The Ionian Mission

‘May I help you to some of these truffles, ma’am?’ said he to his right-hand neighbour, a dowager whose influential countenance had helped to re-establish Diana’s reputation, damaged by ill-judged connections in India and the United States and only partially restored by her marriage.

‘Alas, I dare not,’ she said. ‘But it would give me great pleasure to see you do so. If you will take an old woman’s advice, you will eat up all the truffles that come your way, while your innards can still withstand ’em.’

‘Then I believe I shall,’ said Stephen, plunging a spoon into the pyramid. ‘It will be long before I see another. Tomorrow, with the blessing, I shall be aboard ship, and then hard tack, salt-horse, dried peas and small beer must be my lot: at least until that Buonaparte is brought down.’

‘Let us drink to his confusion,’ said the dowager, raising her glass. The whole table drank to his confusion, and then at due intervals to Dr Maturin’s return, to his very happy return, to the Royal Navy, to one another, and then standing – a point of some difficulty to Miss Trevor, who was obliged to cling to Jagiello’s arm – to the King. In the midst of all this cheerfulness, of this excellent claret, burgundy and port, Stephen looked anxiously at the clock, a handsome French cartel on the wall behind Mr Nathan’s head: he was to take the Portsmouth mail, and he had a mortal horror of missing coaches. To his distress he saw that the hands had not moved since the lobster bisque; like most of the clocks in Diana’s house the cartel had stopped, and he knew that decency forbade even a surreptitious glance at his watch. Yet although he and Diana lived lives more independent than most married pairs they were very, very close in other respects: she caught his look and called down the table ‘Eat your pudding in peace, my dear; Jagiello has borrowed his ambassador’s coach, and he is very kindly driving us down.’

Shortly after this she and the other women withdrew. Jagiello moved up the table to the dowager’s place and Stephen said to him, ‘You are a good-hearted soul, my dear, so you are. Now I shall see Diana for the best part of another twelve hours; and I shall not have to fret my mind over that infernal mail-coach.’

‘Mrs Maturin tried to make me promise that she should drive,’ said Jagiello, ‘and I have given my word that she should, once the sun was up, subject to your approval.’ He sounded uneasy.

‘And did she submit to your condition?’ said Stephen, smiling. ‘That was kind. But you need not be concerned: she drives prodigiously well, and would send a team of camels through a needle’s eye at a brisk round trot.’

‘Oh,’ cried Jagiello, ‘how I admire a woman that can ride and drive, that understands horse!’ And he went on at some length about Mrs Maturin’s shining parts, which had needed only a thorough understanding of horses to be quite complete.

Stephen was aware of Nathan’s amused, benign, cynical face on the far side of the table, smiling at Jagiello’s enthusiasm: there was something about Jagiello that made people smile, he reflected – his youth, his cheerfulness, his abounding health, his beauty, perhaps his simplicity. ‘None of these qualities are mine, or ever have been,’ he said to himself. ‘Are the Jagiellos conscious of their happiness? Probably not. Fortunatos nimium …’ A yearning for coffee spurred his vitals, and seeing that the decanters had made their last round untouched by his pink and somewhat stertorous guests he said aloud, ‘Perhaps, gentlemen, we might join the ladies.’

Jagiello’s offer of the coach had come as a surprise, and the other carriages had been ordered early so that Dr Maturin should be able to make his farewells and reach the Portsmouth coach with half an hour to spare. The carriages therefore appeared at half past ten and rolled away, leaving Stephen, Diana, and Jagiello with a delightful sense of holiday, of free, unexpected, unmortgaged time. Nathan was also left behind, partly because he had come on foot from his house just round the corner and partly because he wished to speak to Diana about money. She had brought some magnificent jewels back from India and the United States, many of which she never wore; and in the present state of war, with Napoleon’s astonishing, horrifying victories over the Austrians and Prussians, their value had increased immensely. Nathan wanted her to take advantage of the fact and to put some of the rubies (‘vulgar great things, much too big, like raspberry tarts’ she said) into a select list of deeply depressed British stocks, a drug on the market – an investment that would yield splendid returns in the event of an Allied victory at last. However, he only smiled and bowed when she suggested that they should take the remains of the bombe glacée into the billiard-room and there eat it while they played. ‘Because in any case Stephen must say goodbye to his olive-tree,’ she observed. Hers was perhaps the only billiard-room in Half Moon Street to possess an olive: the room had been built out over the garden behind, and Stephen, prising up a flagstone by a convenient window, had set a rooted cutting from a tree growing in his own land of Catalonia, itself the descendant of one in the grove of Academe. He sat by it now, showing Nathan the five new leaves and the almost certain promise of a sixth. With another husband Nathan might have spoken about these stocks and shares; but Stephen would have nothing whatsoever to do with his wife’s fortune – he left it entirely to her.

