‘Oh, very handsome, sir; and I make no doubt I shall bring them back myself.’
When this interview and a few others that showed the trend of Captain Aubrey’s mind were over, Stephen said, ‘And I shall be getting some medical stores: we are sadly short of portable soup; and, since that unfortunate lingering in Mahon, blue ointment. Tell me, Jack, am I right in supposing that we shall have four or even five days longer here than you had wished?’
‘No: you are quite right.’
‘Then shall you wait on Lady Keith?’
‘Of course I shall. And on the Admiral too.’
‘Please may I come with you?’
‘By all means. Queenie speaks of you so pleasantly.’ On the day of the visit Stephen went ashore early, bought a new wig at Barlow’s and searched through the entire market until he found a pot of lilies-of-the-valley in just-opening bud. Returning he gave Mona and Kevin a square of chocolate calculated for solid jaws and iron stomachs; yet though they thanked him prettily they neither ate nor moved but stood gazing up in something between wonder and alarm. At last Mona said, ‘You have changed your hair.’
‘Never mind, my dear,’ he replied. ‘It is only a wig.’ He took it off to show: and both instantly burst into tears.
‘Dear Lady Keith,’ he said as they sat in the parlour overlooking her fine garden and the Strait, with misty Africa on the far side, ‘do you remember the first time you ever saw a man without his wig?’
‘No. Papa always took it off when he was teaching me to swim at Brighton, and I was so much concerned with splashing that I did not remark the change, or scarcely: a rapid moult indeed, but a perfectly natural one.’
‘I ask because my two children - children that I bought in the slave-market at Algiers - a boy and a girl, twins - wept most bitterly when I took mine off this morning, and could not be comforted.’
‘Poor little souls - there are those damned apes again: Jack, pray bang on the window, will you? - how old are they?’
‘Just losing their milk-teeth. An Algerine corsair took them off the Munster coast and I mean to send them back to their parents, peasants in a village I know. I hope to find a King’s ship bound for the Cove of Cork.’
‘There should be no difficulty: I shall ask the Admiral. But what do you mean to do with them in the mean while?
If you are ordered to sea, for example? Ordered to the West Indies?’
‘I had hoped to find a suitable, kindly family, to keep them until a suitable, kindly man-of-war should carry them home, with a letter to a priest I know in Cork and a purse to take them to Ballydonegan in an ass-cart.’
‘Do they speak English?’
‘Very little, and much of that little rather coarse: but it is wonderful how the infant mind absorbs a language through the ears.’
‘Well, if you like to entrust them to me, I shall tell our Scorpion, our chief gardener, to put them up: he has a good wife, quite a large cottage, and only grown-up children. He speaks English, Rock-English, and he is a good, decent man. In any case I shall look after them.’
‘How deeply kind of you, Lady Keith: may I bring them up later today?’
‘Please do. I shall look forward to seeing them. But tell me now, Dr Maturin, what did you see on the Barbary Coast, in the way of birds?’
‘Some way inland there was a vast saline lake crowded with flamingos and a large variety of waders; vultures all the usual kinds; the brown-necked raven. Among the mere quadrupeds there were hyenas, of course, and an elegant leopard. But what would really have pleased you was an anomalous nuthatch.’
‘Dear me, Maturin,’ cried Lady Keith, who was particularly attached to nuthatches, ‘anomalous in what respect?’
‘Well, you instantly see that he is a nuthatch, though an absurdly small one: but then you realize that he has almost no black on his crown, that his whole mantle is more nearly blue than is quite proper, that his tail is even shorter than that of other species, and that his voice is more like that of a wryneck than...’
The description was cut short by the Admiral
