‘Eh? Oh, her. Yes. Certainly. Quite so. Very proper. Rowed of all - run her up.’ The boat ground through the shingle. They ploughed across the beach, crossed the road into the dunes. ‘Here?’ asked Jack.
‘Just past the gibbet - a little dell, a place I know, convenient in every way. Here we are.’ They turned a dune and there was a dark-?green post-?chaise and its postillion eating his breakfast out of a cloth bag.
‘I wish we could have worked the hearse,’ muttered Jack.
‘Stuff. Your own father would not recognize you in that bandage and in this dirty-?yellow come-?kiss-?me-?death exsanguine state: though indeed you look fitter for a hearse
than many a subject I have cut up. Come, come, there is not a moment to lose. Get in. Mind the step. Preserved Killick, take good care of the Captain: his physic, well shaken, twice a day; the bolus thrice. He may offer to forget his bolus, Killick.’
‘He’ll take his nice bolus, sir, or my name’s not Preserved.’
‘Clap to the door. Give way, now; give way all together. Step out! Lay aloft! Tally! And belay!’
They stood watching the dust of the post-?chaise; and Bonden said, ‘Oh, I do wish as we’d worked the hearse-?and-?coffin lark, sir: if they was to nab him now, it would break my heart.’
‘How can you be so simple, Bonden? Do but think of a hearse and four cracking on regardless all the way up the Dover Road. It would be bound to excite comment. And you are to consider, that a recumbent posture is bad for the Captain at present.’
‘Well, sir. But, a hearse is sure: no bum ever arrested a corpse, as I know of. Howsoever, it’s too late now. Shall you pull back along of us, sir, or shall we come for you again?’
‘I am obliged to you, Bonden, but I believe I shall walk into Dover and take a boat back from there.’
The post-?chaise whirled through Kent, saying little. Ever since Chaulieu, Jack had been haunted by the dread of tipstaffs. His return to the Downs, with no ship and a couple of prizes, had made a good deal of noise -very favourable noise, but still noise - and he had not set foot on shore until this morning, refusing invitations even from the Lord Warden himself. He was moderately well-?to-?do; the Fanciulla might bring him close on a thousand pounds and the transport a hundred or two; but would the Admiralty pay head-?money according to the Fanciulla’s muster-?roll when so many of her people had escaped on shore? And would his claim for gun-?money for the destroyed transports be allowed? His new prize-?agent had shaken his head, saying he could promise nothing but delay; he had advanced a fair. sum, however, and Jack’s bosom had the pleasant crinkle of Bank of England notes. Yet he was nowhere near being solvent, and passing through Canterbury, Rochester and Dartford he cowered deep in his corner. Stephen’s assurances had little force with him: he knew he was Jack Aubrey, and it seemed inevitable that others too should see him as Jack Aubrey, debtor to Grobian, Slendrian and Co. for ?1 1,012 6s 8d. With better reason it seemed to him inevitable that those interested should know that he must necessarily be summoned to the Admiralty, and take their steps accordingly. He did not get out when they changed horses; he passed most of the journey keeping out of sight and dozing - he was perpetually tired these days - and he was asleep when Killick roused him with a respectful but firm ‘Time for your bolus, sir.’
Jack eyed it: this was perhaps the most nauseating dose that Stephen had ever yet compounded, so vile that health itself was scarcely worth the price of swallowing it. ‘I can’t get it down without a drink,’ he said.
‘Hold hard,’ cried Killick, putting his head and shoulders out of the window. ‘Post-?boy, ahoy. Pull in at the next public, d’ye hear me, there? Now, sir,’ - as the carriage came to a stop - I’ll just step in and see if the coast is clear.’ Killick had spent little of his life ashore, and most of that little in an amphibious village in the Essex mud; but he was fly; he knew a great deal about landsmen, most of whom were crimps, pickpockets, whores, or officials of the Sick and Hurt Office, and he could tell a gum a mile off. He saw them everywhere. He was the worst possible companion for a weak, reduced, anxious debtor that could well be found, the more so in that his absolute copper bottomed certainty of being a right deep file, no sort or kind of a flat, carried a certain conviction. By way of a ruse de guerre he had somehow acquired a clergyman’s hat, and this, combined with his earrings, his yard of pigtail, his watchet-?blue jacket with brass buttons, his white trousers and low silver-?buckled shoes, succeeded so well that several customers followed him from the tap-?room to gaze while he leaned in and said to Jack, ‘It’s no go, sir. I seen some slang coves in the tap. You’ll have to drink it in the shay. What’ll it be, sir? Dog’s nose? Flip? Come, sir,’ he said, with the authority of the well over the sick in their care, or even out of it, ‘What’ll it be? For down it must go, or it will miss the tide.’ Jack thought he would like a little sherry. ‘Oh no, sir. No wine. The Doctor said, No wine. Porter is more the mark.’ He brought back sherry - had been obliged to call for wine, it being a shay - and a mug of porter; drank the sherry, gave back such change as he saw fit, and watched the bolus go gasping, retching down, helped by the porter. ‘That’s thundering good physic,’ he said. ‘Drive on, mate.’
The next time he woke Jack it was from a deeper sleep. ‘Eh? What’s amiss?’ cried Jack.
‘We’m alongside, sir. We’m there.’
‘Ay. Ay. So we are,’ said Jack, gazing at the familiar doorway, the familiar courtyard, and suddenly coming to life. ‘Very well. Killick, stand off and on, and when you see my signal, drive smartly in and pick me up again.’
He was sure of a fairly kind reception at the Admiralty: the cutting-?out of the Fanciulla had been well spoken of in the service and very well spoken of in the press - it had come at a time when there was little to fill the papers and when people were feeling nervous and low in their spirits about the invasion. The Polychrest could not have chosen a better moment for sinking; nothing could have earned her more praise. The journalists were delighted with the fact that both ships were nominally slops and that the Fanciulla carried almost twice as many men; they did not point out that eighty of the Fanciullas were peaceable Italian conscripts, and they were good enough to number the little guns borne by the transports in the general argument. One gentleman in the Post, particularly dear to Jack’s heart, had spoken of ‘this gallant, nay, amazing feat, carried out by a raw crew, far below its complement and consisting largely of landsmen and boys. It must show the French Emperor the fate that necessarily awaits his invasion flotilla; for if our lion-?hearted tars handle it so roughly when it is skulking behind impenetrable sand-?banks under the cross-?fire of imposing batteries, what may they not do should it ever put to sea?’ There was a good deal more about hearts of oak and honest tars, which had pleased the Fanciullas - the more literate hearts perpetually read it to the rest from the thumbed copies that circulated through the ship - and Jack knew that it would please the Admiralty too: in spite of their lordly station they were as sensitive to loud public praise as common mortals. He knew that this approval would grow after the publication of his official letter, with its grim list of casualties - seventeen dead and twenty-?three wounded - for civilians liked to have sailors’ blood to deplore, and the more a victory cost the more it was esteemed. If only little Parslow could have contrived to get himself knocked on the head it would have been perfect. He also knew something that the papers did not know, but that the Admiralty did: the Fanciulla’s captain had not had the time or the wit to destroy his secret papers, and for the moment the French private signals were private no longer - their codes were broken.
But as he sat there in the waiting-?room thoughts of past misdeeds filled his uneasy mind; anything that Admiral Harte’s malignance could do would have been done; and in fact he had not behaved irreproachably in the Downs. Stephen’s warning had fallen on a raw conscience: and it could only have come through Dundas - Dundas,
