Tide's Turn
Eh. I am trying for something a bit longer. Keep in mind this will only be my second fic in this fandom...
Title: Tide’s Turn (Part 1/?)
Pairing: Jack/Stephen
Rating: PG13 as of yet
Period: Desolation Island
Summary: Suppressing one’s feelings is a dangerous course…
Disclaimer: Consider it disclaimed.
Author’s Note: I’ve been out of the pattern of the books for awhile, so if errors in nautical technicalities pop up, I apologize in advance. I am trying to get back into the swing of things with book six now, but it’s coming slowly as I like to savor them.
Only when he had safely briefed Sir Joseph Blaine on the produce of the latest talks in Barcelona did Stephen Maturin retire to his room at the Grapes in the liberty of the Savoy. He was soaked through and through and little relished the thought of a damp evening in front of the fireplace, steaming gently though never completely drying out, musing on the fallacies of existence and man’s tendency to steep himself deeper and deeper into the mire of his own manipulations.
After a lonely dinner of port and lampreys-whose succulent properties failed, on this occasion, to rouse Stephen from his melancholy-he rose and with a gait ponderous from exhaustion made his way toward the room he always kept ready at a moment’s notice. Winter in this bleak country, he reflected bitterly, existed solely to sap the warmth from the bones and the cheer from the heart. He then raised an eyebrow at his own romanticism, and supposed he had been listening to one too many sea-ballads over his many years with Captain Aubrey.
That very captain, to Stephen’s utter (if well-masked) astonishment, leaned heavily against Stephen’s very door, his great battlescarred bulk all but filling the hallway. His ruddy robust face under its crown of golden waves was even ruddier than usual-less, it seemed to Stephen, due to robustness than to the fat welling tears that slid copiously down his cheeks. His neckcloth was dirty, his doublet askew, and his silk stockings boasted a layer of mud that would have caused Killick, his steward, to go into fits. He clutched the doorframe as if his very life depended on it.
“My dear Jack, what happened?” Stephen cried, rushing to steady his friend as he lurched too far forward.
“Oh…there you are, Stephen,” Jack croaked, fixing the much shorter man with a bleary, red-rimmed glance. “I knew you always roomed at the Grapes but…you’re so often away…”
Stephen struggled to ease Jack to the side without topping him off a balance he was unlikely to recover. “Let me get the door, dear, let me get you inside-look at the state you’re in”!” He caught a whiff of alcohol as he led (or, more aptly, darted in front of) Jack into the tiny room. “Jack, you are drunk,” Stephen announced with perfectly bald distaste as he slid the jars of pickled toes and cormorant chicks from where Jack’s unwieldy entrance had knocked them nearly off their shelf.
“I am…nothing of the sort, ha ha,” Jack’s voice drifted sorrowfully from the tearful mess he was quickly making of Stephen’s pillow. An fantastic sneeze punctuated his misery. “That’s just like you, to…worry…” At which point he dissolved into drunken sobbing which by some last prideful effort of his own he managed to keep silent, more or less.
Though there wasn’t a scrap of space left on the bed for him to sit, Stephen patted Jack’s heaving shoulders awkwardly from where he stood wedged between bed and bookshelf, obscurely and unexpectedly moved by the spectacle of Lucky Jack bawling his eyes out. When a suitable amount of time had passed without the prodigious snoring that he knew would signify Jack’s drunken slumber, Stephen spoke in the supercilious voice he reserved for his patients. “Would it be forward of me to question your uncommon melancholy disposition?”
“Oh Stephen,” Jack moaned, “she’s gone. I came back from the Admiralty in the highest spirits-those prizes came in after all; the claimants were dismissed-and she and the children…George and Frances and Charlotte…” These words prompted a fresh spate of tears that would have been most unseemly in a military man of Jack’s caliber, had Stephen been one to put any degree of stock in such striated beliefs. As it was, he maintained a respectful silence until Jack’s silent sobs had given way to mere sniffling, interrupted now and then by great sneeze the like of which Stephen knew meant a fever to come. He half-expected to launch another deluge with the unnecessary words, “By she I assume you mean Sophie?”, but Jack only slumped where he lay, giving every appearance of having abandoned any attempt to preserve dignity.
“Yes. Sophie. And I just can’t smoke why-she left a note but it made no sense to me, none at all. Oh, why do we ever come ashore, Stephen? To lose our wives and our little ones and wander alone through our empty gardens?”
The image this evoked in Stephen’s mind touched him very deeply indeed, and grasping Jack’s shoulder he dropped his bedside manner for that of a friend. “May I see the letter?”
Jack rummaged in his mud-caked coat with his ham-sized hands, and came up with a tearstained and much-crumpled sheet of paper, which he handed to Stephen over his side without looking at him. “See if you can make light of it. You’re always so good with all manners of soft speaking…why, I believe you could talk your way into Boney’s own palace itself,” Jack rambled, causing Stephen to look up in alarm from the letter. Had the Admiralty intimated something to Jack about the nature of Stephen’s last sojourn? But no-the phrase had been purely complimentary, and Stephen counted it as a step away from all-consuming despair that Jack could remark on something not directly related to his misfortune. Though, Stephen admitted as he smoothed the note into legibility, he highly doubted Jack capable of all-consuming despair, distressing though this latest development was and would be.
“ ‘My Dearest Jack’,” Stephen read to himself, “ ‘please understand that I care for you no less now than I did when you were still a brash young post-captain running around Mapes Court on a that ridiculous horse. But I can no longer bear to share your heart with another, and so I think it for the best that we part for awhile. I dare not tell you our whereabouts, mine and the children’s, for I know you would but come running in full regalia bearing protestations of your undying love, etc., etc. I do not think I could stand that. So please accept my best wishes and the assurance that the children and I are safe in good hands. Be not too troubled, Your Loving Sophie.’”
Stephen read over the letter again, conscious of a smoldering fury rising in his gut. He loved Sophie; had loved her as the dear friend she was almost since they had met at Mapes Court so long ago. It was he who had encouraged her to profess her true feelings to Jack, and he who had looked on with amused good humor as their marriage progressed to produce a home, then twins, then the healthy little boy who was undoubtedly the apple of Jack’s eye. Why would dear, sweet Sophie, who had so long born the vagaries of schedule the life of a sea captain’s wife necessitated, and who had known quite well what she was getting into when she married, lash out at Jack in this cruel and unjustified manner?
At the same time, Stephen was suspicious. Whatever had been praying on her mind so long had to have been something noteworthy-something about which, surely, Jack would have at least an inkling. Stephen opened his mouth to ask Jack as much but was interrupted by the long-expected snore-Jack had fallen into a deep sleep, occupying the whole of Stephen’s bed with his muddy, portly self. Sighing and suddenly giving in to an exhaustion he had long been ignoring, Stephen pulled the coverlet out from under Jack’s filthy boots, then thought better of it and wrestled Jack’s boots off as well. The blanket did not quite cover Jack, though it did all it could, and Stephen made sure to stoke up a fire much needed by the both of them before settling himself into the only chair in the room, with his coat for a blanket. It would be a long night.
