The Fortune of War (24 page)

'When I learnt that there was a possibility of meeting you,' said Johnson, bringing a portfolio from beside his desk. 'I put these in my baggage.' They were extraordinarily exact and delicate paintings of American birds, among them the anhinga. 'And here is the very fowl you were speaking of,' said Johnson, when they reached it. 'Do let me beg you to accept it, as some slight acknowledgment of the pleasure your monography gave me.'

Polite but steady refusal: Johnson urged the picture's trifling commercial value - he would be ashamed to say how little he gave the artist - but he was too well-bred to insist beyond a certain point and they moved on to the painter himself. 'A young Frenchman I met on the Ohio river, a Creole, very talented, very difficult. I should have ordered a great many more, but unhappily we fell out. He was a bastard, and bastards, as no doubt you have observed, are often more touchy than ordinary beings; one sometimes offends them without meaning to; and sometimes indeed they seem to trail their coats.'

Stephen was himself a bastard, and at the word his hackles rose; yet he could not but admit the justice of the remark, and what was much more to the point, a man as polite as Johnson would never have made it if he had known that it could have any present application. Clearly, Diana had been discreet: uncommonly discreet, since a friend's bastardy, divorce, or deformity was so often the earliest point of description, the earliest sacrifice to the candour of intimacy.

A servant came in and spoke to Johnson in a low tone. 'You will excuse me for two minutes, Dr Maturin?' he said. 'Just for two minutes, while I get rid of these people?'

'By all means,' said Stephen, 'and in the meantime I believe that I shall pay my respect to Mrs Villiers; for I understand that she is in the same hotel.'

'Oh yes, yes. Do - she will be delighted. Hers is the red door at the end,' said Johnson on the threshold. 'Straight down the corridor. You will find your way? I stand on no ceremony with you, as you see, my dear sir: and I will join you as soon as I have sent these men away.'

Along the passage: the last steps quite slow, and a pause before the red door. He tapped, heard a voice, and walked in. He had unconsciously composed his face so that it bore a civil unassuming old-acquaintance look, and he was surprised to find the effort that had been required when the expression fell apart on his seeing not Diana but a black woman weighing twenty stone.

'Mrs Villiers, if you please?' he said.

'What name shall I say, sir?' asked the black woman, smiling at him from her splendid height and bulk.

'Stephen!' cried Diana, running in.' 'Oh, how glad I am to see you at last.' The same step, the same voice; and he felt the same blow about his heart. He kissed her warm dry hand and felt its responding pressure. She was telling the black woman to hurry down and bring up the best pot of coffee that Madame Franchon could make. 'And some cream, Polly.' The veil of tears cleared from his eyes; he recovered his composure and said, 'What a magnificent creature.'

'Yes, yes,' said Diana in a kind of quick parenthesis, holding his hands and looking him full in the face, 'Johnson has dozens like that - he breeds the house-slaves for size. Stephen, you have come at last! I was so afraid you might not - I waited in all the morning - had everyone denied.' She drew him nearer and kissed him. 'You did not get my note? Stephen, sit down: you are looking quite pale. How are you, and how is poor Aubrey? The coffee will be here directly.'

'No note, Villiers. Was it discreet?'

'Oh, just compliments and begged you would call.'

'Listen, my dear, Johnson will be here in a minute. What does he know about us?'

At another time this question would probably have received a very fierce and disconcerting answer, but now she only said, 'Nothing: old acquaintance, practically childhood friends. Oh, Stephen, how glad I am to see you, and to see a British uniform, and to hear a British voice. I was so sorry, so very sorry about Clarges Street and all that wild dashing out of town - out of England - without even seeing you.' The coffee came, with cream and petits fours, and as she poured it out so she poured out her words, pell-mell - the Leopard's voyage, the wreck on Desolation Island, news of it all from Louisa Wogan; this dreadful, dreadful war, her mad decision to go back to the States; the loss of Guerrière, Macedonian, Java - how was Jack Aubrey bearing it? With Polly's return she had switched into French, and with astonishment Stephen observed that she was calling him tu. He was astonished too by her loquacity. Both she and her cousin Sophie had always talked at a great pace, but now Diana's words tumbled over one another; few sentences reached their end; and the connecting association of ideas was at times so tenuous that although he knew her very well he could scarcely follow. It was as though she had recently taken some stimulant which so hastened her mental processes that they outran even her outstanding powers of articulation.

