Honour This Day (3 page)

Haven said, “The guardboat is alongside, sir.”

Bolitho gestured past him. “You have not rigged winds'ls, Captain.”

Why could he not bring himself to call Haven by his first name?
What is happening to me?

Haven shrugged. “They are unsightly from the shore, sir.”

Bolitho looked at him. “They give some air to the people on the gundecks. Have them rigged.”

He tried to contain his annoyance, at himself, and with Haven for not thinking of the furnace heat on an overcrowded gundeck.
Hyperion
was one hundred and eighty feet long on her gundeck, and carried a total company of some six hundred officers, seamen and marines. In this heat it would feel like twice that number.

He saw Haven snapping his orders to his first lieutenant, the latter glancing towards him as if to see for himself the reason for the rigging of windsails.

The first lieutenant was another odd bird, Bolitho had decided. He was over thirty, old for his rank, and had been commander of a brig. The appointment had not been continued when the vessel had been paid off, and he had been returned to his old rank. He was tall, and unlike his captain, a man of outward excitement and enthusiasm. Tall and darkly handsome, his gipsy good looks reminded Bolitho of a face in the past, but he could not recall whose. He had a ready grin, and was obviously popular with his subordinates, the sort of officer the midshipmen would love to emulate.

Bolitho looked forward, below the finely curved beakhead where he could see the broad shoulders of the figurehead. It was what he had always remembered most when he had left the ship at Plymouth.
Hyperion
had been so broken and damaged it had been hard to see her as she had once been. The figurehead had told another story.

Under the gilt paint it may have been scarred too, but the piercing blue eyes which stared straight ahead from beneath the crown of a rising sun were as arrogant as ever. One out-thrust, muscled arm pointed the same trident towards the next horizon. Even seen from aft, Bolitho gained strength from the old familiarity.
Hyperion,
one of the Titans, had overthrown the indignity of being denigrated to a hulk.

Allday watched him narrowly. He had seen the gaze, and guessed what it meant. Bolitho was all aback. Allday was still not sure if he agreed with him or not. But he loved Bolitho like no other being and would die for him without question.

He said, “Barge is ready, Sir Richard.” He wanted to add that it was not much of a crew.
Yet.

Bolitho walked slowly to the entry port and glanced down at the boat alongside. Jenour, his new flag lieutenant, was already aboard; so was Yovell, a case of documents clasped across his fat knees. One of the midshipmen stood like a ramrod in the stern-sheets. Bolitho checked himself from scanning the youthful features. It was all past. He knew nobody in this ship.

He looked round suddenly and saw the fifers moistening their pipes on their lips, the Royal Marines gripping their pipeclayed musket slings, ready to usher him over the side.

Haven and his first lieutenant, all the other anonymous faces, the blues and whites of the officers, the scarlet of the marines, the tanned bodies of the watching seamen.

He wanted to say to them, “I am your flag officer, but
Hyperion
is still
my
ship!”

He heard Allday climb down to the barge and knew, no matter how he pretended otherwise, he would be watching, ready to reach out and catch him if his eye clouded over and he lost his step. Bolitho raised his hat, and instantly the fifes and drums snapped into a lively crescendo, and the Royal Marine guard presented arms as their major's sword flashed in salute.

Calls trilled and Bolitho lowered himself down the steep tumblehome and into the barge.

His last glance at Haven surprised him. The captain's eyes were cold, hostile. It was worth remembering.

The guardboat sidled away and waited to lead the barge through the anchored shipping and harbour craft.

Bolitho shaded his eyes and stared at the land.

It was another challenge. But at that moment it felt like running away.

2 A
S
AILOR'S TALE

J
OHN
A
LLDAY
squinted his eyes beneath the tilted brim of his hat and watched the inshore current carry the guardboat momentarily off course. He eased his tiller carefully and the freshly painted green barge followed the other boat without even a break in the stroke. Allday's reputation as the vice-admiral's personal coxswain had preceded him.

He stared along the barge crew, his eyes revealing nothing. The boat had been transferred from their last ship
Argonaute,
the Frog prize, but Bolitho had said that he would leave it to his coxswain to recruit a new crew from
Hyperion.
That was strange, he had thought. Any of the old crew would have volunteered to shift to
Hyperion,
for like as not they would have been sent back to sea anyway without much of a chance to visit their loved ones. He dropped his gaze to the figures who sat in the sternsheets. Yovell who had been promoted from clerk to secretary, with the new flag lieutenant beside him. The young officer seemed pleasant enough, but was not from a seagoing family. Most who seized the chance of the overworked appointment saw it as a sure way for their own promotion. Early days yet, Allday decided. In a ship where even the rats were strangers, it was better not to make hasty decisions.

