him with great troubled eyes.
'Not at all, my dear,' said Stephen, returning the pressure. 'Tell me now, have these people been pestering you since I went away?'
'Only twice. I had to go to St Simon's the next day, and I told him you had spent the night with me. He was pleased, and said I should have a letter the next time.'
'The same foreigner with the Neapolitan accent - the small pale middle-aged man?'
'Yes; but the one who gave me the letter was an Italian.'
'How is Mr Fielding?'
'Oh, he is not well. He does not say so - only that he had a fall and hurt his hand - but he is not himself. I am afraid he is very ill: sick to his heart. I will show you his letter.'
It was certainly devoid of some quality that the earlier letters had possessed: not elegance, for Mr Fielding had no talent that way, but rather flow, cohesion, natural sequence, and in some obscure way the affection that had showed through: it was a painstaking letter that hobbled along, recounting his fall on the icy steps into the exercise yard and his kind treatment in the prison infirmary, and urging Laura to do everything in her power to show their gratitude to the gentlemen who made this correspondence possible: they were certainly able to influence the government.
It would not do, thought Stephen as he looked at the carefully-formed writing. The tale of the injured hand was just a little too circumstantial and in any case it had been used far too often. His earlier impression became something very near a certainty: Fielding was dead and his forged hand was being used to keep Laura in subjection. The strong likelihood was that the French agent in Malta was Graham's Lesueur, and that Wray had failed to catch him: perhaps it was just as well, since a Lesueur fed false information through Laura would be far more useful than a Lesueur tied to a post in front of a firing-squad. But he would have to be fed fast, before the Surprise moved on, for without consulting Sir Joseph or one of his closest colleagues Stephen would not like to entrust the matter to anyone else in Malta: and of course before Fielding's death was known - once that happened Laura's function vanished. Not only would Lesueur disbelieve everything she told him, but since it would be in her power - indeed her interest - to compromise him and his whole organization he would certainly eliminate her. She would vanish with her function.
All this passed through his mind with the utmost rapidity, never even reaching the stage of words, while he looked at the letter. They were much the same reflections that had occurred to him the first time, but now they were informed with a far greater certainty, and, because of his very strong feeling for her, with a far greater sense of urgency. He made much the same comforting reply as he had made before, and their talk drifted away to the technical side of her connection with the intelligence agents. She was less cautious now and she gave him an accurate description of Lesueur and some of his colleagues, and she spoke of one Basilio's criminal levity- he had told her, for example, that it had never been intended that Dr Maturin should go to the Red Sea: another man was to have taken his place. From all she said it became distressingly clear that some at least had committed the common blunder and sometimes mortal sin of underestimating the power of a woman, and that even if Lesueur did not know that she had recognized him it was obvious that she knew so much about his network that he could not possibly tolerate her defection.
'Alas,' said Stephen, after a long pause, and then his face lightened. 'There she is,' he said, nodding at his 'cello, which stood against the wall on the far side of Laura's piano. 'I fairly longed for her on this last voyage.'
'You think of the 'cello as a woman?' she said. 'It has always seemed to me so masculine. Deep-voiced, perhaps unshaved.'
'Man or woman,' he said, 'let you make us some coffee and eat up your supper, which I have half demolished God forgive me unthinking, and then we might play the piece we crucified last time.'
'Man or woman,' he said as he took the instrument out of its brutish wrapping, or sack, 'what a coil there is between them.'
'What did you say?' she called from the kitchen, and it was evident that she was still eating.
'Nothing, nothing, my dear: muttering was all.' He tuned the 'cello, reflecting upon his feelings for her. Very strong desire, of course; but also tenderness, esteem, liking, an amitie amoureuse carried to a higher degree than he had known it before.
He came out in the street in the first light, detected the watcher with intense satisfaction, and made his thoughtful way down to the quay, there to wait until the dghaisas began to ply for hire. It had been arranged that he should take a room at Searle's, that she should come to him in a domino and a faldetta, and that he should provide her with something to set Lesueur in appetite. Just what should it be?
He stood on the steps of the landing-place turning the wealth of possibilities over in his mind, staring with wide-open unseeing eyes at the degraded Worcester, which, amid the frigid indifference of all who had served in her, had already been turned into a sheer-hulk; and through his musing came the familiar London waterman's cry, 'Up or down, sir?' repeated at intervals. At the third repetition he collected himself, looked at the foot of the steps, and saw the grinning faces of the Surprise's bargemen. 'For the barky, sir?' asked Plaice at bow-oar. 'Captain will be down directly minute. Bonden is just gone up to Searle's: I wonder you did not see him as he passed. But you was in a study, no doubt.'
'Good morning, Doctor,' cried Jack, appearing behind him. 'I did not know you were in the hotel.'
'Good morning, sir,' said Stephen. 'I was not. I slept with a friend.'
'Oh, I see,' said Jack. He was pleased, in that Stephen's frailty gave countenance and justification to his own, but at the same time he was disappointed, more disappointed than pleased, since a frail Stephen necessarily fell short of the very highest standard of virtue. Jack regarded him not so much as a saint as a being removed from temptations: he was never drunk, nor was he given to dangling after women in far foreign ports, still less did he go to brothels with the other officers, and although he was notoriously lucky at cards he very rarely played; so this commonplace fall, negligible in another man or in Jack Aubrey himself, took on a heinous aspect. Not without malice Captain Aubrey said, as the boat crossed the misty, steaming harbour, 'Have you seen your letters? We have had a whole sack of mail at last,' meaning 'Diana has written to you: I saw her hand on the covers: I hope it will make you feel guilty.'
'I have not,' said Stephen, with a provoking composure. But he was not in fact at all indifferent to the arrival of the post, and as soon as he had his letters he hurried down to read them in the privacy of his cabin. Diana had indeed written, and at some length for her, describing an intensely-social life: she saw a good deal of Sophie, who had come up to town twice for the children's teeth and had stayed at Half Moon Street each time, and of Jagiello, a young attache at the Swedish embassy who had been imprisoned in France with Jack and Stephen and who sent
