Clarissa Oakes (27 page)

Although Jack and Stephen had played some deeply satisfying music that evening, Stephen sitting with his feet braced against the heel of the ship on a batten shipped for the purpose and Jack standing to play his fiddle, the Captain woke early in the morning watch on Sunday with the humiliation of his ship's disgrace still strong in his mind, and a clear recollection of Wainwright's silent astonishment and tactfully averted eyes when they came on deck. The wind had begun dropping through the middle watch, as some inner recorder told him, and he was not at all surprised to find the ship ghosting along under limp, dew-soaked sails over a grey sea with barely a ripple on the heavy swell from the south.

   'Good morning, Mr Davidge,' he said, taking the log-board from its place. 'Good morning, Mr Oakes.'

   'Good morning, sir,' said Davidge. 'Good morning, sir,' said Oakes.

   Although there were stars and even their reflexions in the west, the eastern sky was light enough for him to read the board: and from what the sky to starboard told he saw the calm would not last.

   'Have any sharks been seen?' he asked.

   Davidge hailed the lookout: no sharks, no sharks at all, sir.

   'I will just peep under the counter, sir,' said Oakes. 'Sometimes we have a messmate there.' A moment later he called 'All clear, sir.'

   'Thankee, Mr Oakes,' said Jack. He walked to the gangway stanchions, hung his shirt and trousers over the ridge-rope, breathed deep and dived deeper. The bubbles hissed past him, his whole weight changed; and the water was cool enough to be wonderfully refreshing. He swam powerfully for half a mile, and turning he contemplated the ship, her trim, her perfect lines, as she rose and fell, sometimes disappearing altogether in the trough of the swell. The sun had now turned the whole sky blue, light blue, and he could feel its warmth on the back of his neck. Yet even so some blackness remained; he did not rejoice with the whole of his being. The abiding fury was wholly dissipated however when within twenty yards of the frigate he caught sight of Mrs Oakes leaning over the quarterdeck rail, far aft.

   'Heavens,' he cried inwardly. 'I may be seen naked,' and he instantly dived, swimming as fast and far as he could on one breath.

   He need not have feared nor held his breath to so near bursting-point: already Oakes was running in one direction to shield her eyes and Killick, with a towel, in the other, to shield his person.

   Killick, seeing his captain's approach from afar, had also timed his first breakfast with particular care, rather as a keeper obliged to live in the same cage with a testy omnipotent lion might time his gobbets of horseflesh to the very first stroke of the zoological bell.

   For once Stephen shared this first breakfast. He had been so much taken up with encoding that he had not looked at a tenth part of his botany specimens nor even at all his birds and their parasites with anything like really close attention, and the thought of them brought him out of his cot at first light with that almost trembling or rather bubbling excitement he had known from very early days—his first sight of St Dabeoc's heath when he was seven, of a dell filled with Gold of Pleasure the next year, and of the Pyrenean desman (that rare ill-natured cousin to the shrew) only a few weeks after that!

   'I was very near offering Mrs Oakes a dreadful spectacle just now,' said Jack after a pause in which they each drank two cups of coffee. 'I was swimming back—was within pistol-shot—when I noticed her there at the rail. Had she looked my way she must have beheld a naked man.'

   'That would have been very shocking, indeed,' said Stephen. 'Pray pass the breadfruit toast.' He remembered an earlier occasion on which Mrs Oakes had in fact beheld a naked man, through the scuttle of the cabin in which she had been examined, perfectly unmoved. Jack was standing in a boat, giving directions about the recovery of a hawser cut by the sharp coral rock and on the point of diving himself; and she contemplated him with a detached interest: 'Captain Aubrey would be considered a fine figure of a man even in Ireland, would he not?' she asked. 'But surely he has been most dreadfully cut about?'

   'I should scarcely like to number the wounds I have sewn up and dressed, or the musket and pistol balls I have extracted,' said Stephen. 'You are to observe, ma'am, that they are all honourably in front; except for those that are behind.'

   That was long before their walk in Annamooka: indeed it was the first time he had distinctly seen anything unusual in her attitude towards men, an almost clinical attitude that disconcerted him to some degree, since neither her face nor her everyday behaviour was marked by any irregularity of life. He was still thinking of her when Jack said 'Speaking of Mrs Oakes, it is long since I heard her howling on Martin's viola: or Martin himself, for that matter.'