His eyes settled on Bolitho's squared shoulders and he tried to control the apprehension which had been his companion since their return to Falmouth. It ought to have been a proud home-coming despite the pain and the ravages of battle. Even the damage to Bolitho's left eye had seemed less terrible when set against what they had faced and overcome together. It had been about a year ago. Aboard the little cutter
Supreme.
Allday could recall each day, the painful recovery, the very power of the man he served and loved as he had fought to win his extra battle, to hide his despair and hold the confidence of the men he led. Bolitho never failed to surprise him although they had stayed together for over twenty years. It did not seem possible that there were any surprises left.

They had walked from the harbour at Falmouth and paused at the church which had become so much a part of the Bolitho family. Generations of them were remembered there, births and marriages, victories at sea and violent death also.

Allday had stayed near the big doors of the silent church on that summer's day and had listened with sadness and astonishment as Bolitho spoke her name.
Cheney.
Just her name; and yet it had told him so much. Allday still believed that when they reached the old grey stone house below Pendennis Castle it would all return to normal. The lovely Lady Belinda who in looks at least was so like the dead Cheney, would somehow make it right, would comfort Bolitho when she realised the extent of his hurt. Maybe heal the agony in his mind which he never mentioned, but which Allday recognised.
Suppose the other eye was somehow wounded in battle?
The fear of so many sailors and soldiers. Helpless. Unwanted. Ferguson, the estate's steward who had lost an arm at the Saintes what seemed like a million years back, his rosy-cheeked wife Grace the housekeeper, and all the other servants had been waiting to greet them. Laughter, cheers, and a lot of tears too. But Belinda and the child Elizabeth had not been there. Ferguson said that she had sent a letter to explain her absence. God knew it was common enough for a returning sailor to find his family ignorant of his whereabouts, but it could not have come at a worse moment or hit Bolitho so hard.

Even his young nephew Adam, who now held his own command of the brig
Firefly,
was not able to console him. He had been ordered back to take on supplies and fresh water.

Hyperion
was real enough, though. Allday glared at the stroke oarsman as his blade feathered badly and threw spray over the gunwale. Bloody bargemen. They'd learn a thing or two if he had to teach every hand separately.

The old
Hyperion
was no stranger, but the people were. Was that what Bolitho wanted? Or what he needed? Allday still did not know.

If Keen had been flag captain—Allday's mouth softened. Or poor Inch even, things would seem less strange.

Captain Haven was a cold fish; even his own coxswain, a nuggety Welshman named Evans, had confided over a “wet” that his lord and master was without humour, and could not be reached.

Allday glanced again at Bolitho's shoulders. How unlike their own relationship. One ship after the other, different seas, but usually the same enemy. And always Bolitho had treated him as a friend,
one of the family
as he had once put it. It had been casually said, yet Allday had treasured the remark like a pot of gold.

It was funny if you thought about it. Some of his old mess-mates might even have jibed him had they not been too respectful of his fists. For Allday, like the one-armed Ferguson, had been pressed into the King's service and put aboard Bolitho's ship, the frigate
Phalarope—
hardly an ingredient for friendship. Allday had stayed with Bolitho ever since the Saintes when his old coxswain had been cut down.

Allday had been a sailor all his life, apart from a short period ashore when he had been a shepherd, of all things. He knew little of his birth and upbringing or even the exact whereabouts of his home. Now, as he grew older, it occasionally troubled him.

He studied Bolitho's hair, the queue tied at the nape of his neck which hung beneath his best gold-laced hat. It was jet-black, and in his appearance he remained youthful; he had sometimes been mistaken for young Adam's brother. Allday, as far as he knew, was the same age, forty-seven, but whereas he had filled out, and his thick brown hair had become streaked with grey, Bolitho never appeared to alter.

At peace he could be withdrawn and grave. But Allday knew most of his sides. A tiger in battle; a man moved almost to tears and despair when he had seen the havoc and agony after a seafight.

The guardboat was turning again to pass beneath the tapering jib-boom of a handsome schooner. Allday eased over the tiller and held his breath as fire probed the wound in his chest. That too rarely left his mind. The Spanish blade which had come from nowhere. Bolitho standing to protect him, then throwing down his sword to surrender and so spare his life.

The wound troubled him, and he often found it hard to straighten his shoulders without the pain lancing through him as a cruel reminder.

Bolitho had sometimes suggested that he should remain ashore, if only for a time. He no longer offered him a chance of complete freedom from the navy he had served so well; he knew it would injure Allday like a worse wound.

