with a tall midshipman, stiff with the sense of occasion and the rigour of his starched, frilled shirt, who had been a youngster in his watch in the Thunderer; and lastly he bowed to the commandant’s secretary, who returned his bow with a smile, raised eyebrows and a very significant look.
‘I wonder what that infamous brute has been up to now,’ thought Jack, walking down towards the harbour. As he walked memories of the secretary’s duplicity and of his own ignoble truckling to that influential personage came into his mind. A beautiful, newly-coppered, newly-captured little French privateer had been virtually promised to him: the secretary’s brother had appeared from Gibraltar – adieu, kiss my hand to that command. ‘Kiss my arse,’ said Jack aloud, remembering the politic tameness with which he had received the news, together with the secretary’s renewed professions of good will and of unspecified good offices to be performed in the future. Then he remembered his own conduct that evening, particularly his withdrawing to let the small man walk by, and his inability to find any remark, any piece of repartee that would have been both crushing and well clear of boorishness. He was profoundly dissatisfied with himself, and with the man in the black coat, and with the service. And with the velvet softness of the April night, and the choir of nightingales in the orange-trees, and the host of stars hanging so low as almost to touch the palms.
The Crown, where Jack was staying, had a certain resemblance to its famous namesake in Portsmouth: it had the same immense gilt and scarlet sign hanging up outside, a relic of former British occupations, and the house had been built about 1750 in the purest English taste, with no concessions whatever to the Mediterranean except for the tiles; but there the likeness stopped. The landlord was from Gibraltar and the staff was Spanish, or rather Minorcan; the place smelt of olive oil, sardines and wine; and there was not the least possibility of a Bakewell tart, an Eccles cake or even a decent suet pudding. Yet, on the other hand, no English inn could produce a chambermaid so very like a dusky peach as Mercedes. She bounced out on to the dim landing, filling it with vitality and a kind of glow, and she called up the stairs, ‘A letter, Teniente: I bring him…’ A moment later she was at his side, smiling with innocent delight: but he was only too clearly aware of what any letter addressed to him might have in it, and he did not respond with anything more than a mechanical jocosity and a vague dart at her bosom.
‘And Captain Allen come for you,’ she added.
‘Allen? Allen? What the devil can he want with me?’ Captain Allen was a quiet, elderly man; all that Jack knew of him was that he was an American Loyalist and that he was considered very set in his ways – invariably tacked by suddenly putting his helm hard a-lee, and wore a long-skirted waistcoat. ‘Oh, the funeral, no doubt,’ he said. ‘A subscription.’
‘Sad, Teniente, sad?’ said Mercedes, going away along the corridor. ‘Poor Teniente.’
Jack took his candle from the table and went straight to his room. He did not trouble with the letter until he had thrown off his coat and untied his stock; then he looked suspiciously at the outside. He noticed that it was addressed, in a hand he did not know, to Captain Aubrey, R. N.: he frowned, said ‘Damned fool’, and turned the letter over. The black seal had been blurred in the impression, and although he held it close to the candle, directing the light in a slanting manner over its surface, he could not make it out.
‘I cannot make it out,’ he said. ‘But at least it ain’t old Hunks. He always seals with a wafer.’ Hunks was his agent, his vulture, his creditor.
At length he went so far as to open the letter, which read:
By the Right Honourable Lord Keith, Knight of the Bath, Admiral of the Blue and Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s Ships and Vessels employed and to be employed in the Mediterranean, etc., etc., etc.
Whereas Captain Samuel Allen of His Majesty’s Sloop Sophie is removed to the Pallas, Captain James Bradby deceased –
You are hereby required and directed to proceed on board the Sophie and take upon you the Charge and Command of Commander of her; willing and requiring all the Officers and Company belonging to the said Sloop to behave themselves in their several Employments with all due Respect and Obedience to you their Commander; and you likewise to observe as well the General Printed Instructions as what Orders and Directions you may from time to time receive from any of your superior Officers for His Majesty’s Service. Hereof nor you nor any of you may fail as you will answer the contrary at your Peril.
And for so doing this shall be your Order.
Given on board the Foudroyant
at sea, 1st April, 1800.
To John Aubrey, Esqr,
hereby appointed Commmander of
His Majesty’s Sloop Sophie
By command of the Admiral Thos Walker
His eyes took in the whole of this in a single instant, yet his mind refused either to read or to believe it: his face went red, and with a curiously harsh, severe expression he obliged himself to spell through it line by line. The second reading ran faster and faster: and an immense delighted joy came welling up about his heart. His face grew redder still, and his mouth widened of itself. He laughed aloud and tapped the letter, folded it, unfolded it and read it with the closest attention, having entirely forgotten the beautiful phrasing of the middle paragraph. For an icy second the bottom of the new world that had sprung into immensely detailed life seemed to be about to drop out as his eyes focused upon the unlucky date. He held the letter up to the light, and there, as firm, comforting and immovable as the rock of Gibraltar, he saw the Admiralty’s watermark, the eminently respectable anchor of hope.
He was unable to keep still. Pacing briskly up and down the room he put on his coat, threw it off again and uttered a series of disconnected remarks, chuckling as he did so. ‘There I was, worrying … ha, ha … such a neat little brig – know her well … ha, ha … should have thought myself the happiest of men with the command of the sheer-hulk, or the Vulture slop-ship … any ship at all … admirable copperplate hand – singular fine paper … almost the only quarterdeck brig in the service: charming cabin, no doubt … capital weather – so warm … ha, ha … if only I can get men: that’s the great point…’ He was exceedingly hungry and thirsty: he darted to the bell and pulled it violently, but before the rope had stopped quivering his head was out in the corridor and he was hailing the chambermaid. ‘Mercy! Mercy! Oh, there you are, my dear. What can you bring me to eat, manger, mangiare? Pollo? Cold roast pollo? And a bottle of wine, vino – two bottles of vino. And Mercy, will you come and do something for me? I want you, désirer, to do something for me, eh? Sew on, cosare, a button.’
‘Yes, Teniente,’ said Mercedes, her eyes rolling in the candlelight and her teeth flashing white.
‘Not teniente,’ cried Jack, crushing the breath out of her plump, supple body. ‘Capitan! Capitano, ha, ha, ha!’
He woke in the morning straight out of a deep, deep sleep: he was fully awake, and even before he opened his eyes he was brimming with the knowledge of his promotion.
‘She is not quite a first-rate, of course,’ he observed, ‘but who on earth wants a blundering great first-rate, with not the slightest chance of an independent cruise? Where is she lying? Beyond the ordnance quay, in the next berth to the Rattler. I shall go down directly and have a look at her – waste not a minute. No, no. That would never do – must give them fair warning. No: the first thing I must do is to go and render thanks in the proper quarters and make an appointment with Allen – dear old Allen – I must wish him joy.’
The first thing he did in point of fact was to cross the road to the naval outfitter’s and pledge his now elastic credit to the extent of a noble, heavy, massive epaulette, the mark of his present rank – a symbol which the shopman fixed upon his left shoulder at once and upon which they both gazed with great complacency in the long glass, the shopman looking from behind Jack’s shoulder with unfeigned pleasure on his face.
As the door closed behind him Jack saw the man in the black coat on the other side of the road, near the coffee-house.