be so good as to go there and ask for Dr Maturin. My compliments and I am very much concerned to say we shall not be back in port by dinner-time; but I will send a boat this evening at any time he chooses to appoint.’
They were not back in port by dinner-time: it would indeed have been a logical impossibility, since they had not yet left it, but were sweeping majestically through the close-packed craft towards the fairway. One advantage of having a small vessel with a great many hands aboard is that you can execute manoeuvres denied to any ship of the line, and Jack preferred this arduous creeping to being towed or to threading along under sail with a thoroughly uneasy crew, disturbed in all their settled habits and jostling full of strangers.
In the open channel he had himself rowed round the Sophie: he considered her from every angle, and at the same time he weighed the advantages and disadvantages of sending all the women ashore. It would be easy to find most of them while the men were at their dinner: not merely the local girls who were there for fun and pocket-money, but also the semi-permanent judies. If he made one sweep now, then another just before their true departure might clear the sloop entirely. He wanted no women aboard. They only caused trouble, and with this fresh influx they would cause even more. On the other hand, there was a certain lack of zeal aboard, a lack of real spring, and he did not mean to turn it into sullenness, particularly that afternoon. Sailors were as conservative as cats, as he knew very well: they would put up with incredible labour and hardship, to say nothing of danger, but it had to be what they were used to or they would grow brutish. She was very low in the water, to be sure: a little by the head and listing a trifle to port. All that extra weight would have been far better below the water-line. But he would have to see how she handled.
‘Shall I send the hands to dinner, sir?’ asked James Dillon when Jack was aboard again.
‘No, Mr Dillon. We must profit by this wind. Once we are past the cape they may go below. Those guns are breeched and frapped?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then we will make sail. In sweeps. All hands to make sail.’
The bosun sprang his call and hurried away to the fo’c’sle amidst a great rushing of feet and a good deal of bellowing.
‘Newcomers below. Silence there.’ Another rush of feet. The Sophie’s regular crew stood poised in their usual places, in dead silence. A voice on board the Généreux a cable’s length away could be heard, quite clear and plain, ‘Sophie’s making sail.’
She lay there, rocking gently, out in Mahon harbour, with the shipping on her starboard beam and quarter and the brilliant town beyond it. The breeze a little abaft her lar-board beam, a northerly wind, was pushing her stern round a trifle. Jack paused, and as it came just so he cried, ‘Away aloft.’ The calls repeated the order and instantly the shrouds were dark with passing men, racing up as though on their stairs at home.
‘Trice up. Lay out.’ The calls again, and the topmen hurried out on the yards. They cast off the gaskets, the lines that held the sails tight furled to the yards; they gathered the canvas under their arms and waited.
‘Let fall,’ came the order, and with it the howling peep-peep, peep-peep from the bosun and his mates.
‘Sheet home. Sheet home. Hoist away. Cheerly there, in the foretop, look alive. T’garns’l sheets. Hands to the braces. Belay.’
A gentle push from above heeled the Sophie over, then another and another, each more delightfully urgent until it was one steady thrust; she was under way, and all along her side there sang a run of living water. Jack and his lieutenant exchanged a glance: it had not been bad – the foretopgallantsail had taken its time, because of a misunderstanding as to how newcomer should be defined and whether the six restored Sophies were to be considered in that injurious light, which had led to a furious, silent squabble on the yard; and the sheeting-home had been rather spasmodic; but it had not been disgraceful, and they would not have to support the derision of the other men-of-war in the harbour. There had been moments in the confusion of the morning when each had dreaded just that thing.
The Sophie had spread her wings a little more like an unhurried dove than an eager hawk, but not so much so that the expert eyes on shore would dwell upon her with disapprobation; and as for the mere landsmen, their eyes were so satiated with the coming and going of every kind of vessel that they passed over her departure with glassy indifference.
‘Forgive me, sir,’ said Stephen Maturin, touching his hat to a nautical gentleman on the quay, ‘but might I ask whether you know which is the ship called Sophia?’
‘A King’s ship, sir?’ asked the officer, returning his salute. ‘A man-of-war? There is no ship of that name – but perhaps you refer to the sloop, sir? The sloop Sophie?’
‘That may well be the case, sir. No man could easily surpass me in ignorance of naval terms. The vessel I have in mind is commanded by Captain Aubrey.’
‘Just so: the sloop, the fourteen-gun sloop. She lies almost directly in front of you, sir, in a line with the little white house on the point.’
‘The ship with triangular sails?’
‘No. That is a polacre-settee. Somewhat to the left, and farther off.’
‘The little small squat merchantman with two masts?’
‘Well’ – with a laugh – ‘she is a trifle low in the water; but she is a man-of-war, I assure you. And I believe she is about to make sail. Yes. There go her topsails: sheeted home. They hoist the yard. To’garns’ls. What’s amiss? Ah, there we are. Not very smartly done, but all’s well that ends well, and the Sophie never was one of your very brisk performers. See, she gathers way. She will fetch the mouth of the harbour on this wind without touching a brace.’
‘She is sailing away?’
‘Indeed she is. She must be running three knots already – maybe four.’
‘I am very much obliged to you, sir,’ said Stephen, lifting his hat.
‘Servant, sir,’ said the officer, lifting his. He looked after Stephen for a while. ‘Should I ask him whether he is well? I have left it too late. However, he seems steady enough now.’
Stephen had walked down to the quay to find out whether the Sophie could be reached on foot or whether he should have to take a boat to keep his dinner engagement; for his conversation with Mr Florey had persuaded him that not only was the engagement intended to be kept, but that the more general invitation was equally serious – an eminently practicable suggestion, most certainly to be acted upon. How civil, how more than civil, Florey had been: had explained the medical service of the Royal Navy, and taken him to see Mr Edwardes of the Centaur perform quite an interesting amputation, had dismissed his scruples as to lack of purely surgical experience, had lent him Blane on diseases incident to seamen, Hulme’s Libellus de Natura Scorbuti, Lind’s Effectual Means and Northcote’s Marine Practice, and had promised to find him at least the bare essentials in instruments until he should have his allowance and the official chest – ‘There are trocars, tenaculums and ball-scoops lying about by the dozen at the hospital, to say nothing of saws and bone-rasps.’
Stephen had allowed his mind to convince itself entirely, and the strength of his emotion at the sight of the Sophie, her white sails and her low hull dwindling fast over the shining sea, showed him how much he had come to look forward to the prospect of a
