Treason’s Harbour. Patrick O’Brian
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said, ‘What’s o’clock? It is time for my goat’s milk. Always late, these buggers. It is essential that I should have my goat’s milk regular,’ and he looked eagerly at the door.
‘I hope you keep well, sir, in this climate?’ said Jack. ‘It is reckoned very healthy, I believe.’
‘There ain’t no such thing as health when you’re old,’ said the Admiral. ‘Health to what end?’
The milk came in, brought by a man-servant remarkably like the woman Jack had seen, apart from the blue-black stubble of a five-days beard. ‘Where is the signora?’ asked Hartley. ‘Coming,’ said the servant; and indeed she appeared in the doorway as he left, carrying a tray with a wine-bottle and some biscuits and a glass upon it: she had changed her dirty white dress for another, perceptibly cleaner and cut remarkably low. Jack saw Hartley’s dead face come to life: yet in spite of his animation his first words were a protest – ‘Aubrey don’t want wine at this time of day.’
Before anything could be decided on this point a bawling broke out in the courtyard and the Admiral and the woman hurried over to look out. He fondled her bosom, but she brushed him off and began shouting through the window in a flawed metallic voice that must have carried a mile and a half. This went on for some time. Jack had not much more penetration than the next man yet it was perfectly evident to him that Hartley had fallen unlucky; but that mixed with his obvious lechery there was what might be called love or infatuation or at any rate a strong attachment.
‘A splendid temperament,’ said the Admiral when she had run out of the room to carry on the argument at close quarters. ‘You can always tell a fine spirited girl by the jut of her bum.’ There was a slight flush on his face and in a much more human tone he said, ‘Pour yourself a glass of wine and then one for me – I’ll hob and nob with you. They don’t let me drink anything but milk, you know.’ A pause in which he took snuff from a screw of paper, and he said, ‘I go over to Valletta now and then to see about my half-pay; I was there not a fortnight ago and Brocas mentioned your name. Yes, yes: I remember perfectly well. He talked about you. It seems you still have not learnt to keep your breeches on. So much the better. Play the man while you still can, I always say. I wish I had not lost so many opportunities in the past; I could weep blood when I think of some of them – splendid women. Play the man while you can; you are a gelding long enough in your grave. And some of us are geldings before we get there,’ he added, with something between a laugh and a sob.
As Jack walked back towards the sea the heat was greater, the glare of the white road more blinding, and the harsh clamour of the cicadas louder still. He had rarely been so sad. The black thoughts flooded in, one upon another: Admiral Hartley, of course; and the perpetual rushing passage of time; inevitable decay; the most unimaginable evil of impotence … Instinctively he jerked back as something shot past his face like a block hurtling from high aloft in action: it struck the stony ground just in front of his feet and burst apart – a tortoise, probably one of the amorous reptiles of a little while ago, since this was the very place. And looking up he saw the huge dark bird that had dropped it: the bird looked down at him, circling, circling as it stared. ‘Good Lord above,’ he said. ‘Good Lord above…’ And after a moment’s consideration, ‘How I wish Stephen had been here.’
Stephen Maturin was in fact sitting on a bench in the abbey church of St Simon’s, listening to the monks singing vespers. He too was dinnerless, but in this case it was voluntary and prudential, a penance for lusting after Laura Fielding and (he hoped) a means of reducing his concupiscence: to begin with his pagan stomach had cried out against this treatment, and indeed it had gone on grumbling until the end of the first antiphon. Yet for some time now Stephen had been in what might almost have been called a state of grace, stomach, break-back bench, carnal desire all forgotten, he being wafted along on the rise and fall of the ancient, intimately familiar plainchant.
During their stay in Valletta the French had been more than usually unkind to the monastery: not only had they taken away all its treasure and sold off its cloister but they had wantonly broken the armorial stained-glass windows (which had been replaced with cane matting) and had stripped the walls of the exceptionally fine marble, lapis lazuli and malachite that covered them. Yet this was not without its advantages. The acoustics were much improved, and as they stood there among the dim, bare stone or brick arches the choir-monks might have been chanting in a far older church, a church more suited to their singing than the florid Renaissance building the French had found. Their abbot was a very aged man; he had known the last three Grand Masters, he had seen the coming of the French and then of the English, and now his frail but true old voice drifted through the half-ruined aisles pure, impersonal, quite detached from worldly things; and his monks followed him, their song rising and falling like the swell of a gentle sea.
There were few people in the church and those few could hardly be seen except when they moved past the candles in the side-chapels, most of them being women, whose black, tent-like faldettas merged with the shadows; but when at the end of the service Stephen turned by the holy-water stoup near the door to pay his respects to the altar, he noticed a man sitting near one of the pillars, dabbing his eyes with his handkerchief. His face was lit by a shaft of light from a small high opening on to the secularized cloister, and as he turned Stephen recognized Andrew Wray.
The doorway was filled with very slowly moving, eagerly talking women, and Stephen was obliged to stand there. Wray’s presence surprised him: the penal laws were not what they had been, but even so the acting Second Secretary of the Admiralty could not possibly be a Catholic; and although Stephen had caught sight of Wray at concerts in London from time to time it had never occurred to him that love of music rather than of fashionable company might have brought him. Yet the Secretary’s emotion was genuine enough; even when he had composed himself and was walking towards the door his face was grave and deeply moved. The women heaved the leather curtain to one side, the door opened, letting them out and a beam of sunlight in. Wray took no notice of the holy water, nor of the altar – a further proof that he was no Papist. He glanced at Stephen. His expression changed to one of urbane civility and he said, ‘Dr Maturin, is it not? How do you do, sir? My name is Wray. We met at Lady Jersey’s, and I have the honour of being acquainted with Mrs Maturin. I saw her, indeed, a little before I sailed.’
They talked for a while, blinking in the brilliant sun and speaking of Diana – very well, when seen at the Opera in the Columptons’ box – and of common acquaintances, and then Wray suggested a pot of chocolate in an elegant pastry-cook’s on the other side of the square.
‘I go to St Simon’s as often as I can,’ he said as they sat down at a green table in the arbour behind the shop. ‘Do you take a delight in plainchant, sir?’
‘I do indeed, sir,’ said Stephen, ‘provided it be devoid of sweetness or brilliancy or striving for effect, and exactly phrased – no grace-notes, no passing-notes, no showing away.’
‘Exactly so,’ cried Wray, ‘and no new-fangled melismata either. Angelic simplicity – that is the heart of the matter. And these worthy monks have the secret of it.’
They talked about modes, agreeing that in general they preferred the Ambrosian to the plagal, and Wray said, ‘I was at one of their Masses the other day, when they sang the Mixolydian Agnus; and I must confess that the old gentleman’s dona nobis pacem moved me almost to tears.’
‘Peace,’ said Stephen. ‘Shall we ever see it again, in our time?’
‘I doubt it, with the Emperor in his present form.’
‘It is true that I am just come from a church,’ said Stephen, ‘but even so I could wish to see that tyrant Buonaparte doubly damned to all eternity and back, the dog.’
Wray laughed and said, ‘I remember a Frenchman who acknowledged all sorts of very grave faults in Buonaparte, including tyranny, as you so rightly say, and even worse a total ignorance of French grammar, usage and manners, but who nevertheless supported him with all his might. His argument was this: the arts alone distinguish men from the brutes and make life almost bearable – the arts flourish only in time of peace – universal rule is a prerequisite for universal peace – and here as I recall he quoted Gibbon