loving care the roses at Ashgrove Cottage produced more greenfly, caterpillars, mildew, rust, and grey mould than flowers – never enough at any one time to make a bed for a dwarf, let alone a six-foot sea-officer who tipped the beam at sixteen stone. In the figurative sense, his marriage was a good deal nearer the roses than most; he was a good deal happier than he deserved