in the Med I do not know, by the by, such rare birds they are. But he’s no great loss, whatever they may say: and a chest of Ward’s drop will answer just as well; nay, better. And the carpenter for amputations. May I offer you a glass, sir?’ Jack shook his head. ‘As for the rest,’ the lieutenant went on, ‘we really were very moderate. The Pallas has close on her full complement. Captain A only took his nephew and a friend’s son and the other Americans, apart from his cox’n and his steward. And his clerk.’
‘Many Americans?’
‘Oh no, not above half a dozen. All people from his own part – the country up behind Halifax.’
‘Well, that’s a relief, upon my word. I had been told the brig was stripped.’
‘Who told you that, sir?’
‘Captain Harte.’
Mr Baldick narrowed his lips and sniffed. He hesitated and took another pull at his mug; but he only said, ‘I’ve known him off and on these thirty years. He is very fond of practising upon people: by way of having a joke, no doubt.’ While they contemplated Captain Harte’s devious sense of fun, Mr Baldick slowly emptied his mug. ‘No,’ he said, setting it down, ‘we’ve left you what might be called a very fair crew. A score or two of prime seamen, and a good half of the people real man-of-war’s men, which is more than you can say for most line of battle ships nowadays. There are some untoward sods among the other half, but so there are in every ship’s company – by the by, Captain A left you a note about one of ’em – Isaac Wilson, ordinary – and at least you have no damned sea-lawyers aboard. Then there are your standing officers: right taut old-fashioned sailormen, for the most part. Watt, the bosun, knows his business as well as any man in the fleet. And Lamb, the carpenter, is a good, steady fellow, though maybe a trifle slow and timid. George Day, the gunner – he’s a good man, too, when he’s well, but he has a silly way of dosing himself. And the purser, Ricketts, is well enough, for a purser. The master’s mates, Pullings and young Mowett, can be trusted with a watch: Pullings passed for a lieutenant years ago, but he has never been made. And as for the youngsters, we’ve only left you two, Ricketts’ boy and Babbington. Block-heads, both of them; but not blackguards.’
‘What about the master? I hear he is a great navigator.’
‘Marshall? Well, so he is.’ Again Mr Baldick narrowed his lips and sniffed. But by now he had drunk a further pint of grog, and this time he said, ‘I don’t know what you think about this buggery lark, sir; but I think it’s unnatural.’
‘Why, there is something in what you say, Mr Baldick,’ said Jack. Then, feeling the weight of interrogation still upon him, he added, ‘I don’t like it – not my line at all. But I must confess I don’t like to see a man hanged for it. The ship’s boys, I suppose?’
Mr Baldick slowly shook his head for some time. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘No. I don’t say he does anything. Not now. But come, I do not like to speak ill of a man behind his back.’
‘The good of the service…’ said Jack, with a general wave of his hand; and shortly afterwards he took his leave, for the lieutenant had come out in a pale sweat; was poorly, lugubrious and intoxicated.
The tramontana had freshened and now it was blowing a two-reef topsail breeze, rattling the fronds of the palms; the sky was clear from rim to rim; a short, choppy sea was getting up outside the harbour, and now there was an edge to the hot air like salt or wine. He tapped his hat firmly on his head, filled his lungs and said aloud, ‘Dear God, how good it is to be alive.’
He had timed it well. He would pass by the Crown, make sure that dinner would be suitably splendid, brush his coat and maybe drink a glass of wine: he would not have to pick up his commission, for it had never left him – there it was against his bosom, crackling gently as he breathed.
Walking down at a quarter to one, walking down to the waterside with the Crown behind him, he felt a curious shortness of his breath; and as he sat in the waterman’s boat he said nothing but the word ‘Sophie’, for his heart was beating high, and he had a curious difficulty in swallowing. ‘Am I afraid?’ he wondered. He sat looking gravely at the pommel of his sword, scarcely aware of the boat’s smooth passage down the harbour, among the crowded ships and vessels, until the Sophie’s side rose in front of him and the waterman rattled his boathook.
A quick automatic searching look showed him yards exactly squared, the side dressed, ship’s boys in white gloves running down with baize-covered side-ropes, the bosun’s call poised, winking silver in the sun. Then the boat’s motion stopped, there was the faint crunch as it touched the sloop, and he went up the side to the weird screaming of the call. As his foot touched the gangway there was the hoarse order, the clump and crash of the marines presenting arms, and every officer’s hat flew off; and as he stepped upon the quarterdeck he raised his own.
The warrant-officers and midshipmen were drawn up in their best uniforms, blue and white on the shining deck, a less rigid group than the scarlet rectangle of the marines. Their eyes were fixed very attentively on their new commander. He looked grave and, indeed, rather stern: after a second’s pause in which the boatman’s voice could be heard over the side, muttering to himself, he said, ‘Mr Marshall, name the officers to me, if you please.’
Each came forward, the purser, the master’s mates, the midshipmen, the gunner, the carpenter and the bosun, and each made his bow, intently watched by the crew. Jack said, ‘Gentlemen, I am happy to make your acquaintance. Mr Marshall, all hands aft, if you please. As there is no lieutenant I shall read my commission to the ship’s company myself.’
There was no need to turn anybody up from below: every man was there, washed and shining, staring hard. Nevertheless, the calls of the bosun and his mates piped All hands aft for a good half-minute down the hatchways. The shrilling died away. Jack stepped forward to the break of the quarter-deck and took out his commission. As soon as it appeared there came the order ‘Off hats’, and he began in a firm but somewhat forced and mechanical voice.
‘By the right Honourable Lord Keith…’
As he ran through the familiar lines, now so infinitely more full of meaning, his happiness returned, welling up through the gravity of the occasion, and he rolled out the ‘Hereof nor you nor any of you may fail as you will answer the contrary at your peril’ with a fine relish. Then he folded the paper, nodded to the men and returned it to his pocket. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Dismiss the hands and we will take a look at the brig.’
In the hushed ceremonial procession that followed Jack saw exactly what he had expected to see – a vessel ready for inspection, holding her breath in case any of her beautifully trim rigging with its geometrically perfect fakes and perpendicular falls should be disturbed. She bore as much resemblance to her ordinary self as the rigid bosun, sweating in a uniform coat that must have been shaped with an adze, did to the same man in his shirt-sleeves, puddening the topsail yard in a heavy swell; yet there was an essential relationship, and the snowy sweep of the deck, the painful brilliance of the two brass quarter-deck four-pounders, the precision of the cylinders in the cable-tier and the parade-ground neatness of the galley’s pots and tubs all had a meaning. Jack had whited too many sepulchres to be easily deceived; and he was pleased with what he saw. He saw and appreciated all he was meant to see. He was blind to the things he was not meant to see – the piece of ham that an officious fo’c’sle cat dragged from behind a bucket, the girls the master’s mates had hidden in the sail-room and who would keep peeping out from behind mounds of canvas. He took no notice of the goat abaft the manger, that fixed him with an insulting devilish split-pupilled eye and defecated with intent; nor of the dubious object, not unlike a pudding, that someone in a last-minute panic
