15. “All over the Med like

a Blue-arsed Fly… ”

February – August, 1805

Hastings could never step across the threshold of his captain’s cabin without a brief image flickering through his mind of that unfortunate incident concerning the future Lady Pelham, with its accompanying shudder of embarrassment. In particular, he had since then always made most diligent note of waiting for the captain’s “Come!” before entering. He felt again as he heard it now the little wave of relief that he had apparently been forgiven for that dreadful gaffe.

“You sent for me, sir?”

Pelham turned from his desk, a sheaf of papers before him. He was not quite as pale as his doeskin weskit and linen shirtsleeves, although the roses had not come back to his cheeks as much as Hastings (and Lady Pelham) would have liked before seeing him take up once more the responsibilities of command, considering his recent close-call with the grey spectre of a wretched and inglorious death ashore in his bed at the hand of an adversary no more worthy than an inflammation of the lungs.

It was well into February already, damn it, and he was straining at the leash, eager to return to their patrols. They were due to sail upon the noon tide; he had already made his farewells — wrenching ones, this time, more so than ever. Although Sophie had put a brave face upon it, for his sake, he knew.

He looked irritated. Hastings waited for his captain to speak.

Pelham held a paper in his right hand: he looked down at it with the same resigned distaste Hastings had seen upon his face when regarding a most uncommonly fat and repulsive pale-brown weevil twitching in his biscuit. He sighed.

“Mr. Hastings.”

“Sir?”

“Be so good as to deal with this.”

He held out the paper to Hastings. It was addressed on its folded back to the captain, with a large inky half-thumb-print in place of a seal, and bore upon its other side a few lines from an ill-tempered hand that had not troubled to trim the spluttering nib before penning them: “Sir — since I no longer have the honour of possessing your confidence in my manifold and lengthy services aboard your vessel, not to mention the insults you have heaped upon my professional abilities, and the calumny I have suffered at your ungrateful hands, I am compelled to tender my resignation as your ship’s surgeon forthwith. Kindly arrange to have my effects and all of what is due to me forwarded aboard Aphrodite, where my Hippocratic talents are appreciated as they should be. May you have luck in finding a replacement one-tenth as experienced as myself. Ezekiel Ramsbottom, M.D.”

“…forwarded where, sir?” asked Hastings, squinting at the half-indecipherable scrawl.

“Aphrodite,” Pelham said drily, “ …poor beggars.”

“I didn’t know she was in port, sir.”

“Came in on the tide an hour ago — he didn’t waste any time. Which I cannot afford to do either, sir — we have already given the man his measure and more of our attention this morning. There is much to do, Mr. Hastings!”

The frown had appeared once more between those black brows, and Hastings stood to attention. “I will see to it right away, sir.”

“That is all,” snapped Pelham, who had already turned his attention back to the rest of the sheaf in front of him before Hastings had made the two steps to the door. “Oh, and Hastings — ”

“Sir?”

“I regard finding a replacement as being a far more pressing matter than the conveyance of his sea-chest off this ship.”

“Of course, sir.” Hastings wondered how on earth he was to conjure up a ship’s surgeon in the two hours before they were to sail, being (as they were) rarer than hen’s teeth even in Plymouth, Portsmouth and Greenwich, let alone among the miserable pool of qualified men to be found upon this barren hunk of limestone. Part of him wished Pelham had given the task to Wainwright. But he knew why he had not.

“Hippocratic windbag,” spat Pelham after him.

“Hypocritical, more like, sir,” ventured Hastings in a rash moment.

Pelham turned to look at him with an expression of disbelief. “Did I just hear a witticism, Mr. Hastings?”

“I hope not, sir,” mumbled the wretched lieutenant, his colour rising. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

“I fail to see anything in the slightest amusing about our present predicament, Lieutenant.”

“No, sir.” Hastings hung his head, shuffled his feet in embarrassment, thus failing to see Pelham’s lined face break suddenly into one of those extraordinary smiles which his ship’s company might wait years to see — though since his acquisition of a ready-made family (including most notably the Indomitable Miss Mavis), they had been sighted more often this past year than in the previous decade. In truth, their situation was far from a source of mirth — but the occasion of his grave lieutenant’s daring to crack a dry remark was too singular to overlook.

“I would not have thought it of you, Mr. Hastings. Whatever next?”

Hastings swallowed. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Well I suppose we must accept with gratitude whatever Barbary barber you can inveigle into joining us, upon any pretext whatever, Mr. Hastings.”

Hastings looked up sharply at the pun, met that smile; returned it with a hasty grin of his own.

“Aye, aye, sir. But fancy his leaving it till now, the rat! God! What irresponsibility — ! We are in the lurch, sir — badly so — er — might I ask, then, under the circumstances, sir, could that ‘pretext’ involve any – er – money changing hands?”

Pelham sighed again. “If I had had more time to deal with it, sir, I should doubtless have suggested his departure myself; but I thought we could tolerate the man one more voyage, till we were better placed to find another. Now we shall have to do whatever it takes, Mr. Hastings, whatever it takes. A signing bounty of – hm – no more than twenty guineas, sir, less if you can manage it — on top of the Naval pay, of course, I shall have to bear the expense myself, but it is will be a well-spent investment, if so — you may see if any of the surgeons presently in port are unsatisfied with their current arrangements. I hate to poach, but needs must — I can apologize to their captains the next time we are ashore.”

“Twenty guineas, sir,” repeated Hastings: a princely sum. Accustomed to his captain’s usual careful ways, he allowed his surprise to creep into his voice.

“I believe that is what I said, Mr. Hastings,” replied Pelham crisply. “That would be for a contract of no less than one year, mind. Two, better. To be paid in half upon completion of six months’ service, in full at the end of the term. No – better – dammit – as pressed as we are – here, take this —!” He got up, went to his locker, selected a few gold coins and handed them over into Hastings’ keeping. “Do as you see fit, sir. They may discharge a debt, perhaps, or take care of dependents — ” He sighed here, thinking once more of the hopelessness of the task he was placing upon these young shoulders. “You are dismissed,” — and he turned back, with a lingering curl of the mouth, to the enormous task of catching-up with his neglected command within the impossibly short time left to him before they were to weigh anchor.

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

Hastings climbed the slippery stone steps onto the quay with a sinking heart. Pelham had asked him to perform the impossible. He would be lucky to find the worst barber-sawbones, let alone a qualified ship’s surgeon. And before they sailed? It was out of the question. Could they go to sea without one? Even aboard a civilian vessel, bones were broken and ghastly accidents brought disfigurement and death: that was just the way of things at sea. But aboard a man-o-war a surgeon was essential; would have his hands full after every engagement. There were six-inch splinters to pull, scalps to sew-up, limbs to lop and stumps to tar; burns to grease, lights to stuff back and wait for a merciful death. Without a surgeon, an injured man would have even less hope than he currently did — which was not much.

And the responsibility for it all would be his.

He thought of the chaos and stink of the cockpit, the shrieks, the smoking lanterns, the men held down by stalwart shipmates as they had their mashed appendages sawn off one by one — if they lasted the wait. A Naval fight was a cruel thing indeed. He could think of nothing more dreadful in all the ranks of human experience. How each of them came to accept it, men and officers — to take the horror of it for granted — sometimes struck him afresh, before he too resigned himself to it again as a terrible commonplace of this duty they had assumed, the safeguarding of His Majesty’s seas against all comers.

So was he now to tempt some other ship’s surgeon into leaving his charge in the lurch at the drop of a hat, in order to come aboard the Indy? An unpleasant thought, but it was clear where his duty lay: and he had his captain’s orders. Not to mention a bribe of twenty guineas — more than many a man earned in a year. He set his shoulders and strode towards the taverns and stalls of the town.

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

Hastings thought he knew why Pelham had chosen him for this seemingly-impossible task; but he hardly knew the half of it. Less than one percent, most likely, as modest an opinion as he had of himself compared with his captain’s.

Pelham had watched him grow into his command. From a green midshipman, giving orders more confidently than he felt, he had become this able and competent lieutenant, repository of his captain’s complete trust. Pelham watched the lad leave, wished him well, hoped that if anyone might pull this off, it would be his favourite young officer and protégé.

Favourite for so many reasons. He let his mind linger on this favoured subject even as he reviewed the papers before him and tried to turn the rest of his thoughts once more away from the sweet delights of his enforced (but no less welcome) honeymoon with Sophie, to focus on all of this instead: the orders, intelligence, lists, rosters, accounts, reports, charts, plans. So much responsibility that lay upon a captain’s shoulders – yet here on this desk lay the least important part of it. And Hastings knew that, as so many of them did not; understood, and showed by his actions, that if you did not have the loyalty and faith of your men, you had nothing: your rank was meaningless, a disgrace to the Navy if you wore a uniform and did not deserve it.

He had asked him to go because he knew that Hastings wore his heart upon his face, and that it would take such a lion’s heart to persuade a surgeon to join them now, if any thing could. And he had asked him because he knew that Hastings understood that this mission held the lives of the men in it. Finally, he had asked him because he knew that Hastings would take it not as a crushing and impossible order, a defeat before it was attempted even, as Wainwright would have done, even while thinking he was doing his stolid best; but as a challenge, a sign of his captain’s trust and faith in him, and so would do his very true and desperate best —— better than that, even.

Pelham heard the ship’s boat go over the side, to take the lad ashore on his errand, charged with the wellbeing of all of them, and remembered another time he had sent him ashore, to arrange the details of his wedding; and another time yet, the first that Hastings had really commanded all of his attention after he had come aboard. The time he got the measure of him — or that they got each other’s, more truth to tell, captain and officer both.

Oh, he had watched him, that first year, as closely as he did all his officers, missing nothing; seeing him fulfill his promise, a steady and brave soul, a good midshipman, competent in action, dutiful and conscientious and well-liked by his men. That counted with Pelham more than anything else. So when the opportunity presented itself, he had sent him with his division and another in the longboat to cut out an enemy vessel, under the command of an officer from another ship: a joint venture.

Yes, still a midshipman, he had been then. And about to learn a very painful lesson indeed. A lesson about duty, and faith, and command, that had stayed with him afterwards: Pelham had seen the mark of it in his face, knew him a better officer for it; indeed, it had formed a large part of his belief that the lad was ready to pass for lieutenant. Such an incident would mark a watershed in the life of a man, an officer: so it had, here. It had tested young Hastings as no board of captains could. The theory of the examination was no difficulty, the arbitrary questions put to him by the examining captains fortunately answerable — they were not always — and so with his captain’s warmest recommendation on top, Hastings had passed, wore a lieutenant’s uniform these past few years, and earned it every day.

Pelham thought back to the occasion that brought all the lad’s qualities into question. How he nearly had lost all, been consigned to disgrace and his captain’s black-list, instead.

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

It had been Stroud, that rough-and-ready top-man, who set all to rights. Knocking at his captain’s door – daring to – what balls the man had. A common seaman, asking to speak to the captain in the sanctuary of his cabin, not going through his officer — how dare he? Well, Pelham had a hearty respect for his crew, knew which of them deserved his ear. If the man dared to approach him, he had earned that much. And so he listened to Stroud, back then. Was glad to. And grateful ever afterwards, that he had done so.

“It ain’t right, sir,” the man had said, knuckling his forehead. “Beggin’ yer parding, Captain Pelham, sir, but I can’t let you go on a-thinkin as ’ow it were ’is fault. It weren’t, sir, and that’s the God’s honest truth!”

Pelham had looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”

Stroud was hot and brave in Hastings’ defence: “That boat as was lost, sir, that raid what you sent us on, with them officers from the other ship, sir.”

Pelham closed his eyes for a moment, the loss of his men fresh. Three good seamen killed, the ship’s long-boat lost, two men shot and Hastings, his own trusted midshipman, just then returned back aboard, staring straight ahead of him, reporting the losses. “How did this happen, Mr. Hastings?” he had asked.

Captain Pelham stared at Stroud in that moment, reviewing his conversation of a fortnight earlier with the young man now in question. He had scarcely been able to believe it himself, not then, not since, not now. Saw Hastings’ face again, earnest, anguished; pinched with horror and blame. “It was my responsibility, sir. We did not surprise them as we had planned.”

Damn! Damnation! Good men’s lives thrown away for a stupid mistake. How could Hastings have allowed it? “What happened?”

“I gave the order to fire, sir. To all my men. Because a shot was fired too soon, sir, and they were onto us.”

“A shot? A single shot? Not your own order to fire?”

“Yes, sir. No, sir.”

“By whom?”

“I do not know, sir.” Hastings stared ahead of him. “You have the report, I believe, sir, from Lieutenant Pocock — there is nothing further I can tell you.”

Pelham already knew some of it; wanted to hear from his own man. But this was not the same story he had heard. It was a greater tangle than ever — although it was staring to make sense, as it had not from the mouth of Pocock, the lieutenant from Calypso who had had charge of the miserable expedition. An earlier shot, then? Was Hastings trying to get himself off the hook? Surely not! Pelham had seen him in action, under fire: this was not an officer who lost his nerve. Although his courage was of the deliberate kind, he had seen that much; not quite his own cold one but something braver, a mastery of self rather than a calm as swept over Pelham in action. No less useful. Every man must face death in his own way, and carry on; Hastings did, consciously, on purpose. So how —? Why? What in the hell had happened, here? He must make sense of it with no help from Hastings, then. “What if I ordered you to tell me? Is that all you know?”

“That is all I can say, sir. All I know.”

“Would you lie to me, Mr. Hastings?” Pelham could not abide a lie. Cowardice, even, he could stomach better than that.

“No, sir. I hope not, sir. You have Lieutenant Pocock’s report, do you not, sir?”

“I do.”

“Then I have nothing to add. Sir. Beyond what I have said.”

“What you have said is not what I heard, Mr. Hastings.”

“I cannot comment on that, sir.”

The lieutenant in command of the expedition, from Calypso, had stood here in front of Pelham only hours earlier, telling him of the loss of his men and his boat. “ — couldn’t be helped, sir, I’m sorry to say,” the man had said, his eyes not meeting Pelham’s. “Most unfortunate. Er – your officer – gave the order to fire too soon, sir, and gave away the game.”

Pelham could scarcely believe it, even then, knew there must be more to it than that. But what? And now this. At least Hastings’ order to fire had been given after the surprise was lost. But still — someone bore responsibility here, and he had not found out who.

So he had tried to stare Hastings down. “Mr. Hastings,” he said, as sternly as ever he had spoken to the lad; no, more so, as disappointed as he was — disappointed, yes; betrayed, even. “You understand, do you not, that this loss is counted your responsibility? That this boat, these men, are in your record? Were under your command? These good men we have lost? And you the one that gave the order to fire, when we were not ready to board? Even though another officer had charge of the expedition? And you did not wait upon his order, to fire?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you are telling me that the surprise was already lost; but you cannot say more? And that the responsibility for this loss still lies with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Pelham glared. “It is your word against his. There must be something more you can tell me, sir.”

“I regret it, sir — there is not.”

“Then I must reprimand you formally, Mr. Hastings. Much as it pains me to do so. And as I said, it will be entered into your record. But you leave me no option.”

“I understand, sir.” Hastings’ stare remained unwavering.

“I don’t think you do.”

“If you say so, sir. I am sorry, sir.”

Pelham sighed, then. “I am disappointed, Midshipman Hastings.” He did not drop his gaze from Hastings’ white face; nor did Hastings, returning his look, those hazel eyes wide and filled with — what? Pelham tried to read them, to see what they could tell him that Hastings’ words would not. One of these officers had stood here and lied to him. A lieutenant, with two years’ seniority; a midshipman, in command of a boat full of men, in action for the first time away from his ship. One of them had met his eyes, and the other had not. One of them had said he was responsible, and the other had agreed.

Those speckled, bright eyes, blinking now but steady. There was deep pain there at the loss of the men, a responsibility the lad would feel for the rest of his days. Men in Hastings’ division had died before, but never upon the execution of his own order, given independently on an expedition far from the ship, his own blame and no-one else’s. Pain, yes, and something else. Was it defiance? No, not quite; but something hot. What?

“I do not believe you, Mr. Hastings,” Pelham had said, quietly.

“ Sir,” said Hastings. “I regret it, sir.”

Pelham spoke between clenched teeth, then: “Your regret can hardly be entered into your record, sir. Nor, for that matter, into my opinion of you at this moment.”

“No, sir.”

“That is all?”

“I — there is nothing more I can say, sir. I was responsible — I am, sir.”

“I see. And that is all you have to tell me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Disappointed does not begin to express my feelings at this moment, Mr. Hastings. You are dismissed, sir.”

Hastings had left, his head bent in a stiff carriage, his shoulders straight. Proud, then. What had he to be proud of? Damn it, what had taken place here?

A week had passed; two. Pelham had frowned every time Hastings approached him. If that would not winkle it out of him, nothing would: he knew the weight of a captain’s disapproval. Yet the young man remained silent, did his duty, reported to him and bore himself calmly, as if this were as inevitable as the loss which occasioned it. What could have happened?

And now here was Stroud to tell him.

Thank God. At last. So he would get to the bottom of it, then. Nothing had troubled him as much as this in a very long while.

“I am very pleased you have come to me, Stroud,” he said.

“Sir,” said Stroud, standing very straight in front of him. Pelham wondered if he should take off his coat, give Stroud a less imposing captain in shirtsleeves, to get more out of him. But that would be too obvious, now. He let his face soften encouragingly instead. “At ease, Stroud. I think we have much to discuss.”

The narrow face wore a look of surprise, as if he had expected a hostile reception. Am I such a tyrant? wondered Pelham. “Yes, man, I knew something was wrong here. I want to hear it. All of it. You may sit, if you like.” He waved toward a side-chair opposite.

“I’d be more comfortable standin’, sir, I couldn’t sit in front of you. It wouldn’t be right, sir.” This was the first time the man had ever spoken to him face-to-face, alone. He was making a splendid job of it. He was telling his own truth, not what his captain wanted him to say. Pelham nodded curtly, schooled his features into less than the frown they wished to wear.

“Very well, I understand. Now then ——? It’s not right, you are telling me? Not his fault? I must tell you, Stroud, that you are setting your word against Mr. Hastings’ own, here. Be very careful what you tell me.” He sat back, watched the man’s face. Wide-open; worked-up; angry and calm at the same time; determined; loyal. He liked what he saw; he liked it better than anything he had seen yet.

“All I know is the god’s honest truth, sir, an’ if ’e can’t or won’t tell you ’isself, sir, then I will. I got to, sir. We all agree, sir, every man-jack in the division, sir, an’ I said I’d be the one to come to you, Captain Pelham, sir. Them lads as was killed – e’s be’avin’ like it was ’is fault, sir, and it weren’t, it weren’t none of it ’is fault! If ’e ’adn’t given the order to fire, sir, we shouldn’t none of us ’ave got back alive!”

“I see,” said Pelham, leaning back further and allowing his fingertips to touch in front of his chest. He wanted to lean forward and take the man by his shirt-front, shouting “tell me!” — but that would not do. He must appear calm, open. He did so. “Go on,” he said, quietly.

“It was that lieutenant from the other ship, sir. In the other boat, comin’ along the other side of ’er, sir. We ’eard the shot, didn’t know what the fuck — oh Christ, sir, I beg yer parding, you know ’ow it is, in action, sir —”

“Very well,” said Pelham, “tell me – do not mind your language — hold nothing back, Stroud: go on.”

“So we ’eard it, sir, and didn’t none of us know what the ’ell could ’ave ’appened, sir, to fuck it all up like that, but we knew we was goners, sir. Well the frenchies all come runnin’ on deck an’ there we was a short pull away from ’er still, sir, no way we could board ’er now, an’ they was takin’ aim at us, sir. Mr. ’Astings told us to fire because they was gettin’ ready to shoot us down like dogs, sir! ’E ’ad to! That other bloody orficer didn’t say nuffink, sir, we could ’ear ’im even if we couldn’t see ’im, an’ ’e didn’t order it, sir, but we ’ad to fire, sir!”

“I see.”

“An’ we did, sir, two bloody boats against a fuckin’ sloop, sir, you should ha’ seen us, an’ ’e kept us pullin’ an’ firin’ — Mr. ’Astings — didn’t ’ear a peep from that fuckin’ Peacock, Pocock, whatever ’is stupid name is… not at first, sir, till ’e started cussin’ ’is men — an’ ’e got us out of there, sir, Mr. ’Astings, wiv most of us alive to tell the tale, sir, ’e didn’t flinch when ’e saw they was training the cannon on us, sir, ’e pulled like the rest of us, ‘steady, men,’ ’e said, all white ’e was, sir, but as firm as you please, gave the boys ’eart even though poor ole Davy was bleedin’ like a pig an’ Knights’s brains was splattered all over ’im an’ Smith was screamin’, sir, because of ’ow they’d shot ’im through the balls, poor sod — ”

“I see.”

“An’ we pulled away, sir, an’ the lads was all in stroke an’ ’e ’ad ’alf of us coverin’ fire an’ the other ’alf pullin’, sir, as beautiful as you please like we was on a Sunday afternoon in the park, an’ ’e was telling the men what was shot ’e’d ’ave ’elp for ’em in no time, they wasn’t to fret, ’e’d get ’em back alive if it killed ’im, sir, an’ ’e would ’ave if that ball ’adn’t ’it us amidships, sir.”

“God,” said Pellew. “The boat was struck? Directly? By cannon-shot? All I heard was that it sank — ”

“Right under me nose, sir. Blew Wiggins to pieces. We all got a bit of ’im. Weren’t nothink left. An’ we sank like a stone, sir, it was all over then. An’ Mr. ’Astings pulled as many of the lads as couldn’t swim to the bits of the boat, sir. There was a couple more what would ’ave drownded, an’ the rest of us was pullin’ ’em up, sir. An’ they lost their range, then, them French bastards, they couldn’t see us no more in the dark once the boat was lost, sir. Jemmy drownded. But Pike an’ Barlow didn’t, sir, ’e wouldn’t let ’em. An’ then ’e swam to get the other boat, sir, Mr. ’Astings, with that piss-poor excuse for an officer. Sir. They come past us an’ they wasn’t even looking’ fer us, sir, they was just pullin’ ’ell-fer-leather away from that bloody balls-up, beggin yer parding, sir, an’ their orficer was yellin’ at them at the top of ’is lungs an’ them Frenchies was firin’ on them, sir. They still ’ad the range, all that fuckin’ noise as ’e was making, sir. Screamin’, ’e was, pissing ’imself I’d say.”

“I see,” said Pelham, trying to imagine the scene; seeing it all too well, and feeling disgust and grief at what he saw. His men, abandoned and betrayed. “But he was — in charge of the expedition — Lieutenant Pocock — so he was giving the orders, then, to salvage what could be salvaged? To save the men from our boat? Surely that was what he was shouting, was it not, Stroud?”

“No, sir. Just cussing, sir. They should ’ave put Mr. ’Astings in charge, sir. ’E wouldn’t never ’ave buggered it up like that.”

“No,” said Pelham, “I am quite sure he would not. So what happened then?”

“Mr. ’Astings got them to pull fer us, sir, where we was, an’ shut the fucker up — oh Christ, sir — ”

“It’s all right, Stroud,” said Pelham, “don’t mind that. You have every right to be upset, from what I am hearing, and I have asked you to hold nothing back, in telling me. This is what I want to hear — what I must hear.”

“Yes, sir, it is,” said Stroud. “An’ ’e won’t tell, you, sir.”