He had known her in a great variety of moods - friendly, confidential, perhaps even loving for one short period; certainly, and for much longer periods, indifferent, impatient at his long dumb importunity, sometimes exasperated, hard, and even (though more through the force of circumstances than her own volition) very cruel - but never in this.

He had the strangest impression that she was clinging to him. And yet no, not to him but to some ideal personage who happened to have the same name; or at least to a mixture of this shadow and himself. And quite apart from that there was some essential change.

He felt the edge of a desperate coldness overcome his first agitation as she talked and as he covertly examined her, sipping his good coffee. The last time he had seen her he had been struck by the brilliance of her complexion; now it was comparatively dull. Otherwise, in spite of the years, there was little physical change: still the same splendid carriage of her head, the same great misty dark-blue eyes, the same black hair sweeping up. Yet there was some lack that he could not define, some discordancy. His eye moved beyond her to one of the many tall looking-glasses in the room and he saw her fine straight back, the perfect rise of her neck, the graceful movement of her hands, and in the reflection he also saw himself, a squat figure in the small gilt chair, looking crushed. He pulled himself upright, and as she said, with a smile, 'Why, Stephen, where is your tongue?' he heard steps outside and murmured, 'In English, now, my dear.'

The door opened and Mrs Wogan walked in, followed by Johnson. The women kissed each other; Madame Franchon and her tiny husband brought another pot of coffee, received congratulations on their petits fours; a general din of talk, and what seemed like a great crowd of people. Polly, reaching behind Johnson for an empty cup, dropped in on the floor; Johnson whipped round, and Stephen saw her face turn grey as she stared in naked terror, her arms down by her sides; but Johnson turned back to Stephen with a laugh - 'Where would the china-makers be, if no cups were ever broke?' - and went on talking about the ivory-billed and the pileated woodpeckers. Another man came in, an American: introductions, though Stephen only caught the Mr Secretary part of the name. A great deal of conversation, dominated by the harsh metallic voice of the newcomer. Stephen wanted to observe them, but here was Mrs Wogan talking to him, very pleased, even triumphant, and so pretty; and now Diana; and presently it appeared to him that a dinner-party had been arranged and that he was invited. 'I shall so look forward to it,' said Diana, as he took his leave.

He walked out of the hotel into the fog, fog that thickened as he wandered down towards the harbour: fog in his mind as he tried to interpret the strong and sometimes contradictory emotions that overlapped and mingled in his unreasoning part - grief, disappointment, self-accusation, loss: above all irreparable loss - a cold void within.

A moderate breeze off the shore blew windows in the fog, and strange turbulencies; out over the sea it formed again, but on the landward side it was low-lying and patchy. Over the harbour and the navy yard the upper masts thrust up into clear air, and in many places the hulls of the nearer ships could be seen. Neither Jack Aubrey nor Mr Herapath, who was sitting with him, had missed a move as the President and Congress got under way. They had been lying at single anchor throughout the morning's flood tide, and now at slack water the President's fife could be heard through the silence, squeaking 'Yankee Doodle' to encourage the hands at the capstanbars. The big frigate, looking perfectly enormous in the fog, moved steadily across the smooth harbour: a freak of the breeze or some odd echo brought the cry 'Up and down, sir' clear to the open window, and it was followed by the crisp orders.

'Hook the cat.'

'Man the cat.'

'Off nippers.'

'Away with the cat.' 'Hook the fish.'

'Away with the fish.'

'Haul taut and bitt the cable.'

In a single movement the President dropped and sheeted home her topsails; and the Congress did the same.

'There they go,' murmured Jack, as the dim, ghostly sails vanished in the fog: but a moment later both ships set their topgallantsails, and these rose well above the bank, so that the frigates' course could be followed far along the intricate, turning fairway. As they went, Herapath named the shoals and banks until he came to Lovell's Island, where first the President and then the Congress faded quite away. 'At this rate, you should hear the great guns in about an hour,' he said. 'If the squadron is close in.'

