The Surgeon’s Mate. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ sir. But here are the doctors, sir, if you wish to speak to them.’

      ‘Mr Fox, how d’ye do?’ said the Admiral, turning to the Shannon’s surgeon, who had just come up the main hatch-way with a companion, both of them in their working clothes. ‘And how is your patient? Is he fit to receive a visit, a short visit?’

      ‘Well, sir,’ said Mr Fox with a doubtful shaking of his head, ‘we dread any excitement or mental exertion at this stage. Do you not agree, colleague?’

      His colleague, a small sallow man in a blood-stained black coat, dirty linen and an ill-fitting wig, said, ‘Of course, of course,’ in a somewhat impatient tone. ‘No visits can possibly be allowed until the draught has had its effect,’ and he was moving away without another word when Captain Aubrey took him by the elbow and said in a private voice, ‘Hold hard, Stephen: this is the Admiral, you know.’

      Stephen looked at Aubrey with his strange pale eyes, redrimmed now after days and nights of almost incessant exertion, and said, ‘Listen now, Jack, will you? I have an amputation on my hands, and I would not pause to chat with the Archangel Gabriel himself. I have only stepped up to fetch my small retractor from the cabin. And tell that man not to talk so loud.’ With this he walked off, leaving nervous smiles behind him, anxious looks directed at the Admiral: but the great man did not seem at all put out. He gazed about the ship and over the water at the Chesapeake and his deep delight showed clear beneath his immediate concern for the Shannon’s captain and her missing officers and men. He asked Wallis for the muster-roll of the prisoners of war, and while it was being fetched he stood by an improvised hood over the cabin skylight with Jack Aubrey and said, ‘I know I have seen that face before; but I cannot put a name to it.’

      ‘He is Dr –’ began Captain Aubrey.

      ‘Stay. Stay. I have it. Saturnin – that’s the man. Admiral Bowes and I were calling at the palace to enquire after the Duke, and he came out and told us how he did. Saturnin: I knew I should get it.’

      ‘The very same man, sir. Stephen Maturin was called in to doctor Prince William, and I believe he saved him when all else had failed. A prodigious physician, sir, and my particular friend: we have sailed together since the year two. But I am afraid he is not quite used to the ways of the service yet, and he sometimes gives offence without intending it.’

      ‘Why, he is no great respecter of persons, to be sure; but I am not at all offended. I don’t take myself for God the Father, you know, Aubrey, although I have my flag; and anyhow, it would take a great deal to put me out of humour on such a day – Lord, Aubrey, such a victory! Besides, he must be a great man in the physical line, to be called in to the Duke. How I wish he may save poor Broke. Your servant, ma’am,’ he cried, gazing with respectful admiration at an extraordinarily elegant young woman who suddenly appeared from the temporary hood, carrying a basin and followed by a weary, blood-spattered surgeon’s assistant. She was pale, but in these surroundings her pallor suited her: it gave her a quite remarkable distinction.

      ‘Diana,’ said Captain Aubrey, ‘allow me to name Admiral Colpoys: my cousin Mrs Villiers. Mrs Villiers was in Boston, sir, and she escaped with Maturin and me.’

      ‘Your most humble, devoted, ma’am,’ said the Admiral, bowing. ‘How I envy you, having been in such a brilliant action.’

      Diana put down her basin, curtsied, and replied, ‘Oh, sir, I was kept below stairs all the time. But how I wish,’ she said with a fine flash of her eye, ‘how I wish I had been a man, to board with the rest of them.’

      ‘I am sure you would have struck them dead, ma’am,’ said the Admiral. ‘But now you are here, you must take up your quarters with us. Lady Harriet will be delighted. Here is my barge, at your pleasure, if you choose to go ashore this minute.’

      ‘You are very good, Admiral,’ said Diana, ‘and I should be most happy to wait on Lady Harriet, but what I am about will keep me some hours yet.’

      ‘I honour you for it, ma’am,’ said the Admiral, for a glance at the basin showed the nature of her occupation. ‘But the moment you are ready, you must come up to the house. Aubrey, the moment Mrs Villiers is ready, you are to bring her up to the house.’ His beaming smile faded as a high quavering shriek, almost inhuman in its agony, came up from the sickbay, piercing the noise of cheering like a knife: but he had seen a great deal of action – he knew the price there was to pay – and with little less good humour he added, ‘That is an order, Aubrey, d’ye hear me?’ Then, turning to the young lieutenant he said, ‘Now Mr Wallis, let us go to our business.’

      The hours had passed: Captain Broke had been carried to the Commissioner’s house and his wounded shipmates to the hospital, where those who were not out of their minds with pain lay peacefully enough by the wounded Chesapeakes, sometimes exchanging quids of tobacco and smuggled rum; the American prisoners of war had been taken out of their ship, the few surviving officers paroled and the men sent to the barracks; and the most wretchedly miserable of all, the British deserters captured in the Chesapeake, had been taken to prison, with no likelihood of leaving it except for a journey to the gallows. At present the cruellest face of war was no longer to be seen: joy and lively anticipation began to overcome thoughtfulness and grief in the frigate as neighbouring captains sent over parties of volunteers, men enough to provide a harbour-watch so that the Shannons might have a run ashore; and the newcomers’ gaiety, combining with the continuing shouts and yells from the wharves, made the younger liberty-men laugh aloud as they stood, treading on one another’s toes on the gangway, while their companions, moving carefully not to get tar on their gleaming ducks, hoisted out the boats.

      ‘Cousin Diana,’ said Jack Aubrey, ‘should you like to go ashore? I will hail Tenedos for her captain’s gig.’

      ‘Thank you, Jack,’ said she, ‘but I had rather wait for Stephen. He will not be long.’ She was sitting on a small green brass-studded trunk, the only thing she had brought with her in their hurried flight from Boston, and she was gazing out at Halifax over a shattered nine-pounder gun. Jack stood by her and gazed too, one foot on the carriage; but he gazed with no more than the shallowest surface of his attention, while the rest of his mind floated free. His whole being was suffused with deep happiness, for although this victory was none of his, he was a sea-officer through and through, wholly identified with the Royal Navy from his childhood, and the successive defeats of the last year had weighed upon him so that he had been hardly able to bear it. Now the burden was gone: the two ships had met in equal fight; the Royal Navy had won; the universe was restored to its true foundations; the stars had resumed their natural march; and as soon as he reached England there was every likelihood that he should have a command, the Acasta of forty guns, that would help to make their march more natural still. Then again, as soon as he was ashore he would run to the post for his letters: he had not heard from Sophie, his wife and Diana’s first cousin, all the time he had been a prisoner of war in Boston, and he longed to hear from her, longed to hear how the children did, longed to hear of his horses, the garden, the house … yet beneath all this there was a point, and more than a point, of anxiety. Although he was an unusually rich commander, an officer who had made more prize-money than most captains of his seniority – more indeed than many admirals – he had left his affairs in a highly complicated state, and their unravelling depended upon the honesty of a man whom neither Sophie nor his friend Maturin trusted at all. This man, a Mr Kimber, had promised Jack that the disused lead-mines on his land could be made to produce not only more lead but also a surprising amount of silver by a process known to Mr Kimber alone, thereby yielding a very handsome return indeed upon the initial outlay; yet the last letters that Captain Aubrey had ever received from his wife, far away in the East Indies, before he was captured by the Americans on his return voyage to England, had spoken not of yield, not of profit, but of obscure unauthorized doings on the part of Kimber, of very heavy new investments СКАЧАТЬ