The Ionian Mission. Patrick O’Brian

expensive, fashionable way of life in her girlhood with no money to support it; then worse poverty still, and dependence; then difficult, troublesome, passionate and even violent lovers; and all this had worn her spirited temper, rendering it mordant and fierce, so that for a great while he had never associated Diana with laughter: beauty, dash, style, even wit, but not laughter. Now it had changed. He had never known her so happy as she had been these last few months, nor so handsome. He was not coxcomb enough to suppose that their marriage had a great deal to do with the matter; it was rather her setting up house at last, with a wide and varied acquaintance around her and the rich easy life she led there – she adored being rich; yet even so a visible, tangible husband was not without an effect, even if he were not of the right race, birth, shape, religion, or tastes – even if he were not what her friends might have wished her at an earlier time. Jack was perfectly silent, wholly concentrated on Sophie far over the water: she was now stooping to the little boy at her side; she held him up high, clear of the rail, and he and his sisters all waved again. He caught the twinkle of their handkerchiefs through the yards of Ajax and Bellerophon, and behind the eyepiece of his telescope he smiled tenderly, an expression rarely seen by his shipmates. ‘Do not suppose,’ said Stephen, continuing his inward discourse, ‘that I am in any way favourable to children’ – as though he had been accused of a crime – ‘There are far too many of them as it is, a monstrous superfluity: and I have no wish, no wish at all, to see myself perpetuated. But in Diana’s case, might it not settle her happiness?’ As though she were conscious of his gaze she too waved to the ship, and turning to Jagiello she pointed over the sea.

      The Agamemnon, homeward-bound from the Straits, crossed their field of view, a great cloud of white canvas; and when she had passed Portsmouth was gone, cut off by a headland.

      Jack straightened, snapped his telescope to, and looked up at the sails: they were trimmed much as he could wish, which was scarcely surprising since he himself had formed young Mowett’s idea of how a ship should be conducted, and they were urging the Worcester’s one thousand eight hundred and forty-two tons through the water at a sedate five knots, about all that could be expected with such a breeze and tide.

      ‘That is the last we shall see of the comforts of shore for some considerable time,’ observed Stephen.

      ‘Not at all. We are only running down to Plymouth to complete,’ said Jack absently, his eyes fixed aloft: the Worcester’s pole-topgallantmasts were too taut, too lofty by far for her slab-sided hull. If he had time in Plymouth he would try to replace them with stumps and separate royal-masts.

      He deliberately set his mind to the problem of shipping these hypothetical royals abaft the cap and quite low, to relieve the strain on the notoriously ill-fastened ship in the event of a Mediterranean blow: he knew the wicked force of the mistral in the Gulf of Lions, and the killing short seas it could raise in under an hour, seas quite unlike the long Atlantic waves for which these ships were presumably designed. He did so to deaden the pain of parting, so much stronger than he had expected; but finding the sadness persist he swung himself up on to the hammock-netting and, calling to the bosun, made his way aloft, high aloft, to see what changes would have to be made when his stump topgallantmasts came aboard.

      He was still aloft, swinging between sea and sky with the practised, unconscious ease of an orang-utan, close in technical argument with his dogged, obstinate, conservative, greybearded bosun, when a hundred feet and more below him the drum began to beat Roast Beef of Old England for the officers’ dinner.

      Stephen walked into the wardroom, a fine long room with a fine long table down the middle, lit by a great stern-window right across its breadth, a room which, despite the lieutenants’ cabins on either side, offered plenty of space for a dozen officers, each with a servant behind his chair, and as many guests as they chose to invite. Yet at the moment it was sparsely inhabited: three Marines in their red coats by the window, the master standing in the middle, his hands on the back of his chair, quite lost in thought, the purser looking at his watch, Pullings and Mowett by the door, drinking grog and evidently waiting for Stephen.

      ‘Here you are, Doctor,’ cried Pullings, shaking his hand. ‘On time to the second.’ He was smiling all over his tanned friendly face, but there was more than a hint of anxiety in his eye, and in a low voice he went on, ‘Poor Mowett is afraid he upset you, sir, playing off his humours when you came aboard: it was only our fun, you know, sir, but we were afraid you might not have twigged it, being, as I might say, so uncommonly damp.’

      ‘Never in life, my dear,’ said Stephen. ‘What are you drinking?’

      ‘Two-water grog.’

      ‘Then pray give me a glass. William Mowett, your very good health. Tell me, when will the other gentlemen appear? I was deprived of my breakfast, and I raven: have they no sense of time, at all?’

      ‘There ain’t no other gentlemen,’ said Pullings. ‘We only have a skeleton crew, and so,’ – laughing heartily, since the conceit had only just come to him – ‘we have only a skeleton wardroom, ha, ha. Come, let me introduce the others right away: I have a surprise for you, and I long to show it. I fairly gripe to show you my surprise.’ Mr Adams the purser had seen the Doctor in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the Commissioner’s ball, and was very happy to see him again; Mr Gill the master, a sad contrast to the purser’s fat round-faced jollity, claimed an acquaintance from the days when he was a master’s mate in the Hannibal, and Stephen had repaired him after the battle of Algeciras – ‘though there were too many of us for you to remember me,’ he said. Captain Harris of the Marines was amazingly glad to be sailing with Dr Maturin: his cousin James Macdonald had often spoken of the Doctor’s skill in taking off his forearm, and there was nothing so comfortable as the thought that if one were blasted to pieces there was a really eminent hand aboard to put one together again. His lieutenants, very young pink men, only bowed, somewhat awed, for Stephen had a great reputation as a raiser of the dead and as the invariable companion of one of the most successful frigate-captains in the service.

      Pullings hurried them away to table, took his place at the head, dashed through his soup – the usual wardroom soup, Stephen noticed, quite useful for poultices; though at the same time he did notice a familiar, exquisite, yet unnameable scent on the air – and then called out to the steward, ‘Jakes, is it done?’

      ‘Done, sir, done to a turn,’ came the distant answer, and a moment later the steward raced in from the galley with a golden pie.

      Pullings thrust in his knife, thrust in his spoon, and his anxiety gave way to triumph. ‘There, Doctor,’ he said, passing Stephen his plate. ‘There’s my surprise – there’s your real welcome aboard!’

      ‘Bless me,’ cried Stephen, staring at his goose and truffle pie – more truffle than goose – ‘Mr Pullings, joy, I am amazed, amazed and delighted.’

      ‘I hoped you might be,’ said Pullings, and he explained to the others that long ago, when first made lieutenant, he had seen that the Doctor loved trubs, so he had gone out into the forest, the New Forest, where he lived by land, and had dug him a basket, by way of welcome aboard: and Mowett had composed a song.

      ‘Welcome aboard, welcome aboard,’ sang Mr Mowett

      ‘Sober as Adam or drunk as a lord

      Eat like Lucullus and drink like a king,

      Doze in your hammock while sirens do sing,

      Welcome, dear Doctor, oh welcome aboard,

      Welcome aboard,

      Welcome aboard.’

      The others ground their glasses on the table, chanting ‘Welcome aboard, welcome aboard,’ and then drank to him in the thin harsh purple liquid that passed for claret in the Worcester’s wardroom.

      Thin though it was, the claret was nothing like so disagreeable as the substance called port that ended the meal. This probably had the same basis of vinegar and cochineal, but Ananias, the Gosport wine-merchant, had added molasses, raw spirit, and perhaps a little sugar of lead, a false date and a flaming lie by way of a label.

      Stephen