“”No,” said Pelham, “and I am not pleased to hear it. Not that — and not this neither! It is a shambles, all of it! Why was I not informed?” he barked —— as if Stroud could answer that question. He recovered himself, then: “I beg your pardon, man; you are informing me. And quite rightly so. And I am grateful to you; you have done nothing wrong. But god! There is much wrong, here!”

Stroud returned his stare evenly, look for look, angry flash for angry flash. “ ’E can’t, sir. Call the other orficer a coward, sir!”

“A coward, Stroud? I thought you said it was an accident, a stray shot? From one of the men in his boat? How could Lieutenant Pocock have prevented that?”

“One of his men? ’Oo told you that, sir?”

“Mr. Hastings implied it, though he would not tell me which boat it came from, but I did not think any of you men would have — and then you did, just now.”

“Well, yes, that’s all we knew at the time, sir. But I axed one of ’is men, as soon as they pulled us aboard, sir. I was that angry, sir. ’Ow could you go an’ fuck it up like that, I axed ’im. Which o’ yer was it? Trigger-happy sod? Got ’alf of us killed? An’ it were ’im, sir, ’is own man told me! Lieutenant bloody fuckin’ Pocock! ’E were nursin’ ’is pistol all nervous wiv ’is fuckin’ finger on the trigger, sir, primed and cocked! It went off in the boat, ’e damn near shot one of ’is own men, sir, the ball passed between ’em, my lad told me, sir, took a chunk out of ’is scalp. That’s what ’appened, sir!” Stroud was breathing heavily, furious. Pelham overlooked the curses and profanities: at last he was getting what he wanted, and the wild words let him know it was the truth.

“God,” said Pelham. “And he didn’t admit to it?”

“I told Mr. ’Astings, sir, soon as I could. An’ ’e asked the other sod, what went wrong. And ’e said it was us as fired, sir. On Mr. ’Asting’s order! An’ Mr. ’Astings said, But a shot came from your boat, sir, an’ that fucker said You must be mistaken, sir! All I ’eard was your giving the order to fire!” Stroud took on a disgusted tone as he aped Pocock’s upper-class tones. “An’ ’e said, sir, our Mr. ’Astings, ’e said, But that is not what ’appened! —— and that prick said, that is my report, sir, and I am sorry for it, but I must say it as I saw it. Cool as a cucumber, lyin’ in ’is teeth, sir! An’ Mr. ’Astings looked like a fish, sir, out o’ water, an’ then ’e turned away an’ started in on tendin’ to our lads what was ’urt so bad. And we pulled back to the Calypso, and then sailed on to the Indy, sir. But I seen you givin’ ’im them dirty looks, sir, our Mr. ’Astings, an’ so ’as all the lads, an’ a-blaming of ’im, an’ we won’t stand for it, sir; you got to know!”

“Indeed I do,” said Pelham. “You have done the right thing, in coming to me, Stroud. You are a good man, I knew it already — worthy of a good officer.”

“Which I got, sir.”

“Yes, you do,” said Pelham, “and it hurt me deeply, to doubt it even for a second. I am much relieved, at what you have told me. Would you be so good as to ask Mr. Hastings to report to me immediately?”

The frown he wore as he spoke troubled Stroud; what had he gone and done, now? Not got his orficer into further difficulties! Oh, damn and shit if he had. “Sir, I ain’t — don’t tell me ’e’s in trouble wiv you more, sir, fer not tellin’ yer?”

“I shall have to dress him down for keeping it from me, Stroud. Before I tell him I should likely have had to do the same, if I were a midshipman too, in his place. Not putting his word against a senior officer, in command of the expedition, and accusing him of cowardice and dereliction of his duty. Although he should have told me — the man is a danger to his men — but — ” — here Pelham sighed. “You have not got him into trouble, Stroud. You may tell your division I am grateful. I shall deal with him fairly. More fairly than I have so far, god knows!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“No,” said Pelham, “thank you, Stroud.”

And so Hastings had stood in front of him again, and Pelham had flashed at him: “For god’s sake! Your record besmirched, sir? My trust in you, betrayed? And you said nothing — nothing! Why in the hell did you not tell me the truth, sir?”

“I could not, sir,” said Hastings stiffly. “What good would it have done? My word against a senior officer’s, sir?”

“Because I would have believed you,” said Pelham, furious. “Without question. I know you, sir. What kind of officer you are. My officer. Damn you, sir, I have had the training of you and I could not believe that you would so let me down.”

“I told you they fired a shot, sir.”

“So you did. So you did. But you did not even tell me it was the other boat! Not even when I pressed you!”

“No, sir. It happened — what else was there to say, sir?”

“He put the blame on you, Hastings! For Christ’s sake, man! The captain of Calypso thinks you gave the order to fire, sir! Prematurely – and thus lost the men, the expedition, everything. You have told me you did not until you had to, and I believed you; but you told me nothing further, nothing I could take to him and insist he interrogate his man further — you were a clam, sir, a wretch! I had nothing to go on, in defending you, sir!”

Hastings blinked. “I could not see what else to do, sir.”

“Couldn’t you! Damnation, man, can you not be as conscientious a subordinate as you are a commander? Do not ever withhold the truth from me again, Mr. Hastings. Upon any pretext whatsoever. I do not care if it is the reputation of his Majesty himself you must impugn - if it is the truth, sir, I want it from you! Immediately! I expect nothing less! It is not your responsibility to decide what to do with it, sir, it is mine! Do you understand?” Pelham had lost his temper, was shouting now, a few inches from Hastings’ face.

Hastings did not flinch, though he was as white as a new sail. “Yes, sir.”

Pelham mastered his fury, looked his midshipman up and down. Saw himself at that age, standing a lieutenant before Nelson, his captain, explaining a setback they had encountered. Taking full responsibility for it — although he had not been falsely accused: it had been a blunder, no-one’s fault, and so he took it as his because it was a man in his division that had made the mistake, and so his responsibility. How many years ago? He could feel it still. Meeting those cold blue eyes that blazed icy fire. “I should have done the same thing you did, I think,” he said, “but that does not make it right. And you now have my direct order, sir, to withhold nothing from me. Ever. For any reason. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” said Hastings, stiffly.

Pelham shook his head. “Oh, good God, man, must I say it in words a child would understand? I must, I see it. You hold yourself as if you are still ashamed, sir. As if you have done wrong.”

“I have, sir. In not telling you.”

“Well, that, yes. And I hope you are sorry for it — you should be, sir! But —— ” Pelham put his face in front of his lieutenant’s, three inches away. “ — but — I am proud of you, sir. Of your conduct – of all I have heard about that night, now. Do you understand that?”

“Proud, sir?” Hastings blinked, bewildered.

“Yes, sir; damned proud. From what I hear, you saved your men. You couldn’t have captured the sloop, or even saved your boat — but you lost only one man drowned and two killed outright — you got the wounded back — and you are responsible, sir, for as much of this calamity as was pulled from complete ruin. For what was rescued. Your men think so highly of you, sir, that they would not let an injustice continue. Even if they had to tell me to my face that I have been wrong.”

“Not wrong, sir!”

“Yes, wrong. For ever doubting that there was more to it than you told me. For the dressing-down I gave you. For misplacing my faith in you. For not getting one of them in here and ordering him to tell me what really happened. For taking Pocock’s word even though I gagged on it. For failing in my duty to you and the men. For allowing this injustice to be perpetrated when I knew it stank. They saw it — would not stand for it. Your entire division. Sent Stroud to tell me I was mistaken in my assessment of you.”

Hastings choked.

“You deserve no less, sir,” said Pelham softly. “Their lives are in your hands, and they know it. They are proud of you. You are their officer, and they would give their lives for you, and they know that you know it. And they know you value them. And all of that is just as it should be. Although it is rare, rarer than I wish it were.”

“Sir,” said Hastings slowly, “that is how we all feel about being aboard this ship, sir — under you —— ”

Pelham looked up, surprised. Realized he should not be; smiled. “Yes, Mr. Hastings,” he said. “That is what I have been trying to convey to you. The essence of command. Not your orders, not your sailing ability, not your navigation, not your seamanship, not your uniform, not your seniority — if you have not the trust of your men, sir, a trust you have earned and must earn and deserve every day you are in command of them, then you have nothing. Nothing. A ship, and disgrace. But with it, then — yes, you may call yourself an officer. If I have taught you that, sir, I have nothing more to teach you than mere theory: you have learned the most precious thing I have to show you, sir. And I thank God for it.”

Hastings breathed in and out; said nothing.

“I shall have to think how I am to deal with this — mess. This damned — debacle,” said Pelham then, with a deep sigh. “I will have a note appended to your record saying what I believe took place. On good authority, which I shall not name; but the word of more than one man. I shall say it was a delegation from your entire division, sir. And then — I shall speak privately with Captain Brassey next time I see him. He should know he has a liar and a coward for a lieutenant. I shall tell him I heard nothing from you, sir, upon my honour; as I did not. We shall see how he deals with it, then. God, what a hornet’s-nest.”

“Sir,” said Hastings, swallowing. “You are kind, sir.”

“No; I am your commander, and I am treating you as you deserve — fairly — that is all. Hmm,” said Pelham then, intrigued by the question now and wishing to put Hastings further on the spot, if it were command they spoke of. “How would you deal with it, if you were him, sir? You the captain, and your officer so disgraced?”

Hastings swallowed again; Pelham could see him thinking, considering, rejecting his first impulse, finding the words for a second. “I – I should ask him to report to me privately, sir, and tell him all I knew, and let him know I had it on a very good authority which I was not inclined to disbelieve; but that I found it hard to credit, sir, and I was sure he must have an explanation for me. And then I would have to see what he said, sir.”

“And if he stared ahead stonily, as you did the last time you were in here before me, sir?”

Hastings flushed – he had not seen himself as the lieutenant under interrogation, but as the captain, just as Pelham had wished him to. The realization he had put his captain in just such a position troubled him all over again. “I am sorry, sir,” he said.

“I accept your apology, for now, sir; I am more interested in your answer. I like to hear your thinking. So — if he says nothing?”

“Then I would have to tell him that if he did not defend himself, sir, that it must go on his record and my opinion of him, sir, until I heard otherwise. And I should not trust him as far as I could spit, sir.”

“I see. And if he told you the truth, instead?”

“What, sir, that he lost his nerve and his pistol discharged?”

“Yes...”

“ …and that he had put the blame elsewhere?”

“Yes.” Pelham’s frown was very bleak, now, the line between his brows a painful furrow.

“Oh, god, sir. Then — I should tell him that to have fired his piece accidentally was a grievous error, sir, and I hoped that he should learn from it, and think of the men who were lost because of it, sir, and reflect upon his own courage, sir, and bethink himself next time he took out such an expedition, to master himself better. That he would have learned a dreadful lesson, sir. If that were all.”

Pelham’s face was thunderous, now, with anger and disgust; but for the thought of the rest of it, Hastings knew, not his own conduct. His voice grated: “ — and what of the other issue? The lie?”

“If he admitted it — I — I should have to tell him, sir, that privately I considered him unworthy of his rank or my trust ever again, sir, and that I regretted it but that for the safety of my men I should be forced to place that in his record also. And tell him that if I ever suspected for one second that he had not learned his lesson here, that I should see him dismissed the service. Sir.”

“So you would give him one chance to redeem himself? After that, even? Not reduce his rank at once? Or worse?”

“I would not want to, sir; but I would. Extend that chance. His career…”

Pelham frowned. “Damn his career. What of his men ——?”

“I should send a steadier man out with him, sir. Not give him command alone, until he had proved himself.”

Pelham looked him up and down. So the lad had more faith in human nature than he did. Well, tempered with good judgement, faith was not a bad thing. The men responded to it, worked the harder to earn it, to keep it. It was better than harshness, to win over a crew. “Hmm. Would you. I am not sure that I should give him that much, even — but it is a good enough reply. A considered one. Generous, even — but not necessarily too gentle. I am pleased to hear it. Though my instincts run counter — but you did not see him here before me, lying in his teeth as he did, and blaming you. A mistake is one thing, any man may make one, and I too should be generous, for a mistake. But a lie…!” he shook his head, as if to clear his brain of the smell of it. “I have given men second chances, on occasion — and even, on occasion, I have lived not to regret it. You think like a captain, Hastings. Pray God you shall live to be one, sir, the Navy has need of officers like you. It is a desperate balancing-act, sometimes. The good of the service – the good of the ship – orders — the good of the men, when to risk their lives… it must never be taken lightly, or for granted. Never.”

“No, sir.”

“I see you do not take it lightly, Mr. Hastings. You are my best officer, sir, midshipman or no, and I am glad to have my faith in you restored. Now — you may go. Unless there is anything else you wish to say.”

Hastings turned brimming eyes on him: tears of relief? Or gratitude? “Thank you, sir,” he croaked.

“I speak as I see fit, Mr. Hastings, I have said nothing you do not deserve. Now let us never need to have another such conversation. Ever. By my explicit order.”

“Sir.”

“Good. Carry on, Mr. Hastings.” Pelham’s tone was soft now, the purr of a big cat fully in command of the situation once more: a tone of satisfaction, of relief, yes, a relief greater than Hastings’ own, even.

He watched the young man leave, the straight carriage of his back, only the head stooped under the low curving deck; felt the pride and pleasure in a captain’s heart that could only come of the very very best, and rarely then.

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

And so this was the young man he had sent to find them a surgeon. He did not doubt his success for a moment.

And he was right, of course.

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

The surgeon of the frigate just now anchored beside them had gone ashore to replenish his pharmacy — they had been in port all of an hour. Hastings asked until he found him.

“Sir,” he said, standing beside the unremarkable man in a shabby green coat who was bringing a sample of asafoetida to his nose, and deciding there was no point in beating about the bush – either the man would consent, or he would not, and if he did not Hastings still had his errand before him: “Mr. Johnson, sir, of Melpomene? Sir - is there anything at all I can say to you that would persuade you to join us aboard Indomitable? Now?”

“What!?” The man turned a thin face to him, intelligent, with a prominent nose and a narrow mouth well-schooled in pain and silence; yet not lacking compassion.

“You heard me, sir. We are to sail in two hours, sir — less — and we must have a surgeon, sir. Or we will lose men.”

“But — I have my own charge — aboard Melpomene, sir! And you have not even introduced yourself —!”

Hastings flushed. “I beg your pardon, sir. Hastings, of the Indomitable. Oliver Hastings. Under Captain Pelham, sir.”

Johnson turned, gave him his full attention. Hastings returned his guarded gaze with an open one. The slight, stooped man before him was known to him by reputation: men had come aboard the Indy from Melpomene speaking highly of him. Hastings never let any piece of information that might be useful pass him by; had seen the name of the frigate beside them, remembered a conversation he had had with Bates and a couple of transferred hands a year earlier, and leapt at the chance to solve their problem and leave them in better stead, because of it. A reputation in the navy had to be carried from top to bottom of a ship, or it was not worth having. The men knew better than the officers, half the time, who deserved their respect. After all, they lived and died by it; and nothing could be hidden from them by a fine strutting manner and brave words, afterwards. “Your reputation has preceded you, sir,” he added, even as Johnson bowed with a slight old-fashioned formality – he was by nature a very precise man – and introduced himself. “I have heard much of your skill, sir. From men you have treated. And of your great patience, and kindness, too, sir.”

Johnson stared. He had not heard anything of the kind from his own captain, who took his services entirely for granted and did not even allow him the extra monies he requested to stock the ship’s sick-bay with more than the requisite minimum. He also knew that this was no empty flattery he had just heard; this young man had spoken the truth, with obvious sincerity. There was not, by all appearances, a guileless bone in this gangly blue-and-white-clad body that stood before him, stiff and proud, waiting for his answer. He was a good ship’s doctor, a trained surgeon too, and he knew it: knew the men knew it. He could not say he was particularly happy in his berth; only that it sufficed. He had lost his nerve, ashore, once, attending a delivery; told his client the duke afterwards, in his cups, what he thought of his ducal seduction of the serving-woman that had died because he had failed, not having the heart to cut the living child in pieces and pull it from her womb, to save her. The Navy was all that was left, after that. He was an excellent surgeon.

He looked Hastings up and down. “And why should I sail with you, sir?’’

“My men need you, sir. They will die if you do not. Needlessly. And my captain is — well — there is none better in the fleet, sir. We have the very best ship in the Navy, sir, you will be happy aboard – highly-regarded and appreciated – and find yourself in very good company, sir, under as fair and firm a commander as you might ever wish to sail with — not more than a single flogging in six months, usually, less even, and no unnecessary loss of life, sir, nothing to make a doctor sick at heart — ”

“How do you know what would make a doctor sick at heart?”

“My father is one, sir, and I — I can only imagine — seeing what I have, and knowing what sickens me — ”

Johnson was intrigued in spite of himself. A swift plumbing of the depths of conversation, here – this young man wasted no time in coming to the point, and he was passionate: two qualities Johnson appreciated. Was he intelligent, also? Apparently so. And he promised good company, aboard: no small inducement in itself. Bad company could certainly ruin a berth, most wretchedly so. So Pelham ran a tight ship, that much he knew: but was this passionate young man representative of the rest? Could there be so much enthusiasm, so much – what – pride and joy – aboard a Naval vessel? For if so, then something in his jaded heart was pricking up ears of longing. “What sickens you, Mr. – er – Hastings?”

“Men’s lives thrown away, sir. Glory at too high a price. When prudence would have been better. A captain with no care for his crew, sir.”

Johnson reflected on his own situation. He was tempted.

“Captain Pelham has offered a signing bonus, sir. But that is not why you should join us. Sir.”

“Then why should I?’’

“Because there is no better ship in the Navy, sir, and it is the chance of a lifetime, to serve under him.”

Johnson looked at this bright face, the blazing eyes, the hot tongue. A young man so very proud of his ship – as to make the offer sound like a prize opportunity, not a desperate gambit. He liked what he saw. None of the officers aboard Melpomene would have said half as much; a quarter, even. They would have made the request dully, in embarrassment, squirming, expecting his refusal. As this young man did not. “A signing-bonus, Mr. Hastings?”

Hastings gave him the details. “I have the half in cash, sir.”

“Do you! Do you, indeed! Then send for my chest, sir, or better yet — do not — they will try to keep me. Let me come as I am – I own precious little of value. I shall need clothing — get me that — I have how much money to spend here, before we go aboard?”

Hastings looked at him strangely: had he decided so quickly? Did he understand? “The money is for you, sir —”

“No, we shall discuss that later with your captain. Yes, I have heard of him. Who hasn’t? Nelson’s first, was he not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I shall spend every penny here. Is your sick-bay well-equipped… well-stocked?’’

“I do not know, sir.”

“You say are a doctor’s son — give me your assessment.”

“No, sir. No better than adequately, sir. He has one-fourth of the selection my father keeps. And – he is very traditional in his treatments, sir.”

“For several hundred men? One-fourth of a doctor’s ashore, who may get all he wants at any time? For shame! We have much work to do, Mr. Hastings, and very little time to do it in, as far as I can tell. I must know the state of your surgery. The pharmacopia I shall select myself, now, with this money you have so kindly brought me. A fresh start is a wonderful thing, I believe, Mr. Hastings. Go tell your Captain Pelham I shall be aboard at – what time, sir?”

“We sail upon the afternoon tide. And I am sure you may place whatever you need above the money we have upon my Captain’s account, sir, he would wish it, I know. You won’t need anything in the surgical line, sir – we have a full surgery, and many extra instruments – the captain would allow nothing less. It is a particular passion of his. You will not regret it, sir.”

“Let us hope not,” smiled the surgeon. He tried not to allow his excitement to show, being a cautious and dry man; but faced with this flushed and enthusiastic young officer, it was hard to hide it altogether. A fresh opportunity, a new ship, a good captain — life holding out a promise to him, to redeem himself as a doctor. He was tired of Melpomene. Not a bad ship; just not a good one. There were plenty worse; but now Providence had delivered up to him a better, and the money to treat the men as they deserved, with the very best of his skill.

He felt quite sure he would not regret it; as indeed he did not. Although it cost him his heart, but that was not the same as regret.

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

When Hastings returned aboard Indomitable, the ship’s boat loaded with cases of bottles and jars and screws of paper in chests and this unimpressive, slightly hunchback little man in the shabby coat, Pelham closed his eyes for a moment and thanked his God. Then he barked over the rail, harshly, “Good god, Hastings, I asked you to find us a surgeon, not an entire damned hospital!”

Hastings looked up at his captain. Johnson noted the ease and sparkle of his reply: he was not reprimanded here and he knew it. The captain seemed to be hiding his pleasure, and Hastings was well aware of it, and answered him accordingly, without a scrap of defensiveness; pleasure, rather, and a quiet satisfaction. “Sir, I beg your pardon, sir, but I could not have the one without the other – and so I had to take both, sir, it was the best I could do in the time.”

“Very well, Mr. Hastings,” growled the captain, “get him aboard – you are welcome, sir, I am sure – doctor - ?”

“Johnson,” called up the surgeon, pulling himself up the side-ropes and stepping aboard. The captain had come down to meet him; was shaking his hand firmly, vigorously.

“Damned pleased to have you aboard, sir,” he was saying, meeting Johnson’s eyes for a moment warmly even as he turned half his attention to the matter of the supplies. “Get that load aboard and stowed,” he cried then, gesturing his head toward the boat. He caught his breath on the shout, had to turn aside and cough at the end of it.

Johnson made a quick assessment: forty-odd, energetic, highly intelligent; a man who would drive others to their best, but himself harder still. Recently ill, apparently, for there was pallor under the tan and the cheeks were somewhat hollow, flushed in a manner he did not quite like to see for so little exertion as coming down from the quarterdeck to greet him. He did not like the sound of the cough, not its dryness nor the way the man winced, even as he tried to hide it. Still, the voice was firm, the eyes clear: the nails in the hand he had shaken were pink, not blue, straight and not clubbed, thank God – so this was not of long-standing, then, the lung-trouble, and there had been no fever in the touch. He must be fairly well-recovered, so, and Johnson would soon address the vestiges of the cough that remained.

He looked the captain up and down, and found his scrutiny returned. “Your officer is a very persuasive young man,” he said.

He could not have known that to compliment Pelham upon one of his men was the swiftest way to his heart, but he saw the effect of it. The dark brown eyes filled with warmth and pride even in all the preoccupation of getting the ship under weigh. “Indeed he is, sir,” replied the captain briskly. “Which is why I sent him.”

“He did you proud, sir.”

“I am pleased to hear it,” said Pelham, “though I expected no less, sir. I knew he would pull the rabbit out of the hat, if anyone could. Not that you are a rabbit, sir,” (he lifted one eyebrow wryly, apologetically), “ but to have secured your services at such short notice – we are fortunate, fortunate indeed, and I thank you most - er – sincerely for it.”

“Thank me when I have filled the position, sir,” said Johnson. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

Pelham eyed him shrewdly. “Indeed it is, sir. We are of a like mind, I see. Your modesty does you credit. Our last man was a windbag – the highest opinion of him aboard this ship was his own. Deservedly so. I think – I think we are going to do very well with you aboard, sir – both personally and professionally. I hope so.”

Johnson observed the quiet joy in the man who stood before him. Being a newcomer to the ship, he could only guess at its origin, and not being privy to the circumstances of the captain’s private life, he was not in a position to speculate, unlike every other man aboard Indomitable, that this happy effect and visible ease was the result of the captain’s just having returned aboard from a prolonged spell of being nursed back to health by his wife most tenderly and with every attention to all of his needs, including at last thank God the opportunity to make love to her (albeit carefully, given his condition) upon every possible occasion and a few more besides. All the doctor could see was that here stood a man in the prime of life who was so entirely comfortable with himself, his command and his life that it glowed in him like a steady light: the man was a veritable lantern in uniform. Johnson allowed himself a slight answering twinkle. Already his precious powders and herbs and tinctures and essences and syrups and greases and oils were being swung aboard; the men on deck had wasted no time in rigging the hoist, and were working quickly and expediently to get it all below decks.

