‘The doctors are going ashore,’ said Joe Plaice to his old friend Barret Bonden.
‘I don’t blame them,’ said Bonden. ‘I should like to see the sights of Spalato myself. I dare say they are going to burn a candle to some saint.’
‘That’s a genteel way of putting it,’ said Plaice.
At six bells in the middle watch, when all the larboard and most of the starboard guns had been drawn and reloaded with powder that Jack kept for saluting, the doctors came back. They were kindly helped up the side by powerful seamen and they crept, weary and bowed, towards their beds.
‘Wholly shagged out,’ said the gunner’s mate. ‘Dear me, they can’t hardly walk.’
‘Well, we are all of us human,’ said the yeoman of the sheets.
‘There you are, gentlemen,’ called the Commodore from by the wheel. ‘You have come aboard again, I find. Let me advise you to get what sleep you can, for presently there may be too much noise for it.’
‘Kedge up and down,’ cried Whewell from the bows.
‘Win her briskly, Mr Whewell,’ said Jack, and directing his voice aft, ‘Are you ready, Master Gunner?’
‘Ready, aye ready, sir,’ replied the gunner, that bull of Bashan.
‘Mr Woodbine,’ said Jack to the master, ‘we will take her in now: just topsails. You can make out the Frenchman’s lights, I believe?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘Then steer for a point a cable’s length astern of her and then run up her larboard side within fifty yards. But I shall be on deck again by then.’ He walked aft and called over the dark water, ‘Pomone!’
‘Sir?’ replied Captain Vaux.
‘I am about to get under way.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘Hands to make sail,’ said the master to the bosun, who instantly piped the invariable call. ‘Topsails,’ said the master. In almost total silence the hands appointed to gaskets, sheets, clewlines and buntlines, ties, halyards and then braces carried out their tasks with barely a word, at great speed: a pretty example of exact timing, co-ordination and long-established skill, if there had been anyone there who did not take it for granted.
The topsails rose; they filled and they were sheeted home: the ship began to move, with the warm breeze steady on her larboard quarter. Within moments she had steerageway, and the water spoke down her side, as gently as the breeze in the rigging: out of the shelter of Brazza she began to roll and pitch just a little - it was life renewed after that lying-to.
Light there was none, apart from the faint blur of the moon behind very high cloud - never a star - and here and there remote top-lanterns on the shipping far on the starboard bow and the odd cluster of lights on the distant quay. Dark and silent: so dark that even the topsails grew faint towards the height of the cross-trees.
All along the starboard side the gun-crews stood mute, some just visible above their shaded fighting-lanterns: midshipmen or master’s mates behind them: lieutenants behind each division.
Mr Woodbine kept his eyes fixed on the Cerbere’s lit stern from the moment they cleared the channel: it grew larger, brighter and brighter. He glanced across at the Commodore, who nodded. ‘Round to,’ said Woodbine to the man at the wheel, and then, as Surprise’s turn laid her parallel to the Cerbere, ‘Dyce, very well dyce,’ and he steadied her on this course. When her bows came level with the Frenchman’s quarter the master backed the main topsail, taking the way off her, and Jack cried ‘Fire!’
Instantly the ship’s side shot forth an enormous volume of sound and an immense smoke-bank lit with brilliant flashes - smoke that drifted evenly over the Cerbere, which replied through it with an even greater roar - greater, though as Jack noticed with satisfaction, not quite so exactly uniform.
Stephen Maturin, worn limp as an old and dirty pair of stockings after countless hours of negotiation, mostly in Slavonic languages that he understood no more than Turkish and that had to be translated, all in a stifling atmosphere, with people playing shawms outside to prevent the possibility of eavesdropping - shawms in no key known to him or range of intervals - had lain flat on his cot the moment he reached it, plunging instantly into a stupor rather than a Christian sleep.
From this his body leapt up at the first prodigious crash, leaving its wits behind it: and when the two came together he found that he was sitting by the door, his body as tense as a frightened cat’s.
