The Nutmeg of Consolation (7 page)

They chose coming with him out of a desire for novelty, an unwillingness to see Li Po just at present, and the glory of carrying the rifle. The path was narrow, their legs short, and they had either to run in front of him and talk over their shoulders or else behind and call out to the back of his head as he carried the boy; for there was no question of their not talking, with so much to communicate and so many important things to learn. The slimmer of the two, whose eyes had that extraordinary purity of curve only to be seen in Chinese children, wished Stephen to know that her best friend in Batavia, whose name could be interpreted Golden Flower of Day, possessed a striped Dutch cat. No doubt the old gentleman had already seen a striped Dutch cat? Would the old gentleman like to hear an account of the plants in their garden, and of the betrothal ceremonies of their aunt Wang? This and a catalogue of the varieties of edible birds' nests, with their prices, lasted almost to the edge of the forest, and they could be heard from the camp well before their forms could be seen.

'Lord, Jack,' said Stephen when the boy had been put into a cot with a basket over his leg and Ahmed at hand to comfort him, and when the little girls had been turned loose to admire the wonders of the camp, 'there is a great deal to be said for the Confucian tradition.'

'So my old nurse always used to tell me,' said Jack. 'Just let me send for your blessed gazelle, and then tell me where you found them and why you are looking so pleased.'

'The tradition or shall I say doctrine of infinite respect for age. As soon as I told that worthy child to run along like a good girl now, she stood up, bowed with her hands clasped before her, and ran off. It was the turning-point, the crisis: either all was wrecked or all succeeded. Had she proved froward, or stubborn, or disobedient I was lost... The animal is behind and rather beyond the cricket-field, in a tree one half blackened by lightning, one half green. That is how I shall bring up my daughter.'

'Don't you wish you may succeed? Ha, ha, ha! Bonden, there. Bonden, the Doctor has saved our bacon again - has saved our bacon - so take three more hands and a stout spar to the lightning-struck tree by the cricket-pitch as quick as ever you like. Now, sir?' - turning to Stephen.

'Now, sir, prepare to be amazed. There is a vast junk with empty holds lying off the north side of the island: the children had come ashore to collect edible birds' nests. I believe the vessel will come round as soon as the wind serves, and I think it likely that its owner and captain will carry us back to Batavia. That boy in splints is his son. And I have draughts on Shao Yen, a Batavia banker he must necessarily know, draughts that will certainly pay our passage; and if his demands are not exorbitant they will leave enough over for some modest vessel that may still enable us to keep our rendezvous in New South Wales or even before.'

'Oh Stephen,' cried Jack, 'what a glorious thought!' He beat his hands together, as he did when he was very deeply moved, and then said 'He had better not be exorbitant... By God, to keep our rendezvous... With this wind we should be in Batavia in three days at the most; and if Raffles can help us to something that will swim at something better than five knots we have time in hand for a much earlier rendezvous. Time and to spare. Lord, how providential that you happened to be by when the poor boy broke his leg.'

'Perhaps hurt it would be more exact. I will not absolutely certify the fracture.'

'But he has splints on.'

'In such cases one cannot be too careful. How pleasantly the breeze is freshening.'

'If your junk is at all weatherly - and I am sure she is a wonderfully weatherly craft - it should bring her round by the afternoon. Just how big is she? I mean,' he added, seeing the look of deep stupidity in Stephen's face, 'what does she displace? What is her tonnage? What does she weigh?'

'Oh, I cannot tell. Shall we say ten thousand tons?'

'What a fellow you are, Stephen,' cried Jack. 'The Surprise don't gauge six hundred. How does your blessed junk compare with her?'

'Dear Surprise,' said Stephen, and then recollecting himself, 'I do not let on to be an expert in nautical affairs, you know; but I think the junk, though not so long as the Surprise, is distinctly fatter, and swims higher in the sea. I am fully persuaded that there is room for everybody, sitting close, and for what possessions we may have left.'

'If you please, sir,' said Killick, 'dinner is on table.'

'Killick,' said Jack, smiling on him in a way that Killick would have found incomprehensible if he had not been listening attentively, 'we have not put all our wine into the common pool yet, have we?'

'Oh no, sir. Which there is grog for all hands today.'