“Come, sir,” said Pelham, “you must be eager to get your kingdom organized. Mr. Cooper, take Dr. Johnson here down to the sick-bay and show him his cabin. I hope you will join me for dinner, sir?”

“I shall, with pleasure,” replied Johnson, looking forward to it already. “Do you have any currently on the sick-list?”

Pelham’s approval for his down-to-business approach was as palpable as a hot brick. “Let me see – I am just now come aboard myself, but I recollect, I did see the list – one man with a rupture, chronic I am sorry to say, and one with a broken hand, and a couple who have not been wise in the closeness of their acquaintance with the ladies of the town, I am even sorrier to say. Also an impetigo and – er – two ringworms. I have this morning ordered them head-shaved and doused with sulphur and paraffin and bid them stay away from any sources of ignition. But I am mightily pleased to have you take over, sir. You may well find there are more cases, our previous man was not – er – energetic in pursuit of his trade.”

“I see,” nodded Johnson, mentally reviewing how best to hold sick-call, whether he would invite malingerers with a general inspection of the crew by divisions. He rather thought it unlikely, aboard this ship. “Very good, sir. Till later, then.”

“I shall look forward to it, sir,” replied Pelham, and his tone gave every indication that he meant it – which indeed he did.

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

That first dinner was both a revelation and a promise of all that was to come. Pelham had gathered a group of officers capable of lively conversation, and encouraged them in it: the atmosphere around the captain’s table was a most happy one, filled with a mutual respect and yet also among the officers a most appropriate recollection of the deference they owed their captain: they were at ease with him while not over-familiar. This balance was very apparent, from the way he addressed them as equals at table to the way he gave orders on deck; and their response in each case. Here was a man who had his distinctions finely drawn and his men comfortable with that firmness, knowing where they stood.

Johnson observed the captain hiding an extra twinkle in his eye when he addressed Hastings, more so than any of the others. The young man seemed to have gained his captain’s confidence most particularly. The rest of the officers could not be unaware of this; and yet the captain was warm with each of them in person, at table, and they appeared to have just such an affection for the lieutenant themselves, so that their captain’s appeared part of the whole regard in which he clearly was held. Hastings turned out to be most modest in his manner when not trying to sell his ship and his captain in five-minutes-flat.

Pelham announced a toast at the end of the meal, which had been quite fine since they were fully-provisioned and had only just left port with all manner of fresh supplies. Immediately after proposing the health of the His Majesty, Pelham turned to Johnson. “Welcome aboard, sir,” he said with sincerity. “We could not be more delighted to have you. You will find yourself very welcome here, sir, I have no doubt of it. You must not hesitate to ask any of my officers if you should need anything – anything at all – please, whatever you should require, sir, we wish to hear of it at once. Gentlemen — I give you Mr. Johnson, our very own and very welcome ship’s surgeon!”

The rest of them rose again, held up their glasses to him. Nothing of the kind had happened to him in his life, and he was confused to find himself flushing awkwardly at being the focus of so friendly a regard. “Welcome aboard, sir,” they chorused, and drank his health.

Hastings rose then. “Gentlemen,” he said, at ease now among his fellow-officers and warming to his subject even while calling so much attention to himself still brought him a blush, “I shall relieve our good doctor of making his first request. I stole him away from Melpomene, as you well know, and this in so much haste and secrecy that he barely had time to write his letter of regret and resignation. Fortunately they are to be in port to refit for a good fortnight, and they may well be able to find themselves another – though I do not believe they will find a better, not this side of the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. For those of you who have not heard, gentlemen, Mr. Johnson here has treated members of our crew in the past, and they speak most highly of him. Well – to cut a long story short – he did not have time, nor did we think it prudent, to send for his dunnage. And so, besides this toast, sirs, I propose a tax – a tax upon all of our sea-chests – to furnish him with enough shirts and drawers and so on that he may not disgrace himself nor us. We did manage to pick up a handful of effects in the town, but all of our attention was bent on getting him and his pharmacy aboard….”

Johnson watched his needs being addressed via this humour and kindliness with a strange feeling in his gut. This young man had complete command of the situation, and the captain was sitting back and enjoying his handling of it. Hastings stood now, the candle-light playing on his dark-red hair – Johnson appreciated such things, although he had not ever allowed himself to act upon them, most especially not while aboard ship – his open face grinning happily as the offers of small-clothes and shirts came in. From the half-dozen of them there assembled, he would find himself adequately clothed till they could put into the next port, and all done kindly, generously, the captain leading and offering to make up any shortfall. Hastings’ eyes turned to him and he felt his heart turn over. He blinked and hid it. God, would this voyage tear him in two? No; he must not allow it. Look, but don’t touch, he had always told himself, and here he knew he must never trespass; or else risk ruin. Not to mention hurting this beautiful lad — young man, he corrected himself, for one who enjoyed his captain’s confidence and his fellow officers’ respect so clearly, junior as he was to more than one of them, could hardly be called a lad.

He smiled carefully, nodded and thanked each of them in turn.

**********

Pelham looked up at the knock. It was one he did not recognize: not as loud as Hastings’, not as deliberate as Wainwright’s, but firm and quick.

“Come!” he called.

Johnson entered, a small brown bottle in hand. “Captain Pelham, sir,” he said, “I could not help noticing your cough yesterday. Mr. Hastings tells me you are but lately recovered from a very serious inflammation of the lungs, sir. I have now unpacked all of my supplies, and while you have not asked me, I took the liberty of mixing this for you, sir.”

Pelham raised an eyebrow. “Took the liberty, sir?”

Johnson did not appear in the least disconcerted. “You are my charge, Captain Pelham, no less than any man aboard this ship, sir, and I should be remiss in my duty if I did not prescribe as I see is needed, sir, for you or any other member of the crew.”

“Your duty, hm?” said Pelham, his mouth starting to curl up at one corner. He did not recall the word ever having burdened Ramsbottom’s lips.

“Indeed, captain. I should be pleased to have a fuller consultation upon the subject of your health and recovery, sir, and the precautions I would still recommend for a man in your situation – ”

“Precautions?” echoed Pelham, losing his smile. Ramsbottom’s bullying meddling was still fresh in his mind, even though its subject – Sophie’s care of him – was now, sadly, no longer to the point. Still the word raised unpleasant memories and the spectre of unwarranted interference.

“Avoiding exposure to extremely damp or windy weather on deck, sir, though fine days and sunshine are beneficial – the taking of extra quantities of sauerkraut and inspissated lime-juice, I have observed such antiscorbutics to help prevent further respiratory difficulties such as colds, that can set back a recovery — nothing major, sir – but in the meantime, I wished you to begin with this.” Johnson observed the captain’s manner turning a little milder: but there was still some heat in that pair of brown eyes that would not help between them, if he did not defuse it. He pressed on, making his case before Pelham should dismiss him. “My intent is not to mollycoddle you, sir, but to return you to the full performance of your duty, without delay, with no further risk to your health nor to your command, sir. I am well aware that much depends on you, Captain Pelham — and if your ability to accomplish it depends upon your strength, sir, then it is my charge to return it to you, if it is within my power to do so — to support the body’s natural healing processes — as I may, sir, and intend to, with the help of this. It will help to keep the cough at bay, so that you do not further irritate your lungs unnecessarily. A mild linctus, sir, no more.”

He was pleased to see his words received with a questioning frown, rather than a disapproving one. “No paregoric – no poppy, I hope?” said Pelham. “I will not be impaired, sir.”

Johnson smiled. “I would never prescribe anything of the kind without notifying you, sir. That would be an unwarranted presumption. For the good of the ship as well as my respect for your intelligence.”

Pleased, Pelham permitted himself a slight smile, then. He felt no small relief at what he had heard, and the calm, reasoned way in which the fellow spoke. This was not one prima-donna face-to-face with another, but two men who well knew what responsibility was, and their part in assuming it. “A sound answer, sir, and one I appreciate more than I can tell you. My last surgeon had no intelligence to speak of, which hardly left him in any position to respect it in others – or to consider his patients as entire individuals, with their own particular – er – circumstances. Such as my responsibilities of command. So – I am most grateful to you, then. Hm!” He nodded for emphasis. “ Yes, the cough has been – troublesome. It is all that is left of a far worse condition, I am glad to say. I was in bad shape a couple of weeks ago, I admit it — my wife would tell you if I did not, or Hastings I have no doubt — he did, did he? — but with no thanks to that fool, and very great thanks to my wife’s nursing, I am restored — as you see — ” He took the bottle from Johnson’s outstretched hand, thinking how rarely yet he had had the occasion to use the words, ‘my wife,’ and how very much he enjoyed saying them and feeling the warmth they brought him. “I have no doubt it tastes foul?”

“It is my own formulation, sir – I hope it is not as foul as all that. There is honey, as well as a number of herbal compounds, including a couple I have found to have a similar calming effect to poppy upon the nervous system and the cough reflex — to dampen the unhealthy excitation of illness — without affecting the faculties, or promoting drowsiness, in the dose I am recommending. Mostly I would call the flavour reminiscent of rosemary and lemon, with a note of mint.” He approached Pelham one step further: not at all unsure of himself, but more in the manner of a man who merely seeks to confirm certain information, he added, “I trust I have not overstepped my limits, sir? It is not my intent to be familiar. But I cannot hold back, where I see that some treatment is indicated.”

Pelham’s lips twitched. “I would say you have judged your limits very nicely, doctor, very nicely indeed. I am impressed, sir. With your sensitivity – with your zeal – with your understanding. I think we have made a very good find in you, sir.” His look was keen, appraising. Johnson hoped he would continue to pass the tests of his position so easily, as they grew ever more severe.

“I hope so, sir,” he said, not quite smiling in response – his teeth were less than perfect – but looking very pleased. His narrow face held a slight flush. “I certainly hope so. You should take a teaspoonful every four hours, sir, while you are awake, and two before you retire, when the full calming effect may be beneficial.”

Pelham set it down on his desk. “I thank you, Dr. Johnson.”

Johnson knew the polite dismissal of a busy man when he heard it. “Sir,” he said, as he closed the door behind him, “ — it was no more than my duty — and my pleasure.”

Pelham uncorked the bottle, took a swig. Johnson had been quite accurate in his assessment: it was not at all unpalatable. Like the honey-and-lemon Sophie had made for him, but with other, more pungent additions. He followed it up with a small brandy and turned his attention back to his paperwork.

It did indeed calm the cough, giving his sore chest a better chance to heal in the fresh salt air. He had hardly expected to be Johnson’s first patient; but as an experimental subject, he thought the ship was fortunate to have secured his services.

***********

Johnson was used to loneliness and self-denial. He had always held himself aloof from his fellows aboard ship, knowing that to act upon his most private feelings must bring disgrace and worse. By nature a solitary and untrusting soul, it had not been too difficult to do so. Here, though, was a challenge of a kind he had not met. He had worked hard to regard himself as basically an asexual creature, with a – well – appreciation, only, for all of human creation, but those of his own gender even more so. Hastings, this candle-flame of a young man, forced him to look more truthfully into his soul. Could he still rise and take his place in this easy, convivial fellowship – one that included smiles, teasing, laughter, warm looks, kindness, trust – and not lay himself open like one flayed? Yes, he could: he must.

And so he did. All the officers sought him out, in and out of the sick-bay, following-up on the men in their divisions under his care, or for company alone. None more conscientiously than Hastings, which was hardly to be wondered-at: Johnson would have been surprised had it not been so. It did not take long before he felt as if he had been aboard Indomitable all his life — or at least, waiting for just such a home. Perhaps for the first time he felt himself valued as he deserved to be. Certainly they had a way of drawing him out, in being so very natural with one another, that made it a satisfying place to be. Sometimes they dined all together at the captain’s invitation, as they had the first night; and at other times, when Pelham sought his solitude, Johnson ate with the officers most companionably below-decks. He came to develop an affection for each of them, for different reasons — Wainwright, kindly and literal-minded, who tried so very hard and spoke so wryly of his wife and children back at home, sharing his wife’s treasured home-cooked dainties with them on special occasions; Cooper, who would never be the officer that Hastings was, but who could be persuaded after a glass or two to talk of his interest in astronomy; Partridge, pretty (though not in the way that seared Johnson’s soul) and fresh-faced, with his love of music and his willingness to sing, play the fiddle, the flute, cards or backgammon at any and every opportunity that presented itself. All of them faithful, hard-working, dedicated, diligent in their duty. Pelham would have stood for nothing less. There was no room for slacking here, no-one got away with anything – nor would they have wished to! — and so there was not the fallow ground for resentments and back-biting that is so easily sown on a laxer ship, under a less firm hand. Oh, they had their differences and disagreements – these were human beings, after all, and this was hardly Eden – but the atmosphere aboard was such that it was clearly expected for all discord to be resolved, all disagreements settled as between gentlemen, all parties worthy of respect; and so there were not the bitter escalations and rifts that beset some officers’ messes he had known. Yes indeed, Hastings had spoken no less than the truth, in his invitation that fortunate day.

A few times Pelham requested the honour of his presence singly, and Johnson came to look forward to an evening of wry discussions upon many topics with one who shared his broad yet sadly-experienced view of human nature. They found each others’ intelligence pleasingly complementary, and Johnson learned much about the essence of this navy he served in from studying Pelham alone and on the quarterdeck. He would not have transferred to another ship again for all the money in the Navy’s yearly allotment. Money meant nothing to him: fellowship, all. He had never before found a place where he could be himself. This one seemed to invite it. Of course, his deepest yearnings he still held close to his soul; but he did not feel ashamed of them, here. Perhaps he was coming to accept himself with a little of the warmth and readiness with which they took him into their ship, their mess and their hearts.

His favourite evenings of all, though, were those where the captain’s guest rotation (always strictly fairly divided, so no conclusions of favouritism could be drawn from it) comprised himself and Hastings, either with no other guests — best of all! — or a couple more only. Then it seemed to him that the conversations and the passion with which they were pursued, the intimacy and regard they fell into so easily, filled the cabin with a glow richer even than the candles in their curving silver candelabras. Here was a captain who liked to unbend in company he trusted, showing a human side of himself he kept well-covered upon the quarterdeck, where it hid behind his eyes and could be seen only by those who read faces as easily as books. The captain, he thought, would make a long and very complex book. And Johnson saw that with Hastings, his trusted man, Pelham left no side of himself obscure; nor did the lad, in return. They might have been father and son together, thought Johnson, watching them and warming his long-cold heart at their flame, and little by little allowing himself almost as much candour with them. Friendship, while it might not openly be named so between a captain and his subordinates, was what he found on those occasions.

For Hastings alone he reserved his most particular confidences, about his fears for his patients, and even the incident in his past that had brought him here. With no-one was he more himself. Still, never for one second would he ever have allowed himself to betray the more-than-warmth he felt for this extraordinary creature. Although to do so — to rein-in one side of his unbidden feelings — sometimes now brought him physical anguish of a kind he had long cut-off. It must be – it was – enough to feed his soul for now that the lad was comfortable with him, sought his company, exchanged frank opinions of the men and their ailments and all manner of other subjects.

He also noted that when Pelham was not among them, his private life was the subject of much gossip and speculation among the junior officers, from whom he soon learned of the recent marriage – a hasty affair, sir! – not to mention the comeliness of Lady Pelham, her charms described with such warmth he felt he could have appreciated them himself, almost – clearly a woman of magnetism and spirit, to have made such an impression upon these saucy (though impressionable) lads. And he noted also that when Mr. Hastings was present, he silenced such talk with a disapproving look, defending his captain’s privacy most fiercely even while it seemed an impossible undertaking on so crowded and intimate a vessel. Johnson only admired him the more, for attempting it: was touched by the fierce modesty in him that disapproved of such naughty, ribald, affectionate remarks as they made when they were off-watch and had had a glass or two more than they could well handle without loosening their tongues.

He did not ever see Hastings in that state. The tall and awkward yet somehow simultaneously graceful young man kept himself always completely under control in all he said and did. Not unlike his model, the captain; which was little surprise, then, given the admiration Hastings so clearly felt for Pelham — a regard the captain just as evidently returned. Johnson would lie awake, some nights, reviewing his own thirty-five dry and cautious years, and consider Hastings: all he was.

To start with, of course, he was the cause of his own coming aboard in the first place, not that he had foreseen falling in love with him, and would not have permitted himself to call it that under any circumstances; for he held himself much as Pelham had done for most of his life at sea, fiercely celibate and wrenching his thoughts from any such treacherous direction by long force of habit. And yet that was only the beginning of Hastings, as an officer, a young man. He had, as has been noted, a puritanical streak in him, clearly a virginal one, and Johnson was happy to think of him as essentially and deeply innocent, unlike several of his younger fellow-officers. If he were so untouchable, now and for ever more, it was comforting to Johnson that he be also so untouched. In the face of this purity, Johnson could well contain himself. He was, after all, no more experienced himself; only in the ways of wanting. These he had long acquaintance with, mostly locked away (although the lines about his mouth suggested something of the kind). Hastings could be admired, quite simply. Well: loved. Platonically, then, anyway, at least on the surface. There was no coarseness or crudeness to him. When he spoke of women it was with respect, and in some cases affection.

There was a morning in the sick-bay when he had mentioned his late mother to Johnson, and his eyes had filled with tears for a moment: their conversation had been very open and the lad’s defences were down. Johnson watched him turn away and dash them quickly aside, swallow and carry on speaking. (This moment, the sparkle of Hastings’ tears, shivered and burned and haunted Johnson by nights for the rest of his life – a gift, then, though one with thorns.) Clearly, Hastings liked women and enjoyed their company. When, now and then, the subject of Lady Pelham came up, his youthful admiration of her was very apparent. He did not seem to view women as merely vessels for a man’s satisfaction, as might have been assumed from some of the midshipman’s-mess conversations Johnson had overheard. There was almost a sacredness in the way Hastings mentioned those he cared for. He noted something similar in Pelham, who would very occasionally say the words, “my wife,” and then a new tone would sound in his voice and his face would lose its stern-ness and transform itself in a moment of fierce joy before returning once more to the captain’s frown.

So he came to know these men, officers and crew, and to concur on his own account with what Hastings had so fervently assured him of: that this was indeed the very best ship in the Navy.

He certainly had his work cut out for him. Aboard a ship like this, there were always ruptures, accidents, occasional illnesses – although the active life and fresh air prevented many ailments common on land; after being in port a nasty cold might sweep through the men, bringing runny noses and sore throats and earaches to be endured, or god forbid, far worse, the measles – he hoped not, although if any ship could sail on half her crew if she had to, this one could. Action was an another story altogether: after an action he would work without cease, sometimes for days and nights together. It was expected: how could he do less?

He concealed his special devotion to Hastings, knowing if any kindliness in him were apparent in that direction it was no more than was shared by the rest of the crew to a man, as devoted to the lad as he was to them, from the captain down to the ship’s-boy.

—— And so went about his business with the pleasure and satisfaction of a job well done and a man who knows himself appreciated – which he was, Pelham losing no opportunity to tell him so. Sometimes it was but a glance, across the deck, even – such was the subtlety with which the man commanded, that a look from him brought a flood of recognition and an answering loyalty, without words, even. Thus, as the weeks and months went by, Johnson thanked his lucky stars for the day he had been hunted down by Hastings, knowing nothing more could come of it than this; but this fed his soul, more than he had ever thought to find or have in his life. At last, he had found the place where he belonged.

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

The enemy second-rater came down on them quickly, under cover of a squall whose dirty and swift appearance out of the south had almost taken them by surprise with all sail set. They had not made landfall in over a week, though they knew they must be hard upon the north-east coast of Spain, having previously passed Mallorca. Still hauling-in canvas, the ship shuddering and heaving before the lashing winds and cat-o-nine-tails rain, suddenly they heard the lookout’s hail, swiftly followed by the captain’s bellow: all hands!

There was no time to prepare for the action before it was upon them. The Frenchman fired first, while half of them were still aloft. One ball sailed through the main topsail, carrying away half the mizzen topsail-yard, six plunging topmen and a tangle of rigging, while another smashed through two prime deck-hands and the bell-housing: the ship’s bell made a doleful clang as it fell to the deck below. A third shattered the rail directly in front of the captain, driving a razor-splinter into the front of his thigh. The rest went wide, raising plumes of white out of the jostling pewter waves.

They were not so fortunate the next time.

Hastings ran past his division, jumping over blocks and wounded men. “Wait – don’t fire till she bears — don’t waste a shot — wait — wait — now fire! FIRE!” — and the roar of the Indomitable’s broadside deafened him momentarily.

It was a swift and ugly action, made more perilous by the driving squall and the sudden loom of land under their lee: by Pelham’s reckoning, through the sheets of rain, the approach to Punta Rioja, beyond which the land fell away again towards the estuary of the Guadalquivir and its marshes. They would clear it, though not by much. He strained to see the shape of it, that low shoulder with a cairn at the summit, a line of hills receding from it — and his blood froze. They were not there at all, but ten miles to the south, and the looming cape was not Punta Rioja after all, but Punta Deste. Punta Deste, whose right hook reached out fully two more sea-miles into the Mediterranean, a jumble of shattered rocks, a tide-race, a deadly low second headland hidden just beyond the first.

Three or four precious minutes had passed since he had first mistaken it; minutes that might now cost him his ship.

Surely the French captain must have made the same error: surely he would not be pursuing them onto this lee shore, if he recognized its peril to himself? Could he have overlooked it? In this sudden gale they would neither of them escape that carnivorous granite fang, greedy for English and French alike, calling for its next ration of flesh and timbers and bobbing barrels, shrieks and bubbling saltwater lungs.

Nothing to do but keep as close a rein on her as he could — and his nerve. In this weather, under those ever-approaching twin decks of guns, twice the metal of the Indy, it would be certain death to attempt anything else.

Pelham had bound a cloth tightly round his leg. Thus expediently, if bloodily decorated, he strode the quarterdeck in his customary tigerish way as they drew past the first point, revealing the line of rocks at the foot of the second. Between orders, Pelham found himself holding his breath: meeting the eyes of the ship’s master, he wondered how long it took to drown. It would be more merciful to be dashed insensible on the rocks, or beheaded by chainshot, but he supposed he would find out soon enough.

Those men who were not sailing her fought the guns like lions under their officers’ example. Getting a range from the bucking gundeck in those mad seas while expecting at any moment to feel her strike upon the rocks was not an easy task, but they turned their whole selves to it single-mindedly, as if they were just now out upon a morning gunnery-exercise, the target trailing behind them on a rope and the sea a sparkling quilt of blue, turquoise and indigo, instead of this murderous dwindling stretch of pure chaos.

If any of them pissed or shat themselves in terror, the flying rain and blood concealed it and they fought on anyway.

There was no sea-room, no sea-room at all, and nothing to do in the teeth of the wind but pray through clenched teeth they would somehow make it. Their chances of doing so seemed to shrink tenfold with every yard of leeway they made. It was the most nightmarish quarter-of-an-hour any of them had ever passed, but the preoccupation of their duties under fire brought them through: in a well-drilled crew, the automatic rituals of swabbing, loading, charging and firing the cannon seem to accomplish themselves without regard to the carnage among its members.

