The Unknown Shore. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ with at least sixty parish churches as yet unseen, to say nothing of chapels.

      Here, by an unhappy fatality, Tobias turned to his right, hoping to find the river, but he found Bedlam instead, and the broad dark open space of Moorfields. He looked with respectful wonder at the vast lunatic asylum, but the new shoes that Jack and he had bought earlier in the day (it seemed more like several months ago) were now causing him a very highly-wrought agony, and he wandered into Moorfields, now deserted by all prudent honest men, to sit on the grass and take them off. After this he went on much more briskly, and determined to ask his way of the next citizen he should meet: it was some time, however, before he met anyone who would stop, and by then he had walked clean out of Moorfields northwards.

      ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said to one of a group who were crossing the vague field with a lantern, ‘but can you tell me …’ With a thrill of horror he found that he did not know the name of the street where he lodged, nor Jack’s street either.

      ‘Tell you what?’ said the lantern, suspiciously.

      ‘Knock him down,’ said the lantern’s friend, adding, ‘We’ve got pistols, you rogue.’

      ‘Tell me where I am?’ asked Tobias, with unusual presence of mind.

      ‘Where you are?’

      ‘If you please.’

      ‘Don’t you know where you are?’

      ‘No, I do not.’

      ‘He doesn’t know where he is,’ said the lantern.

      ‘He will cut your throat in a minute,’ said the lantern’s friend. ‘Why don’t you knock him down?’

      ‘So you want to know where you are?’

      ‘Yes, sir, I should like to know very much.’

      ‘Why, then, you’re in Farthing Piehouse Field,’ said the lantern, and by way of proof waved towards a dirty glimmer a hundred yards away, saying, ‘And there’s the Farthing Piehouse itself, in all its charming lustre.’

      ‘Sir, I am obliged to you,’ said Tobias.

      ‘At your service, sir,’ said the lantern, with a bow.

      ‘You could still knock him down,’ said the friend, wistfully. ‘It’s not too late.’

      The door of the Farthing Piehouse opened easily, letting out the odour of farthing pies: it was a crowded room, and when Tobias walked in holding his shoes, they all looked up; but the farthing pie-eaters were thieves to a man, and as it was obvious to them that Tobias had just stolen these shoes – that he too was a thief – they took no more notice of him.

      ‘When I have eaten a pie, I shall ask the way back to the river,’ thought Tobias, ‘and from there I shall be able to find the house, no doubt. It is most likely, too, that I shall remember the name of the street quite suddenly, if I do not force my mind to it. The mind is saturated with new ideas, but it is starved for material sustenance, and must be fed. House,’ he cried, ‘House, a pie here, if you please.’

      ‘A pie for the gentleman,’ called the man of the house into the kitchen, adding, in a voice meant only for his spouse, ‘A rum cully what I never set my glimmers on before.’

      Tobias, by way of keeping his mind from searching too hard (it was a mind that would remember almost anything if it were not worried and if it were given time, but it was apt to grow stupid if it were overpressed), turned his attention and his anatomical knowledge to his pie. But this was a most discouraging course of study, and he abandoned it in favour of recalling the events of the day: he dwelt with pleasure upon Ransome, not only as a most amiable companion, but also as a living proof that unaided merit could rise, for Ransome had entered the Navy as an ordinary pressed seaman. ‘I wish I had been able to find a moment to ask him about money, however,’ said Tobias, yawning: he had intended to do so, but what with their voyage on the river, the lions and the other beasts in the Tower, there had not been time. Jack had shared his purse with Tobias, and these were the first coins that Tobias had ever owned; but Tobias’ education had been such that although he could have dealt in the market places of Athens or Rome with ease, he did not know a farthing when he saw one, and he was sadly perplexed by the whole system of modern coinage. The English currency, even now, is the most complicated in the world, with its twelve pence to the shilling and its twenty shillings to the pound; but it is child’s play to the time when there were broad pieces, reckoned at twenty-three and twenty-five shillings, half and quarter pieces, ninepenny and fourpence-halfpenny pieces, as well as tin, brass and copper small change, and when the shilling passed for thirteen pence halfpenny and the guinea for anything between a pound and twenty-five shillings.

      To distract his mind, which would revert with a touch of panic to the question of his lost address, Tobias turned his fortune on to the table, with the intention of making what sense he could of the inscriptions. At the sound of money all the farthing pie-eaters stopped talking, eating or drinking; and when Tobias, paying his host with a four-shilling piece, asked for a direction to the river, he spoke in the midst of a profound and attentive silence. The man slowly paid out a mountain of small coins, talking as he dribbled them out, and from his questions the hearers learnt that Tobias was lost, unknown and unarmed, and that this was his first day in London.

      The pie-man scratched his head: he had a certain pity for his guest – even a very ill-natured brute will stop a blind man from walking into an open pit – but he also had a duty towards his regular customers. In the end he satisfied his conscience by giving Tobias an exact route for the Thames, by telling him that he ought to take care, great care, and by winking with all the significance in his power.

      The door closed behind Tobias: the pie-man said to his wife, ‘He never did ought to of been let out alone,’ and shook his head.

      There was a pause of some few listening minutes, then the door opened, and all the regular customers hurried in again.

      ‘They never left him so much as his shirt,’ said the pieman to his wife, coming back into the kitchen.

      ‘Well, my dear,’ said she, placidly wiping her hands upon her apron and looking through the door to where the regular customers were making their division, ‘I hope they have not cut his throat, that’s all. Or if they have, that they done it at a decent distance from the house, poor wandering soul.’

       Chapter Three

      JACK BYRON sat in Thacker’s coffee-house, staring vacantly before him: he was almost alone in the place, apart from the waiters, and he sat there as steadily and silently as if he had been part of the furniture. The clock in front of him said half-past seven, and the big calendar beside it bore the ominous name Friday, newly changed that morning.

      The door opened, and an elderly man in a black coat and a periwig walked in: he nodded to Jack, who bowed, although for the moment he did not recognise him. It was Mr Eliot, the surgeon of the Wager, to whom Keppel had presented Jack some days before. ‘So you have not gone down to Portsmouth yet?’ he said, with some surprise.

      ‘No, sir,’ said Jack.

      ‘Are you not cutting it uncommon fine?’ asked the surgeon.

      ‘Yes, sir,’ said Jack, who was all too vividly aware of the racing hours СКАЧАТЬ