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, sir: though, indeed, the ship’s company did make great case of him – swore by him and his silly nostrums, the damned set of gabies; and were much distressed at his going off. And how ever you will replace him 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