Pelham left them to that duty, giving all his attention to the sea and the weather and the grasping land, knowing they would fight till they dropped, confident in their endeavors to defend the ship from her attacker while he turned all his skill and experience to the task of inching her past – not onto – the waiting rocks. It was almost by willpower alone, it seemed, that he accomplished this feat: the forces of nature having arranged themselves against him, and failed.

Only the consummate seamanship of Pelham and the ship’s master brought them safely through. Heeled over and on a course so close to the wind it ought to have been impossible to maintain it, they clawed round the second point with barely a stone’s-throw to spare, so close that they all saw the lines of white foam trailing from its teeth on the shoulders of breaking waves that smashed under and over their bows — as all the while, the French roundshot continued to splinter the ship’s sides and top. A lone, blessedly rounded underwater rock scraped her bottom – they exchanged glances, prayed every prayer they had ever prayed in that split second all over again – and then she was free, out of danger, and so were they.

As they passed into the wide-open bay beyond, finding at last the sea-room to go about from that impossible tack they had held, a lucky (or well-aimed) shot from their starboard sternmost gun carried away the ship’s wheel of their pursuer, half-a-mile behind: Pelham brought his glass to his eye with an oath as she jerked up into the wind, her crew taken all aback no less than their ship. “God,” he said. “They’ll never rig relieving-tackles, if they haven’t already placed ’em — ” —— and over the groans of their own wounded, the roar of the surf and the wind’s shriek, they heard within a minute that most terrible of sounds: a ship striking.

Almost an animal sound, an animal with many throats, as timbers rend and masts groan under the strain of canvas pulling at a ship now caught fast in the land’s grip, going nowhere but down —— a sound they knew, and wished heartily never to hear again for the rest of their lives — though if it had to come to them over the wind, with the screams of men and the crash of breakers, they had rather it were the enemy, for sure. But in moments such as these the enemy suddenly become mere drowning men, all other distinctions torn from them by the rocks and the surf, leaving only a terrified humanity all too like their own.

Pelham watched over the stern of the Indy in a terrible mixture of triumph and horror as the two-decker lost her masts one by one within minutes, heeled over, showed her copper bottom between rags of rain and spray. Crawling forms swarmed over her top rail, putting him in mind of an ant-hill that has been kicked; wavered there like the poor ants rearing-up. A powerful sea broke over her: after it surged back, most of them were gone.

She had tried to drive him there, risking weather and chance, and had been caught in her own trap. He wondered what kind of a captain would deliberately launch his men into such peril, and whether he would find him and pick him out of the water so as to ask him. Now that it was over, his thigh throbbed. The squall was passing, the rain letting-up. He took fresh assessment of their own damage, eyeing the rigging, the fallen blocks, men weltering in their own guts in the waist of the ship. Already his crew were moving purposefully to set all to rights: the wounded carried below, a loose gun fastened safely, the topmen waiting for the order to bend more sail on, the deckhands at the halyards ready to haul away now there was sea-room to do so. He turned his gaze to the headland, the oblique angle between himself and the shoreline, now receding; the widening expanse of open water between the Indy and destruction. A ten-mile-wide bay stretched between them and Punta Rioja to the north.

How short a space of time; how close they had come to their fate. Now they were off the hook, and their enemy jerking in his death-throes on it.

At least the current raced past the point toward them. Men might be on it, clinging to spars. If he came about now, lives might yet be saved.

“Launch boats,” he said, his voice grating wearily: “ — pick up survivors.”

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

Much later, in his own cabin, he drew down his britches and looked at his wound. It was a deep puncture, the oak piece a leaf-shaped knife thrust into his flesh. If it had caught him six inches up and to the left, there would be little remaining of his manhood. That knot of parts had been a source of conflicting emotions to him in his life, but he had rather keep both parts and life, or neither, he reflected. Although God knew there had been times in the past when he had turned his face in shame from a weeping woman in a wretched marriage-bed, and cursed his flesh and himself for being so made as to want what they wanted so desperately.

But Time had passed since those days. Besides, after believing himself long past any such fuss, the delight with which those parts of him were received by Lady Pelham had taken him by surprise — turning years of shame and resignation into a renewed (if bemused) pleasure in their existence.

Catherine would have been relieved, he thought wryly, if I had come home cut — but Sophie’s reaction to such a calamity would confound him all over again. He thought she would still care for him: but to forgo the most singular way he possessed of bringing that sparkle to her eyes would be a grievous loss indeed. Not for the first time, he breathed a prayer of thanks for his own survival — and another, this one for the first time, that he had been spared emasculation, turned thirty degrees aside from that gelding flight.

It hurt, most disproportionately so. A tiresome thing to have to deal with. The surgeon was still below (thank God for him!), the lower decks crowded with wounded, his own men and the enemy. Out of a crew of likely seven or eight hundred men aboard the Frenchman, they had been able to save forty or so. He considered his own good fortune so far, never to have endured such a disaster, and wondered how the French captain could look anyone in the eye ever again, let alone clamber aboard the Indy demanding a cabin for himself. A bitter scorn curled in his gut for the man.

Once more out at sea, the land’s threatening reach far behind him — fully thirty miles and more each minute — he could finally take time to deal with his own injury (though he begrudged it). He sat down carefully in his favourite chair, the one from his desk, pulled now to the stern-window for the best light. To be able to get away — to be alone, on this crowded shoe-box of a ship — was without doubt the single most glorious privilege attached to his rank. To be able to sit half-stripped in privacy, though wounded, and take care of himself felt like a strange but most welcome benediction.

Even after untying the bloody cloth, he was pleased to see, it oozed but sluggishly: no more soaking through his britches. The wood was almost buried in a puncture of bruised flesh, made puffy by the tightness of the constriction he’d worn above it for the last two hours. Fierce pins-and-needles gripped his calf as the circulation returned to the limb below.

Pelham poured brandy on it. It stung, bringing tears to his eyes. He pushed on either side, to see if the splinter would rise up into his grasp. It did, a little, though the pain this occasioned told him each side of it was barbed with a hundred tiny shreds pulling deeper into the muscle. He cursed, most roundly. Not a job to be done by hand, then: it would have to be the Sheffield steel locking tweezers, sitting ready on the table beside him in a baize cloth: his own pair, like their miniature counterparts, but as long as his hand and made to grasp six-inch chunks slippery with blood.

He had caught splinters before — you could not fight His Majesty’s wooden ships for half a lifetime, iron balls smashing into their sides by the ton, and escape their omnipresence — it was an unpleasantly familiar pain. At least this time it was so situated that he could tend to it himself.

He did so: distracted himself as he tugged at it further, a most agonizing experience, by wondering whether Sophie would kiss this new scar as she loved to kiss all his old ones, discovering them one by one as she ventured over his battered body like a prayerful pilgrim, their first night together. This thought was almost sweet enough to make the agony bearable as he drew it all the way out: almost. A sharp groan escaped him in spite of himself, and then a stream of oaths.

Then it was out and the purple hole closing by itself. A seep of fresh blood followed, but there was little to see or feel save for the grinding pulse deep in the wound. He pried the edges apart and trickled more brandy in, then took a deep breath and picked up his silver salt-shaker: added its white stream to his lot of pain. “Christ,” he said. “Jesus.” He sat there a minute longer, the flame of it filling his body, till the greatest wave of it passed. Better than gangrene, though. Another application of brandy, this time to the insides, brought relief; enough to bind up the leg and pull on another pair of britches. Just in time: a knock at the door, followed by Wainwright’s anxious tones, reminded him that there was yet much to do.

“Yes?” he called, noting his senior lieutenant’s stolid expression the next moment as Wainwright’s bulk filled the doorway.

“The butcher’s bill, sir,” said Wainwright, holding out a scrawled list for his examination.

“Everything else shipshape?”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Pelham squinted down at the paper. Thank God, as he already knew, Hastings’ name was not upon it, nor any of his senior officers; he noted with regret the death of young Cooper in the last half-hour — and was that Parsons or Pearson under the heading for amputations? Damn, there were too many good men under that heading! A man from Hastings’ division, also — the lad would be beside himself with concern and guilt. Damnation! What a waste – what a f-cking waste! Why had he not kept better lookout for attack? Because all hands were needed to haul in canvas before they split sheets and foundered under the squall, he answered himself, but that did not make it any less bitter to have been taken by surprise.

Damn it all: damn this frog who would risk his ship to inflict these injuries upon Pelham’s men, and lose it trying. So which of the two had had a leg go south, Pearson or Parsons? In truth, it would be harder to spare an excellent topman than a very green junior midshipman who would never make a good officer, from what he had been able to see so far. The lad would be better off ashore. He hoped the surgeon Hastings had found was up to the task. It was bloody and gruelling work, sawing bones while men screamed under your hands and were held down by their mates. “Is that Pearson losing his leg?” he asked, looking up at Wainwright grimly.

“No, sir, poor Mr. Parsons.”

“Most unfortunate,” murmured Pelham, thinking the opposite, with some guilt. “Any trouble from the French?”

“Not really, sir,” said Wainwright, “not the men. They wouldn’t dare, sir. Not to mention most of ’em is half-drowned, sir.”

“Indeed,” said Pelham drily. “All our officers all right?”

“Well not Mr. Cooper, sir, he’s dead — ” Wainwright looked stricken, to his credit.

“Yes, yes,” Pelham could not keep the impatience from his voice anyway; the man was a solid second-in-command, but somehow did not follow his captain’s lightning train of thought fast enough to carry on a conversation without useless explanations. Hastings would have been right with him, not offered information he clearly had right under his nose. “I meant the ones not hurt enough to be on here.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” replied Wainwright, his face clearing. “Mr. Hastings took a cruel knock on the head, and Mr. Parsons won’t make lieutenant without his leg, sir, but he’s looking as good as anybody might, under the circumstances — we came off light, sir, there’s no saying otherwise.”

“Indeed,” said Pelham, who had not been going to say otherwise. “Anything else I should know about?”

“The Frenchie captain’s raising a bit of a ruckus, sir, is all. The surgeon has him down in the cockpit helping with his own wounded, and he doesn’t like it one little bit.”

“I don’t see that he has much choice in the matter,” said Pelham. “I shall see him in due course — but in the meantime he must make himself useful. Damme, sir, if it was you or me or Hastings in his shoes, we’d be fighting to get to our men, not away from them!”

“Just so, sir.”

“Let me have the complete damage report as soon as you are able.”

“Aye, aye, sir,”

“And ask Mr. Hastings to report to me as soon as possible.”

Pelham stared out of the window, not waiting to watch Wainwright leave. His leg hurt damnably. And now he had the French captain to deal with — an arrogant fellow, quite egregiously so under the circumstances, by all appearances. Damn him.

The sea was a race of jumbled water behind them. It would be bearing a strange and gruesome flotsam, now: the limbs tossed overboard, French and English alike, as the surgeon worked on into the afternoon.

He wished he had heard from Sophie.

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

Six weeks of rain and further squalls passed. They had had to revictual in Malta, of all places, putting off the prisoners there and taking aboard a new midshipman – coincidentally, from Aphrodite. (Ramsbottom’s tenure as surgeon was no great success there either, they learned then, little to anyone’s surprise aboard the Indy. Again they all blessed their good fortune at having tempted Mr. Johnson away from his comfy berth aboard their neighbouring frigate at anchor in Gib. Perhaps the signing-pay had helped —? Pelham still had no idea it was his own reputation Hastings had used to persuade the man to come aboard.)

It had been fully eight months since they had last put into Gibraltar: eight long months at sea, chasing the length of the Mediterranean and back like a bloody blue-arsed fly; even, in between, out into the Atlantic for a month — they had passed the glimmering Rock twice in the middle of the night. Pelham had thought of Sophie, asleep in her bed and unaware of his being so close, and found the pang accompanying this thought to be most exquisitely sharp — having had almost no news from them in all that time, just missing ships out of Gib; or heard a packet had been waiting for him somewhere, only to be left or forwarded where he was not; or passing hopeful prospects in weather so foul neither could heave-to. Their movements had been as crazy and unpredictable as the French and Spanish attempts to break out of the various ports where the Royal Navy had attempted to confine them. The last he’d had from her been in June: written before Easter, for it contained Mavis’s optimistic drawings of their new Easter-bonnets. He had written to her regularly, of course, and hoped that somewhat more of his had reached her.

At least Johnson had proved himself royally. He was sober and conscientious. Pelham felt a twinge of regret at having poached him from Melpomene, joining them so hurriedly that his dunnage had had to be left aboard his old ship — the man’s one greenish-brown coat had become so stained he had to heave it overboard six weeks out of port, after but two minor actions, and he now went among them in borrowed plumage, a ragbag of a wardrobe, till he should have the opportunity at last to clothe himself fully again .

After the near-wrecking on Punta Deste, a mountain of wounded had been turned over to his care, the shattered half-drowned French on top of their own from the fight, to which he had applied himself most diligently. Ramsbottom’s departure was the greatest blessing that could possibly have come of Pelham’s illness and their subsequent quarrel. And the new midshipman had a better head for heights than the hapless Cooper, and a greater mathematical propensity than poor little Parsons into the bargain: so it was an ill wind, after all.

Still, Pelham found himself with a lingering bad temper from his forced entertainment of Capitaine Lafond. The man was a glory-hound, and now he had paid the price. Well – in actuality, had he done so, Pelham could have found it easier to forgive him – but Lafond had risked the lives of his crew to attack the Indy, under appalling odds, and they had been the ones to pay: their captain had merely lost his ship, not (unfortunately) his life. To be polite to the man had been almost beyond him: the best he could manage was a sort of frigid formality, tempered to his relief by Hastings’ rather greater grace. I do not suffer fools gladly, he thought, and that is that. I am too old to change my ways now.

And now, at last — at last, they were headed for Gibraltar. Pelham had received a signal via Euryalus and the chain of frigates beyond her that Admiral Nelson wished his return. His impatience to see Sophie amused him; previously, he could happily have spent a year at sea and never looked back: found the prospect of a further year perfectly acceptable, welcome even. Not now.

He found his thoughts turning ever more urgently to this homecoming; to the sight of her face; to losing himself in the haven of her embrace. Not that he was any less delighted at the prospect of seeing Mavis: it was merely another kind of excitement, one that could more easily be contained. The longing for Sophie tore at his guts, all the more so now that the reality of seeing her was so close-at-hand.

God! It had been eight long months since he had seen her, enjoyed her as his wife (ill as he had been) — and how much longer since he had had the opportunity to do so in full health and in any way he wished, unhindered, taking longer than five minutes to do so? He counted again in his head even while he was only too acutely aware of the answer: two years. Two years! God — it did not bear thinking about — how could it have been two years since he had come to her first, the only time he had had all he wanted of her — as completely, energetically, tenderly as he wished, with all his passion unchecked by haste or illness or the calendar? Two years! Christ. He was getting old: time was passing him by.

He loved his command, would have done nothing else for any money, any reason. But it came at a personal price, he saw now, one he had not counted before — the necessity of keeping two halves of himself in counterbalance, never able to have and be both fully at the same time.

Still, he had been fortunate to have been home at all, during those two years — he could name plenty of ships that had been away from their home port longer than that. He should be grateful, he reminded himself, for the times they had enjoyed together, however incomplete. Thinking again of his wedding night, and the slow sweetnesses of his convalescence, he smiled. He did not regard the incident with the table with quite such unmixed emotions, though — he had been rough with her, brutal even, and he knew it: it troubled him. Although he still thrilled, thinking of it – felt guilty that he should. Sitting down to dinner was a bittersweet and constant reminder. Well — he would make up to her for it, for all of that, now, please God.

He had a most particular set of plans for this visit — besides the obvious ones. They involved a member of his crew, and the whole tangled issue of Sophie’s independence, and her refusal to add to her consequence or her household as a result of becoming Lady Pelham. Well, not refusal exactly, but ardent wish to retain as simple a life as before he joined it. Thank God he had been able to persuade her to get a permanent maid, with the help of Lady Davenport; but still he fretted over her, wanted to see her free from cares — and himself, if he were to be honest. He did not wish for the distraction of wondering if she were managing in his absence.

Pelham sighed, hoping his idea would find favour. He did not wish to order her; indeed, he had no right to. But he wanted this to work, most dearly so. He stared at the net of light across the ceiling of his cabin, remembering his breakfast with her here.

The knock he awaited sounded at the door.

“Come,” he called.

Stroud entered nimbly, considering his crutch: stood erect before his captain. “You axed to see me, sir,” he said.

Pelham turned slowly, looked at the weather-beaten face before him. It was a little pale now under its tan — losing a foot costs a deal of blood, usually, and pain makes a poor bedfellow — but the eyes were calm and met his evenly. He had always liked that about the man. There had been a time when they would have held an insolent glare, but that was long past: Stroud had turned himself into one of the most valued topmen on the Indy. It was a shame about his foot: a very great shame indeed. Hastings felt personally responsible, even though he wasn’t: the gun had got loose from its emplacement – perhaps its cable shot through – and it had recoiled over Stroud’s foot, even as he fell with his face and hand ripped by a razor-splinter. It could have happened to any of them. Still, Pelham saw yet again that opportunity may arise out of the most wretched places.

“Thank you, Stroud,” he said, “I did indeed. Er – you may sit down.’

“I’d rather stand, sir,” said Stroud, “if it’s all the same to you.”

“Certainly,” said Pelham – “I thought it would be easier.”

“I ain’t looking for easier, sir,” said Stroud, meeting his gaze warily now from under sandy brows — Pelham was reminded of the suspicion of a boar who thinks he may be cornered.

“I see,” he said. “Er — Stroud — you are aware, are you not, that we will not be able to keep you on aboard the Indy.”

Immediately the look turned hot, the boar trapped. “I can manage, sir, you got to give me a chance — that is, if you would, sir — ” the voice trailed away as Stroud recalled his position. The fresh scar seaming his already ugly face turned crimson, now.

“You must know that I cannot,” Pelham said, evenly. “Much to my regret, I promise you. You are a danger to yourself and others.”

“No, I’m not, sir. I’ll do anything — put me in the waist, sir, or leave me ’elp in the galley — I can turn the capstan as ’ard as any on ’em, sir, you know I can, and I can ’elp the bo’sun with the sails, an’ give the carpenter a ’and —— ”

“I cannot afford to feed a single man who is less than able-bodied, Stroud. Not aboard this ship.”

“Sir, I’m more able-bodied than two of them bloody waisters put together, sir, an’ you know it! And so does Mr. ’Astings, sir. ’E said ’e was going to ’ave a word wiv you about keeping me aboard, sir.”

“Did he?” said Pelham, raising his eyebrows.

Stroud flushed. “Don’t be down on ’im, sir, it was my idea. On’y ’e knows, like, wot I can do. Bloody ’ell, sir, so do you, an’ all — look ’ow nice I fixed up your good lady’s cistern, sir, not to mention I’m a crack shot with the bow-chaser, sir, an’ you knows it!” Desperation had turned his dignity to pleading. “There’s plenty of cripples an’ gimps in the Navy, sir!”

“Not aboard my ship,” said Pelham, with genuine regret. “Look at you, man – only one foot, and half a hand into the bargain. We’d be in a tight spot, one of these days, sooner or later — short-handed, after a fight, perhaps, on a lee shore again, or in a hurricane —”

“God forbid,” said Stroud.

“Indeed — and I would need every man left alive to go aloft and reef sail, or haul on the yards, or get a rogue gun back into place — ”

Stroud looked at what remained of his left hand: two mutilated fingers and a stub of thumb.

“I could cook, sir — ”

Pelham frowned, raised his hand. “And leave the rest of the crew with the bellyache, unfit for duty? Cook is a skilled job, Stroud, not one you just walk into. Or hop, even.” Their eyes met, not unpleasantly. “Let me finish. I’m not through with you yet, man.”

“What, then, sir? A piddling pint-sized pension and a berth ashore somewhere? What use would I be?”

“Plenty,” said Pelham. “And not just anywhere; somewhere in particular.”

Stroud looked at him sideways. Already this was the second longest conversation the capting had had with him in all the five years Stroud had been under his command; but it seemed, having taken his time, as if the old bugger was driving somewhere after all. He waited for the other shoe to drop. A funny way of looking at it, under the circumstances, being as how he had only the one, himself, or would have were he not barefoot; a grin cracked his scarred cheeks.

“Something amusing?” asked the captain drily.

“No, sir — only as ’ow I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, like, an’ then I thought it wouldn’t do me no good if it did!”

Pelham folded his arms, narrowed his eyes. “I have seen you to have a great care for the members of my family,” he said.

Stroud swallowed. “Oh, sir, I’d do anyfink for Miss Mavis, you know that. An’ your good lady, sir, a champion if ever there was one – begging your pardon, sir,” he added, recollecting himself. It was hardly his place to pass judgement on Bloody Sir Edward’s nearest and dearest, after all, albeit warmly.

“I need a favour from you, Stroud,” Pelham said slowly. “That is, I am requesting one.”

“What, me, sir? Do you a favour?”

“Once you leave this ship – as you must, when we put in – you will no longer be under my command. I am sure you could find a berth aboard another ship. Not every captain has – well – has men lined-up to fill his crew, as we do here aboard the Indy. Able or not.”

“Right, sir,” said Stroud, beginning to see where this was going and feeling a strange flutter in his rough, tough seaman’s guts.

“But I have a – a position to offer you. If you are willing. Because I know I can count on you.”

“To the death, sir,” Stroud’s tone was solemn.

“Indeed. That is why I am asking you to take care of them in my absence.”

Images of Miss Mavis halfway up the ratlines and fearless filled Stroud’s head, swiftly followed by a memory of the softly rounded curves and gentle, concerned features of Lady Pelham when she was still Mrs. McKenzie, as glimpsed from up on the roof, before they caught the capting’s eye, even — or almost before, for what else would they have been doing up there with that bloody tank, otherwise?

Stroud reviewed his options. It did not take long: they were few. “I’d be honoured to, sir,” he said, hoarsely and with a clumsy gallantry that brought an answering lump to Pelham’s throat.

“You will have to let it seem that she is doing you a kindness by taking you on,” said Pelham carefully.

“What am I to do, sir? I’m no butler!”

“No; you are to look out for them. To see what needs to be done and do it without needing to be asked. To shoulder all the hard work you can, and arrange to have the rest dealt with. To keep an eye on them. God, man, I’m not asking you to pin on an apron — I’m asking you to make yourself useful! You have plenty of initiative – I’ve seen it myself. What’s the work? I don’t know – whatever they need. Keep Miss Mavis out of trouble, with her hoydenish ways. Be there. I can’t – you can.” Pelham’s eyes flashed with this last statement; he cleared his throat, started again in a calmer tone. “You know my wife is – accustomed to a great degree of independence. And a most modest household. She – er – she does not wish it any greater. I respect that – but I would wish —— ”

Stroud grinned. “I think I ’ave it now, sir.”

“Your pay would double,” began Pelham “ — to be fair — I’d rather see you do this a thousand times than ship aboard some other berth… and I’ll consider you on the Indy’s list for your share of prize money.”

“I would ’ave done it for nuffink, sir,” said Stroud, “if you’d ’ave asked me.”

“Would you?” asked the captain, raising those familiar thick dark eyebrows. But now Stroud felt no fear whatever.

“ ’Course I would, sir. In a ’eartbeat.”

“I rather think – that’s why I asked you,” said Pelham. “Because I trusted that you would.”

“I’ll need a peg, sir. Soon as this stump ’eals up, I’ll put weight on it, be getting around as good as ever. No more crutch for me, sir, not ashore! Not with these sea-legs!”

