5. The Alameda Gardens

The expedition to the Alameda Gardens was an unqualified success. It left Mavis with a sunburnt nose, a soaking, and pockets full of the most wondrous cones and berries; Sophie with her long-set-aside sketchbook newly alive with several delicate little watercolour pages of light and shade, leaves, flowers and figures; and Pelham with the realization that he loved her.

It came upon him quite suddenly, as she sat beside him on a stone step, her little box of colours on the ground next to her, making a quick and charming impression of Mavis across a little courtyard trailing her hand in a fountain, and carrying on a conversation with Pelham at the same time. Her manner with him was so – unmannered, he thought; he could be comfortable for ever talking to her. Pelham had never been known to suffer fools gladly. The greater the weight of responsibilities his shoulders came to bear, the more impatient he became with wasting time, with ignorance and stupidity, with lack of common sense and limited understanding. Sophie’s company seemed to him like water in the desert.

Her intelligence rivalled his, so that he never had to explain or wait for her to catch up with his thinking; she understood at once, before his thoughts were half-formed, where he was going with them; and she offered in return ideas that bore the mark of reflection, candour and a complete lack of pretension. If she had ever put on airs in her life (which he doubted), that time must have been long since; for now she simply conversed with him, giving as good as she got, and meeting his eyes from time to time with an open and frank expression that felt like the recognition of a lifelong, beloved friend.

He watched her hand make the brush an extension of itself, picking up colour and forming a little splash here, a line there, a daub, a smudge – all the while asking him about the Indomitable and his command, and telling him stories of Gibraltar during the siege, unaware that she was pausing in the middle of her sentences to look up at Mavis and back down at her page.

Pelham was heartily tired of the effort of charming women; and more so of their efforts to charm him, which he had far rather they would not make. Who wants to feel that their company requires an effort? he thought. That is why she is so perfectly wonderful; it is effortless to be with her, she says what she thinks, and desires the same of me; perhaps I am even coming to love her.

Oh; but there is that dangerous word. What must it mean, if it is so? Partings and tears, quarrels and expectations, disappointments and disillusionment, surely.

No, it wouldn’t, he answered himself. It would mean that I could lay my head in her lap and she would cradle it, and go on talking to me in just that pleasant tone – it would mean that I could look at her and not shield my regard from her, and she would look back in the same fashion – it would mean that I could confide in her completely, and trust her to keep my confidences – it would mean coming into her arms, and being received with the same warmth and grace she is showing me at this moment as her friend.

I have found the still centre of the world, thought Pelham, around which all revolves. And in her person resides all that is needful. It is as simple as that. Or is it? No; it is also that to behold her is not enough; I shall not have the peace I seek, until I am gathered to the heart of her. I must surrender all my rank and put aside my defences, and come to her as a man, naked as the day I was born, and lose myself in her until I faint upon her bosom. Oh, Christ! How do I dare do that? But — what is so terrible about saying, I want her? Nothing less will suffice, that is the simple truth of it. I want to come home to her; I want her arms to be my home. I “request and require” it; I need it. Will it be safe? Will she accept me, thus? And if she does not, what am I to do then?

Sophie, having no idea of the direction his thoughts had taken, looked up apologetically: “You have grown quiet! I’m so sorry, I must have become absorbed in my painting.”

“No,” he said, “I had become absorbed in watching you.”

She looked at the ground and a deep flush filled her cheeks.

What a poor scrub I am, with my mealy-mouthed timid “perhaps”, and “coming to love her,” Pelham told himself sternly. It is a fact – there is no denying it. To be with her feeds my soul. When will I tell her so?

“I am sorry to have been such poor company,” she said, “that that is all I left for you to do.”

“It was my choice,” said Pelham. “I was struck dumb by a thought I had.”

“And what was that?”

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he thought.

“That I want nothing more at this moment than to put my head in your lap, Sophie.” It was the first time he had called her by her given name.

She turned her face to him, then. Across it chased expressions of shock and painful disbelief; hope; wonder; fear; and something unveiled in her eyes which made his heart thump inside his chest. Her cheeks were sharply flushed. She is not beautiful, he thought; except she is, because I see her inside and out, and I want all I see. If only I had more to offer her in return!

She moved her sketchbook from her lap. Oh, God, thought Pelham, could it really be as easy as this?

A loud splash made them both look up in spite of themselves. Mavis had overbalanced and fallen in the fountain.

They ran to her rescue, fished her out spluttering and protesting that she could have managed perfectly on her own, thank you, and patted her as dry as could be achieved by two clean handkerchiefs, one large and one small. But the spell was broken, and Pelham did not know how to get the moment back.

They strolled on through the shaded walks and lovely vistas, Sophie collecting herself by answering his questions about the flowers, their families and Latin names according to her Hortus – Pelham shared her pleasure in the economical precision of specialized words, whether in his own trade or any other – and Mavis running ahead with her helter-skelter, leggy impetuousness that reminded Pelham of a colt’s. She is verging on that awkward age, he thought, where she will be all knees and elbows, graceless, finding fault with herself.

The subject seemed too overwhelming to broach again, and each was quiet with their own thoughts as much as they spoke together. From time to time Sophie looked up at Pelham with a combination of fear and shyness he had not seen in her before. On coming to some rough stone steps, he offered her his arm. She took it, and he folded his fingers over hers, and kept them there for fully quarter of an hour longer as they walked slowly side-by-side.

We have turned a corner, thought Pelham, and neither of us quite knows where it leads, or what we are to do – except that we do know, and that is the most frightening thing of all. But it will be all right. It is all about being all right.

Mavis was busy with some vermilion hibiscus-flowers, stroking their polleny tongues and turning the dropped ones upside-down like ladies in ball-gowns on the flagstones. “I don’t even know what your title is for,” said Sophie to Pelham. “Did they knight you for extraordinary bravery?”

“No, they just decorated me for that,” he twinkled at her, trying to make light of what must come next, for her sake. “No, it’s a family title, a very minor one, in Devon. I never expected to carry it – I was the youngest of three brothers, that’s why I went into the Navy. But – now I’m the only survivor in the male line, so – like it or not, it’s mine.”

“Oh.” Sophie became very occupied with her book and paints, before she spoke. “I’m so sorry about your brothers. Your poor mother!”

“Oh – indeed – though I am quite sure she’d survive anything – even the Flood. But yes – yes. It was a shame.” He shook his head: he had not called Harry or George to mind in a good while. He should do so, more often. Did his mother miss them? She had never said so. She must, though. He had not said so either, after all: but he had. He changed the subject: “What about you?”

“I was an only daughter. My father longed for a son, but when he had none he poured all his love of learning into me.” She paused. “He made clocks, you may recall.”

“Of course. Your beautiful long-case clock. Josiah Goodenough, if I am not mistaken? Remember, ma’am, you are speaking to a sailor. We love clockmakers, we live by their art. They have given us the key to our position at sea – the longitude – which is to say, to our very lives. To us it is one of the highest callings.”

“Mama! Captain Pelham! Look, it’s a ball. An admiralty ball. Here are the captains – ” Mavis had picked up some long, shiny black pods of some kind, and arranged them into ranks – “and here are the ladies, all dressed up. May I have the honour of this dance, madame?” She grabbed hold of Pelham’s hands and swung him around, giggling, till she fell down. He reeled slightly, gave his head a quick jerk to clear it, and came back to Sophie. She held her hand out to him and he took it; her fingers rested on his arm. Her nails were unfashionably short, little white slivers like new moons against the blue-black wool of his uniform: the hands of a woman who did not sit idly by while others did for her.

They walked on.

Pelham drew cannons in Sophie’s sketchbook, at Mavis’s request, following a brief revisit to the subject of fractions. He then explained Sir Home Popham’s most excellent and ingenious improvements to the Naval signalling system, by which a simple numerical reference could be made to any number of common words and phrases in the Signals Book carried by every ship – although by some lamentable and most unaccountable oversight the name “Mavis” was not included in the list, nor “Sophie” neither (but of course he promised to bring this omission to the attention of Their Lordships the very next time he should find himself at the Admiralty) – it being necessary in the meantime to spell them out letter by letter in the signal-hoist, thus: M-A-V-I-S – and he drew the flags for her. Sophie coloured them in, at his direction; Mavis added cannonballs.

Together they speculated upon the musical qualities of the hind legs of grasshoppers, and knelt to observe that most curious of native weeds, the “squirtwort” as Mavis called it. She gleefully demonstrated its remarkable seed-dispelling habit to Pelham, who obliged her by saying “I’ll be damned!” when a ripe pod discharged its liquid contents all over his shoe-buckle from the stem end, whence he did not expect it (though, of course, she did). Sophie had become pensive, quiet. That is all right, too, said Pelham to himself; it is a damned big thing to contemplate.

