Read Online 21: The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey by Patrick O’Brian - Free Book Online

unlimited amount. As a peace-maker the Nuncio had worked wonders, though to be sure commercial enterprise had played its part.
    “It is only a Friday,” said Jack, when he and his first lieutenant (he sailed without a flag-captain) had made sure that there was not a becket out of place and that all Suffolk ’ s were present, correctly shaved and provid ed with all that was required. “ It is only a Friday, but I think I shall stroll up well beyond our usual mound with a telescope. Do you choose to come, Stephen?”
    “ I do, too: we might see some of the first migrants.”
    Up and up: fairly easy going now that they were used to the land; and as they rose the horizon increased enormously, the empty horizon, though in with the land there were some lateen-rigged fishermen.
    The mound they chose was thinly covered with a sparse herbage in which there grew a small particularly vicious cactus, while in the many bare places the earth showed dull purplish red: a landscape more wholly foreign they had never seen, although they had travelled very, very widely - it was, after all, their calling.
    “Dear Lord,” said Jack, sitting comfortably down, his back to a rock, after a piercing search of the nearer sea and the northern horizon, “ how I long for Woolcombe and the green Woolhampton downs, speckled with sheep. Woolcombe and the soft dew falling: the cawing of rooks. When I was a mere post-captain, you know, and there was this prospect of peace, I used to console myself, particularly when I was solvent again with that dea r prize-money and Cousin Edward’ s land doing so well - I used to console myself with the thought of restoring the place to what it was when I was a boy, before my father lost his head about the Stock Exchange, when we had a pack of hounds and a damned good huntsman and when the water-bailiff kept the streams as neat as a man-of-war: full of trout and the odd salmon on the spring run. Lord, we had such sport, such fun! There was an old hound called Captain, and he always hit off the line afte r a check. ‘Hark to Captain’ we would cry, and they all followed him like a single creature. Lord! How I longed to be back! Now of course I must stand my trick as a flag-officer: and most uncommon lucky I am to have it to do. But I do so long to be back, sometimes, under Hamble Down, showing George how to work out a line. Stephen, you can ha ve no idea how beautiful it is.”
    “Can I not?”
    “ Oh of course you can, of course you can. I am sure the Glens of Avoca are even finer. I do beg your pardon. But, do you see, it was my childhood.”
    “ Have you noticed that small vessel right in with the land, almost beneath us, under the clif f? Her sails are all in a line.”
    Jack leapt to his feet. “By God, she’ s Ringle,” he cried. “ S he must have stood inshore. . .” The voice and the explanation died on the downward slope.
    “ I should never have believed that a man so tall and stout could have moved so fast,” murmured Stephen, fixing the schooner in his glass. He liked to believe that he could make out Brigid and Christine with Edward Heatherleigh clinging to a spar behind them, but it was clearly time to descend.
    The perilous slope, the milder slope, the mule-track, the paved road, and at last the quays with Jack still far, far ahead, though now moving more like an admiral.
    Ringle was a beautifully-proportioned vessel and it was only when there was a tight knot of people on her fo’c’ sle that one saw how small she was in fact. Kindly hands heaved on the mooring ropes to let Stephen step aboard from the quay, and clear over the genera l din he heard the Aubrey twins’ shrill cry , raised for the seventh time, “ Why are you not wearing your admiral's uniform?” while at the same time his own Brigid slipped th rough the throng and whispered “Dearest Papa” as he bent to kiss her. Christine was just behind , and looking up from the child’ s shining, happy, sun browned face he said,