* * * *
Stephen woke, not to his own craving for laudanum as he had expected, but rather to an explosive set of sneezes followed by a deep-throated cough which made the doctor in him leap to considerations of tinctures and concoctions, and made the friend in him wince in sympathy. Blinking and yawning-and wishing the fire had not died out in the night, for he was mightily stiff in his bones-Stephen rose and went to the side of Jack, who gave him an apologetic grimace as he tried to stifle a cough.
“Did I wake you?” he asked pointlessly, for they both knew the answer. After another sneeze he looked around him at the muddy bedsheets and seemed to sink into an even deeper gloom. “Oh I’m sorry, Stephen, I’ve gone an stolen your cot from you. Here, let me give it back-“ He made as if to rise, but Stephen pushed him firmly back down just as another spate of coughing wracked his body.
“You’ll be spending a great deal longer than one night in that bed, I fear,” Stephen sighed, turning to bustle about his bottles and vials. “I’ll start you with a concoction of orange peel and Peruvian bark, but I can only guess how long you spent wallowing about in the rain last night. No doubt you’ll catch a horrible fever and add injury to insult, as is your wont.” A rare smile took the sting from his words as he turned, proffering a glass.
“Why do you smile?” Jack croaked, taking the glass with both sweaty hands and eyeing its contents with a grimace. “I should think this a most wretched turn of events-your own berth taken by a great bawling nitwit, and a sickly one, too. This on what, your second day back from wherever you go haring off to?”
“My first,” Stephen corrected, waiting until Jack had choked down the entire dosage to add, “and I am smiling, my dear Captain Aubrey, because when I think of where you could have ended up in the state you were in last night-whether it be in a bloodied heap in a back alley or passed out in some vile tavern, or in the hands of one of the tipstaffs themselves-it comforts me to know that in this most difficult of circumstances you came to me. I shudder to imagine what optimistically-deemed ‘treatment’ you might be receiving this morning had you retired to, say, a brothel with whose headmistress you had some acquaintance.”
Jack smiled feebly at him before settling back down into the pillows as Stephen insisted. The smile quickly faded, though, as the acrid taste of Stephen’s concoction and the agony of a biting hangover stirred his grog-fogged mind to wakefulness and a bitter recollection of the previous day’s events. “Oh Stephen, I just don’t know what to-“
“Hush, for all love, and heed a physician’s words!” Stephen cried, feeling not the slightest guilt in bringing his profession to bear at such a time as this. “You can do nothing, Jack, absolutely nothing, until you are in as you would say, shipshape form, and you will be of no use to anybody, least of all yourself, until you achieve that end.” At Jack’s injured look he relented a little. “If it will ensure your full engagement of the task of getting rest, I will go out this very morning to inquire of some of my local acquaintances the nature of the thing that went on in Ashgrove Cottage, and question after the current lodging of your family. That is, if you promise on your honor to remain here in bed and get the sleep you need.”
“On my honor!” Jack replied fervently, pulling the blanket up to his chest (which was as high as it would go) to illustrate the point.
So satisfied, Stephen spared only the briefest of movements donning a dry-if rumpled-coat and waistcoat before administering a last demand for somnolence and hurrying out into the grey English day.
No few questions preyed on Stephen’s mind as he made his way toward the Admiralty and Sir Joseph Blaine, who surely was not expecting Stephen so soon after his last visit. But when dealing in affairs such as theirs, he reflected, one must become used to predicting the unpredictable, and he had no doubt that Sir Joseph would prove inestimably useful, once the reason for Stephen’s visit became clear. It was surprising what one could learn, sitting behind one’s desk all day.
But Sir Joseph and his forthcoming reception were hardly at the top of Stephen’s list of worries. Instead he brooded on Jack, dear Jack, and Sophie and the seemingly impossible notion of the pair of them having a row. Not a petty argument about newly-acquired racehorses or Jack’s ever-present desire for a ship and a dashing post-no, the Aubreys were quite capable of having those sorts of disagreements, as Stephen had witnessed on more than one occasion. But it took more than racehorses or ships to shatter the marital cheer if not bliss those two had, or had had, and Stephen could not fathom what the cause could be. The tempting conclusion to draw was adultery, of course, but Stephen could not, would not believe Sophie of even looking at another man, let alone bedding him, and as for Jack…
Stephen frowned, lost in thought, and barely managed to leap out of the path of a post-chaise and its cursing driver (swearing like a sailor, part of Stephen’s mind noted with utter dryness), so deep was he in his thinking. As for Jack, he continued to himself once he hade turned down a less-frequented street, well, that was another matter. Jack’s premarital appetites were well-known throughout the service-he had even charmed the wife of an admiral at one time, and it nearly ended his career-and Stephen had been hard-pressed, last night and then in the morning, not to question Jack about the possible truth in Sophie’s claim. Pitting desire to reason against desire to set his patient to rights, Stephen had let the latter win out and told himself that only later, when Jack’s constitution was strong enough to handle most unpleasant questions from a close friend, would Stephen spring that particular surprise on him. The thought of surprise, and subsequently Jack’s old ship the Surprise, brought back memories whose warmth contrasted sharply with the present morbid state of affairs, the result of which was that Stephen reached the Admiralty in a grey mood indeed. Fittingly, it started to rain as he ducked in.
Under the combined influence of the weather and the prospect of the conversation to come, the other thing which had been troubling Stephen completely slipped his mind.
As soon as he entered, Stephen knew something was amiss. Sir Joseph was too jovial, too effusive in his welcome of a man he had seen not a day before-and, above all, he did not query after the reason for the unexpected visit until he was a ways along in his usual pleasantries-far too long, as far as Stephen was concerned. Still, he put on his best physician’s mask of attentive listening as Sir Joseph prattled on about a recent lecture the Society gave on the mating habits of bandicoots, an upcoming seminar on the effects of heightened exposure to coal on the human body and, finally, when all topics capable of having even the remotest interest for Stephen had been exhausted, they sank to the subject of Sir Joseph’s wife, at which point Stephen allowed himself a little cough of impatience which brought Sir Joseph’s unceasing tide of conversation to a blessed standstill.
“And to what do I owe this…visit?” Sir Joseph asked at last, as though Stephen had wrenched the words from him with forceps.
“I came to inquire into the misfortunes having befallen my particular friend…” Here Stephen paused despite himself, for Sir Joseph’s behavior was most extraordinary. Thought he room was uncomfortably cool due to the earliness of the hour and the lack of a fire in the grate, the man across the mahogany desk from Stephen seemed to be experiencing quite a heat wave of his own. Sweat beaded on his forehead and slid down his face like poorly-applied paint down the side of one of Jack’s ships, and skin once a wintry English shade of chalk took on no faint reddish tinge-one that even the closely-shielded lamps ensconced on either side of the great desk could not explain away. Though he would not swab his forehead or unbutton his collar (perhaps, Stephen thought, because it would draw unavoidable attention to his overheated state), Sir Joseph was clearly a man under great strain. Had circumstances been different, Stephen would have suggested a course of physic immediately.