They sat at a rickety wooden table and ordered lemonade, and rested there under huge palm trees sipping it. “Mavis, you should have worn a bonnet,” said Sophie reproachfully, “the sun has kissed your nose again!”

“Who cares about freckles, anyway?” Mavis tossed over her shoulder, as she ran to investigate a small lizard she had just spotted sunning itself on the stone wall.

“Clearly not you, my love,” laughed her mother.

Call me that, one day, if you please – and let it be soon, thought Pelham. Since the moment of epiphany over the sketch-book, he had been suffering under several confused and contradictory desires – to grasp her by the arms, pull her to him and kiss her, right here in public; to woo her patiently, until she saw as clearly as he did the inevitability, the perfection, the all-rightness of their union – although God knew he was not a patient man; to come to her in the night and ask simply to be taken into her life and her bed. That last choice seemed the least correct, but it was the one he found himself longing for.

The lizard left behind its tail. On showing-off her prize, Mavis let it fall into her lemonade. Pelham retrieved it and she drank the rest anyway. “What?” she said, “I’m thirsty!”

“Are you! Well – we should be getting along, my dears, before I must take my leave – ”

“Oh! Do you have to go?”

“Mavis,” reproached her mamma, “the Captain’s got his duty to do. You know that, darling. We must count ourselves very, very fortunate that he has spared us this whole afternoon!”

“But, Captain Pelham – why can’t you come and go as you please? You’re the captain!”

“Mavis, is it possible that I detect a whine?” said Pelham, raising one eyebrow in an expression that had caused midshipmen to quake in their buckled shoes.

“Sorry! I just want to know why you can’t be the one to decide what you do.”

“But I am,” said Pelham, “and that is why I must take my leave of you. I must make myself do so, Mavis, with no-one to tell me. Self-discipline is the hardest kind of all, child – as you will learn one day. It is the requisite of an officer. That is why they made me a captain. His Majesty King George is counting on me for the defence of his realm. I cannot let him down!”

“Oh.” Mavis dragged the toe of her shoe in the dust. “You make it sound as if he asked you himself!”

Pelham frowned, then. “Mavis, you are making light of something which is more sacred to me than the Almighty himself. Duty is not a word, child – it is my honour you so lightly question. Hm? Nothing in the world counts more with me than that. Without it I am nothing; it is more to me than my friends, my family – my life even.”

“Are you cross with me?”

“No,” said Pelham, “I want you to understand.”

Mavis bit her lip. Her hero had employed a sterner tone with her than she had heard from him yet: a glimpse of the steel in him, hitherto hidden by his kindness. They made their way home in a mood now subdued and flat. Mavis felt it keenly as they walked in silence. “Please don’t be cross with me,” she quavered.

Pelham sighed. “Mavis, if I have been harsh, forgive me. I – do not take my duty lightly, child. And – truth to tell – I think I have been accusing myself of putting my duty second, a little. I am not used to indulging in the pleasures of a social life on shore, d’you see.” She made no answer – he bent to take a quick look at her downturned face. How easily a hard word from him could wound, he thought – he was unused to sparing tender feelings. “Mavis, listen to me. If I were to be cross with you, my dear, you should most certainly know about it. All about it. You would not have to ask me!”

“Why?”

“Because when I am cross, Mavis, I raise my voice in tones you have not heard from me, and please God you never shall – not unless you offend against discipline and commit the gravest dereliction of your duty!”

Now she knew he was funning with her again, and as the weight fell from her shoulders she skipped and smiled up at him. “Such as what?”

“Well, let me see. Mavis, have you recently been most reprehensibly, horribly, disgustingly drunk?”

She shook her head.

“And a good thing too. No blasphemy, I hope?”

“Well I learned a word from your sailors that made mamma blush, but it wasn’t blasphemy!”

“Good lord, Mavis – heaven forbid! Well, then, no foul language in the presence of ladies and officers either, d’you hear me?”

“Yes!”

“What about mutiny and seditious talk? There’d better not have been any of that. That’s a hanging offence. No complaining about the vittles, neither, my dear, or else I shall be compelled to have you flogged.”

“Mama doesn’t make me eat things I don’t like.”

“A kind and wise woman. Now on this next head, Mavis, I fear you shall not get away so lightly. What about order and cleanliness? Do you scrub your decks every morning? Is your cabin shipshape – not a thing out of place, and everything painted and polished to within an inch of its life?”

“I don’t have a cabin!”

“What about your room, then, Miss?”

“Oh.” She hung her head.

“Well, there’s always room for improvement, even in the best young midshipman, my dear, so now we know where you are to direct greater efforts, do we not?”

Mavis put her hand in his. Sophie was on his other arm – Pelham being most acutely conscious of the light pressure of her hand, which he would not have given up for the world – so they walked three abreast up the hill: he felt the nearness of his leaving, and the child’s need to hold onto him, so he did not cast her off despite the awkwardness of their passage through the narrow street.

Not one of them but felt it to be too soon, when the moment came for him to take leave of them and return to the Indy – his other mistress, most jealous of his time and energies. The afternoon had passed so swiftly, in such pleasant pastimes. His moment of truth-telling lay in the middle of it like a rough gemstone on the ground, waiting to be picked up. Sophie got busy with her book and paints, and would have let him go without referring to it again; so Pelham had to. After all, being decisive was his stock-in-trade. He took her chin between finger and thumb. She did not resist. He tilted her face up to his and gave her a long look. He ought to just kiss her and get it over with. Lord knew he wanted to, very badly so, but that was out of the question – wasn’t it? Not here: not in public. But when, then? Oh, God, but it would be so easy to do so, now, with her upturned face inches from his. Would she pull away, if he did? For a second he felt foolish, having set himself up without first knowing what to say, until it came to him in one of those moments of “it’s all right”-ness, and he found that he did know.

“Sophie –– ”

“Yes, Edward?”

His name sounded different, when she said it.

“I meant it,” he said simply.

She nodded.

He watched her walk the last few yards to her door, the sway of her hips, the lovely line of her like a ship under sail; the rich crown of her hair tumbling from its confinement under her bonnet. Please, God, let it be all right, he prayed; and let her take me to her soon, before I am altogether crazed with longing for it.

*********************

They usually had no faces, the nubile women who visited Pelham’s dreams from time to time, and disported themselves while he watched in an erotic fever of pleasure. This night he was the fountain, however, helpless to prevent himself from spilling, and Sophie looked up at him with the pearls of his seed in her hair and all across her full, sweet, naked bosom: “Yes, Edward,” she said.

He woke then, wet and trembling. “Oh, God,” he said, “what am I to do?”

Unable to find further sleep, he put on his dressing-gown and came to his desk in the wide day-cabin. He sat for a while in the semi-darkness.

Come, man, he told himself; it is now or never. I know – I cannot fail to know – that there is a moment in every situation which must be seized when it comes, or the momentum is lost and the world turns anyway. I have spent my life learning to recognize it, and act with decision, before the opportunity is snatched away by the same hand that gave it, for want of grasping it in that moment. So – let her decide; I can but ask.

He reached to light a candle; hesitated ; thought better of it; sat back. And yet – it is so hard a life I am asking her to assume; to be able to give her so little a portion of my time, even though she has my heart entirely – what does that mean, if I must be absent so much? To spare her a few hours and days in the intervals permitted by my duties – can my name and my ring alone sustain her, when she has had no word from me in months and must rise from her empty bed each day not knowing if I am alive or dead?

He reached once more for the candle by which to see paper, pen and ink. The match flared, the flame guttered a moment and caught. Its small wavering light filled the cabin.

And yet – how can I fail to act, now that I have seen the possibility of a kind of fulfillment I never suspected might exist, in the whole of my life up till now?

He picked up the pen, and before he should have further occasion to think otherwise, wrote.

Sophie – you see before you the new Galileo. I have discovered that the universe is Sophi-centric, and that I have fallen into such a gravitational pull, there is no resisting – I must fall all the way. How far shall I fall? Will you receive me? I must know. Edward.

*********************

The young midshipman had been told to ask if there was to be an answer. Sophie broke the seal, and read the few lines. She leaned against the wall and drew a deep breath. She read it again.

Life is risk, she thought.

“Please wait just a moment,” she said to the young man, trying to keep her voice from trembling. She went into the house and returned almost immediately with a folded piece of paper. “I don’t know where my sealing-wax has got to,” she said, “but it doesn’t really matter.”

“If you say so, ma’am,” said the teenaged officer in his Britannic Majesty’s Navy, all six feet of him in his blue-and-white uniform, remembering to bow a few seconds too late; put the scrap of paper in his pocket, and sprinted back to the ship.

