The Yellow Admiral (13 page)

Jack growled and turned on his side. 'Mr Whewell's compliments, sir,' said the boy rather louder, smiling at Stephen, 'and the squadron is in sight. Topsails-up in the eastsouth-east.'

'Thank you, Mr Wetherby,' said Jack, now broad awake. 'Have the idlers been called?'

'Not yet, sir: perhaps five minutes to go.'

'Thank you, Mr Wetherby,' said Jack again, dismissing him. 'I thought as much,' he observed with satisfaction. 'I rarely miss the reluctant creeping about of those poor unfortunate creatures.'

After a pause Stephen said, 'Jack, I have heard the term idlers for ever; but in your private ear alone I will confess that I do not know its exact signification.'

A penetrating glance showed Jack Aubrey that however wildly improbable it might seem he was not in fact being made game of and he replied, 'Why, do you see, it means those who are not required to make part of a night-watch unless all hands are called. Another word for them is daymen, because they are on duty all day. But for fear they should grow proud, and give themselves airs, they are roused out rather before the sun and made to help clean the decks. Your loblolly-boy is an idler: so is the butcher, and the cooper and a whole lot of people like that... tell me, Stephen, what will you do for a loblolly-boy now that you have left Padeen behind?'

'The Dear knows. I shall look through the new draught in case we now have a paragon aboard the Bellona, a wholly reliable man that will give exact doses as regularly as my watch strikes the hour.' He held it up, waited for the few moments until it uttered its little silvery note: six o'clock, and as though by magic a clash of buckets broke out overhead, a splash of water, the creak of pumps and the steady grinding of holystones, together with the usual orders, cries, and even oaths as the decks were restored to a barely-lost perfection. Stephen knew that even in a vessel as small as the Ringle the hullabaloo would go on for the best part of an hour, and rising on his elbow he spoke somewhat louder,'... a man that will not cod the hands with dog-Latin or half-understood medical terms, a kind modest truthful creature. Where is such a treasure to be found, for all love?'

'Could you not call Padeen back?'

'I could not. As you know very well, he became addicted to one of my tinctures - it is worse than the drink, so it is, far worse - and I dare not leave him a daily temptation. And then again I promised him a few acres in the County Clare, enough for a small but decent living, if he would look after Brigid and Clarissa in Spain. But will he go there? Sure he is with child to go there. He knows just how the few fields lie, and the little small house - but a slate-roofed house, Jack, which is a very near approach to glory with us. Yet will he go there? He will not. What if there should be owls? Or good people under the hill where he has the right to cut turf? Or if he should find himself alone and frightened? I tell him the priest would find him a decent wife or any of the countless go-betweens, so busy in Gort or Kilmacduagh. Indeed, the whole thing is very like marriage: he would and he would not. Two men have I known that conducted a proper, regular courtship, urging their suit: both killed themselves the day they were to go to church. And no doubt there are and have been many like them.'

'Do you know of any young women who have done the same?'

'I do not. But I do know of three and have heard of more that ran away on their wedding night.'

'So have I.'

'There is a great deal to be said for a country education, where a girl may see a cow led to the bull as a matter of course, the filly to the stallion, and where a phallus is an acknowledged object - a matter of some curiosity perhaps but certainly nothing wholly unexpected, possibly wholly unexpected and even apprehended as a horrid malformation, an unnatural growth.'

'I scarcely think a country education always...' began Captain Aubrey, but he was cut short by a singularly violent and reverberating crash as two idlers, carrying a large matted block of stone, loaded with shot and intended for the perfect cleansing of the planks just overhead, dropped the entirety. This was followed by a great deal of howling, agonized howling, and Stephen ran up on deck in his nightshirt - a crushed foot for sure.

By the time he had dressed the mangled limb and administered his usual thirty-five drops of laudanum the sun was up, Jack was washed and shaved, his fine clubbed queue of yellow hair was new-tied behind his nape and himself seated before the breakfast-table in a small cabin smelling gloriously of toast, coffee and kippered herring.

'Forgive me, Stephen,' he cried, 'I am afraid I did not wait. Greed overcame me.'

'You say that almost every morning, brother; and I am afraid it is true,' said Stephen. 'But I pray that you may yet be saved from gule, that most brutish and most unamiable of the seven deadly sins. But come, Jack' - looking at him attentively - 'you are fresh-trimmed, neat as a bridegroom, almost handsome, in your fine coat and golden epaulettes. What's afoot?'

