Read Online The Fortune of War by Patrick O’Brian - Free Book Online Page B

Byron, my remaining mids, and Bonden and Killick. You would laugh to see Killick looking after Stephen, as he has been doing ever since Stephen's servant - a half-wit -went away in the boats. Stephen is very unwilling to be looked after, but Killick has taken it into his head that it is his duty, and sews on buttons, washes and darns his two and a half shirts, irons his neckcloth, brushes his only decent coat, and makes him shave at least once a week by steady nagging in that grating voice of his, in spite of any amount of abuse - it is like an old angular mother-hen with a fractious chick. He turned him out quite presentably for dinner with Yorke today, and he is working on what he thinks is the proper kind of wig for a doctor to wear, making it out of spun-yarn crimped at the galley fire: perhaps it will be an improvement on the horrible old scratch-bob that has survived so many storms and broken eggs and dank mossy plants. Yorke gave us a capital dinner, with roast buffalo, a pair of ducks, a ragoo, and a roly-poly pudding; and he and Stephen got along famously, as I hoped they should. People may say that Yorke is no great seaman, but he is a very good fellow, and he drank his two bottles without turning a hair; and in any case he has an excellent premier, a man by the name of Warner, who drives the ship at a tremendous pace - almost as fast as I could wish to see her eat up the fifteen thousand miles between us. They will be two hundred and fifty less at noon tomorrow, believe, for now we have sunk the land we have the full monsoon, and Warner is on deck at all hours, in jib, out jib, wetting the royals and top-gallants as though we were in chase of a golden fortune, and leading the foremast jacks a pretty dance of it. La Flèche was always a good sailer, like so many of your French flush-deck corvettes, but Warner gets more out of her than I should have thought possible: he may have persuaded Yorke to give her foremast a trifle more rake than is quite right, but he is a fine seaman, and at the moment we are making eleven knots one fathom. It is a pity that he and Stephen should have contrived to fall foul of one another, but so it is: there was some disagreement before dinner, and then a kind of hairy thing between a bear and an ape behaved unsuitably on the quarterdeck. And then there is a rule here that no smoking is allowed anywhere but in the galley, and Warner pointed it out: it is a good rule, but perhaps he might have put it more tactfully. Still, we have thousands of miles of sweet sailing before us (I hope), and being homeward bound, with everybody in a good humour, no doubt they will come to love one another before we reach soundings. I was amazingly witty at dinner, for your letter was as good as wine to me, and there was wine as well.' There followed a description of the wit, and Jack went on, 'As for that damned fellow Kimber, sweetheart, never let your mind be tormented: if the worst comes to the worst, and if he ruins us, the girls' portions are safe, and I always have my pay. The moment I am home I shall call him to a pretty sharp account, I promise you; until then I intend not to vex my spirits but to indulge in idleness, high living, sweet sailing, and music. And perhaps I shall attend to my youngsters more than I have been able to do up to the present: in the nature of things they have necessarily come to some notion of practical seamanship by now, but their notions of navigation are very strange. Young Forshaw is a good boy - far prettier even than his sisters, though no doubt adolescence will soon cope with that -but sometimes I doubt he knows the odds between east longitude and west, which would be a disadvantage to a mariner, particularly to a mariner in hurrying round the world to his wife. And so good night, my dearest soul.'
    In another part of the ship Stephen Maturin, having no one to confide in, wrote to himself, to the Stephen Maturin of some future period, who alone could read this private,