The land in question was Cape Nao, the southern limit of their cruising ground: it stood up there against the western horizon, a dark certainty, hard in the vagueness along the rim of the sky.
'A very fine landfall, Mr Marshall,' said Jack, coming down from the top, where he had been scrutinizing the cape through his glass. 'The Astronomer Royal could not have done better.'
'Thank you, sir, thank you,' said the master, who had indeed taken a most painstaking series of lunars, as well as the usual observations, to fix the sloop's position. 'Very happy to – approbation -, His vocabulary failed him, and he finished by jerking his head and clasping his hands by way of expression. It was curious to see this burly fellow – a hard-faced, formidable man – moved by a feeling that called for a gentle, graceful outlet; and more than one of the hands exchanged a knowing glance with a shipmate. But Jack had no notion of this whatsoever – he had always attributed Mr Marshall's painstaking, scrupulous navigation and his zeal as an executive officer to natural goodness, to his nautical character; and in any case his mind was now quite taken up with the idea of exercising the guns in the darkness. They were far enough from the land to be unheard, with the wind wafting across; and although there had been a great improvement in the Sophie's gunnery he could not rest easy without some daily approach to perfection. 'Mr Dillon,' he said, 'I could wish the starboard watch to fire against the larboard watch in the darkness. Yes, I know,' he went on, dealing with the objection on his lieutenant's lengthening face, 'but if the exercise is carried on from light into darkness, even the poorest crews will not get under their guns or fling themselves over the side. So we will make ready a couple of casks, if you please, for the daylight exercise, and another couple, with a lantern, or a flambeau, or something of that kind, for the night.'
Since the first time he had watched a repetition of the exercise (what a great while since it seemed), Stephen had tended to avoid the performance; he disliked the report of the guns, the smell of the powder, the likelihood of painful injury to the men and the certainty of a sky emptied of birds, so he spent his time below, reading with half an ear cocked for the sound of an accident – so easy for something to go wrong, with a briskly-moving gun on a rolling, pitching deck. This evening, however, he came up, ignorant of the approaching din, meaning to go forward to the elm-tree pump – the elm-tree pump, whose head the devoted seamen unshipped for him twice a day – to take advantage of the sloping light as it lit up the under-parts of the brig; and Jack said, 'Why, there you are, Doctor. You have come on deck to see what progress we have made, no doubt. It is a charming sight, is it not, to see the great guns fire? And tonight you will see them in the dark, which is even finer. Lord, you should have seen the Nile! And heard it! How happy you would have been!'
The improvement in the Sophie's fire-power was indeed very striking, even to so unmilitary a spectator as Stephen. Jack had devised a system that was both kind to the sloop's timbers (which really could not bear the shock of a united broadside) and good for emulation and regularity: the leeward gun of the broadside fired first, and the moment it was at its full recoil its neighbour went off – a rolling fire, with the last gun-layer still able to see through the smoke. Jack explained all this as the cutter pulled out into the fading light with the casks aboard. 'Of course,' he added, 'we make our run at no great range – only enough to get in three rounds. How I long for four!'
The gun-crews were stripped to the waist; their heads were tied up in their black silk handkerchiefs; they looked keenly attentive, at home and competent. There was to be a prize, naturally, for any gun that should hit the mark, but a better one for the watch that should fire the faster, without any wild, disqualifying shots.
The cutter was far away astern and to leeward – it always surprised Stephen to see how smoothly-travelling bodies at sea could appear to be almost together at one moment and then, when one looked round, miles apart without any apparent effort or burst of speed – and the cask was bobbing on the waves. The sloop wore and ran evenly down under her topsails to pass at a cable's length to windward of the cask. 'There is little point in being farther,' observed Jack, with his watch in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other. 'We cannot hit hard enough.'
The moments passed. The cask bore broader on the bow. 'Cast loose your guns,' cried James Dillon. Already the smell of slow-match was swirling along the deck. 'Level your guns out tompions… run out your guns… prime, point your guns… fire.'
It was like a great hammer hitting stone at half-second intervals, admirably regular: the smoke streamed racing away in a long roll ahead of the brig. It was the larbowlines who had fired, and the starboard watch, craning their necks a-tiptoe upon any point of vantage, watched jealously for the fall of the shot: they pitched too far, thirty yards too far, but they were well grouped. The larboard watch worked with concentrated fury at their guns, swabbing, ramming, heaving in and heaving out: their backs shone and even ran with sweat.
The cask was not quite abeam when the next broadside utterly shattered it. 'Two minutes five,' said Jack, chuckling. Without even pausing to cheer, the larboard watch raced on; the guns ran up, the great hammer repeated its seven-fold stroke, white water sprang up round the shattered staves. The swabs and rammers flashed, the grunting crews slammed the loaded guns up against their ports, heaving them round with tackles and handspikes as far as ever they would go; but the wreckage was too far behind – they just could not get in their fourth broadside.
'Never mind,' called Jack. 'It was very near. Six minutes and ten seconds.' The larboard watch gave a corporate sigh. They had set their hearts on their fourth broadside, and on beating six minutes, as they knew very well the starboard watch would do.
In fact, the starboard watch achieved five minutes and fifty-seven seconds; but on the other hand they did not hit their cask, and in the anonymous dusk there was a good deal of audible criticism of 'unscrupulous grass-combing buggers that blazed away, blind and reckless – anything to win. And powder at eighteen pence the pound.'
The day had given place to night, and Jack observed with profound satisfaction that it made remarkably little difference on deck. The sloop came up into the wind, filled on the other tack and bore away towards the wavering flare on the third tub. The broadsides rapped out one after another, crimson-scarlet tongues stabbing into the smoke; the powder-boys flitted along the deck, down through the dreadnought screens past the sentry to the magazine and back with cartridge; the gun-crews heaved and grunted; the matches glowed: the rhythm hardly changed. 'Six minutes and forty-two seconds,' he announced after the last, peering closely at his watch by the lantern. 'The larboard watch bears the bell away. A not discreditable exercise, Mr Dillon?'
'Far better than I had expected, sir, I confess.'
'Well now, my dear sir,' said Jack to Stephen, 'what do you say to a little music, if your ears are not quite numbed? Is it any good inviting you, Dillon? Mr Marshall has the deck at present, I believe.'
'Thank you, sir, thank you very much. But you know what a sad waste music is on me – pearls before swine.'
'I am really pleased with tonight's exercise,' said Jack, tuning his fiddle. 'Now I feel I can run inshore with a clearer Conscience – without risking the poor sloop too much.'
'I am happy you are pleased; and certainly the mariners seemed to ply their pieces with a wonderful dexterity; but you must allow me to insist that that note is not A.'
'Ain't it?' cried Jack anxiously. 'Is this better?'
Stephen nodded, tapped his foot three times, and they dashed away into Mr Brown's Minorcan divertimento.
'Did you notice my bowing in the pump-pump-pump piece?' asked Jack.
'I did indeed. Very sprightly, very agile. I noticed you neither struck the hanging shelf nor yet the lamp. I only grazed the locker once myself.'
'I believe the great thing is not to think of it. Those fellows, rattling their guns in and out, did not think of it. Clapping on to the tackles, sponging, swabbing, ramming – it has grown quite mechanical. I am very pleased with them, particularly three and five of the port broadside. They were the merest parcel of lubbers to begin with, I do assure you.'
'You are wonderfully earnest to make them proficient.'
'Why, yes: there is not a moment to be lost.'
'Well. You do not find this sense of constant hurry oppressive – jading?'
'Lord, no. It is as much part of our life as salt pork -even more so in tide-flow waters. Anything can happen, in five minutes' time, at sea – ha, ha, you should hear Lord Nelson! In this case of gunnery, a single broadside can bring down a mast and so win a fight; and there's no telling, from one hour to the next, when we may have to fire it. There is no telling, at sea.'
How profoundly true. An all-seeing eye, an eye that could pierce the darkness, would have beheld the track of the Spanish frigate Cacafuego running down to Carthagena, a track that certainly would have cut the Sophie's if the sloop had not lingered a quarter of an hour to dowse her lighted casks; but as it was the Cacafuego passed silently a mile and a half to the westward of the Sophie, and neither caught sight of the other. The same eye would have seen a good many other vessels in the neighbourhood of Cape Nao for, as Jack knew very well, everything coming up from Almena, Alicante or Malaga had to round that headland: it would particularly have noticed a small convoy bound for Valencia under the protection of a letter of marque; and it would have seen that the Sophie's course (if persisted in) would bring her inshore and to the windward of the convoy in the half hour before first light.
'Sir, sir,' piped Babbington into Jack's ear.
'Hush, sweetheart,' murmured his captain, whose dreaming mind was occupied with quite another sex.
'Mr Dillon says, top lights in the offing, sir.'
'Ha,' said Jack, instantly awake, and ran up on to the grey deck in his nightshirt.
'Good morning, sir,' said James, saluting and offering his night-glass.
'Good morning, Mr Dillon,' said Jack, touching his nightcap in reply and taking the telescope. 'Where away?'
'Right on the beam, sir.'
'By God, you have good eyes,' said Jack, lowering the glass, wiping it and peering again into the shifting sea-haze. 'Two. Three. I think a fourth.'
