The Surgeon’s Mate. Patrick O’Brian

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      ‘How I honour him,’ she cried enthusiastically. ‘ “Never mind manoeuvres; always go straight at ’em”: that is exactly what I feel – that is the only way for anyone with spirit. And how well I understand Lady Hamilton.’ And after a pause in which they both ate cold lobster she said, ‘But how did you come to be a passenger on the Shannon?’

      ‘That is a long story,’ said Jack.

      ‘It could not be too long for me,’ said Miss Smith.

      ‘A trifle of wine?’ suggested Jack, advancing the bottle.

      ‘No more, I thank you. To tell the truth my head is turning a little already. But perhaps it is the dancing, or the music, or the closeness, or sitting next to a hero: I have never sat next to one before. But when you have quite finished your lobster, perhaps we might take a turn in the fresh air.’

      Jack protested that he had done eating; he had only been toying with his lobster; he too found the room insupportably close.

      ‘Then we can go out by this glass door. I am so glad: I had half promised that odious Colonel Aldington the next dance, and now I shall be able to escape him.’

      In the garden she took his arm and said, ‘You were going to tell me how you came to be a passenger on the Shannon. Please start from the very beginning.’

      ‘The very beginning would take us back to the Leopard – the old Leopard, you know: fifty guns on two decks. They rebuilt her, more or less, and gave me the command, with orders to take her out to Botany Bay and then to proceed to the East Indies. It should have been a straightforward passage, but there was bad luck aboard. Plague broke out when we were in the doldrums; then a Dutch seventy-four ran us down into the high southern latitudes, far south and east of the Cape; and then we contrived to run foul of a mountain of ice in a thick fog and beat off our rudder. We were obliged to bear away, half-sinking, for some islands still farther south and east; and it was nip and tuck whether we should fetch them or no, with all hands pumping day and night. But, however, we did; and not to be long-winded about it, we patched the Leopard up, hung a new rudder, and carried her first to New Holland and then through the Endeavour Strait to rendezvous with Admiral Drury off Java.’

      ‘Java! That is in the East Indies, is it not? How romantic! Spices and people in palanquins! Elephants too, I dare say. How you have travelled, and what a great deal of the world you have seen! Were the ladies of Java as beautiful as they say?’

      ‘There were some pretty creatures, to be sure; but none to touch those of Halifax. The Admiral was very pleased about the Dutch seventy-four –’

      ‘Why, what happened to it?’

      ‘Oh, we sank her: a lucky shot can do wonders in those seas, with a following wind. I am speaking of the forties, you understand, with a full gale and more right aft. She broached to and sank the moment her foremast carried away. But he was not so happy about the Leopard’s statement of condition: her guns had been obliged to be heaved overboard, and in any case the ice had given her frame such a wrench that she could not carry any weight of metal – no good to man or beast: only fit for a transport. However, that did not concern me. I was already appointed to another ship, a frigate called the Acasta, so he packed me off home in La Flèche. We had a beautiful passage –’

      Miss Smith uttered a shrill scream and recoiled into his arms. A toad was walking deliberately across the path, glistening in the light from the windows. ‘Oh, oh,’ she cried, ‘I nearly touched it.’

      Jack helped the toad gently on to the grass with his toe, somewhat hampered by her clinging arm. When it was gone she said she could not bear reptiles, nor spiders: they made her feel quite ill. Then she laughed in a way that Jack would have thought unsteady had she been a plain woman, and suggested that they should find a seat in the shrubbery. But as it happened, victory, wine, good food, and perhaps the warmth of the ballroom had suggested the same thing to so many other guests that there was not an empty seat to be found among the clustering laurels; while at the secluded summerhouse they started back only just in time to avoid a very grave indiscretion. They were obliged to be content with a bench near the sundial; and there, as they sat down in the warm night air, filled with the smell of greenness and summer and night-scenting flowers, he glanced up at the guards of the Bear for a notion of the time; and seeing that they were dimmed by wafts of low haze drifting in from the sea he observed, ‘I dare say we shall have a shower, presently.’

      But she, taking no notice of his remark, said, ‘You were saying you had a beautiful passage.’

      ‘So we did, logging at least two hundred miles from noon to noon, day after day of sweet sailing, until we had rounded the Cape and crossed the tropic line. But then a damned – an extremely untoward thing fell out. She took fire, burnt to the water-line, and blew up.’

      ‘Heavens, Captain Aubrey!’

      ‘Then the boats separated in the darkness, and seeing they were not provisioned, we had a sad time of it until we were picked up by Java, some way off Brazil. But even then our troubles were not over, because some days later Java fell in with the American Constitution, and as you remember, the Americans beat her into a cocked hat.’

      ‘Oh, how well I remember: people absolutely wept when they heard the news. But they said it was not fair – that the American was not really a frigate at all, or that they had more guns or something.’

      ‘No: she was a frigate without any kind of doubt, a heavy frigate; and it was a fair fight, I do assure you. She would have been a tough nut to crack in any case, and in the event she used her guns better than we did: and we were taken.’

      ‘But the dear gallant Shannon has set that right,’ she said, laying her hand on his knee.

      ‘So she has,’ said Jack, laughing with pleasure. ‘And now I find it hard to remember how hipped we all were at the time. Well, the Americans were very good to us once it was all over: they sent most of Java’s people home in a cartel and carried those of us who were knocked about back to Boston. Maturin very handsomely volunteered to come with me and his other patients –’

      ‘You were wounded?’ she cried.

      ‘Oh, only a musket-ball in the arm,’ he said. ‘But it went bad, as these things will, and I should have lost it but for him. So there we were, do you see, prisoners of war in Boston. Our exchange was delayed for one reason or another, and finding the situation did not suit, Maturin and I took a boat, together with Diana Villiers –’

      ‘What in Heaven’s name was she doing there?’

      ‘She had been staying with friends, before the war was declared. And we sailed out to meet Shannon as she stood in to look into the harbour. Broke was kind enough to take us aboard and give us a passage to Halifax, and that is how –’

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