They looked at her: green, hair draggling over her clammy face, eyes closed, mouth clenched tight, a look of mingled death and stubborn resistance. Stephen wiped her cheek Jack said, 'I shall favour the boat. You might move the bait-pots and that old sack under her head: perhaps she don't like the smell.'
He took the scow wide of Lovell's Island, south about, to ease the motion: south about, with the battery under his lee, through the channel, and there, as he cleared the southern tip, he saw what his soul had longed to see: topgallantsails and topsails beyond the northernmost of the Brewster islands, a ship standing in from the Graves.
Without his telescope he could not swear she was the Shannon yet, and he said nothing; but in his heart he had a beautiful calm certainty.
'You seem pleased, brother?' said Stephen, after a while, looking from the green-yellow to the red and beaming face.
'Yes, I am, to be candid with you,' said Jack, 'and so will you be, I believe. Do you see that ship, just clear of the northern island now?'
'I do not.'
'The northern island - the further island, the one on the left. Hull up, for God's sake.'
'Ah, I perceive it now. And for what my opinion is worth, I should say it looks quite like a man-of-war. There is a neatness, a certain air, that we associate with a man-of-war.'
Abandoning all opportunity for wit, Jack laughed aloud and said, 'That is Shannon, standing in for her morning look at the Chesapeake, ha, ha, ha!'
The Shannon stood on, stemming the tide; the scow, as close-hauled at it would lie, steered to cross her bows. Two miles had separated them at first: with their combined rates of sailing this distance lessened to half a mile in ten minutes, and Jack saw that he could not fetch her on this tack - the scow's leeway was too great - and that going about would leave him in her wake. 'Did I speak too soon?' he thought, and standing up he hailed as he had rarely hailed before. 'The ship ahoy. Shannon ahoy.'
A moment of the most intense anxiety, and he saw the frigate back her foretopsail: the way came off her just enough to let the scow run alongside. The awkward boat gave her a shrewd thump amidships, and from the deck above a thundering voice, a familiar voice, cried, 'Mind the paintwork, God damn your eyes. Mind the paintwork - fend off. I've a mind to put a round-shot through your bottom.'
Then, in a milder tone, 'Well, Jonathan, have you any lobsters aboard? Paul, pass him a line.'
With the line firm in his hand and ease flooding through his heart, Jack could be facetious now.
'I must ask you to moderate your language, sir; we have a lady in the boat. Pray tell Captain Broke that I should like a word with him. And take your hands out of your pockets when you speak to me, Mr Falkiner.'
Blank consternation on the broad honest weather-beaten face above, the dawn of wrath, shocked silence, fore and aft, then a huge grin, and Falkiner cried, 'By -dear me, 'tis Captain Aubrey. I beg your pardon, sir. I will jump to the cabin directly. Will you come aboard, sir?'
Running feet on deck, orders, urgent cries, the rumble of Marines' boots, side-boys running down with baize covered ropes, and Jack, poised on the roll, stepped across the gap and came up the side, piped aboard in style. The Marines presented arms, Jack took off his hat, and there was Broke, napkin in hand, egg dribbling down his chin. 'Why, Jack!' he cried. 'How glad I am to see you. How come you here? How do you do - your arm?'
'Philip,' said Jack, 'how d'ye do? I came in this boat, I do assure you. Might I beg for a bosun's chair? We have a lady aboard, somewhat indisposed, Sophie's cousin Diana Villiers. And perhaps my surgeon might use it too: he is a prodigious doctor, but no great seaman.'
Diana was hoisted up, limp, past caring, a dripping dead rat, a dripping dead female rat, and carried into the absent master's cabin. Stephen came up after her and, bending low to his ear as he struggled out of the bosun's chair, Jack murmured, 'I can say it now: we have escaped - give you joy of your freedom, brother.' He then presented him, 'Doctor Maturin, my particular friend - Captain Broke. I say, Philip, you don't happen to be breakfasting, do you?
Poor Maturin here is fairly clemmed, quite wasting away and fractious for want of food.'
It was extraordinary how naval routine took them in once more: they had not been aboard a few hours before they were entirely at home - they might have been in the Shannon these last weeks or even months, with all the familiar smells and sounds around them, and the familiar motion, unusually pronounced today. Not only had they several former shipmates before the mast, in the gunroom, and in the cabin, but almost every detail of the Shannon's closely ordered life was the same as it had been in their other ships; and when the drum beat Roast Beef of Old England for the officers' dinner Stephen found that he salivated, in spite of his late and copious breakfast. Boston might have been a thousand miles away, but for the fact that it could still be seen, down there at the bottom of its great bay, as the frigate stood out to sea again, her morning's inspection done, to resume her long blockade.
She was nothing much to look at, just an ordinary thirty-eight-gun eighteen-pounder frigate of about a thousand tons that had been shabbily treated by the dockyard in the article of paint and that had been on the North American station for close on two years in all weathers, most of them unpleasant, with ice forming thick on the yards, rigging, and deck, playing Old Harry with what very little she possessed in the way of ornament or gingerbread work or graces. But she was a happy ship: her people had been together, with few changes for a man-of-war, ever since Broke commissioned her; they were thoroughly used to one another, to their officers, and to their work; and they worked well, a willing, efficient crew of seamen.
Yet this happiness, at least as far as the gunroom was concerned, was overlaid by a heavy consciousness of defeat, a feeling that with the capture of three Royal Navy frigates in succession the service had fallen far, far below itself, and a most eager restless desire to avenge Guerri?, Macedonian and Java. Stephen became aware of this when Watt, the first lieutenant, led him into the gunroom. Several officers were already there, and they made him very welcome. But once the introductions and the ordinary civilities were over he might have been in the Java again; the atmosphere was much the same - indeed, the officers were even more concerned about the American war. It was even more immediate to them, far more immediate, and they had been on the verge of action ever since it had been declared. From service gossip and the proceedings of the court-martial that acquitted Chads and the surviving officers of the Java they knew far more about the battle with the Constitution than did Stephen, but there were gaps in their knowledge and they plied him with questions: had the Americans used bar- shot? What effect did it have? Were there in fact many British deserters in the Constitution? At what range did she open fire? What did Dr Maturin think of their standard of gunnery? Did her round-shot break to pieces on impact? Was it true that the Americans used sheet-lead for their cartridges?