‘Come, Stephen,’ said she, putting down her cue. ‘I have left you such a pretty position.’

Dr Maturin addressing himself to a shattered leg with a saw in his hand was a bold, deft, determined operator; his gestures were rapid, sure, precise. But billiards was not his game. Although his theory was sound enough his practice was contemptible. Now, having studied the possibilities at length, he gave his ball a hesitant poke, watched it roll deliberately into the top right-hand pocket without touching any of the others, and returned to his olive-tree. The other players belonged to a different world entirely: Nathan gathered the balls into a corner, nursing them in a long series of almost imperceptible cannons and breaking them only to leave his opponent in a most uncomfortable situation; Jagiello accomplished some surprising feats at the top of the table with a spot-stroke; but Diana favoured a more dashing game by far, delighting in the losing hazard. She walked round the table with a predatory gleam in her eye, sending the balls streaking up and down with a ringing crack. At one point, when she had already made a break of thirty-seven and needed only three to win, the balls were awkwardly placed in the middle. She hoisted her slim person on to the edge of the table and she was about to reach right out with her whole length poised over the baize when Stephen called, ‘Take the rest to it, my dear; take the long rest, for all love.’ There was a strong possibility that she was with child, and he did not like the position at all.

‘Bah,’ said she, lowering her cue to her outstretched hand: she glared along it, her eyes narrowed, the tip of her tongue showing from the corner of her mouth; she paused, and then with a strong smooth stroke sent the red straight into the bottom right-hand pocket while her own ball shot into that on the left. She slipped off the table with such a lithe, easy grace and such an open delighted triumph that Stephen’s heart stopped for a beat and the other men looked at her with the utmost fondness.

‘Captain Jagiello’s coach,’ said the butler.

As far as real battlefields and beds of roses were concerned, Captain Aubrey was far better acquainted with the first, partly because of his profession, which, with enormous intervals of delay, often cold and always wet, brought him into violent conflict with the King’s enemies, to say nothing of the Admiralty, the Navy Board, and bloody-minded superiors and subordinates, and partly because he was a wretched gardener. For all his loving care the roses at Ashgrove Cottage produced more greenfly, caterpillars, mildew, rust, and grey mould than flowers – never enough at any one time to make a bed for a dwarf, let alone a six-foot sea-officer who tipped the beam at sixteen stone. In the figurative sense, his marriage was a good deal nearer the roses than most; he was a good deal happier than he deserved (he was neither a sure provider nor quite strictly monogamous) and although he was not ideally happy, although he might secretly wish for a companion with more sense of a man’s carnal nature and somewhat less possessive, he was profoundly attached to Sophie: and in any case he was often away from home for years on end.

He now stood on the poop of HMS Worcester, about to set off again; and his wife sat a little way behind him, on an incongruous elbow-chair brought on deck for the occasion.

The ship had been at single anchor in Spithead these long hours past, the Blue Peter as firmly established at her foretopmast head as though it had been nailed there, her foretopsail loosed, and her capstan-bars shipped and swifted a whole watch ago, ready to send her on her way: the entire ship’s company was in a state of angry tension – officers snappish, dinner delayed, all eyes indignantly turned to the shore. She swung broad on the slackening ebb, and Captain Aubrey moved over to the starboard rail, his telescope still trained on Portsmouth. His face, his naturally good-tempered, cheerful face, was set, dark, and stern: the wind still served, but only just, and once the tide began to make his ship might as well return to her moorings – she would never get out against the tide. He loathed unpunctuality; and unpunctuality it was, gross unpunctuality, that was keeping him here; he had already begged a long, long breathing-space from the port-admiral, who was devoted to Mrs Aubrey, but this could not last and any moment now a hoist would break out on that flagstaff over there, the Worcester’s signal to proceed to sea, and then sail she must, surgeon or no surgeon, leaving her gig’s crew to find their way as best they might.

