The Surgeon’s Mate. Patrick O’Brian
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instantly replied that he too admired beauty in a woman – that he was very happy to have a most perfect example as his partner – by far the most perfect example in the room. Miss Smith neither blushed nor hung her head; she did say ‘Oh fie, Captain Aubrey,’ but when he took her hand again to whirl her round there was no reprobation in her clasp.
By the time he took her in to supper he knew a great deal about her: she had been brought up in Rutland, where her father had a pack of hounds – she adored fox-chasing, but unhappily many of the men who hunted were sad rakes – she had been engaged to be married to one, until it was found that he had an unreasonable number of natural children. She had had several seasons in London, where her aunt lived in Hanover Square; and from what she said Jack learnt, to his surprise, that she must be thirty. She was now keeping house for her brother Henry, who, though a soldier, was so shortsighted that he had been put into the commissariat; he was away now, looking after the army stores at Kingston, an inglorious employment. But even the real fighting soldiers were not much better; they marched and counter-marched and accomplished little; they were not to be compared with the Navy. She had never been so excited in her life as when she saw the Shannon bring in the Chesapeake. She was filled with enthusiasm for the Navy, she cried; and Jack, looking at her flushed and eager face and hearing her tremulous, enraptured tone, quite believed her.
At the supper-table itself she begged him to describe the battle in every detail, and he did so with great good humour: it was a comparatively simple single-ship action, lasting only a quarter of an hour; she followed it with the utmost eagerness and, it seemed to him, with unusual good sense and understanding. ‘How glad you must have been to see their colours come down. How proud of your victory! I am sure my heart would have burst,’ she exclaimed, clasping her hands over her bosom, which yielded to the pressure.
‘I was delighted,’ he said. ‘But it was not my victory, you know. It was Philip Broke’s.’
‘But were you not both in command? You are both captains.’
‘Oh no. I was only a passenger, a person of no consequence.’
‘I am sure you are being too modest. I am sure you rushed aboard, sword in hand.’
‘Well, I did venture on their deck for a while. But the victory was Broke’s and Broke’s alone. Let us drink to his health.’
They drank it in bumpers. Their neighbours joined them: they were redcoats, but full of good will. One of them had obviously wished Captain Broke a happy recovery many times already, so many that a few minutes after this fresh toast his friends led him away, leaving them alone at the table. Miss Smith returned to the Navy. She showed the keenest interest in the service: she knew almost nothing of it, alas, having always lived so far from the sea, but she had adored poor Lord Nelson and she had worn mourning for months after Trafalgar. Did Captain Aubrey share her admiration, and had he ever met the great man? ‘Yes, I do, and I did,’ he said, smiling with great benevolence, for there was no shorter way to Jack’s heart than a love for the service and an adoration of Nelson. ‘I had the honour of dining with him when I was a mere lieutenant: the first time he only said “May I trouble you for the salt?”, though he said it in the kindest way; but the second time he said “Never mind manoeuvres; always go straight at ’em”.’
‘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,