The Hundred Days by Patrick O’Brian Read Free Book Online Page B

powderhorn,
priming-wire, bed, quoin, train-tackle, shot and all the rest told a knowing
eye a great deal about the gun-crew and even more about the midshipman of the
sub-division. The Dover, still actively
reconverting herself, was in rather a sad way, but not very discreditably so;
the others would do at a push, and the little Briseis, one of that numerous
class called coffin-brigs from their tendency to turn over and sink, was
positively brilliant. He told her captain so, and the hands within earshot
visibly swelled with satisfaction.
    Back to Surprise and her great cabin, familiar,
elegant, but in spite of its conventional name not really spacious enough for
all the administrative work he had to do. There were no more than six ships or
vessels in the squadron, but their books and papers already overflowed the
Commodore’s desk: not much more than a thousand men were concerned, but all
those of real importance in the running of the squadron had to be entered on
separate slips together with what comments he had so far been able to make on
their abilities; and to house these slips he had called upon his joiner to make
temporary tray-like wings to his desk, so that eventually he should have all
the elements at his disposal laid out, to be rearranged according to the tasks
the squadron might be called to undertake. In these quite exceptional
circumstances, with no settled ships’ companies apart from those
in Surprise and to some extent Briseis, he would have an equally
exceptional free hand.
    But Jack Aubrey was a neat creature by temperament
and rigorous training, and he had set no more than one foot in the cabin before
he saw that order was confounded, that some criminal hand had merged at least
three complements into one unmeaning heap, and that this same hand had spread
out several manuscript sheets of music, the score of a pavan in C minor.
    ‘Oh I do beg your pardon, Jack,’ cried Stephen,
walking quickly in from the quarter-gallery. ‘I had a sudden thought to be set
down - but I trust I have not disturbed anything at all?’
    ‘Not in the least,’ said Jack. ‘And Stephen, I
believe I have solved your problem. I believe I have found you a loblolly-boy
you will thoroughly approve of.’
    Stephen, concerned though he was with his music -
only two bars yet to write, but the magical sound already fading from his inner
ear - and filled though he was with a conviction that Jack’s mild ‘not in the
least’ concealed an intense irritation, made no reply other than a questioning
look. He owed his survival as an intelligence-agent to an acute ear for
falsity, and Jack’s last words were certainly quite untrue.
    ‘Yes,’ Jack went on, ‘together with a draft of
hands turned over to the squadron out of Leviathan, refitting, Maggie Cheal and
Poll Skeeping have come aboard; and Poll was trained at Haslar. She is up to
anything in the way of blood and horrors.’
    ‘You are speaking of women, brother? You who have
always abominated so much as the smell of a skirt aboard ship? The invariable cause of trouble, quarrelling, ill-luck. Wholly out of place in any ship, above all in a man-of-war.
I have never seen a woman aboard a man-of-war.’
    ‘Have you not, my poor Stephen? Did you never see
them helping with the guns and passing shot in Bellona?’
     ‘Never in life. Am I not always shut up in the cockpit
during an action?’
    ‘Very true. But if Jill Travers, for
example, the sailmaker’s wife who helped serve number eight, had been wounded,
you would have seen her.’
    ‘But seriously, Jack, are you obliged to take these
women aboard? You who have always inveighed against the
creatures.’
    ‘These are not creatures, in the sense of
whore-ladies or Portsmouth trollops: oh no. They are
usually middle-aged or more, often the wife or widow of a petty or even of a
warrant-officer. One or two may have run away like the girl in the ballad,
wearing trousers, to be with her Jack when he sailed; but most have used