'You have not been on deck, I find. The squadron is hull-up already, and pretty soon Bellona's number will break at the admiral's mizen topmast together with the signal captain repair aboard flag.'

'Be so good as to pass what is left of the toast; and naturally the coffee-pot.'

'And,' went on Jack in a low voice, 'if I know anything of your doings on a foreign shore, he or at least his secretary will ask to see you. Stephen, would it not be prudent to shave, and shift your coat and breeches?'

'Jack,' said Stephen. 'I have it in contemplation to grow a beard and put an end to these ill-timed fleers for good and all. In time of war the Roman emperors always wore beards. And as for this coat' - looking at his sleeve - 'it will do very well for many years yet.'

'At least let Killick give it a brush. There is lint on the front; and I fear that may be blood. You would never wish to put the barky to shame aboard the Charlotte.'

'Perhaps I should have put on my apron,' said Stephen, dabbing at the blood with his napkin. 'But there is no possibility whatsoever of finding a new coat until my sea-chest is unpacked.'

In the natural course of events Killick heard all this, and before Stephen had fully answered Jack's enquiries after Evan Lloyd, cook's mate, whose foot had been crushed by

the bear - a conversation very much at cross-purposes until at last it became apparent that Stephen had never yet gathered that a bear, at sea, was only a holystone writ large - Preserved Killick was standing there with a prim expression on his face and a respectable blue uniform coat (virtually unworn) over his arm. 'Which it was almost on top,' he said. 'And you will have to get out of those there old breeches. The Bellona don't want no more of them there London cries. Monmouth Street cries, for shame.'

Stephen hung his head, keeping himself in countenance to some slight degree by pouring coffee. Not long before this, when the Bellona's yawl had been taking him ashore in Bantry Bay, dressed it must be admitted in a way that did neither himself nor the service much credit, one of the Royal Oak's cutters, with a ribald crew commanded by a drunken midshipman, called out 'What ho, Bellona! Any old do'? Any old rags, bottles, bones, rabbit skins?' in the manner of the London street traders; and to the infinite grief of the ship the cry had become popular in west Cork. Killick and his shipmates prayed that it would not be imported into the blockading squadron; and in this they were supported by the whole wardroom and by the midshipmen's berth. And indeed Captain Aubrey, who almost always checked Killick's wilder flights, remained silent on this occasion.

It was therefore with a fairly respectable surgeon that Jack walked the quarterdeck after breakfast. 'There, do you see,' he said, nodding over the starboard quarter at a tall dark rugged mass of granite with white water all round its cliffs, 'that is Ushant, of course, as you know very well; but I do not believe you have ever seen it from the east, from the landward side: not that you can see the land for the moment, but you soon will, when the early mists have cleared. At present we are sailing through the Fromveur Passage, keeping well out in forty-fathom water - it shoals horribly as you go east towards that island on the larboard beam: Mol�, a capital place for lobsters on a calm day. Once we are a little farther south and once we have skirted the Green Rock and reached those wicked old Black Rocks four miles further on, you will be able to look over some very ugly, dangerous water indeed right into the Goulet de Brest, a long channel into the harbour, into the inner and outer roads, rather like the entrance to Mahon: they cannot get out with the wind in the south-west, as it so often is; but on the other hand it batters us most cruelly when it blows hard, while they lie at their ease perfectly sheltered. And then again, if we are blown right off, to Cawsand, say, or Torbay, and the wind comes round to north or even north-east, out they come, knock our merchantmen and convoys to pieces while we are beating up, tack upon tack, like so many Jack-Puddings.' Jack spoke eloquently and at length of the hardships of the Brest blockade, and although Stephen listened with a decent attention he also watched the squadron, or at least all the squadron then present inshore, as they stood towards the Ringle, close-hauled to the kindly breeze.

