English and Spanish. He was approaching the square, and through the fresh green of the very young leaves he could see the Généreux’s royals and topgallants twinkling in the sun far over on the other side of the harbour, hanging out to dry. The busy street, the green, and the blue sky over it was enough to make any man’s heart rise like a lark, and three-quarters of Jack’s soared high. But the remaining part was earthbound, thinking anxiously about his crew. He had been familiar with this nightmare of manning since his earliest days in the Navy, and his first serious wound had been inflicted by a woman in Deal with a flat-iron who thought her man should not be pressed; but he had not expected to meet it quite so early in his command, nor in this form, nor in the Mediterranean.
Now he was in the square, with its noble trees and its great twin staircases winding down to the quay – stairs known to British sailors for a hundred years as Pigtail Steps, the cause of many a broken limb and battered head. He crossed it to the low wall that ran between the stair-heads and looked out over the immense expanse of enclosed water before him, stretching away left-handed to the distant top of the harbour and right-handed past the hospital island miles away to its narrow, castle-guarded mouth. To his left lay the merchantmen: scores and, indeed, hundreds of feluccas, tartans, xebecs, pinks, polacres, polacre-settees, houarios and barcalongas – all the Mediterranean rigs and plenty from the northern seas as well – bean-cods, cats, herring-busses. Opposite him and to his right lay the men-of-war: two ships of the line, both seventy-fours; a pretty twenty-eight gun frigate, the Niobe, whose people were painting a vermilion band under the chequered line of her gunports and up over her delicate transom, in imitation of a Spanish ship her captain had admired; and a number of transports and other vessels; while between them all and the steps up to the quay, innumerable boats plied to and fro – long-boats, barges from the ships of the line, launches, cutters, yawls and gigs, right down to the creeping jolly-boat belonging to the Tartarus bomb-ketch, with her enormous purser weighing it down to a bare three inches off the water. Still farther to the right the splendid quay curved away towards the dockyard, the ordnance and victualling wharfs and the quarantine island, hiding many of the other ships: Jack stared and craned with one foot on the parapet in the hope of catching a glimpse of his joy; but she was not to be seen. He turned reluctantly away to the left, for that was where Mr Williams’ office lay. Mr Williams was the Mahon correspondent of Jack’s prize-agent in Gibraltar, the eminently respectable house of Johnstone and Graham, and his office was the next and most necessary port of call; for besides feeling that it was ridiculous to have gold on his shoulder but none to jingle in his pocket, Jack would presently need ready money for a whole series of grave and unavoidable expenses – customary gifts, douceurs and the like, which could not possibly be done on credit.
He walked in with the utmost confidence, as if he had just won the battle of the Nile in person, and he was very well received: when their business was over the agent said, ‘I suppose you have seen Mr Baldick?’
‘The Sophie’s lieutenant?’
‘Just so.’
‘But he has gone with Captain Allen – he is aboard the Pallas.’
‘There, sir, you are mistaken, if I may say so, in a manner of speaking. He is in the hospital.’
‘You astonish me.’
The agent smiled, raising his shoulders and spreading his hands in a deprecating gesture: he possessed the true word and Jack had to be astonished; but the agent begged pardon for his superiority. ‘He came ashore late yesterday afternoon and was taken to the hospital with a low fever – the little hospital up past the Capuchins, not the one on the island. To tell you the truth’ – the agent held the flat of his hand in front of his mouth as a token of secrecy and spoke in a lower tone – ‘he and the Sophie’s surgeon did not see eye to eye, and the prospect of a cruise under his hands was more than Mr Baldick could abide. He will rejoin at Gib, no doubt, as soon as he is better. And now, Captain,’ said the agent, with an unnatural smile and a shifty look, ‘I am going to make so bold as to ask you a favour, if I may. Mrs Williams has a young cousin who is with child to go to sea – wants to be a purser later on. He is a quick boy and he writes a good clear hand; he has worked in the office here since Christmas and I know he is clever at figures. So, Captain Aubrey, sir, if you have no one else in mind for your clerk, you would infinitely oblige…’ The agent’s smile came and went, came and went: he was not used to be on the asking side in a favour, not with sea officers, and he found the possibility of a refusal wonderfully unpleasant.
‘Why,’ said Jack, considering, ‘I have no one in mind, to be sure. You answer for him, of course? Well then, I tell you what, Mr Williams, you find me an able seaman to come along with him and I’ll take your boy.’
‘Are you in earnest, sir?’
‘Yes … yes, I suppose I am. Yes: certainly.’
‘Done, then,’ said the agent, holding out his hand. ‘You won’t regret it, sir, I give you my word.’
‘I’m sure of it, Mr Williams. Perhaps I had better have a look at him.’
David Richards was a plain, colourless youth – literally colourless except for some mauve pimples – but there was something touching in his intense, repressed excitement and his desperate eagerness to please. Jack looked at him kindly and said, ‘Mr Williams tells me you write a fine clear hand, sir. Should you like to take down a note for me? It is addressed to the master of the Sophie. What’s the master’s name, Mr Williams?’
‘Marshall, sir, William Marshall. A prime navigator, I hear.’
‘So much the better,’ said Jack, remembering his own struggles with the Requisite Tables and the bizarre conclusions he had sometimes reached. ‘To Mr William Marshall, then, Master of His Majesty’s sloop the Sophie. Captain Aubrey presents his compliments to Mr Marshall and will come aboard at about one o’clock in the afternoon. There, that should give them decent warning. Very prettily written, too. You will see that it reaches him?’
‘I shall take it myself this minute, sir,’ cried the youth, an unhealthy red with pleasure.
‘Lord,’ said Jack to himself as he walked up to the hospital, gazing about him at the vast spread of severe, open, barren country on either side of the busy sea, ‘Lord, what a fine thing it is to play the great man, once in a while.’
‘Mr Baldick?’ he said. ‘My name is Aubrey. Since we were so nearly shipmates I have called in to ask how you do. I hope I see you on the way to recovery, sir?’
‘Very kind in you, sir,’ cried the lieutenant, a man of fifty whose crimson face was covered with a silvery glinting stubble, although his hair was black, ‘more than kind. Thankee, thankee, Captain. I am far better, I am glad to say, now I am out of the clutches of that bloody-minded sawbones. Would you credit it, sir? Thirty-seven years in the service, twenty-nine of them as a commissioned officer, and I am to be treated to the water-cure and a low diet. Ward’s pill and Ward’s drop are no good – quite exploded, we hear: but they saw me through the West Indies in the last war, when we lost two-thirds of the larboard watch in ten days from the yellow jack. They preserved me from that, sir, to say nothing of scurvy, and sciatica, and rheumatism, and the bloody flux; but they are of no use, we are told. Well, they may say what they please, these jumped-up young fellows from the Surgeons’ Hall with the ink scarcely dry on their warrants, but I put my faith on Ward’s drop.’
‘And in Brother Bung,’ remarked Jack privately, for the place smelt like the spirit-room of a first-rate. ‘So the Sophie has lost her surgeon,’ he said aloud, ‘as well as the more valuable members of her crew?’
‘No great loss, I do assure you,