But things were as they were, and without giving any outward sign that he was aware of Sir Joseph’s distress, Stephen pressed on. “You know that you are always fretting about rewarding me with this or that, and I am always refusing. I come to you at last with the news that I have found a way you can reward me for my efforts on behalf of king and country. I would humbly request the benefit of your wide array of contacts on the domestic front, regarding the matter of the absence of one Sophia Aubrey and family from their residence at Ashgrove Cottage in Hampshire.”
Sir Joseph grimaced. “As eager as I am to reward you, Stephen, you know I can’t manipulate my network into investigating the marital dispute of every half-cock jack…”
Something in Stephen flashed angrily, but he beat it down within his breast before it could reach his eyes. “Nonsense,” he retorted with perfect good nature, “We have delved into the histories of others on more than one occasion-your niece's fiancée strikes me as the most recent, I believe.” Sir Joseph’s briefest of winces confirmed this fact, though Stephen had hazarded a guess. “Besides,” he continued, “were it a matter of marital dispute I would not retain half the curiosity I do. Captain Aubrey knows of no reason why his wife would take their children and flee to the Dear knows where-and that is another thing I’d like to pursue. Their current whereabouts. Might it be possible to obtain them…?” Here he stopped again, for a bridling contempt had risen in Sir Joseph’s eyes ever since the mention of Jack’s name.
“I am afraid, Dr. Maturin, that my schedule is exceedingly full at the moment…” he sighed, shuffling papers purposefully about the desk to make his point, “and I simply can’t bring myself to endanger a fragile network of informants simply on the whim of a well-meaning friend of a…of one like Aubrey.”
This time Stephen could not keep silent. “And just what has Captain Aubrey don’t to inspire such unmitigated scorn in you, sir?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself, Doctor!”
With a mighty effort Stephen reeled in his temper. It would not do to lose the one lead he had to a fit. “If there is any danger to the person of Jack Aubrey,” he said in carefully neutral tones, picking up on an implication made earlier in Sir Joseph’s tirade, “I have to insist that I am made aware of it immediately. I am his friend, after all, and regardless of the nature of his marital status, I am charged by terms of friendship first and foremost to ensure his better welfare.”
Sir Joseph sneered openly. “Stephen, I’m beginning to think you’re honestly oblivious to half the world that goes on around you. You’re losing your touched, old boy. But if it will ease your harping any, I can tell you with all certainty that Mrs. Aubrey and her three children boarded a packet boat yesterday, bound for Simonstown. And I know no more than that!” he snapped as Stephen opened his mouth to demand details. “As to the nature of the dispute and the departure, I leave that you to muddle through. For myself, I am happy to say I have more pressing matters to attend to. Good day, sir.”
It was a dismissal, and Stephen took it uncomplainingly, if with a face flushed nearly as scarlet as the sunset over the East Indies. With grim satisfaction he consoled his disgruntlement at having failed to procure as much as he would have liked with the knowledge that he had a few contacts of his own in the area at which Sir Joseph could only guess.
Their questioning would have to wait, however, for the sun was nearly at its zenith now, and Jack would be wanting (or, rather, needing-the thought of someone actually desiring one of his foul concoctions amused Stephen on some distant level) his next dose of orange peel and Peruvian bark. With a furrowed brow Stephen crossed back across town on wet cobbles to the Savoy and the Grapes therein.
He found Jack not, as he might have expected, bumbling about the room in direct opposition to Stephen’s injunctions, nor even sitting up in bed-the portly captain lay drenched in sweat in the cramped confines of his bed, lips twitching in soundless cries and forehead wrinkled in an expression of somnia-suppressed pain. Now and again he would thrash, flinging the blankets and covers everywhere, then sink into a pattern of fervent mumbling whose words defied comprehension.
“Jack-Jack, dear, wake up!” Stephen cried, alarmed at the progress of the fever and the ineffectiveness of his proscribed physic. He grabbed a discarded neckcloth and wiped Jack’s brow with it, emitting a steady stream of entreaties to wake, wake, and take down a draught of sulphurous ether, there’s a dear now.
Jack’s eyes flickered open in his florid face, and the two brilliant points of blue burned bright with fever. “What about our old Corelli, eh, Stephen?” he rasped, smiling absurdly up at his benefactor. “Or Boccherini-I’d dearly love a few bars of Boccherini.”
“Hush, and let me prepare you something,” Stephen soothed, deeply troubled by the dreamy state and ludicrous talk. Before he could turn away to his shelf, though, Jack grabbed his hand with a strength startling in so sick a man, and pulled Stephen close until their faces were but inches apart.
“What did you find, Stephen,” Jack giggled, his breath rank in Stephen’s nostrils. “What did you find, what did you find on your little cutting-out expedition?”
Stephen frowned and tried to pull away, but Jack had pinned his arm against his great chest in a vise-like grip. “Jack, you have a fever. You have to let me prepare-“
Jack, his blue eyes gleaming, yanked hard on Stephen’s arm, bringing him close enough to kiss-which Jack did, slamming his lips against Stephen’s with a heat the Doctor leapt to attribute to the illness. When Jack let go his eyes shown like twin lamps.
“Jack…you’re feverish…” Stephen stammered, pulling back to the shelf. Hands shaking, he grasped at the bottle containing the alcoholic tincture of laudanum only to render up empty air-he had forgotten to stop by the apothecary that morning. Cursing to himself, he now set about preparing a strong concoction of sulphurous ether as best he could. He dared not look at Jack reclining behind him, and half-hoped that the fever would have plunged him back into semi-consciousness by the time his physic was ready.
Stephen hoped in vain. Jack peered at him from where he sweated in his mess of covers, breathing heavily. This time, though, his face bore a grimace of such pain that Stephen set aside the glass of Jack’s medicine to place his hands on Jack’s forehead. “You’re burning up,” he said, at which Jack shifted very slightly under his hand.
“It’s not that, Stephen old boy,” he said in what barely qualified as a whisper.
Stephen frowned as he reached for the glass. “What is it, then?” he asked with forced nonchalance, reminding himself repeatedly that he was conversing with a sick man.
“I won’t remember this, Stephen.” Jack closed his eyes and sweat or tears-Stephen couldn’t tell which-seemed to gather at their corners. “I’m in a fever. I know it, and I won’t smoke this when it’s over. Please, Stephen.” Jack opened his eyes; fixed Stephen with blue bright burning entreaty. His hand, its unnatural strength gone now, twitched weakly on the coverlet.
“What would you have me do?” Stephen whispered, quite ashamed of the way his hands shook.
“I won’t remember any of this,” Jack repeated helplessly.
