The Ionian Mission (36 page)

   'God damn me,' said Harte, 'I should hang the mutinous buggers if I had my own way, every last one of them. But with both chief witnesses dead, I suppose it must be so.'

   'Since
Worcester
must go in,' said Jack, 'I could pick an excellent frigate's crew from her people alone, men who are used to working together—several old Surprises among them.'

   'Make it so, Aubrey, make it so,' said Harte: and in the same tone of awkward goodwill he continued, 'Of course you will have to have a sloop of some kind in company for this sort of expedition: if you like I will try to let you have Babbington in the
Dryad
.'

   'Thank you very much, sir,' said Jack. 'I should like that of all things.'

   ' "I should like that of all things," said I, with a winning leer and a bob of my head,' wrote Jack Aubrey in his letter home, a letter dated from '
Surprise
, at sea'. 'But I hope, sweetheart, you will not think me ungenerous or mean-spirited when I say I do not trust him: that is to say, I do not trust the long continuance of his goodwill. If I choose the wrong man among these beys or if the operations do not go well, I think he will throw me to the dogs without the least hesitation; and William Babbington after me. Stephen don't trust him neither.' He paused; and reflecting that he could not very well describe his friend's vehement refusal to appear in the character of an intelligence-agent before 'a man so weak, so choleric, so little master of his passions, and so likely to be indiscreet' as Harte even though the Rear-Admiral might for the moment be acting Commander-in-Chief, he added 'which is very sad.' But the words were no sooner written than they struck him as ludicrous, and he was so very far from sad himself, that he laughed aloud.

   'What now?' called Killick angrily from the sleeping-cabin: he was one of the very few who disliked the move into the
Surprise
and he had been in a most unpleasant temper ever since they left Malta. His immediate predecessor, Captain Latham's steward, a fornicating sodomite by the name of Hogg, had changed everything—nothing was the same. The night-locker where Killick had always kept needle and thread for small repairs had been moved from starboard to larboard: the midships scuttle under which he had always worked had been blocked up and painted over. He could no longer find anything, nor could he see to sew.

   'I was only laughing,' said Jack.

   'If I had that Hogg under my needle now,' said Killick, giving the hem of Captain Aubrey's best neckcloth a vicious stab, 'wouldn't I learn him to laugh? Oh no: not half I wouldn't . . .' His voice diminished in volume, but his nasal whine had a curiously penetrating quality and as Jack carried on with his letter he half-heard the stream of discontent flowing on: '. . . unhappy ship, and no wonder . . . everything changed . . . acres of fucking brass . . . closed up my scuttle . . . how can a poor unfortunate bugger see with no light, sewing black upon black?' This last was so shrill that it quite broke in upon Jack's line of thought. 'If you cannot see in there, carry it out into the stern-gallery,' he called, forgetting for a moment that they were no longer in the
Worcester
.

   'Which there ain't no stern-gallery, sir, now we been degraded to a sixth-rate,' cried Killick with malignant triumph. 'Stern-galleries is for our betters, and I must toil and moil away in the dark.'

   'Killick is in a horrid passion, I am sorry to say,' wrote Jack, 'and will not be comforted until we are back in a ship of the line. For my part I do not care if I never see a ship of the line again: after these months of close blockade, a well-found frigate seems the ideal command to me, and I may say the same for all my officers. I am to dine with them today, and we are to have a grand poetic contest, a kind of sweepstake, to be judged by secret ballot. Killick,' he called, 'rouse out a glass of bitters, will you? And have one for yourself while you are about it.' The gun-room's dinner was earlier than Jack's usual hour, and he wanted to do honour to their feast.

   'Which there ain't none left, sir,' replied Killick, pleased for the first time that day. 'Don't you remember the case dropped into the hold in consequence of the orlop-scuttle had been shifted, which they never told us, and was stove: so there ain't none left—all wasted, not even tasted, all gone into the bilge.'

   'All wasted

   Not even tasted

   All gone into the bilge,' he repeated in a lugubrious chant.

   'Oh well,' said Jack, 'I shall take a turn upon the quarterdeck: that will answer just as well.'

