purpose, as you suggested before.'
'Certainly,' said Wray. 'And I remember I said that the Dey might be used to kill two birds with one stone. Now I might go so far as to say three.'
'So much the better,' said Lesueur. 'But in the meanwhile surely you would be well advised not to frequent him so much.'
'Officially I shall probably only see him once more: I have no wish to see a disciple of Waterhouse's looking into my proceedings here, and I do not think he wishes to interfere in any way. And unofficially I shall in all likelihood spend no more than an afternoon with him, to have my revenge for a ridiculous run of bad luck. But you will allow me to say that I do not at all relish this spying, this supervision, this advice on the choice of my companions, or these airs of superiority.'
'Let us not disagree; it must necessarily lead to the destruction of us both,' said Lesueur. 'You shall see Maturin every day of the week if you choose: I only beg you to remember that he is dangerous.'
'Very well,' said Wray, and then rather awkwardly, 'Have you heard from the rue Villars?'
'About paying your card-debts?'
'If you like to put it that way.'
'I am afraid they will not go beyond the initial grant.'
As Wray had predicted, he and Maturin met again aboard the flagship, where it was agreed that Hairabedian was certainly a French agent and that for obvious reasons his friends or colleagues in Valletta had arranged for the stealing of his papers. At the same time the Admiral put forward the suggestion that perhaps Dr Maturin might be seconded to Mr Wray's department to help look for these friends or colleagues; but the suggestion was coldly received by both sides and he did not pursue it. Unofficially they met far more frequently; not indeed every day of the week, but, since luck still ran against him, pretty often. This was not because Stephen's sudden intense desire for gambling was unsatisfied, but rather because his cabin in the Surprise was filled with pots of paint, and his peace aboard destroyed by incessant hammering and vehement cries, while his natural companions were all taken up with wholehearted, purely naval activities, and once he had made his morning rounds at the hospital, he felt obliged to give Wray what part of the afternoon he did not spend in the hills or along the shore with Martin. His evening he usually passed with Mrs Fielding, and it was at her house that he most often saw Jack Aubrey.
The dockyard had indeed made a very fine job of the Surprise's inwards; in their tortuous way they had fulfilled their side of the bargain. But the private agreement had not gone beyond certain clearly-defined structural repairs, and the shipwrights had left her more visible parts in a very horrid state: nor did Jack much care for her trim, the rake of her masts, or the look of her rigging. He felt very strongly that if the ship was to die to the Navy she should do so in style, in great style; besides, there was always the possibility that he might take her into action again before the end. All hands therefore turned to and tended her as she had rarely been tended before: they shifted her massive cables end for end, they roused out her lower tier of casks and restowed the hold to bring her a little by the stern, her favourite trim, they painted her inside and out and scraped her decks; Mr Borrell and his crew cosseted the guns and their furniture, the magazines and the shot; while Mr Hollar, his mates and all the young gentlemen sped about aloft like spiders. For once they were not in a tearing hurry, since the Captain of the Fleet had assured Jack that the Surprise would not be sent to sea until she had her Marines aboard once more and at least 'a reasonable proportion' of the hands that had been taken from her; yet even so her captain and first lieutenant, who had heard a good many official promises in their time, carried the work forward at a good round pace. In principle Jack disliked much in the way of shining ornament, but he felt that this was a special case, and for once in his life he laid out a considerable sum on gold-leaf for the gingerbread work of her stern and he called in the best inn-sign painter in Valletta to attend to her figurehead, an anonymous lady with a splendid bosom. All this was fine, satisfying, seamanlike work - as he told the exhausted midshipmen, it gave them a deeper insight into the nature of a man-of-war than months or even years of simple sailing - and he was at last able to do many of the things that he had always intended to do; but it all had a cruelly bitter taste at times, and he was glad to follow his fiddle, carried by a Maltese supernumerary, to Laura Fielding's musical evenings, there to play or to listen to other playing, sometimes very well indeed.
By now he had grown quite used to the notion that Laura and Stephen were lovers; he did not mind it, though he admired them a little less, but he did think it more than usually unfair that Valletta should still suppose that he, Jack Aubrey, was the happy man. People would say 'If you happen to pass by Mrs Fielding's, pray tell her that . . .'or 'Who will be coming on Tuesday evening?' as though their relationship were an established thing. Of course, a great deal was owing to that vile dog Ponto, who had welcomed him with a vast and noisy demonstration of love in the crowded Strada Reale within ten minutes of his setting foot on shore; but it also had to be admitted that Stephen and Laura were extraordinarily discreet. Nobody seeing Stephen at one of her evening parties would ever suppose that he spent the rest of the night there.
Wray certainly did not. Quite early in this period he made scarcely-veiled laughing allusion to 'your friend Aubrey's good fortunes that we hear so much about.' But as the days went by he was less and less inclined to laugh about anything at all. He had not come to the end of his run of bad luck and by now he had lost so much that Stephen could not in decency deny him his continually-repeated revenge, though at present the game bored him sadly. Although Wray had had a great deal of practice he was not a very good player; he could be deceived by a sudden change from stolid defence to risky attack; and his own attempts at deceit, which went little beyond slight hesitations and faint looks of disgust, were tolerably transparent. But above all he held no cards and Stephen had such good ones that the game grew duller still. Furthermore an anxious, unlucky Wray was by no means such an amusing companion as he had been before. As they became better acquainted Stephen found that Wray was more of a rake than he had supposed, that he attached an excessive importance to money, and that he was not overburdened with principles; a clever man, to be sure, but one with little bottom. Wray did not attempt to correct fortune, however: some question of irregularity at cards had at one time attached to his name, and no man in Wray's position could afford a second accusation.
They usually played at the officers' club or in their green arbour, and it was in this arbour that they met for what had been agreed upon as their final session. For some time Wray had been waiting for a remittance, and being short of cash - Stephen had taken it all - he settled his losses with promissory notes. They played now for the entire debt, Stephen caring little for the issue, so long as he could get away in plenty of time to visit a cave full of bats with Martin and Pullings.
Wray lost again, and even more emphatically than before. He spent some while over his score and his calculations, and with preparing what he had to say. Looking up with a particularly artificial smile he said that he was very much concerned to have to tell Dr Maturin that because of recent losses in the City his remittance had not come and he was unable to clear accounts with him; he regretted it extremely; but at least he could offer some kind of solution - he would give his note of hand for the whole sum now, and in the course of the next few days he would have a deed of annuity on his wife's estate drawn up, payments at the usual rate being sent to Maturin's banking-house every quarter until Mrs Wray inherited, when the principle would be cleared off without the slightest difficulty: everybody knew the Admiral had come into a noble fortune, entailed as to nine tenths.
'I see,' said Stephen. He was not pleased. They had been playing for ready money, and it was perfectly immoral in Wray to have embarked upon their last game when he could not put cash down if he lost. Stephen had
