Clarissa Oakes (18 page)

   '
Battened down
,' said Martin. 'There is a term I have heard again and again, like
bitter end
and
laid by the lee
, without ever really understanding it. Perhaps, sir, you would explain them?'

   'Certainly,' said Stephen. The seamen uttered no word; their vacant expressions betrayed nothing; only two exchanged covert glances. 'Certainly. But in these cases one drawing is worth a thousand words, so let us walk upstairs and find paper and ink.'

   Hardly were they at the door, attended by Padeen, than there were cries on the ladderway and Reade was passed down, pouring with blood. A falling block had struck him so that he fell on to the marline-spike poised in his hand. It was awkwardly wedged between his ribs and he was half fainting with the pain.

   'Hold him just so and sit on the step,' said Stephen to Bonden, who was carrying the boy. 'Padeen, two chests into his cabin and the great lantern this living minute.'

   The two chests were lashed together, forming a table; Reade lay on his back on a spare studdingsail with his mouth tight shut, his breath coming fast and shallow; the surgeon looked down in the strong light, swabbing away the blood, gently feeling the spike and the wound and the crepitation of bone.

   'This is going to be extremely painful,' said Stephen in Latin. 'I shall fetch the poppy.' Hurrying below he unlocked the hidden laudanum, poured a strong dose into a phial, caught up some instruments and ran back. Once there he cried 'Padeen, now, fetch me the long ivory probe and two pairs of retractors,' and as soon as Padeen was gone he raised the boy's head and poured the dose into his mouth. For all Reade's fortitude, tears were running fast.

   Jack Aubrey was at the door. 'Come back in half an hour,' said Stephen. Half an hour, and the waves of pain rose and fell, reaching a shocking height before Stephen withdrew the splinter pressing on a thoracic nerve. Reade lay there, inert now, pale, running with sweat. 'There now, my dear, the worst is over,' said Stephen in his ear. 'I have not seen a braver patient.' And to Jack at the door, 'With the blessing he will do.'

   'I am heartily glad of it,' said Jack. 'I shall look in again at eight bells.'

   By eight bells Reade had drifted off and Stephen stepped to the door when he heard Jack's step. After a few low words Jack said 'Mrs Oakes asks whether you would like her to sit up with him tonight.'

   'Will I first see how he comes along?'

   'Aye: do,' said Jack.

   'And may he have a cot rather than his hammock, and two strong men to lift him in?'

   'At once.'

   The cot was slung; Bonden and Davies, bracing themselves with infinite care against the heave of the sea, raised the boy on his taut sailcloth, lowered him so gently that he never stirred, and walked silently out.

   Stephen returned to his seat, musing on a variety of things—the presence of a highly-developed olfactory system in albatrosses, its paradoxical absence in vultures—the easier motion of the ship, her less urgent voice—the situation in the gun-room—and at two bells Reade said, in a sleepwalker's voice, 'I doubt we are making more than eight knots now.'

   'Listen, my dear,' said Stephen, 'should you like Mrs Oakes to sit by you a while? Mrs Oakes?'

   'Oh, her,' said Reade. After a long pause he went on '. . . they go in and out of that door, like a bawdy-house. I see them from here,' turned his head away and drifted off again.

   When Jack returned Stephen told him that a medical hand was still required—that the patient should be moved downstairs tomorrow, if possible, for constant attention—and that Martin would relieve him in less than an hour.

'Surely the tempest has disarmed,' he said, walking into the lamplit cabin. 'The noise up here is less by half, and I climbed the stairs with barely a stagger.'

   'The breeze has been dropping steadily,' said Jack, 'and after the last downpour—Lord, how it did pelt! Splashing from the deck up to your waist and gushing from the lee-scuppers like a fire-engine: if we had not battened down quite early you would have had a sopping bed—after the last downpour, the sky cleared . . . but tell me, how is the boy?'

   'He is fast asleep and snoring. The wound itself was not very grave—pleura untouched—and extracting the marline-spike was no great matter, but it had driven a splinter of rib hard against a nerve, and withdrawing that was a delicate business. Now that it is out, however, he ought to be comfortable enough; and unless there should be infection, which is happily rare at sea, we may see him walking about quite soon. The young are wonderfully resilient.'