“Sea-leg, don’t you mean?” Pelham could not help himself.

“Bloody ’ell, sir, I only lost me foot – me leg’s as good as new!”

“Quite right. So it is. I beg your pardon, Stroud. And — ”

“Sir?”

“Do you think you could mind your language when you are in their company? Particularly Miss Mavis — she has the skills of a parrot…”

“Indeed she does, sir,” agreed Stroud, blushing to recall some of the choicer phrases she had acquired from their mending of the tank. “I’ll be as easy said as a bairn, sir, never you fret. Watch my tongue night and day, I will.”

“You’ll have to. Very good. And, Stroud — ”

“Sir?”

“I’m most grateful to you.”

Stroud pulled his forelock and beat a retreat before the capting could so lose his dignity as to thank him again for what he would freely have given the other foot for, if he couldn’t sail any more.

Pelham heaved a sigh of relief, and began to consider how best to present the situation to Sophie.

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

They drew closer. He paced the quarterdeck, expecting any minute to hear the lookout’s call announcing the craggy shape of the Rock above the horizon. He put his own glass to his eye a dozen times and more, sweeping the crinkled edges of the wave-covered world for its first faint blur.

It was just after daybreak. Before nightfall he would be in her arms. Oh, God. He was trying not to think of Sophie at almost every moment.

He was failing in this endeavour.

Sophie.

Sophie, Sophie, Sophie.

Sophie.

The merest whisper of her name, swinging in his cot at night, was enough to stiffen him instantly. That necklace, swinging between her breasts as she leaned over him: her hair sweeping across his chest — sometimes he could not sleep until he had taken himself the rest of the way, a thing he had almost never done when he had not had her to think about.

He thought about her while looking-over his charts; while staring past Mr. Hastings’ head, falling suddenly silent in the middle of a discussion about re-distributing the balance of stores in the hold; now, on deck.

He thought often of their wedding night, and the memento he had sent her of it, the necklace she never took off. Out of an obstacle she had made something extraordinary, unlooked-for, unguessed-at, where he had thought to have nothing. But still he wished to give as well as take – as a lover, as Sophie’s lover. Although he wondered what pleasure a man could possibly give a woman that would rival all she had given him, that night, shattering all his preconceptions about what love-making was — god! he could feel her still… he shifted his stance, uncomfortably; forced his thoughts elsewhere.

They returned to her, though, now more than ever with every sea-mile he drew closer to her. Still no sign yet — the Northern Pillar of Hercules must be lurking just below the horizon. By his reckoning they should have sighted it by now. Was it two or three or ten minutes since he had last swept the arc where it should rise with his glass?

Sophie.

This time what came to him was the piercing compassion he had felt, the next morning. To have seen her so discomfited and shamed, after the triumphant sparkle of her eyes by candle-light, just hours earlier, seemed to him one of the most poignant memories of all their marriage. (That and the time he had been so cruel that she told him to go away — but to think about that was still too painful.) He could only imagine what she must have felt, discovering herself next to him in a crimson welter, a mortifying puddle. Poor Sophie! As if she could help it —! Her napkin had soaked quite through: he had not realized there could be as much blood as that.

Though why that should feel any more terrible or shameful on the face of it than his needs she had tended to so matter-of-factly, during his illness, made little sense when one considered it. Why was it that a woman’s courses seemed so forbidden and threatening a thing to men? Once it had seemed repulsive to him too, the very idea of it, blood there between a woman’s legs where his desire lay too — until it was Sophie, and the unmentionable became simply another of her mysteries. After all, he thought, even from a purely practical standpoint, he would prefer to deal with blood than shit: besides smelling less, it washed off more easily. And yet this time of a woman's menstruation seemed to hold a special power, some would have called it dark — certain religions, he knew, considered such a woman unclean, all that she touched defiled. Well, they could believe it if they wished — as if a touch from Sophie could ever be anything but a benediction, the essence, the definition of grace!

Please God, soon — tonight — just her touch: just that.

He ached for it.

Now.

Although he could not help adding a swift reflexive prayer that he might have better luck with the calendar, this visit, than the last one when he had had all his health and strength, the time but not the opportunity, over a year ago.

And when he arrived, he would have to go and see what on God’s green and watery earth Admiral Nelson had to tell him that was of sufficient importance to keep half the fleet standing-off through the straits, out in the Atlantic, awaiting his own return.

High up from the masthead came a hoarse, windblown cry: Land-ho! Land on the starboard bow! Land-ho! It’s Gib, sir! It’s Gib!

16. The Crouched Lion Springs

Summer, 1805

When they slipped as nice as you please into the lee of that old “lion couchant” affectionately known to all of them as Gib, hove-to and let go, it was mid-morning.

Admiral Nelson was waiting for Pelham in his cabin. They had barely anchored alongside the towering Victory when a hail came requesting – or demanding – Pelham’s presence forthwith. Pelham had muttered, wiped the rest of the shaving-lather from his face, re-tied his neckerchief, put on his better hat, and climbed down to Victory’s boat. A short pull by the spankingly-attired seamen, and he was hauling himself up velvet-covered sideropes to ascend the twice-as-massive, black-and-butter (they called it Nelson-checkered) sides of that glorious old first-rate ship-of-the-line, now the Admiral’s flagship.

Her keel had been laid down in 1759; she had been launched the same year he had, 1765. He wished he looked as little the worse for wear. A fresh coat of paint worked wonders: it was a shame one could not apply the same restoratives to men. Her angled tumblehome was twice that of his Indomitable – fully three gun-decks to his one. Four acres of sailcloth, she held, when all were set, her sprits’ls, stuns’ls, spanker. And wasn’t it twenty-seven miles of rigging? It didn’t bear thinking about, the sheer size of a first-rate.

He was piped aboard, met by the first lieutenant. “Admiral Lord Nelson will see you now, sir,” said he, leading the way.

“Will he now!” muttered Pelham to himself, wondering where Hardy was and still comparing this magnificent tub – vessel, then – to his own darling and twice-as-maneoeuverable Indy.

It was a beautiful cabin, three times the size of Pelham’s own, and most magnificently appointed. The little admiral wasted no time beating about the bush.

“Ah. Pelham. Good to see you again, sir — it’s been a while. Have a drink.”

“No, thank you, sir.”

“Have one.”

Pelham poured from the elegant cut-glass decanter. Victory rocked gently. Nelson said nothing further. Pelham started by speculating what he could want – but found himself unable to, and furthermore so eager to see his family, now that he was so close, that even here his thoughts strayed to them, had to be jerked back to the present.

The admiral stood with his back turned, staring out of the stern-window toward Gibraltar town. His graying hair formed a halo-mop about his head; his thin shoulders barely filled the splendid uniform, this brilliant, brave – some called him foolhardy – little man with all of England in his single frail hand.

“Hardy’s dead,” he said, after a moment.

“Good God. I – I’m most sorry to hear it, m’lord. Killed?”

“No – smallpox,” said Nelson with a sigh. “Dammit. We got along, you know.”

“Yes, sir,” said Pelham. There really was nothing else he could say. Then Nelson turned to face him, and that brilliant blue eye glittered with a single-minded passion: beating the French. A passion that would brook no obstacle; certainly not the wishes of a frigate-captain. Pelham’s heart began to sink: was he to be ordered out to sea again? Back to England, to fetch Hardy’s replacement? Without seeing Sophie?

“I’ve been looking for a captain,” said Nelson, “and damme, sir, if I can’t stand any of ’em!”

“What, not Harry Blandish, sir? Or Red Ned Pickens? Or – or… ” Pelham ran through the first-rate and second-rate captains serving under Nelson.

“Useless,” said the Admiral tersely. “For my purposes.”

“But surely — ” started Pelham; and then he stopped. His former captain eyed him, saying nothing.

No.

Please.

No.

Yes.

“I want you, Pelham,” said Admiral Viscount Lord Horatio Nelson.

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

Afterwards, back aboard the Indy, Pelham tried to recall how it was that he had said nothing, then, when it might have been possible to talk his way out of it; before it was too late. It was a rare occasion indeed for him to lose the power of speech.

“My ship, sir — ” he had said at last, and “…you could do much better than me, sir, I’ve not handled more than the Indy these five years — haven’t been close to the fleet, too independent, I ——— ”

“Prince of Wales,” said the Admiral. “You. My first lieutenant. Best man that ever served under me. Ever.”

Pelham stared back at him. It had been a long time; but he recognized the determination blazing from the remaining eye.

“I’d rather not, sir,” he said at last.

Nelson drew himself up to his full five feet. “Might I remind you of your duty, Captain Pelham?”

“My men — ”

“Keep the best half,” said Nelson, “if that’s what it takes to make you happy. I know you always had the best crew in the whole damn fleet.”

“But yours, sir — ”

“Are adequate,” said Nelson. “Losing Hardy’s knocked the stuffing out of ’em. We could use an infusion of fresh blood. Used to your ways. Martinet that you are.”

“Sir!”

“Hard, then. Indomitable can have some of ours.”

“My officers —— ” Pelham shook his head. Surely this was another nightmare from which he would wake – soon, he prayed. Blast the honour; bugger the glory – the compliment to himself be damned! He wanted nothing more than to have the universe return to the state it was in ten minutes earlier, before he left his ship. A feeling of regret he recognized, having met it and vanquished it almost immediately after every action, when men had been lost and decisions taken and lives ruined. When he was still counting the cost, before the triumph set in and assuaged it enough to be bearable.

This was as sharp.

And as irrefutable.

“Bring your officers,” said Nelson gently, now that he had got his way, knowing what Pelham must be feeling in this moment, “ – as many of them as you want.”

How could this be happening? What was the man thinking! It was unheard-of, to bring up a mere frigate-captain beyond all the ranks of first- and second-raters — it just wasn’t done! Noses would be out-of-joint from the Admiralty all across the Atlantic! But His Lordship was known for precisely that — the bold move, the unexpected risk on which all turns — fighting and sailing not by the book but by instinct and what the moment offers up — and for succeeding brilliantly, on that account, which let him get away with it. So, swift and decisive and far from Their Sea Lordships, he acted alone: the tiger’s deadly, solitary hunt, his fleet an extension of his will. When the tiger springs, he does not miss. Not even me, thought Pelham ruefully: I am seized, now.

And yet he had to try, one last vain sally at changing the Admiral’s mind: “Sir,” he said, “— in a chess game — would you take up a knight, when you have bishops and rooks, and a queen to hand?”

The blue eye surveyed him coolly: “I will scan the board and take up the piece with which I shall win, sir.”

“But, sir —!”

“A knight moves boldly, Pelham, unexpectedly — under my bidding he jumps — goes in where a queen may not, for checkmate.” The last two syllable were clipped, final. They hung in the space between them: clearly, Lord Nelson intended to have the last words upon this subject, and these were they.

Checkmate.

Yes, sir.

And so it was that Pelham paced his own cabin, back home (for how long?) aboard Indomitable, never dearer than now he was to lose her. Fretting and planning and wondering how he was to see Sophie and Mavis, manage the business with Stroud, get half his men aboard Victory – how would he choose them, for God’s sake? – and all the rest of it. And how was he to go home, with so much to do, his head full of all this?

Too much: it was all far too much. He was still in shock, trying to come to terms with it all in his head before taking action. Some parts of his brain raced ahead, preparing entire series of orders and planning the transition, while others still fought the whole idea. Through it all he felt stunned, as if a yard had fallen on him.

Everything in him wished it not to be so; every part of his training and duty knew that he must. The sounds of shipboard activity seemed faraway, as Indomitable prepared for revictualling and repair, unaware that she was about to be decapitated (for so he thought of it, finding it impossible to conceive of her and himself separately). It seemed if he were hearing it all through layers of wool and canvas, or perhaps that his ears were packed with oakum.

The door opened without a knock; he turned a black frown toward the intruder.

“Papa! Papa! Oh, Papa!” — Pelham looked up, but barely had time to brace himself before Mavis launched herself into his arms.

“What! Mavis!” He felt out-of-breath all of a sudden, as if everything were telescoping and rushing toward him too fast.

“Oh Papa, we have missed you so!”

“So have I,” he said, hugging her to him before detaching her arms and setting her back down on the deck to look at her. She seemed fully six inches taller, though every bit as intrepid. “Where is your Mama?” A sick fear clutched at his gut then, and he added, “tell me she is well? Mavis? She is quite well?”

Mavis grinned up at him, but he wanted to hear her say it; had to hear the words. He grasped her by the shoulders and shook her. “Mavis, tell me — do not stand there in silence — how is your Mama?”

“Oh, Papa,” she said, rubbing her arms where he had squeezed her, “what a fuss-pot you are! Goodness, is it going to make into you a bear? I thought you’d be happy! She’s perfectly healthy, it’s a very natural thing, you know. Only that she couldn’t climb the side-ropes, so Mr. Hastings is slinging the chair for her.”

Pelham felt as if another yard had fallen on him — if not an entire mast. “What do you mean, perfectly natural? And she can’t climb aboard? Mavis, are you telling me —— ” he sat down heavily in the chair, his head swimming. Fear had him in its grip, now. “Mavis, she’s not – with child?”

“Of course! What a goose you are being, Papa! Didn’t you get our letters?”

“No,” he said.

“Well she’ll be up here any minute and then you can see for yourself,” she cried triumphantly.

“Oh, God,” he said.

Outside came Hastings’ voice, raised: “Hurry up, now — rig that chair! We haven’t got all day! That’s Lady Pelham down there, for heaven’s sake!”

Down there? In a boat — ? Sophie? Pregnant?

Pelham leapt out of his chair and rushed out on deck in his shirtsleeves, hatless.

She sat sedately in the stern of the rowboat, facing a sturdy-looking woman at the oars, her hair blowing about her face in the way he remembered. When she saw him her face lit as if from within: “Edward!” she cried, waving madly, “Edward!” In lifting her arm, her shape was revealed: the deep swell of her belly instead of a waist.

His heart flew up into his throat and choked him.

“Edward!” she cried again, still waving, her movement making the little boat rock wildly. He came to himself, ran to the rail; leapt over the side and let himself down towards her without knowing how he did so: his arms and legs had turned to wet twine. Stepping into the boat, he pushed past the oarswoman and so came to his Sophie.

He could not find any words.

“Sit down, Edward,” she said, patting the seat, “you’re making the boat tip so.”

He tried to do so, but found himself kneeling instead upon the wet planking where an inch of bilgewater swirled, stinking of fish.

“Darling,” she said, looking into his face and reading the anguish there.

Words came: not the right ones. “Oh Christ, no,” he said, “I can’t lose you — ”

She looked hurt for a moment, then understanding dawned. “You didn’t know — ” she said. “Oh, love.”

“No,” he said, and the rest of his body crumpled: he laid his head in what remained of her lap, and held onto her legs as if by his grip alone he could keep her from the jaws of death for ever.

If everything had been too much before, this was beyond comprehension.

“Love,” she said again. “Oh, my poor love. You didn’t get our letters? None of them?”

He shook his head, his face still buried against her belly. He had always thought from looking at women with child that the mass must be soft and yielding, as a man’s potbelly is. Lord knew he had never had occasion to touch one, until now. His wife. His child. Memories of letters from Catherine, filled with anxiety and blame, nudged to the surface of his mind, and he pushed them away and held her tighter. The firmness of her womb astonished him. Then something nudged him, pushing back – something that was within-Sophie-and-yet-not-Sophie, and he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I’m — I’m — shocked,” he said, looking up into her face and feeling more foolish than he had ever felt in his life, more even than the time he first came to her so unused to being with a woman; or the nadir of their wretched quarrel; or the time he had begged her to touch him, in his illness, and she had refused — more foolish than any of these.

“Well it can hardly come as a complete surprise, my love, ” she smiled tenderly, “after all, we are married, you know.”

“But I was ill,” he said hoarsely, and then said no more, remembering the honeymoon of his recuperation and the many times he had pulled her to him, those two heavenly weeks, as if making up for lost time. “When — ?”

“Soon,” she said, “in a month or two, at the most. I can’t believe you didn’t get a single one of our letters. I wrote to you every week, packets and packets — Mavis would run down to the harbour, and give them to anyone who was going out, they must be scattered all over the Mediterranean!”

“Except where I was,” he said, hauling himself up off his dripping knees as he became aware once more of the unremitting scrutiny of his enthralled ship’s company.

Hastings, seeing him do so, ventured to hail them, then; he had held his tongue earlier, got the hoist ready in silence, threatening the men with a glance borrowed straight from Pelham’s own repertoire that if any of them made a sound they risked keel-hauling.

“Sir? Ma’am? Are you ready for the hoist now, my lady?”

Pelham turned to Sophie.

“Of course,” she said, “I have longed to come aboard since the hour you sailed.”

“Ready,” Pelham shouted back. His voice felt like a thing belonging to someone else, as if he had picked up some horn and it had stuck in his throat.

“Shall I wait, mum?” asked the woman at the oars.

“No,” said Pelham, “Her ladyship will go back ashore in one of the ship’s boats.”

“Your ladyship!” murmured the woman. Sophie blushed. “Here,” she said, pressing a silver coin into her hand, “Thank you so very much.”

Pelham handed Sophie into the contraption of wooden seat and hempen ropes as if she might break. He drew the rope across the front and pegged it in place. “Hold on tight – ” he said, “don’t let go — ”

“Edward” she said, “I have not become an imbecile, nor even incapacitated.” Then she saw the blur of shock and bewilderment still in his eyes, and felt sorry for having spoken so.

“Haul away,” he shouted up at the men on the ropes: “Handsomely there, damn you, don’t let her sway like that — Mr. Hastings, you take the line, sir, to swing her aboard; I am trusting you to be careful — ”

She reached the deck and they set her down as gently as kiss-my-hand; she unpinned the front rope and took Hastings’ arm to stand upright. Her top-heavy shape became fully apparent now: he was blushing more furiously than a lieutenant had any right to. A similar fierce shade could be seen upon the faces of Mr. Wainwright and Mr. Partridge right behind. Pelham arrived at the rail and stepped back aboard to the sound of the bosun’s pipe. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he said, waving the piping seamen aside as if they were flies.

Mavis came running up to them from the lap of Mr. Stroud, who had been telling her he was most pleased to see her, indeed he was, but that she would soon be too old to sit there, oh dear me yes. “Mr. Stroud has lost his foot!” she cried in dismay.

“Oh, dear,” said Sophie.

“Well, that ain’t quite so, Miss,” murmured Stroud. “Leastways, I know ezzackly where it is. At the bottom of the sea off perishing Spain, it is. Not lost. Just – not attached no more to me leg, like.”

“How can you laugh about it!” wept Mavis. “And that terrible scar! On your poor face!”

“Beats cryin’, don’t it!” replied her hero, grinning. “And I’m right lucky we ’ad a good doctor aboard to sew me face back on again at all, see, otherwise I’d ’a been laughing out of the other side of it, wouldn’t I then! Now, Miss, don’t you go making no more of them faces, or the wind’ll change and you’ll look as ugly as me for ever!”

Pelham cleared his throat. “Mr. Hastings – Stroud – ” he said, “take Miss Mavis for’ard and fetch her some lemonade. I – would like to speak with Lady Pelham privately in my cabin for a few minutes.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Hastings.

Mavis’s face fell a little as her parents walked away, Sophie upon Edward’s arm. “I’ve only just come aboard too,” she sniffled, “and he’s barely spoken to me!”

“Now, then,” said Hastings comfortingly, “you mustn’t upset yourself. I am sure he will send for you to join them very soon, or come out looking for you.”

“Didn’t you see ’is face, Miss?” asked Stroud. “A complete shock to ’im, it was, ’er bein’ in the family way, I’d swear to it. Beggin’ your parding, Miss, but a thing like that can knock a man sideways – even a capting.”

Mavis turned to him. “You’re right,” she said, wiping her tears on the back of her hand and then blowing her nose on her apron-hem for good measure. “He didn’t know. I told him.”

“Well, then” said Stroud, following them with his crutch, the stump of his leg swinging along encased as inoffensively as might be in one of Mr. Hastings’ good stockings, looking for all the world like a wrapped suet-pudding the cook was about to put in the copper, “there you are!”

Hastings gave Mavis his arm, to climb up to the forecastle where the ship’s bell, only slightly dented, had been re-hung in its glowing new teak and mahogany housing. He pulled a coil of rope for her to sit on and took the hand she held out to him in both of his. “It’s been a long time,” he said. “Your papa must have missed you both very much indeed.”

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

Inside his cabin, Pelham struggled for words. “I don’t know what to say,” he said at last, “really I don’t.”

“Hush,” she said, “it’s all right. You needn’t say anything at all.”

“But — ”

“Ssshhh,” she said, and sitting carefully down on the window-seat, she opened her arms to him and held him when he came into them with his head upon her shoulder.

“I’m happy,” she whispered, after a good while, “happier than I have ever been in my life. I’ve wanted to bear your child since – oh, long before we were married!”

He drew back to look at her then. “You what?”

“Yes, of course I did!”

He shook his head, wondering if he would ever understand the ways of women in general, and his wife in particular. “I wanted to make love to you,” he said, “the moment I met you. Up on the hill. You were so – breathtaking. Ravishing. With your dress all plastered to your thighs, and I could see the shape of you, your nipples even, and you hadn’t a clue.”

“Edward!”

“And I had to pretend I didn’t feel a thing, no, nor see it either. Till you announced you were about to march back in public like that, and I had to stop you, somehow. But I did. Feel. A lot of things. It’s still one of my favourite memories. You, like that, all unaware.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Lovelier than anything I’d ever laid eyes on. Till later, of course —— ” he saw her expression, and stopped. “It’s the truth,” he said. “Do you mind?”

“No,” she said, “I love it — do you know, Edward, you haven’t kissed me yet?”

“I’ve been too overcome,” he said, “here, let’s at least make up for it now — ”

After a long while further he drew back once more to study her face. It was fuller: a little extra chin had crept in, and her soft round jaw was somewhat puffy. But her colour was high and her eyes clear and sparkling: she looked, as Mavis had said, in the picture of health. A new fretwork of tiny lines had etched themselves under her eyes, so that the beautiful orbs seemed suspended in the most delicate moving net of criss-crossed rosy flesh.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

“You,” he answered.

“Didn’t your mother teach you it’s rude to stare?”

“Is it? You never seemed to mind, before.”

“Well – no, only this time I feel very plump, and so awkward, Edward — and you are looking at my double-chin, and… ”

“Ssshh,” he said, his turn now, and kissed all the places where he had been gazing. “I have a new scar for you to kiss,” he said playfully then, “on my leg.” She raised her eyebrows. “My upper leg.”

“I can’t wait,” she whispered, and knowing that she meant it made almost everything feel better than it had for the last hour. Except for the Victory, and Nelson. Nothing could make that feel anything less than disastrous. He heaved a deep sigh.

She tilted her head, to read his face better: “Edward, what ever is the matter?”

And so he told her.

Mavis and Hastings had been playing noughts-and-crosses for a good while when Pelham sent his marine guard to fetch her. (Mavis was winning handily.)

“Mavis,” said the captain, taking her hands and looking into her hazel eyes most gravely, “I must leave your mamma in your care again.”

“Well I’ve done a good job so far, haven’t I?” she declared.

“Indeed you have, sweetheart. And you must do better still, now that she is so close to her time.” Something moved across his face, a shadow that pained her to see it, and she remembered their conversation the afternoon of the day she had confided in him about the clock, and he had made it better, just as she had known he would. Now he was trusting her to keep it so, this life he treasured, this woman he loved, her mamma. In the face of those memories of his first wife, who died like a bottle with a cork stuck in it, her child still unborn, all those long years ago. A shudder ran through her at the thought.