The Sophie was lying there, hove to, with her foretopsail to the mast and her maintopsail almost full, the one counterbalancing the other as she lay right under the dark cliff. The wind – what wind there was – was a puffy, unreliable air from the north-north-west, smelling of the warm hillside; but presently, as the land grew warmer, it would no doubt veer to the north-east or even frankly into the east itself. Jack gripped the shrouds. 'Let us consider the positions from the top,' he said. 'God damn and blast these skirts.'
The light increased; the thinning haze unveiled five vessels in a straggling line, or rather heap; they were all hull-up, and the nearest was no more than a quarter of a mile away.
From north to south they ran, first the Gloire, a very fast ship-rigged Toulon privateer with twelve eight-pounders, chartered by a wealthy Barcelona merchant named Jaume Mateu to protect his two settees, the Pardal and the Xaloc, of six guns apiece, the second carrying a valuable (and illegal) cargo of uncustomed quicksilver into the bargain; the Pardal lay under the privateer's quarter to leeward; then, almost abreast of the Pardal but to windward and only four or five hundred yards from the Sophie, the Santa Lucia, a Neopolitan snow, a prize belonging to the Gloire, filled with disconsolate French royalists taken on their passage to Gibraltar; then came the second settee, the Xaloc; and lastly a tartan that had joined the company off Alicante, glad of the protection from Barbary rovers, Minorcan letters of marque and British cruisers. They were all smallish vessels; they all expected danger from the seaward (which was why they kept inshore – an uncomfortable, perilous way of getting along, compared with the long course of the open sea, but one that allowed them to run for the shelter of coastal batteries); and if any of them noticed the Sophie in the stronger light they said, 'Why, a little brig, creeping along close to the land: for Deсia, no doubt.'
'What do you make of the ship?' asked Jack.
'I cannot count her ports in this light. She seems a little small for one of their eighteen-gun corvettes. But at all events she is of some force; and she is the watch-dog.'
'Yes.' That was certain. She lay there to the windward of the convoy as the wind veered and as they rounded the cape. Jack's mind was beginning to move fast. The flowing series of possibilities ran smoothly before his judgment: he was both the commander of that ship and of this sloop under his feet.
'May I make a suggestion, sir?'
'Yes,' said Jack in a flat voice. 'So long as we do not hold a council of war – they never decide anything.' He had asked Dillon up here as an attention due to him for having detected the convoy; he really did not want to consult him, or any other man, and he hoped Dillon would not break in on his racing ideas with any remarks whatever, however wise. Only one person could deal with this: the Sophie's master and commander.
'Perhaps I should beat to quarters, sir?' said James stiffly, for the hint had been eminently clear.
'You see that slovenly little snow between us and the ship?' said Jack, breaking across him. 'If we gently square our foreyard we shall be within a hundred yards of her in ten minutes, and she will mask us from the ship. D'ye see what I mean?'
'Yes, sir.'
'With the cutter and the launch full of men you can take her before she's aware. You make a noise, and the ship bears up to protect her: he has no way on him to tack – he must wear; and if you put the snow before the wind, I can pass through the gap and rake him once or twice as he goes round, maybe knocking away a spar aboard the settee at the same time. On deck, there,' he called in a slightly louder voice, 'silence on deck. Send those men below' -for the rumour had spread, and men were running up the forward hatchway. 'The boarders away, then – we should be best advised to send all our black men: they are fine lusty fellows, and the Spaniards dread them – the sloop cleared for action with the least possible show and the men ready to fly to their quarters. But all kept below out of sight: all but a dozen. We must look like a merchantman.' He swung over the edge of the top, his nightshirt billowing round his head. 'The frappings may be cut, but no other preparation that can be seen.'
'The hammocks, sir?'
'Yes, by God,' said Jack, pausing. 'We shall have to get them up precious fast, if we are not to fight without 'em -a damned uncomfortable state. But do not let one come on deck until the boarders are away. Surprise is everything.
Surprise, surprise. Stephen's surprise at being jerked awake with 'Quarters, sir, quarters,' and at finding himself in the midst of an extraordinarily intense muted activity -people hurrying about in almost pitch darkness – not a glim – the gentle clash of weapons secretly handed out -the boarders creeping over the landward side and into the boats by twos and threes – the bosun's mates hissing 'Stand by, stand by for quarters, all hands stand by,' in the nearest possible approach to a whispered shout – warrant officers and petty officers checking their teams, quieting the Sophie's fools (she bore a competent share), who urgently wanted to know what? what? and why? Jack's voice calling down into the gloom, 'Mr Ricketts. Mr Babbington.' 'Sir?' 'When I give the word you and the topmen are to go aloft at once: topgallants and courses to be set instantly.' 'Aye aye, sir.'
Surprise. The slow, growing surprise of the sleepy watch aboard the Santa Lucia, gazing at this brig as it drifted closer and closer: did it mean to join company? 'She is that Dane who is always plying. up and down the coast,' stated Jean Wiseacre. Their sudden total amazement at the sight of two boats coming out from behind the brig and racing across the water. After the first moment's unbelief they did their best: they ran for their muskets, they pulled out their cutlasses and they began to cast loose a gun; but each of the seven men acted for himself, and they had less than a minute to make up their minds; so when the roaring Sophies hooked on at the fore and main chains and came pouring over the side the prize crew met them with no more than one musket-shot, a couple of pistols and a half-hearted clash of swords. A moment later the four liveliest had taken to the rigging, one had darted below and two lay upon the deck.
Dillon kicked open the cabin door, glared at the young privateer's mate along a heavy pistol and said, 'You surrender?'
'Oui, monsieur,' quavered the youth.
'On deck,' said Dillon, jerking his head. 'Murphy, Bus-sell, Thompson, King, clap on to those hatch-covers. Bear a hand, now. Davies, Chambers, Wood, start the sheets. Andrews, fiat in the jib.' He ran to the wheel, heaved a body out of the way and put up the helm. The Santa
Lucia paid off slowly, then faster and faster. Looking over his shoulder he saw the topgallants break out in the Sophie, and in almost the same moment the foresail, mainstaysail and boom mainsail: ducking to peer under the snow's forecourse, he saw the ship ahead of him beginning to wear – to turn before the wind and come back on the other tack to rescue the prize. There was great activity aboard her: there was great activity aboard the three other vessels of the convoy – men racing up and down, shouts, whistles,
the distant beating of a drum – but in this gentle breeze, and with so little canvas abroad, they all of them moved with a dream-like slowness, quietly following smooth predestinate curves. Sails were breaking out all over, but still the vessels had no way on them, and because of their slowness he had the strangest impression of silence – a silence broken a moment later as the Sophie came shaving past the snow's larboard bow with her colours flying, and gave them a thundering cheer. She alone had a fair bow-wave, and with a spurt of pride James saw that every sail was sheeted home, taut and drawing already. The hammocks were piling up at an incredible speed – he saw two go by the board – and on the quarter-deck, stretching up over the nettings, Jack raised his hat high, calling 'Well done indeed, sir,' as they passed. The boarders cheered their shipmates in return; and as they did so the atmosphere of terrible killing ferocity on the deck of the snow changed entirely. They cheered again, and from within the snow, under the hatches, there came a generalized answering howl.
The Sophie, all sails abroad, was running at close on four knots. The Gloire had little more than steerage-way, and she was already committed to this wheeling movement was already engaged upon the gradual curve down-wind that would turn her unprotected stern to the Sophie's fire. There was less than a quarter of a mile between them, and the gap was closing fast. But the Frenchman was no fool;
Jack saw the ship's mizen topsail laid to the mast and the main and fore yards squared so that the wind should thrust the Stern away to leewaids and reverse the movement – for the rudder had no bite at all.
'Too late, my friend, I think,' said Jack. The range was narrowing. Three hundred yards. Two hundred and fifty. 'Edwards,' he said to the captain of the aftermost gun, 'Fire across the settee's bows.' The shot, in fact, went through the settee's foresail. She started her halliards, her sails came down with a run and an agitated figure hurried aft to raise his colours and lower them emphatically. There was no time to attend to the settee, however. 'Luff up,' he said. The Sophie came closer to the wind: her foresail shivered once and filled again. The Gloire was well within the forward traverse of the guns. 'Thus, thus,' he said, and all along the line he heard the grunt and heave as the guns were heaved round a trifle to keep them bearing. The crews were silent, exactly-placed and tense; the spongers knelt with the lighted matches in their hands, gently blowing to keep them in a glow, facing rigidly inboard; the captains crouched glaring along the barrels at that defenceless stern and quarter.
'Fire.' The word was cut off by the roar; a cloud of smoke hid the sea, and the Sophie trembled to her keel. Jack was unconsciously stuffing his shirt into his breeches when he saw that there was something amiss – something wrong with the smoke: a sudden fault in the wind, a sudden gust from the north-east, sent it streaming down astern; and at the same moment the sloop was taken aback, her head pushed round to starboard.