Stephen did not know what Jack wanted him to do. He want not sure he wanted to; not sure he could allow himself to know. Swallowing and wishing sorely for a mere 100 drops of laudanum, he took Jack’s sweaty paw in his own shaking fingers and bent forward gently, gently, to place his lips on Jack’s cheek. It was a fleeting touch; he had swept the concoction from the shelf between Jack’s lips in an instant. But the change in Jack was marked. The crease in his brows smoothed away, his damp eyelids sank closed, and with a great sigh he settled into sleep almost before Stephen would administer the physic.
He managed it, however, and long after Jack’s breathing had steadied Stephen stood staring, the drained glass still in his hand, deep in thoughts he had no wish to have.
* * * *
Over a meager dinner of bread, cheese and claret-his appetite had completely withered, though he had had no breakfast-Stephen pondered his position. Across the table (and behind a rather large salmon which he was making short work of, at Stephen’s expense) sat Alexei Raskol, and already his eyes swam under the influence of drink. Stephen plied him with food, wine and nods, finding neither desire nor opportunity to speak much himself, for his Russian friend, though grown portly with age, had yet to forsake his penchant for constant and frivolous conversation. Stephen had but to wait, and the time to pose questions would present itself.
Meanwhile there were a great many other things weighing upon his mind, most of which took the shape of a large yellow-haired man with an unfailing good nature and sparkling blue eyes. Stephen had not guessed the severity of the cold Jack caught, not by a yardarm-and indeed this distressed him almost as much as the afternoon’s events. Though he considered himself a modest and even self-effacing practitioner in his field, he nevertheless liked to think himself capable of diagnosing a simple cold. And yet he knew even then that he had not been entirely focused on the task at hand when he first prescribed Peruvian bark and orange peel. His mind had been elsewhere…
A light touch on his wrist, a gentle motion if ever there was one, brought Stephen back to the present with a thin veneer of distaste. Fat, balding Alexei seemed to have quite finished with his fish-indeed, there was but skin and bones left on the plate-and endeavored now, via heady sighs and long looks and finally this unlooked-for tenderness, to pluck Stephen’s interest up from where he had dropped it so many years ago.
“Ah, Stephen, my sweet Stephanopoulos, you must eat! We don’t want you wasting away to the skin and bones you examine every day…”
Frowning, Stephen removed Alexei’s hand from his own in a precise and impersonal gesture. “Alexei, my friend, as I have told you on countless occasions, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an ox.”
“Oh but surely you remember our little games…?”
“It is not to reminisce on times past that I renew our acquaintance. I come seeking information,” Stephen asserted stiffly.
The fat Russian’s face fell to beaming in drunken delight. “Information! If it’s information you want, surely it is best discussed over a glass of port at the Gentlemen’s Club?”
“I am afraid my membership expired quite some time ago.”
“About the time you took up with that Jack Aubrey character, I know. But we’ve missed you terribly at the Club and I’m sure they’d welcome you back-“
Stephen’s eyes had narrowed at the sound of Jack’s name on this drunkard’s lips, and now he devoutly wished he had left wine completely out of the bargain for this meeting. He had not touched a drop himself, but Alexei’s face was looking very vinous indeed by this time, and Stephen preferred not to think about what memories the wine might stir in the mind of his old “acquaintance.”
“It is exactly this Jack Aubrey which I’ve come to see you about,” he said, glaring down Alexei’s attempt at an interruption. “For reasons unbeknownst to me, Sir Joseph has taken to keeping close with his information, and as such he refuses to enlighten me as to the reasons and whereabouts of Mrs. Sophia Aubrey’s abandonment of her husband. Now I know you’re quite well acquainted with the Admiralty, and-why do you look at me like that?”
Drunken grin had quickly dissipated into equally drunken pout, and only another glass of wine-ordered on Stephen’s bankroll-could loosen Alexei’s tongue. “And what was it Sir Joseph said to you, when you went a-asking after the missus Aubrey?” the Russian sulked; nearly sniffled.
“I believe the words he used were ‘why don’t you ask him yourself,’ though I don’t see why it matters.” Stephen decided he most certainly did not like the trend of this conversation, and would have cordially excused himself had not his need-and his curiosity-been so great.
“Oh Stephanopoulos, sometimes you are as stubborn as an ox. And as blind.” Here Alexei belched mightily. “I just can’t believe that a man of your intellect would need guidance on this matter.”
“For old time’s sake, Alexei, cease leading me in these infuriating circles of yours!”
“Old time’s sake? Old time’s sake? You’re one to talk of old time’s sake, Dr. Stephen Maturin. And abandonment! You abandoned us as the club when you signed on to dither about in a boat with a great blonde brute of a man who wouldn’t know Plotinus if it hit him in his brazen head! And what do you expect his womenfolk to do, then, when he prefers braving the briny deeps with his effeminate doctor instead of cuddling up to his wife-“
“Alexei, do keep your voice down!” Stephen hissed, barely in control himself. “Your accusations are ridiculous and unfounded. I have done nothing-nothing of the sort you imply with Jack Aubrey, nor with anyone else. And I don’t see-“
“But that’s just the thing, Stephanopoulos, that’s exactly the thing! Nor with anyone else! You have kept yourself to your laudanum as to a convent, patiently curbing the one desire you think you cannot indulge in, that swaggers about in the Royal Navy’s blue and gold…”
Before Stephen could stop himself he had whipped out a lancet under the table and pressed it against Alexei’s thigh, gouging the flesh with the double-edged blade. “I will have no more of your vile assumptions, sir,” he snarled, voice shaking, “nor will I allow you to debase my friend and comrade in my presence. I sought you for neither games nor the fondling of memories-I simply request to know what you know on the matter and manner of Sophie Aubrey’s boarding of a packet boat bound for Simonstown, since my superior sees fit to closet himself away form my confidence.” He jabbed harder with the knife. “I trust that you will not suffer the same reticence as he. If not I can certainly arrange a visit from my second.”
Alexei’s hands had started to quake on the table where they lay helpless, but to his credit his voice remained comparatively stable as he replied, “I honestly did not know you had no clue, Stephen. I thought you were toying with me. Mrs. Aubrey’s departure was-“ he gulped, “the talk of the Home Office. She came to us with the idea of going to the Admiralty afterwards, you see, only we set her to rights about that because-because we couldn’t afford to lose you. Yes, don’t look so skeptical-you are the Office’s most valuable hand in the Continent right now, or one of them anyway, and to lose you to the hangman’s noose would be a crushing blow. May-may I have a sip of wine before I continue?”
“You’re doing just splendidly without it,” Stephen answered coldly.
“As you wish. But Sophia-Sophie, you call her?-Mrs. Aubrey would have you in jail, the state she was in, and failing that she wanted the fastest ship out of England, the farthest distance away, as possible. So we arranged that for her, quietly with the Admiralty without telling them what it was about.”
“And just what was it about? It is this information I keep trying to drag forth from you.”
“Why, it’s that-“ Alexei blushed, quite independently of his drunkard’s complexion-“It’s that Captain Aubrey prefers you, dear, to his wife.”
