Treason’s Harbour. Patrick O’Brian
too late. Holden was already sitting at his old shipmate’s table, one hand holding a glass of wine, the other stretched out, pointing at a singularly magnificent diamond spray in Jack Aubrey’s hat. ‘What, what is that?’ he cried.
‘It is a chelengk,’ said Jack with some complacency. ‘Ain’t I elegant?’
‘Wind it up again. Wind it up for him,’ said his friends, and the Captain set his hat, his best, gold-laced, number one full-dress scraper, on the table: the splendid bauble – two close-packed lines of small diamonds, each topped by a respectable stone and each four or five inches long – had a round, diamond-studded base; this he twisted anti-clockwise for several turns, and as he put on his hat again the chelengk sprang into motion, the round turning with a gentle whirr and the sprays quivering with a life of their own, so that Captain Aubrey sat in a small private coruscation, a confidential prismatic firework display, astonishingly brilliant in the sun.
‘Where, where did he get it?’ cried Holden, turning to the others, as though Captain Aubrey might not be addressed while the chelengk blazed and trembled.
Did Holden not know? – Why, from the Grand Signior, of course, the Sultan of Turkey – For taking the rebellious Torgud and her consort – Where had Holden been, not to have heard of the action between the Surprise and the Torgud, the neatest action this last age?
‘I knew the Torgud, of course,’ said Holden. ‘She carried very heavy metal, and she was commanded by that murderous bloody-minded dog Mustapha Bey. Pray, Jack, how did you set about her?’
‘Well, we were just opening the Corfu channel, do you see, with a steady topgallant breeze at south-east,’ said Jack. ‘And the ships lay thus…’
In the quieter, more philosophic bower Dr Maturin, sitting with his legs crossed and his breeches unbuckled at the knee, felt a slight movement upon his calf, as of an insect or the like: instinctively he raised his hand, but years of natural philosophy – of a desire to know just what the creature was, and a wish to spare the honey-bee or the innocent resting moth – delayed the stroke. He had often paid for his knowledge in the past, and now he paid for it again: he had scarcely recognized the great twelve-spotted Maltese horse-fly before it thrust its proboscis deep into his flesh. He struck, crushed the brute, and sat watching the blood spread on his white silk stocking, his lips moving in silent rage.
Graham said, ‘You were speaking of your freedom from tobacco: but should we not consider a determination not to smoke as an even greater deprivation of liberty? As an abolition of the right of present choice, which is freedom’s very essence? Should not a wise man feel himself free to smoke tobacco or not to smoke tobacco, as the occasion requires? We are social animals; but by ill-timed austerities, that lead to moroseness, we may be led to forget our social duties, and so loosen the bonds of society.’
‘I am sure that you mean kindly in speaking so,’ said Maturin. ‘Yet you must allow me to say that I wonder at it – I wonder that a man of your parts should believe in a simple, single cause for so complex an effect as a state of mind. Is it conceivable that mere absence of tobacco alone could make me testy? No, no: in psychology as in history we must look for multiple causality. I shall smoke a small cigar, or part of a small cigar, out of compliment to you; but you will see that the difference, if it exists at all, is very slight. Indeed, the springs of mood are wonderfully obscure, and sometimes I am astonished at what I find welling up from them – at the thoughts and attitudes that present themselves, fully formed, before the mental eye.’
It was quite true. The John Dory and the yearning for tobacco were not enough to account for Maturin’s ill-temper, which in any case had lasted for some days, surprising him as he woke each morning. As he pondered it suddenly occurred to him that at least one of the many reasons was the fact that he was sexually starved and that recently his amorous propensities had been stirred. ‘The bull, confined, grows vicious,’ he observed to himself, drawing the grateful smoke deep into his lungs: but that was not a full explanation, by any means. He moved out into the sun, to the leeward side of the arbour, so that he should not fumigate Professor Graham; and there, blinking in the strong light, he turned the matter over in his mind.
His move brought him into sight from the Apothecary’s Tower, a tall, severe building with an incongruous clock in its forehead. Its gaunt, unfurnished topmost room had not been occupied since the time of the Knights; the floor was coated with soft grey dust and bat-dung, and in the dim rafters high overhead the bats themselves could be heard moving about, while all the time the clock ticked away the seconds in a deep, resonating tone. It was a cheerless, inimical room, yet it provided watchers with a fine view of the Baracca, of Searle’s hotel and of its courtyard, though not, obviously, of its covered bowers. ‘There is one of them,’ said the first watcher. ‘He has just moved into the sun.’
‘The naval surgeon, smoking a cigar?’ asked the second.
‘He is a naval surgeon, and a very clever one, they say; but he is also an intelligence-agent. His name is Maturin, Stephen Maturin: Irish father, Spanish mother – can pass for either; or for French. He has done a great deal of damage; he has been the direct cause of many of our people’s death and he was aboard the Ocean when your cousin was poisoned.’
‘I shall deal with him tonight.’
‘You will do nothing of the kind,’ said the first man sharply. His Italian had a strong southern accent, but he was in fact a French agent, one of the most important French agents in the Mediterranean, and the Maltese with him bowed submissively. Lesueur was the Frenchman’s name and he was not unlike a somewhat older version of the Dr Maturin whose face he was now examining so attentively with a pocket spy-glass – a slight man of under the middle height, sallow, stooping, bookish, with an habitually closed, reserved expression, a man who would rarely draw attention but who having drawn it would give the impression of more than usual self-possession and intelligence: and Lesueur also had the easy authority of one with great sums of money at his command. He was dressed as a fairly prosperous merchant. ‘No, no, Giuseppe,’ he said more kindly, ‘I commend your zeal, and I know you are an excellent hand with a knife; but this is not Naples, nor even Rome. His abrupt, unexplained disappearance would make a great deal of noise – the implications would be obvious, and it is absolutely essential that our existence should not be suspected. In any event there is little to be learnt from a corpse, whereas the living Dr Maturin may supply us with a great deal of information. I have set Mrs Fielding on him, and you and Luigi will watch his other meetings with the greatest care.’
‘Who is Mrs Fielding?’
‘A lady who works for us: she reports directly to me or Carlos.’ He might have added that Laura Fielding was a Neapolitan married to a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, a young man who had been captured by the French during a cutting-out expedition and who was now confined in the punishment-prison of Bitche for having escaped from Verdun; and as he had killed one of the gendarmes who were pursuing him it was likely that he would be condemned to death when his trial came on. But the trial was postponed again and again, and by an exceedingly roundabout route Mrs Fielding was told that it might be postponed indefinitely if she would cooperate with a person who was interested in the movements of shipping. The matter was put to her as having to do with international insurance – with great Venetian and Genoese firms whose French correspondents had the government’s ear. The story might not have answered with anyone thoroughly accustomed to business, but the man who told it was a convincing speaker and he produced a perfectly authentic letter written by Mr Fielding to his wife not three weeks before, a letter in which he spoke of ‘this exceptional opportunity to send his love and to tell his dearest Laura that the trial had been put off again – his confinement was now much less severe, and it seemed possible that the charges might not be pressed with the utmost rigour’.
Mrs Fielding was well placed for the gathering of intelligence: not only was she very widely received, but to eke out her minute income she gave Italian lessons to officers’ wives and daughters and sometimes to officers themselves, and this brought her acquainted with a good many pieces of more or less confidential information, each in itself trifling enough, but each helping to build up a valuable picture of the situation. In spite of her poverty she