'Hands to the braces,' called Marshall, putting up the helm to bring her back. Back she came, though slowly, and the second broadside roared out: but the gust had pushed the Gloire's stern round too, and as the smoke cleared so she replied. In the seconds between Jack had had time to see that her stern and quarter had suffered – cabin windows and little gallery smashed in; that she carried twelve guns; and that her colours were French.
The Sophie had lost much of her way, and the Gloire, now right back on her original larboard tack, was fast gathering speed; they sailed along on parallel courses, close-hauled to the fitful breeze, the Sophie some way behind. They sailed along, hammering one another in an almost continuous din and an unbroken smoke, white, grey-black and lit with darting crimson stabs of fire. On and on: the glass turned, the bell clanged, the smoke lay thick: the convoy vanished astern.
There was nothing to say, nothing to do: the gun-captains had their orders and they were obeying them with splendid fury, firing for the hull, firing as quickly as they could; the midshipmen in charge of the divisions ran un and down the line, bearing a hand, dealing with any beginning of confusion; the powder and shot travelled up from the magazine with perfect regularity; the bosun and his mates roamed gazing up for damage to the rigging; in the tops the sharpshooters' muskets crackled briskly. He stood there reflecting: a little way to his left, scarcely flinching as the balls came whipping in or hulled the sloop (a great rending thump), stood the clerk and Ricketts, the quarter-deck midshipman. A ball burst through the packed hammock-netting, crossed a few feet in front of him, struck an iron netting-crane and lost its force on the hammocks the other side – an eight-pounder, he noticed, as it rolled towards him.
The Frenchman was firing high, as usual, and pretty wild: in the blue, smokeless, peaceful world to windward he saw splashes as much as fifty yards ahead and astern of them – particularly ahead. Ahead: from the flashes that lit the far side of the cloud and from the change of sound it was clear that the Gloire was forging ahead.
That would not do. 'Mr Marshall,' he said, picking up his speaking-trumpet, 'we will cross under her stern.' As he raised the trumpet there was a tumult and shouting forward – a gun was over on its side: perhaps two. 'Avast firing there,' he called with great force. 'Stand by, the larboard guns.'
The smoke cleared. The Sophie began to turn to starboard, moving to cross the enemy's wake and to bring her port broadside to bear on the Gloire's stern, raking her whole length. But the Gloire was having none of it: as though warned by an inner voice, her captain had put up his helm within five seconds of the Sophie's doing so, and now, with the smoke clearing again, Jack, standing by the larboard hammocks, saw him at his taffrail, a small trim grizzled man a hundred and fifty yards away, looking fixedly back. The Frenchman reached behind him for a musket, and resting his elbows on the taffrail he very deliberately aimed it at Jack. The thing was extraordinarily personal:
Jack felt an involuntary stiffening of the muscles of his face and chest – a tendency to hold his breath.
'The royals, Mr Marshall,' he said. 'She is drawing away from us.' The gunfire had died away as the guns ceased to bear, and in the lull he heard the musket-shot part almost as if it had been in his ear. In the same second of time Christian Pram, the helmsman, gave a shrill roar and half fell, dragging the wheel over with him, his forearm ploughed open from wrist to elbow. The Sophie's head flew up into the wind, and although Jack and Marshall had the wheel directly, the advantage was gone. The port broadside could only be brought to bear by a further turn that lost still more way; and there was no way to be lost. The Sophie was a good two hundred yards behind the Gloire now, on her starboard quarter, and the only hope was to gain speed, to range up and renew the battle. He and the master glanced up simultaneously: everything was set that could be set -the wind was too far forward for the studdingsails.
He stared ahead, watching for the stir aboard the chase, the slight change in her wake, that would mean a coming movement to starboard – the Gloire in her turn crossing the Sophie's stem, raking her fore and aft and bearing up to protect the scattered convoy. But he stared in vain. The Gloire held on to her course. She had drawn ahead of the Sophie even without her royals, but now these were setting: and the breeze was kinder to her, too. As he watched, the tears brimming over his eyelids from the concentration of his gaze against the rays of the sun, a slant of wind laid her over and the water ran creaming under her lee, her wake lengthening away and away. The grey-haired captain fired on pertinaciously, a man beside him passing loaded muskets, and one ball severed a ratline two feet from Jack's head; but they were almost beyond musket-range now, and in any case the indefinable frontier between personal animosity and anonymous warfare had been passed – it did not affect him.
'Mr Marshall,' he said, 'pray edge away until we can salute her. Mr Pullings – Mr Pullings, fire as they bear.'
The Sophie turned two, three, four points from her course.The bow gun cracked out, followed in even sequence by the rest of the port broadside. Too eager, alas: they were well pitched up, but the splashes showed twenty and even thirty yards astern. The Gloire, more attentive to her safety than her honour, and quite forgetful of her duty to Seсor Mateu, the unvindictive Gloire did not yaw to reply, but hauled her wind. Being a ship, she could point up closer than the Sophie, and she did not scruple to do so, profiting to the utmost by the favour of the breeze. She was plainly running away. Of the next broadside two balls seemed to bit her, and one certainly passed through her mizen topsail. But the target was diminishing every minute as their courses diverged, and hope diminished with it.
Eight broadsides later Jack stopped the firing. They had knocked her about shrewdly and they had ruined her looks, but they had not cut up her rigging to make her unmanageable, nor carried away any vital mast or yard. And they had certainly failed to persuade her to come back and fight it out yard-arm to yard-arm. He gazed at the flying Gloire, made up his mind and said, 'We will bear away for the cape again, Mr Marshall. Southsouth-west.'
The Sophie was remarkably little wounded. 'Are there any repairs that will not wait half an hour, Mr Watt?' he asked, absently hitching a stray slab-line round a pin.
'No, sir. The sailmaker will be busy for a while; but she sent us no chain nor bar, and she never clawed our rigging, not to say clawed. Poor practice, sir; very poor practice. Not like that wicked little old Turk, and the sharp raps he give US.'
'Then we will pipe the hands to breakfast and knot and splice afterwards. Mr Lamb, what damage do you find?'
'Nothing below the water-line, sir. Four right ugly holes amidships and two and four gun-ports well-nigh beat into one: that's the worst. Nothing to what we give her (the sodomite),' he added, under his breath.
Jack went forward to the dismounted gun. A ball from the Gloire had shattered the bulwark where the aft ring-bolts were fastened, just as number four was on the recoil. The gun, partly checked on the other side, had slewed round, jamming its run-out neighbour and oversetting. By wonderful good luck the two men who should have been crushed between them were not there – one washing the blood from a graze off his face in the fire-bucket, the other hurrying for more slow-match – and by wonderful good luck the gun had gone over, rather than running murderously about the deck.
'Well, Mr Day,' he said, 'we were in luck one way, if not the other. The gun may go into the bows until Mr Lamb gives us fresh ring-bolts.'
As he walked aft, taking off his coat as he went – the heat was suddenly unbearable – he ran his eye along the south-western horizon. No sign of Cape Nao in the rising haze: not a sail to be seen. He had never noticed the rising of the sun, but there it was, well up into the sky; they must have run a surprising long way. 'By God, I could do with my coffee,' he said, coming abruptly back into a present in which ordinary time flowed steadily once more and appetite mattered. 'But, however,' he reflected, 'I must go below.' This was the ugly side: this was where you saw what happened when a man's face and an iron ball met.
'Captain Aubrey,' said Stephen, clapping his book to the moment he saw Jack in the cockpit. 'I have a grave complaint to make.'
'I am concerned to hear it,' said Jack, peering about in the gloom for what he dreaded to see.
'They have been at my asp. I tell you, sir, they have been at my asp. I stepped into my cabin for a book not three minutes ago, and what did I see? My asp drained -drained, I say.'
'Tell me the butcher's bill; then I will attend to your asp.'
'Bah – a few scratches, a man with his forearm moderately scored, a couple of splinters to draw – nothing of consequence – mere bandaging. All you will find in the sick-bay is an obstinate gleet with low fever and a reduced inguinal hernia: and that forearm. Now my asp -,
'No dead? No wounded?' cried Jack, his heart leaping up.
'No, no, no. Now my asp -' He had brought it aboard in its spirits of wine; and at some point in very recent time a criminal hand had taken the jar, drunk up all the alcohol and left the asp dry, stranded, parched.
'I am truly sorry for it,' said Jack. 'But will not the fellow die? Must he not have an emetic?'
'He will not: that is what is so vexing. The bloody man, the more than Hun, the sottish rapparee, he will not die. It was the best double-refined spirits of wine. 'Pray come and breakfast with me in the cabin; a pint of coffee and a well-broiled chop between you and the asp will take away the sting – will appease…' In his gaiety of heart, Jack was very near a witticism; he felt it floating there, almost within reach; but somehow it escaped and he confined himself to laughing as cheerfully as Stephen's vexation would with decency allow and observing, 'The damned
Villain ran clean away from us; and I am afraid we shall have but a tedious time making our way back.! wonder, I wonder whether Dillon managed to pick up the settee, or whether she ran for it, too.'