Pelham was on the quarter-deck when he returned with Sophie’s message. The furrows in the Captain’s face grew deeper when he saw the boy climb back aboard.

What is going on here? wondered the midshipman.

“Well, man? Have you got a reply?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Well, give it to me – !”

The midshipman fumbled in his pockets, first one, then the other; found the note; handed it over.

Pelham turned his back and strode to the ship’s rail, where he unfolded the paper, with its one word.

6. Love & Duty

His Britannic Majesty’s Navy was not satisfied with the demands it had placed so far that week upon Captain Pelham. Shortly after receiving Sophie’s note, while his guts were still in a ferment of agitation and anticipation, another message came aboard for him: the Vice Admiral’s compliments to Captain Sir Edward Pelham, and he was to repair at once to the Vice Admiral’s ship to receive further orders.

He let himself down into the waiting boat, noting the glazed black straw hats and matching striped shirts of its crew with a mixture of scorn and (if he were to be honest) a small dash of envy. His own men could put on a smart turn-out when the occasion demanded, but they were first and foremost the crew of a fighting-ship, highly-trained in action and all matters pertaining to seamanship; still, they remained individuals, and he had not got them up like footmen for the satisfaction of his own vanity, or to increase the Indy’s consequence. If Froggy paid half the attention to training his gun-crews that he did to their appearance in port, they’d be a damned sight greater credit to the Navy, was his considered opinion on the subject.

These reflections turned to a kind of resignation as the boat pulled up to the Admiral’s flagship. Whatever Froggy wanted, it was most likely going to interfere with his new and as yet tender plans for his personal life. Damn, thought Pelham, could the man not have waited twenty-four hours?

He could not; or at least, the French would not allow it. A couple of enemy ships had escaped the blockade of Cadiz Harbour, and the Indomitable was to go after them and hunt them down, leading a small force in pursuit.

“How close are ye to being ready, Pelham?” asked the Admiral, taking snuff with an exaggerated gesture.

“If we work through the night, sir, we can be completely ready by morning – say, an hour after sunrise – half past six or so. What of the other ships, sir?”

“They’ll follow you out – I spoke to their captains earlier. They’ll be coming aboard in a few minutes to go over it all. Snuff, sir?”

“No, thank you, sir.”

The Vice Admiral sniffed again, from the other nostril this time. “Don’t let ’em get away, Pelham. Find them, sir! I’ll be damned if those Frenchies are going to sneak about free as they please on my watch!”

“No, sir. You said Grampus and Ajax, sir?”

“I did – why, isn’t that enough for you?”

“Not at all, sir; the three of us should be plenty. I was just adding up their guns – the sea-room we’ll need – Grampus don’t steer too close to the wind, she’s not built for it, so we’ll have to accommodate her – damn. Wind’s from the nor-nor-west – we’ll have the devil of a job beating past the strait, unless it shifts.”

“You know your business, Captain Pelham – I just expect you to do it, sir!”

Pelham returned from the meeting with a hundred things coursing through his brain. He called his officers into his cabin and outlined their orders; then gave each one very precise instructions on his responsibilities between now and the time they should set sail. He requested and received fresh reports on the state of readiness of everything in the ship, from stem to stern, frowning and nodding in turn, as appropriate, over the work that had been accomplished during his brief absence that afternoon. His mind engaged itself at double-speed, as if he had hauled up additional mental canvas, planning every move – the thought processes involved having some things in common with a piece of meticulous engineering, and yet others with a chess game.

Yes, he could buy himself the time. Not much, but if his officers didn’t let him down, he could still leave port the next day a little further towards resolving his private life and future happiness. He was well aware that putting out to sea meant leaving for an indefinite period, with no certainty of a swift return or indeed of any return in the foreseeable future; and so he set everything in motion that was humanly possible, and dismissed everyone from his cabin: “Now, cut along and get it done, gentlemen! Have everyone mind their lanterns – we want a ship that’s ready to sail, not a blazing hulk. Well – there’s a lot to do – don’t dawdle!”

Two notes from me in one day, he thought: poor Sophie! Hurry up and wait, as they said; that was the life of a Naval wife, to be sure, and she was getting a generous taste of it already.

He pulled out another sheet of paper, and wrote quickly without allowing himself to take time in composition:

My very dearest Sophie:

Your note filled me with the keenest joy, as you knew it must. I would hear it again from you directly, so as to believe it altogether. I have just now received orders that we are to make sail in the morning, and must make all haste to have my ship ready to comply. It is not possible for me to wait on you before midnight; but by then, if all my orders have been followed exactly, I hope to be able to come ashore for a short time to see you, hold you, hear it again from your own lips, and take leave of you (for now). Shall you be up? I will knock quietly, so as not to wake Mavis. I hope to see you – you cannot know how much. Your obedient servant, Edward Pelham.

Too cool of a signing-off, he said to himself, but it’s written now and it’ll have to do. Hastily he folded and sealed it. “Cooper!”

Partridge came running into the cabin on his roar.

“Fetch Mr. Cooper, sir, smartly now, and tell him he is to go ashore at once –

take this – same place as before, with my compliments. I need him back here right away, so tell him not to wait for an answer this time.”

“Yes, sir.”

Pelham turned the full force of his attention once more on the task of getting the Indy ready for a prolonged chase and the very good chance of a fight.

********************

“Captain Pelham’s compliments, ma’am. He said I wasn’t to wait for an answer – lots to do on board ship!”

“I see. Er – thank you, Midshipman – ”

“Cooper, Ma’am.”

“Thank you, Midshipman Cooper. My compliments in return.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Cooper set off down the hill at a run.

Sophie opened the note and read its terse lines. It was not what she expected to see, and the news that he was about to sail again brought a cry to her lips.

Well, then, tonight it must be, she thought. I am totally lost, now. I shall be a fallen woman by morning. I wanted him to want me, and now he does, so I have got what I asked for. What shall I do when I lose him? Oh God, help me be strong enough to bear it!

Later, putting Mavis to bed, she looked down at her and reproached herself for her selfishness. I am risking all – all – to become the mistress of a man I did not know, three months ago. He might break our hearts. He will. One day, sooner or later, he will grow tired and move on – or be sent back to Portsmouth, and forget us – and I am willing to accept all that, a storehouse of loss in the future, that I am laying up grief by grief, just to hold him now? Because he said he wanted to lay his head in my lap, and my womb cramped and liquefied? Because I do not want to go to my grave never having known what it is to have the man I love in my bed? Because he has asked me?

And yet still there was no other answer possible than yes.

***************************

Pelham had hurried; he was out of breath when she opened to his soft knock. It was half past midnight. Sophie stepped back inside the passageway and opened her arms to him, and he came into them and gathered her so tightly to him, she thought her ribs must crack. His right hand came up to cup her cheek, and he said, “Is it still yes?”

“Of course,” she said, “ – you knew that!”

“Oh, God, Sophie,” he said, and stood catching his breath enough to kiss her. When he did it was in disbelief, careful and deliberate at first as if finding his mark and then when he did so, suddenly very hard indeed.

She fitted perfectly into his arms. Her nearness overwhelmed him; the warmth of her. He had not kissed a woman in fifteen years; never, with such abandon — had to stop, to catch his breath again.

He drew back to look at her. He was expecting some passionate midnight meeting, to kiss her at last and discover the anguish of tearing himself from her while aroused hopelessly, as he knew he would be – as he was, to within an inch of his life, or so it felt, but he had expected that – and, please God, with her promise to be his safely given and taken. He had most certainly not expected her to be dressed in her nightgown. He blinked.

“Did I wake you?” he asked.

“Edward – of course not! I’ve been waiting for you. Oh, Edward, I’m so afraid – but I want this, I do – God help me, I do!”

“Want what?”

“You – ”

“Oh, my God,” said Pelham again, and meant it.

Her bedroom was spare and whitewashed, with a cream lace-trimmed coverlet over her bed. There was room for no other furniture except the small stand in the corner for the basin and ewer, and a little ladder-back chair. A candle burned in a pewter candlestick on the stand; it threw slender, wavering shadows all around the walls and ceiling. As they came into the room a moth fluttered in too; Sophie caught it before it reached the candle, released it carefully outside on the landing; closed the door, and turned back to Pelham. He found the gentle gesture inexpressibly reassuring.

The day he first knew he wanted her, contemplating all that it might mean, he had asked himself: will it be safe?

He had his answer. He had known it all along.