* * * *
Title: Tide’s Turn (Part 1/?)
Pairing: Jack/Stephen
Rating: PG13 as of yet
Period: Desolation Island
Summary: Suppressing one’s feelings is a dangerous course…
Disclaimer: Consider it disclaimed.
Author’s Note: I’ve been out of the pattern of the books for awhile, so if errors in nautical technicalities pop up, I apologize in advance. I am trying to get back into the swing of things with book six now, but it’s coming slowly as I like to savor them.
Only when he had safely briefed Sir Joseph Blaine on the produce of the latest talks in Barcelona did Stephen Maturin retire to his room at the Grapes in the liberty of the Savoy. He was soaked through and through and little relished the thought of a damp evening in front of the fireplace, steaming gently though never completely drying out, musing on the fallacies of existence and man’s tendency to steep himself deeper and deeper into the mire of his own manipulations.
After a lonely dinner of port and lampreys-whose succulent properties failed, on this occasion, to rouse Stephen from his melancholy-he rose and with a gait ponderous from exhaustion made his way toward the room he always kept ready at a moment’s notice. Winter in this bleak country, he reflected bitterly, existed solely to sap the warmth from the bones and the cheer from the heart. He then raised an eyebrow at his own romanticism, and supposed he had been listening to one too many sea-ballads over his many years with Captain Aubrey.
That very captain, to Stephen’s utter (if well-masked) astonishment, leaned heavily against Stephen’s very door, his great battlescarred bulk all but filling the hallway. His ruddy robust face under its crown of golden waves was even ruddier than usual-less, it seemed to Stephen, due to robustness than to the fat welling tears that slid copiously down his cheeks. His neckcloth was dirty, his doublet askew, and his silk stockings boasted a layer of mud that would have caused Killick, his steward, to go into fits. He clutched the doorframe as if his very life depended on it.
“My dear Jack, what happened?” Stephen cried, rushing to steady his friend as he lurched too far forward.
“Oh…there you are, Stephen,” Jack croaked, fixing the much shorter man with a bleary, red-rimmed glance. “I knew you always roomed at the Grapes but…you’re so often away…”
Stephen struggled to ease Jack to the side without topping him off a balance he was unlikely to recover. “Let me get the door, dear, let me get you inside-look at the state you’re in”!” He caught a whiff of alcohol as he led (or, more aptly, darted in front of) Jack into the tiny room. “Jack, you are drunk,” Stephen announced with perfectly bald distaste as he slid the jars of pickled toes and cormorant chicks from where Jack’s unwieldy entrance had knocked them nearly off their shelf.
“I am…nothing of the sort, ha ha,” Jack’s voice drifted sorrowfully from the tearful mess he was quickly making of Stephen’s pillow. An fantastic sneeze punctuated his misery. “That’s just like you, to…worry…” At which point he dissolved into drunken sobbing which by some last prideful effort of his own he managed to keep silent, more or less.
Though there wasn’t a scrap of space left on the bed for him to sit, Stephen patted Jack’s heaving shoulders awkwardly from where he stood wedged between bed and bookshelf, obscurely and unexpectedly moved by the spectacle of Lucky Jack bawling his eyes out. When a suitable amount of time had passed without the prodigious snoring that he knew would signify Jack’s drunken slumber, Stephen spoke in the supercilious voice he reserved for his patients. “Would it be forward of me to question your uncommon melancholy disposition?”
“Oh Stephen,” Jack moaned, “she’s gone. I came back from the Admiralty in the highest spirits-those prizes came in after all; the claimants were dismissed-and she and the children…George and Frances and Charlotte…” These words prompted a fresh spate of tears that would have been most unseemly in a military man of Jack’s caliber, had Stephen been one to put any degree of stock in such striated beliefs. As it was, he maintained a respectful silence until Jack’s silent sobs had given way to mere sniffling, interrupted now and then by great sneeze the like of which Stephen knew meant a fever to come. He half-expected to launch another deluge with the unnecessary words, “By she I assume you mean Sophie?”, but Jack only slumped where he lay, giving every appearance of having abandoned any attempt to preserve dignity.
“Yes. Sophie. And I just can’t smoke why-she left a note but it made no sense to me, none at all. Oh, why do we ever come ashore, Stephen? To lose our wives and our little ones and wander alone through our empty gardens?”
The image this evoked in Stephen’s mind touched him very deeply indeed, and grasping Jack’s shoulder he dropped his bedside manner for that of a friend. “May I see the letter?”
Jack rummaged in his mud-caked coat with his ham-sized hands, and came up with a tearstained and much-crumpled sheet of paper, which he handed to Stephen over his side without looking at him. “See if you can make light of it. You’re always so good with all manners of soft speaking…why, I believe you could talk your way into Boney’s own palace itself,” Jack rambled, causing Stephen to look up in alarm from the letter. Had the Admiralty intimated something to Jack about the nature of Stephen’s last sojourn? But no-the phrase had been purely complimentary, and Stephen counted it as a step away from all-consuming despair that Jack could remark on something not directly related to his misfortune. Though, Stephen admitted as he smoothed the note into legibility, he highly doubted Jack capable of all-consuming despair, distressing though this latest development was and would be.
“ ‘My Dearest Jack’,” Stephen read to himself, “ ‘please understand that I care for you no less now than I did when you were still a brash young post-captain running around Mapes Court on a that ridiculous horse. But I can no longer bear to share your heart with another, and so I think it for the best that we part for awhile. I dare not tell you our whereabouts, mine and the children’s, for I know you would but come running in full regalia bearing protestations of your undying love, etc., etc. I do not think I could stand that. So please accept my best wishes and the assurance that the children and I are safe in good hands. Be not too troubled, Your Loving Sophie.’”
Stephen read over the letter again, conscious of a smoldering fury rising in his gut. He loved Sophie; had loved her as the dear friend she was almost since they had met at Mapes Court so long ago. It was he who had encouraged her to profess her true feelings to Jack, and he who had looked on with amused good humor as their marriage progressed to produce a home, then twins, then the healthy little boy who was undoubtedly the apple of Jack’s eye. Why would dear, sweet Sophie, who had so long born the vagaries of schedule the life of a sea captain’s wife necessitated, and who had known quite well what she was getting into when she married, lash out at Jack in this cruel and unjustified manner?
At the same time, Stephen was suspicious. Whatever had been praying on her mind so long had to have been something noteworthy-something about which, surely, Jack would have at least an inkling. Stephen opened his mouth to ask Jack as much but was interrupted by the long-expected snore-Jack had fallen into a deep sleep, occupying the whole of Stephen’s bed with his muddy, portly self. Sighing and suddenly giving in to an exhaustion he had long been ignoring, Stephen pulled the coverlet out from under Jack’s filthy boots, then thought better of it and wrestled Jack’s boots off as well. The blanket did not quite cover Jack, though it did all it could, and Stephen made sure to stoke up a fire much needed by the both of them before settling himself into the only chair in the room, with his coat for a blanket. It would be a long night.