'Then rouse out a couple of bottles of the Haut Brion with the long cork, the eighty-nine: and tell my cook to knock up something to stay the little girls' hunger till the gazelle comes in.' To Stephen he said 'The Haut Brion should go well with the Dublin horse, ha, ha, ha! Ain't I a rattle? You smoked it, Stephen, did you not? No reflexion upon your country of course, God bless it - mere lightness of heart.' Chuckling he drew the cork, passed Stephen a glass, raised his own and said 'Here is to your glorious, glorious junk, the timeliest junk that ever yet was seen.'

The glorious junk appeared round the point before the end of the second bottle and began beating up for the anchorage. 'Before we drink our coffee I shall just look at that dressing,' said Stephen. 'Mr Macmillan,' he called in the hospital-tent, 'be so good as to give me two elegant splints and white bandage galore.'

They unwound the strips of jacket and swabbed the scratch quite clean. 'Something of a sprain do I see, sir,' said Macmillan, 'and a considerable tumescence about the external malleolus; but where is the break? Why the splint?'

'It may exist only in the form of an imperceptible crack,' said Stephen, 'but we must bind it up with as much care and attention as if it were a compound fracture of the most untoward kind; and we shall anoint it with hog's lard mixed with Cambodian bole.'

Returning to his coffee he observed that Jack Aubrey, light-hearted though he was, had not overlooked the necessity for a show of strength: the earthwork was bristling with armed men, all clearly visible from the junk.

Li Po came up the hill therefore with a submissive, deprecating air, accompanied only by a youth carrying a contemptible box of dried litchis and a canister of discreditable green tea: Li Po begged the learned physician's acceptance of these worthless articles - mere shadowy tokens of his respectful gratitude -and might he see his son?

The little boy could not have played his part better. He moaned, groaned, rolled his eyes with anguish, spoke in a faint and dying voice, and shrunk petulantly from his father's caressing hand.

'Never mind,' said Stephen. 'His suffering will be less once we are afloat; I shall attend him every day and when I remove these bandages in Batavia you will find his leg perfectly whole.'

Chapter Three

When the Diane ran on to her uncharted reef she was carrying the British envoy to the Sultan of Pulo Prabang back to Batavia, the first stage in his journey home: Mr Fox had been successful in negotiating a treaty of friendship with the Sultan in spite of active French competition, and since he was extremely eager to carry it to London he and most of his suite set out in the frigate's pinnace with an officer and crew to sail the remaining two hundred miles in what appeared to be favourable weather. At the same time he left a fully authenticated, signed and sealed duplicate with his private secretary, David Edwards, both as a reasonable precaution and as a means of getting rid of him: Mr Fox had taken against the young man and did not wish for his company during the long voyage from Batavia to England.

But the pinnace had been overtaken by the same typhoon that shattered the grounded Diane; and with the envoy and the original lost this duplicate took on an entirely different importance, and the penniless cheerful sanguine young man, much in need of some settled employment, built great hopes upon it. If he were to appear in Whitehall and say to the minister, 'Here, sir, is the treaty with the Sultan of Prabang', or 'Sir, I have the honour of bringing you the treaty concluded between His Majesty and the Sultan of Prabang' surely it must lead to something? Not indeed to the knighthood or baronetcy that Fox had expected, but surely to some little place under Government - attach�in one of the smaller, more remote legations, or Deputy Harbinger to the Board of Green Cloth? He was an honourable creature and he had no knowledge of the poisonous letter that Fox had enclosed with the duplicate, a letter that spoke ill of practically everyone aboard the Diane, particularly his secretary; but Stephen, who as an intelligence- agent was obliged to live by a different code, was well acquainted with its contents.

Edwards, bound by duty, a lingering affection for his chief, decent interest and everything that was proper had enveloped the treaty in linen, waxed silk and an outer case: he always carried it in his bosom, and now as he and Stephen stood side by side on the lofty poop of Li Po's junk, gazing astern, he tapped his chest, which gave out an answering hollow, cardboardy sound, and said, 'Sometimes it appears to me that this document is under a curse. It has been wrecked and very nearby sunk; it has been attacked by Dyaks and very nearly burnt; and now it is in grave danger of being seized by pirates, to the utter annihilation of all our efforts.'