   It answered even better. The hands had already eaten their dinner and drunk their grog but the midshipmen's berth was rounding out their pease-pudding and pig's trotters with toasted bloaters, laid in at Valetta, and the smell eddying aft from the galley brought water to his mouth. Yet the bloaters were not really necessary: happiness always gave Jack Aubrey an appetite and at present he was filled with irrational glee, a glee that redoubled as he stood on that familiar quarterdeck, so much nearer to the sea than the
Worcester's
, and surveyed the noble spread of canvas that was urging the
Surprise
eastwards to her meeting with the
Dryad
at nearly three knots in a breeze so faint that many ships would not have had steerage-way, while at the same time he felt her supple lift and yield to the southern swell, a more living motion than that of any other ship he knew.

   His was largely an irrational happiness and entirely on the surface: he had only to move down one layer in his mind to meet his very real distress for Admiral Thornton, one more for the shocking disappointment of the battle that had escaped them—a battle that might have ranked with St Vincent or the Nile and which would almost certainly have made Tom Pullings a commander (a move particularly near to Aubrey's heart)—another layer still for his own deeply worrying failure at Barka: and if he sank farther there were always his legal and financial worries at home and his anxiety about his father. The newspapers in Malta had spoken of General Aubrey's being returned for no less than two constituencies at once; and it appeared that the old gentleman was now twice as loquacious. He spoke against the ministry almost every day, and he was now doing so entirely in the more extreme Radical interest, alas, a real embarrassment to the ministry. And there was not much room for rational glee if Jack looked forward, either, but rather the prospect of an exceedingly difficult situation in which diplomacy rather than hard fighting would be called for, a situation in which he could rely on no support from his chief, a situation in which a mistaken choice might bring his naval career to an end.

   Yet gleeful he was. The tedium of blockade on short commons in a heavy, ill-contrived ship that might publicly disgrace herself at any minute was behind him, at least for the immediate future; the wearisome and in some ways painful transfer, the paper-work and the wrangling with the authorities in Malta was over; the
Worcester
, that walking corpse, was the dockyard's corporate anxiety, not his; and although he had left the oratorio behind him he had also left the mumps, that fell disease. He had dispersed his more useless midshipmen and all his youngsters but for two, Calamy and Williamson, for whom he felt a particular responsibility. And he was aboard a thoroughbred frigate, a ship he knew through and through and that he loved entirely, not only for her amiable qualities but because she was part of his youth—quite apart from the fact that he had commanded her in the Indian Ocean, where she had behaved quite beautifully, he had served in her long, long ago, and even the smell of her cramped and awkward midshipmen's berth made him feel young again. She was rather small (few smaller left in the service), she was rather old, and although she had been very much strengthened, almost rebuilt, in the Cadiz yard, it would never, never do to take her across to meet the heavy Americans; but he had found to his delight that her refitting had not altered her sailing qualities in the least—she was astonishingly fast for those who knew how to handle her, she could come about like a cutter, and she could eat the wind out of any ship on the station. For this kind of mission, and for the eastern Mediterranean in general, she was everything he could ask (except in broadside weight of metal), above all as he had had the most uncommon good fortune of being able to give her a crew of hand-picked seamen, in which even the afterguard could hand, reef and steer. There were still many who had not sailed with him before the
Worcester
, but a surprising proportion of the frigate's two hundred men had done so—all the first and second captains of the guns for example, and nearly all the petty officers—and wherever he looked he saw faces he knew. Even when they were not old shipmates he could put a name to them and a character, whereas in the
Worcester
far too many had been anonymous. And he observed that they looked remarkably cheerful, as though his own good humour had spread: certainly they had just had their grog, and the weather was fine, and this was a peaceful make-and-mend afternoon, but even so he had rarely seen a more cheerful crew, particularly the old Surprises. 'A
surprising
proportion of old Surprises,' he said to himself, and chuckled.

   'The skipper's luck is in,' murmured Bonden, as he sat on the gangway, embroidering
Surprise
on the ribbon of his shore-going hat.

   'Well, I hope so, I'm sure,' said his heavy cousin Joe. 'It's been out long enough. Get your great arse off of my new shirt, you whoreson lobster,' he said mildly to his other neighbour, a Marine.