* * * *
Stephen woke, not to his own craving for laudanum as he had expected, but rather to an explosive set of sneezes followed by a deep-throated cough which made the doctor in him leap to considerations of tinctures and concoctions, and made the friend in him wince in sympathy. Blinking and yawning-and wishing the fire had not died out in the night, for he was mightily stiff in his bones-Stephen rose and went to the side of Jack, who gave him an apologetic grimace as he tried to stifle a cough.
“Did I wake you?” he asked pointlessly, for they both knew the answer. After another sneeze he looked around him at the muddy bedsheets and seemed to sink into an even deeper gloom. “Oh I’m sorry, Stephen, I’ve gone an stolen your cot from you. Here, let me give it back-“ He made as if to rise, but Stephen pushed him firmly back down just as another spate of coughing wracked his body.
“You’ll be spending a great deal longer than one night in that bed, I fear,” Stephen sighed, turning to bustle about his bottles and vials. “I’ll start you with a concoction of orange peel and Peruvian bark, but I can only guess how long you spent wallowing about in the rain last night. No doubt you’ll catch a horrible fever and add injury to insult, as is your wont.” A rare smile took the sting from his words as he turned, proffering a glass.
“Why do you smile?” Jack croaked, taking the glass with both sweaty hands and eyeing its contents with a grimace. “I should think this a most wretched turn of events-your own berth taken by a great bawling nitwit, and a sickly one, too. This on what, your second day back from wherever you go haring off to?”
“My first,” Stephen corrected, waiting until Jack had choked down the entire dosage to add, “and I am smiling, my dear Captain Aubrey, because when I think of where you could have ended up in the state you were in last night-whether it be in a bloodied heap in a back alley or passed out in some vile tavern, or in the hands of one of the tipstaffs themselves-it comforts me to know that in this most difficult of circumstances you came to me. I shudder to imagine what optimistically-deemed ‘treatment’ you might be receiving this morning had you retired to, say, a brothel with whose headmistress you had some acquaintance.”
Jack smiled feebly at him before settling back down into the pillows as Stephen insisted. The smile quickly faded, though, as the acrid taste of Stephen’s concoction and the agony of a biting hangover stirred his grog-fogged mind to wakefulness and a bitter recollection of the previous day’s events. “Oh Stephen, I just don’t know what to-“
“Hush, for all love, and heed a physician’s words!” Stephen cried, feeling not the slightest guilt in bringing his profession to bear at such a time as this. “You can do nothing, Jack, absolutely nothing, until you are in as you would say, shipshape form, and you will be of no use to anybody, least of all yourself, until you achieve that end.” At Jack’s injured look he relented a little. “If it will ensure your full engagement of the task of getting rest, I will go out this very morning to inquire of some of my local acquaintances the nature of the thing that went on in Ashgrove Cottage, and question after the current lodging of your family. That is, if you promise on your honor to remain here in bed and get the sleep you need.”
“On my honor!” Jack replied fervently, pulling the blanket up to his chest (which was as high as it would go) to illustrate the point.
So satisfied, Stephen spared only the briefest of movements donning a dry-if rumpled-coat and waistcoat before administering a last demand for somnolence and hurrying out into the grey English day.
No few questions preyed on Stephen’s mind as he made his way toward the Admiralty and Sir Joseph Blaine, who surely was not expecting Stephen so soon after his last visit. But when dealing in affairs such as theirs, he reflected, one must become used to predicting the unpredictable, and he had no doubt that Sir Joseph would prove inestimably useful, once the reason for Stephen’s visit became clear. It was surprising what one could learn, sitting behind one’s desk all day.
But Sir Joseph and his forthcoming reception were hardly at the top of Stephen’s list of worries. Instead he brooded on Jack, dear Jack, and Sophie and the seemingly impossible notion of the pair of them having a row. Not a petty argument about newly-acquired racehorses or Jack’s ever-present desire for a ship and a dashing post-no, the Aubreys were quite capable of having those sorts of disagreements, as Stephen had witnessed on more than one occasion. But it took more than racehorses or ships to shatter the marital cheer if not bliss those two had, or had had, and Stephen could not fathom what the cause could be. The tempting conclusion to draw was adultery, of course, but Stephen could not, would not believe Sophie of even looking at another man, let alone bedding him, and as for Jack…
Stephen frowned, lost in thought, and barely managed to leap out of the path of a post-chaise and its cursing driver (swearing like a sailor, part of Stephen’s mind noted with utter dryness), so deep was he in his thinking. As for Jack, he continued to himself once he hade turned down a less-frequented street, well, that was another matter. Jack’s premarital appetites were well-known throughout the service-he had even charmed the wife of an admiral at one time, and it nearly ended his career-and Stephen had been hard-pressed, last night and then in the morning, not to question Jack about the possible truth in Sophie’s claim. Pitting desire to reason against desire to set his patient to rights, Stephen had let the latter win out and told himself that only later, when Jack’s constitution was strong enough to handle most unpleasant questions from a close friend, would Stephen spring that particular surprise on him. The thought of surprise, and subsequently Jack’s old ship the Surprise, brought back memories whose warmth contrasted sharply with the present morbid state of affairs, the result of which was that Stephen reached the Admiralty in a grey mood indeed. Fittingly, it started to rain as he ducked in.
Under the combined influence of the weather and the prospect of the conversation to come, the other thing which had been troubling Stephen completely slipped his mind.
As soon as he entered, Stephen knew something was amiss. Sir Joseph was too jovial, too effusive in his welcome of a man he had seen not a day before-and, above all, he did not query after the reason for the unexpected visit until he was a ways along in his usual pleasantries-far too long, as far as Stephen was concerned. Still, he put on his best physician’s mask of attentive listening as Sir Joseph prattled on about a recent lecture the Society gave on the mating habits of bandicoots, an upcoming seminar on the effects of heightened exposure to coal on the human body and, finally, when all topics capable of having even the remotest interest for Stephen had been exhausted, they sank to the subject of Sir Joseph’s wife, at which point Stephen allowed himself a little cough of impatience which brought Sir Joseph’s unceasing tide of conversation to a blessed standstill.
“And to what do I owe this…visit?” Sir Joseph asked at last, as though Stephen had wrenched the words from him with forceps.
“I came to inquire into the misfortunes having befallen my particular friend…” Here Stephen paused despite himself, for Sir Joseph’s behavior was most extraordinary. Thought he room was uncomfortably cool due to the earliness of the hour and the lack of a fire in the grate, the man across the mahogany desk from Stephen seemed to be experiencing quite a heat wave of his own. Sweat beaded on his forehead and slid down his face like poorly-applied paint down the side of one of Jack’s ships, and skin once a wintry English shade of chalk took on no faint reddish tinge-one that even the closely-shielded lamps ensconced on either side of the great desk could not explain away. Though he would not swab his forehead or unbutton his collar (perhaps, Stephen thought, because it would draw unavoidable attention to his overheated state), Sir Joseph was clearly a man under great strain. Had circumstances been different, Stephen would have suggested a course of physic immediately.
