Desolation Island. Patrick O’Brian

to the Rectory.’

      ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Killick. ‘Rectory it is.’

      ‘Lord, Sophie,’ said Jack when they were alone once more. ‘What a coil!’ He opened the bag. ‘One from the Admiralty, another from the Sick and Hurt Board, and one that looks as though it must be from Charles Yorke – yes, that is his seal – for me; and two for Stephen, care of you.’

      ‘I wish I could take care of him, poor dear,’ said Sophie, looking at them. ‘These are from Diana, too.’ She laid them on a side table, to wait with another, addressed in the same bold determined hand to Stephen Maturin, Esqr., MD, and gazed at them in silence.

      Diana Villiers was Sophie’s cousin, a slightly younger woman, one with a far more dashing style and a black-haired, dark-blue-eyed beauty that some preferred to Mrs Aubrey’s: at a time when Sophie and Jack had been separated, long before their marriage, both Jack and Stephen Maturin had done all they could to win Diana’s favours; and in the result Jack very nearly wrecked both his career and his marriage, while Stephen, who had supposed she would marry him at last, had been most cruelly wounded by her departure for America under the protection of a Mr Johnson – so wounded that he had lost much of his taste for life. He had supposed she would marry him, for although his reason told him that a woman of her connections, beauty, pride and ambition could not be an equal match for the illegitimate son of an Irish officer in the service of His Most Catholic Majesty and a Catalan lady, a short, disagreeably plain man whose ostensible status was that of a naval surgeon, no more, his heart was entirely lost to her, and to his infinite cost it had overruled his head.

      ‘Even before we heard she was in England, I knew that something was working on his mind, poor dear Stephen,’ said Sophie. She would have added her ludicrous proof – a new wig, new coats, a dozen of the finest cambric shirts – but since she loved Stephen as few brothers are ever loved, she could not bear any ridicule to touch him. She said, ‘Jack, why do you not find him a decent servant? At the worst of times Killick would never have allowed you to go out in a shirt a fortnight old, odd stockings, and that dreadful old coat. Why has he never had a steady, reliable man?’

      Jack knew very well why Stephen had never kept a servant for any length of time, never a man who could grow used to his ways, but had contented himself with casual and preferably illiterate Marines or ship’s boys or a half-witted member of the after-guard: for Dr Maturin, as well as being a naval surgeon, was one of the Admiralty’s most highly-valued intelligence agents, and secrecy was essential to the preservation of his life and the lives of his many contacts in the vast area controlled by Buonaparte, to say nothing of the prosecution of his work. This had necessarily come to Jack’s knowledge in the course of their service together, but he did not intend to pass it on, even to Sophie, and now he made a reply to the effect that whereas by steady application you might hope to persuade a parcel of pig-headed mules, nothing, no not purchase-upon-purchase, would ever shift Stephen from his chosen path.

      ‘Diana could, by waving her fan,’ said Sophie: her face was not well-suited for crossness, but now it expressed a variety of cross emotions – indignation for Stephen, displeasure at this renewed complication, and something of the disapproval or even jealousy of a woman with a very modest sexual impulse for one in whom it was quite the reverse – the whole tempered by an unwillingness to think or speak unkindly.

      ‘I dare say she could,’ said Jack. ‘And if she could make him happy again by doing so, I should bless the day. There was a time, you know,’ he went on, staring out of the window, ‘when I thought it was my duty as a friend – when I thought I was doing the right thing by him to keep them apart. I thought that she was just plain wicked – devilish – wholly destructive – and that she would be the end of him. But now I don’t know: perhaps you should never interfere in such things: too delicate. Yet if you see a fellow walking blindfold into a pit … I acted for the best, according to my lights; but it may be that my lights were not of the very brightest kind.’

      ‘I am sure you were right,’ said Sophie, touching his shoulder to comfort him. ‘After all, she had shown herself to be – well, to be, what shall I say? – a light woman.’

      ‘Why, as to that,’ said Jack, ‘the older I grow, the less I think of capers of that kind. People differ so, even if they are women. There may be women for whom these things are much as they might be for a man – women for whom going to bed to a man doesn’t necessarily signify, don’t affect them in the essence, as I might say, and don’t make whores of ’em. I beg your pardon, my dear, for using such a word.’

      ‘Do you mean,’ asked his wife, taking no notice of his last remark, ‘that there are men to whom breaking the commandment does not signify?’

      ‘I am got on to dangerous ground, I find,’ said Jack. ‘What I mean is … I know very well what I mean, but I am not clever at putting it into words. Stephen could explain it far better – could make it clear.’

      ‘I hope that neither Stephen nor any other man could make it clear to me that breaking marriage vows did not signify.’

      At this juncture a terrible animal appeared among the builders’ rubble, a low dull-blue creature that might have been a pony if it had had any ears; it carried a small man on its back and a large square box. ‘Here is the hairdresser,’ cried Jack. ‘He is hellfire – he is extremely late. Your mother will have to be frizzed after the consultation: the doctors are due in ten minutes, and Sir James is as regular as a clock.’

      ‘The house on fire would not induce Mama to appear with her head undressed,’ said Sophie. ‘They will have to be shown the garden; and in any case Stephen will certainly be late.’

      ‘She could put on a cap,’ said Jack.

      ‘Of course she will put on a cap,’ said Sophie, with a pitying look. ‘How could she possibly receive strange gentlemen without a cap? But her hair must be dressed under it.’

      The consultation for which these gentlemen were converging upon Ashgrove Cottage had to do with Mrs Williams’s health. At an earlier period she had undergone an operation for the removal of a benign tumour with a fortitude that astonished Dr Maturin, accustomed though he was to the uncomplaining courage of his seamen; but since then her spirits had been much oppressed by vapours, and it was hoped that the high authority of these eminent physicians would persuade her to take the waters at Bath, at Matlock Wells, or even farther north.

      Sir James had travelled in Dr Lettsome’s chariot: they arrived together, and together they absolutely declined Captain Aubrey’s suggestion of viewing the garden; so Jack, called away to receive the horse-coper and his new filly, left them with the decanter.

      The physicians had taken note of the new wings being added to Ashgrove Cottage, of the double coach-house, the long line of stables, the gleaming observatory-dome on its tower at a distance: now their practised eyes assessed the evident wealth of the morning-room, its new and massive furniture, the pictures of ships and naval engagements by Pocock and other eminent hands, of Captain Aubrey himself by Beechey in the full-dress uniform of a senior post-captain, with the red ribbon of the Bath across his broad chest, looking cheerfully at a bursting mortar-shell in which were to be seen the Aubrey arms with the honourable augmentation of two Moors’ heads, proper – Jack had recently added Mauritius and La Réunion to his grateful sovereign’s crown, and although the Heralds’ College had but a hazy notion of these possessions, they had felt that Moors would suit the case. The physicians looked about them as they sipped their wine, and with a visible satisfaction they gauged their fees.

      ‘Allow me to pour you another glass, my dear colleague,’ said Sir James.

      ‘You are very good,’ said Dr Lettsome. ‘It really is a most capital Madeira. The Captain has been fortunate in the article of prize-money, I believe?’

      ‘They tell me that he recaptured two or three of our Indiamen at La Réunion.’

      ‘Where is La Réunion?’

      ‘Why, it is what they used to call the Ile Bourbon – in the neighbourhood of the Mauritius, you know.’

      ‘Ah?