What do I do now? he thought. Whatever I want to? His mouth found her face with more hunger than finesse, fragments gasped in between, painfully aware of how much he wanted her: “Oh! – oh, Sophie – oh – oh – Sophie, Sophie – this isn’t what I meant, you do know that, don’t you? – but – Sophie – !”

“Isn’t it? You said you wanted to lay your head in my lap! Don’t say you didn’t mean that!” She was smiling up at him uncertainly, yet knowing that he did.

“God help me, Sophie, I need you,” he said. “I can’t change my life – you do understand that? My duty is – my duty; it’s my life. But if only I had you to come home to – this to come back to – ”

“You do,” she said.

“Sophie ––– ” he whispered.

His need for her was close to overwhelming; never had it felt so free to him, with such sweet promise of imminent fulfillment. But not now, surely: not yet ——? He did not know how he was to get there from here: it was beyond him to imagine it, everything that must happen in-between. There was a dance expected of him, and he did not know the steps. Never in his life had he wanted anyone or anything half so much, or felt so unsure how to go about attaining it. How does a gentleman make love? He did not know. But considerately, slowly, subtly, he felt sure: everything he was not.

She reached to help him out of his frock-coat. It crumpled onto the floor, and with it all the trappings of his rank. There was an innocence to him, in his shirtsleeves: an intimacy, as if he were already undressed.

The candlelight bathed all in a soft golden glow: the two of them dressed all in white, held so tightly in each others’ arms, in that white room, beside that white bed. Pelham closed his eyes; opened them again. It was all still there, and so was she.

He felt like a hermit crab without its shell. It had been a very long time. How far shall I fall? he had asked her: will you receive me? It seemed to him, standing on the brink of it, as if this last plunge might be sudden and precipitous.

“Is this really what you want?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said; “yes.”

What else could he do, but give her what she wanted?

He did not know, afterwards, how he came to take off even as many of his clothes as he did, for all he could remember was the sound of his own blood drumming in his ears, and her voice urging him on (which he could barely believe, except that she repeated it until he must) and both of their fingers tearing at the cotton and linen that kept their flesh from touching. When she revealed herself to him, with a shy passion he knew in the moment it happened he would not forget while he lived and breathed, he groaned aloud. She pulled him to her as if rescuing a drowning man. He said, brokenly, “Sophie – I haven’t done this in – God knows – ”

“Hush,” she said, “it’s all right –”

“I shall make a damned fool of myself, I want you so much – ”

“Sssssh,” she said, “it’s all right – ”

“Sophie, I can’t wait – I need you now, oh God Sophie – ”

“Hush, Edward,” she said, “it’s all right!”

And it was.

*********************

Afterwards he lay in her arms, with his head snuggled on the swell of her breasts. They were as glorious as he remembered from the first moment of their meeting, up on the hill on that rainy day, except that now in the candlelight he could admire the strawberries-and-cream of them, and make her sob each time he tasted it. Yet what left him most shattered, so as to tremble at the thought, was her desire for him – equal to his own for her. This was not only a revelation; it seemed so miraculous that his throat hurt to recall it, even these few minutes later.

“You never cease to astonish me,” he murmured.

She cradled his head, her fingers twisting in his queue. He held her breasts like clusters of grapes in his two hands. He could bring forth her cries with the brush of his fingertips, his thumbs; he did so, wonderingly. He had never come to a woman who desired him – nor even imagined it. The most he had dared to hope was that she would lie back one day (and make it soon, he had prayed) and receive him with the warmth and grace he had seen in her from the first. He had let himself imagine her, tender and accepting of him. That she might positively want him – his scarred and weatherbeaten body, his clumsy desperate lovemaking – had never occurred to him.

She begged him not to stop, then; and so he did not.

“I had no idea,” he said, later – “none.”

“My love,” she whispered back from the curve of his arm, her face against his breast. Sweat spiked the tuft of dark hair in his armpit: its sheen covered him. She tasted it on his flesh, along the curve of his ribs. He held her, stroking her hair, a tiny tremor still in his body. “Promise me you will come back soon,” she whispered, knowing he could not.

He sighed. “Promise? No, sweetheart, I can’t – but I will come back. How could I stay away from this?” His lips brushed her hair as he spoke: “Next time I come home to you, Mrs. Pelham, we shall not stop making love till dawn – God knows, I have so much to learn! – will you teach me? Of course you will – and I shall take off all of my clothes, please God, like a good husband should, and – what? Sophie, what?”

She had pulled back from him, was staring at him as if he were someone else. “Edward – what are you talking about?”

“What do you mean, what am I talking about? What is there not to understand? You are the paragon of arranging things, Sophie; surely this is not beyond your powers of managing? Do you need me, to have the banns read? Shall we get a special license, instead? You must find out while I’m at sea, so even if I’m only ashore for a day, we can tie the knot, and – Sophie! You are staring at me as if I were speaking Greek – what is this?”

“Don’t think you have to marry me, Edward, just because of this.”

“Are you deranged? What do you think – ! You said you would, Sophie, I’m counting on it – of course I must – and so must you marry me! Tell me you have not thought better of it!”

“Oh, Edward, not that – ”

“What then? Good God, woman, I want to find you on the quay with your arms wide open each time I step ashore – I want to know I can come home to you and put my head in your lap any time I may – I want to lie in my cot and think of you here in this bed, aching for me, as I shall be aching for you!” He paused to catch his breath. “Sophie – tell me, am I asking for too great a sacrifice from you? Will it be too hard, to be my wife? How are we to do all that, otherwise?”

“Plenty of people do; you need not feel obliged – ! Look at Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson… ”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sophie, that doesn’t count – they’re each of them married to other people, for God’s sake! Have you taken leave of your senses?” He was frowning now: “Obliged, is that what you call it? You think it obligation on my part? I am the one who wants to marry you, Sophie – do you not recall! It is I shall be obliged to you, if you will only have me – ! Besides, you said yes, I have it in writing, in your own hand!”

“I didn’t realize that’s what you meant,” she said, her voice shaking.

“My God! Do you mean to say – you took me into your bed – thinking I should be no more to you than this – and yet you received me?”

She did not answer.

“Hm? Sophie?”

“Yes – that’s what I thought. Are you angry?”

“No,” said Pelham hoarsely, “not angry. I think – hurt, perhaps, that you could think so much of me, and so little of yourself – and so little of me, too, as to suppose I should – !”

Any of his officers would have read the signs, and sealed their lips, but she did not know any better, and so continued despite his protest: “But you are – titled, Edward, a person of consequence, and we are poor nobodies, you should be ashamed of us!”

Pelham’s eyes turned from soft to blazing. Entire ships’ companies had shrunk before such looks. She began to tremble. “Now I am angry! Yes, and you shall hear me out, Sophie. I have never heard such foolishness – such stupidity! And from you – ! I thought you an intelligent woman! A woman of sensibility! How could you think I should insult you so, as to bed you and kiss you off like a slut? The very notion offends me! Title be damned, I should hope at least you will give me credit for being a gentleman –––! Why, if you had not insisted, I swear I never should have come to you thus without being wed — never — my God! And you insult us both, Sophie – let me not hear you say one more word in criticism of my chosen wife! You are the equal of any woman I have ever met, in breeding, in understanding, in beauty, in conduct – besides, you came into this world Goodenough, you cannot deny it now!” He gripped her shoulders and shook her. “Hm? Hm? Answer me, Sophie!”

For answer, overcome, she wept in his arms.

He could have made love to her all over again, listening to her sobs; but he simply held her instead, not wanting to be greedy. Now and then, closing his eyes, he kissed her hair: it smelled freshly washed, of sandalwood (it was; she had done so, upon receiving his second note). Then, wondering, he lay still, holding her.

In less than the space of two hours, his world had turned upside-down. He barely recognized himself as this new person, this deeply satisfied man, this wondering lover, this soon-to-be husband; and yet it seemed now that he had indeed been destined to be this too – as if it were a picture of a self he had once hoped to be, lost twenty years earlier, believed it gone for ever, now by some unlooked-for grace restored to him. In her arms he had found permission to be the rest of himself.

She was a refuge to him: and yet such a mystery, still. He had thrown himself into her like a storm tide, and she had met him with all the strength and solidity of the shore. Thinking over his life and the events of the last hours, he realized how little he knew. So much more than before – but enough now to see the extent of his unknowing: his absolute ignorance. A sigh escaped him.

“Mmmmm…?” she murmured.

“Sophie – ” he said.

“What, Edward?” She nestled her head into his shoulder.

“Let me look at you –?”

He sounded oddly hesitant for such a simple request. “You are,” she said, looking up at him, “aren’t you?”

“It wasn’t –– your face I meant.” His eyes were soft in the candlelight.