   'I am delighted to hear it. And I dare say you will be delighted to hear that we know where we are. Tom and I had two beautiful lunars, the one on Mars, the other on Fomalhaut. If the wind had not hauled round a little north of east we might have made the Friendly Isles tomorrow.'

   'You will never tell me, for all love, that you have been careering over this stormy ocean like a mad bull day and night without knowing where you were? And if you had run violently upon an island, Friendly or not, where would you have been then, your soul to the Devil?'

   'There is dead reckoning, you know,' said Jack mildly. 'Shall we have something to eat?'

   'How happy that would make me,' cried Stephen, suddenly conscious that he was clemmed, pinched and wasted with hunger.

   'Which there is the best part of the hen that died,' said Killick, in one of those inferior pantomime appearances they knew so well. 'And since the galley stove is still hot, you might fancy a little broth to wet your biscuit first.'

   'Broth and chicken, what joy,' said Stephen, and when Killick had left he went on, 'Tell me, Jack, just how would you explain the term
battened down?
'

   A piercing look showed Jack that although this was almost past believing he was not in fact being made game of, and he replied 'First I should say that we talk very loosely about hatches, often meaning hatchways and even ladderways—"he came up the fore hatch"—which of course ain't hatches at all. The real hatches are the things that cover the hatchways: gratings and close-hatches. Now as you know very well, when a great deal of water comes aboard either from the sea or the sky or both, we cover those real hatches with tarpaulins.'

   'I believe I have seen it done,' said Stephen.

   'Not above five thousand times,' said Jack inwardly, and aloud 'And if it also comes on to blow and rain uncommon hard, we take battens, stout laths of wood, that fit against the coaming, the raised rim of the hatchway, and so pin the tarpaulin down drum-tight. Some people do it by nailing the batten to the deck, but it is a sad, sloppy, unseamanlike way of carrying on, and we have cleats. I will show them to you first thing in the morning.'

   For seamen first thing in the morning meant that dismal hour at the fag-end of an old and weary night when elm-tree pumps and head-pumps flood the already sodden forecastle, upper deck and quarterdeck with water, and the still sleep-sodden hands move aft in gangs, sanding, holystoning, sweeping and flogging more or less dry: for some seamen it also meant the time when Reade, still bleary with opium, was carried down to a sheltered extension of the sick-berth, there to be watched by Padeen.

   For Stephen however it meant first thing in the Christian day, and it was in this sense that Oakes came below with the Captain's compliments and would the Doctor like to see the cleats they had spoken of? He was a pale, silent, dangerous-looking young man now, no longer an oafish overgrown youth; but he managed a smile for Stephen and added 'You might see something else too.'

   The something else was a mildly ruffled sea, unvarying Prussian blue almost to the horizon under a pure pale sky: the sun just clear of the eastern ocean, the moon sinking into it on the other hand: and on the starboard bow a low domed island of some size, far off but already as green as a good emerald in that slanting light. The breeze, blowing directly from this island, was so faint that it scarcely whispered in the rigging, nor filled the towering array of sails with any firm conviction; yet it seemed to Stephen that the air brought the scent of land.

   'Where is the Captain, Barber?' he asked a seaman on the gangway.

   'He is at the masthead, sir.'

   So, it appeared, was everyone else who could command an eminence and a telescope. Hammocks had not yet been piped up, but the watch below had come on deck of their own accord, and there they were, gazing at the distant island with great satisfaction, saying very little. Six bells, and John Brampton's spell at the wheel was done: he was a young smuggler and privateersman from Shelmerston, one of the Sethian persuasion, but less rigid than his fellows, and in his cheerful way he called out 'Good morning, sir,' as he went forward.

   'Good morning, John,' Stephen replied, and pausing, Brampton asked him whether he did not admire the Captain. 'Never out. We knew he was not cracking on for sport; and there she lies!'

   'Where? Where?'

   'Right in with the island. Uncle Slade with his spyglass in the fore jack-crosstrees made her out directly, when the sun lit up her sails. You can't deceive the Captain, ha, ha, ha!' He was still laughing when he seized the foremast shroud and ran up to join his uncle.

   'Good morning, Doctor,' said Jack, reaching the deck by way of a back-stay, his boyish agility making an odd contrast with his worn face. 'What news of Reade?'

