'Padeen, let you bring the little mare in twelve minutes,' and the words brought a quick turn of the small fair head, ordinarily immobile, absorbed in an inner world.
The little mare carried him with a long easy stride down the miles of bare upland road, along the turnpike for a while and so to the lane leading up through Jack Aubrey's plan. tations to the knoll on which he had built his observatory: for Captain Aubrey was not only an officer professionally concerned with celestial navigation but also a disinterested astronomer and, although one would never have suspected it from his honest, open face, a mathematician: a late-developing mathematician it is true, but one of sufficient eminence to have his papers on nutations and the Jovian satellites published in the Philosophical Transactions and translated in several learned journals on the Continent.
Jack had just closed the door of this building and he was standing on its step contemplating the English Channel when Stephen came in sight, round the last upward curve.
'Ho, Stephen,' he hailed, though the distance was not great. 'Have you come back? What a splendid fellow you are, upon my sacred honour! True to your day and almost to your hour. I dare say you could not wait to see the squadron - a glorious sight! Although it is nothing like what I promised you in the first place - no squadron ever is. I have been gloating over them this last half hour, ever since Pyramus came in.' And indeed the slide of the revolving copper dome was pointing directly down at Portsmouth, Spithead and St Helens. 'Should you like to have a look? It would not be the least trouble...' He glanced at Stephen's mount, paused, and in quite another tone he went on 'But Lord, how I rattle on about my own affairs. Forgive me, Stephen. How do you do? I hope your journey was...
'I am well, I thank you, Jack: and I am happy to see that your head is mended, though you look sadly worn. But my journey did not answer as I could have wished. I had hoped to find Diana; and I did not.. I came upon some of her horses, however: this is one.'
'I recognized her,' said Jack, caressing the mare. 'And I too had hoped...'
'No. She had sold two mares and a stallion to a man that breeds running horses near Doncaster. He very kindly let me have Lalla here, but he had little notion of Diana's movements apart from Ripon and Thirsk, where she had friends: she had spoken of Ulster, too, where Frances lives.'
He swung out of the saddle and they walked slowly on towards the stables. 'But that is of no great account. Do you remember Pratt, the thief-taker?'
'By God, I should think I do,' cried Jack: and well he might. Earlier in his career he had been accused of rigging the Stock Exchange, and Pratt, who as the son of a gaoler had spent much of his childhood among thieves and who had improved his knowledge of the underworld by serving with the Bow Street runners before setting up on his own account, had acted for Jack and his lawyers, finding an essential witness in a masterly fashion - masterly but inefficacious since the witness's face, upon which identification depended, had been as one might say erased.
'Well, I have retained Pratt and his colleagues to find her out and I have little doubt of their eventual success. I do not mean to persecute her, you understand, brother: it is because she is labouring under two separate misunderstandings, both of which I wish to remove, an act that can be done only by word of mouth.'
'Of course. Certainly,' said Jack, to fill the silence; and the mare, turning her head, gazed at them with her lustrous Arabian eyes, blowing gently on them as she did so.
'You know about Brigid, of course. She is called an idiot, which is wholly incorrect: hers is a particular form of development, slower than most; but Diana does not know this. She believes there is idiocy, which she cannot bear...' Jack too had a horror of anything like insanity, and a word almost escaped him. '... and feeling no doubt that her reluctant presence was not only useless but positively harmful, she went away. She believes that I should blame her for doing so: that is the first misunderstanding. The second is, as I said, that she believes in this idiocy, and I wish to tell her that she is mistaken. Children of this kind are rarer than true idiots - who, I may say, can be told at a glance - but they are not very uncommon. There are two of them in Padeen's village in the County Kerry - they are called leanai sidhe in Ireland - and both were I will not say cured but brought into this world rather than another. They were taken at the critical moment. Padeen is the sort of person who can do this. He is strangely gifted.'
'I remember him taking a trapped cat in his hand and undoing the jaws with never a scratch: and there was the savage stone-horse we took out for the Sultan.'
'Just so: and many another example. But in this particular development, in Brigid's particular development, the balance is extremely delicate: it may go either way. The circumstances - the physical environment itself - are so exceptional. I must consult with Dr Willis: I must write to Dr Llens in Barcelona, the great expert in these matters. Yet in any case Mrs Williams must be kept away. She called and savaged Clarissa with impertinent questions and then insisted on seeing the child, her grand-niece: she frightened her, offering to give her a great shaking if she would not speak. I am happy to say that Clarissa put her out of the house directly.'
'I have a great esteem for Clarissa Oakes.'
'So have I. But that woman shall not go to Barham again. I must have a word with her.'
They were almost in the stable yard, and Jack said, 'In point of fact she and Mrs Morris are waiting for you: I said you would be here today, and they are waiting for you. They are in a great taking.'
'What's amiss?'
'Their man Briggs played the informer once too often: the hands caught him in Trump's Lane, coming back from the ale-house, and beat him. Black night, no words; only a din like a great puppy being whipped.'
'Oh Dr Maturin,' cried the three children more or less in unison, as they came running in from a side-walk. 'There you are. You have arrived! Grand-mama posted us by the gazebo to look out for you. She and Mrs Morris beg you to come at once. Briggs was set upon and terribly beaten by the Hampton Blacks. .
'Mr Owen the apothecary has plastered him and says he may live; but we doubt it.'
'Please may we take you there at once? We were promised fourpence if we took you at once. Papa will look after the horse, will you not, dear Papa?'
'She is a mare, stupid. An Arab, sir, I believe?'
Stephen walked in, and when he had endured their clamour, indignation and circumstantial account for some considerable time, he desired the ladies to leave him with the patient. He made his examination: here indeed was a truly swollen, bloated face, and back and buttocks strongly marked with rope's-end and cobbing-board; but no broken bones, no incised or lacerated wounds. Stephen was surprised that a man long accustomed to the race- course should be so upset by these moderate degrees of violence; yet Briggs was quite prostrated - fright almost
