The Yellow Admiral (23 page)

Captain Aubrey bowed, hoped that the Admiral was at least tolerably comfortable, and wondered whether he had made any observation on the Bellona's parting company or on the taking of a prize.

'Those are matters quite outside my province,' said the secretary in an impersonal tone. 'But I am sure that Captain Calvert will have directions for your immediate proceedings.'

He had, of course, and although he too declined to be drawn about the Bellona's inability to make out the signal to tack, he did say, 'As far as the prize is concerned - and I give you joy of her, I am sure: she sounds a genuine stunner - he is perhaps the only flag-officer in the service who would have been totally unmoved. He is not interested in money.' Jack had heard this before: it formed part of the Admiral's reputation. Certainly he had an ample fortune, and at sea he lived very quietly, entertaining no more than was,strictly necessary: yet this did not square with his passion for inclosing larger and larger tracts of common land, fens, and open pasture.

Pending Lord Stranraer's recovery - and as Craddock said, they longed for the return of Dr Maturin, in whom the Admiral had so much confidence - Jack was returned to the inshore squadron. Even at this late stage of the war, with Wellington well north of the Pyrenees, established on the Garonne and ready to push north, there was always the possibility of the French fleet, seizing the opportunity of a brisk north-east wind, breaking out of Brest, conceivably defeating Stranraer's divided force in two separate battles, and, if this coincided with one of Buonaparte's astonishing recoveries by land, reversing the whole course of the war: or at any rate of ending it for themselves in a blaze of glory. In the meanwhile Captain Aubrey was to resume his patrolling under Captain Fanshawe's orders, but at the same time he was to pay particular attention to the surveying of stated parts of the coast and above all to the fixing of the position and depth of a number of submerged rocks, such as that upon which the Magnificent was lost, totally lost, in 1804.

A man could scarcely have been much lower in the spirits than Jack Aubrey: yet it was striking to see how he plunged back mto life at sea, a hard life particularly at this season and in Brest Bay, but one with a set pattern he had known from boyhood, and one in which he had a task that gave him deep satisfaction. He had always liked surveying, and now he gave himself up to his submarine rocks with a conviction that settling their bearings was an absolute good. 'Perhaps Stranraer feels the same about inclosure,' he reflected, squaring himself in the boat and peering through the rain-misted sights of his azimuth compass at the buoys tossing five fathoms above the top of that cruel rock the Buffalo. 'Mr Mannering, note 137�E.'

In most commissions the midshipmen's berth yielded a boy or two who really liked navigation, sea-mathematics, and who began, with unconcealed delight, to seize the underlying principles: Mannering was the most recent, with the same zeal, earnestness and growing enthusiasm.

He was a comfort to Jack: so, on a very different scale, was the appearance of the Ringle, beating steadily into the usual sou'wester. Very soon a telescope made it apparent that Stephen was not on board - Jack had hardly expected him - but he did take pleasure in Reade's account of their splendid run up to the Downs: eight or nine knots most of the time, with points of an estimated fourteen when the tide was with them - never a dull moment - the Doctor in his highest form.

The splendid run had brought the Doctor ashore so soon, and the mail-coach had whirled him up to London at such a pace that there was time to leave a note for Sir Joseph at the Admiralty begging that they might sup together at their club that evening: and this a full two days and a half before he had thought it possible.

He took a room at the club, the only one available, a little cheese-shaped affair from which, if one chose to stand up very straight and peer over the parapet, one could look down into Mrs Abbott's well-known bawdy-house; but Stephen was really more concerned with coping with his shabby clothes as well as he could do with a nail-brush, while his dirty shirt was concealed by a black neckcloth carefully spread over all. A couple of stitches of surgical neatness fixed it in place and he went down into the hall, with its fine hospitable fire.

Sir Joseph hardly kept him waiting at all. 'How very glad I am to see you, Stephen,' he cried. 'By Warren's computation you were already a thousand miles from here, with the distance growing every day.'

'So I should have been, by our arrangements. But I learnt something of real consequence, and since I had no carrier pigeon at hand, I thought I should bring it myself. What a heavenly smell!'

'It is frying onions. The kitchen door is being repaired.'