Dr Maturin’s sea-chest had come aboard, and his well-remembered ’cello-case, brought in good time from the Portsmouth mail; but no Doctor had come with them. It was in vain that Bonden, the Captain’s coxswain, badgered the coachman and the guard: no, they had not seen a little ill-looking sallow cove in a full-bottomed wig; no, they had not left him by accident at Guildford, Godalming or Petersfield, because why? Because he was never on the bleeding coach to begin with, cully. Bonden might put that in his pipe and smoke it, or stuff it up his arse, whichever he preferred; and there was eighteenpence to pay on the bass fiddle, as being unnatural baggage, unaccompanied.

‘How I do loathe unpunctuality,’ said Captain Aubrey. ‘Even by land. Forward there: belay that smiting-line.’ This last was delivered in a voice so strong that it echoed from the walls of Noman’s Land Fort, and the words ‘that smiting-line’ mingled faintly with his next remark, which was addressed to his wife. ‘Really, Sophie, you would think that a fellow of Stephen’s parts, a prodigious natural philosopher, could be brought to understand the nature of the tide. Here is the moon at her perigee, in syzygy, and near the equator, as I showed you last night, and you smoked it directly, did you not?’

‘Oh, perfectly, my dear,’ said Sophie, looking wild: at least she had a clear recollection of the pale crescent over Porchester Castle.

‘Or at least he might grasp its importance to seamen,’ said Jack. ‘And a full-blown spring tide at that. Sometimes I despair … My dear,’ looking at his watch again – ‘I am afraid we must say goodbye. If ever he should appear at Ashgrove Cottage, you will tell him to post down to Plymouth. Mr Pullings, a bosun’s chair, if you please, a whip for the dunnage, and pass the word for the children.’

The cry ran through the ship ‘Children aft – children report to the Captain – all children aft’ and Jack’s two little girls came running from the galley, grasping massy half-eaten slabs of cold plum-duff, followed by George, their younger brother, in his first pair of pantaloons, carried by a hairy quartermaster. But George’s full-moon face was anxious and preoccupied; he whispered into the seaman’s hairy ear. ‘Can’t you wait?’ asked the seaman. George shook his head: the seaman whipped off the pantaloons, held the little boy well out over the leeward rail and called for a handful of tow.

On the poop itself Jack was still gazing through the innumerable masts – half the Channel fleet and countless transports, with smallcraft of every shape and size plying between them and the shore. He had the Sally Port clear in his glass, with the men-of-war’s boats going to and fro, and his own gig waiting there, his coxswain sitting in the stern-sheets, eating bread and cheese with one hand and haranguing his shipmates with the other: behind the Sally Port the rough unpaved triangular square and the Keppel’s Head inn at the far side, with its broad white balcony. And as he watched a coach and four took the corner at break-neck speed, scattering officers, seamen, Marines and their attendant trollops, and drew up, still rocking perilously, in the middle of the open space.

‘Our number, sir,’ said the signal-midshipman, his glass trained on the flagstaff. ‘And now Worcester proceed to sea.’ Another hoist, and the midshipman searched madly in his book. ‘Without further … further …’

‘Delay,’ said Jack without taking his eye from his telescope. ‘Acknowledge. Mr Pullings: strike the Blue Peter. All hands to weigh.’ He saw a woman pass the reins to a man, leap from the box and run down to the boats, followed by a small black figure from the body of the coach, carrying an enormous parcel. ‘Sophie,’ he said, loud over the bosun’s pipes and the pounding of feet, ‘ain’t that Diana?’

‘I am sure it is,’ said she, looking through the glass. ‘I can recognize her sprigged muslin from here. And that is poor Stephen, with the parcel.’

‘At last,’ said Jack. ‘At last. The usual hell-fire drama. Thank God he has someone to look after him, even if it is only Diana. Mr Pullings, our skeleton crew may take some time to win the anchor, though I am sure it will be done with every appearance of alacrity. Sweetheart, it is over the side with you, alas.’ He handed her down to the quarterdeck, where the bosun’s chair was swung inboard, waiting to lower her into the Arethusa’s barge, lent by their friend Billy Harvey.

‘Goodbye, my dearest,’ she said, smiling as well as she could, the great tears welling. ‘God bless and keep you.’

