Free Post Captain by Patrick O’Brian Page A

Jack. 'I think I shall leave it for today. Just put up these strings in a paper for me, will you, together with the rosin. Keep the fiddle, and I will let you know one way or the other by the end of the week. Stephen,' he said, taking his friend's arm and guiding him across the busy street, 'I must have been playing that fiddle a good hour and more, and I still don't know my own mind. Jackson was not in the way, nor his partner, so I came straight here. It was odd, damned vexing and odd, for we had appointed to meet. But he was not at home: just this fool of a clerk, who said he was out of town - they expected him, but could not tell when. I shall pay my respects to Old Jarvie, just to keep myself in mind, and then we can go home. I shall not wait for Jackson.'
    They rode back, and where they had left the rain there they found it again, rain, and a fierce wind from the east. Jack's horse lost a shoe, and they wasted the best part of the afternoon finding a smith, a surly, awkward brute who sent his nails in too deep. It was dark when they reached Ashdown Forest; by this time Jack's horse was lame, and they still had a long ride before them.
    'Let me look to your pistols,' said Jack, as the trees came closer to the road. 'You have no notion of hammering your flints.'
    'They are very well,' said Stephen, unwilling to open his holsters (a teratoma in one, a bottled Arabian dormouse in the other). 'Do you apprehend any danger?'
    'This is an ugly stretch of road, with all these disbanded soldiers turned loose. They made an attempt upon the mail not far from Aker's Cross. Come, let me have your pistols. I thought as much: what is this?'
    'A teratoma,' said Stephen sulkily.
    'What is a teratoma?' asked Jack, holding the object in his hand. 'A kind of grenado?'
    'It is an inward wen, a tumour we find them, occasionally, in the abdominal cavity Sometimes they contain long black hair, sometimes a set of teeth this has both hair and teeth. It belonged to a Mr Elkins of the City, an eminent cheese-monger. I prize it much.'
    'By God,' cried Jack, thrusting it back into the holster and wiping his hand vehemently upon the horse, 'I do wish you would leave people's bellies alone. So you have no pistols at all, I collect?'
    'If you wish to be so absolute, no, I have not.'
    'You will never make old bones, brother,' said Jack, dismounting and feeling the horse's leg. 'There is an inn, not a bad inn, half a mile off the side-road: what do you say to lying there tonight?'
    'Your mind is much disturbed by the thought of these robbers, highwaymen, footpads?'
    'I tremble so that I can hardly sit on my horse. It would be stupid to get knocked on the head, to be sure, but I am thinking more of my horse's legs. And then again,' he said, after a pause, 'I have a damned odd feeling: I do not much care to be home tonight. Strange, because I had looked forward to it - lively as a libertyman this morning -and now I do not care for it so much. Sometimes at sea you have that feeling of a lee-shore. Dirty weather, close-reefed top-sails, not a sight of the sun, not an observation for days, no idea of where you are to within a hundred miles or so, and at night you feel the loom of the shore under your lee:
    you can see nothing, but you can almost hear the rocks grinding out your bottom.'
    Stephen made no reply, but wound his cloak higher against the biting wind.
    Mrs Williams never came down to breakfast; and quite apart from this the breakfast-room at Mapes was the most cheerful in the house; it looked south-east, and the gauze curtains waved gently in the sun, letting in the smell of spring. It could not have been a more feminine room -pretty white furniture, a green sprigged carpet, delicate china, little rolls and honey, a quantity of freshly-washed young women drinking tea.
    One of these, Sophie Bentinck, was giving an account of a dinner at the White Hart which Mr George Simpson, to whom she was engaged to be married, had attended. 'So then the toasts went