   'I only hope it's not come in too hearty, that's all,' said Bonden, reaching out for the solid wooden truck of number eight gun's carriage.

   Joe nodded. Although he was a heavy man he perfectly grasped the meaning of Bonden's 'luck'. It was not chance, commonplace good fortune, far from it, but a different concept altogether, one of an almost religious nature, like the favour of some god or even in extreme cases like possession; and if it came in too hearty it might prove fatal—too fiery an embrace entirely. In any event it had to be treated with great respect, rarely named, referred to by allusion or alias, never explained. There was no clear necessary connection with moral worth nor with beauty but its possessors were generally well-liked men and tolerably good-looking: and it was often seen to go with a particular kind of happiness. It was this quality, much more than his prizes, the perceived cause rather than the effect, that had made the lower deck speak of Lucky Jack Aubrey early in his career; and it was a piety at the same old heathen level that now made Bonden deprecate any excess.

   Captain Aubrey, staring out over the weather-rail, smiling as he recalled the simple fun he had had in this same ship as a boy, heard the crunch of the Marine drummers's boots coming aft. He cast a last automatic glance at the dog-vane, said 'Very well Dyce' to the helmsman, went below for his best neckcloth, and put it on while the drum beat Roast Beef of Old England; then bending low under the beams he walked into the gun-room just as Pullings took up his station at the door to welcome him.

   'Come, this is altogether snugger and more homely,' said Jack, smiling at the friendly faces, eight of them tight-packed round the gun-room table; and homely it was for those brought up in sea-going slums, though perhaps a little snugger than could have been wished, since each had his servant behind his chair and since the day was uncommonly warm and still, with no air coming below. The fare was homely too, the main dish being the roast beef of Old Calabria, a great piece of one of those Italian buffaloes known as grey friars in the Navy and shipped to Malta when they were quite past work; and this was followed by figgy-dowdy.

   'Now that is what I call a really good basis for literature,' said Jack, when the cloth had been drawn, the King's health drunk, and fresh decanters set upon the table. 'When is the sweepstake to begin?'

   'Directly, sir,' said Pullings. 'Thompson, pass round the voting-papers, place the ballot-box, collect the stakes, and hand along the glass. We have agreed, sir, that each gentleman is to limit himself to a four-and-a-half-minute glass; but he may explain the rest of the poem in prose, speaking quick. And we have agreed, sir, that there is to be no applause, nor no cat-calls, for fear of influencing the vote. It is all to be as fair as Habeas Corpus.'

   'Or
Nunc dimittis
,' said the purser. But although Mr Adams had been very active in framing the rules, he and others turned shy at the last moment, and the pearly nautilus passed round for the stakes held only a half-guinea, an assortment of English silver, and three pieces of eight, the contribution of the remaining competitors, Mowett, Rowan, and Driver, the new Marine officer shipped at Malta, a very ample, pink, amiable young man with weak eyes and a way of chuckling to himself. His powers were as yet unknown to the gun-room. They drew lots, and Rowan began. 'Now, gentlemen,' he said, speaking quick and in prose, 'this is part of a poem about the
Courageux
, Captain Wilkinson, running plumb on to the Anholt reef by night, wind at south-west, double-reefed topsails and forecourse, making eight knots. Turn the glass.' Pullings turned the sand-glass and without the slightest change of tone or pace or the least concession to the conventions of recital Rowan went straight on, his jolly round face beaming on the company,

'Dismal was this, many did despair

That her dissolution was very near;

She thumped heavy, and masts did play

That in their obedience to the prow, would jump away.

'Awful the grinding noise of keel and heel

With an unusual motion made the crew to reel,

The rudder being most oppressed and bound

But soon it got released and went to the ground.

'Sail first being set to press her over the reef,

But striking harder without relief

'Twas instantly chewed up and fasted again anew

With willingness and zeal by her gallant crew.

'At last the deleterious order to prepare

To throw the cannon overboard. Oh what despair!

The officer of the third post ventured to state

Oh noble chief tan pray hesitate!