The Thirteen Gun Salute (10 page)

'In any event, it is honourable in him to feel so bound to Captain Aubrey that he will not leave without permission.'

'Oh yes, he has always been perfectly honourable.' There was a long pause, and Martin said, 'Do you know when the post office will open in the morning? We spent so long in the Irish Sea that the packet is sure to have come before us: perhaps two packets. I long to hear from home.'

'It opens at eight o'clock. I shall he there as the bell strikes.'

'So shall I.'

So they were, and little good did it do them. There was nothing whatsoever for Martin and only two letters for Dr Maturin. Jack had a couple from Hampshire, and according to their usual habit they read them at breakfast, exchanging pieces of family news. Stephen had scarcely broken the seal of his first before he cried, with a passion rare in him, 'Upon my word, Jack, that woman is as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of Nile.'

Jack was not always quick, but this time he instantly grasped that Stephen was talking about his wife and he said, 'Has she taken Barham Down?'

'She has not only taken it, she has bought it.' And in an undertone 'The animal.'

'Sophie always said she was very much set upon the place.'

Stephen read on, and then said, 'But she means to live with Sophie until we come home, however. She is only sending Hitchcock and a few horses.'

'So much the better. Stephen, did she tell you the kitchen boiler at Ashgrove blew up on Tuesday?'

'She is doing so at this minute - the words are before me. Brother, there is much to be said for living in a monastery.'

The next letter did nothing to reconcile him with his lot. It was written in that curiously ungracious business style which his bankers had brought to a state of high perfection: the person who signed it asserted that he was, with great respect, Stephen's humble obedient servant, but he either ignored questions or gave irrelevant answers, and where quite pressing matters were concerned he had a way of saying 'these instructions will be carried out in due course'. The nearest he could bring himself to an apology for the loss of a paper or certificate was 'it is regretted that if the document in question ever reached our hands, it has temporarily been mislaid; any inconvenience that may possibly have been caused is deplored'; the general tone was contentious, the advice on financial matters was so hedged with reservations as to be valueless, the language was both inflated and incorrect. 'Oh for a Fugger, oh for a literate Fugger,' he said.

'Two letters for the Doctor, sir, if you please,' said Killick, coming in with a sneer on his naturally rather disapproving face. 'This here delivered upside down, at the starboard gangway, by a parcel of lobsters. T'other by a genteel Lisbon craft with a violet awning and handed up decent.'

Killick had studied the seals with some care; the first he recognized, the English royal arms impressed in black wax, the second, a violet affair, he could not make out at all. But they were both important seals and naturally he was concerned to find out what the letters contained. Lingering at a suitable distance he heard Stephen cry, 'Give you joy, Jack! Sam is made: he is to be ordained by his own bishop on the twenty-third.'

For Jack the word 'made' was ringed with haloes. In the service it had two meanings, the first (a very great happiness) being commissioned, the second (supreme happiness) being appointed post-captain. Yet the world in which he had been brought up and which still clung about him most tenaciously looked upon Papists with disfavour - their loyalty was uncertain, their practices foreign, and Gunpowder Plot and the Jesuits had given them a bad name - and although he could without much difficulty accept Sam as some kind of an acting monk or monk's assistant, Sam as a full-blown Popish priest was quite different. But he was extremely fond of Sam, and if the promotion gave Sam joy... 'Well I'm damned,' he exclaimed, all these emotions finding expression in the words. 'What is it, Mr West?'

'I beg pardon, sir,' said West, 'but the port-captain is coming alongside.'

Jack being gone, Stephen opened his second letter. It was from the embassy and it asked him to call at his very earliest convenience.

'Here is your second-best coat, sir,' said Killick. 'I have made a tolerable good job of t'other, but it is not dry yet, and this will serve in a dark old church. The launch is going over the side this minute.'