She reached out, put her arms about his neck. Into his ear, for his hearing only, she murmured, “Don’t worry, Papa. She’ll be all right. I promise.”

“How can you?”

“Because I know,” she whispered back. “She’s not too old, really, and she’s very strong, and her hips are nice and wide. Honestly. The doctor said so.” And she kissed her beloved papa upon the forehead before leaving him with reluctance, to go back ashore with her mother and Mr. Hastings in one of the ship’s boats.

Pelham sat in his cabin for a long while, sometimes thinking and sometimes simply staring into space, before rousing himself. Beside the twin shocks brought by today, neither of which he knew what to do about yet, nor how to feel – if indeed he felt anything at all, for he was not sure he did, so far – beside these, his most terrifying ship-actions seemed child’s-play.

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

Johnson entered Pelham’s cabin quietly, as he usually did, wishing not to disturb the captain’s thought process until Pelham should look up and thus indicate he was fully ready for the interview to which he had summoned him. Pelham stood behind his desk, papers in both of his hands. Johnson had never seen the captain’s desk and table in such disorder. There was a wildness to Pelham's eye he was not used to seeing there: here was a man who had himself under control, but with an effort. On seeing Johnson, he sighed deeply and dropped all of the papers on top of the rest.

“You sent for me, sir,” Johnson reminded him.

“Yes, I did. I am not quite so far gone in my faculties, doctor, as to have forgotten that fact.”

Johnson did not take offence; clearly, the captain was under unusual stress today — and he had a very fair idea as to why — and so if the man chose to bark at him, he would accept it. Water off a duck’s back, he thought, as far as I am concerned; and it will do him good to snap a little.

The water below sparkled all across the ceiling of the cabin. It winked upon the silver ink-stand which Pelham took up and set down again; it found its way into the lines around his eyes and played with them. “No, sir,” said Johnson, calmly.

Pelham heaved another sigh, shook his head as if defeated by the very thought of what it was he wanted to say. Then, visibly, he took himself in hand and launched in upon all that was on his mind: “There are two matters, Doctor, on which I find myself needing to speak with you today. Neither of them – er – easy to address. One of them touches you directly, sir, as it touches half the men aboard this ship; and the other is a private concern of my own. And I must tell you, sir, that at this moment I do not know which troubles me the more greatly.”

Johnson observed the strain about his mouth, the lines from nose to chin more tightly drawn even than usual. “I have often found, sir, that it is easier to turn my attention fully upon my duty if I am not also attempting to manage a personal matter, and fretting over it. So perhaps we should begin there?”

Pelham looked up at him wearily. “You are right, I think. It – will be simpler, to address, I dare say – there is not very much you can tell me here, I don’t believe – only that I would know what I can ––– ”

Johnson had more than an idea what must come next, but he did not let on by any expression or word; only waited for the captain to continue. He did, after a pause: “If you do not already know, sir, that I was surprised to find my wife greatly with child this morning, then you are the only man aboard this ship to be so ignorant.”

Johnson looked down briefly, then met his eyes. “I was aware of that, yes, sir.” He was going to add his congratulations, but noted the captain blinking, his general air of unhappiness, and forbore. Instead he waited again until the captain should find the words to go on.

“I understand the men find my shock highly amusing. I – I wish I could say the same.”

Johnson hesitated before he spoke. It was in truth a discovery that any man would wish to make privately, and the thought of the un-captain-like vulnerability Pelham had exhibited in that moment must now sting him sharply. To their credit, the men on deck and aloft who had been privy to it — seen with their own eyes their captain fall to his knees, hatless, coatless — had kept perfectly silent until he should have recovered himself, a fact Johnson thought indicative of the very great respect and esteem in which they held him, not to mention their wondering how many of them might be in the same case or worse, if they were to put foot ashore in Portsmouth. That they could see him so unmanned and give him at least the consideration of a minute’s hush spoke louder than their silence. Yet in the moment it must have been painful — in the recollection, excruciating. From what Johnson had heard, Pelham had on occasion been seen to kiss his wife publicly, which was shocking enough; but a brief uxorial kiss was at least a deliberate action, very far indeed from an involuntary collapse into her lap. He spoke carefully, softly: “Sir, you live your life under their noses, indeed, sir, and – they know that – it is part of their regard for you, sir, in the end, since you ask so much of them, that they possess all of you there is – that your duty here is so overweening. It gives them confidence – and they see you for the man you are, I would say, as well as the captain, and they face the same issues – writ smaller, perhaps, but the same – we are all human, sir – you are their model here no less than on the quarterdeck, I would say, Captain Pelham.”

Pelham raised an eyebrow. “Would you!”

“Yes, sir. She – she appeared very well, sir, Lady Pelham, I was glad to note.”

“What do you not note?”

“As little as I can help, sir, it is a habit of mind – you must forgive me, it is not prying, sir, but a doctor’s way of seeing the world. Just as you do not miss an expression upon a man’s face, or a shift in the wind, or an opportunity to gain the weather-gage on an enemy.”

“I see. And so – the reason I am troubled?”

“I had rather you told me, sir. I do not wish to try reading your private thoughts – your heart.”

“Thank you,” said Pelham. “I – I – I am afraid of losing her, sir. My wife.” He looked away; Johnson could not help seeing the quiver of his mouth as he clamped it shut. Something out of the window occupied all Pelham’s attention for a few seconds. His adam’s-apple jerked up and down, moving the knot of his black cravat. “I – I was married before, Doctor, and – there was an unhappy outcome to the pregnancy in that case. It was – a long time ago, and the patient – er – my – wife, at that time – was not – of the phlegmatic disposition of my — of Sophie – nor the physical constituency – nor even the experience – it was a first birth – Sophie has already borne a child – no; two, though the second – I recall – she said – there was a tragedy at the birth, it strangled on the cord – but now – she is not a young woman, sir, although some years younger than myself, and I – ” he trailed off, cleared his throat.

Johnson kept his manner dry, professional, to help Pelham retain his composure. “What is her age, sir?”

“Oh, lord – have I asked her, even? Three-and-thirty? I – it did not seem important, I — ”

“That is good enough, sir. And from what I see, she is a strong woman, in excellent health — her colour was good, I could not help noticing, sir, and she seemed most joyful, hardly nervous I should say, not even the type — bright eyes, clear, a very good sign, you must have seen for yourself — with a sound constitution, and – most positive of all, sir, built on a – generous, more than a – shall we say – ungenerous – scale? That of a mother, dare I say it, not an undergrown child herself?”

Pelham looked sharply at him, to see if any insult was intended, but Johnson's earnest manner drew any sting he might have felt. “Indeed,” he said, “yes, I am glad to say, if it is the width of her hips to which you refer, then yes, she is — solid, not fragile, thank God, she has a generous – er – anchorage.”

Still, his eyes were over-bright, and not as clear as Johnson liked to see; and the way in which he held himself did not denote a man reassured. Pelham paced like one caged for a turn or two, then came back to his surgeon, shaking his head again. Johnson made a quick assessment of his captain’s marriage, from all he had seen and intuited, including the warmth with which Pelham was wont to say “my wife,” and the readiness with which he had laid his head in her lap, in the row-boat, that morning, not to mention the likely well-founded opinions of the junior officers in their cups upon the subject of his very great good fortune. Whatever constraint Pelham felt with regard to his crew, it did not extend to the person of his wife, obviously: and she had held him closely, as had been widely witnessed, for quite some time till he was able to rise of his own accord. So he dared to make an observation he would never have made, otherwise; knowing that it would calm Pelham's troubled mind more than anything less direct. “Sir, I have made an observation in my own practice, before I took to sea, that I think will – be of some help?”

“What is that?”

“Besides the adequate pelvic width, sir, and the fact that she is not a primipara – a first-time mother – there are other indications of a successful outcome, an easier labour. I wonder – pardon my forwardness, sir, but I see you are greatly troubled, and I would allay your fears if I may – ”

“What?”

“There is a type of woman, sir, who resists the animal nature in her – is not at all comfortable with the – er – more physical side of her being - the type that resists the marital connection, for example, or does not relish it – this type is often costive, and also fears childbirth greatly – and can have a very difficult time of it. There is no surrender to the natural forces, and the patient – the labouring woman — I have observed it, many times – by her own terror and resistance – makes the process more drawn-out and painful, I am convinced of it. And then again, there is another kind – you must pardon my presumption here, sir, but if I am to set your mind at rest, I must speak frankly – a second kind of woman, sir, which by all appearances I gauge your wife to be – rarer, I am sorry to say, for the state of womankind — a type of woman who has a warm nature, sir, who finds no resistance in herself to the marriage relation – on the contrary, indeed — and who is able in a similar fashion to give herself up to the forces of labour, when they overtake her — and while she may still find it a very great travail, sir, this type of woman – in my experience – has the better outcome, over all. Sir.”

He looked at the wall, while he was mentioning these rather intimate beliefs of his, to allow Pelham the privacy and space he so needed and rarely received. He knew that this information would help more than anything else he could say, if Pelham would accept it in the spirit in which it was offered. Here was something he could set alongside his own knowledge of his wife, and see the truth of it, imagine her capacity here as he had seen it already for himself, and draw comfort from it.

The water plashed gently against the oaken sides of the frigate, for so long Pelham’s home, his pride and joy. Outside the sounds of the crew at work came to them filtered, a pleasant low mixture of cries, footsteps, a ship’s bell calling out the hour across the harbour and then their own, amid a chorus of others far and near. Half the fleet stood off in wait for Pelham’s arrival and his interview with Nelson.

“I – I see –– ” said Pelham softly. “Well – you have judged her aright, sir, hardly to my surprise – she is such a one – she is very – natural in her response to – to – physicality of all kinds – to sickness, to all types of need, to – yes. Yes. I – I see. Yes. It makes a great deal of sense, what you are telling me – indeed.”

“You have had a terrible experience, sir,” added Johnson, “in losing your first wife. What – what were the circumstances? You implied a maternal death –?”

“She died, yes. Undelivered.” Pelham’s voice was harsh, now. “She was – narrow, of a nervous disposition, not well-nourished – she had had fainting-fits – there was no joy in her, nor hope — she was in terror of the delivery, and blamed – well – she did not survive to deliver the child, it was – I do not know the details or understand them, sir, it is a horrible thing to picture – it killed her in the attempt, what more can I say, and so the child also – it never saw the light of day. There was hemorrhaging, I understand, and no progress at all – and so she died. I was not there, I was in the West Indies — my sister wrote to me of it. That is all I know.”

“I see,” said Johnson quietly, picturing it and the botched delivery that had sent him to sea. Although he could likely not have saved the woman he was now hearing of. His own failure had been a healthy woman, a child too large and malformed, no bleeding but the labour stalled, only one thing to be done: and he had hesitated to do it, until it was too late and the uterus ruptured. Then the end was inevitable and swift. “A Caesarean surgery might have rescued the child, but not if there were bleeding, as you say – altogether a hopeless case, sir. I am sorry.”

“It was a very long time ago,” said Pelham to the desk, then raised his eyes to Johnson’s. They were anguished. “And she was of the – the first disposition you describe, very nervous indeed. And we were not even well – acquainted, I would have to say. But I cannot help but fear a repetition, sir, and while I survived the first – er – loss – with perhaps more guilt than anything, it – it would break me now, to lose my wife ––– I cannot lose her, sir, she means all the world to me and more —!” here he blinked, his face and his fear and his devotion quite naked, but held Johnson’s gaze.

“I can make no promises, sir, as you well know,” said Johnson, “but I can honestly tell you that I feel perfectly sanguine in reassuring you of a happy outcome, sir, with a far greater likelihood than not. Your wife gives every indication of a woman who is well-made to withstand the rigours of parturition –– ”

“Tell me,” said Pelham. “ What it is like. The process. How it happens. Why does it take so damned long — what — tell me?”

Johnson’s heart went out to the man. He thought about his own knowledge of such things, and how he would feel if he had to stand by and watch with no understanding whatsoever. It was very apparent to him that the captain was a man who was accustomed to knowing; who needed it. Knowledge is power, he reflected, and there is nothing aboard his ship he does not understand minutely, in all its subtleties, complexities, varieties. But faced with this mystery, he feels himself powerless — even emasculated almost, perhaps. He may control nothing here, there are no orders to be given, and so he is beside himself.

So he told him, gently, directly, as much as he reasonably could for having merely studied and observed the process, not undergone it himself. As he spoke he watched Pelham’s face change its expression, from one of out-and-out misery to one of some degree of calm and understanding. “I see,” said Pelham once or twice, “I see.” When Johnson finished speaking he sighed deeply. “I pray to God you are right, sir, about her — about her disposition, and how she may withstand it — !” He stared out of the stern-window, where the clouds lay feathered across the sky like wisps of lamb’s-wool freshly carded.

“As I do, sir,” replied Johnson softly. “And now – there was something else that troubled you, sir, concerning the ship — ?”

“Oh, God, yes,” said Pelham. A marine shouted an order outside, and then the voice of Mr. Cowles, the ship’s master, could be heard — something about the sails… Pelham turned from the window to face Johnson again. His face was set in a different way now, businesslike, almost tigerish, the vulnerability it had worn so recently locked away behind purposeful brows and a harsh line for a mouth. “Sir – you have had charge of three hundred-odd souls – it has kept you quite busy, I believe?”

“Indeed, sir,” said Johnson, seeing the new strain that had entered the face before him and wondering what it might indicate.

Pelham watched him closely as he asked: “How should you like to be responsible for eight hundred?”

“Eight hundred!”

“More,” said Pelham. “I am to take command of Victory. Immediately – within a few days – less. By tomorrow, if His Lordship will have his way. Will you come with me, sir?”

Johnson could not conceal his surprise, nor his misgivings. He had found his berth aboard Indomitable to be as good a place as he had ever imagined; he had settled into it, enjoyed the conviviality, the crew he was now coming to know as individuals, the officers. Must all change?

As it must for Pelham? He felt ashamed of himself, realizing that all he felt in his own small sphere, Pelham must bear in the far greater one of a whole ship-of-the-line, a flagship no less, with the Admiral of the Fleet and the darling of the British Navy aboard. “If you need me, sir, then I am your man,” he said. “Although I would think they must already have a surgeon – I should not like to put his nose out of joint, sir — ”

“We shall arrange something,” said Pelham. “I have begun to speak of these things with His Lordship, and he has professed himself quite obliging on the matter of my officers — there may well be work for you and an assistant, and I believe I heard their man was ready to give up so heavy a charge — but we have worked together, sir, you and I — you have my full confidence – and I do not give that lightly. I should be most – grateful and – pleased – if you should see fit to come aboard when I transfer. You will not lack for company – his Lordship has given me leave to bring across half my officers, and of course we shall have Mr. Hastings along – ” — he turned, glancing at Johnson’s face, but there was little doubt his mention of the one name was deliberate: although it was their mutual friendship he meant, surely? — “he does not know it yet, but it will be a fine advancement for him, and so – we shall see.”

“It is a very great responsibility, sir,” said Johnson, quietly.

“Indeed,” agreed Pelham: “ — yours, sir, or mine?”

“Both,” said Johnson. “Sir – so we are to have charge of His Lordship, then, between us — you his fleet and his command, and I his person — ?”

“Indeed,” said Pelham again. He looked at the hunchbacked man before him, who appeared so slight yet had the tireless strength of three men when it came to surgeries after action; and the will and the memory of an elephant where his patients were concerned, their symptoms, their history, their wellbeing — this man who read him like a book and always seemed to know which thought was the right one to offer. Who rarely smiled, seemed distant, often, yet to whom he had spilled all his heart, today, and felt the better for it — to whom he had revealed himself at his most private, here, more than before any human being ever save for Sophie, and found in response to his soul laid bare exactly the care and truth he had hoped for. An odd fellow: secretive in some ways — still waters ran deep, he reflected — yet one he had come to count on. Typical, that the man should think immediately of the responsibility this new situation brought to both of them. “Yes,” he said, on a sigh.

“I am honoured by your faith in me, sir,” said Johnson, “and by your confidence.”

“You have earned it, sir,” said Pelham flatly, as if there were no emotion left in him any more, today.

“And from what you have said, sir, this remains — so far — unannounced?”

“Yes,” said Pelham, “—just while I think some more, how to handle it — who to take — I — I know all must be done quickly… and I have not even been home yet — ”

Johnson looked at him, his head tilted a little sideways like a drab but sharp-faced bird – some small heron, perhaps. “Do not omit to go home, sir,” he said. “After all the events of today — it is no more than your due. The ships will wait. The men will wait. Lord Nelson will wait. Take a few hours with your wife.”

Pelham looked across back at him, then down at the deck, then up again. He wore a distracted air. Johnson repeated it, softly: “Go home to your wife tonight, sir,” he said. “That is my advice, as your medical man.”

“Oh, God,” said Pelham. “How can I take the time?”

“How can you not, sir?” Johnson returned his stare look for look. In the depths of Pelham’s eyes he saw a longing not unlike his own: except that this one was licit, and he was sending the man home to find its surcease. “I shall be in the sick bay, if you need me, sir,” he said. “I shall await your announcement to the ship’s company, of course.”

“Victory,” murmured Pelham. “The flag —— oh, God..! ”

“Sir,” said Johnson with a bow, and excused himself.

“Mr. Johnson — ” came the captain’s voice after him.

“Sir?” – he stepped back into the cabin.

“I thank you, sir. For all you have – shared with me, today. And for your willingness to continue to serve under me, wherever we may find ourselves.” Pelham nodded, decisively this time. Johnson knew that now, he had been properly dismissed.

“You are very welcome, sir,” he said, his creaking voice at its most grave.

“Indeed,” said Pelham. He said it slowly, thoughtfully, as if agreeing with Johnson’s estimation of the grace with which his assistance had been offered today. “And I am heartily glad of it, sir.”

That was the image Johnson carried of him for a long time afterwards, this man standing in his cabin, bowed under the weight of surprises and fresh responsibilities which had fallen upon him in the space of a couple of hours, struggling to make sense of it all, and thanking his colleague sincerely for what little help he had been able to offer.

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

Pelham came home to Sophie in the middle of the night, after working all that time on a master-plan for the changeover. He let himself in and undressed and climbed into bed beside her as if he had been away an hour, not eight months, and she nestled into his embrace sleepily. He had not known her to sleep so soundly, before; the soft swish of his clothes coming off would have woken her. And yet she had looked as if she lacked for sleep, more than not, that afternoon.

“Oh, love,” she murmured, trembling — or was it he that shook? He could not be sure any more; but it didn’t matter, not now. She started to kiss his chest, nuzzling his flesh as if hungry for its sustenance, running her hands over his body in practiced ways that brought liquid lightning to his veins instantly.

“Oh, wait,” he said, “don’t, Sophie — just let me hold you… ”

“Why ever not?” she asked.

“Not now, it wouldn’t be right — would it?”

“Of course it would,” she whispered. “Nothing in the world could be righter. Just so long as you are gentle – can you be gentle with me, Edward? Even this first time, after all these months?”

“I don’t know,” he breathed ——

“Well, try,” she said softly.

“Oh God, of course I will, what am I thinking? I must be, I will be — if you’re sure it’s all right. Is it? —— all right? Are you sure?”

“Let’s see,” she whispered.

It felt to him then as if he must rig stout cables within like relieving-tackles to hold back the strain: he did so, mastering himself, before he even dared to touch her further. Once they were in place he made her whimper, as he had so longed to do each time he had heard a seagull cry between then and now.

Her body had changed, alarmingly so, but he found that he still knew how to raise its sail to the hot wind of his own wanting, bring it around, make it answer his helm, as sweetly as his own ship, until even the relieving-tackles could not hold. He shook with the force of it, restrained still in spite of everything.

“Love,” she said, and helped him find a place for his knees between her thighs, his body raised up on his hands and outstretched arms so as not to crush her. And then she drew him to her, all the way, her belly between them so that he was bent around it like a bow, her face absolutely radiant beneath his. And he felt once more the miracle of her, wet, familiar, new.

“This won’t harm you, will it? Or the child? Is it all right?” he repeated, as soon as he could speak at all.

“Is it?” she asked him back.

“Oh, God,” he said, and accepted the all-right-ness once more as a gift from the almighty.

It was different, being so very careful with her — different, but achingly sweet. When he was overtaken by it altogether, the roughness he had held back came from his throat in harsh sounds.

Later he suckled at her breasts, heavy and full in his hands, until she wept and would not tell him why.

“What am I to do?” he asked, looking for direction from her — for this had never done anything but delight her, up till now.

“Your duty,” she said, and he understood then. These comings-and-goings pure heartbreak for her, caused by him, about which he could do nothing.

“Now, is what I meant,” he whispered, brushing his lips past each swollen tip. He had never been so careful, before: the discipline of it awoke new levels of need in him.

“Like this?” she asked, and turned her back to him so that they lay like spoons on their sides. It was awkward for her to turn over, he noted: this observation brought a fresh lump to his throat. She looked for a moment like a beetle stuck on its back; he bit back the comment, gave her his arm to grip, to help her. Her clumsiness pierced his bowels, almost, his graceful Sophie. Or was this but a new kind of grace, whose ways he must learn, like a man who has never seen the ballet?

Once settled, she moved against him sweetly, wantonly, till he groaned. So this was a fresh offering of herself, then? Oh, lord, how could she know…? And then, how accept so sweetly in turn that he should still feel so aroused by her, even in her Madonna-state at whose feet he should have been worshipping, in homage to her, not yearning once more for this gift of herself to him. Not only did she sanction his need of her – she invited him. Oh, this was grace indeed. In full measure, and then to overflowing. “Did you mean… again — ?” he asked her, holding his breath.

“Of course,” she said, “Edward, if you please, that is… ”

“If I please — !” he repeated. He pleased, indeed. Oh, did he please.

Freed from the fear of crushing her, this time he gave a little freer rein to his need also. He pushed from his mind the images that went with a man’s belly curved around tender buttocks: this was his wife, and he needed to be within her sweet wetness – and this way was easiest, and so he was here where he longed to be. Between his loins and her silken back was a crucible of silver fire that turned to gold and then flame as he let himself claim her. And then he was spilling again and the words spilled from him at the same time, words this time not sounds: “oh Sophie – Sophie – don’t die — oh, please, for God’s sake, don’t die — Sophie, Sophie, I — I — ” … and at last it came out, the deepest truth of all: “oh, Christ! I’m so afraid – ! –!”, his voice breaking then.

“My love,” she said, sadly. “My poor love. Sssshhh — ssshhh!! I had no idea you were so heartbroken. Over her. That poor girl. Woman, I should say.”

“Girl. You’re a woman. And I wasn’t,” he replied, his voice muffled against her shoulder-blades. “Not over her. That was so long ago, and we – we didn’t suit, you knew that. It wasn’t like this. Not in any way. It was wretched, from beginning to end. But now, with you — oh, God, I feel it in my bowels, Sophie, the terror of coming home and finding you not here… ”

“Edward — you must simply trust that all will be well,” she murmured. “Because it will.”

“Do I have any other choice?” His voice came out harsh again.

“Yes,” she whispered, “you could make yourself sick with worry these weeks, and it wouldn’t make any difference at all, except that we should both of us be wretched — you fretting, and me heartsick that you are fretting!”

“In all my life,” he said, “I have never felt as naked as I do at this moment.”

“Yes, love,” she said.

“What would I do without you?”

