Chapter Six: This Moment Was Both
There have been very few times in our long friendship that Jack Aubrey and I have really fought. Despite our conflicting personas, studies—what have you—we bicker; we do not wage war.
And even fewer times than that have I, as a physician, inflicted pain on another intentionally—in a manner that could have been avoided.
This moment was both.
In four running strides I reached him. Jack had the door partially open already, but I grabbed his ailing shoulder and pressed down with my fingers. He cried out and swung at me; prepared, I leapt backwards. Captain Aubrey glared at me with great anger and greater hurt, clutching his provoked shoulder. My own anger at his behavior was chasing away the remorse I immediately felt at wounding him.
"What is it, Jack? Hmm? Is pushing me away helping?" His eyes shifted evilly into mine.
"Leave it alone, Stephen..." he growled.
"Is starving yourself helping? Is bleeding, Jack? Or, I know, not sleeping for two days might do the trick. My my, you must feel wonderful, Captain Aubrey. It's a wonder you don't look better."
My voice had grown progressively louder and soaked in sarcasm as Jack walked toward me with the threatening stagger of a hunter. I ignored him, squaring my shoulders.
"But above all, Jack..." I continued shouting, "Above all, run away. Don't just tear yourself to pieces. And run away from me especially. Because God knows—and only He knows—what it is I have done to warrant—."
"IT ISN'T YOU, STEPHEN! IT'S ME...IT'S WHAT I'VE DONE." At last he bellowed. When the echo died off, that terrible silence slammed against my head as though the ceiling had fallen on it.
A trickle of blood intersected Jack's eyebrow, causing him to grunt and swab at it. Instinct stepped me forward, instantly less desperate to know what troubled my captain as to ease his obvious discomfort. But the one step I managed pushed him back three.
"Jack—" I whispered, arm outstretched. His head shook from side to side in denial. "Please, just...let me..." Let me pick up the pieces.
" Please." Utter anguish was my last option; if Jack could no longer respond to that perhaps I could not help him.
The bell on the quarterdeck clanged in its bored manner. Scrambling—thudding.
Silence.
Like a crumbling pillar of stone after a hurricane he stood—so still for so long, I began to accept that I would receive no answer in this forum. I turned to the window, to the torrent of windy rain slathering the Surprise.
" I..." I whirled back around, my eyes searching Jack's lips for signs of animation. Had so faint a sound—any sound at all—escaped him? Please speak, brother. Say anything, coherent or otherwise...
"I h-hesitated, Stephen." I closed my eyes for a moment in relief that he was producing sentences of any sort.
"When you were shot...afterwards. It was as though I didn't know what I was supposed to do or what...decision was correct. So I just kept after the Acheron. I HESITATED with your life. Even when I could see it slipping away." He choked on the last, cleared his throat, and continued. Jack's voice raised and sped with each phrase.
"I suppose the reality is that I was so shocked by my own uncertainty, dumbfounded because I—Jack Aubrey—needed someone to tell me what to do. And once I didn't have that, well...my God, Stephen. It wouldn't have been Howard who had killed you but myself, to be sure."
His words clanged in me as though I were standing in proximity to the bells of Notre Dame.
" Good Heavens, Jack. It would have been nothing of the sort—"
" Stephen, in those days—days— that I waited, it was no less my duty to do what was best for this crew. And I couldn't even accomplish that. I was actually coming closer to filling their purses than securing their health and limbs. Regardless of the crew, personally, you were my best friend and I neglect—"
"AM, Jack. I AM your best friend." Jack's glossy eyes rolled about my face with something akin to disbelief.
"I'm not altogether certain I deserve that privilege, Stephen."
It was dim in the cabin now, dark enough for a bolt of lightening to light the deeply etched lines of his face. Jack stood, shoulders drooped inwards, wisps of gold hanging in front of his eyes, which were searching the floor mournfully. I ran a hand over my face, sighing.
" That is nonsense, Jack." I sighed in exasperation. "It's absolute nonsense. You speak as though—"
" Is it, Stephen?" His voice was climbing to a yell. "It's nonsense that after what passed between us in this room at the Galapagos, after I couldn't convince myself that your life was more important than the damned privateer, it's nonsense that I have made a gross error in fellowship towards you?"
