Free The Unknown Shore by Patrick O’Brian Page B

turkeys, who were peering at him inquisitively with their little beady eyes, were too preposterous to have been brought on his Majesty’s service, and the keeper turned his back. How unwise was this, how imprudent a move, and how sincerely the keeper regretted his temerity when he felt an iron hand upon his neck and found himself dashed with appalling force into the Monument.
    The Monument, as the world in general knows, is a hollow column, with a spiral staircase inside it: for a brief interval this tube was filled with a whirling mass of keeper, turkey and enraged sailorman, a confused mass that ascended to emerge crimson and breathless on the square parapet under the brass knob that tops the edifice.
    Ransome always carried a knife and a piece of line; he would have felt indecently naked without them. ‘Now, brother,’ he said, showing them to the keeper, ‘you must bear a hand. Because why? Because it’s in the King’s name, that’s why; and I swear I’ll have the quivering liver out of you, else.’ He tapped the keeper pleasantly in the region of his liver, and passed him the turkeys.
    ‘Do you swear it’s in the King’s name?’ asked the keeper in gasps, when he could fetch his breath.
    ‘Yus,’ said Ransome, spitting on his hands and eyeing the brass flames that sprang from the upper part of the Monument.
    ‘I wouldn’t give no countenance otherwise,’ said the keeper. ‘Have you got a wipe?’
    Ransome passed him the powerful square of canvas that served him for a handkerchief, and the keeper neatly hooded the turkeys with it; the birds at once become docile and motionless. ‘You don’t know nothing about fowls,’ he said, with surly self-approbation.
    ‘Now listen, cock,’ said Ransome from amidst the flames, ‘I shall let you down this line, and you must make ‘em fast when I’m atop. And then, do you see, I shall haul ‘em up: and a flaming multitude will turn out: and we shall press a tidy few.’ He spoke slowly, for the top of the Monument is quite unlike the rigging of a ship, and although the two-hundred-foot drop did not worry him, the arrangement of the flames did; for whereas the rigging of a ship isbased upon utility, monumental brass flames are there for architectural effect – a wholly different principle.
    ‘If you had said you was the press earlier, we could of walked up like Christians,’ said the keeper sulkily. ‘Three hundred and forty-five steps, run up like Barbary apes.’
    ‘What?’ called Ransome, round the curve, and perilously engaged with some artistic flames.
    ‘Three hundred and forty-five steps,’ shouted the keeper. ‘Six inches thick.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘And ten and a half wide.’
    ‘All hands aft, Mr Hape,’ said the captain of the press smack.
    The vessel was not so large that all hands could not hear this perfectly well, but they would not have considered it manners to move before the order was officially relayed. All hands, having been properly summoned, stood facing the quarter-deck, not in the stiff, wooden rigidity of soldiers, but in the easy,
dégagée
attitude of sailors – looking, it must be admitted, not unlike a band of dutiful gorillas: for these were the press-gang, equally impervious to the blows of the pressed and to the temptations of the shore.
    ‘Listen to Mr Byron,’ said the captain, whose mind was reeling with the magnitude of the design, and who did not trust himself to do it justice.
    Jack explained it, to the infinite delight of the crew, and said, ‘But this is the great point: I am confident that a friend of mine will be there. He was lost, by reason of being freshly come up from the country. Now here’s a guinea,’ he cried out, pulling one out, ‘and here’s a guinea’ – pulling out another – ‘and if I had any more I would put it down – I can’t say fairer than that, damn your eyes. And the first man to clap him to, shall have them both. He is a little cove, ugly, with light green eyes and a pale