Ramis, Waring, four unknowns. ‘Tell me, were there any letters for Mr Nicolls?’
‘Nicolls? No, none. Plenty for the rest of the gunroom, however. Killick!’
‘What now, sir?’ said Killick angrily, with a spoon in his hand.
‘Gunroom steward: post. And bring another jug. Stephen, just look at this, will you?’ He handed a letter: Mr. Fanshaw presented his compliments to Captain Aubrey, and had the honour to state that he had this day received the sum of ?9,755 13s 4d from the Admiralty, representing an ex gratia payment to Captain A in respect of the detention of His Most Catholic Majesty’s ships (lara, Fama, Medea and Mercedes; that their Lordships did not have it in contemplation to make .any payment of head-?money or gun-?money, nor for the hulls; and that the above-? mentioned sum, less sundry advances as per margin and the usual commission, had been paid into Captain A’s account with Messrs Hoare’s banking house.
‘It is not what you would call handsome,’ said Jack laughing, ‘but a bird in the hand is worth any amount of beating about the bush, don’t you agree? And it pretty well clears mc of debt: now all I need is a couple of moderate prizes, and then upon my word I cannot see what Mother Williams can possibly object to. To be sure, there is not a smell of a merchantman left this side of Batavia; not lawful prize, I mean, and God preserve me from sending in another neutral; but still, they have some privateers cruising from the Isle of France, and a brush with one or two of them . . . ‘ The old eager piratical gleam was in his eye; he looked five years younger. ‘But Stephen, I have been thinking about you. I must heave the ship down, re-?stow her - Mr Stanhope’s dunnage and presents are all ahoo in the after-?hold - get her more by the head, shift all manner of things; and it occurred to me, now you are so amazing agile, should not you like to take a week’s leave and ride into the interior? Jaguars, ostriches, unicorns -,
‘Oh Jack, how truly good of you! I had to put violence upon myself to come away from Cape St Roque, to abandon that vegetable magnificence. The Brazilian forest is the haunt of the tapir, the boa, the peccary! You may find it hard to credit, Jack, but never yet have I beheld a boa.’
Boas he had beheld, and handled too; hummingbirds; fire-?flies; the toucan in his glory, peering from his nest; the ant-?cater and her child, tinted purple by the sunrise over a desolate swamp; armadillos, three kinds of New World monkey; a true tapir he had seen, before he came back to the ship at Rio, having worn three horses and Mr White, his companion, to a shadow. Here, riding at single anchor, he found a strangely altered Surprise, with a thirty-?six gun frigate’s mainmast, her fore and mizen raked strongly aft, and her sides repainted black and white - the Nelson checker. ‘It is a plan of my own,’ said Jack, welcoming him aboard, ’something between the Lively and the old Surprise I knew as a boy. It will move her in light airs, with her narrow entrance, do you see, and above all give her an extra knot under a press of canvas. You are going to object to her top-?hamper, I know’ - Stephen was gaping up at an immature parrot - ‘but I have tossed out all my shingle-?ballast and replaced it with pig-?iron - I cannot tell you how kind the Admiral has been - and we have stowed it low. She is as stiff as - why, as stiff as you can imagine; and if we cannot get an extra knot I shall be amazed. We may need it, for Lyra was in, and she tells us Linois has passed into the Indian Ocean with a ship of the line, two frigates and a corvette. You remember Linois, Stephen?’
‘Monsieur de Linois, who captured us in the Sophie? Yes, yes. I remember him perfectly. A cheerful, polite gentleman, in a red waistcoat.’
‘And a prodigious good seaman, too; but if I can help it, he shall not catch us again, not in his seventy-?four. The frigates are another matter: the Belle-?Poule is a heavy great brute, forty guns to our twenty-?eight, and twenty-?four-?pounders; but the S?millante is smaller, and we should stand a chance with her, if only I can get our people to move brisk and fire straight. That would be something like a prize, eh? Ha, ha!’
‘Do you apprehend any immediate danger? Have these vessels been seen at the Cape?’
‘No, no, they are ten thousand miles away. They have come into the Indian Ocean by the Sunda Strait.’
‘Then is it not perhaps a little premature to. .
‘Not a bit, not a bit. Even from the service point of view, there is not a moment to be lost. The crew is not half worked up - nothing like the Livelies, not a patch on the Sophies; and then again, you know, I do so long to be married! The idea of being married drives a man, by God: you can have no idea. Married to Sophie, I mean:
I beg pardon if I have spoke awkward again.’
‘Why, my dear, I am no great friend to marriage, as you know; and sometimes I wonder whether you may not set too great a store on a contract compelling you to be happy - whether any arrival can amount to the sum of voyages - whether, in fact, it would not be better to travel indefinitely.’ His own letters from Sophia told a wretched tale of persecution; Mrs Williams’s health was really breaking up - the President of the College of Physicians and Sir John Butler were not men to be deceived by vapours or hypochondria, and there were some ugly; ugly symptoms - but her strong restless mind seemed to have gathered fresh energy. Sometimes touchingly pale and racked with pain (she bore real pain with great fortitude), sometimes her red, angry self, she was battering her daughter with Mr Hincksey, the new parson. In an exhausted voice from what she called her death-? bed she would beg her daughter to give up this Captain Aubrey, who would never make her happy, who was going to India everyone knew why - who was going to India after that woman - and to let her mother die in peace, knowing her safely married and settled in Swiving rectory, so near at hand, among all their connections, so comfortable, not in seaside lodgings the other end of England or in Peru; married and settled with a man all her friends approved, a man with handsome private means and brilliant prospects, a man who could make a proper provision for her and who would look after her sisters when their mother was gone - poor motherless girls! A man to whom Sophie was not indifferent, whatever she might say. Captain Aubrey would soon get over it, if indeed he was not over it already, in the arms of some trollop: as his precious Lord Nelson said, every man was a bachelor once he was beyond Gibraltar; and India was a great way beyond Gibraltar, if the atlas was to be believed. In any case, Admiral Haddock and every gentleman of the Navy she had ever known, all said ‘Sea-?water and distance wash love away’; they were all of the same opinion. She only spoke for Sophie’s good; and she implored her not to refuse this one, this last request, for the sake of her sisters, even if her mother’s happiness meant nothing to her.
Stephen knew Hincksey, the new rector, a tall, well-?looking, gentlemanlike man; a sound scholar; nothing of the evangelical; amusing, witty, kind. Stephen loved and esteemed Sophie more than any woman he knew, but he expected heroic virtue in no one: not heroic virtue of long duration, with few allies and they ten thousand miles away. Ten thousand miles, and how many weeks, months, even years? Time meant one thing in an active, ever-? changing life; quite another in a remote provincial house, cooped up with a strong woman devoid of scruple, convinced of her divine rectitude.
In any case, Mrs Williams’s fear and detestation of debt was wholly genuine, and this gave her argument a strength and truth far beyond her ordinary reach; in her quiet, settled part of the country imprisonment - imprisonment! - for debt did not happen, and the shocking tales she heard from outlying regions or from the dissolute, giddy metropolis concerned only raffish adventurers or worse; though her whole childhood had been tinged by whispered apocalyptic accounts of people so abandoned by God as to have lost their capital in the South Sea Bubble. By her own efforts Mrs Williams, like all the people she knew, might have earned fivepence a day at weeding or plain sewing, though some of the gentlemen might have done a little better at haysel and harvest; the