It was a natural curiosity, a curiosity shared by every man aboard the Sophie, apart from Stephen; but it was not to be satisfied that forenoon, nor yet for a great while after the sun had crossed the meridian. Towards noon the wind fell to something very near a calm; the newly-bent sails flapped, hanging in flaccid bulges from their yards, and the men working on the tattered set had to be protected by an awning. It was one of those intensely humid days when the air has no nourishment in it, and it was so hot that even with all his restless eagerness to recover his boarders, secure his prize and move on up the coast, Jack could not find it in his heart to order out the sweeps. The men had fought the ship tolerably well (though the guns were still too slow by far) and they had been very active repairing what damage the Gloire had inflicted. 'I will let them be at least until the dog-watch,' he reflected.
The heat pressed down upon the sea; the smoke from the galley funnel hung along the deck, together with the smell of grog and the hundredweight or so of salt beef the Sophies had devoured at dinner-time: the regular tang-tang of the bell came at such long intervals that long before the snow was seen it appeared to Jack that this morning's sharp encounter must belong to another age, another life or, indeed (had it not been for a lingering smell of powder in the cushion under his head), to another kind of experience – to a tale he had read. Stretched out on the locker under his stern window, Jack revolved this in his mind, revolved it again more slowly, and again, and so sank far down and away.
He woke suddenly, refreshed, cool and perfectly aware that the Sophie had been running easily for a considerable time, with a breeze that leant her over a couple of strakes, bringing her heels higher than his head.
'I am afraid those damned youngsters woke you, sir,' said Mr Marshall with solicitous vexation. 'I sent 'em aloft, but I fear it was too late Calling out and hallooing like a pack of baboons. Damn their capars.'
Although he was singularly open and truthful, upon the whole, Jack at once replied, 'Oh, I was not asleep.' On deck he glanced up at the two mastheads, where the midshipmen were peering anxiously down to see whether their offence was reported. Meeting his eye, they at once stared away, with a great demonstration of earnest duty, in the direction of the snow and her accompanying settee, rapidly closing with the Sophie on the easterly breeze.
'There she is,' said Jack inwardly, with intense satisfaction. 'And he picked up the settee. Good, active fellow capital seaman.' His heart warmed to Dillon – it would have been so easy to let that second prize slip away while be was making sure of the crew of the snow. Indeed, it must have called for extraordinary exertions on his part to pin the two of them, for the settee would never have respected her surrender for a moment.
'Well done, Mr Dillon,' he cried, as James came aboard, guiding a figure in a tattered, unknown uniform over the side. 'Did she try to run?'
'She tried, sir,' said James. 'Allow me to present Captain La Hire, of the French royal artillery.' They took off their hats, bowed and shook hands. La Hire said, 'Appy,' in a low, pйnйtrй tone: and Jack said, 'Domestique, monsieur.'
'The snow was a Neapolitan prize, sir: Captain La Hire was good enough to take command of the French royalist passengers and the Italian seamen, keeping the prize-crew under control while we pulled across to take possession of the settee. I am sorry to say the tartan and the other settee were too far to windward by the time we had secured her,
and they have run down the coast – they are lying under the guns of the battery at Almoraira.'
'Ah? We will look into the bay when we have the prisoners across. Many prisoners, Mr Dillon?'
'Only about twenty, sir, since the snow's people are allies. They were on their way to Gibraltar.'
'When were they taken?'
'Oh, she's a fair prize, sir – a good eight days since.'
'So much the better. Tell me, was there any trouble?'
'No, sir. Or very little. We knocked two of the prize-crew on the head, and there was a foolish scuffle aboard the settee – a man pistolled. I hope all was well with you, sir?'
'Yes, yes – no one killed, no serious wounds. She ran away from us too fast to do much damage: sailed four miles to our three, even without her royals. A most prodigious fine sailer.'
Jack had a notion that some fleeting reserve passed across James Dillon's face, or perhaps showed in his voice; but in the hurry of things to be done, prizes to survey, prisoners to be dealt with, he could not tell why it affected him so unpleasantly until some two or three hours later, when the impression was reinforced and at least half defined.
He was in his cabin: spread out on the table was the chart of Cape Nao, with Cape Almoraira and Cape Ifach jutting out from its massive under-side, and the little village of Almoraira at the bottom of the bay between them: on his right sat James, on his left Stephen, and opposite him Mr Marshall. what is more,' he was saying, 'the Doctor tells me the Spaniard says that the other settee has a cargo of quicksilver hidden in sacks of flour, so we must handle her with great care.'
'Oh, of course,' said James Dillon. Jack looked at him sharply, then down at the chart and at Stephen's drawing: it showed a little bay with a village and a square tower at the bottom of it: a low mole ran twenty or thirty yards out into the sea, turned left-handed for another fifty and ended in a rocky knob, thus enclosing a harbour sheltered from all but the south-west wind. Steep-to cliffs ran from the village right round to the north-east point of the bay. On the other side there was a sandy beach all the way from the tower to the south-west point, where the cliffs reared up again. 'Could the fellow possibly think I am shy?' he thought.
'That I left off chasing because I did not choose to get hurt and hurried back for a prize?' The tower commanded the entrance to the harbour; it stood some twenty yards to the south of the village and the gravel beach, where the fishing-boats were hauled out. 'Now this knob at the end of the jetty,' he said aloud, 'would you say it was ten foot high?'
'Probably more. It is eight or nine years since I was there,' said Stephen, 'so I will not be absolute; but the chapel on it withstands the tall waves in the winter storms.'
'Then it will certainly protect our hull. Now, with the sloop anchored with a spring on her cable so' – running his finger in a line from the battery to the rock and so to the spot – 'she should be tolerably safe. She opens as heavy a fire as she can, playing on the mole and over the tower. The boats from the snow and the settee land at the Doctor's cove' – pointing to a little indentation just round the south-west point – 'and we run as fast as ever we can along the shore and so take the tower from behind. Twenty yards short of it we fire the rocket and you turn your guns well away from the battery, but blaze away without stopping.'
'Me, sir?' cried James.
'Yes, you, sir; I am going ashore.' There was no answering the decision of this statement, and after a pause he went on to the detailed arrangements. 'Let us say ten minutes to run from the cove to the tower, and…'
'Allow twenty, if you please,' said Stephen. 'You portly men of a sanguine complexion often die suddenly, from un considered exertion in the heat. Apoplexy – congestion.'
'I wish, I wish you would not say things like that, Doctor,' said Jack, in a low tone: they all looked at Stephen with some reproach and Jack added, 'Besides, I am not portly.'
'The captain has an uncommon genteel figgar,' said Mr Marshall.
The conditions were perfect for the attack. The remains of the easterly wind would carry the Sophie in, and the breeze that would spring up off the land at about moon-rise would carry her into the offing, together with anything they managed to cut out. In his long survey from the masthead, Jack had made out the settee and a number of other vessels moored to the inner wall of the mole, as well as a row of fishing-boats hauled up along the shore: the settee was at the chapel end of the mole, directly opposite the guns of the tower, a hundred yards on the other side of the harbour.
'I may not be perfect,' he reflected, 'but by God I am not shy; and if we cannot bring her out, then by God I shall burn her where she lies.' But these reflexions did not last long. From the deck of the Neapolitan snow he watched the Sophie round Cape Almoraira in the three-quarter darkness and stand into the bay, while the two prizes, with the boats in tow, bore away for the point on the other side. With the settee already in the port there was no possibility of surprise for the Sophie, and before she anchored she would have to undergo the fire of the battery. If there was to be a surprise it would lie with the boats: the night was almost certainly too dark now for the prizes to be seen crossing outside the bay to land the boats in Stephen's cove beyond the point -'one of the few I know where the white-bellied swift builds her nest'. Jack watched her going with a tender and extreme anxiety, torn with longing to be in both places at once: the possibilities of hideous failure flooded into his mind – the shore guns (how big were they? Stephen had been unable to tell) hulling the Sophie again and again, the heavy shot passing through both sides – the wind falling, or getting up to blow dead on shore – not enough hands left aboard to sweep her out of range – the boats all astray. It was a foolhardy attempt, absurdly rash. 'Silence fore and aft,' he cried harshly. 'Do you want to wake the whole coast?'
He had had no idea how deeply he felt about his sloop: he knew exactly how she would be moving in – the particular creak of her mainyard in its parrel, the whisper of her rudder magnified by the sounding-board of her stern; and the passage across the bay seemed to him intolerably long.
'Sir,' said Pullings. 'I think we have the point on our beam now.'
'You are right, Mr Pullings,' said Jack, studying it through his night-glass. 'See the lights of the village going, one after the other. Port your helm, Algren. Mr Pullings,
send a good man into the chains: we should have twenty fathom directly.' He walked to the taffrail and called over dark water, 'Mr Marshall, we are standing in.' The high black bar of the land, sharp against the less solid darkness of the starry sky: it came nearer and nearer, silently eclipsing Arcturus, then the whole of Corona: eclipsing even Vega, high up in the sky. The regular splash of the lead, the steady chant of the man in the weather chains: 'By the deep nine; by the deep nine; by the mark seven; and a quarter five; a quarter less five…
Ahead lay the pallor of the cove beneath the cliff, and a faint white edge of lapping wave. 'Right,' said Jack, and the snow came up into the wind, her foresail backing like a sentient creature. 'Mr Pullings, your party into the launch.'