‘God bless you too,’ said Jack, and in a hard, unnatural voice he called ‘A whip for the children.’ One by one they were lowered down like little bundles to their mother, their eyes closed and their hands tightly clasped. ‘Mr Watson,’ he said to the midshipman in charge of the boat, ‘be so good as to speak my gig as you pull in, and tell ’em to spread more canvas, to spread every stitch they possess. My compliments and best thanks to Captain Harvey.

He turned to give the orders that would carry the Worcester into the offing on the very tail of the ebb: he had ten minutes in hand, which might just suffice with this breeze, Bonden being a capital smallcraft sailor; and these ten minutes must be spent in persuading the sharpest eyes in the Navy that the Worcester was in fact obeying orders with all imaginable zeal rather than sitting there with her hands in her pockets. Ordinarily he would have left all this to Tom Pullings, his first lieutenant, an old and trusted shipmate; but he knew that there was not a man aboard who was not perfectly well aware of his motions, the ship having a small temporary crew of old experienced hands, all men-of-war’s men, and since the seamen delighted in deception, above all any deception intended to blear the port-admiral’s eye, he was afraid they might overact their parts. It was a ticklish business, managing this tacit connivance at disobeying a direct order while at the same time maintaining his reputation as an efficient officer, and perhaps there was a little too much brisk running about to be quite convincing. At one point a gun from the shore brought his heart into his mouth, much as it had leapt when he was a youngster and the same Admiral, then a commander, had caught him playing the fool rather than attending to the exact trim of the outer jib; but it was only the great man emphasizing his desire that Andromache should send a lieutenant to his office: Andromache had spent more than forty seconds hoisting out a boat. Even so, Jack dared not risk the same reproof in the face of the fleet, and the Worcester was well under way, her best bower catted, her topsails sheeted home (though faintly), and her topgallants loose in the brails by the time the gig crossed her wake under a press of canvas and shot up her starboard side. Out here the flood was cutting up an awkward, high-chopping sea against the breeze and hooking on would require the most accurate judgement. However, Bonden was a most accurate judge of these things: he might decide to wait until the ship was clear of the Wight, but in any case there was no danger of the boat being stove alongside.

Jack was still angry: he was also cold and unhappy. He glanced down at the heaving boat, the bowman poised with his hook, Bonden at the tiller gauging the scend of the sea, alternately filling a trifle and then luffing up, and at Stephen, looking meek in the stern-sheets, nursing his box: he sniffed, and went below without a word. The Marine sentry at the cabin door changed his smile to a look of remote wooden respect as he passed.

On the quarterdeck Mr Pullings said to a midshipman, ‘Mr Appleby, jump down to the purser and ask him for half a pint of sweet oil.’

‘Sweet oil, sir?’ cried the midshipman. ‘Yes, sir, directly,’ he said, seeing a hint of brimstone in the first lieutenant’s eye.

‘Pin her, Joe,’ said Bonden. The bowman hooked on at the mainchains, the big lugsail came down with a run, and speaking in a curt, official voice Bonden said, ‘Now, sir, if you please. We can’t hang about all day under the barky’s lee. I’ll look after your old parcel.’

The Worcester was a wall-sided ship and the way into her was a series of very shallow smooth wet slippery steps that rose vertically from the waterline, with no comfortable tumblehome, no inward slope, to help the pilgrim on his way; still, they had manropes on either side and this made it just possible for very agile, seamanlike mariners to go aboard: but Dr Maturin was neither agile nor yet seamanlike.

‘Come on, sir,’ said the coxswain impatiently as Stephen crouched there, hesitating with one foot on the gunwale. The gap between the ship and the gig began widening again and before it should reach proportions of a chasm Stephen made a galvanic spring, landing on the lowest step and grasping the manropes with all his might. Here he stood, gasping and contemplating the sheer height above: he knew he had behaved very ill, and that he was in disgrace. Bonden, though an old friend, had greeted him without a smile, saying, ‘You have cut it precious fine, sir. Do you know you have very nearly made us miss the tide? And may yet.’ And in the passage from the shore he had heard a good deal more about ‘missing the tide, and a roaring great old spring-tide too,’ and about the Captain’s horrid rage ‘at being made to look a ninny in the face of the whole fleet – like a flaming lion all through the ebb; which if he misses of it at last, there will be all Hell to pay, and with boiling pitch at that.’ Harsh words from Bonden, and no kindly stern-ladder or even bosun’s chair to bring him aboard … here the Worcester gave a lee-lurch, heaving her ugly larboard flank so high that the copper showed, while the starboard, with Stephen on it, sank to a corresponding depth. The cold sea surged deliberately up, soaking his legs and the greater part of his trunk. He gasped again, and clung tighter.