But things were as they were, and without giving any outward sign that he was aware of Sir Joseph’s distress, Stephen pressed on. “You know that you are always fretting about rewarding me with this or that, and I am always refusing. I come to you at last with the news that I have found a way you can reward me for my efforts on behalf of king and country. I would humbly request the benefit of your wide array of contacts on the domestic front, regarding the matter of the absence of one Sophia Aubrey and family from their residence at Ashgrove Cottage in Hampshire.”
Sir Joseph grimaced. “As eager as I am to reward you, Stephen, you know I can’t manipulate my network into investigating the marital dispute of every half-cock jack…”
Something in Stephen flashed angrily, but he beat it down within his breast before it could reach his eyes. “Nonsense,” he retorted with perfect good nature, “We have delved into the histories of others on more than one occasion-your niece's fiancée strikes me as the most recent, I believe.” Sir Joseph’s briefest of winces confirmed this fact, though Stephen had hazarded a guess. “Besides,” he continued, “were it a matter of marital dispute I would not retain half the curiosity I do. Captain Aubrey knows of no reason why his wife would take their children and flee to the Dear knows where-and that is another thing I’d like to pursue. Their current whereabouts. Might it be possible to obtain them…?” Here he stopped again, for a bridling contempt had risen in Sir Joseph’s eyes ever since the mention of Jack’s name.
“I am afraid, Dr. Maturin, that my schedule is exceedingly full at the moment…” he sighed, shuffling papers purposefully about the desk to make his point, “and I simply can’t bring myself to endanger a fragile network of informants simply on the whim of a well-meaning friend of a…of one like Aubrey.”
This time Stephen could not keep silent. “And just what has Captain Aubrey don’t to inspire such unmitigated scorn in you, sir?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself, Doctor!”
With a mighty effort Stephen reeled in his temper. It would not do to lose the one lead he had to a fit. “If there is any danger to the person of Jack Aubrey,” he said in carefully neutral tones, picking up on an implication made earlier in Sir Joseph’s tirade, “I have to insist that I am made aware of it immediately. I am his friend, after all, and regardless of the nature of his marital status, I am charged by terms of friendship first and foremost to ensure his better welfare.”
Sir Joseph sneered openly. “Stephen, I’m beginning to think you’re honestly oblivious to half the world that goes on around you. You’re losing your touched, old boy. But if it will ease your harping any, I can tell you with all certainty that Mrs. Aubrey and her three children boarded a packet boat yesterday, bound for Simonstown. And I know no more than that!” he snapped as Stephen opened his mouth to demand details. “As to the nature of the dispute and the departure, I leave that you to muddle through. For myself, I am happy to say I have more pressing matters to attend to. Good day, sir.”
It was a dismissal, and Stephen took it uncomplainingly, if with a face flushed nearly as scarlet as the sunset over the East Indies. With grim satisfaction he consoled his disgruntlement at having failed to procure as much as he would have liked with the knowledge that he had a few contacts of his own in the area at which Sir Joseph could only guess.
Their questioning would have to wait, however, for the sun was nearly at its zenith now, and Jack would be wanting (or, rather, needing-the thought of someone actually desiring one of his foul concoctions amused Stephen on some distant level) his next dose of orange peel and Peruvian bark. With a furrowed brow Stephen crossed back across town on wet cobbles to the Savoy and the Grapes therein.
He found Jack not, as he might have expected, bumbling about the room in direct opposition to Stephen’s injunctions, nor even sitting up in bed-the portly captain lay drenched in sweat in the cramped confines of his bed, lips twitching in soundless cries and forehead wrinkled in an expression of somnia-suppressed pain. Now and again he would thrash, flinging the blankets and covers everywhere, then sink into a pattern of fervent mumbling whose words defied comprehension.
“Jack-Jack, dear, wake up!” Stephen cried, alarmed at the progress of the fever and the ineffectiveness of his proscribed physic. He grabbed a discarded neckcloth and wiped Jack’s brow with it, emitting a steady stream of entreaties to wake, wake, and take down a draught of sulphurous ether, there’s a dear now.
Jack’s eyes flickered open in his florid face, and the two brilliant points of blue burned bright with fever. “What about our old Corelli, eh, Stephen?” he rasped, smiling absurdly up at his benefactor. “Or Boccherini-I’d dearly love a few bars of Boccherini.”
“Hush, and let me prepare you something,” Stephen soothed, deeply troubled by the dreamy state and ludicrous talk. Before he could turn away to his shelf, though, Jack grabbed his hand with a strength startling in so sick a man, and pulled Stephen close until their faces were but inches apart.
“What did you find, Stephen,” Jack giggled, his breath rank in Stephen’s nostrils. “What did you find, what did you find on your little cutting-out expedition?”
Stephen frowned and tried to pull away, but Jack had pinned his arm against his great chest in a vise-like grip. “Jack, you have a fever. You have to let me prepare-“
Jack, his blue eyes gleaming, yanked hard on Stephen’s arm, bringing him close enough to kiss-which Jack did, slamming his lips against Stephen’s with a heat the Doctor leapt to attribute to the illness. When Jack let go his eyes shown like twin lamps.
“Jack…you’re feverish…” Stephen stammered, pulling back to the shelf. Hands shaking, he grasped at the bottle containing the alcoholic tincture of laudanum only to render up empty air-he had forgotten to stop by the apothecary that morning. Cursing to himself, he now set about preparing a strong concoction of sulphurous ether as best he could. He dared not look at Jack reclining behind him, and half-hoped that the fever would have plunged him back into semi-consciousness by the time his physic was ready.
Stephen hoped in vain. Jack peered at him from where he sweated in his mess of covers, breathing heavily. This time, though, his face bore a grimace of such pain that Stephen set aside the glass of Jack’s medicine to place his hands on Jack’s forehead. “You’re burning up,” he said, at which Jack shifted very slightly under his hand.
“It’s not that, Stephen old boy,” he said in what barely qualified as a whisper.
Stephen frowned as he reached for the glass. “What is it, then?” he asked with forced nonchalance, reminding himself repeatedly that he was conversing with a sick man.
“I won’t remember this, Stephen.” Jack closed his eyes and sweat or tears-Stephen couldn’t tell which-seemed to gather at their corners. “I’m in a fever. I know it, and I won’t smoke this when it’s over. Please, Stephen.” Jack opened his eyes; fixed Stephen with blue bright burning entreaty. His hand, its unnatural strength gone now, twitched weakly on the coverlet.
“What would you have me do?” Stephen whispered, quite ashamed of the way his hands shook.
“I won’t remember any of this,” Jack repeated helplessly.