Fourteen men filed fast by him and silently over the side into the creaking boat: each had his white arm-band on.
'Sergeant Quinn.' The marines followed, muskets faintly gleaming, their boots loud on the deck. Someone was grasping at his stomach. It was Captain La Hire, a volunteer attached to the soldiers, looking for his hand. 'Good lucky,' he said, shaking it.
'Merci very much,' said Jack, adding, 'Mon captain,' over the side; and at that moment a flash lit the sky, followed by the deep thump of a heavy gun.
'Is that cutter alongside?' said Jack, his night-eyes half blinded by the flash.
'Here, sir,' said the voice of his coxswain just beneath him. Jack swung over, dropped down. 'Mr Ricketts, where is the dark lantern?'
'Under my jacket, sir.'
'Show it over the stern. Give way.' The gun spoke again, followed almost immediately by two together: they were trying for the range, that was sure: but it was a damned roaring great note for a gun. A thirty-six pounder? Peering round he could see the four boats behind him, a vague line against the loom of the snow and the settee. Mechanically he patted his pistols and his sword: he had rarely felt more nervous, and his whole being was concentrated in his right ear for the sound of the Sophie's broadside.
The cutter was racing through the water, the oars creaking as the men heaved, and the men themselves grunting deep with the effort – ugh, ugh. 'Rowed-off all,' said the coxswain quietly, and a few seconds later the boat shot hissing up the gravel. The men were out and had hauled it up before the launch grounded, followed by the snow's boat with Mowett, the jolly-boat with the bosun and the settee's launch with Marshall.
The little beach was crowded with men. 'The line, Mr Watt?' said Jack.
'There she goes,' said a voice, and seven guns went off, thin and faint behind the cliff.
'Here we are, sir,' cried the bosun, heaving two coils of one-inch line off his shoulder.
Jack seized the end of one, saying, 'Mr Marshall, clap on to yours, and each man to his knot.' As orderly as though they had been mustering by divisions aboard the Sophie, the men fell into place. 'Ready? Ready there? Then tear away.'
He set off for the point, where the beach narrowed to a few feet under the cliff, and behind him, fast to the knotted line, ran his half of the landing-party. There was a bubbling furious excitement rising in his chest the waiting was over this was the now itself. They came round the point and at once there were blinding fireworks before them and the noise increased tenfold: the tower firing with three, four deep red lances very low over the ground, the Sophie, her brailed-up topsails clear in the irregular flashes that lit up the whole sky, hammering away with a fine, busy, rolling fire, playing on the jetty to send stone splinters flying and discourage any attempt at warping the settee ashore. As far as he could judge from this angle, she was in exactly the position they had laid down on the chart, with the dark mass of the chapel rock on her port beam. But the tower was farther than he had expected. Beneath his delight – indeed, his something near a rapture – he could feel his body labouring, his legs heaving him slowly along as his boots sank into the soft sand. He must not, must not fall, he thought, after a stumble; and then again at the sound of a man going down on Marshall's rope. He shaded his eyes from the flashes, looked with an unbelievably violent effort away from the battle, ploughed on and on and on, – the pounding of his heart almost choking his mind, hardly progressing at all. But now suddenly it was harder ground, and as though he had dropped a ten-stone load he flew along, running, really running. This was packed, noiseless sand, and all along behind him he could hear the hoarse, gasping, catching breath of the landing-party. The battery was hurrying towards them at last, and through the gaps in the parapet he could see busy figures working the Spanish guns. A shot from the Sophie, glancing off the chapel rock, howled over their heads; and now an eddy in the breeze brought a choking gust of the tower's powder-smoke.
Was it time for the rocket? The fort was very close -they could hear the voices loud and the rumble of trucks. But the Spaniards were wholly engrossed with answering the Sophie's fire: they could get a little closer, a little closer, closer still. They were all creeping now, by one accord, all clearly visible to one another in the flashes and the general glow. 'The rocket, Bonden,' murmured Jack. 'Mr Watt, the grapnels. Check your arms, all.'
The bosun fixed the three-pronged grapnels to the ropes; the coxswain planted the rockets, struck a spark on to tinder and stood by cherishing it; against the tremendous din of the battery there was a little metallic clicking and the easing of belts; the strong panting lessened.
'Ready?' whispered Jack.
'Ready, sir,' whispered the officers.
He bent. The fuse hissed; and the rocket went away, a red trail and a high blue burst. 'Come on,' he shouted, and his voice was drowned in a great roaring cheer, 'Ooay, ooay!'
Running, running. Dump down into the dry ditch, pistols snapping through the embrasures, men swarming up the ropes on to the parapet, shouting, shouting; a bubbling scream. His coxswain's voice in his ear, 'Give us your fist, mate.' The tearing roughness of stone and there he was, up, whipping his sword out, a pistol in the other hand: but there was no one to fight. The gunners, apart from two on the ground and another kneeling bent over his wound near the great shaded lantern behind the guns, were dropping one by one over the wall and running for the village.
'Johnson! Johnson!' he cried. 'Spike up those guns. Sergeant Quinn, keep up a rapid fire. Light along those spikes.'
Captain La Hire was beating the locks off the heated twenty-four-pounders with a crowbar. 'Better make leap,' he said. 'Make all leap in the air.'
'Vou savez faire leap in the air?'
'Eh, pardi,' said La Hire with a smile of conviction.
'Mr Marshall, you and all the people are to cut along to the jetty. Marines form at the landward end, sergeant, firing all the time, whether they see anyone or not. Get the settee's head round, Mr Marshall, and her sails loosed. Captain La Hire and I are going to blow up the fort.'
'By God,' said Jack, 'I hate an official letter.' His ears were still singing from the enormous bang (a second powder magazine in a vault below the first had falsified Captain La Hire's calculations) and his eyes still swam with yellow shapes from the incandescent leaping half-mile tree of light; his head and neck were horribly painful from all the left-hand half of his long hair having been burnt off – his scalp and face were hideously seared and bruised; on the table in front of him lay four unsatisfactory attempts; and under the Sophie's lee lay the three prizes, urgent to be away for Mahon on the favourable wind, while far behind them the smoke still rose over Almoraira.
'Now just listen to this one, will you,' he said, 'and tell me if it is good grammar and proper language. It begins like the others: Sophie, at sea; My Lord, I have the honour to acquaint YOU that pursuant to my orders I proceeded to Cape Nao, where I fell in with a convoy of three sail under the conduct of a French corvetto of twelve guns.
Then I go on to put about the snow – merely touch upon the engagement, with a fling about his alacrity – and come to the landing-party. Upon its appearing that the remainder of the convoy had run under the guns of the Almoraira battery it was determined that they should be attempted to be cut out which was happily accomplished, the battery (a square tower mounting four iron twenty-four-pounders) being blown up at twenty-seven minutes after two, the boats having proceeded to the SSW point of the bay. Three tartans that had been hauled up and chained were obliged to be burnt, but the settee was brought out, when she proved to be the Xaloc, loaded with a valuable cargo of quicksilver concealed in sacks of flour. Pretty bald, ain't it? However, I go on. The zeal and activity of Lieutenant Dillon, who took his Majesty's sloop I have the honour to command, in, and kept up an incessant fire on the mole and battery, I am much indebted to. All the officers and men behaved so well that it were insidious to particularize; but I must acknowledge the politeness of Mons. La Hire, of the royal French artillery, who volunteered his services in setting and firing the train to the magazine, and who was somewhat bruised and singed. Enclosed is a list of the killed and wounded: John Hayter, marine, killed; James Nightingale, seaman, and Thomas
Thompson, seaman, wounded. I have the honour to be, my Lord – and so on. What do you think of it?'
'Well, it is somewhat clearer than the last,' said Stephen. 'Though I fancy invidious might answer better than insidious.'
'Invidious, of course. I knew there was something not quite shipshape there. Invidious. A capital word: I dare say you spell it with a V?'
The Sophie lay off San Pedro: she had been extraordinarily busy this last week, and she was rapidly perfecting her technique, staying well over the horizon by day, while the military forces of Spain hurried up and down the coast looking for her, and standing in at night to play Old Harry with the little ports and the coast-wise trade in the hours before dawn. It was a dangerous, highly personal way of carrying on; it called for very careful preparation; it made great and continual demands on luck; and it had been remarkably successful. It also made great demands on the Sophie's people, for when they were in the offing Jack exercised them mercilessly at the guns and James at the still brisker setting of sails. James was as taut an officer as any in the service: he liked a clean ship, action or no action, and there was no cutting-out expedition or dawn skirmishing that did not come back to gleaming decks and resplendent brass. He was particular, as they said; but his zeal for trim paintwork, perfectly-drawing sails, squared yards, clear tops and flemished ropes was, in fact, surpassed by his delight in taking the whole frail beautiful edifice into immediate contact with the King's enemies, who might wrench it to pieces, shatter, burn or sink it. The Sophie's people bore up under all this with wonderful spirit, however, a worn, lean and eager crew, filled with precise ideas of what they should do the minute they stepped ashore from the liberty-boat -filled, too, with a tolerably precise notion of the change in relations on the quarter-deck: Dillon's marked respect and attention to the captain since Almoraira, their walking up and down together and their frequent consultations had not passed unnoticed; and, of course, the conversation at the gun-room table, in which the lieutenant spoke in the highest terms of the shore-party's action, had at once been repeated throughout the sloop.
