Desolation Island. Patrick O’Brian

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      Sir Joseph felt the pale eye upon him, and it was with a certain uneasiness that he returned to Aphra Behn. ‘Yes. She was a brilliant agent, brilliant. And we might call Mrs Wogan the Behn of Philadelphia. She too turns an elegant verse, and she writes a pretty play; letters are as good a shield as natural philosophy, perhaps even better. But unlike Mrs Behn she has been caught, and she is to be packed off on the first ship bound for New Holland, lucky not to be hanged. I never like to see a woman hanged, do you, Maturin? But I was forgetting – all is grist to your grisly mill, and you have your female subjects too. She is not to be hanged, because the D of C, as our Admiral would put it, has made interest for her: it seems they were bed-fellows not long since. For the same reason she is to be treated with certain égards – a corner to herself aboard, perhaps a woman, and no servitude when she arrives at Botany Bay, there to spend the rest of her days. Botany Bay! What a goal for a naturalist, if not for an adventuress! Maturin, you need, you deserve, a break, a holiday to set you up. Why do not you accompany this ship? To keep your hand in, you can plumb the lady’s mind; it contains a vast deal more than was revealed to us, of that I am very sure, and what she has to say may resolve your doubts about Mrs Villiers. To make my suggestion more tempting, I may observe that the ship in question is to be commanded by your friend Aubrey, though he don’t yet know this part of his duty. The Leopard, for the Leopard is her name, was already under orders for Botany Bay to deal with the unfortunate Mr Bligh, of whose predicament you are aware; when she has done this, and has delivered Mrs Wogan, together with some people we shall add as a blind, she is to join our force in the East Indies, where, with your spirits quite recovered, you will be of the utmost service. Pray do consider of it, Maturin.’

      Stephen’s longing, temporarily allayed by food, had returned with even greater force. He left the parlour for his bedroom and his draught, and returning he said, ‘Your Mrs Wogan, now: you speak of her as a second Aphra Behn, and therefore as a woman of shining parts.’

      ‘Perhaps I was going a little far: I should have added qualifications for time and place. The Americans’ intelligence is but an infant plant – you will remember the ingenuous young man that came with their Mr Jay – and native shrewdness, even where it exists, is no substitute for some hundred years of practice. Yet even so, this young woman had been well tutored; she knew what questions to ask, and she learnt many of the answers. I was surprised to find that there was no French connection: none, at least, that we could fix upon. But my comparison really does not hold, for whereas the Mrs Behn I meet in our files shows a most remarkable sagacity, and a grasp of the situation that would do honour to any politician, Mrs Wogan seems to me a somewhat simple lady at bottom, relying upon intuition and dash whenever she is required to go beyond her plain instruction, rather than upon any considerable fund of knowledge.’

      ‘Please to describe her.’

      ‘She is between twenty-five and thirty, but she still retains her bloom: black hair, blue eyes: about five foot eight, but looks taller, since she stands so straight – magnificent carriage of her head. A slight but undeniable figure; though these things, you know, can be improved by stuffing. A thoroughly genteel air, nothing bold or flaunting. Writes like a cat, with every third word underlined, and cannot spell. Speaks excellent French, however, and sits a horse to admiration: no other education that can be detected.’

      ‘You might almost be describing Mrs Villiers,’ said Stephen, with a painful smile.

      ‘Yes, indeed. I was so struck by the likeness that I wondered whether there might be some relationship; but it appears there is none. The details of her birth escape my mind for the moment, but they are all in the files and I shall see that you have them. No relationship, I believe; yet there is indeed a striking resemblance.’ He might have added that in Mrs Wogan’s case too there was a hopeless lover, a young man who hung on the borders of her life; a young man so peripheral that he had been set free. Those who took him up found no hint of guilty knowledge, and it was thought better to let him go: Sir Joseph retained only a recollection of the deep unhappiness and the somewhat unusual name of Michael Herapath. ‘Yet when I speak of her apparent simplicity,’ he went on, ‘I may be one of that numerous company of men who have been deceived by women. There is more in this than we know at present, and the skein is well worth the untangling. As I say, it would keep your hand in, Maturin, and it might even yield a jewel. Pray do consider of it.’

      During his journey down to Hampshire Stephen turned it over in his mind, but only with the surface of his mind, the rest being taken up with longing, with a continuous, painful evocation of Diana’s person, voice, and movement, a statement of her moral imperfections, her levity and her extravagance; then with a keener longing still, and an absurd tenderness. As for Sir Joseph’s proposition, he did not care one way or another and in any case he knew that there was little choice – virtually none for him. He would go, and if past experience were still a guide, the naturalist within would revive in time. He would make vast collections; huge areas would open to his view; his heart would beat again at the sight of new species, new genera of plants, birds, and quadrupeds; and the Indies might provide some of those encounters with the enemy that wiped out everything but the extreme excitement of the contest. But was past experience still a guide? The stimulation of London and of all his meetings there died away as he travelled, and it was succeeded by an indifference greater than he had ever known.

      In this grey state of mind he arrived at Ashgrove Cottage, and there, since his indifference did not extend to his friends’ concerns, he was instantly aware that something was amiss. His welcome was as kind as ever he could have wished, but Jack’s weather- and war-beaten face was even redder than usual; he was rather larger than life and taller, and there were traces of recent storms in their constrained behaviour to one another. Stephen was not very much surprised to learn that the new filly had shown a strange inability to run faster than others after the first three furlongs, and that she was given to crib-biting, jibbing, kicking, rearing, and windsucking; nor that a gang of Kimber’s workmen had stoned his buzzard’s nest; nor that Kimber himself was in disfavour for having made an unexpected and very costly revision of his estimates; but he was quite startled when Jack took him aside and told him that he was in a most hellfire rage with the Admiralty – was about to throw up the service – his flag be damned. He was used to their blackguardly ways – had suffered from them ever since he had first worn the curse of God – but had never supposed they would presume to use him so – had never supposed they could be such – so as to tell him, without a moment’s warning, that Leopard was to be used for transportation.

      ‘To a landsman,’ said Stephen, ‘this might seem a ship’s prime function, its true raison d’être.’

      ‘No, no; what I mean is transportation –’ cried Jack.

      ‘So I had understood.’

      ‘– the transportation of convicts. Convicts, Stephen! God’s my life! I am sent a letter in a damned crabbed hand, telling me that I am to expect a tender from the hulks – the hulks, in the name of all that’s pure – with a score or so of assorted murderers that I am to receive aboard and carry to Botany Bay. Orders are sending to the Yard for the building of a cage in the forepeak, and accommodation for their keepers. By God, Stephen, to expect an officer of my seniority to turn his ship into a transport, and to play the turnkey! I am writing them such a letter! You must help me to some epithets, Stephen. And what really angers me is, that Sophie doesn’t seem able to grasp how monstrous their conduct is. I tell her it is a most improper proposal, but I wonder at their effrontery, and that I shall stick to Ajax, the new seventy-four, a fine ship, with no flash Newgate cullies lurking in the hold. But no. She sighs; says I know best, of course; and then five minutes later there she is, crying up the Leopard, and what a delightful, СКАЧАТЬ