'Frying onions, frying bacon, sardines grilling over vinecuttings, the scent of coffee - these things oh how they stir my animal desires! I had no dinner.'

'Then let us sup at once - my dear Golding, how do you do?' - this to a passing member in court dress - 'What shall you eat?'

'Steak and kidney pudding, without the shadow of a doubt: I slaver at the very words. And you?'

'My usual boiled fowl and oyster-sauce, with a pint of claret: and I do not mind how soon I have it. The sight of your hunger has excited mine.'

They moved on to the already well-filled supper-room, and for some time they ate seriously, with few more words than 'How is your bird?' 'Capital, I thank you: and your pudding?' 'A fine honest piece of work,' said Stephen, taking a little wishbone from his mouth. The recipe for Black's steak and kidney pudding called for larks. 'And this, for example, is the true skylark, Alauda arvensis, not one of the miserable sparrows you find in certain establishments.'

When the cutting-edge of appetite was somewhat blunted, they talked of their most recent captures - moths, butterflies, beetles. Then pudding in the ordinary sense made its appearance: apple tart for Stephen, sillabub for Sir Joseph.

'I had a most gratifying journey,' said Stephen, lashing on the cream. 'Apart from the fact that a vessel which bounds, fairly bounds, over the main fills all aboard with joy,

I grudged every hour away from London. There are many things I must tell you, and I have real hopes of making your flesh creep.'

'Have you, though?' said Blaine, looking at him with a considering eye. 'Perhaps coffee at my house might be better.'

They walked up a foggy St James's Street and so to Shepherd's Market and the familiar book-lined room far from the sound of traffic.

'Have you ever met an amateur intelligence-agent?' asked Stephen, when they were installed with their coffee and petits fours.

'You would not mean Diego Diaz, would you?'

'Well, yes,' said Stephen, somewhat dashed.

'Oh, one sees him everywhere - Almack's, White's, the big dinners. He is very well with most of the women who entertain in London, and he knows a great many people. The embassy people fight rather shy of him, however, in spite of his grand connexions.'

'Yes, he is a little conspicuous. I will come back to him presently, if you will allow me. For the moment, may I talk about some Chileans I met in France?'

'Please do.'

'Met again, I should have said, since I was introduced to them first in Peru. They are warranted by O'Higgins, Mendoza, and Guzman; and with their friends they are interested in a renewal of our alliance, our understanding, with the Peruvians, but this time an alliance directed at Chilean independence. I have drawn up an account of our conversations, of their needs and their hopes, of their resources and of their undertaking with regard to slavery: and since, unlike the Peruvian enterprise, theirs depends to a considerable degree on a naval or quasi-naval presence, I think it proper to submit these papers to you in the first place, together with their credentials and letters from our friends in those parts, in the hope that you will talk the matter over.'

'I shall most certainly do so,' said Blaine, receiving the packet; and looking intently at Stephen he added, 'How eager, how deeply committed do you think they are, compared with the Peruvians?'

'On the basis of my contacts with them in America and of my long, long interviews during the last week, I should say that our prospects of success are greater by perhaps a third. And as you will find when you read my pages they rely much more on attack and defence by sea - on the mobility conferred by even a froward ocean, as compared with the mountains and intolerable deserts of the lower western part of South America.'

'I look forward with the utmost eagerness to reading your account many of the people here who supported us last time will be enchanted'.

'Dear Joseph, how kind of you to say so. You will put it into the proper Whitehall prose, scabrous, flat-footed, with much use of the passive, will you not? I may have allowed something approaching enthusiasm to creep in.'

Sir Joseph poured them out some remarkably smooth full-bodied old brown brandy and when each had thoughtfully drunk about half his glass he said, 'There are only two things to be said against your otherwise Heaven-sent coca-leaves: they do diminish one's acuity of taste, and they do prevent one from sleeping. Happily I have taken none today, though

I shall do so tonight in order to digest your papers - that was a mere parenthesis, and I go on But how very much their advantages outweigh them - the vivid intensity of reflection, the vividness of life itself, the reduction of commonplace distresses, cares and even griefs to their proper status. And I have recently found that they enhance one's appreciation of music, particularly of difficult music, to a very high degree'

They talked for a while of their sources of supply, of the difference between the leaves from various regions, possibly from different sub-species of the same shrub, and each showed the other the contents of his pouch.