'Unless my adding is out,' said Jack, looking up from his paper, 'we have taken, sunk or burnt twenty-seven times our own weight since the beginning of the cruise; and had they all been together they could have fired forty-two guns at us, counting the swivels. That is what the admiral meant by wringing the Spaniard's tugs; and' – laughing heartily -'if it puts a couple of thousand guineas in our pockets, why, so much the better.'
'May I come in, sir?' asked the purser, appearing in the open door.
'Good morning, Mr Ricketts. Come in, come in and sit down. Are those today's figures?'
'Yes, sir. You will not be pleased, I am afraid. The second butt in the lower tier was started in the head, and it must have lost close on fifty gallon.'
'Then we must pray for rain, Mr Ricketts,' said Jack. But when the purser had gone he turned sadly to Stephen. 'I should have been perfectly happy but for that damned water: everything delightful – people behaving well, charming cruise, no sickness – if only I had completed our water at Mahon. Even at short allowance we use half a ton a day, what with all these prisoners and in this heat; the meat has to be soaked and the grog has to be mixed, even if we do wash in sea-water.' He had wholly set his heart on lying in the sea-lanes off Barcelona, perhaps the busiest convergency in the Mediterranean: that was to have been the culmination of the cruise. Now he would have to bear away for Minorca, and he was by no means sure of what welcome would be waiting for him there, or what orders; not much of his cruising time was left, and capricious winds or a capricious commandant might swallow it entirely – almost certainly would.
'If it is fresh water you are wanting, I can show you a creek not far from here where you may fill all the barrels you choose.'
'Why did you never tell me?' cried Jack, shaking him by the hand and looking delighted – a disagreeable sight, for the left side of his face, head and neck was still seared a baboonish red and blue, it shone under Stephen's medicated grease, and through the grease rose a new frizz of yellow hair; all this, taken with his deep brown, shaved other cheek, gave him a wicked, degenerate, inverted look.
'You never asked.'
'Undefended? No batteries?'
'Never a house, far less a gun. Yet it was inhabited once, for there are the remains of a Roman villa on the top of the promontory, and you can just make out the road beneath the trees and the undergrowth cistus and lentisk. No doubt they used the spring: it is quite considerable, and it may, I conceive, have real medicinal qualities. The country people use it in cases of impotence.'
'And can you find it, do you think?'
'Yes,' said Stephen. He sat for a moment with his head down. 'Listen,' he said, 'will you do me a kindness?'
'With all my heart.'
'I have a friend who lives some two or three miles inland: I should Like you to land me and pick me up, say, twelve hours later.'
'Very well,' said Jack. It was fair enough. 'Very well,' he said again, looking aside to hide the knowing grin that would spread over his face. 'It is the night you would wish to spend ashore, I presume. We will stand in this evening you are sure we shall not be surprised?'
'Quite sure.'
'- send the cutter in again a little after sunrise. But what if I am forced off the land? What would you do then?'
'I should present myself the next morning, or the morning after that – a whole series of mornings, if need be. I must go,' he said, getting up at the sound of the bell, the still-feeble bell, that his new loblolly boy rang to signify that the sick might now assemble. 'I dare not trust that fellow alone with the drugs.' The sin-eater had discovered a malignance towards his shipmates: he had been found grinding creta alba into their gruel, under the persuasion that it was a far more active substance, far more sinister; and if ill-will had been enough, the sick-bay would have been swept clean days ago.
The cutter, followed by the launch, rowed attentively in through the warm darkness, with Dillon and Sergeant Quinn keeping watch on the sides of the high wooded inlet; and when the boats were two hundred yards from the cliff the exhalation of the stone-pines, mixed with the scent of the gum-cistus, met them it was like breathing another element.
'If you row a little more to the right,' said Stephen, 'you may avoid the rocks where the crayfish live.' In spite of the heat he had his black cloak over his shoulders, and sitting huddled there in the stern-sheets he stared into the narrowing cove with a singular intensity, looking deathly pale.
The stream, in times of spate, had formed a little bar,
and upon this the cutter grounded: everybody leapt out to float it over, and two seamen carried Stephen ashore. They put him down tenderly, well above the high-water mark, adjured him to take care of all them nasty sticks laying about and hurried back for his cloak. Falling and falling, the water had made a basin in the rock at the top of the beach, and here the sailors filled their barrels, while the marines stood guard at the outward extremities.
'What an agreeable dinner it was,' observed Dillon, sitting with Stephen upon a smooth rock, warm through and through, convenient to their hams.
'I have rarely eaten a better,' said Stephen. 'Never at sea.' Jack had acquired a French cook from the Santa Lucia, a royalist volunteer, and he was putting on weight like a prize ox. 'You were in a very copious flow of spirits, too.'
'That was clean against the naval etiquette. At a captain's table you speak when you are spoken to, and you agree; it makes for a tolerably dismal entertainment, but that is the custom. And after all, he does represent the King, I suppose. But I felt I should cast etiquette adrift and make a particular exertion – should try to do the civil thing far more than usual. I have not been altogether fair to himself, you know – far from it,' he added, nodding towards the Sophie, 'and it was handsome to invite me.'
'He does love a prize. But prize-taking is not his prime concern.'
'Just so. Though in passing I may say not everyone would know it – he does himself injustice. I do not think the men know it, for example. If they were not kept well in check by the steady officers, the bosun and the gunner, and I must admit that fellow Marshall too, I think there would be trouble with them. There may be still: prize-money is heady stuff. From prize-money to breaking bulk and plunder is no great step – there has been some already. And from plunder and drunkenness to breaking out entirely and even to mutiny itself is not a terrible long way further. Mutinies always happen in ships where the discipline is either too lax or too severe.'
'You are mistaken, sure, when you say they do not know him: unlearned men have a wonderful penetration in these matters – have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong? It is a penetration that seems to dissipate, with a little education, somewhat as the ability to remember poetry will go. I have known peasants who could recite two or three thousand verses. But would you indeed say our discipline is relaxed? It surprises me, but then I know so little of naval things.'
'No. What is commonly called discipline is quite strict with us. What I mean is something else – the intermediate terms, they might be called. A commander is obeyed by his officers because he is himself obeying; the thing is not in its essence personal; and so down. If he does not obey, the chain weakens. How grave I am, for all love. It was that poor unlucky soldier at Mahon I was thinking of brought all this morality into my mind. Do you not find it happens very often, that you are as gay as Garrick at dinner and then by supper-time you wonder why God made the world?'
'I do. Where is the connexion with the soldier?'
'It was prize-money we fought over. He said the whole thing was unfair – he was very angry and very poor. But he would have it we sea-officers were in the Navy for that reason alone. I told him he was mistaken, and he told me I lied. We walked to those long gardens at the top end of the quay – I had Jevons of the Implacable with me – and it was over in two passes. Poor, stupid, clumsy fellow: he came straight on to my point. What now, Shannahan?'
'Your honour, the casks are full.'
'Bung 'em up tight, then, and we will get 'em down to the water.'
'Goodbye,' said Stephen, standing up.
'We lose you, then?' said James.
'Yes. I am going up before it grows too dark.'
Yet it would have had to be strangely dark for his feet to have missed this path. It wound up, crossing and recrossing the stream, its steps kept open by the odd fisherman after crayfish, the impotent men going to bathe in the pool and by a few other travellers; and his hand reached out of itself for the branch that would help him over a deep place – a branch polished by many hands.
Up and up: and the warm air sighing through the pines. At one point he stepped out on to a bare rock and there, wonderfully far below already, rowed the boats with their train of almost sunken barrels, not unlike the spaced-out eggs of the common toad; then the path ran back under the trees and he did not emerge again until he was on the thyme and the short turf, the rounded top of the promontory jutting out bare from the sea of pines. Apart from a violet haze on the farther hills and a startling band of yellow in the sky, colour had all gone; but he saw white scuts bobbing away, and as he had expected there were the half-seen forms of shadowy nightjars wheeling and darting, turning like ghosts over his head. He sat down by a great stone that said Non fui non sum non curo, and gradually the rabbits came back, nearer and nearer, until on the windward side he could indeed hear their quick nibbling in the thyme. He meant to sit there until dawn, and to establish a continuity in his mind, if that could be done: the friend (though existent) was a mere pretext. Silence, darkness and these countless familiar scents and the warmth of the land had become (in their way) as necessary to him as air.
'I think we may run in now,' said Jack. 'It will do no harm to be before our time, for I should like to stretch my legs a little. In any case, I should like to see him as early as can be; I am uneasy with him ashore. There are times when I feel he should not be allowed out alone; and then again there are times when I feel he could command a fleet, almost.'
The Sophie had been standing off and on, and it was now the end of the middle watch, with James Dillon relieving the master; they might just as well take advantage of having all hands on deck to tack the sloop, observed Jack, wiping the dew off the taffrail and leaning upon it to stare down at the cutter towing astern, clearly visible in the phosphorescence of the milk-warm sea.