Stephen did not know what Jack wanted him to do. He want not sure he wanted to; not sure he could allow himself to know. Swallowing and wishing sorely for a mere 100 drops of laudanum, he took Jack’s sweaty paw in his own shaking fingers and bent forward gently, gently, to place his lips on Jack’s cheek. It was a fleeting touch; he had swept the concoction from the shelf between Jack’s lips in an instant. But the change in Jack was marked. The crease in his brows smoothed away, his damp eyelids sank closed, and with a great sigh he settled into sleep almost before Stephen would administer the physic.
He managed it, however, and long after Jack’s breathing had steadied Stephen stood staring, the drained glass still in his hand, deep in thoughts he had no wish to have.
* * * *
Over a meager dinner of bread, cheese and claret-his appetite had completely withered, though he had had no breakfast-Stephen pondered his position. Across the table (and behind a rather large salmon which he was making short work of, at Stephen’s expense) sat Alexei Raskol, and already his eyes swam under the influence of drink. Stephen plied him with food, wine and nods, finding neither desire nor opportunity to speak much himself, for his Russian friend, though grown portly with age, had yet to forsake his penchant for constant and frivolous conversation. Stephen had but to wait, and the time to pose questions would present itself.
Meanwhile there were a great many other things weighing upon his mind, most of which took the shape of a large yellow-haired man with an unfailing good nature and sparkling blue eyes. Stephen had not guessed the severity of the cold Jack caught, not by a yardarm-and indeed this distressed him almost as much as the afternoon’s events. Though he considered himself a modest and even self-effacing practitioner in his field, he nevertheless liked to think himself capable of diagnosing a simple cold. And yet he knew even then that he had not been entirely focused on the task at hand when he first prescribed Peruvian bark and orange peel. His mind had been elsewhere…
A light touch on his wrist, a gentle motion if ever there was one, brought Stephen back to the present with a thin veneer of distaste. Fat, balding Alexei seemed to have quite finished with his fish-indeed, there was but skin and bones left on the plate-and endeavored now, via heady sighs and long looks and finally this unlooked-for tenderness, to pluck Stephen’s interest up from where he had dropped it so many years ago.
“Ah, Stephen, my sweet Stephanopoulos, you must eat! We don’t want you wasting away to the skin and bones you examine every day…”
Frowning, Stephen removed Alexei’s hand from his own in a precise and impersonal gesture. “Alexei, my friend, as I have told you on countless occasions, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an ox.”
“Oh but surely you remember our little games…?”
“It is not to reminisce on times past that I renew our acquaintance. I come seeking information,” Stephen asserted stiffly.
The fat Russian’s face fell to beaming in drunken delight. “Information! If it’s information you want, surely it is best discussed over a glass of port at the Gentlemen’s Club?”
“I am afraid my membership expired quite some time ago.”
“About the time you took up with that Jack Aubrey character, I know. But we’ve missed you terribly at the Club and I’m sure they’d welcome you back-“
Stephen’s eyes had narrowed at the sound of Jack’s name on this drunkard’s lips, and now he devoutly wished he had left wine completely out of the bargain for this meeting. He had not touched a drop himself, but Alexei’s face was looking very vinous indeed by this time, and Stephen preferred not to think about what memories the wine might stir in the mind of his old “acquaintance.”
“It is exactly this Jack Aubrey which I’ve come to see you about,” he said, glaring down Alexei’s attempt at an interruption. “For reasons unbeknownst to me, Sir Joseph has taken to keeping close with his information, and as such he refuses to enlighten me as to the reasons and whereabouts of Mrs. Sophia Aubrey’s abandonment of her husband. Now I know you’re quite well acquainted with the Admiralty, and-why do you look at me like that?”
Drunken grin had quickly dissipated into equally drunken pout, and only another glass of wine-ordered on Stephen’s bankroll-could loosen Alexei’s tongue. “And what was it Sir Joseph said to you, when you went a-asking after the missus Aubrey?” the Russian sulked; nearly sniffled.
“I believe the words he used were ‘why don’t you ask him yourself,’ though I don’t see why it matters.” Stephen decided he most certainly did not like the trend of this conversation, and would have cordially excused himself had not his need-and his curiosity-been so great.
“Oh Stephanopoulos, sometimes you are as stubborn as an ox. And as blind.” Here Alexei belched mightily. “I just can’t believe that a man of your intellect would need guidance on this matter.”
“For old time’s sake, Alexei, cease leading me in these infuriating circles of yours!”
“Old time’s sake? Old time’s sake? You’re one to talk of old time’s sake, Dr. Stephen Maturin. And abandonment! You abandoned us as the club when you signed on to dither about in a boat with a great blonde brute of a man who wouldn’t know Plotinus if it hit him in his brazen head! And what do you expect his womenfolk to do, then, when he prefers braving the briny deeps with his effeminate doctor instead of cuddling up to his wife-“
“Alexei, do keep your voice down!” Stephen hissed, barely in control himself. “Your accusations are ridiculous and unfounded. I have done nothing-nothing of the sort you imply with Jack Aubrey, nor with anyone else. And I don’t see-“
“But that’s just the thing, Stephanopoulos, that’s exactly the thing! Nor with anyone else! You have kept yourself to your laudanum as to a convent, patiently curbing the one desire you think you cannot indulge in, that swaggers about in the Royal Navy’s blue and gold…”
Before Stephen could stop himself he had whipped out a lancet under the table and pressed it against Alexei’s thigh, gouging the flesh with the double-edged blade. “I will have no more of your vile assumptions, sir,” he snarled, voice shaking, “nor will I allow you to debase my friend and comrade in my presence. I sought you for neither games nor the fondling of memories-I simply request to know what you know on the matter and manner of Sophie Aubrey’s boarding of a packet boat bound for Simonstown, since my superior sees fit to closet himself away form my confidence.” He jabbed harder with the knife. “I trust that you will not suffer the same reticence as he. If not I can certainly arrange a visit from my second.”
Alexei’s hands had started to quake on the table where they lay helpless, but to his credit his voice remained comparatively stable as he replied, “I honestly did not know you had no clue, Stephen. I thought you were toying with me. Mrs. Aubrey’s departure was-“ he gulped, “the talk of the Home Office. She came to us with the idea of going to the Admiralty afterwards, you see, only we set her to rights about that because-because we couldn’t afford to lose you. Yes, don’t look so skeptical-you are the Office’s most valuable hand in the Continent right now, or one of them anyway, and to lose you to the hangman’s noose would be a crushing blow. May-may I have a sip of wine before I continue?”
“You’re doing just splendidly without it,” Stephen answered coldly.
“As you wish. But Sophia-Sophie, you call her?-Mrs. Aubrey would have you in jail, the state she was in, and failing that she wanted the fastest ship out of England, the farthest distance away, as possible. So we arranged that for her, quietly with the Admiralty without telling them what it was about.”
“And just what was it about? It is this information I keep trying to drag forth from you.”
“Why, it’s that-“ Alexei blushed, quite independently of his drunkard’s complexion-“It’s that Captain Aubrey prefers you, dear, to his wife.”
* * * *