Then Stephen said, 'May I turn to my particular friend Jack Aubrey?'

'Do, by all means,' said Sir Joseph.

'Like most officers of his rank and seniority he is of course deeply concerned about the likelihood of his being yellowed at a future flag-promotion. Can you properly tell me anything about his prospects?'

Blaine poured more brandy, and said, 'Yes, I can. I wish I could say that they were better than they are; and I am not at all sure that he would not be well advised to retire as a post-captain rather than risk the humiliation of being passed over. He is of course a brilliant sailor, as most people would admit. But to some degree he is his own most active and efficient enemy, as I have often told you, Stephen, begging you to keep him at sea or down in the country. He so often addresses the House, speaking with authority as a successful officer; but very rarely does he say anything in favour of the ministry. And his vote is by no means sure. As an aside I will also say, with regard to his present difficulties in the law-courts, that the legal people at the Admiralty might take a different view of defending him were he more reliable: were he a cast-iron, heart-of-oak supporter of Government.'

'I cannot but admit that when he gets up and speaks of corruption in the dockyards and improper material being used on men-of-war he is sometimes regrettably intemperate.'

'What a gift you have for understatement, Stephen. And then again he makes powerful enemies outside the Commons. Lord Stranraer's recent dispatches have done your friend - and mine too, if I may say so - the utmost harm. Neglect of duty: leaving manoeuvres in order to chase a prize ... A prize that is likely to cost him dear, splendid though I hear it was - fairly ballasted with gold-dust in little leather bags.'

'You know how this ill-will arose, sure?'

'I know that the Admiral, a most zealous incloser of land, advised his heir and nephew, Captain Griffiths, to inclose a common bordering on his estate and Aubrey's; that at the last stage Aubrey opposed the petition before the committee; and that it was thrown out. He is also said to have set the country-people against Griffiths, whose stacks have been burnt, his game and deer massacred and himself and his servants pelted in the village, so that his life there is no longer worth living. Stranraer sees this unnatural insubordination of the villagers in exactly the same light as naval mutiny, and of course abhors it. Stranraer's word against a serving officer carries great weight with Government.'

'I know little about the gentleman.'

'He is very able, of that there is no doubt, and a great political economist. To be sure he has made no particular name in the Navy, but that may well have been from lack of opportunity. In his youth he was unusually good-looking and he made a brilliant marriage - a widowed lady with very large estates in her own right - far, far more important than his. It is true that they go to a son by her first marriage or rather to his guardian, since he is an idiot, but while she lives he controls at least nine seats in the Commons, quite apart from the considerable number he guides by his personal influence. He speaks, and speaks very well, for the moneyed landed interest and his support is very much valued by the Ministry - his support in the Commons, I mean, since in the Lords the government majority is so great that his vote there hardly signifies.'

'Has he the reputation of an honest man? A scrupulous man?'

'He is generally much respected: I know nothing against him: but I should not put my hand in the fire for any man as powerful as he has been these many years, so concerned with politics, and so passionate in his religion of inclosures, the country's one salvation.'

'I ask because there was some appearance of orders coming from the Brest squadron that in the ordinary course of events would have prevented Aubrey from appearing before the Committee.'

Blaine raised his hands. 'Oh, as for that, I cannot express an opinion, of course; but I do not think any hardened politician would think such a caper anything but venial, if that. Yet scrupulous or something less than scrupulous, Admiral Stranraer does not love Captain Jack: and his word counts.'

'Nor does Captain Griffiths, who votes with his uncle, and who inherits.'

'Just so. But on inheriting, Captain Griffiths loses his parliamentary value entirely, and he can do no harm. His vote in the Lords is neither here nor there, and he does not influence a single voice in the lower house. The Stranraer estate controls no seat, no borough, and all Lady Stranraer's patronage goes elsewhere. Griffiths becomes a cipher with a coronet; and he is even more likely than Aubrey to be yellowed.'