She took his meaning and blushed crimson. The idea of his gaze on her there overwhelmed her. One day, perhaps, but… not yet. Not that gaze, especially, not those eyes that took in every last detail, each flaw, and missed nothing. Making love with him had been the easiest thing in the world to say yes to; she’d wanted nothing half so much in all her life – but this! To be stared at? Scrutinized? There!!? She felt desperately shy. “Oh – oh, Edward –– I – I think – aren’t we women all –– alike, there? What is there to see?”

He held her gaze: “I wouldn’t know,” he said quietly.

She closed her eyes for a moment. Thought of what lay behind those three words. Oh, Edward, she thought. That was altogether another thing. What an admission –– and what a question, then, for him to ask her! And so – could he be feeling as diffident about it as she was? More so, she saw suddenly from his eyes now, since she hesitated. And – all at once, in that moment, seeing his look – not too much to ask, after all. “Well –– that’s different,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Of course it is,” she whispered, and kissed him before he rose on one elbow to gaze between the part of her thighs. He kissed her back: a lingering, tender kiss unlike any she had had from him so far.

Then he looked.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. The candlelight was apricot on her skin.

She bit her knuckles in shyness, but did not move. He swallowed. “Oh, Christ,” he said again, softly. His voice caught: raw silk.

She felt her thighs begin to tremble under his scrutiny. “It’s – not very pretty, really – not like – looking at my face,” she whispered.

“It’s – not like looking at your face,” he said, “but it is – very – very – pretty.”

“Is it what you expected?”

“No,” he said, slowly, “there’s so much more to you – all these little – I don’t even know how to say it – petals –––– ? Like a rose… I – I wouldn’t even know where to find – you know… ”

She showed him. He drew breath sharply; closed his eyes for a moment; opened them again. His brow wore a set of furrows she had never seen in quite that expression before: “My God,” he whispered.

She began to shake in earnest then, so much so that he noticed it. “Have I made you shake like that,” he asked, “looking –?”

“Well – it’s not every day I do this, Edward – lie back with my legs open and… ”

“I knew it was a lot to ask,” he said, “ –– thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she whispered.

“That’s what I’m thanking you for,” he said, “the way you make me welcome – ” and before giving up the sight of her, he put his fingertips to his lips and then touched her where he had been gazing. His touch was feather-light, a slight brush; no more. She thought his hand trembled as he withdrew it. “Grace,” he said hoarsely. “You. Such grace –– I can't –– ”

She had to laugh, then. “What, lying like this with one knee up and everything in plain sight?”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes shining, and then: “Sophie – ”

“Mmmm? ”

“I –– I've been clumsy with you, I know it –– ! Be patient with me…. teach me to be tender – will you?” His earnest tone and his expression stole the smile from her lips, so she looked back at him until the depth of his regard was altogether too much for her, and she drew his face closer and out-of-focus and kissed him instead.

“My darling,” she whispered, “do you need to ask?” He kissed her back tentatively, then more surely and very, very sweetly. His mouth was not at all hard and hungry this time: as if he now dared to find what might lie beyond need and urgency. Something taut in him had let go. In the middle of the kiss, she tasted salt. Her heart turned inside-out, then.

“So now you know,” she said, softly.

“Yes,” he answered. “I’ll have that to think about now, won’t I – while I’m at sea.”

“I suppose you will, won’t you.”

“Oh, yes,” he whispered, “I suppose I will.” And he kissed her again, more sweetly yet, his mouth trembling against hers; and found, then, that they were not finished, after all, not by a long way ––– and that it was not so very difficult, after all, this time, to find in himself all the tenderness he longed to give her.

**************************

…. There was a moment somewhere in all of it when, strangely, he thought of the tin miners in Cornwall, how they descend the shafts that slant under the sea, and hear it roaring over their heads… it must be like this, he thought, until the sea closed over him altogether and it was Sophie and there was nothing but her, anywhere, ever, and the waves were his sighs breaking even as he kissed her. It was like breathing and drowning and being born; it was like nothing he had ever imagined; it was losing and finding himself, and her. Her cries were softer this time, but he knew they would echo in his ears endlessly. When it was done he shook: she held him, taking his weight without complaint, stroking his hair.

************************

“Christ,” he said again, “I didn’t know — I had no idea… I didn’t know..!”

She held him.

In the town a clock struck the hour: two. Pelham groaned. “Damn! I have no more time – Sophie – Sophie!”

“What?”

“Look at me. Thank you. Now promise me you will have no more foolish thoughts about trying to escape from your word to me. Else I shall have to desert my duty and jump overboard and come looking for you, and I shall be court-martialled, and thrown into jail, if not hanged, and – it will be a sorry tale. Come, Sophie, do not make me – !”

She smiled, as he had intended her to, through the sparkle of fresh tears in her eyes. “You wouldn’t, Edward.”

“No – but I should drive myself into a melancholy fit contemplating it; so be mine, Mrs. Pelham, be mine, as I am already altogether yours!”

She watched him hurry into the rest of his clothes, wind his neckerchief back around his neck. So many buttons, she thought. I have never seen his fingers so clumsy. “Here, let me.” She turned his ivory moleskin waistcoat the right way out, smoothed its creases; helped him slip it over his head, fastened the rest of the buttons all the way up to his neck. “You truly mean that?” she asked softly.

He took hold of her arms so forcefully that his fingers left bruises. He put his face within two inches of hers. “On my life,” he said, and kissed her so roughly she put her hand to her mouth when he finally withdrew.

“Swear it,” he said at the front door.

“Edward, I – ”

“Swear it! ”

“I swear it.”

“All right.” He let out a deep breath.

Did he really doubt it? she thought. Oh, my God, he did!

He kissed her once more, quickly, and pressed her hand before stepping backwards and letting it drop. Then he turned and began to run back to his ship.

7. The Wager

Gibraltar lay behind them, a natural bastion of sheer limestone fortified with the efforts of man until it should command the mouth of the Mediterranean on His Britannic Majesty’s behalf like the lion they called it. From his perch high on the mizzen-topsail-yard, Stroud let the foot-rope bear his weight and felt the swing of the mast in its slow arc through the air as the ship rocked at anchor. He looked down with satisfaction.

Far below him on the scrubbed decks the Indy was a bustle of activity, you might say a hive, though it was purposeful, not chaotic as it might have appeared to an ignorant observer. Not a man among the milling crew who didn’t know his place in it and what to do to get the ship under way. He could hear the turning of the capstan and his favourite chant, the anchor-chains rattling as she rose; orders barked, the breeze whistling in his ears like blowing across the top of a bottle – except there’s more in me ’ead than ’alf a pint of Portsmouth piss, Stroud reflected – an’ I got threepence coming, ter prove it!

Wainwright’s stentorian tones reached him and his fellows along the yard: “Make sail! Make sail, there!” It’s going to be a bit of a bugger gettin’ out, thought Stroud – wind’s in the wrong quarter, an’ she’s fickle as a bloody Gosport girl this mornin’, an’ all. Still, there was the tide to help, even though here in the Mediterranean it was a feeble pull compared to Portsmouth’s deep sucking draw; and if anybody could get this old ship out of harbour, it was Pelham and his crew, who knew her better than they knew themselves.

The yards were sharply hauled, angled to catch the wind from far over on her starboard quarter, and the ship brought round so that the air would scoop across the sails and spill, with no sheet stealing the wind from the one in front of it. His fingers worked quickly and surely, releasing the canvas in time with his neighbors to right and left so it dropped smoothly and bellied as the men below sheeted her home.

On the other side of the mast, to leeward, Bates completed the same operation in a far more sullen mood. Threepence was more than he had to his name, and he maintained quite firmly that the capting going over the quiet side (no pomp, no bo’sun’s whistles) in the middle of the night with no-one but his coxswain and returning two and a half hours later did not constitute spending the night ashore.

They had had a heated discussion about it before going aloft – an observer might have said a row. “I said ’e would, an’ ’e ’as. It’s as simple as that, Bates. Fair an’ square. So pay up, yer louse.”

“’E might ’ave been doin’ anyfink ashore – you don’t know wot ’e were up to!”

“No, but I can guess,” Stroud leered, “an’ so can you. Come on, ’e ’ad us workin’ our bloody balls off ’alf the night to get ready, an’ then ’e cuts over the side for a quickie? Come on, Bates, wot else could it be?”

“You got no proof.”

“I don’t ’ave to ’ave proof, do I, Batesy boy? That weren’t the bet! The bet was, ’e spends the night ashore. You know an’ I know ’e ain’t done that since we been Indies, an’ I’d ’ave laid you ’alf a crown if I could ’ave proved it!”

“Nah. Don’t count. ’E probably forgot somefink!”

“Right! My arse ’e did!”