   'He is doing well so far,' said Stephen. 'No fever: some discomfort, but no very grievous pain—he can lie easy. Mr Martin is with him now, in the sick-berth.'

   'I am so glad,' said Jack. 'And I beg pardon for being aloft when I sent word: a sail had been sighted. But, however, you are come to see these cleats. Shall we step down to the upper deck?'

   'Would you first tell me about this island, and your sail?'

   'Why, it is Captain Cook's Annamooka, exactly where he set it down.'

   'One of the Friendly Isles?'

   'Just so. Did I not mention it last night?'

   'You did not. But I rejoice to hear it. And what of your sail?'

   'It is right in with the shore. From the masthead you can still see it tolerably well with a glass: a European vessel, almost certainly a whaler—I saw a school of about twenty blowing at first light.'

   'How I hope you will sail straight in, take your prize and turn us ashore for a thorough examination of the island's flora, fauna and . . .'

   'Coffee's up, sir,' said Killick.

   'Shall we go down?' asked Jack; and on the upper deck he showed Stephen the after-hatchway, its coaming and its cleats. 'A pin passed through this hole across the cleat, do you see, and grips the batten tight. It was not my invention but my predecessor's. You remember Edward Hamilton?'

   'I believe not.'

   'Oh come, Stephen. Sir Edward Hamilton, who commanded the
Surprise
when she cut out the
Hermione
. The man who was dismissed the service for seizing his gunner up in the rigging.'

   'Must you not seize a gunner up in the rigging?'

   'Oh dear me, no. He is protected by his warrant, just as you are. Anyone else you may seize up, and flog too; but all you can do to an officer that holds a warrant or a commission is to confine him to his cabin until he is brought to a court-martial. Hamilton was well with the Prince of Wales, however, and he was reinstated quite soon . . . It is whimsical enough to think that two captains of the
Surprise
should have been struck off and then brought back.'

   Jack had invited Pullings and Oakes to breakfast, and since service matters were allowed to be discussed at this meal, the westward currents, the tide, the adverse breeze, the probable nature and nationality of the distant sail, the frigate's urgent need of water, livestock, vegetables and coconuts were canvassed, together with the desirability of intensive work on all the rigging, running and standing; but Jack did talk about other things, and he did ask after Mrs Oakes. 'She is very well, sir, I thank you,' said Oakes flushing, 'but she stumbled against a locker in the heavy weather, and she means to keep to her cabin for some time.'

   Stephen excused himself quite early: apart from anything else this was as dull a breakfast as Jack had ever given, the host himself in poor spirits despite his landfall, guests obscurely oppressed, somehow shifty. Martin, relieved by Padeen and the little girls at eight bells, was already at the rail. 'I give you joy of the Friendly Isles,' he said, 'and of the prospect of a noble prize. All the hands who have made the journey to the main jack-crosstrees assure me that she is an American whaler, very deep-laden with spermaceti and no doubt great quantities of ambergris. Do you suppose the Captain means to go straight for her in the Nelson fashion, take her, and give us a run on the island? How I hope so!'

   'So indeed do I. What mind is indifferent to a prize? And in addition to this splendid prize, a week of walking about on Annamooka—that indeed would be bliss. I believe it has a very curious chestnut-coloured cuckoo, and some rails, while the people are as amiable as can be, apart from a certain thievishness.'

   'I have heard that there is an owl in the Friendly Isles,' said Martin.

   'There she blows!' cried Stephen, together with a score of his shipmates: the familiar forward-pointing single jet, a hundred yards to windward, was followed by a black surging as the whale turned and dived, an ancient solitary bull with a lacerated tail. 'An owl, Nathaniel Martin? An owl in Polynesia? You amaze me.'

   'I heard it on good authority. But here is the bosun, who has been to Tongataboo, no great way off. Mr Bulkeley,' calling down into the waist, 'did you see any owls in Tongataboo?'

   'Owls? God bless you, sir,' replied the bosun in his carrying voice, 'there was one tree near the watering-place so thick with owls you could hardly tell which was tree and which was owls. Purple owls.'

   'Did they have ears, Mr Bulkeley?' asked Martin, as one who doubts the value of his question.

   'That I cannot take my oath on, sir; and I should hazard a lie if I said yea or nay.'