'They are going to wear in succession,' said Jack, breaking off; and hardly had he spoken before the leading ship, the Ramillies, fell off the wind in a long smooth curve, bringing it full aft and so on to her larboard beam, followed at exact intervals by her second astern - 'Bellona,' cried Stephen, recognizing his old home as she came broadside on, 'the dear ship: good luck to her.' 'Amen,' said Jack; and as the third followed 'Queen Charlotte, the flag: white ensign at the fore, since Lord Stranraer is a vice-admiral of the white, do you see? Now Zealous. All seventy-fours except the Charlotte, 104, of course. And here are two of his frigates: Naiad and Doris. No doubt they are standing in for the little Alexandria. She is only a twelve pounder but she sails almost as well as dear Surprise, and with this wind she has probably sent her boats in to see what the Frenchmen are doing in the harbour. If so, the gunboats in Camaret Bay may come out. When the haze over the land has cleared. We shall see.'

But before anything could be seen at all the deep sound of gunfire reached them, the rolling fire of heavy cannon, briskly plied. 'That will be the Grand Minou,' said Jack. 'Forty-two-pounders.' And after a moment of tense listening not a murmur aboard, not a sound but that of the rigging and the following sea, the Ringle right before the wind -'There she looms.'

Dim on the tender's larboard bow and directly in the path of the squadron a pallor showed through the landward haze, a pallor that quickly resolved itself into the sails of the Alexandria.

'Ha, ha,' said Jack. 'She is clean out of range; and she has picked up her boats. How those foolish creatures blaze away: fourteen pounds of powder wasted every shot - a stone, no less. No doubt they hope it will be taken for zeal.'

'Sir, sir, our number, sir, if you please: and the signal Captain repair aboard flag' , cried Callaghan.

'Thank you, Mr Callaghan,' said Jack. 'Let us bear down on the Bellona with all the sail we can spread. Mr Wetherby, pray take a glass aloft and see what the frigate is saying.'

A few moments later the midshipman's shrill, somewhat breathless voice began to pipe away, at first hesitantly, and then, as the distance lessened, more surely, calling down the frigate's signals, while Callaghan, having said, 'Reading from last Tuesday's plan, sir,' translated them: 'A first rate, wearing a rear-admiral's flag: a line-of-battle ship with sixteen ports, bearing a broad pennant: a line-of-battle ship: doubtful - probably a seventy-four: a frigate, yards and top-masts struck: a hulk: another: a corvette: a brig without topmasts: two frigates ready for sea, everything aloft...'

'Are we not to go to the Admiral?' asked Stephen in a low voice, when the list had ended and the tender was passing well east of the Queen Charlotte.

'Yes, but by way of the Bellona and so in my own barge,' said Jack, smiling at his simplicity; and in the same undertone he went on, 'I shall watch my step this time, I can tell you. When the Almighty hears my news he will love me even less than he did before; and with such a damned unlucky omen I may expect some wicked squalls. I shall look out for them.'

'To what omen do you refer, brother?' asked Stephen.

'Why, to poor Bonden's being beat, of course. What could be more unlucky? And you say you are not quite happy about his head.'

'Shame upon you and fie, for a poor weak superstitious creature. What connection can there be between the two matters?'

'Well, the heart has its reasons...' Jack began, but then with a confused memory of kidneys troubling his mind he dropped the heart and went on, 'I may be no great scholar, but I do know that Julius Caesar put off an attack because he saw a damned great black bird flying from an unlucky quarter. And Julius Caesar was no weak, simple, womanly creature. It's all one, you know. But tell me, will poor Bonden be fit to see us across?'

'I believe so, with the blessing,' said Stephen. 'May I have ten minutes?'

Jack turned his glass on the Bellona, where they were already well on the way to getting the barge over the side -an arduous business, perfectly unnecessary as far as carrying Mr Aubrey to the flagship was concerned, but of the first importance to Captain Aubrey, to the custom of the sea, to the pride of the Bellonas, in their ship and to their concern for their commander's dignity. They were nearly all thoroughly established seamen - often hereditary seamen -and they liked things done proper, particularly in this case, for well over half had served with Jack before, either in the last commission or in other ships entirely: he was a taut captain but very well liked, a capital seaman, much given to battle and above all exceptionally lucky in prize-money (his present legal difficulties affected only himself, not the hands in any way at all, nor the officers). 'Yes, I think so,' he said, and gave orders to gather the fore-sheet aft, gently lessening the tender's pace.

Hurrying below, Stephen found Bonden half in and half out of his formal rig as captain's coxswain. 'Good day, now, Barrett Bonden,' he said. 'Take off that neckcloth; come here under the skylight and let me see your wound. How do you feel within yourself?'