The Surgeon’s Mate. Patrick O’Brian
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shaking his head. But it was thirty years since he had felt a qualm of seasickness, and that only a slight one; his sympathy could be no more than remote and theoretical; and after a moment he went on, ‘Well, the fact of the matter is, that we sighted an American privateer, a schooner, at daybreak, five miles off, with another, hull-down, far to windward: Dalgleish bore up, and now we are running for it: like a hare, as I said. I dare say we are making close on eleven knots. Should you like to come on deck and see how things lie?’
‘If you please.’
At a casual glance the position seemed scarcely to have changed. The Liberty still lay on the packet’s starboard quarter, and far over the grey heaving sea the other schooner still bore east-south-east. But there was a different feeling aboard the Diligence, a greater tension, and Mr Dalgleish’s expression was more grave by far. The brig had already spread her studdingsails alow and aloft, and she was running beautifully, the water singing down her side so that there was a fine half-heard, half-felt urgent resonance in her hull. But the Liberty had spread much more canvas and she had gained perceptibly, while her distant consort had done better still; she was now hull up and she was about to cross in front of a long, indented iceberg that gleamed over there in the greyness like a close-packed squadron of ships of the line.
Dalgleish was talking to his first mate and to Mr Humphreys, who was now measuring the angle subtended by the pursuers with the utmost concentration. ‘I never saw Mr Henry so determined,’ said Dalgleish, turning to Jack. ‘He is cracking on as though sailcloth and spars were free. Or as if we were a goddam Spanish galleon. Pray take my spyglass, sir, and see what you make of t’other.’
Jack fixed the distant schooner, steadying his hand on the aftermost shrouds, and he studied her as she crossed in front of the ice. ‘She has spread drabblers,’ he observed, ‘boomed out on either side. I have never seen that before, with such a rig. She must be in a hell-fire hurry.’
‘I thought so too,’ said Dalgleish. ‘I thought I picked them up. In all the time I have commanded this packet, to and fro scores of times, I have never seen the like, since war was declared. A man would think we were ballasted with gold.’
Stephen watched some gannets fishing away to leeward – the white flash of their headlong plummeting dive, the splash – and he listened vaguely to the sailors. There was some question of the wind dropping, of its chopping round into the north-west – of the state of the barometer – of skysails and kites: nasty frail wasteful things, costing the eyes of your head, in Dalgleish’s opinion, and certain to carry away in this breeze – of a method, employed by Captain Aubrey in an emergency, of sustaining them by means of doubled travelling backstays, led through a block aloft, snubbed well aft, tended by a sharp hand, and only shifted at the last moment, if at all. He heard Dalgleish say ‘that unlike some packet-captains he was not above learning from gentlemen of the Royal Navy; that however old you were, you might still learn something new every day; and that he should try Captain Aubrey’s method.’
Here Stephen’s attention was wholly taken up by a school of whales, of right whales, that appeared on the larboard bow; he borrowed a telescope and watched them as their steady course converged with that of the brig – watched them until they were so close that the glass would no longer focus and he could distinctly hear not only their vast steaming spout as they surfaced but even the indraught of their monstrous breath. At some point he felt a change in the brig’s progress, a greater thrust that raised her general music by half a tone, and when he looked up he found that she had set flying kites, that the Liberty was distinctly farther off, and that all hands were very pleased with themselves.
‘Now we can eat our dinner in peace,’ said Dalgleish with great satisfaction. ‘A very pretty notion of yours, sir, very pretty indeed. But even so, I believe I shall set up a couple of beckets, with an in-and-out turn over the hounds…’
The whales had gone, in one of their long, mysterious travelling dives; the sailors were deep in their hooks and thimbles, the advantages and disadvantages of hooks and thimbles with a selvagee strop as opposed to lashing-eyes, where backstays were concerned; Stephen returned to Diana. He was a great believer in the alcoholic tincture of laudanum, and this time she had retained his draught long enough for it to have an effect: she lay there, exhausted, but at least no longer racked, in a state between sleeping and waking.
She murmured when he came in, and he told her about the whales. She did not seem to be with him, but nevertheless he added, ‘It also appears that we are being pursued by two privateers: remote and ineffectual privateers, however. Mr Dalgleish is quite happy; he is confident we shall shake them off.’ Diana made no reply. He contemplated her. Lying there flat in her cot, her damp hair straggling, her face green and yellow, set in incipient nausea and general suffering, beyond all care for appearances, she was not a pretty sight: no spectacle for an ardent lover. He tried to put a name to his feeling for her but he found no satisfactory word or combination of words. It was certainly not the passion of his younger days nor anything related to it; nor did it resemble friendship – his friendship for Jack Aubrey, for instance. Affection entered into it, tenderness, and even a kind of complicity, perhaps, as though they had long been engaged in the same pursuit. Possibly the same absurd pursuit of happiness. This evoked some memories too painful to dwell upon, and he continued in a low voice, not to wake her if she was asleep, ‘It seems that these schooners were lying on the course we were expected to take. They were to the south of some island, whereas the prudent Mr Dalgleish sailed to the north: their presence can hardly have been the effect of hazard.’ It might have been the effect of intelligent guesswork on the part of the Americans: or it might have been that the list of their agents in Canada was defective – he doubted that a man like Beck would have left any hole unstopped. Yet on the other hand there was Beck’s staff, and he was thinking about the drunken fellow at the ball when Diana suddenly spoke out of her apparent coma. ‘Of course it was not just chance,’ she said. ‘Johnson would do anything, spend anything, to get us back. He is perfectly capable of hiring privateers, whatever they cost: he would spend money like water, he would move heaven and earth to get hold of me. And my diamonds,’ she added. She turned uneasily, throwing the bedclothes about. ‘They are all I have,’ she muttered after a while: and then ‘I shall never escape from that dreadful man.’ And after still another pause ‘But he shall never have them, not as long as there is breath in my body. No, by God.’
Stephen observed that she was clasping the case tightly against her. He had always known that she valued them extremely, but to this extent … He said, ‘I really do not believe you need feel concerned. We are a great way ahead, and Mr Dalgleish, who knows these waters extremely well, assures me that we shall meet with fog upon the Banks: there they can neither see nor follow us. I shall be heartily glad of it. If there is anything I dislike more than violence on land, it is violence at sea; since the peril is even greater, and apart from that, it is always wet and very often cold.’ She had dropped into a heavy laudanum sleep; tears were still welling from behind her closed eyelids, but she herself was not there.
Almost certainly she was right, he reflected: Johnson was powerful, rich, and influential; his pride had been cruelly wounded and he was a revengeful man. Diana knew him intimately – who more so? – and she could not be mistaken in his temper. And surely it was significant that the privateers should let the Nova Scotia go by and pursue the Diligence alone? She might even be right about the necklace. It was a splendid bauble, so splendid that its central stone had a name, the Nabob or the Mogul or something of that kind; and he had noticed that even very wealthy men were extraordinarily attached to particular possessions. It was, after all, this attachment that gave their price to such diamonds as the Pitt, the Sancy, the Orloff … suddenly the name of Diana’s came to his mind: it was the Blue Peter, a pear-shaped stone of a most surprising colour, like a pale, pale sapphire but with much more life and fire. An impious sailor had taken it from a temple in the time of Aurangzeb and it had kept the name he gave it ever since, a name that Stephen particularly liked, for not only had it a fine round sound but it was also that of one of the few flags he could recognize with certainty, the flag that ships flew when they were about to sail, and it had the pleasing associations of fresh departure, new regions, new creatures of the world, new lives, perhaps new life.
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