worshipped the dollar, but I would never have believed anyone could have made such a coil about small change - in the South, of course, it is quite different. I had to screech and bawl like a fishwife to shift him: oh Lord!' At the recollection she began to laugh, that absurd infectious laugh of hers that always gave Stephen pleasure; and now people turned in the street and smiled at her. A pause, with a few more inward gurgles of mirth, and then suddenly she cried, 'But you never told me you know Diana Villiers!'
'You never asked,' said Stephen. 'You know her too, I collect?'
'Heavens, yes,' said Mrs Wogan. 'I have known her this age and more. We are amazingly close friends. Well, we were in London, anyway; and I love her dearly. As I dare say you know, she is the particular friend of Harry Johnson, a man I know very well; we both come from Maryland. They will be in Boston on Wednesday. I long for you to meet him: he loves birds, too. When I reached the States at last I told them all about you, and Diana cried out, 'But that is my Maturin!' and Harry Johnson said, 'It must be the same Maturin that wrote the paper about boobies' - could it be boobies?'
They passed O'Reilly's hotel, and two British officers, who knew Stephen, looked at him with open envy. They saluted, and Mrs Wogan gave them a flashing smile. 'Poor fellows,' she remarked. 'It is dreadful being a prisoner. I must get Mrs Adams to invite them.'
'It is not so much the Englishmen that you dislike, then, but rather their Government?'
'That's right,' said Mrs Wogan. 'Though of course I hate some Englishmen too: but it is really their Government I detest, and I dare say it is the same with you. Do you know, they hanged Charles Pole, the friend of mine in the Foreign Office I told you about long ago. Such a cowardly, despicable thing to do - they might have shot him. Here we are,' she said, steering him into a muddy street of small brick houses with lean hogs searching along its gutter. 'Are we not squalid? It is the best poor Herapath can do, for the present.'
Poor Herapath was waiting for them in a sparsely furnished room, little less squalid than the street, and full of smoke. He greeted Stephen with a painful mixture of embarrassment and affection, hesitating to offer his hand until Stephen grasped it. He had aged since they parted on Desolation Island and from his emaciated appearance Stephen supposed that he had returned to the abuse of opium. Yet he was essentially the same Herapath, and while Louisa went to fetch their baby he showed Stephen his translation of Li Po with an eagerness that brought the days of the Leopard's sickbay vividly to mind.
The baby was an ordinary specimen of its kind, probably good at bottom; but it was angry at not having been fed, and while its parents argued the point in voices necessarily raised above the usual tone, it roared and howled again. Stephen gazed at its red and angry face, the successive or sometimes mingled expressions of woe and rage, and reproached himself for wishing it never had been born; he also noticed that Herapath was somewhat less inept at handling it, and that the little creature paid more attention to its father than its mother. Eventually, after the usual compliments, delivered in something near a shout, it was carried away, and Herapath said, 'I am exceedingly concerned, Dr Maturin, that I should have left you without paying my debt.'
'Not at all,' said Stephen. 'I seized upon your property and sold your uniforms to Byron, who was naked, and much of your size; you left me the richer for the bargain.'
'I am glad of that: it preyed upon my mind. After all your kindness. .
'Pray, Mr Herapath, do you spend all your hours with Li Po? I had hoped you might perhaps study physic on your return: you have a real gift for medicine.'
'And so I should, if I had the means. As it is, I have read Galen and what other books I can come at. But I hope that when my translation is published, the profits will allow me to return to Harvard and qualify myself as a physician. I have great hopes: Louisa has a friend, a childhood friend from the South, who has made interest with a Philadelphia publisher, and he gives me every reason to suppose that all will be well. The book may come out in a handsome quarto next year, with an octavo edition to follow, if the demand is great enough! In the meantime we live upon an allowance that my father is good enough to make me. But if only he would - ' Herapath checked himself, coughed, and said, 'My father desires me to make you his best compliments, and he hopes for the honour of your company at dinner tomorrow.'
'I should be happy to wait upon him,' said Stephen, rising, for Mrs Wogan had come back, followed by a slatternly black woman and two small black boys with the tea-tray and its grubby appurtenances.
'I do hope it will be to your liking,' said Mrs Wogan, looking anxiously into the pot. 'Sally is better at mint- juleps than tea.'
At one time Stephen had been marooned on a bare rock in the south Atlantic, and his only drink was the warm rainwater that remained in the guano-filled hollows: it had been more disagreeable than Mrs Wogan's tea, but only very slightly so. The taste of his bitter cup stayed with him the rest of the day, although he had endeavoured to qualify it by eating lumps of an amorphous grey substance, said to be spoon-bread, a Southern delicacy.
He was conscious of it when he woke in the morning, and he could still readily evoke the curious mixture of tar, molasses and perhaps verdigris when Herapath came to the Asciepia to fetch him.
'Do you think, sir,' said Herapath uneasily, 'that I should pay my respects to Captain Aubrey?'
'I do not,' said Stephen. 'He would consider it his duty to hang you for having run from the Leopard; and the excitement, the agitation, in his enfeebled state, would be very bad for him. I have just agreed with Dr Choate that no visitors should be allowed, particularly the people from the Navy Department who so upset him the other day.'
The Navy Department had upset Jack Aubrey, but not very much: not nearly so much as that distant victory off the Demerara river. Not nearly so much as the view from his windows, one of which commanded the harbour and the other the moorings of the American men-of-war. It was not that a great deal happened, since all the merchantmen were tied up, sometimes two deep, all along the wharves and little was to be seen in motion apart from small craft and fishing-boats; but what did happen moved him as he had very rarely been moved before.
Apart from the intervals of meals and medical care and the cleaning of his room, he spent the daylight hours with his telescope to his eye. He knew the powerful American frigates intimately well - he even knew a great many of their officers and men, quite apart from those officers from the Constitution whose acquaintance he had made during the voyage and who came to visit him - and he watched them with passionate intensity. Three of them: President, a forty-four-gun twenty-four-pounder, wearing a commodore's broad pendant; Congress, thirty-eight; and of course his own dismantled Constitution. And he had but to swing round and steady his glass on the other windowsill and there in the offing he would catch the topgallantsails of the blockading squadron. Sometimes a frigate, Aeolus or Belvidera or Shannon, would come right into the outer harbour and reconnoitre, and his heart would beat so that he had to hold his breath to keep the glass from moving -beat with wild notions of a cutting-out attack or a landing to carry the forts from behind.
