wretched mind far beyond our milk-and-water hellebore.’
Here they were interrupted by the coming of the boat, and Stephen returned to the Surprise. Her captain had come aboard without ceremony, hooking on to the larboard chains only a few minutes before, and he gave Stephen a hand over the side.
‘Have you had dinner?’ he asked, for the gunroom hour was long passed.
‘Dinner? Perhaps not,’ said Stephen. ‘No, I have certainly not had dinner.’
‘Then come and take a bite with me: though God knows,’ he added, leading the way into the cabin, ‘there is nothing like a court-martial for cutting one’s appetite.’
‘It wants seventeen minutes of the hour, sir,’ said Killick, with a surly look, as though he had been found in fault. ‘Which you said four o’clock, it being a court-martial day.’
‘Never mind,’ said Jack. ‘Tell the cook to stir his stumps, and bring some sherry while we are waiting.’
They did not have to wait long. Jack’s cook was from the East Indies; he was accustomed to be flayed if he did not feed his employers promptly, and before the second glass of sherry was out a fish soup filled the cabin with the scent of saffron, lobster, crab, bonito, mussels, clams, and a wide variety of small coral fishes – fishes, that is to say, from the coral reef.
It was a splendid soup, one that they would ordinarily have taken up to the last drop; but this time they sent it away almost untouched. ‘Did you ask the Admiral about Mr Barrow and Mr Wray?’ asked Stephen, when the steak and kidney pudding had been set on the table.
‘Yes, I did,’ said Jack, ‘and he told me that the position was unchanged.’
‘Thank you for remembering,’ said Stephen, pushing the soft white crust with a spoon. ‘I wish this pudding may be cooked.’ He expressed no opinion about the news, but in fact he was rather pleased. Although the ailing Mr Barrow was still nominally the Second Secretary of the Admiralty his work had been done for some considerable time by Andrew Wray, a youngish well-connected man who had gained a reputation for ability at the Treasury. Stephen had met him long before Wray had anything to do with the Navy – he was an acquaintance of Jack’s – but he had come to know him well only when Wray, as acting Second Secretary, came out to Malta to deal with corruption in the dockyard and a much more serious affair of treachery in the island’s administration, in which some highly-placed man seemed to be giving one of the French intelligence services secret information of the first importance. Yet it was not this that had brought them together; at the time it had seemed to Stephen that Wray, a newcomer to this highly-specialized and very dangerous work, did not enjoy the full confidence of Stephen’s own chief, Sir Joseph Blaine, the head of naval intelligence, who naturally enough preferred his agents to give proof of their powers and above all of their discretion before entrusting them with the lives of a whole network of men. These reticences were very usual in intelligence and counter-espionage, where a man might be admitted to the hall, but might wait there five years before reaching the inner closet. So although Stephen and Wray were on friendly terms and although they listened to music and played cards together – extraordinarily unfortunate cards for Wray, who now owed Stephen a small fortune, and not so small either – Stephen had not seen fit to speak of his own work in the Mediterranean or to mention his connection with Sir Joseph until the very last moment, when he had no choice about it. Quite independently he had identified the traitor and his French colleague, yet no sooner did he possess this precious information than he was obliged to leave the island. He therefore sent post-haste to Wray, who was in Sicily, telling him everything he knew (and thereby of course revealing his own identity) so that Wray might wipe out the whole organization. Unhappily, although the traitor had been seized, the chief French agent had escaped, perhaps because of Wray’s inexperience. Stephen heard of all this in Gibraltar, just before setting off on the voyage that took him to the South Seas; and although he did not see Wray, who was returning to England overland, he took advantage of Wray’s offer to carry a letter home. In undermining the French intelligence agents in Malta Stephen had made use of a very good-looking Italian lady; he had often been seen with her, and she had sailed with him in the Surprise as far as Gibraltar. It was generally supposed that she was his mistress. Word of all this had reached Diana, an unusually passionate, impulsive woman; she had written to him in unusually passionate, impulsive terms and his letter was designed to do away with her resentment of what she saw not as immoral conduct (she had no particular objection to immoral conduct) but as an intolerable public affront. Most unhappily his letter, in the nature of things, could not be wholly candid; it could not tell the whole truth, and he relied upon Wray’s spoken word, or rather his tone of voice, to convey the essential underlying truth that he could not write. He also wanted to hear every last detail of the Maltese plot and the facts behind the traitor’s curious suicide, and these would be much more valuable coming straight from Wray than filtered through Mr Barrow, that inexhaustible bag of foolish self-complacent words, or even through Sir Joseph; for although Sir Joseph (for whom Stephen had collected a large number of beetles and some butterflies) was ten times the size of Wray, a man of great sagacity and immense experience, he had not been there, on the spot, in Malta. Besides, even if Wray was not in Sir Joseph’s class he was still sharp, quick, perceptive and clever. Perhaps rather too clever: certainly too much given to high living and playing for high stakes. Stephen did not dislike him; he had found Wray something of a bore towards the end of his stay in Valletta, when he would insist on playing cards, losing steadily more and more until at last he was unable to pay and was obliged to ask for Stephen’s forbearance, but Stephen did like his deep love for music and the way he had brought about (or at least brought out) the promotion of Tom Pullings, Jack Aubrey’s first lieutenant, in spite of a rather ugly disagreement between Aubrey and Wray some years before – a disagreement whose exact details were unknown to Stephen but one that might have left ill-feeling in a malignant mind. As for Wray’s promises about helping Jack to a heavy frigate on the North American station and Pullings to a sea-going command by way of gratitude for this forbearance, Stephen was not so simple as to look upon them as wholly binding contracts; but even so they were as well to have.
Simplicity was not perhaps one of Stephen’s most outstanding characteristics; yet his mind was not wholly free of it and he had never even suspected the possibility of Wray’s being a French agent. Nor, it must be confessed, had the even less simple Sir Joseph, whose only objection to Wray was his unsuitability, his inexperience and his want of discretion. Neither Stephen nor Sir Joseph could conceive the possibility of any French intelligence organization recruiting an expensive, gambling, fashionable, unreliable, loquacious rake, however sharp and clever.
Nor did either of them conceive that Wray and his more intelligent and powerful but less showy friend Ledward (also a besotted admirer of Buonaparte) were in fact behind the obscure movement in Whitehall that was tending to discredit Sir Joseph and his allies, and to displace him in favour of the comparative nonentity Barrow, who could easily be manipulated even if he did return to effective office, a movement that would, if it were successful, give Wray and Ledward access to that curious body, so rarefied as to be almost ghostly, known simply as the Committee, which took cognizance, at the highest level, of the activities of all the various British and allied intelligence services.
And to crown all, in their short acquaintance Stephen had not perceived that Wray did in fact possess a malignant, revengeful mind. He hated Jack Aubrey for that distant quarrel and he had done him all the harm he could in the Admiralty. He did not hate Stephen except as Jack’s friend and as an agent who had undone many of his French colleagues, but if he could bring the occasion about he would certainly deliver him up to the other side.
‘I shall be glad to see him again,’ said Stephen. ‘Apart from anything else he owes me a vast great heap of money, so he does.’
‘Who does?’ asked Jack, for several minutes and a pound of steak and kidney pudding lay between his answer and Stephen’s
