Free Treason's Harbour by Patrick O’Brian

broken the armorial stained-glass windows (which had been replaced with cane matting) and had stripped the walls of the exceptionally fine marble, lapis lazuli and malachite that covered them. Yet this was not without its advantages. The acoustics were much improved, and as they stood there among the dim, bare stone or brick arches the choir-monks might have been chanting in a far older church, a church more suited to their singing than the florid Renaissance building the French had found. Their abbot was a very aged man; he had known the last three Grand Masters, he had seen the coming of the French and then of the English, and now his frail but true old voice drifted through the half-ruined aisles pure, impersonal, quite detached from worldly things; and his monks followed him, their song rising and falling like the swell of a gentle sea.
    There were few people in the church and those few could hardly be seen except when they moved past the candles in the side-chapels, most of them being women, whose black, tent-like faldettas merged with the shadows; but when at the end of the service Stephen turned by the holy-water stoup near the door to pay his respects to the altar, he noticed a man sitting near one of the pillars, dabbing his eyes with his handkerchief. His face was lit by a shaft of light from a small high opening on to the secularized cloister, and as he turned Stephen recognized Andrew Wray.
    The doorway was filled with very slowly moving, eagerly talking women, and Stephen was obliged to stand there. Wray's presence surprised him: the penal laws were not what they had been, but even so the acting Second Secretary of the Admiralty could not possibly be a Catholic; and although Stephen had caught sight of Wray at concerts in London from time to time it had never occurred to him that love of music rather than of fashionable company might have brought him. Yet the Secretary's emotion was genuine enough; even when he had composed himself and was walking towards the door his face was grave and deeply moved. The women heaved the leather curtain to one side, the door opened, letting them out and a beam of sunlight in. Wray took no notice of the holy water, nor of the altar - a further proof that he was no Papist. He glanced at Stephen. His expression changed to one of urbane civility and he said 'Dr Maturin, is it not? How do you do, sir? My name is Wray. We met at Lady Jersey's, and I have the honour of being acquainted with Mrs Maturin. I saw her, indeed, a little before I sailed.'
    They talked for a while, blinking in the brilliant sun and speaking of Diana - very well, when seen at the Opera in the Columptons' box; and of common acquaintances, and then Wray suggested a pot of chocolate in an elegant pastry-cook's on the other side of the square.
    'I go to St Simon's as often as I can,' he said as they sat down at a green table in the arbour behind the shop. 'Do you take a delight in plainchant, sir?'
    'I do indeed, sir,' said Stephen, 'provided it be devoid of sweetness or brilliancy or striving for effect, and exactly phrased, no grace-notes, no passing-notes, no showing away.'
    'Exactly so,' cried Wray, 'and no new-fangled melismata either. Angelic simplicity - that is the heart of the matter. And these worthy monks have the secret of it.'
    They talked about modes, agreeing that in general they preferred the Ambrosian to the plagal, and Wray said 'I was at one of their Masses the other day, when they sang the Mixolydian Agnus; and I must confess that the old gentleman's dona nobis pacem moved me almost to tears.'
    'Peace,' said Stephen. 'Shall we ever see it again, in our time?'
    'I doubt it, with the Emperor in his present form.'
    'It is true that I am just come from a church,' said Stephen, 'but even so I could wish to see that tyrant Buonaparte doubly damned to all eternity and back, the dog.'
    Wray laughed and said 'I remember a Frenchman who acknowledged all sorts of very grave faults in Buonaparte, including