Jack sighed. The American commodore had chosen the perfect moment for slipping out, and unless he ran bodily into the Royal Navy there was very little chance of his being seen.' Herapath knew it too: but for some time they both listened, their heads cocked sideways, against all reason, 'It seems a wicked thing to say,' observed Herapath at last, 'wicked to wish for battle and death, yet if those two ships were taken now, it might bring this accursed war to an end - shorten it in any case - and prevent still more waste of blood and treasure. Well, sir,' he said, standing up, 'I must leave you: and I trust I have not stayed too long or tired you. The Doctor spoke of five minutes and no more.'

'Not at all, my dear sir. It was most benevolent in you to come; your visit has set me up amazingly, and I hope that your good nature may induce you to look in again, when business does not tie you to your desk.'

When Mr Herapath was gone Jack listened to the silence for a while, then slipped out of bed and began to bound about the room. He was naturally a very powerful man, and heavy, his strength was coming back, and although his right arm was still painful, its muscles flaccid, his left had grown much more deft with exercise, and now he whirled a ponderous chair over his head, thrusting and cutting, backhand and fore, with a wicked lunge from time to time, and all this in deadly earnest. He was a ludicrous sight, leaping to and fro in his nightshirt, but if he were to obey Stephen's orders to the letter - if he were to lie there a mere hulk, doing nothing to prepare for the day when he might be of some use - his heart would surely break. Presently the Emperor of Mexico joined him, and they pranced and sparred together; but not for long. Captain

Aubrey's madness, his savage grunting as he lunged, his red and sweating face, frightened most of his neighbours; and they sensed the savage grief behind his cheerful front. Behind his back they tapped their foreheads, and said that there were limits - this was not a lunatic asylum. Some of the younger nurses were not too well assured, either; and when Maurya Joyce, a faint slip of a girl that a breeze might carry away, came in and bade him 'put it down now, Captain dear, and go back to your bed this minute,' she did so in a squeak. However, he obeyed at once, and seeing him docile she went on in a firmer tone, 'You know very well you are not allowed up, for shame, oh fie, Mr Aubrey. And three gentlemen to see you too.' She tweaked him into respectability, smoothed his sheets, put on his nightcap and whispered, 'Will I fetch you a p-o-t before they come, at all?'

'If you please, my dear,' said Jack. 'And my razor too, while you are about it.' He expected some of the Constitution's officers - Mr Evans was particularly attentive, and the other officers looked in when they were not busy with their gutted ship - or some of the captured English: the daily management of the Asclepia was such that all these people, especially Mr Evans, were found to be exceptions to the rule that forbade him visitors. But following the chamber-pot and the razor, it was Jahleel Brenton who walked in, accompanied by his secretary and a strong, surly man in a cocked hat and a buff waistcoat with brass buttons, presumably a constable or a sheriff's man.

Mr Brenton began in a conciliatory tone; he begged Captain Aubrey not to be agitated - there had been some misunderstanding last time - this visit had nothing to do with the Alice B. Sawyer; it was only to check a few particulars that had not been fully noted down before, and to ask for an explanation of a few sheets that had been found among his papers. 'Our office is required to check all documents found on prisoners of war before any exchange can be contemplated. This, for example,' he said, showing a page covered with figures. Jack looked at it: the figures were in his own hand; the sheet was somehow familiar, though he could not place it. They were not astronomical calculations, nor anything to do with a ship's course, run, or position. Where had Killick dredged it up? Why had he preserved it? Then all at once everything was clear: these were his calculations of the food consumed by the squadron during his second visit to the Cape, kept all these years as something that might come in, something that formed part of that general sense of order and neatness that was part of his character as a sailor.

'These are victualling notes,' he said. 'Compiled according to a system of my own. You will see that they add up to a yearly consumption of one million eighty-five thousand two hundred and sixty-six pounds of fresh meat; one million one hundred and sixty-seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-five pounds of biscuit and one hundred and eighty-four thousand three hundred and fifty-eight pounds of soft tack; two hundred and seventeen thousand eight hundred and thirteen pounds of flour; one thousand and sixty-six bushels of wheat; one million two hundred and twenty-six thousand seven hundred and thirty-eight pints of wine, and two hundred and forty-four thousand nine hundred and four pints of spirits.'