Stephen Maturin turned from the Strand down into the liberties of the Savoy. It was a familiar path, so familiar that of their own accord his feet avoided the worst chasms in the paving, the iron grid that before now had given beneath his modest weight, plunging him down a coal-hole, and the filthy gutter; and this was just as well, since his mind was far away: he was, as Jack had observed, intensely anxious about Diana, so anxious and apprehensive that he was going to the Grapes in order to change and be shaved before presenting himself at Half-Moon Street and in order to have news of her, since she would surely have passed by - she and Mrs Broad, the landlady, were great friends, and both paid too much attention to his linen.
His mind was far away, and the shock was therefore all the greater when, having turned the corner to the inn, he looked up and saw nothing but a blackened hole railed off from the street, with rain-water shining in its cellars, a few charred beams showing where the floors had been, and grass and ferns growing in the niches that had once been cupboards.
The dwelling-houses on either hand seemed untouched; so were the shops on the Westminster side of the street, untouched and busy, with people hurrying up and down as though the horrible sight were commonplace. He crossed, to check his bearings and make doubly sure that this was indeed the shell of the Grapes and not some spatial illusion; and as he stood there he felt a gentle pressure on the back of his leg. Turning, he saw a large rough ugly yard-dog bowing and waving his tail; his lips were writhed back in a grin that might express pleasure or extreme rage, and Stephen instantly recognized the butcher's mongrel. He was not a promiscuous dog; he belonged firmly to the butcher; but he and Stephen had always passed the time of day. and there was a steady, long-standing affection between the two.
'Why, if it ain't the Doctor,' said the butcher. 'I thought it must be you, as soon as I see him bowing and scraping like a French Punch and Judy. You are looking at the poor old Grapes, I do suppose.'
The fire had happened about the time the Surprise left Gibraltar: nobody had been hurt, but the insurance company disputed the claim and Mrs Broad could not rebuild until they paid up; in the meantime she had gone down to her friends in Essex, sadly missed by the whole neighbourhood. 'Every time I look across the way,' said the butcher, pointing with his knife, 'I feel the Liberty has a wound in it.'
A wound, and a strangely unexpected one, thought Stephen, walking north. He had had no idea how much that quiet haven meant to him; there were also some fairly important collections he had left there, mostly of birds' skins, many books... The immeasurably greater wound, 'Mrs Maturin does not live here any more,' delivered at the Half-Moon Street house lacked that sudden staggering quality and for the moment it shocked him less.
He walked steadily towards St James's Street, saying 'I shall most deliberately feel nothing until I have some confirmation: there are a thousand possible explanations.'
Jack's club was not the kind of place that Stephen would have joined of his own accord, but Diana had made a point of it; she had made many of her friends as well as Jack support his candidature, and he had been a member for some time now.
'Good morning, sir,' said the hall porter. 'I have some letters for you, and a uniform-case.'
'Thank you,' said Stephen, taking the letters. The only one of consequence was on top and he broke the seal as he walked up the stairs. It began
Why should a foolish marriage vow,
Which long ago was made,
Oblige us to each other now,
When passion is decayed?
Between this and the last paragraph came a close-packed section, much underlined and not clearly legible in this light. The lines of the last paragraph were spaced wider; it was written more calmly and with a different pen, and it said 'Your best uniform came just after you had left,
so rather than leave it at the Grapes, where the mice and moths swarm prodigiously in spite of all good Mrs Broad can do, I shall send it to the club. And Stephen, I do beg you will remember to put on a warm flannel undershirt and drawers when you are in England: you will find some on top of the uniform and some underneath it.'
These words he had absorbed before he reached the landing. He put the letter into his pocket, walked into the empty library, and looked through the others. One was a request for a loan by return of messenger; there were two invitations to dinners long since digested, and two communications about the Manx shearwater. He read them attentively and then returned to Diana's letter: he must have known, she said, that when he paraded his redheaded lady up and down the Mediterranean, without the least disguise, she would resent it as an open, direct insult. She did not speak of the moral side of things - that was not her style and anyway prating about morality could safely be left to others - but she must own that she had never expected Stephen to do so ill-bred a thing; or having done it in a fit of folly, not to justify himself, at least by a story that she could decently pretend to believe. Here Stephen looked sharply for the date of the letter: there was none. Any woman of spirit would resent it. Even Lady Nelson, a far, far meeker woman than Diana, had resented it, although there had been the decent veil of Sir William. She was obliged to confess that with all Stephen's faults she had never, never expected him to behave like a scrub. She knew very well that ordinary men did so when passion was decayed, but she had never looked upon Stephen as an ordinary man. She would never, never forget his kindness to her, and no amount of resentment would do away with her friendship; yet she was glad, yes so glad, that they had never been married in a Christian or a Roman Catholic church. Then, clearly after a pause and with this second pen, but he was never to think unkindly of her: and after that the postscript about the shirts.
He would no more have thought unkindly of her than he would of a falcon that had flown free, imagining some injury - he had known very proud, high-tempered falcons, passionately attached and passionately offended - but he was wounded to the heart, and he grieved. At first with a generalized grief that included his own desolate loss, so intensely that he clasped his hands and rocked to and fro, then more particularly for her. He had known her a great while, but of all the wild flings, of all the coups de t? he had seen her make, this was the most disastrous. She had run off with Jagiello, a Lithuanian officer in the Swedish service who had long and quite openly admired her. But Jagiello was an ass: a tall, beautiful, golden-haired ass, adored by young women and liked by men for his cheerful candour and simplicity, but a hopelessly volatile ass, incapable of resisting temptation and perpetually surrounded by it, being rich as well as absurdly handsome. He was much younger than Diana; and constancy was not to be looked for. Marriage was impossible, because whatever she might suppose the ceremony Stephen and Diana had passed through aboard HMS Oedipus was legally binding. An active social life was as necessary to her as meat and drink, and he had no reason to suppose that Swedish society would be particularly kind to an unmarried foreign woman whose only protector was a young and foolish Hussar. The thought of her fate in five years or even less made his heart sick. All he could find by way of light in all this darkness was the reflexion that at least she was independent: she did not have to rely on any man's generosity. Yet even this was not certain: at one time she had had great quantities of money, but whether she had invested enough of it to be assured of a reasonable income for the rest of her life he did not know. It was probable, however, since she had a most