“Why wasn’t you asleep, anyway? ’Astings ’ad us turn in for ’alf the watch, so we’d be fresh as daisies this morning!”

“When I got threepence riding on it, I watches my man like a ’awk. An’ you ’eard Skerrit. Capting give ’im a shilling an’ told ’im to ’ave ’imself a nice shore dinner.”

“’E never told you that!”

“No, I ’eard ’im telling his mate Perce, what ’e brought back ’alf a chicken for – an’ swore ’im to secrecy, an’ all. Capting’s man, wouldn’t tell tales – but dinner? In the middle of the night? I ask you – what else could ’e ’ave been up to, wivout Skerrit?”

“I ain’t payin’.”

“You will an’ all.”

“I ain’t”

We’ll see about that, thought Stroud to himself, looking down at the quarterdeck. Come on, me boy, I got threepence riding on you, you beauty. Two an’ a ’alf hours is plenty – if it’s in the middle of the night, it counts. It definitely counts, an’ Bates can’t say nuffink different.

As the ship shuddered before the breeze, Bates too looked down at the knot of officers on the quarterdeck. Their dark coats made them look like blackbeetles from his airy perch, but Pelham stood out – not just from the bullion on his hat, but the way he stood. ’E could be standing there in ’is underwear with the rest of ’em likewise, thought Bates, an’ I’d still know ’im at this distance. Standing as stiff as a bleedin’ poker. ’E’s in command, no bloody doubt about that, bloody ol’ slave-driver. This last thought was accompanied by more pride than condemnation.

Bates, that believer in the perfect uprightness of his Captain – a man above reproach, if ever there was one, without a bone of human feeling in his body, for sure – a man (by reason of both rank and habit) utterly beyond any weakness of the flesh, or slightest slip from proper conduct — knowing this in his heart, if he knew anything at all, Bates prepared to come down on deck. He glanced down at Pelham one more time before edging back along the yard. As he expected, the captain stood at the rail erect as a statue, feet apart, hands clasped behind his back. Don’t let me down, you bastard, he thought; no more sneakin’ ashore in the night watches, Sir, I’m not ’aving it – and then, Oh, my gawd. No! Bloody ’ell, I can’t believe my fuckin’ eyes. It can’t be. It can’t! Not ’im. ’E wouldn’t! Not ’im, out of all of ’em.

But it was.

8. Letters

To Captin Pellum

HMS Indommytabull

VERY IMPORTANT

Dear Captin Pellum,

I am riting you this in a big hury because we are going down to the church to see you off. I am going to give my sixpens to the boatman to bring you this leter so you will know to look for us. We are going to clime the tower and wave a big red scarf. Please wave back. Mama says I should not truble you but if it was me I would want to know so I could wave back, wouldn’t you?

Thankyou for every thing you have done for me and Mama. She told me to pray for you and I said I already did. Dont forget to look for us! With love from your friend Mavis McKenzie PS do not pay any notice to the blud, I cut my self on the pen nife when I was sharpining this pencil so do not worry I am all right, it was just a litle cut but I am rushing now good bye.

*****************

E.P. to S. McK.

6^th September, 1803

About To Leave Harbour

My dearest Sophie –

I write this in great haste less than an hour before we are to sail. Please forgive the dry tone I must take – I have not slept and there is still much to do. I promise you shall get a more tender letter from me next time. I have drawn up instructions to my agent here in order to provide for you and Mavis during my absence – and also in the event of my death. You are my future wife – and it is not impossible that you may be carrying our child at this moment. So you will understand that since I am already yours, then all I have must also be at your disposal should the need arise. This is not a matter of opinion, it is a simple statement of fact. Do not be too proud to see reason here, I pray you. I do not wish you to suffer any financial cares while I am at sea.

I have therefore instructed my agent to draw funds from my bank in London (Hoare’s) – via Messrs Cohen and Levy here on Castle street – and to make available to you the sum of £10 per month. I hope this will make you and Mavis comfortable and want for nothing. Should you need more, you have only to tell him. He will call on you as soon as possible to explain further and to leave you a copy of the will I have just now drawn up. His name is Humphries, you may expect to hear from him within a day or two I hope. I have named you to inherit half my estate in the event of my death at sea before returning. I have mentioned my mother & sister to you I know so you will understand why I could not leave it all to you undivided, which otherwise would have been my intent. Oh such dry stuff I must write you for now! Time and tide do not wait for me, I fear. Let me only say to you again, my dearest, that you are promised from your own lips (and actions!) to be my wife at the first possible opportunity – and that I consider you already to be so. Therefore I beg you not to hesitate in accepting these arrangements, hastily drawn though they are – any more than you hesitated last night to receive

Your own

Edward Pelham

******************

E.P. to Miss M. McK.

10^th September, 1803

At Sea, out of Gibraltar

My dear friend Mavis,

You are a very resourceful young lady I see, and there is nothing to be done about that but be grateful for it! I must thank you from the bottom of my heart for the generous expenditure of your sixpence to make me aware of your farewells. Now let me confess at once that your mamma knows me better than I could sometimes wish. Indeed her fear that I might be much occupied was perfectly astute. I admit that when your note was handed to me I was about to thrust it unread into my pocket until I should be less heavily charged with responsibilities. However, you had the foresight to anticipate this and the word “Important”, heavily underlined, caught my eye just as you intended it should.

Now Mavis I beg you to forgive what I must tell you next – but it is a part of my tale, and I cannot leave it out. For sometimes you make me out the hero when I am only too susceptible to human failings. I read your words and – I fear – frowned at the demand you made upon me in that moment. The anchor was coming aboard, the sails all set to catch the wind, and a hundred and one things seemed to crowd and clamour for my attentions. Yet I could not help but glance back over my shoulder at St. John's tower – and there you were, a little speck of scarlet.

Now you must understand that the life of a sea-going man affords little opportunity for indulgence in most of the seven deadly sins. Sloth is out of the question; nor is there much more occasion for gluttony, I may fairly say. Envy may usually be confined to the number of guns or prizes accorded to the next fellow – but in truth there is little a ship's commander should need to envy any man alive. Lechery we shall not consider too closely, in respect of your tender years, but let me assure you that my life has been quite pure – I have nothing to blush for there. You will have to take my word for that. Avarice neither – a tedious sin and of little attraction, I have always thought, being far more tempted by the pleasures of spending than saving. A life at sea makes one think but little of hoarding up riches for an uncertain future. Anger – well, most fighting men would rate cowardice as far worse a fault. But ah, Mavis, your kind gesture laid bare my ugliest flaw. Do you see, the necessities of command may well persuade a captain that to be proud is not merely his indulgence but his duty. I know that I am guilty of it. Guiltier than most, even. In that instant I knew a shame such as has rarely come over me. Who am I to scorn to wave my hand? – for the sake of preserving my “dignity” ? – For shame! Perish the notion that I am far too important a person to attend for one moment to such insignificant claims as the dear concern of my friends!

So I realized that you could never make the fool out of me that I could – and was, in that very moment! How many friends do I have, that would go to such lengths to show me their care for me? Do I have friends and to spare, that I can so easily slight them? Ah Mavis, you humbled me. I requested Mr. Wainwright to lend me his glass, and trained it up on the tower. There you stood by your mamma, bravely waving that red scarf. In the moment I spied you, I could see your little arms tiring, and you let it droop for a moment – then bravely you took it up once more, to be sure I should see it, should I chance to look. My duty (and my desire) became instantly clear.

I cleared my throat in a captainly sort of way and desired my officers to allow me sea-room, to stand apart on the quarterdeck. I thought it would be hard for you to tell me from among all that crowd of blue uniforms and black hats. When I stood alone at the rail, I waved to you. Yes, you saw me; I know you did, for I peered again in the glass and you were pointing, pulling at your mamma’s sleeve. So I threw all caution to the winds and went so far as to remove my hat and wave it in the air to and fro.

I felt a great number of things in that moment, most of which I cannot express; but foolish was not one of them. Of course I had to snap at my officers – what did they think they were staring at, had they not seen a man wave at his friends before – and berate the crew to turn their attention away from their captain making a spectacle of himself and get back to the matter in hand – leaving harbour on the turn of the tide, with but a fitful wind from the wrong quarter. But Mavis, let me tell you that that moment was a gift I shall treasure for the rest of my life, be it short or ever so long.