'That's where we filled, sir,' said Babbington, pointing up the shadowy beach. 'And if it was not so dark you could see the little sorts of path the Doctor went up from here.'
Jack walked over to stare at the path and to view the basin; he walked stumpily, for he could not come by his land legs right away. The ground would not heave and yield like a deck; but as he paced to and fro in the half-light his body grew more used to the earth's rigidity, and in time his legs carried him with an easier, less rough and jerking action. He reflected upon the nature of the ground, upon the slow and uneven coming of the light – a progression by jerks – upon the agreeable change in his lieutenant since the brush at Almoraira and upon the curious alteration in the master, who was quite sullen at times. Dillon had a pack of hounds at home, thirty-five couple – had had some splendid runs – famous country it must be, and prodigious stout foxes to stand up so long – Jack had a great respect for a man who could show good sport with a pack of hounds. Dillon obviously knew a great deal about hunting, and about horses; yet it was strange he should mind so little about the noise his dogs made, for the cry of a tuneful pack.
The Sophie's warning gun jerked him from these placid reflexions. He whipped round, and there was the smoke drifting down her side. A hoist of signals was racing up, but without his glass he would not be able to make out the flags in this light: the sloop came round before the wind, and as though she could feel his perplexity of mind she reverted to the oldest of all signals, her topgallants loose and sheets flying, to say strange sails in sight; and she emphasized this with a second gun.
Jack glanced at his watch and with longing into the motionless silent pines: said, 'Lend me your knife, Bonden,' and picked up a big flattish stone. Regrediar he scratched on it (a notion of secrecy flitting through his mind), with the time and his initials. He struck it into the top of a little heap, took a last hopeless look into the wood and leapt aboard.
The moment the cutter was alongside the Sophie's yards creaked round, she filled and pointed straight out to sea.
'Men-of-war, sir, I am almost certain,' said James. 'I thought you would wish us to get into the. offing.'
'Very right, Mr Dillon,' said Jack. 'Will you lend me your glass?'
At the masthead, with his breath coming back and the light of day broad over the sharp, unmisted sea, he could make them out clearly. Two ships to windward, coming up fast from the south with all sails set: men-of-war for a ten-pound note. English? French? Spanish? There was more wind out there and they must be running a good ten knots. He glanced over his left shoulder, at the landing trending away eastwards out to sea. The Sophie would have a devil of a job rounding that cape before they were up with her; yet she must do so, or be shut in. Yes, they were men-of-war. They were hull-up now, and although he could not count the ports they were probably heavy frigates, thirty-six gun frigates: frigates for sure.
If the Sophie rounded the cape first she might have a chance: and if she ran through the shoal water between the point and the reef beyond it she would gain half a mile, for no deep-drafted frigate could follow her there.
'We will send the people to their breakfast, Mr Dillon,' he said. 'And then clear for action. If there is to be a dust-up, we might just as well have full bellies for it.'
But there were few bellies that filled themselves heartily aboard the Sophie that brilliant morning; a kind of impatient rigidity kept the oatmeal and hard-tack from going down regular and smooth; and even Jack's freshly-roasted, freshly-ground coffee wasted its scent on the quarter-deck as the officers stood very carefully gauging the respective courses, speeds and likely points of convergence: two frigates to windward, a hostile coast to leeward and the likelihood of being embayed – it was enough to take the edge off any appetite.
'Deck,' called the look-out from within the pyramid of tightly-drawing canvas, 'she's breaking out her colours, sir. Blue ensign.'
'Aye,' said Jack, 'I dare say. Mr Ricketts, reply with the same.'
Now every glass in the Sophie was trained upon the nearer frigate's foretopgallant for the private signal: for although anyone could heave out a blue ensign, only a King's ship could show the secret mark of recognition.
There it was: a red flag at the fore, followed a moment later by a white flag and a pendant at the main, and the faint boom of a windward gun.
All the tension slackened at once. 'Very well,' said Jack.
'Reply and then make our number. Mr Day, three guns to leeward in slow time.'
'She's the San Fiorenzo, sir,' said James, helping the flustered midshipman with the signal-book, whose prettily-coloured pages would race out of control in the freshening breeze. 'And she is signalling for Sophie's captain.'
'Christ,' said Jack inwardly. The San Fiorenzo's captain was Sir Harry Neale, who had been first lieutenant of the Resolution when Jack was her most junior midshipman, and then his captain in the Success: a great stickler for promptness, cleanliness, perfection of dress and hierarchy. Jack was unshaved; what hair he had left was in all directions; Stephen's bluish grease covered one half of his face.
But there was no help for it. 'Bear up to close her, then,' he said, and darted into his cabin.
'Here you are at last,' said Sir Harry, looking at him with marked distaste. 'By God, Captain Aubrey, you take your time.'
The frigate seemed enormous; after the Sophie her towering masts might have been those of a first-rate ship of the line; acres of pale deck stretched away on either hand. He had a ludicrous and at the same time a very painful feeling of being crushed down to a far smaller size, as well as that of being reduced all at once from a position of total authority to one of total subservience.
'I beg pardon, sir,' he said, without expression.
'Well. Come into the cabin. Your appearance don't change much, Aubrey,' he remarked, waving towards a chair. 'However, I am quite glad of the meeting. We are overburdened with prisoners and mean to discharge fifty of 'em into you.'
'I am sorry, sir, truly sorry, not to be able to oblige you, but the sloop is crowded with prisoners already.'
'Oblige, did you say? You will oblige me, sir, by obeying orders. Are you aware I am the senior captain here, sir? Besides, I know damned well you have been sending prize-crews into Mahon: these prisoners can occupy their room. Anyhow, you can land them in a few days' time; so let us hear no more of it.'
'But what about my cruise, sir?'
'I am less concerned with your cruise, sir, than with the good of the service. Let the transfer be carried out as quickly as possible, because I have further orders for you. We are sweeping for an American ship, the John B. Christopher. She is on her passage from Marseilles to the United States, calling at Barcelona, and we expect to find her between Majorca and the main. Among her passengers she may have two rebels, United Irishmen, the one a Romish priest called Mangan and the other a fellow by the name of Roche, Patrick Roche. They are to be taken off, by force if necessary. They will probably be using French names and have French passports: they speak French. Here is their description: a middle-sized spare man about forty years old, of a brown complexion and dark brown-coloured hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose; a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth. That's the parson. T'other is a tall stout man above six foot high, black hair and blue eyes, about thirty-five, has the little finger of his left hand cut off and walks stiff from a wound in hi" 7eg. You had better take these printed sheets.'
'Mr Dillon, prepare to receive twenty-five prisoners from San Fiorenzo and twenty-five from Amelia,' said Jack. 'And then we are to join in a sweep for some rebels.'
'Rebels?' cried James.
'Yes,' said Jack absently, peering beyond him at the slack foretopsail bowline and breaking off to call out an order. 'Yes. Pray glance at these sheets when you have leisure – leisure, forsooth.'
'Fifty more mouths,' said the purser. 'What do you say to that, Mr Marshall? Three and thirty full allowances. Where in God's name am I supposed to find it all?'
'We shall have to put into Mahon straight away, Mr Ricketts, that's what I say to it, and kiss my hand to the cruise. Fifty is impossible, and that's flat. You never saw two officers look so glum in your life. Fifty!'
'Fifty more of the buggers,' said James Sheehan, 'and all for their own imperial convenience. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.'
'And think of our poor doctor, all alone among them damned trees – why, there might be owls. God damn the service, I say, and the – San Fiorenzo, and the bleeding Amelia, too.'
'Alone? Don't you think it, mate. But damn the service to hell, just as you say.'
It was in this mood that the Sophie stretched away to the north-west, on the outward or right-hand extremity of the sweeping line. The Amelia lay half topsails down on her larboard beam and the San Fiorenzo the same distance inshore of the Amelia, quite out of sight of the Sophie and in the best position for picking up any slow prize that offered. Between them they could oversee sixty miles of the clear-skied Mediterranean; and so they sailed all day long.
It was indeed a long day, full and busy – the fore-hold to clear, the prisoners to stow away and guard (many of them privateer's men, a dangerous crew), three slow-witted heavy merchantmen to scurry after (all neutrals and all unwilling to heave-to; but one did report a ship, thought to be American, fishing her injured foretopmast two days' sail to windward) and the incessant trimming of the sails in the shifting, uncertain, dangerously gusty wind, to keep up with the frigates the Sophie's very best would only just avoid disgrace. And she was short-handed: Mowett,
Pullings and old Alexander, a reliable quartermaster, were away in prizes, together with nearly a third of her best men, so that James Dillon and the master had to keep watch and watch. Tempers ran short, too, and the defaulters' list lengthened as the day wore on.
