Beyond the screen bisecting the captain's cabin Morris heard Captain Rakitin leave his indolent young companion while he took his exercise on deck. Morris, wrapped in his silk robe, touched the shoulder of his Ganymede and pointed at the screen. Impassively the boy rose and slipped past the end of the partition where, at the stern windows, communication between the divided cabin was possible. Morris waited, composing his face to its most benign expression, smoking a long, thin Burmese cheroot.
'Good morning,' he said as Chirkov, summoned by curiosity, followed the turbaned pixie. 'Please sit down. I hear you speak excellent English. Would you care for a glass ...?'
The boy produced a porcelain bottle and poured samsu into one of Drinkwater's glasses. Standing, Chirkov tossed back the glass, the raw rice spirit rasping his throat with a fire reminiscent of vodka. The glass was refilled. The Russian seemed reluctant to sit.
'We are both prisoners of Captain Drinkwater ...' Morris began experimentally, pleased with the contemptuously dismissive gesture made by Chirkov.
'You do not like Captain Drinkwater?' Morris asked.
'No! He is doing me dishonour, great dishonour. I will fight and shoot one of his officers soon.'
'A duel, eh? Well, well.' Morris motioned the boy to produce more samsu. 'And what is this great dishonour the ignoble Captain has done you?' Morris's voice had a soothing, honeyed tone.
'He ordered me to be beaten!' Chirkov spluttered indignantly.
'Beaten?' Morris's tongue flickered pinkly over his lips in a quicksilver reaction of heightened interest. He flickered a commanding glance at the Indian boy and more samsu tinkled into Chirkov's glass to be tossed back by the impetuous Russian. 'How barbaric,' Morris muttered sympathetically. 'And it is still painful, eh?'
Chirkov nodded, watching the boy pour yet more samsu. 'Oui ... yes.'
'I have a salve ... a medicine, specific against such a wound. If it is not treated it may fester.' Morris smiled, reassuringly. 'You do not want gangrene, do you?' Abstractedly Morris touched the glowing end of his cheroot to a bundle of sticks by his elbow.
'Gangrene?' Chirkov frowned.
'Mortification ...'
Chirkov understood and the dull gleam of alarm deliberately kindled by Morris appeared in his fuddled eyes.
'Would you like me to ... ? Morris's hands made a gesturing of massage and he addressed a few words of Hindi to the Indian boy.
Samsu and sympathy and the strange scent that wafted now about the cabin from joss-sticks burning in a brass pot beside Morris dissolved the young man's suspicions. The turbanned boy returned to his master's side with a pot of unguent. Morris made a sign for Chirkov to expose himself. Morris smiled a complicit smile and Chirkov, drunk and of sensuous disposition, did as he was bid. Morris dipped his hands in the salve and began to apply it as Chirkov, holding on to the edge of the table, stood before him.
For a few seconds a heavy silence filled the cabin. Morris felt the fierce triumph of discovery as Chirkov's compliance revealed his own hedonistic nature and then the Russian too was aware of the most pleasurable and undreamed of sensations' flooding through him as the tongueless boy obeyed his master's instructions.
'A glass, Mr Ballantyne?'
'Er, thank you, Mr Quilhampton.' Ballantyne struggled with the awkward surname. In the post-daylight gloom of the wardroom Quilhampton pushed the glass across the table, taking two fingers off its base as Ballantyne seized it. Then, holding the neck of the decanter in one hand, his own glass in the other, he tipped his chair back against the heel of the ship and with the unthinking ease of long practice, threw both feet on to the edge of the table. Ballantyne watched with fascination, for the hand in which Quilhampton held his glass, his left, was of wood.
'A rum thing, ain't it?' remarked the unabashed lieutenant.
'I beg your pardon, Mr Q ...' Ballantyne's overwhelming predilection for formality was one of his characteristic features. 'You lost it in action, I believe?'
'Yes. Damned careless of me, wasn't it? Have a biscuit. No? Then pass the barrel, there's a good fellow.'
'Have you had much experience of action?' There was an eagerness in Ballantyne's question that, together with other remarks he had made, had provoked a character analysis from Mount that suggested the new sailing master nurtured a desire to distinguish himself. 'To prove himself,' Mount had explained, with a knowing look that attributed Ballantyne's desire for glory to his coloured skin.
'Action?' remarked Quilhampton. 'Yes, I've seen enough. And you, have you had much experience with women, Mr Ballantyne, for I'm woefully ignorant upon the subject.'
'Women?' A faint light of astonishment filled Ballantyne's eyes. 'But you talk often of your woman, Mr Q ...'
'Because I am a besotted fool,' Quilhampton said in an attempt at flippancy, 'but I want to know of women, of the gender as a whole, not one in particular.'
'What is it you want to know?'
'Have you known many women?'
'Of course. Many, many women.' Ballantyne rolled his head in his quaint, exotic manner.
'Can a woman love a man with a wooden hand?'
'Now you are asking about one woman, Mr Q, and I am not comprehending you.'
'But to answer honestly you need to have known many women,' Quilhampton replied, a faint edge of desperation entering his voice.
'That is true. But I cannot answer for the particular ...'
'No.' Quilhampton's face fell. In the silence the messman entered with a lantern.
'But ...' said Ballantyne as the man retired, 'but I think it would be easier for a woman to love a man with a wooden hand than for a man to love a woman with a wooden leg.'
Quilhampton paused in the act of refilling his glass and stared at Ballantyne. The master was deadly serious and suddenly Quilhampton burst into laughter, giggling uncontrollably so that he only got all four chair legs and both his feet back on the deck with difficulty.
'What the devil is this rumpus?' asked Mount, emerging from his cabin, unfamiliarly attired in shirt-sleeves.
'Ballantyne,' gasped Quilhampton, 'Ballantyne is making up riddles ...'
Mount leaned against the door frame of his cabin and looked upon the young lieutenant indulgently as Quilhampton recounted the conversation. Switching his glance to the master Mount was aware that Quilhampton's unbridled mirth had irritated Ballantyne. He was bristling with affront, unable to see anything beyond Quilhampton's ridicule of his remark. Mount was quick to retrieve the situation.
'Perhaps, Mr Ballantyne, you would favour me with an answer to a more serious question than a young jackanapes like James is capable of framing.'
'What is it, Mr Mount?' Ballantyne asked, suspicious now that the two Englishmen were going to bat him back and forth like a shuttlecock.
'I heard you remark to the Captain that you knew something of our somewhat unusual passenger. Who, or what exactly is he?'
Quilhampton was still giggling, but Mount's question almost silenced him for he could make his own contribution to its answer. Almost, for his amusement was sustained by the sudden overwhelmingly serious cast that Ballantyne's swarthy features assumed. It seemed to Quilhampton that this gravity of its own accord drew Mount to a vacant chair, and his amusement only subsided slowly, for his sensibilities still lingered on Catriona MacEwan, the point from which his question arose.