Now let us turn our attention to the matter of the pen knife. Do not, I pray you, get me into your mamma’s bad graces by severing any or all of your digits, or even leaving them to hang by a thread. I told you when I gave it you that I believe all children should learn to use these useful tools. Well, I suppose that by the time you receive these words of concern, one of three things will already have occurred: you will have maimed your self permanently, and I shall be blamed by your mamma; or she will have confiscated it with that firm, unyielding look in her eye; or you will have been practicing on harmless things like oranges and quill-ends and earthworms for bait, until you have graduated to carving little sticks and the like, to make dollies or puppets or ugly little creatures to do your private bidding, like Prospero and his Caliban, which is what these clever little knives are perfectly made for, or seemed so when I was your age. (Impossible to imagine, but I was, once. A dark, awkward little fellow, much given to experimenting with minor explosions.)

Now I must tell you that you may not expect regular letters from me, since being at sea is a chancy thing, and opportunities do not often present themselves for correspondence to be safely conveyed to one’s beloved family and friends. So I shall number my letters, and do you do the same, so we shall know, if any are missing in between. I shall keep a little notebook to remind me of what number I am up to, and what I have already touched upon, so I do not repeat myself. You might find it useful, to do the same, if you wish.

I am sure that by now your mamma will have told you, Mavis dear, that she is to become my treasured wife as soon as possible upon my return. This will at the same time bring me the very great honour of becoming your father, if you will have me for such. Though if you will not, I shall answer to ‘Edward’, so long as you do not say it too scornfully. I wonder, do you fear that in my marrying your mamma, we shall each of us have less time for Mavis?

I cannot promise you that I shall never gaze upon your mamma when you wish I were listening to you, especially since I shall be ashore for so little time in the scheme of things. But God has blessed me (so far) with two arms – unlike dear Admiral Nelson, who is far braver than I but not quite so complete as a consequence – so that is one arm for each of you, and I shall be the proudest man in the world to walk down the High Street in my best uniform with the two of you on either side of me.

I hope you will accept this news with the pleasure it gives me to mention it, and anticipate the day when we are to be a family with one half of the joy I feel (or even one-fourth part, one-sixth, or one-eighth, or three-sixteenths of it!). I shall do my very best to be a worthy father to you, Mavis. On this you have my word of honour as a gentleman and an officer of His Majesty’s Navy, which is the most solemn oath I know how to swear.

Speaking of oaths, your mamma mentioned that I had been leading you into bad ways and that you had been heard to say at the dinner table that you were d–––d hungry. I beg your pardon for my lack of restraint. I am ashamed that you should have heard such a thing from my lips, especially since I must now set an example to you as a parent should. Let me not hear of any repetitions, I pray you. Furthermore, let me not hear that you have sunk into shameful drunkenness or any other bad between-decks habits.

Now Mavis, be so kind as to kiss your mamma for me most tenderly, and to tell her I told you to do so – mind her at all times, and never doubt for a moment the deep and lasting affection of your devoted servant, Edward Pelham.

PS – It has not escaped my attention that I owe you all of this new happiness of mine, for bringing me into your own and your mamma’s acquaintance. Be assured that I do not forget those to whom I am indebted.

**********************

E. P. to S. McK.

12^th September, 1803

At Sea

Sophie – I hardly know where to start. It was easier by far to write to Mavis. I fear I am not used to the role of gallant lover. I shall express myself very poorly indeed if I try to tell you what has been in my heart these past days and weeks. I want to talk with you, be with you, not scratch at words. Yet you deserve a love letter from me, God knows, and all I have written you so far is that pragmatic little note instructing you to accept money from me. Oh Sophie! You have so spun me around and turned me upside-down, I do not know which end of me is up – except that upon waking, I find myself stiff as a yardarm, seeking you still –– !

Am I too raw in writing you this? I can hardly think so – not after the other night! The way you drew me to you – ! My God, Sophie – ! The thought of those hours with you torments me. It is a need that does not leave me. All day I force myself to address the task at hand, of which there are never less than a score – but then I find I am staring out to sea, seeing the tumble of your hair. Every seagull’s cry seems to be yours – Oh God Sophie, the sounds you made – ! I am forced to distract my thoughts from them, by considering such things as lee shores and hurricanoes, mouldy casks of beef and foul water, half rations, half-pay, incompetent petty officers and sudden squalls.

This works – only up to a point. Then I am lost again.

I do not mean this in a romantical way, Sophie – I mean that you have got me to such a pitch of need that I can barely think. At times it is damned awkward. Still I know that when at last I may sink into your arms & your drenched depths again – all will be well with me. Such fulfillment as I never thought to know.

Now to the other extreme – forgive me my dear – one day I shall strike the balance between dry business and shocking bold statements of naked longing – in between there must be tenderness, if I can but find the words – did Mr. Humphries wait upon you? I hope so, though I penned so many letters and instructions in haste that night upon returning to my ship, when my responsibilities became apparent to me, that it would be a marvel if I did not overlook some important detail – still, I endeavoured to be complete in my instructions to all parties.

You must not be offended at my wish to take care of you and Mavis. I know how you esteem your independence. I should never wish to compromise it – I hope you know how much I value that spirit in you. Yet you must see that I can not come away as if nothing had happened between us, and expect you to wait upon my return to take my name and join your hand in mine – as if I bore no more responsibility than the man in the moon for what might befall – or for your present and future wellbeing, and Mavis’s also.

This is no reluctant duty Sophie, it is a privilege I gladly embrace. I wish to share with you whatever I have, as you have so freely shared with me. Damn, that sounds as if once again I am speaking of your qu––m when – though God knows I have no fault to find with that heavenly place – I meant the fullness of your life – your dear daughter – your peace that falls like manna – the welcome you extend to me.

In any case, my dearest, let Humphries know whatever you need, and he will see to it that it is taken care of as I should if I were there.

I have told Mavis of my delight on seeing you both waving to me – I won’t repeat it for you, but ask you to beg her indulgence and share that part of my letter with you – though the rest is private between Mavis and myself. She is a remarkable creature. But I look at her mamma and I am not surprised.

The wind has come around a point and we are making much better way just now. I felt it even while thinking that all my thoughts were bent on writing to you – yet I knew it, well before Mr. Wainwright sent to tell me. No captain can survive without this instinct. I always look to see which of my officers have it and which might as well be on a merry-go-round for all they are aware.

It is a kind of sixth sense – the ship is like a limb to me, I know where it is even in my sleep – a thing a person might not believe could they not feel it for themselves. It is not so much knowing as feeling – it is not in my head – my gut knows when she is heeled over a whit too far – when the shrouds are strained to their capacity and the topmasts burdened beyond endurance – when the rip tide pulls us backwards even though the way appears forward. Speaking of visceral Sophie – thinking of you produces the strangest plummeting sensation inside of me – as if the bottom had dropped out of me & my guts were about to spill onto the deck. It is very odd and yet I seek it – like returning one’s tongue to a hole in a tooth.

Later – after a day of plain sailing, then some foul weather and a hard blow – I come back to this long conversation with you – do you know, how I have longed for such a trusting conversation, in my life —? Sophie – Sophie – Sophie – no endearment comes as readily to my lips or my pen as your name alone. Here I am the ship’s captain who does his duty as he has always done, it is second nature to him, and then here I am the man who has found his mate and can think of little else – all somehow crammed into one body and a poor fit too.

Was I too rough? Did I hurt you? Did you merely accept the force of my desire, to please me? I was clumsy, I know it – I was beside myself – how could any woman want me so much? Yet I know the answers, even while I cannot quite believe any of it.

Sophie I shall never ever ever forget that moment when you pulled me to you – on a tide of womanly passion you felt no shame to express.

It all happened so quickly! I had no time to reflect or do the prudent thing – thank God, or else I should have bid you fare well, and turned my back on you with both of us too shy to speak, and gone back to my ship, and sailed – and then I should have been writing you a very different kind of letter now, should I not! And wishing ––!

Sophie – being with you is to be completely at ease. This is a gift beyond description. You are so many things, one for every mood and need – tender – generous – patient – wise – witty – modest – sweet – wanton. Sophie, Sophie.

I must put down my pen for now and take it up again in a while. Sleep is heavy on me, my eyes must close in spite of me. God knows I wish it were your arms I laid me down in.

Give me your thoughts. I am hungry to see your writing upon a packet of letters for me. I shall take the keenest interest in any little thing it may please you to tell me. I hope you are not shocked by my directness here. I thought from the beginning of our acquaintance how delightful it was to have found a woman with whom I could be completely candid. I pray that you will forgive anything that seems too unadorned. I do not know what else to say or how to say it.

How shall I take leave of you? I am too weary to play with clever turns of phrase – only to say that I am now and shall remain forever yours,

Edward.

P.S. On looking this through, it is morning – I promised you a love letter and I am not at all sure that this is one. I see I have written of me and my need of you, when I should have been speaking of you and my love for you. And yet as I go about my duty the two seem to be one and the same – I cannot distinguish them. I shall try to do better, next time.

