Stephen said to him, 'You are a good-hearted soul, my dear, so you are. Now I shall see Diana for the best part of another twelve hours; and I shall not have to fret my mind over that infernal mail-coach.'
'Mrs Maturin tried to make me promise that she should drive,' said Jagiello, 'and I have given my word that she should, once the sun was up, subject to your approval.' He sounded uneasy.
'And did she submit to your condition?' said Stephen, smiling. 'That was kind. But you need not be concerned: she drives prodigiously well, and would send a team of camels through a needle's eye at a brisk round trot.'
'Oh,' cried Jagiello, 'how I admire a woman that can ride and drive, that understands horse!' And he went on at some length about Mrs Maturin's shining parts, which had needed only a thorough understanding of horses to be quite complete.
Stephen was aware of Nathan's amused, benign, cynical face on the far side of the table, smiling at Jagiello's enthusiasm: there was something about Jagiello that made people smile, he reflected - his youth, his cheerfulness, his abounding health, his beauty, perhaps his simplicity. 'None of these qualities are mine, or ever have been,' he said to himself. 'Are the Jagiellos conscious of their happiness? Probably not. Fortunatos nimium . . .'A yearning for coffee spurred his vitals, and seeing that the decanters had made their last round untouched by his pink and somewhat stertorous guests he said aloud, 'Perhaps, gentlemen, we might join the ladies.'
Jagiello's offer of the coach had come as a surprise, and the other carriages had been ordered early so that Dr Maturin should be able to make his farewells and reach the Portsmouth coach with half an hour to spare. The carriages therefore appeared at half past ten and rolled away, leaving Stephen, Diana, and Jagiello with a delightful sense of holiday, of free, unexpected, unmortgaged time. Nathan was also left behind, partly because he had come on foot from his house just round the corner and partly because he wished to speak to Diana about money. She had brought some magnificent jewels back from India and the United States, many of which she never wore; and in the present state of war, with Napoleon's astonishing, horrifying victories over the Austrians and Prussians, their value had increased immensely. Nathan wanted her to take advantage of the fact and to put some of the rubies ('vulgar great things, much too big, like raspberry tarts' she said) into a select list of deeply depressed British stocks, a drug on the market - an investment that would yield splendid returns in the event of an Allied victory at last. However, he only smiled and bowed when she suggested that they should take the remains of the bombe glacee into the billiard-room and there eat it while they played. 'Because in any case Stephen must say goodbye to his olive-tree,' she observed. Hers was perhaps the only billiard-room in Half Moon Street to possess an olive: the room had been built out over the garden behind, and Stephen, prising up a flagstone by a convenient window, had set a rooted cutting from a tree growing in his own land of Catalonia, itself the descendant of one in the grove of Academe. He sat by it now, showing Nathan the five new leaves and the almost certain promise of a sixth. With another husband Nathan might have spoken about these stocks and shares; but Stephen would have nothing whatsoever to do with his wife's fortune- he left it entirely to her.
'Come, Stephen,' said she, putting down her cue. 'I have left you such a pretty position.'
Dr Maturin addressing himself to a shattered leg with a saw in his hand was a bold, deft, determined operator; his gestures were rapid, sure, precise. But billiards was not his game. Although his theory was sound enough his practice was contemptible. Now, having studied the possibilities at length, he gave his ball a hesitant poke, watched it roll deliberately into the top right-hand pocket without touching any of the others, and returned to his olive-tree. The other players belonged to a different world entirely: Nathan gathered the balls into a corner, nursing therein a long series of almost imperceptible cannons and breaking them only to leave his opponent in a most uncomfortable situation; Jagiello accomplished some surprising feats at the top of the table with a spot- stroke; but Diana favoured a more dashing game by far, delighting in the losing hazard. She walked round the table with a predatory gleam in her eye, sending the balls streaking up and down with a ringing crack. At one point, when she had already made a break of thirty-seven and needed only three to win, the balls were awkwardly placed in the middle. She hoisted her slim person on to the edge of the table and she was about to reach right out with her whole length poised over the baize when Stephen called 'Take the rest to it, my dear; take the long rest, for all love.' There was a strong possibility that she was with child, and he did not like the position at all.
'Bah,' said she, lowering her cue to her outstretched hand: she glared along it, her eyes narrowed, the tip of her tongue showing from the corner of her mouth; she paused, and then with a strong smooth stroke sent the red straight into the bottom right-hand pocket while her own ball shot into that on the left. She slipped off the table with such a lithe, easy grace and such an open delighted triumph that Stephen's heart stopped for a beat and the other men looked at her with the utmost fondness.
'Captain Jagiello's coach,' said the butler.
As far as real battlefields and beds of roses were concerned, Captain Aubrey was far better acquainted with the first, partly because of his profession, which, with enormous intervals of delay, often cold and always wet, brought him into violent conflict with the King's enemies, to say nothing of the Admiralty, the Navy Board, and bloody-minded superiors and subordinates, and partly because he was a wretched gardener. For all his loving care the roses at Ashgrove Cottage produced more greenfly, caterpillars, mildew, rust, and grey mould than flowers - never enough at any one time to make a bed for a dwarf, let alone a six-foot sea-officer who tipped the beam at sixteen stone. In the figurative sense, his marriage was a good deal nearer the roses than most; he was a good deal happier than he deserved (he was neither a sure provider nor quite strictly monogamous) and although he was not ideally happy, although he might secretly wish for a companion with more sense of a man's carnal nature and somewhat less possessive, he was profoundly attached to Sophie: and in any case he was often away from home for years on end.
He now stood on the poop of HMS Worcester, about to set off again; and his wife sat a little way behind him, on an incongruous elbow-chair brought on deck for the occasion.
The ship had been at single anchor in Spithead these long hours past, the Blue Peter as firmly established at her foretopmast head as though it had been nailed there, her foretopsail loosed, and her capstan-bars shipped and swifted a whole watch ago, ready to send her on her way: the entire ship's company was in a state of angry tension - officers snappish, dinner delayed, all eyes indignantly turned to the shore. She swung broad on the slackening ebb, and Captain Aubrey moved over to the starboard rail, his telescope still trained on Portsmouth. His face, his naturally good-tempered, cheerful face, was set, dark, and stern: the wind still served, but only just, and once the tide began to make his ship might as well return to her moorings - she would never get out against the tide. He loathed unpunctuality; and unpunctuality it was, gross unpunctuality, that was keeping him here; he had already begged a long, long breathing-space from the port-admiral, who was devoted to Mrs Aubrey, but this could not last and any moment now a hoist would break out on that flagstaff over there, the Worcester's signal to proceed to sea, and then sail she must, surgeon or no surgeon, leaving her gig's crew to find their way as best they'might.
Dr Maturin's sea-chest had come aboard, and his well-remembered 'cello-case, brought in good time from the Portsmouth mail; but no Doctor had come with them. It was in vain that Bonden, the Captain's coxswain, badgered the coachman and the guard: no, they had not seen a little ill-looking sallow cove in a full-bottomed wig; no, they had not left him by accident at Guildford, Godalming or Petersfield, because why? Because he was never on the bleeding coach to begin with, cully. Bonden might put that in his pipe and smoke it, or stuff it up his arse, whichever he preferred; and there was eighteenpence to pay on the bass fiddle, as being unnatural baggage, unaccompanied.