So it was too, to judge by the rhythmic cries and the time-honoured oaths and crashes; and when Stephen, neat and brushed, with a fresh-curled wig and a clean handkerchief, came on deck, the Irish, Polish and north-country English Catholic members of the ship's company who were going to Padeen's Mass had already taken their places. They were in shore-going rig - wide-brimmed white sennit hats, Watchetblue jackets with brass buttons, black silk neckerchiefs, white duck trousers and very small shoes - but with no ribbons in the seams or coloured streamers: a sober finery. Maturin bowed to the port-captain, took his leave of Aubrey, and went down the side scarcely thinking of steps or entering-ropes, his mind being so far away. They pulled across to the shore, and leaving the launch with two boat-keepers they moved off in no sort of formation, gazing at the strangely-dressed Portuguese until they came to the Benedictine church; here, once they had passed the holy water, they might all have been at home, hearing the same words, the same plainchant, seeing the same formal hieratic motions and smelling the same incense they had always known.

The Mass over, they lit candles for Padeen and walked out of the cool, gently-lit timeless familiar world into the brilliant sunshine of Lisbon, a very recent city and to many of them quite foreign.

'Good day to you, now, shipmates,' said Stephen. 'You will never forget the way to the boat, I am sure; it is right down the hill.'

He walked up it towards the embassy, his mind turning back more and more rapidly to worldly things.

The porter looked a little doubtfully at his second-best coat - somewhat rusty and threadbare in the full light of the sun - but he sent in his card and the first secretary came hurrying. 'I am so sorry that His Excellency is not in the way this morning,' he said, taking Dr Maturin into his office, '- pray take a seat - but I am to say that the invitation to Monserrate may be accepted with perfect confidence, and that an escort will be provided if it is desired. A coach too, of course.'

'I should be most grateful for a carriage of some kind; yet perhaps a well-paced horse would be quicker and less conspicuous, if one can be spared.'

'Certainly.'

'And may I beg you to have a message carried down to the ship?'

'Alas, my dear Maturin,' cried Sir Joseph from the steps of the Quinta, 'I am afraid you have had a terribly hot ride.' Stephen dismounted; the horse was led away; and Sir Joseph went on, 'Can you ever forgive me? I was so confused, so weary, so muddle-headed by the time I arrived that I sent Carrick off empty-handed. My letter to you is still in my pocket. I will show it to you. Come, walk in, walk in out of the sun and drink some lemonade or East India ale or barley-water - anything you can think of. Tea, perhaps?'

'If it is agreeable to you, I had as soon sit on the grass in the shade by a brook. I am not at all thirsty.'

'What a beautiful idea.' And as they walked along, 'Maturin, why do you carry your hat in that curious way? If I were to walk bare-headed in the sun, or even with a small bob-wig, I should be struck down dead.'

'There is an insect in it that I shall show you when we sit down. Here is a perfect place - green leaves overhead, sweet-smelling grass, a murmuring brook.' He opened his folded hat, took out a pocket-handkerchief and spread it on the ground. The creature, quite unharmed, stood there gently swaying on its long legs. It was a very large insect indeed, greenish, with immense antennae and a disproportionately small, meek, and indeed rather stupid face.

'Bless me,' said Blaine. 'It is not a mantis. And yet -,

'It is Saga pedo.'

'Of course, of course. I have seen him figured, but never preserved nor even dried, far less alive and swaying at me. What a glorious animal! But look at those wicked serrated limbs! Two pairs of them! Where did you find him?'

'On the side of the road just outside Cintra. She, if I may be pedantic. In these parts the females alone are seen: they reproduce parthenogenetically, which must surely ease some of the tensions of family life.'

'Yes. I remember from Olivier's paper. But surely you do not mean to let her go, so rare?' The saga was walking confidently off the handkerchief and into the grass.

'I do, though. Who is without superstition? It seems to me that letting her go may have a favourable influence upon our meeting; for I assume that it is no trifling matter that has brought you to Portugal.'

Blaine followed the saga until it vanished among the grassstems, then turning resolutely away he said, 'No, by God. A little while ago the heavens fell on our heads: opened and fell on our heads. The Spanish ambassador called at the Foreign Office and asked whether there was any truth in the report that the Surprise had been fitted out and sent to encourage rebels or potential rebels, "independentists", in the Spanish South American possessions. Oh dear me, no, he was told; the Surprise was merely a privateer, one of many, going to cruise upon United States whalers and China-bound ships and any Frenchmen she happened to meet. This absurd report must have arisen from a confusion with a perfectly genuine French expedition designed for that very purpose, an expedition that had been frustrated by our capture of the Diane, which was to carry the agents - an expedition that could be substantiated, if any substantiation against such very grave and indeed monstrous charges were required, by the production of documents seized aboard the French frigate. The Spaniard may not have been wholly convinced, though he was certainly shaken; he said he should be very glad to see any evidence, particularly that inculpating those who had been in correspondence with the French, our common enemies; he expressed some surprise that the substance of these documents had not been communicated to him before; but that was easily accounted for by the extreme slowness of British official procedures.'

