lambs.’
‘They may well be. There are horses, fishes, cats, dogs and mice in their barbarous jargon; and bears; so I dare say there are lambs, rams, ewes, wethers and tegs. But these particular animals are for your nourishment: they are literally lambs. He has laid in stores that would be excessive for a pair of ogresses - a cask of petits-?f ours (they will be damnably stale), four Stilton cheeses, a tub of scented soap, forsooth, handtowels - and now, I say, these lambs are required to be washed and combed twice a day. Keep him to dinner - let him sup with you - and perhaps we may have a little peace.’
‘What would he like to eat? A pudding, of. course; and perhaps souse. And what would you like, Stephen? Something with mushrooms in it, I know.’
‘Alas, I shall be a hundred miles away. I have one commission to perform for Captain Aubrey, and then I hoist myself into this evening’s coach. I do not expect to be gone for long. Here is my direction in London: I have written it on a card for you. Pray send me word how you liked your voyage.’
‘Shall you not be coming, Stephen?’ cried Sophia, clasping his arm. ‘What will happen to me?’
‘No, my dear. I cast you adrift. Sink or swim, Sophie; sink or swim. Where is my hat? Come, give me a buss, and I must away.’
‘Jack,’ said he, walking into the cabin, ‘what are you at?’
‘I am trying to get this God-?damned plant to stand upright. Do what I may, they keep wilting. I water them before breakfast and again in the last dog-?watch, and still they wilt. Upon my word, it is too bad.’
‘What do you water them with?’
‘The best water, straight from the scuttle-?butt.’
‘If you anoint them with the vile decoction we drink and wash in, of course they wilt. You must send ashore for some rain-?water; and at that rate of watering, some aquatic plants.’
‘What an admirable notion, Stephen. I shall do so at once. Thank you. But apart from these poxed vegetables, don’t you think it looks tolerably well? Comfortable? Homelike? The gunner’s wife said she had never seen the like: all she could suggest was somewhere to hang their clothes, and a pincushion.’
The cabin resembled a cross between a brothel and an undertaker’s parlour, but Stephen only said that he agreed with Mrs Armstrong and suggested that it might be a little less like a state funeral if the tubs were not quite so rigidly arranged about each cot. ‘I have your plates,’ he said, holding out a green-?baize parcel.
‘Oh, thank you, thank you, Stephen. What a good fellow you are. Here’s elegance, damn my eyes. How they shine! Oh, oh,’ his face fell. ‘Stephen, I do not like to seem ungrateful, but I did say hawser-?laid, you know. The border was to be hawser-?laid.’
‘Well, and did I not say, “Let there be a hawser about the periphery” and did he not say, the shopman, God’s curse upon him, the thief, “Here, sir, is as pretty a hawser as Lord Viscount Nelson himself could desire”?’
‘And so it is. A capital hawser. But surely my dear Stephen, you must be aware, after all this time at sea, that a hawser is cable-?laid, not hawser-?laid?’
‘I am not. And I absolutely decline to hear more of the matter. A hawser not hawser-?laid - what stuff. I badger the silversmith early and late, and we are to be told that hawsers are not hawser-?laid. No, no. The wine is drawn, it must be drunk. The frog has neither feathers nor wool, and yet she sings. You will have to sail up to the Downs, eating the bread of affliction off your cable-?laid baubles, and wetting it with the tears of misery; and I may tell you, sir, that you will eat it without me. Essential business calls me away. I shall put up at the Grapes, when I am in London: I hope to be there well before Michaelmas. Pray send me a line. Good day to you, now: God bless.’
The grapes were home in Catalonia when Dr Maturin left the Abbot of Montserrat. All through the country as he rode his swift-?trotting mule westwards, the vineyards had their familiar shattered, raped appearance; in the villages the streets ran purple-?red with lees and the hot air was heavy with fermentation - an early year, an auspicious year. Melons everywhere, ten for a realillo, figs drying all round Lerida, oranges bronze on the trees. Then a more decided autumn in Aragon; and throughout the green Basque country rain, solid rain day after day, pursuing him even to the dark lonely beach where he stood waiting for the boat, the drops running off his sodden cloak and vanishing into the shingle underfoot.
The surge and grind of waves withdrawing, then at last the sound of careful oars and a low call through the rain:
‘Abraham and his seed for ever.’
‘Wilkes and liberty,’ said Stephen.
‘Let go the kedge, Tom.’ Splashes, a thump; and then, very close to him, ‘Are you there? Let me give you a back, sir. Why, you are all wet.’
‘It is on account of the rain.’
Rain pouring off the deck of the lugger; rain flattening the waves the whole length of the Channel; rain pelting down in the streets of London, overflowing from the Admiralty’s gutter.
‘How it rains,’ said the young gentleman in a flowered dressing-?gown and nightcap who received him. ‘May I take your cloak, sir, and spread it by the fire?’
‘You are very good, sir, but since Sir Joseph is not in the way, I believe I shall go straight to my inn. I have been travelling hard.’
‘I am infinitely concerned, sir, that both the First Lord and Sir Joseph should be at Windsor, but I will send a messenger at once, if you are quite sure that Admiral Knowles will not do.’
‘This is essentially a political decision, as I take it. It would be better to wait until tomorrow, though by God the matter presses.’
‘They should have started back tonight, I know: and from the orders Sir Joseph left with me, I am sure I should not do wrong to invite you to breakfast with him - to come to his official apartment as early as you think fit.’
The Grapes were fast asleep, shuttered, dark, and so unwilling to reply that they might all have died of the plague. He had a despairing vision of never being fed again, of passing the night in the hackney-?coach or a bagnio.