   'I believe I understood him to say that the neck was out of order: or possibly the head. How does it come about, do you suppose, that so few people play it? For a score that make their attempts upon a fiddle not more than one, nay less, tries the viola. Yet it has or can have the sweetest voice.'

   'I cannot tell, I am sure. Perhaps they are less easy to come by. Perhaps they are even more difficult to master: think how rare it is to find a player of the very first rate, fit to answer a violin like Cramer or Kreutzer in say Mozart's . . . Come in. Come in and sit down, Tom,' he called, pouring him a cup of coffee.

   'Thank you, sir. It was only that I forgot to ask whether you meant to rig church today.'

   'Yes,' said Jack, his face clouding again. 'Yes, certainly: there is nothing like church for bringing a sense of order into things. But only the penitential psalms and the Articles.'

Church by all means, with awnings over the quarterdeck; yet before church came the ceremony of divisions, the formal inspection of all hands lined up under their divisional officers, and of their quarters. It was, as Jack had observed, one of a commander's best opportunities for taking the ship's company's pulse. As he passed along the ranks he looked eye-to-eye at every seaman, petty officer and warrant officer aboard; and he would be a dull fellow if the expression or lack of expression on these scores of well-washed, new-shaven faces did not give him some notion of the ship's general temper.

   This worked both ways: the Surprises also gauged the state of their captain's mind; and his progress, accompanied by Pullings and by each divisional officer in turn, left gloom and dismay behind. In spite of his bathe, in spite of his breakfast and in spite of the fine steady breeze there was still a great deal of anger and resentment in his heart. The ship had been mishandled, made to look ridiculous—all that unofficer-like, unseamanlike swearing and shouting and noise in the course of an everyday manoeuvre that the old
Surprise
would have carried through without the slightest fuss and with little more than the single order 'Unmoor ship'—would have carried it through like a man-of-war rather than a slapdash privateer. It was a desecration; and very strong displeasure emanated from him as he walked along. He smiled only once, and that was when he came to the gunner's division, where Mr Smith was attended by Reade, making his first official appearance since his accident. 'I am happy to see you again, Mr Reade,' he said. 'You have the Doctor's leave I am sure?'

   'Oh yes, sir: he declared I was quite fit for—' began Reade: but here his voice, which had just started to break, soared out of control before he brought out 'light duties' in a deep croak.

   'Very good. But even so you must take care. We do not have so very many seamen aboard.'

   On to Oakes and the foretopmen, a division that had always been the most cheerful in the ship and that was now the most disturbed. Guilt accounted for some part of their trouble as it did for their more than usually high perfection of cleanliness and Sunday dress—gestures towards averting wrath—but there was also something more that he could not define. He walked along past them with a grave face and none of the small remarks that so often attended divisions. On to the forecastle-men and so to Jemmy Ducks and his charges. 'How they shoot up,' he reflected. 'Perhaps Fanny and Charlotte will be as long in the leg by now.' Although he looked at them kindly and asked them how they did, they gazed up with even more anxiety than usual. In their very remote Melanesian small childhood formal gatherings had sometimes ended in human sacrifice—a reasonable foundation for uneasiness—but in addition to this they were more exactly in tune with the people's mood than their captain; and so, raising upon the foundation to an uncommon height, they quavered as they replied.

   In the empty sick-berth Stephen and Martin sat carefully in their good clothes, listening to the sound of Padeen putting the last touches of polish and exact order to the surgical instruments. Breaking the silence Martin said in a low tone, 'I owe you a fuller explanation for my conduct yesterday. I did not go with you and Mrs Oakes because for some time now I have felt—how shall I put it?—an inclination, a growing inclination for her that it would be criminal to indulge. I felt I must avoid her company even at the cost of a falseness and incivility that I do assure you, Maturin, I very much regret.'

   'Never in life, my dear Martin,' said Stephen, shaking him by the hand. 'Sure, it is better to flee than to burn; and from the mere philosophical, as opposed to the moral, point of view, we covered rather more ground.'