Blaine took off his shoes and stockings, shifted a little forward on the grass and dangled his feet in the stream. 'Oh what a relief,' he said. 'Maturin, I have had a most hellish journey from Corunna - sleeping in the coach - jolting over vile roads - eight and even ten mules scarcely enough sometimes - the heat, the dust, the dreadful inns - wheels coming off, axles breaking - brigands, large desperate isolated bodies of French and their unpaid mercenaries - our own army pushing us off the road on to by-ways, blind alleys, mountain tracks - a furious French advance that came very near to cutting us off - goat's milk in the coffee, goat's milk in the tea - but above all the perpetual hurry, perpetual weariness and heat - the flies! Forgive me again for being so stupid about Carrick; forgive me if my account of the situation is out of sequence, patchy, disordered - a clear mind is wanted for such complexity, not one that has just been trundled over rocks and deserts that would be a disgrace to Ethiopia.'

'No doubt there were good reasons why you did not take the packet or one of the Admiralty yachts.'

'Two excellent reasons. The first, that although the packet did in fact reach Lisbon long before me, there was no guaranteeing that it would not be windbound for a month, whereas once I was on Spanish soil I could be sure that perseverance would get me to Portugal within certain limits of time, if I survived. The second, that purgatorial though the journey was, I preferred it to a voyage by sea. I am most horribly seasick, and I should certainly have lost essential elements in my grasp of the situation.' He sat stirring his feet in the water and rehearsing the order of events in his mind, and presently he said, 'You will already have perceived that this most damaging information can have reached the Spaniards only through one of the very few men who knew about your mission, almost certainly the man who protected Wray and Ledward and allowed them to get out of the country.Warren and I suspected that the report would be sent, and that is why I particularly insisted upon your calling at Lisbon.'

'I had imagined that to be your motive. In the same way I had understood from the beginning that our journey to South America was also intended to counteract Buonapartist influence there; and your earliest reference to the Diane made it even more certain. From my own, personal point of view this conflict with the French was of the first importance.'

'Of course it was; and will be again, in the same region, I hope. But for the moment we must utterly demolish the report and discredit the source of information. The Surprise must carry on with her voyage, ostentatiously privateering and avoiding all contact with the supporters of independence.'

There was a pause, and Stephen observed that Blaine was looking at him with a quizzical eye, his head cocked on one side; but he made no observation and after the cool breeze had wafted through the leaves for a while Blaine went on, 'But although you and Aubrey will not be fully employed in that hemisphere, I trust that if you agree to my plan you will be even more so in another. The French have learnt, probably through this same source, Ledward's protector, that except on paper we are extremely weak in Java and the East Indies in general. They have therefore sent a mission to the Sultan of Pulo Prabang, one of the piratical Malay states in the South China Sea, urging him to become their ally and to build and equip vessels large enough to capture our East Indiamen on their way to and from Canton, thus cutting the Company's throat. The Sultan's dominions lie almost directly across the Indiamen's route; he has a splendid harbour, forests of teak and everything that is desirable; and a hardy population of seafaring Malays who have hitherto confined themselves to native craft and to piracy on a modest scale - Chinese junks, the occasional Arab dhow. The French have sent shipwrights, tools, materials, guns and treasure. Their official envoy is Jean Duplessis, something of a nonentity; the man who will really conduct the affair is Ledward. He spent much of his youth in Penang and I am told that he speaks Malay like a native - at all events I know he held an important post there under the Company and that he is an unusually able negotiator. The French have sent Wray too, more with the idea of getting rid of him than for any use he is likely to be: once he had ceased to be of value to them in Paris he was treated with great neglect and contempt, whereas Ledward always retained a certain position.' Blaine stopped to collect his ideas again, but shaking his head he went on, 'Do you mind if we go back into the house? If I were given a good pot of tea, a good pot of brown London tea, I believe it might clear my wits.'