'I did not think Dillon could be so savage,' thought Jack, as his lieutenant roared up into the foretop, making the weeping Babbington and his reduced band of topmen set the larboard topsail studdingsail afresh for the third time. It was true that the sloop was flying along at a splendid pace (for her); but in a way it was a pity to flog her so, to badger the men – too high a price to pay. However, that was the service, and he certainly must not interfere. His mind returned to its many problems and to worrying about Stephen: it was sheer madness, this rambling about on a hostile shore. And then again he was profoundly dissatisfied with himself for his performance aboard the San Fiorenzo. A gross abuse of authority: he should have dealt with it firmly. Yet there he was, bound hand and foot by the Printed Instructions and the Articles of War. And then again there was the problem of midshipmen. The sloop needed at least two more, a youngster and an oldster; he would ask Dillon if there was any boy he chose to nominate – cousin, nephew, godchild; it was a handsome compliment for a captain to pay his lieutenant, not unusual when they liked one another. As for the oldster, he wanted someone with experience, best of all someone who could be rated master's mate almost at once. His thoughts dwelt upon his coxswain, a fine seaman and captain of the maintop; then they moved on to consider the younger men belonging to the lower deck. He would far, far rather have someone who came in through the hawse-hole, a plain sailorman like young Pullings, than most of the youths whose families could afford to send them to sea… If the Spaniards caught Stephen Maturin they would shoot him for a spy.
It was almost dark by the time the third merchantman had been dealt with, and Jack was shattered with fatigue – red eyes prickling, ears four times too sharp and a feeling like a tight cord round his temples. He had been on deck all day, an anxious day that began two hours before first light, and he went to sleep almost before his head was down. Yet in that brief interval his darkening mind had time for two darts of intuition, the one stating that all was well with Stephen Maturin, the other that with James Dillon it was not. 'I had no notion he minded so about the cruise: though no doubt he has grown attached to Maturin too: a strange fellow,' he said, sinking right down.
Down, down, into the perfect sleep of an exhausted healthy well-fed young fattish man – a rosy sleep; yet not so far that he did not wake sharply after a few hours, frowning and uneasy. Low, urgent, quarrelling voices came whispering in through the stern-window: for a moment he thought of a surprise, a boat-attack, boarding in the night; but then his more woken mind recognized them as Dillon's and Marshall's, and he sank back. 'Yet,' said his mind a great while later, and still in sleep, 'how do they both come to be on the quarter-deck at this time of the night, when they are keeping watch and watch? It is not eight bells.' As if to confirm this statement the Sophie's bell struck three times, and from various points all through the sloop came the low answering cries of all's well. But it was not. She was not under the same press of sail. What was amiss? He huddled on his dressing-gown and went on deck. Not only had the
Sophie reduced sail, but her head was pointing east-northeast by east.
'Sir,' said Dillon, stepping forward, 'this is my responsibility entirely I overruled the master and ordered the helm to be put up. I believe there is a ship on the star board bow.'
Jack stared into the silvery haze – moonlight and a half-covered sky the swell had increased He saw no ship, no light: but that proved nothing. He picked up the traverseboard and looked at the change of course. 'We shall be in with the coast of Majorca directly,' he said, yawning.
'Yes, sir so I took the liberty of reducing sail.'
It was an extraordinary breach of discipline. But Dillon knew that as well as he did: there was no good purpose to be served in telling him of it publicly.
'Whose watch, is it at present?'
'Mine, sir,' said the master. He spoke quietly, but in a voice almost as harsh and unnatural as Dillon's. There were strange currents here; much stronger than any ordinary disagreement about a ship's light.
'Who is aloft?'
'Assei, sir.'
Assel was an intelligent, reliable Lascar. 'Assei, ahoy!'
'Hollo,' the thin pipe from the darkness above.
'What do you see?'
'See nothing, sir. See star, no more.'
But then there would be nothing obvious about such a fleeting glimpse. Dillon was probably right: he would never have done such an extraordinary thing else. Yet this was a damned odd course. 'Are you quite persuaded about your light, Mr Dillon?'
'Fully persuaded, sir – quite happy.'
Happy was the strangest word to hear said in that grating voice. Jack made no reply for some moments; then he altered the course a point and a half to the north and began pacing up and down his habitual walk. By four bells the light was mounting fast from the east, and there indeed was the dark presence of the land on their starboard bow, dim through the vapours that hung over the sea, though the high bowl of the sky was clear, something between blue Rnd darkness. He went below to put on some clothes, and while the shirt was still over his head there was the cry of a sail.
She came sailing out of a brownish band of mist a bare two miles to leeward, and as soon as he had cleared it Jack's glass picked out the fished foretopmast, with no more than a close-reefed topsail on it. Everything was clear: everything was plain: Dillon had been perfectly right, of course. Here was their quarry, though strangely off its natural course; it must have tacked some time ago off Dragon Island, and now it was slowly making its way into the open channel to the south; in an hour or so their disagreeable task would be done, and he knew very well what he would be at by noon.
'Well done, Mr Dillon,' he cried. 'Well done indeed. We could not have fallen in with her better; I should never have believed it, so far to the east of the channel. Show her our colours and give her a gun.'
The John B. Christopher was a little shy of what might prove a hungry man-of-war, eager to impress all her English seamen (or anyone else the boarding-party chose to consider English), but she had not the least chance of escape, above all with a wounded topmast and her topgallantmasts struck down on deck; so after a slight flurry of canvas and a tendency to fall off, she backed her topsails, showed the American flag and waited for the Sophie's boat.'You shall go,' said Jack to Dillon, who was still hunched over his telescope, as though absorbed in some point of the
American's rigging. 'You speak French better than any of us, now the Doctor is away; and after all you discovered her in this extraordinary place – she is your discovery.
'Should you like the printed papers again, or shall you—' Jack broke off. He had seen a very great deal of drunkenness in the Navy; drunken admirals, post-captains, commanders, drunken ship's boys ten years old, and he had been trundled aboard on a wheelbarrow himself before now; but he disliked it on duty – he disliked it very much indeed, above all at such an hour in the morning. 'Perhaps Mr Marshall had better go,' he said coldly. 'Pass the word for Mr Marshall.'
'Oh, no, sir,' cried Dillon, recovering himself. 'I beg your pardon – it was a momentary – I am perfectly well.'
And to be sure, the sweating pallor, the boltered staring look had gone, replaced by an unhealthy flush.'Well,' said Jack, dubiously, and the next moment James Dillon was calling out very actively for the cutter's crew, hurrying up and down, checking their arms, hammering the flints of his own pistols, as clearly master of himself as possible. With the cutter alongside and ready to push off, he said, 'Perhaps I should beg for those sheets, sir. I will refresh my memory as we pull across.'
Gently backing and filling, the Sophie kept on the John B. Christopher's larboard bow, prepared to rake her and cross her stem at the first sign of trouble. But there was none. A few more or less derisive cries of 'Paul Jones' and 'How's King George?' floated across from the John B. Christopher's fo'c'sle, and the grinning gun-crews, standing there ready to blow their cousins to a better world without the least hesitation or the least ill-will, would gladly have replied in kind; but their captain would have none of it -this was an odious task, no time for merriment. At the first call of 'Boston beans' he rapped out, 'Silence, fore and aft. Mr Ricketts, take that man's name.'
Time wore on. In its tub the slow-match burned away, coil by coil. All along the deck attention wandered. A gannet passed overhead, brilliant white, and Jack found himself pondering anxiously about Stephen, forgetful of his duty. The sun rose: the sun rose.
Now at last the boarding-party were at the American's gangway, dropping down into the cutter: and there was Dillon, alone. He was replying civilly to the master and to the passengers at the rail. The John B. Christopher was filling – the odd colonial twang of her mate urging the men to 'clap on to that tarnation brace' echoed across the sea -and she was under way southwards. The Sophie's cutter was pulling across the intervening space.
On the way out James had not known what he would do. All that day, ever since he had heard of the squadron's mission, he had been overwhelmed by a sense of fatality; and now, although he had had hours to think about it, he still did not know what he would do. He moved as though in a nightmare, going up the American's side without the slightest volition of his own; and he had known, of course, that he would find Father Mangan. Although he had done everything possible, short of downright mutiny or sinking the Sophie, to avoid it; although he had altered course and shortened sail, blackmailing the master to accomplish it, he had known that he would find him. But what he had not known, what he had never foreseen, was that the priest should threaten to denounce him if he did not turn a blind eye. He had disliked the man the moment recognition flashed between them, but in that very first moment he had made up his mind – there was not the slightest possibility of his playing the constable and taking them off. And then came this threat. For a second he had known with total certainty that it did not affect him in the least, but he had hardly reached another breath before the squalor of the situation became unbearable. He was obliged to make a slow pretence of examining all the other passports aboard before he could bring himself under control. He had known that there was no way Out, that whatever course he took would be dishonourable; but he had never imagined that dishonour could be so painful. He was a proud man; Father Mangan's satisfied leer wounded him beyond anything he had yet experienced, and with the pain of the wound there came a cloud of intolerable doubts.
The boat touched the Sophie's side. 'No such passengers aboard, sir,' he reported.
So much the better,' said Jack cheerfully, raising his L hat to the American captain and waving it. 'West a half south, Mr Marshall; and house those guns, if you please.' the exquisite fragrance of coffee drifted up from the after hatchway. 'Dillon, come and breakfast with me,' he said, taking him familiarly by the arm. 'You are still looking most ghastly pale.
You must excuse me, sir,' whispered James, disengaging himself with a look of utter hatred. 'I am a little out of order.'