   'For the same reason I broke my viola,' said Martin, still with his first idea: then, the second having pierced through, he clapped his hand to his pocket and cried, 'Very true. And at one point in our return, when Dr Falconer and I were sitting among old and rotting tree-trunks, felled by some long-past hurricane—a kind of locality you did not encounter, I collect—I found a large variety of beetles. Here,'—producing a flat box from his pocket—'is a selection I beg you will accept.'

   Stephen opened the box and tilted it to the filtered light. 'Here's glory for you!' he cried. 'Longicorns to a man: no, these must belong to the
Cleridae
—such colours! How they will make Sir Joseph stare: and how grateful I am. They are all dead, I find.'

   'Yes. I cannot bear that perpetual hopeless striving to escape, the scrabbling noise. So I pass them through spirits of wine.'

   'Gentleman, dear, himself is upon us,' said Padeen in a nervous whisper and of course in Irish, thrusting his head through the hatch like a rabbit and withdrawing it at once.

   'Perhaps I should tell you that Captain Aubrey means to invite you to dine with Pullings, the Oakeses and myself,' said Stephen.

   'Oh, thank you,' said Martin with a harassed smile. 'Now that I am forewarned I believe I can keep my countenance for the space of a dinner.'

   Yet when Jack, having gone through the motions of inspecting the sick-berth, said 'Mr Martin, may we hope for the pleasure of your company at dinner today?' Martin replied 'Alas, sir, I must beg to be excused. I am very far from well, and shall absent myself even from church: but allow me to say how very sensible I am of your goodness. Far from well—indeed, a man must be uncommonly disordered to decline an invitation from both his patron and his commanding officer.'

   The refusal of a captain's invitation to dinner was extremely unusual in the service—an act assumed to be a declaration of hostility, very near neighbour to mutiny if not to high treason—but Jack, who could not look upon either Martin or Stephen as a truly maritime animal, took it quite calmly, suggested that perhaps he had ate something in Annamooka, recommended lying down—'A man's pillow is his best medicine: though I should not say so in the present company'—asked his advice on the more lowering psalms, and carried on with his inspection.

   As he and Pullings walked forward along the cable-tier a rat crossed their path and Jack cried 'Bless me! It was here that we found Mrs Oakes, looking like a boy. That was in fact no great while ago in time or course made good, if you consider; yet now she seems as much part of the ship as the figurehead.' Pullings, who worshipped and detested the figurehead equally and in torment, uttered a murmur of assent, and after a while Jack went on 'Where did she get those trousers from, do you imagine? They were much too small for Oakes.'

   'They belonged to poor Miller, sir,' said Pullings, speaking of a midshipman killed in Jack's most recent action, 'and when his things were sold at the mainmast Reade bought the uniform, hoping he would grow into them when we were in New South Wales. But, however, he did not; and I suppose he passed them on—I only speak at a venture, sir. I have no real knowledge,' he added, unwilling to have the air of an informer.

   'It is very likely,' said Jack, calling young Miller to mind. 'They were much of a size.'

   He said no more until they were in the light of day once more, a light so brilliant that it caused them to narrow their eyes, but that also made it clear to the ship's people that nothing had happened below to change their skipper's state of mind, and that they still had a right Tartar on their hands.

   Jack Aubrey's large open florid blue-eyed face could not by any contortion be made to look shrewish or mean, but indignation for his ship and deep anger against the men who could have used her so gave it a leonine ferocity that had a wonderfully daunting effect. It did not change during divine service, an austere ritual unrelieved by the presence of the Reverend Nathaniel Martin, who though no hand at a sermon added a greater humanity than was present today: after the regulation prayers, read in a strong, unforgiving tone, and the sin-confessing psalm, the Surprises heard their captain raise his already powerful voice a pitch or two and run through the dreadful Articles of War in a tone less forgiving still. He dwelt with more than usual emphasis on the words '. . .if any officer, marine, soldier, or other person in the fleet, shall presume to quarrel with any of his superior officers, being in the execution of his office, or shall disobey any lawful command of any of his superior officers, every such person being convicted . . . shall suffer death.' And on 'If any person in the fleet shall quarrel or fight with any other person in the fleet, or use reproachful or provoking speeches or gestures, tending to make any quarrel or disturbance, he shall, upon being convicted thereon, suffer such punishments as the offence shall deserve . . .' And on 'No person in or belonging to the fleet shall . . . negligently perform the duty imposed upon him, or forsake his station, upon pain of death.'