“That’s a rhetorical question,” she replied gently; “go to sleep. Oh, and Edward, forgive me for saying this, but — she carried your child – she was a woman, dearest – forgive her too, my love. And yourself. Forgive yourself, Edward.”

And for want of anything wiser to do, he took her advice; first about going to sleep, but also, on reflection, about poor Catherine — and lastly, concerning himself.

Morning came all too soon, as it must. He cursed it.

“What?” she said, sleepily.

“I said, damnation,” he replied, honestly if not prettily.

“Why? Because you must leave?”

“Yes.”

She turned then — again, that struggle, her arms and legs flailing till she managed it. He was reminded this time of a ship whose halyards are all shot away, at the mercy of the wind and current, no longer under control. “That’s so hard for you,” he murmured. “My poor Sophie. Here, take my hand — ”

She did so, blushing. “I feel foolish,” she said.

“Don’t,” he said tersely.

“Very well.”

“I hate to go — you don’t know,” he said.

“This is it?” she gasped.

“In half an hour. For now. I must complete the transfer into Victory by this afternoon. His Lordship has been waiting upon me – he is eager to get back out to sea. Can you imagine it — after all this time? A few hours, and my life turned upside-down?”

“It’s still the right way up here, I hope,” she said, her face twisting.

“Always,” he said. “Will you get up with me? Or shall I bring you a cup of tea, before I go?”

“You would never manage the fire,” she said. “I have Peggy bank it before she leaves, but sometimes it goes out. I’ll get up and make a pot for both of us.”

He drew on his clothes, watching without her noticing as she put on her wrapper. It did not close around her waist any more. Or middle – she had no waist. Her silhouette was bulky in front of the window. His child — their child — soon to be born from her body. The clumsy shape of her, barrel-bellied as a water-hoy whose sole purpose is to carry its cargo. The observation shamed him, and then he remembered her words from the night before. Forgive yourself, Edward. How could he help but observe it? And how could he not feel the difference between Sophie-as-wife, and this new soon-to-be mother? There had been no criticism in his thought, nor malice — not even unkindness, just a fathomless tenderness and a level of gratitude that stung his eyes with tears. He forgave himself for thinking it. She found him looking at her, then, with a strange expression accompanying these various thoughts chasing through his brain. She flushed: it pained him to see it. “I must look very foolish to you,” she said again, “or strange, anyway. A shock, so sudden. A whale. This big belly.” She looked down at it, twisting her hands together at her bosom.

“No” he said. “Not foolish. Don’t say that – or even think it. Strange, yes. A shock — indeed. But – beautiful, so — I swear to God, Sophie, even a whale has such grace, in the water, my dear – a ship in full sail cannot be any lovelier… than you are now, as you turn to me, like that – yes, just like that, against the window, and I marvel that our child lies within your body… ”

“Do you mean that?” she said.

“Look at me,” he said. “Look at my face. Read it.”

She did so, and blinked tears from her eyes all over again.

Downstairs, he sat across from her at the kitchen-table. “I was thinking about taking the house next door, too,” she said. “It is for lease, and we could have more space, then. After the baby comes – we could knock out the wall and have the hallways connect, it would be easy —— ”

“That would be splendid,” he said.

She brightened. “Do you think so?”

“Absolutely. I have to go,” he said, Victory crowding into his thoughts despite himself.

She put her hand to her mouth. “Of course,” she said. And let him go, with a brief kiss and a hopeful look. “You’ll let us see you off?” she called after him.

“I’ll send for you, if I can,” he called back.

She watched him till he turned the corner; put both hands on her belly, and hugged it; then lifted them to cover her face as she wept in the street. It was early: no-one was about to see.

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

This made her cry too, the same week, but not in the same way:

Beeches,

25^th June, 1805

Dear Sister Sophie,

Thank you so kindly for yours of last April.

My dear, your news gives me a joy I cannot begin to describe.

To think that after all this time my dear Brother is to have a child of his own moved me to tears upon reading your words.

God will be good to him this time I know and grant you a Safe delivery and every thing that could be desired for your health and well-being. I shall pray each day for His great goodness to bring you through, my dearest Sister.

This second chance at happiness at his time of life is the most precious gift imagineable. I had long thought this beyond any possibility. He seemed committed to the Navy and in no way looking to take a Wife: I had given up on that hope long ago. The reason for this lies in his bitter experience I am sure.

He most probably has not told you much of his first Marriage and I am not sure whether you would wish to hear it, but you did ask to hear more of him, any thing it should please me to tell — and so, thinking you might be curious and not wish to ask him directly, let me mention that as you have probably suspected it was a very grave error and most unhappy. He was away at sea a great deal even then and after our brothers’ tragic loss our Mother was most insistent that besides his duty to his Country he owed a nearer one to his Family, namely to continue it. I do not think he would have married, else. Certainly not then. But he felt it his obligation to do so, while he still Might – forgive me Sophie, you cannot be Unaware of the dangers attending his Profession – and so he fixed on a person already of our acquaintance who would I dare say not have looked at him when he was but the youngest of three brothers – and yet in whose eyes his suit found favour once he was our father’s heir.

In his choice of her I would have to say it was as if she seemed expedient and serviceable, like some piece of equipment he required for his ship – I had not the impression that his affections were engaged beyond the ordinary. He felt he should have a wife — he had little time to select one, so rarely was he ashore — he took what was familiar and close-at-hand. It seemed an obvious choice at the time, though more so to him than to me. Her mother was very keen on it and threw them together — she in her turn was pleasant to him I am sure, accepted his courtship, doubtless that much went to his sailor’s head.

She was of a cool disposition and he once said to me that he thought in choosing her there would be calm at home, which he wished for. She did have quite perfect manners, in an unfeeling, automatic way. And I should mention that she was considered a beauty, although I never found her so. Well my dear it turned out that they did not suit. This did not surprise me to learn, but I fear it did surprise Edward, who was quite naïve at that time. He has never been a great sophisticate where women are concerned.

He said nothing to me, you must understand; only that I know my brother, I can read him, and he was not happy — did not have the look of a groom, after their wedding-day — rather, of someone who has made a terrible realization and knows that he must live with it. I think of that old expression about having made one’s Bed —! This was the first time I had seen his face wear that grim expression which later became his habitually, I am sad to say.

Well of course he had to return to Sea and she got along quite happily without him, I must say. She did not especially like to Speak of him, while he was gone, as you do — how this warms my heart, Sophie! – she never asked me, as you have, to Tell any Thing of his Childhood or any thing that would make one Suppose she took an Interest in his Career. When he was Gazetted and then Decorated she Contained her Pride very well. Her face only grew petulant and sharp when he returned on his brief leaves. A year, two I suppose now I count them. It was very clear that she liked the title better than the man who bore it. — our Father had departed this World during that time, so Edward inherited. After his last leave she — well, you know the rest. She was as narrow as a bean-pole and not of a sanguine temperament. I wish I had pointed this much out to him before he committed himself. The blessed state of expectant motherhood was not one she wished for – or even barely tolerated. She became very liverish – she never ate, my dear! – another of her affectations – fell prey to Fainting-fits and ill-humours— in my opinion these brought her the attention she felt she deserved for carrying this Child so unwelcome to her. As you know she did not deliver it before she left this world. It fell to me to Write to Apprise him of this Tragedy, since our mother was too distraught at the loss, hardly of her Daughter-in-Law for whom she had but little respect, but of her Posterity.

Now every thing is entirely the opposite with you, Sophie, I know it, so do not think for a moment that any of this can hurt you, my dear. On the contrary. I have received another letter from Edward which you would blush to read for how warmly he speaks of you, Sophie. It is the letter of a man very deeply in love and transported with happiness. This comes in every line and between them even more so. In it he apologizes for failing to tell us more of you earlier, and in particular for allowing us to think this was anything less than a Perfect match for him. And to me he gives a description of you that could not fail to move you. I shall quote a little of it for you — “sister, dear, she is all I have ever wanted and more. She is my harbour, my refuge, my home– she is grace to me. Rejoice for me Mary, for I have found my all.”

There, did I not tell you so? If you but knew the dry terms in which he writes to us usually, you would be even more moved.

Now that you are blushing, let me add a little to that picture of him which I have painted so far — that as a boy he was rather solitary of habit, and would spend much time when he could abroad in the fields and up on the moors. He had a particular fascination for gunpowder and conducted many little experiments with it, usually with a great degree of care but occasionally with rather greater results than he had intended. Our Orangery has never been the same since — I think you can imagine all too well. He was punished very severely for that episode. He would have been about nine years of age at the time, I suppose. He did come straight to our Papa and Confess his Authorship of the Ruin. He did not want our Brothers blamed. Papa, I have blown up the Orangery, he said, by Accident, sir, and I am very Sorry for it. He meant only to Demolish a Pile of wooden crates, not realizing the Force of his engine would Travel so very far beyond the Field in which he had Stacked them. I remember how white his face was with a red spot upon each Cheek. I have thought of it often since, fondly, our Shock, the Uproar in the house, and then his Marching into the Breakfast-Room. Many a child would have learned his lesson but Edward merely went further Afield after that to conduct his Trials.

Besides that, he liked to build Bridges and dams across our stream, to construct kites and also wood-and-paper gliding birds and fly them from the edges of the Tors up on the moor – some flew quite half-a-mile, upon the Wind! He never cared much for hunting, which surprises me now considering his career. He has always been capable of great Self-Discipline, even as a boy. His Focus even then was quite Extraordinary, it made one Think there must be great things ahead of him. He mastered Mathematics with a very great Ease, French less so but he was persistent in his Studies. His Latin was once Excellent. He always had a hot Temper, though. Yet he is capable of great Patience also in the Furtherance of his Endeavours. He went into the Navy young, made Midshipman at thirteen and Lieutenant at seventeen. He even was First under Nelson in the dear old Prince of Wales – in case he has not mentioned it to you.

So you see his life has been one of Service to his country with very little time left over for his personal happiness. I did not think of him as having a Life apart from the Navy. We have seen him very little — sometimes it has been years in between his visits. Although he sends gifts from time to time when he finds something he thinks “will bring a rose to his sister’s cheek” – there I am quoting again, his small Tendernesses to me have meant so very much through the years – and he does write to us.

Though not as fully and warmly as you do.

Let me finish here before this gets too thick to post, or compels me to write cross-wise also, a habit I have never liked. And send it on so that you may have a hope of receiving it before the Happy – nay, Blessed Event.

May the Lord keep His hand stretched over you Sophie, in the times to come, and bring us only continued good news from you and yours. Be sure to let us know right away when you can, of your Delivery and health, before mama succumbs to apoplexy waiting. In the meantime and for ever, please accept the very best wishes and kindness of your affectionate sister Mary.

17. Friendship

August – September, 1805

Letty Davenport sat in her elegant parlour and held Sophie’s hands. “Good girl” she said, “not letting him see you cry when he left.”

“It was so hard,” sobbed Sophie.

“Of course it was. The hardest thing in the world. Why, having children is easier by far — they come, then the pains, and it’s over with: they’re born. Poof! You’re done with it, for ever – that child, anyway. But this – parting – why, it tears your heart out every time like Promiscuous upon the rock! Or Prometheus, or whoever he was. The fellow with the eagle.”

“I believe that was his liver,” murmured Sophie through her tears.

Lady Davenport smiled. “Lights, liver, heart – whatever. It’s all the same. Really. I do believe they couldn’t do it, in our place.”

“What do you mean?”

“If it was us that went, and them that had to stay behind. The men. They simply wouldn’t stand for it – wouldn’t stay at home – they’d go off and get into all sorts of trouble, and misbehave themselves, and let everything go to ruin, and then fling their hands up and say, what do you expect!”

Sophie dried her eyes. “I am so glad to have you for a friend,” she said. “Who else could make me smile when my husband has just left, after a single night ashore?”

“Who indeed!” said Lady Davenport sardonically. “At least I hope he was considerate,” she added in her most forthright manner. “You didn’t have to beat him off with a stick, did you?”

Sophie laughed. “No, I didn’t,” she said. She did not think it necessary to enlighten her friend as to why no sticks had been called-for.

“I should hope so. Sometimes I think that’s all they want. Men. That and fighting.” Lady Davenport’s creased face took on a sad cast for a moment.

“Don’t you think they want the same things we do?”

“What?”

“Well – a home to come to, and children, and — peace, perhaps? I don’t know — what else?”

“Peace? Pfui! Plenty of excitement, more like,” offered Lady Davenport wryly, “the more dangerous the better, and betting on long odds, and taking foolish risks, and rushing about all over the place looking important. Not to mention money, and rank, and the good opinion of men just as foolish as they are! And that fellow between their legs, let’s not forget, that rules them altogether sometimes, I think – at least between the ages of fifteen and fifty! And do you know what’s the worst of it?” she sighed.

Sophie hated to think.

“Why, that we wouldn’t have them any other way, fools that we are!”

She leaned over, shrieking with laughter, poking Sophie with her fan. Sophie nodded slowly. “Well, yes, to a point — but I think that is because we were made like that, spoon and fork, or bird and tree — ”

“Or sword and scabbard,” hooted Lady Davenport, wiping her eyes. “Oh, my lord, Sophie, I declare you are the most entertaining person I know. Besides myself.”

Sophie held up her hand a moment. “Think, Letty. The birds – the peahens, all flocking after the one with the most splendid tail. The bull in the field, with his harem of cows. Don’t we do the same thing, in falling for the man with the most gold lace on his uniform, the one who seems powerful and wise?”

“Are you a cow?” asked Lady Davenport in quizzical tones.

“No; but I recognize that part of what I love about Edward is his air of command. I cannot separate Edward the man from the captain.”

“Not even in bed?”

Sophie blushed. “He comes to me as the captain, still, I think — and uses me to – to find the deeper part of him. For a little while. The one that stands before God, naked.”

“My goodness!” Lady Davenport’s eyebrows shot up towards her hairline. “You lucky girl.”

“Yes,” said Sophie, and gave a watery smile. “I know.”

“The only part of Lloyd I ever seem to find is – you know!”

“Well, that too,” said Sophie carefully. “I think they are linked, you know.”

“Good lord,” said Lady Davenport.

“Well, I’m not a very churchgoing sort of a person,” said Sophie in reply, “but I do think that God is good, to have made us like that – tools to uncover each others’ souls – as it were – and have a great deal of delight in doing so!”

“I’m envious,” said Lady Davenport simply; and meant it. “Now I know why he is so utterly crazed for you. To come to you like that and have you find his soul for him into the bargain. And does he find yours?”

“Oh, yes,” said Sophie, “of course. He makes me face things about myself I don’t like very much, or even things I’m afraid of.”

“That sounds most uncomfortable! I don’t think I should like it at all.”

“Yes; yes, it is. But it’s – well, it’s necessary. In a way. You see – in being braver for him a bit of the time, I end up being braver for my self, a lot of it. For my self and Mavis. When I was poor and living alone, it felt like such a struggle – every day, I can’t explain, without any end in sight. I didn’t know how I should manage, at all. But somehow I did. And now I am to have his child, and he is sailing off to be Lord Nelson’s flag captain, so much against his will, but it is his duty, and… I thought I would struggle, to find the courage to be that strong, and bear a goodbye like the one we just had: but I find that I can.”

“So you can, my dear,” said Lady Davenport, patting her knee. “Now then, I hope you will join me for a plate of lunch before we send for the carriage for you?”

“Yes, thank you.” Sophie had learned to acquiesce gracefully; in this case, it was the only thing to do.

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

It was gone three o’clock when Lady Davenport’s carriage brought her all the way home. She had been leaning back against the seat-cushions, wearied, but opened her eyes as the motion halted. To her surprise, before the liveried footman could descend from the rear of the carriage and reach the door, a shock-headed figure in blue-and-white canvas duck sprang up from her doorstep and beat him to it. This was the more remarkable for the figure’s having but one foot, the other leg ending in a white-stockinged stump a few inches below the knee.

“Good heavens, Mr. Stroud!” she exclaimed.

“Stroud is good enough, mum,” he grinned, handing her down. “No Mister. We keep that for orficers, in the Navy.”

“If you prefer it, then – ”

“I believe I do, mum… now then. You an’ me, we ’as got something a bit ticklish to discuss, madam. My lady.”

“Oh – what’s that?”

The carriage drove away. It was a hot day in August, and the heat rose up most oppressively from the cobbled street. She swayed; he was at her arm in a flash. “Let’s – let’s go inside,” she said. They made a strange sight, the two of them, she whole and weary, he maimed and yet more sprightly on his crutch and one foot than she on both of hers. They went inside. Before Sophie could worry whether it would be inappropriate to invite him to take a seat in the parlour, or an insult if she did not, Stroud saw her predicament and solved it. “I reckon I’d be a sight more comfortable in the kitchen, my lady, if that’s all right wiv you.”

“Of course,” she nodded, and they sat there where she had sat so recently with Edward. Stroud held out a paper to her, with a familiar hand across it. She broke the seal and opened it. Scrawled, it read: “My darling — pardon me, but I find I forgot to mention something most pressing to you last night in the distraction of our seeing one another again. My dear love! Well — it is the man Stroud. He is no longer able-bodied, and I cannot in good conscience have him aboard my ship. Yet I am concerned that he not be cast aside altogether, since pensions are so wretched for the crippled, and his service has been so very loyal. He might make himself useful to you and Mavis, if you could be so kind as to consider taking him under your wing. As you well know, he worships you both, I am convinced of it, and he has my complete trust to conduct himself at all times to your benefit.

Will you consider it? I am sorry that time does not allow me to gain your assent before acting. If you must say no, would you at least arrange with Mr. Humphries for him to receive a few pounds before attempting to gain a passage back to England? But I hope you will be able to oblige me in this, Sophie, I really do. In haste – my love to you, you cannot know how much! Which I always tell you, I know, but you cannot – and to Mavis, and to our child that is to be, from your own Edward.”

Sophie wiped away a tear with the palm of her hand. “He wants me to take you in,” she said. “Or on, whichever.”

“There’s a difference, mum,” said Stroud.

“Which is it?” she asked.

“Seen right through him, ’aven’t you, my lady?”

She looked at his terrifyingly scarred face. The eyes were level, intelligent. “How many men have lost limbs, aboard the Indy?” she asked.

“Lord, mum, I’d ’ave to say I’ve lost count. Two or three every action, most like. The big ones, anyway. ’Alf a dozen a year, I’d say. More, in a bad year. Them as doesn’t die from it, that is.”

“I see. And he wants me to believe all of a sudden that you are a charity case?”

“If you want, mum.”

“Are you?”

“I ’ope not, mum, I really do. I’m more useful wivout me leg than most blokes is wiv both on ’em, I swear to God I am. Well, it’s just me foot, really, I still got most o’ me leg, see. But it’s ’im, mum. You’d be doing ’im a kindness, really. Not me.”

“Go on,” she said, thinking she knew what he was going to say. About her stubbornness in the matter of her domestic arrangements, her lack of consequence therefore, his dislike of her performing any sort of household tasks whatever, even though she had spent a lifetime doing so; her foolish pride, that had to be hoodwinked so.

“ ’E frets ’imself silly, mum. No man at sea ought to ’ave to do that,” said Stroud, with complete and devastating candour. “Not worry about ’is old lady, at ’ome, and fight the enemy into the bargain – begging your parding, mum.” He looked at her swollen shape. “Specially not now, now wiv you bein’ – you know. Expecting. ’E thinks your life is too ’ard, and you ain’t got a soul to watch out fer you when ’e ain’t in port. It eats ’im up, mum. I know it does. I been there. Didn’t last, it were too ’ard. An’ ’is face, mum, talkin’ about you — ’im not bein’ there — didn’t bear lookin’ at.”

“I see,” said Sophie slowly. Was it selfish, then, her proud insistence upon managing everything herself? Was she not strong? Or could both be true at the same time?

Stroud waited for her to say something further; the little tirade had been more than she had ever heard from him.

He added, after a silent while, “You needn’t tell ’im I told you that, mum. Whether or not you take me on. It’s between you an’ me, that is.”

“Would you be so good as to stay, Mr. Stroud?” she asked him. “I think — I think Mavis and I – and the child (she flushed) – will be most – most glad of your services. Most glad.”

“Well, then that settles it, don’t it, mum!” declared Stroud with a puckered, seamed, lopsided grin.

Which, apparently, it did.

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

The godsend of Stroud’s appearance on the scene could not have come a moment too soon. As Sophie had mentioned, the house next door had just become available for lease, and with her increasing household it was desperately apparent that she would either have to remove, or risk her home bursting at its seams. She was not of a mind to take on an entirely new place, most especially not in imminent expectation of her delivery, and so this solution appeared with perfect timing just as the situation had become intolerable. She had certainly found, as her pregnancy advanced, that she was less and less able to keep up with even the simplest domestic tasks. The fire was beyond her, the cooking made her feel faint; the cleaning and turning-out of the beds was now so far beyond her strength that she could not even imagine how she had been used to do it all, in the difficult days before Edward had come into her life.

She still enjoyed tending to the flowers in the little paved yard in the back, and in her new-found happiness of the last two years had added to them, including window-boxes at every casement and lemon-trees and vines in pots, so that the scene was a perfect riot of every hue in her paintbox and then more besides, changing from morning till night, from month to month. Even on her weariest days she would sit out here, in the shade under the fig-tree, and if the watering-can was too heavy for her to carry, Mavis would come home and fill it for her (from the splendidly-renovated cistern on the roof, through a lead pipe with a spigot) — and carry it round at her mother’s direction. She did find that she got out-of-breath very easily, and that she must not over-exert herself, at the risk of swollen ankles and sharp cramps in her calves, not to mention a giddy feeling.

Lady Davenport had seen to it that she engaged a full-time maid, who was with her from before dawn till after supper in the evening, and furthermore that the heavy duties were undertaken by a respectable Spanish-speaking woman of the town. “That is the absolute minimum, my dear; anything less and even I cannot maintain that you are a lady! Let’s not bring shame upon your husband’s head in his absence by having it said he neglects your wants? Eh?” Lady Davenport also sent her carriage for Sophie three or four times a week, to bring her down to Government House and to take her about for anything else she might need. At other times Sophie had arranged with a neighbor’s boy to run and fetch her a garry, should she require one, from the stand down the hill.

She felt fortunate indeed that this slow metamorphosis was taking place in the relatively volatile, fluid social world of Gibraltar. In an English town she would not have stood a chance of changing her situation, no matter how much money might be poured into the endeavour; but here, where there were so many expatriate gentry now on their uppers, not to mention military connections and officers who had married above, or below their station, not to mention merchants, and even Jews and Arabs – qualified doctors received in the best houses! – it was not difficult to be accepted for her self; and as Edward’s wife, both. She certainly did not wish to disguise her origins — but nor did she wish to disgrace Edward by clinging to a way of life that appeared wretchedly insufficient.

Thus it was that the project of the house-next-door could not be put off another week, and Stroud found himself hobbling through it with Sophie on the same afternoon he joined her employ. “I have but to sign the lease,” she explained, “it is really already arranged. But I was unsure how I should manage it, where to make the passage to connect them.”

“Well, Mum,” said Stroud thoughtfully, “ ’Ow many front doors do you need?”

“One, really,” said Sophie, “of course!”

“Well, then,” Stroud continued, “you knock through ’ere, be’ind this one, see, and you got a ’allway that’s twice as wide, an’ it lets into both sides, see. An’ you could turn the parlour in the back of your old ’ouse into a mornin’-room, an’ these bigger ones on the new side could be your new parlour an’ sittin’-room. Or library, or whatever takes yer fancy.”