'Sure, this is a sight calculated to freeze a man's blood in his veins,' replied Stephen, looking at the wicked proa tearing along in their wake, close-hauled to the south-west breeze, both its outriggers skimming white on the sea: wicked, in that it was certainly a pirate and much faster than the junk, but not very dangerous, in that it was small, containing no more than fifty men squeezed tight and possessing not a single gun. 'Yet even so, I think they will sheer away , as Captain Aubrey would put it, as soon as he and Mr Welby have ranged the Marines along the side. In any event, Mai-mai, who has more experience of sea-Dyaks and of pirates in general than any twelve of us, assures me that this is only a low Karimata proa. She wonders at its assurance, since this is Wan Da's territory. When he is neither hunting nor on duty at the palace he sails up and down the strait and to and fro in it, levying tribute on all those who have accepted his protection and sinking or burning the rest.'

At last the Marines came clumping up, red coats, white cross-belts, bright muskets and all, fit for any parade-ground. They lined the rail, all the rails, and Captain Aubrey called up to Stephen 'Pray tell him to port his helm.'

A series of barking falsetto orders in Chinese and the junk began a smooth curve that displayed her overwhelming armament, which included the two carronades. The pirates, having contemplated this for a while, turned and went racing away to the northwards in search of an easier prey.

'Mr Welby,' said Jack, 'it might save many valuable lives, was you to dismiss your jollies at once, and let them take off their stocks.' With Li Po he exchanged smiles and bows, and to Stephen and Edwards he said 'I am so sorry to have kept you in fear and trembling all this while, but the construction of the junk is so very unlike anything we are used to that the poor fellows could not come at their things - boots in one hold, accoutrements in another, bayonets far from cross-belts, and pipe-clay in the after-magazine with the gunpowder. Would you believe me, gentlemen, if I were to tell you that this vessel has no less than six separate holds? And when I say separate I mean divided from one another by a watertight bulkhead.' His officers came swarming up a ladder to a curious little deck or platform without a name in the Royal Navy vocabulary, looking about them with the lost amazement usual in landsmen aboard a man-of-war. 'Ain't I right, Mr Fielding,' he called, 'when I tell the Doctor here there are no less than six separate holds?'

'It is an understatement, sir,' replied Fielding. 'Richardson and I make seven and the master reckons eight: we are going to make another tour. The midshipmen say they have reached double figures.'

'Mai-mai, sweetheart,' said Stephen down through a grating beneath which the little girls could be seen playing an elaborate form of hopscotch, 'would you be a kind child and show these gentlemen each several compartment of the junk in turn? I am sure they will give you a whole ship's biscuit for yourself.' Ship's biscuit: they were passionately attached to it, old though it might be, and could not be brought to believe that in ordinary times the seamen were given a pound every single ordinary working day.

'It is a strange way of building a ship,' said Jack, 'but Lord, it has its advantages! If the Diane had had those bulkheads she would be swimming yet.' And he went on about the wonderful economy of knees, the flexible strength far surpassing even what Seppings could provide, until the vacant expressions before him quenched his flow.

'I must dress that boy's leg,' said Stephen. 'On the right there is still another pelican.'

He had not only the splints to attend to under the anxious parent's eye and the startling purple balm to renew, but also his serious rounds in company with Macmillan who, he found to his surprise, was drunk. Some degree of drunkenness was a common state aboard a man-of-war after dinner and here the degree was more pronounced than usual, the grog having been mixed with Li Po's arrack, a spirit almost twice as strong as that saved from the Diane after the purser had stretched it with pure rain water and a little vitriol; and Macmillan had of course dined in the midshipmen's berth at noon. For all that Stephen was surprised, Macmillan being ordinarily a most exact, abstemious man. Even now he was perfectly steady and his dressings were perfectly neat, but his more or less neutral English was invaded by his native Scotch, with its curious glottal stops, strong aspirates and rolling r's, and his general attitude was more assured and loquacious than usual. 'I lay awake the nicht,' he observed, 'and on a sudden it came to me why you had crackit yon wee bairn's leg. Heuch, heuch, you must have thocht me a puir slow-witted gowk.'