" We are both at fault for the Galapagos, Jack. You must share the blame on that account." I matched Jack's volume, suddenly aware that Killick wouldn't need to be hunched over near the doorknob to hear this conversation.
"After the words that I should never have even thought came out of my mouth, I should have been all the more resolute, with all the more celerity, to turn this ship around—as you would have—and return to the islands."
Tell me, dear God Jack, tell me these aren't truly the reasons you've—
Jack turned a hip to me, hand sweeping at his still-bloodied brow. His eyes sought distraction; his breathing was heavy and deep.
" Jack," my voice was high-pitched in my strain of disbelief, "you assume too much, brother. I would have struggled with such a decision as well. Do you really believe that I don't understand you have a duty, Jack? That you have orders? I know I grumble regularly about the service—" Jack's eyebrows raised at this, citing my understatement.
"Alright, I belittle it regularly...but the point is, Jack, I don't harbor any contempt towards you for waiting or weighing your options."
" It...does not...matter, Stephen," he hissed. "The fact remains that I have fai—" Shudders convulsed through his frame and out of his voice. "I am so dreadfully sorry, Stephen. I am sorry for both my inappropriate words and my silence. I am sorry for my actions..." My mind revisited those images. I fought the urge to shudder now.
Distantly he explained why he had fought in such a way aboard the Acheron. "Because I was sure," he said. "I was certain of what I had to do again." Jack paused to let out a shallow, tired sigh.
"But I couldn't control it." There was a terrible agony in his voice, as though he were standing in judgment before some higher being, trying to justify all his days. My shudders transformed into aches: My God. What dark workings go on beneath the façade of such commanding skin.
"I have failed you, Stephen. In more ways than one..." He could not continue, as his eyes had plowed into my face. I could not move. In all the twisting explanations I had spun in my head for his behavior, I never imagined that the unshakeable Aubrey had frightened himself into a vicious stupor.
"Joy..." I finally whispered, closing the space between us, arm outstretched. He flinched away from me still, without making eye contact.
"No, Stephen." His tears were real now. "No." Jack set his teeth definitively, fingered the stained cloth in his hands, and shuffled back to the door. I was sent reeling.
You can't actually be—you aren't—going back out there. I had to stop him, had to say something to stop him...the door was opening, he was stepping through—
"Jack, if this is all some...production to weasel gratitude out of me, you've far out done yourself, brother."
That did it. Jack Aubrey froze in the doorframe, head slowly rising to rest proudly between the sculpted shoulders. And when he turned around to see the smirk I wore, his fatigued face showed his amusement—his "well argued" admission.
When I approached this time, he did not flinch or thrash or flee. Jack stood certainly still, as though awaiting instructions. One of his massive hands wandered behind him to re-shut the door. Both our expressions shed their momentary lightness; pain still leaked through his drooping features and tears were still threatening.
"You have punished yourself enough, now, and unreasonably so. Come, sit down before you fall down, joy..." He let me lead him to his hammock.
" Stephen, your life is more dear than mere orders. How could I ever—?"
"Shhh...be still now." I leaned over him, trying to examine his forehead. The cut was long but shallow and he flinched as I pressed a proper cloth to it. For the first time in nearly a week, Jack Aubrey was sitting still, breathing normally.
It was while I was fastening to the bandages to his head that I felt the sickly heat surrounding the captain. The long hours in the rain were taking their effect. His eyes questioned me when I pressed a hand to the back of his neck, gauging how high the fever already was.
You love too deeply, Jack Aubrey. And look where it has brought you again. You love just too deeply...
Shouts preceded the familiar cracking, snapping, crunching of wood on deck. Jack's peace snapped with it, and he sprang to his feet. I was forced to step backwards (again) as he muttered something about the mizzenmast.
"Jack, you have a high fever..." I began, making no effort to harness my exasperation. "You cannot withstand another fifteen minutes in this rain."
"Her masts are breaking, Stephen. How many more would you have me lose, sitting idly by?" In a thunderclap he was back out the door, leaving it half-open so that I could see Killick in his shadows. Slowly the steward shuffled back into the room.
"You weren't sitting idly by..." I scolded to Killick, who, for the first time I can remember, openly agreed with me.
