The Yellow Admiral by Patrick O’Brian Read Free Book Online Page A

Griffiths, a fairly rich newcomer, has perhaps ten thousand pounds' worth. Harding and all his relations in the farms and cottages may have come by holdings worth two or three hundred in the last two or three hundred years. So what will their vote amount to? And then there are three or four other big men apart from Griffiths. My own cousin Brampton, at Westport, longs to round out three of his farms, where the common runs deep into the estate. Well, now, when we were sweltering in the Gulf of Guinea, and while you, my poor Stephen, were not only sweltering but also turning as yellow as a guinea, they got together their precious petition, with a majority of shares supporting it - I need not tell you how easy it is for a man with a fair-sized estate to persuade cottagers who earn much of their living on that estate to put their signature or marks to a paper that takes away their share in a common - and after a long pause while it was being put into proper order and the bill drafted, Griffiths presented it to the House. It was read twice in the usual gabble, no one paying the least attention, and it was referred to a committee, the parliamentary committee that I was telling you about. If that committee reports favourably the bill will be read a third time, almost certainly without debate, and passed as a matter of course and commissioners will come down and start the sharing out. But if I can prevent it, the committee will not report favourably.'
    'How shall you prevent it?'
    'If my shares in the common are not enough to do away with their majority, they will at least reduce it to precious little; and then I should lay handsome odds, say eleven to three, that the weight of my position will swing the balance, will turn the scale.'
    'Sure, a post-captain in the Royal Navy is a most imposing creature; but is not Captain Griffiths of the same rank and somewhat greater seniority?'
    'Certainly. But he is not lord of the manor and I am.'
    'Heavens, Jack, I had no notion of it, no notion at all. So they still exist? The office or perhaps I should say the eminence I had heard of, but supposed it to belong to the distant past, when lords exercised the droit de seigneur with the utmost rigour, and the high justice and the low, with a private pair of gallows. So they still exist? I am amazed, amazed.'
    Even now, after all these years, the extent of Stephen's ignorance by land as well as by sea, of course, could astonish Captain Aubrey. He looked affectionately down, and in the simplest words explained the nature of his function. 'It amounts to little nowadays, after all the modern passion for paring down and changing for the sake of change: the lord of the manor has few rights left apart from what the manor courts leave him, and the occasional escheat; but logically or not he does retain a certain standing, and it is rare for a committee to go against his opposition. And then again, he does have some powers coming down from earlier times: I may not be able to lie with the commoners' brides on their wedding night, but I do open the fair in the Dripping Pan- the charter it cannot start without I am there, or at least my deputy - and I do kick the first football of the season and bowl the first ball when cricket comes round, unless I am at sea.'
    They had been rising steadily through his account of lordship of a manor and now, from the top of a grassy bank he waved down to a shallow amphitheatre - it was too large to be called a deli - with a fine sward kept trim by sheep and rabbits and now by a small, remote flock of snow-white geese tended by a girl. 'You would not think so to look at it now,' he said, 'but on Old Lammas Day you can hardly get along for stalls and tents - Aunt Sally, the great rat of Tartary, two or three bearded ladies, boxing-booths, where our lads get finely battered by knowing old bruisers from Plymouth- such fun. And this is where we have our football in the winter and cricket in the summer, as well as leaping and foot