Truth to tell, he was rather vague about what it was that quality did in all those empty rooms in their houses, having grown up in one room himself which he shared with his mother, father (till Stroud Senior was taken and hanged at Winchester assizes for helping himself to Lord Delme’s pheasants one dark night) and nine surviving children. Still, he had a fair idea, from listening and hobnobbing with those who served the quality, and he was an astute student of all kinds of human nature (as has been seen).

“Oh,” said Sophie, “I could have a piano again!”

“You could ’ave a ’ole perishing orch-y-stra, if you wanted, mum,” said Stroud, and they laughed till tears rolled down their cheeks at the thought. “Mind you,” he added, “you can’t just go a-knockin’-down of walls, mum. Got to think what they might be a-’oldin’ up. Don’t want the upstairs to come tumblin’ into the downstairs, do we. Got to put in a nice strong beam acrost the new ’ole, an’ not ’ave it run too long. Ten feet, twelve, mebbe. Same thing upstairs, on the landing.”

“Of course,” said Sophie, “I was wondering about that.”

“Was you?” said Stroud, with new respect for her intellect.

“I think I ought to take one of the big bedrooms upstairs, for when Edward – that is,” Sophie trailed off in embarrassment.

“Right you are, mum, indeed you ought. Why, ’is quarters aboard the Indy is almost bigger’n your little ’ouse, mum, you couldn’t fit one o’ them nice big four-poster beds in your upstairs, not from what I’ve seen. But you can now. Look!” They had reached the top of the stairs in the new house, and the front bedroom was larger than all of Sophie’s ground floor.

“Oh, dear,” she said — for besides being tall and grand, it was also filthy and the plaster crumbling; although it had a very pretty French-door opening over the street below, with an ornamental railing and large shutters to keep out the heat and dust of the day.

“This? This’ll be a treat, you wait and see! A lick o’ paint in ’ere will make all the difference, mum. That plaster ain’t nuffink, I could fix that wiv one ’and, let alone two. Well, one an’ a ’alf. Three days, tops, mum, I can ’ave this ready to move you in.”

“Could you really?”

“ ’Course I could! We spends all our time in port painting the ship, mum, I’m the dabbest ’and wiv a brush that you ever could wish to meet!”

Sophie looked up at his nut-brown and crimson face. Did nothing daunt him? He grinned back, the asymmetry more marked than ever. Sophie decided then that she knew why Mavis cared for him so; and why Edward had sent him to her. “I am so glad you came, Mr. Stroud,” she said; and this time he simply tugged his forelock and did not correct her over the appellation.

Just then Mavis came running in to find them. Soon all three were so engrossed in their plans that they did not leave until dusk had fallen and, candle-less, Sophie had to take Mavis’s hand down the shadowy staircase to return next door to the cozy little lamplit house where Edward had first found his home.

And so it was: Sophie went to stay with Lady Davenport for a week, to escape the dust, while Stroud found an old shipmate down at the waterfront and engaged him to come up and wield the sledgehammer; and negotiated with a local builder for the tackles and jacks allowing placement of the all-important oak beam. “But I don’t like to incur any unusual expenses while Sir Edward is away,” protested Sophie faintly, but Stroud had her answer all ready, and it was irrefutable: “No, mum, look, we can put everyfink on account down at the chandler’s, mum. Why, I know for a fac’ that when we weigh anchor aboard the Indy, ’e’s got more money in wine and port and brandy than it’s goin’ to take us to do this ’ole ’ouse. I promise you. And not a penny out of your ’ousekeeping money, mum.”

“But what about paying this fellow, what’s-his-name, the Lascar?”

“I sailed wiv ’im aboard Defiance, ’e’s all right. Name of Muhammed, mum. ’E is one, and all. One o’ them ’eathen Mohammedans. Worships Allah. But as fine a chap as you could wish to meet, blackamoor or not. ’Ard worker. Ain’t but a spot of casual labour, fer ’im. ’E’d do it for bed and board an’ a few nice dinners down the road wiv us in the kitchen, mum. Your ’elp, I mean. Separate. You got to start eating in that new dining-room when we get you ’ome.”

Stroud, Sophie was beginning to realize, had a very nice feeling for the distinctions of class which would make her a fit consort for his capting, in his mind; while retaining a sailor’s right to speak to her with the trenchant clarity befitting an equal, on some other (deeper?) level.

Mavis spent more time at the new house than at Government House that week, returning only late at night with paint in her hair and whitewash-streaks all over her clothes. “You’ll see,” was all she would say when asked how it was coming along. “It’s going to be perfect — you’ll see.” Every morning Sophie would go to the chandler’s in the carriage to choose the wash and paint for the room they were to do that day. She chose by instinct, imagining the space and the light in each room, and its purpose, and whether it was most important that it be light, or intimate, or elegant, and what was the colour of the room next door, and so on. She had picked a lovely blue for the shutters, all to match with the old house which was to get a facelift also.

For sentimental reasons she kept her old original front-door, and bricked-up the other one, even thought the next-door hall was larger. It made an intriguing entry, stepping inside at first and then aside into a wider, cooler stone-flagged space and seeing only for the first time then the sweep of the broader staircase that ascended in the new house. The little house was the older of the two, and its ceilings lower, but Sophie retained the back parlour just as it was; she loved it far too much to change it. After all, it was there that Edward had first felt so at home that he allowed himself to drop his guard enough to fall asleep in the threadbare armchair, while she cooked his breakfast.

However, staying with her friend Lady Davenport was an epiphany for Sophie. Never in her life had she been half so comfortable – so cosseted – so cared-for. Should she want hot-water, there it was, no having to ask the maid hours in advance. And to sit in a room for hours on end with nothing to do but chat and look forward to the next meal, in whose selection, purchase, cooking and serving she had had no hand whatsoever — pure extravagance! She thought privately that this was far too much luxury for anyone ever to wish for, except the most spoiled and idle; but she could see how a person might become accustomed to it. “I would be bored, though,” she told herself, and made sure that she spent the mornings at Letty’s out upon the veranda painting, or sewing some lacy little cap for the baby.

Her last day there, before the new-old house was quite ready, Lady Davenport came up to her room before she was dressed. Lying in bed until seven was such a novelty to her that she felt like a kept woman – but the Davenports socialized till late in the evenings, often not getting to their beds until well past midnight or even one or two in the morning — their candle-budget alone must be more than my new rent!, she thought.

“May I come in?” came that kind, though imperious voice.

“Of course, if you don’t mind sitting on the bed,” called Sophie back to her.

“I am SO excited, my dear,” announced her friend, before she was even half-way in the room. “Do get up today, because someone very special indeed is to pay a visit this morning.”

“Oh?”

Lady Davenport sat on the bed: “Lady Hamilton!”

“Oh!” said Sophie.

“She is such a dear. You’ll take to her, I know you will. You two remind me of one another so much – my goodness! What you have in common – so passionately in love with your sailor-lads, such common-sense – I have always said that is far more important than blue blood… ”

Sophie flushed. “Do you mean… Wasn’t she commonly-born before she married Sir Charles?”

“What a commotion of commons! Whatever we mean by them! Oh my dear, she makes you look like a paragon of aristocratic virtue! Why, you came to us perfectly respectable, above reproach, a widow… Emma got her start in modelling, you know! In tableaux! For gentlemen! In gauzy dresses, perfectly see-through, imagine — Emma’s, that is, not the gentlemen!”

“Should we hold that against her?”

“Oh, absolutely not! Heaven forbid! Good gracious, I would have to say she has served her country more ardently than most of our lords and ladies put together!” Here Letty raised her eyebrows till Sophie realized it was Emma’s personal history she meant: wife to the Government attaché in Naples, and subsequently her scandalous liaison with Lord Nelson. “It was very good of Sir Charles not to make a fuss, I always thought. Put the country’s good ahead of his own. Opening his home and his marriage-bed to our greatest hero, the lamb…”

“Letty, you have a sharp tongue when you want. From what I understand, she truly loves him – and he, her.”

“Who? Sir Charles Hamilton? Or Lord Nelson?”

“Hmm,” replied Sophie thoughtfully, “I meant Lord Nelson, but since you ask, I think her husband too. Really I do. To behave so generously, in the face of such a – challenging turn of events… ”

“You,” said Letty, blowing a kiss at her, “are a sweetheart. The poor man has horns, and you call him uxorious! Why, you would never think badly of anybody, I declare!”

“Why, of course not! When we can think of what is good in them?”

“But bad is so much more fun!” declared Lady Davenport over her shoulder as she swept out of the room: “everybody knows THAT!”

“Come back!” cried Sophie. “I thought you said she was your friend?”

“Oh, she is!” laughed Lady Davenport. “I’m telling no more than the truth here, my dear, you and everybody in the country already know, it’s hardly a secret – imagine what I’d say if she were my enemy!”

When she arrived, the once-styled “Pocket Venus” was a revelation to Sophie. Formerly a person of humble origins, much like herself, she had taken-on every appearance of being a lady. Her gown was silk with a matching corded-velvet spencer, her bonnet of the latest style straight from Paris (via Spain: some things, like fashion, transcending mere details such as a state of hostility). She was also as open and dramatic as Lady Davenport. The two of them in one room, reflected Sophie, was like being surrounded by peacocks!

“Oliver has told me so much about your Edward,” said Emma, drawing her chair up to where Sophie sat in stately immobility with her feet resting upon a little stool. “He was his captain, you know – your husband served under him, years ago, and his Lordship has always had the highest opinion of his ability – the highest!”

“I am very pleased to hear it,” said Sophie shyly.

“And you are but lately come into his life, I understand, after all those years as a widower! I must say, as much time as they spend away at sea, I wonder how they ever do manage to form connections with any of us landlubbers! I have told Horatio I should grow a fish’s tail, and take to the waves, so that I might see him somewhat more often!”

“And what did he have to say to that!!??” asked Lady Davenport, snorting.

Emma had the grace to blush, but answered with a sly candour: “Why, that if the pictures of mermaids which he had seen were any indication, such a fishy anatomy would quite obviate the purpose of my visit!”

“What!?” Lady Davenport frowned. She had only half-listened to the reply, since she had been thinking of what she was going to say next. “A wit, is he? It’s wasted on me: I don’t get your drift… ”

Sophie whispered: “two legs… but only one tail, I think… ”

“Precisely,” smiled Emma, fingering the miniature of her heroic lover that was pinned openly to the fichu at her pretty little bosom.

Lady Davenport laughed uproariously then. “Oh my dear – two legs – oh ha, ha! I declare, I knew you two would get along famously! See, she took your meaning right away… what did I tell you? I’m too old and staid, Huw and I, my goodness, what have I missed by staying with a soldier, eh? These sailors are the very soul of romance, I swear! And those lovely blue uniforms, I’ve always said that… ”

Emma shared a little smile with Sophie that endeared her further still.

“So Emma, tell us. The other day we were discussing what men want. Besides that! I said danger. Sophie said children. Well look at her, with one on the way, we would have to expect that, wouldn’t we! What’s your opinion, my dear?”

Emma thought for a moment. In repose, Sophie noticed, her delicate face was strained and starting to sag. Just like her own, she thought; and yet he loves her more than ever… “Well,” Emma replied, looking from one of them to the other, “don’t you think it’s to be mothered?”

“In what way!” cried Lady Davenport; but Sophie had an answer. “You’re right!” she said. “Of course you are. Not to be told what to do, but the way a mother loves her child – no matter what he has done or who he is, with all her heart, brooking no criticism of him, finding no fault. Her loyalty. That’s what you meant, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that and one more thing.”

“What?”

“To comfort him,” said Emma.

“Oh,” said Sophie, “yes…. yes.”

“You see – they go off to war and they think we are the weak ones. They protect us – or think they do! Poor lambs… they have it all turned about. Really, they need us. They think they are taking, when what we are doing is giving.”

“Goodness, yes,” said Sophie.

Emma was in full flow now: “We keep the mysteries of birth and death. They merely plant the seed; we carry it! We must bear their children AND their loss. And, to flatter their good opinion of themselves, we have to do all of that while giving the appearance of weakness – quite a feat, don’t you think!”

Sophie looked at her with new respect. Here was a woman who seemed to share an understanding of the relationship between the sexes that went beyond that one current in society: one whose power and truth Sophie herself had felt, but not yet articulated. “You have a daughter, don’t you,” she asked.

“Yes – Horatia. She is in England…. I – I do miss her.” A shadow passed across her almost-flawless face then. “But Lord Nelson is here, and so – so am I.”

“So we make the sacrifices, too,” said Sophie gently. “Always.” And frowned, shifted in her chair uncomfortably, rubbing her belly as the child kicked her.

Emma leaned across and took her hand. “Who is your midwife, my dear?” she turned to Lady Davenport. “Who is the best to be had, here?”

“A Mrs. Simons,” said Sophie. “And she is married to a doctor – they attend cases together. It is the best combination, so I have heard. She is Spanish, you know. He trained in Edinburgh. An interesting couple altogether. She has a – a kind manner. He says I am coming along very well.”

“Very good,” said Emma. She had caught the edge of anxiety beneath Sophie’s gay tones: “Would you like me to attend you also? When the time comes? I – I know how it is, when he is so very far away and you feel so alone… ”

“Would you do that?” whispered Sophie, her eyes bright. “We have just met, and I should not like to impose… ”

“If you would like it, then of course I would!” said Emma warmly.

Sophie felt something that had been almost at the breaking-point within her give way a little. To be the recipient of just a modest kindness was overwhelming to her; so much – first Lady Davenport, then Stroud, and now this – was almost more than she could manage.

“We will both be there,” said Lady Davenport, “won’t we” — and they sat on either side of Sophie and held her hands, while she put her head back in the chair and let the tears come rolling down her cheeks.

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

The new house boasted both a piano and a dining-room. Upstairs, Mavis’s old room was now home to a resident maid, while Sophie’s former bedroom - oh, happy memories! – had become the spare room, though the very concept of a spare room shocked her at first. Meanwhile the lovely front bedroom in the new house had been transformed. Stroud had worked wonders with the paint and wash, achieving not only simple flat washes of colour, but even going so far as to create stripes of subtle variations, a pale- and a medium- cream side-by-side, for example, not to mention a third shade of buttermilk upon the ceiling. The light played upon it most seductively (what a thought! said Sophie to herself, but that is what it is, the way it plays with the angles and kisses the walls where the sun falls…!).

She had looked at her savings, realized from Edward’s monthly stipend to her since the very first night he had lain in her arms, and ordered a tall new bed with buttercup-gold damask bed-curtains; and a whole gross of beeswax candles.

The dining-room was Wedgwood blue – a favourite shade of Edward’s, she thought, since he had had his cabin painted in it, and the music-room beyond it a calm soft green. Lady Davenport begged her to accept the loan of a dining-room set of eight chairs and a table, since her own entertaining now must extend so far beyond what it was in the early days of her marriage, being the Governor’s wife and all; but she simply could not bear to part with this old set, my dear, and would Sophie not do her the kindness of giving it some use…? It was pearwood; it glowed.

Mavis’s room bore evidence of her predilection for the sea: besides overlooking the harbour, so that she no longer had to risk life and limb going out upon the roof-peak to spot which ships had come in, it housed her collection of glass fishing-floats picked up in her many blithe hours of beachcombing, her sea-urchins ditto in descending order of size, from the violet one that was as big as her two cupped hands to the tiniest moss-green and pink pair, no bigger than her little-finger-nails; and a ship’s wheel (“I just found it for ’er, mum – didn’t pay nuffink – no, nor it’s not lifted, neither, an’ that’s the god’s honest truth!”).

The piano, it should be noted, was Sophie’s original instrument; Stroud had had a few words with the pawnbroker from whose shop it had been sold a few years earlier, after getting the details from Mavis, and tracked it down to a dark neglected corner in the home of a linen-merchant whose wife had since left him for a traveling violinist, and who “couldn’t bear the sight of the perishing thing, mum, ’e all but begged me to get it orf ’is ’ands!” When he could no longer bear to stand on his new peg to paint, of an evening, he had sat in front of the walnut case and polished it back almost to its former glory.

Reunited with its stool, whose solitary presence Pelham had noted on one of his earliest visits, it stood inside the doorway of the new music-room-cum-library. Mavis had intimated to Mr. Stroud also that there might be some books to be traced; she had spent one entire afternoon at the second-hand bookshop, growing ever dustier as she opened each tome in the establishment in search of her grandfather’s bold hand. She found thirty-seven; plus a windfall of six whole tea-chests full of their fellows, which the bookseller had intended to get to, one of these fine days; though apparently no day had yet seemed fine enough in the ten years they had sat in his back room.

Sophie cried when she saw them.

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

Her first guests in the new parlour were her new friends, naturally. After admiring the pretty rooms and elegant taste, they sat comfortably together. Sophie told them the tale of the miraculous recovery of her library, and her reaction upon seeing it resurrected.

“I’ve been crying a lot, lately,” she sighed, looking over the rim of her pretty new china teacup (the set, a gift from Emma).

“Of course you have,” both her friends said at once. “Why, even a woman with her husband at home is tearful in her last weeks,” continued Emma, while Letty cried, “Didn’t you when you were expecting, before?”

“Yes I did, though I hid it then — and I had more cause to cry, back then, too… ”

“Really?” “Why?” They both put down their teacups and looked at her with a different kind of interest.

“My – my husband then was not kind,” Sophie murmured, looking down. “He had little affection for me, and less respect.”

“Dear, dear,” they clucked.

“He used – force, sometimes, when he was in a temper – I was not used to it, my home was very peaceful as a child, and so it came as a great shock to me, that a man could beat his wife when she had done nothing to deserve it – ”

“Well, no wonder. Thank heavens Sir Edward will not raise his hand to you! – he does not, does he?”

“Oh, goodness, no!” Sophie saw for a moment again her first husband’s face, coming at her with the poker in his hand, and the purple hue in his cheeks, the spittle at the corners of his mouth. She shuddered. And let the memory fade in favour of a more recent one: Edward, lantern-jawed, blinking back tears, the look on his face in the morning light as he gazed openly at her enceinte body in all its clumsy, extraordinary grace. “I ought not to be sad,” she said. “Not – not now.”

“Good – I didn’t think he was that kind of a man. In my experience a commander who is respected by his troops is also a fair and just man; you can count upon it.” Letty Davenport spoke with authority; she had had to patch-up and sit with far too many officers’ wives of the other sort, in her long career in the army. “Men may hide things from their friends and peers – defects of character, vicious propensities – but his subordinates always bear the brunt of it. Those over whom he has power. That’s the way of it, always has been.”

Sophie turned to Emma: “They love Lord Nelson,” she said. “We all do. I – I did, before he took Edward to be captain of Victory! —— ”

Emma seemed to glow. “I like it that you are honest with me, Lady Pelham,” she smiled. “And yes, indeed, there is something – remarkable about him, he captures one’s loyalty in a heartbeat, and then… ”

“Then?” prompted Sophie gently.

“Then there is no going back. Ever,” finished Emma, and looked away.

“Stroud says all the common sailors love him too,” Sophie added softly into the silence which followed. “Not just the officers, but even the men under the most brutal captains, the pressed men, the hopeless ones – the ones who would mutiny and murder their own officers, if they could – they would all lay down their lives for him!”

“Stroud? Is that your man? The one your husband sent you?”

“Yes,” said Sophie. “I asked him about Lord Nelson, because of – well– of Edward having to be his flag-captain, and then because of you,” she finished, turning to Emma.

“Well,” said Emma, “he’s very brave. Some think he takes too great a risk, in his plans. But you don’t win by being predictable. He fights to win. Always. He’ll take any chance, for that.”

“We were all so proud when he was wounded, and continued on — the whole country — did you not feel it?” Lady Davenport pressed on.

Emma Hamilton let a glaze come over her china-blue eyes. “How did I feel?” she repeated slowly: “…did I feel proud? How do you think I felt?”

She turned to Sophie. “That’s why you cry,” she said. “Isn’t it. You carry the weight of the world right now, this child and all of it. His safety too. Your husband’s. The whole fleet.”

Lady Davenport shook her head, not in disagreement but in sympathy.

“Yes,” whispered Sophie, “yes.”

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

September, 1805

To: Captain Edward Pelham,

HMS Victory

My most precious husband and lover, captain of my heart for ever –

Our child greets you with kicks and shoves, preparing to escape the confines of my womb, eager for daylight and the sight of you (as I am). How I hope you will be here soon, my darling.

All the talk in the town is of preparation for a fleet action at any time. I know my darling husband well enough to know how overmastering are the responsibilities upon him at this crucial juncture, with the Admiral of our whole Fleet looking to him for support at every moment. I do not wish him to be distracted with any domestic cares. Nor need he be.

Now you must once more therefore listen to my reassurance that all will be well, my love, and cease your fretting. You have enough concerns without the burden of these new fears. Remember Edward that I have twice given birth with no danger to myself; that these womanly hips you so delight to ‘lie at anchor’ between are wide and generous; that I am well, famously so: and more contented than at any time in my life – which is the best tonic for health and an easy confinement that may be. Mavis is taking upon herself the task you set her, of waiting upon me hand and foot to fill my every need before I may even express it; she guards my rest like a tigress and will brook no disturbance of it!

My love, I know you are afraid for me. You must be all the more so now that my time approaches and you can not be here. I express it, because you did. Do you know the bed fairly shook the last night you were home, curled around my back like spoons with your hands upon my belly, telling at last your fear of losing me? This is no reproach – on the contrary my love, I loved you for your truthfulness. As I did from the beginning – and you, me.

It must surely occur to you that my own fears for you can hardly be less! And so my love, take this to heart I beg you.

Listen: nothing is certain in this world Edward, and you would take me for a fool if I were to tell you otherwise; but my darling, I know as far as anything can be known that all will be well here. Everything in me feels ready for this important event that is soon to happen. I am strong, joyful, eager; my breasts are beginning to fill with milk (how will you share them my love? We shall see! It is your own child that must claim them now!) – my heart and lungs are clear, says the doctor, and the child vigorous and lusty (how could it be otherwise, since its planting was no less so?)

So fret not, Edward; do your duty my love, with a clear mind and your full attention upon the matters at hand, and trust to me to do the same here, namely the delivery of our child. When next I see you, my darling, our love will be made flesh for all to see. I find I have tears in my eyes, writing that. Oh Edward you have given me so much more than I dreamed could ever be mine! There is no joy like that of being your own loving and devoted Wife, soon to be mother of your Child. I kiss you now and for ever, my love; for ever, your own S.

P.S. Please give my kind regards to Lieutenant Hastings, and thank him for his very kind wishes. Besides the letters to you from Mavis which I enclose herewith, she has written to thank him also, for his spending that time with her on the ship, as well as the last time you were home before — and I am certainly grateful to him for that too, my love! While I do not think you have any rival for her affections as yet, she spent much time over the illustrations in her note to him. Do not be jealous! Remember, she is about to share all of my time, for the first time in her life, and I think she feels herself a little adrift, and is thus reaching out to new directions for her interest and sustenance. I hope he will take her childish affection as freely and simply as it is offered. He seems a very decent young man, not the kind to hurt a child with heedless disdain or coldness. I hope you will grant him your permission to reply to her, since I take him for a young man of great sensibility in such matters of familiarity, and not one to presume upon it to the detriment of your command.

Please also convey my thanks to Mr. Hastings on behalf of the men, in return for their good wishes “for the health of your good lady, sir,” as you wrote (did I detect a smile in your words? Did your face twitch as you thanked him, knowing yourself revealed in my expectant state? My love!)

Now go and do your duty, Edward, and come home to us safe and sound — darling – captain – husband – lover – father.