P.P.S. It occurs to me that I have not even told you that I love you. Let me do so, then –– Sophie I love you. There – it is not so very hard to say, I find. That is a relief. Now I cannot wait to say it to you. Until then – and then, too, I hope – I kiss you every where.

**************************

S. McK. To E.P.

6^th September, 1803,

Gibraltar.

Dearest Edward,

Are you well? Are you safe? You told me once I had the gift of repose – but could you see me pacing and fretting as I have been, you would not recognize that once-tranquil spirit. I must get used to it I know – and I shall – but you are so very lately gone, and the thought of the dangers facing you makes me want to lock you in my room, in my arms, and never let you go – except that you should be very unhappy after a few hours, and long for the salt wind in your face and an ensign snapping behind you and the big guns ready for action – and you would not be the man I desire, away from all of that.

Your letter arrived at home before Mavis and I had even returned from the town. I want you to know that I did not allow myself to shed any tears up on the tower, even when you waved, and all the time Mavis and I watched your sails grow smaller and more insubstantial until the Indomitable floated like a dream on the horizon, topsails-down, and slipped from view. It was deeply kind of you to indulge her. I was cross when she told me what she had done, the little minx, knowing how very crucial a moment it must be for you. I can’t imagine what you thought when you received her orders. Though when you did indeed return her wave, her face was such a sight to see that I could not be angry with her any longer.

Edward, you ask me to forgive the dry tone of your letter – you apologize, promise a more tender one next time. When I think of all you had to do in those few short hours before setting sail, that you turned your attention to providing for us – and so very thoroughly! – speaks more than any tender indulgent expressions. You like to say that you judge a man by what you see him do – well then my darling, by your own standards you show yourself a prince among men. Your ‘dry’ arrangements reveal a care and force of character beyond what is common. You went straight to what you saw to be necessary, when you might have had every excuse to let it go undone in your enormous preoccupation before sailing.

And such generosity – ! When I began to read what you had written and realized what you had done, then the paper blurred before my eyes and I had to set it down in order to compose my self. I could bear to watch you sail away, but not to think of you at your desk in your cabin half the rest of the night scribbling instructions here and there so that Mavis and I (with or without any child that we might – please God – have conceived in our hasty, headlong union – oh, how I should like to bear your child!) should be comfortable for the rest of our lives, even if you were never again to know my arms about you – Edward, that was the mark of an honourable man! Spare me tendernesses; show me only such love as you did in that letter, and I shall be the most fortunate of women.

As I already know myself to be. When I arose early from my bed this morning, to go down to the harbour with Mavis and see you set sail, I was sensible of a small trickle of you across my inner thigh. I say ‘of you’ because it is all I have of you for now, and you left it there, so I regard what remains in my womb as some little liquid portion of your being, for me to treasure until you shall return. Does this sound foolish? Only it brings me to think of your face in the moment you spilled it there, so intent – that furrow between your brows that I know so well – your eyes fathomless and dark yet shining with feeling. See, I shall make up for your ‘dry’ letter with my own damp one my love, so we shall be even!

I write this little jest to gloss over the fact that writing to you in these terms makes me long for you all over again. Though why I should conceal that from you, who must most delight in it, I do not know. Perhaps because I fear to be too vulnerable, in admitting the power of my longing for you. When you turned to me so soon after the first time and asked me, might I receive you again (with an astonished croak in your voice which alone would have opened me to you body and soul) I felt an exultation like nothing I have ever known. I want to say, it must be like when you board a prize and carry her off, but that isn’t it, it can’t be at all, because in your embrace there is no conquest, only a mutual surrender which alone can deliver the soul’s victory, to admit its want of another.

For when we pretend that we need no-one, then we are most alone – weak – proud – deluded; and when we rejoice in another’s existence, we are at our strongest and most truly our selves. My opinion I suppose but I have seen it to be true so many times over! Tell me, did you not feel a part of yourself coming alive, on spending time in our small home and quiet company?

Well, not always so quiet, I allow, on Mavis’ account, but joyful and simple – I saw you unbend, expand, grow easier in your manner and ever more readily amused and entertained – more willing day by day to show your self, your true thoughts. I watched your face soften, in turning to Mavis and to me – its harsh lines – lines graved in watching and causing the deaths of men – re-forming themselves into other expressions. Your shoulders lost their rigidity, day by day. Yet it seemed not a loss but a gain, from finding yourself welcome without needing to make any impression beyond being simply your self. I hope I have made myself understood. I mean that there is something holy, whole and healing in the company of those who truly love us for who we are – we cannot live without it.

So let me therefore not hide or dissemble the depth of my wish to take you into me once more and know the print of your face upon my bosom, your hand’s press, the want you can’t hide seeking me out.

I have two images of you my love, and I struggle to reconcile them; I write this to the Edward who came but so lately to my bed, so astonished and so grateful – naked (well that is poetic license since you kept on half of your clothes my love, but nonetheless you seemed so) – unashamed to claim me once, twice – to suckle at my breast like a greedy child – who asked me (God! asked me? – yes!) – what should please me most – to teach him – the Edward I could beg, sobbing, not to stop, and he did not –– that Edward, I think, reads these words with astonishment perhaps at their openness, but also with a keen and smarting delight – at least, I hope so – I imagine so – knowing my lover as I do, yes I do, the Edward who came to me but last night and brought me all of himself, without restraint.

And yet – and yet – here is this closely-written letter of mine, so bare, so brazen, so intimate – to be sewn into a canvas packet, and launched across the high seas in search of the renowned and resplendent Captain Sir Edward Pelham, stern commander of His Majesty’s Frigate Indomitable – warrior – martinet – a very Caesar on board his vessel, not so distant from the Almighty Himself – an august and decorated hero, not to mention a drawing-room gallant and charmer of ladies of rank, object of their daughters’ most high-flown ambitions, a man of parts on land and sea, with a reputation not much smaller than the rock of Gibraltar – how is he to take these private, familiar remarks?

Surely they must compromise his dignity? How is he to remain aloof, when there is one who dares to address him so nakedly? Does he sit at his table in his cabin, the sanctum Sanctorum of the ship, and wait for his officers to leave him so he may open these sheets once more in private with their shameless, incandescent thoughts? Does he thrust them half-read under the table, when interrupted, like a schoolboy? Does he feel that such things may be whispered, but not committed to paper (God forbid they should fall under any eyes but his own!) – ? which is it, Edward? One – or both, perhaps?

Well my love I am sure you will tell me, either by letter or – if you return sooner – then in person. Do not be too harsh with me if I have taken a tone here that is more familiar than you can bear. I cannot help the things I want to say to you, and I have never bitten my tongue in your company, since you have always encouraged me to continue blurting out my thoughts, what ever they were – you with your raised eyebrow, that tilt of your jaw, the line twitching in your cheek as you listen – see, I have been studying you Edward, so that I shall not fail to recall one atom of your being while you are gone.

I see you like that now, half amused at me, half in disbelief that I dare let such wantonness pass my lips. So here they are, my thoughts I mean – less guarded than I ever thought I should write to any body – for I never had any body who could stir me to such revelations as these, till now – I hardly knew I could be capable of writing so shamelessly!

I think I shall gradually recover from the shock of how we were together last night, and sound more like everyday in my next letters to you. There will be tales of Mavis’ adventures I am sure, and a commentary on the weather, and what new dresses we have allowed our selves thanks to your kind generosity – the colour of the ribbons, and such like. I think these little snippets of news from home will seem trivial, yet bind you to us with a special kind of longing – I hope so. There will be hours and days to tell you all of these things. But this time there is too much else to say.

Well I have written you long into the night and my candles are guttering. I cannot risk Mavis bursting in upon these thoughts, any more than you would want your midshipmen to find you gazing at them in a un-captain-like moment of unguarded longing. So I will kiss you for now – oh Edward, my lips are still bruised from your first kisses last night, the rough ones that broke your reserve at last, and proved to you that I meant what I said when I did not flinch from them – I press them to feel the smart, I do not want my mouth ever to feel itself again – that will be another small unbearable loss, like your seed this morning and the sight of your creamy topsails dipping and then gone – so kiss me hard, very hard, mercilessly hard, yes as hard as that and harder yet – that’s right Edward, breathless as you were last night (dry, indeed!! Yes, love – if you say so!) – come to me now my love and lie all night in my arms till tomorrow, when we must once more take up our separate lives. May your days be prosperous and safe my darling, until the world spins far enough and the winds blow enough and the currents flow enough and you turn your bowsprit toward home where you are unfailingly, unendingly, achingly welcome to your loving Sophie.