As she rolled back again vigorous, impatient hands seized his ankles, and he found himself propelled up the side. ‘I must remember to pay the proper compliment to the quarterdeck,’ he reflected, when he was very nearly there. ‘This may attenuate my fault.’ But in his agitation he forgot that he had earlier pinned his hat to his wig, to preserve it from the wind, and when on reaching the holy space he pulled it off – when both rose together – his gesture had more the appearance of ill-timed jocularity than of respect, so much so that some of the young gentlemen, two ship’s boys, and a Marine, who did not know him, dissolved in honest mirth, while those who did know him did not seem mollified at all.

‘Upon my word, Doctor,’ said Mowett, the officer of the watch, ‘you have cut it pretty fine, I must say. You very nearly made us miss our tide. What was you thinking of ? And you are all wet – sopping wet. How did you get so wet?’

Mr Pullings, standing by the weather rail, looking stiff and remote, said, ‘The rendezvous was for the height of flood two tides ago, sir,’ with no kind word of greeting.

Stephen had known Mowett and Pullings since they were mere snotty reefers of no consequence whatsoever, and at any other time he would have snapped them as tight shut as a snuff-box; but now their vast moral superiority, the general strong mute disapprobation of the Worcester’s company, and his own wet misery left him without a word, and although in the depths of his mind he was half aware that this harshness was at least in part assumed, that it belonged to the naval idea of fun he had so often suffered from, he could not bring himself to respond.

Pulling’s grim expression softened a little. He said, ‘You got a ducking, I see. You must not stand there in wet clothes: you will catch your death of cold. Has it reached your watch?’

Very, very often in Dr Maturin’s career, it – that is to say the sea, that element so alien to him – had reached his watch when he came aboard, and indeed sometimes it had closed over his head; but every time the fact astonished and distressed him. ‘Oh,’ he cried, groping in his fob, ‘I believe it has.’ He took out the watch and shook it, shedding still more water on the deck.’

‘Give it here, sir,’ said Pullings. ‘Mr Appleby, take this watch and put it in the sweet oil.’

The cabin door opened. ‘Well, Doctor,’ said Jack, looking even taller than usual and far more intimidating. ‘Good morning to you, or rather good afternoon. This is a strange hour to report aboard – this is cutting it pretty fine – this is coming it tolerably high, I believe. Do you know you very nearly made us miss our tide? Miss our tide right under the Admiral’s front window? Did not you see the Blue Peter flying all through the forenoon watch – nay, watch after God-damned watch? I must tell you, sir, that I have known men headed up in a barrel and thrown overboard for less: far less. Mr Mowett, you may round in and set the jib and forestaysail at last. At last,’ he said with heavy emphasis, looking at Stephen. ‘Why, you are all wet. Surely you did not fall in, like a mere lubber?’

‘I did not,’ said Stephen, goaded out of his humility. ‘The sea it was that rose.’

‘Well, you must not stand there, dripping all over the deck; it ain’t a pretty sight, and you may take cold. Come and shift yourself. Your sea-chest is in my cabin: at least it had some notion of punctuality.’

‘Jack,’ said Stephen, shedding his breeches in the cabin, ‘I beg your pardon. I am very sorry for my lateness. I regret it extremely.’

‘Punctuality,’ said Captain Aubrey: but then, feeling that this, the beginning of a homily on the great naval virtue, was hardly generous, he shook Stephen’s free hand and went on, ‘Damn my eyes, I was like a cat on hot tiles all through this vile morning and afternoon; so I spoke a little hasty. Join me on deck when you are shifted, Stephen. Bring the other glass, and we will take a last look at the shore before we round the Wight.’

The day was sparkling clear, the powerful telescopes showed the Sally Port sharp and bright, the inn and its white balcony, and on the balcony Sophie and Diana side by side, Jagiello tall on Diana’s arm, his arm in a sling, and next to Sophie a diminishing row of heads that must be the children: a flutter of handkerchiefs from time to time. ‘There is Jagiello,’ said Stephen. ‘I came down in his coach. That was the source of the trouble.’