"Which I am assuming it is not taken care of?" he grumbled soon afterwards. I slammed my materials around and jammed them under my arm.
"No, Killick, it is not. Shame on me for not tying him down when I had the chance."
I stormed back to my berth, accepting defeat at last. The trouble with you Jack Aubrey is that one can ever carry on any sort of meaningful discourse before you fly off to coddle your damned boat...
Feeling in a most unreasonable mood, I opened my sketchbook to continue working, determined to pay no mind to the calls or thuds on deck. No injuries from the collapse were appearing, so I had nothing to distract me. Nothing...
Every time there was a thump, I imagined it was Jack finally falling unconscious.
Every officer's call was for my name, shouted urgently in a panic.
Every bolt of lightening, assurance that some tragedy would occur.
I managed no measurable amount of time at my books, the torpid ocean not allowing for one controlled line. And the deck above me was growing eerily quiet; soon it seemed minutes had passed since there had been any calls to the wind. I, alarmed, raced from my headquarters, out through the berth, straight into Tom Pullings.
"Doctor..." he panted, a lake already forming at his feet. Jack Aubrey was hanging in between his shoulders and Peter Calamay's.
"Dear God, what happened?" I questioned, snapping out of my surprise and helping to move the heavy captain.
"Not sure, sir," Tom managed. "The Captain couldn't seem to keep his feet. I went to help him up and noticed how uncommonly warm he is, especially considering this freezing rain." I listened to what I already knew while clearing a proper space to lay Jack down, at long last. But as we tried to move him again, lucidness returned to Jack and he shook the midshipman and lieutenant off of him.
"Thank you Mr. Calamy, Mr. Pullings. That will be quite enough..." he slurred out, motioning for them to leave. They looked to me for their orders though, and I nodded my consent.
"Her mizzen mast was broken clean in half, lines are snapping with each gust of wind. Our foretop sail is in shreds...if this storm doesn't do us in..." Jack raised his eyebrows in question. And what of Jack Aubrey, hmm? What is broken in him?
As he rattled on about parts of the ship I didn't even recognize, I shuffled his burly frame over to a table, forcing him to sit. The wrappings on his forehead were pink: soaked through already with blood, the rain making them limp and useless. I changed them rapidly, anxiety at Jack's over-heated person and clammy hands mounting.
"Stephen..." his voice was so very timid and his darting eyes so uneasy.
"What is it, my dear?"
"Shoulder...hurts..." I could have chuckled at his childlike manner if I were not so distraught. I had nearly put aside the signs of his ailment and Jack has had a great many things happen to him without so much as an "owww."
Slowly I peeled away his wet jacket and tunic. He watched me intently, then dropped his eyes away, like a puppy who didn't want me to discover what he had done in the other room. As his shirt slid down off of his right shoulder, I met my new challenge.
The end of a bayonet had had its way with Jack's shoulder. It had had its way five times.
All the shades of purple, green, and gray surrounded the infected area, spreading far down his arm. The wounds themselves were an angry, deep scarlet, struggling to close themselves without proper stitching.
"Joy...what is this?" My voice screeched. I placed three fingers with ghostly gentleness near one of the deep holes and trembled, yanking back, when Jack cried out.
"Stephen..." Jack groaned. His eyes were so weary now; my own were stinging knowing that I could not spare him every pain.
"Jack Aubrey," I began, sternly as possible, "you know far better than this. Dear God—Jack..." He began to chuckle.
"If you were so very angry, Stephen, it would be all done and over with by now."
I eased him down flat, allowing him to relax ever so slightly. And when I had found some dry blankets to wrap around his feverish body, I started to clean Jack's disastrous limb.
When the three large stab wounds were sewed up, I enclosed the shoulder in clean bandages and let it be. The eyes so long clamped shut slid open and smiled at me.
"I'm so very sorry..." Jack Aubrey whispered at me, in the shadowy room. I might as well have choked on my heart.
"Love, no...you have nothing to...no..." I pressed my cool hand to his sweaty brow. He nodded softly and made his attempt to sleep.
I exhaled at last, near three in the morning, when I could feel his fever declining. The rain had drizzled its last and the lower decks became crowded again now that the men could finally rest. I felt at peace for what seemed the first time in all my years and dropped off to sleep beside the captain.