The barge pointed her stem towards the nearest jetty and Allday saw Bolitho's fingers fasten around the scabbard of the old sword between his knees. So many battles. So often they had marvelled that they had been spared once again when so many others had fallen.

“Bows!”
He watched critically as the bowman withdrew his oar and rose with a boathook held ready to snatch for the jetty-chains. They looked smart enough, Allday conceded, in their tarred hats and fresh checkered shirts. But it needed more than paint to make a ship sail.

Allday himself was an imposing figure, although he was rarely aware of it unless he caught the eye of some girl or other, which was more often than he might admit. In his fine blue coat with the special gilt buttons Bolitho had presented to him, and his nankeen breeches, he looked every inch the Heart of Oak so popular in theatre and pleasure-garden performances.

The guardboat moved aside, the officer in charge rising to doff his hat while his oarsmen tossed their looms in salute.

With a start Allday realised that Bolitho had turned to look up at him, his hand momentarily above one eye as if to shield it from the glare. He said nothing, but there was a message in the glance, as if he had shouted it aloud. Like a plea; a recognition which excluded all others for those few seconds.

Allday was a simple man, but he remembered the look long after Bolitho had left the barge. It both worried and moved him. As if he had shared something precious.

He saw some of the bargemen staring at him and roared, “I've seen smarter Jacks thrown out of a brothel, but by God you'll do better next time, an' that's no error!”

Jenour stepped ashore and smiled as the solitary midshipman blushed with embarrassment at the coxswain's sudden outburst. The flag lieutenant had been with Bolitho just over a month, but already he was beginning to recognise the strange charisma of the man he served, his hero since he had been like that tongue-tied midshipman. Bolitho's voice scattered his thoughts.

“Come along, Mr Jenour. The barge can wait; the affairs of war will not.”

Jenour hid a grin. “Aye, Sir Richard.” He thought of his parents in Hampshire, how they had shaken their heads when he had told them he intended to be Bolitho's aide
one day.

Bolitho had seen the grin and felt the return of his sense of loss. He knew how the young lieutenant felt, how he had once been himself. In the navy's private world you found and hung on to friends with all your might. When they fell you lost something with them. Survival did not spare you the pain of their passing; it never could.

He stopped abruptly on the jetty stairs and thought of
Hyperion
's first lieutenant. Those gipsy good looks—
of course.
It had been Keverne he had recalled to mind. They were so alike, Charles Keverne, once his first lieutenant in
Euryalus,
who had been killed at Copenhagen as captain of his own ship.

“Are you all right, Sir Richard?”

“Damn you, yes!”
Bolitho swung round instantly and touched Jenour's cuff. “Forgive me. Rank offers many privileges. Being foul-mannered is not one of them.”

He walked up the stairs while Jenour stared after him.

Yovell sighed as he sweated up the steep stone steps. The poor lieutenant had a lot to learn. It was to be hoped he had the time.

The long room seemed remarkably cool after the heat beyond the shaded windows.

Bolitho sat in a straight-backed chair and sipped a glass of hock, and marvelled that anything could stay so cold. Lieutenant Jenour and Yovell sat at a separate table, which was littered with files and folios of signals and reports. It was strange to consider that it had been in a more austere part of this same building that Bolitho had waited and fretted for the news of his first command.

The hock was good and very clear. He realised that his glass was already being refilled by a Negro servant and knew he had to be careful. Bolitho enjoyed a glass of wine but had found it easy to avoid the common pitfall in the navy of over-imbibing. That could so often lead to disgrace at the court martial table.

It was too easy to see himself in those first black days at Falmouth, where he had returned there expecting—expecting what? How could he plead dismay and bitterness when truthfully his heart had remained in the church with Cheney?

How still the house had been as he had moved restlessly through the deepening shadows, the candles he held aloft in one hand playing on those stern-faced portraits he had known since he was Elizabeth's age.

He had awakened with his forehead resting on a table amidst puddles of spilled wine, his mouth like a birdcage, his mind disgusted. He had stared at the empty bottles, but could not even remember dragging them from the cellar. The household must have known, and when Ferguson had come to him he had seen that he was fully dressed from the previous day and must have been prowling and searching for a way to help. Bolitho had had to force the truth out of Allday, for he could not recall ordering him out of the house, to leave him alone with his misery. He suspected he had said far worse; he had later heard that Allday had also drunk the night away in the tavern where the innkeeper's daughter had always waited for him, and hoped.

He glanced up and realised that the other officer was speaking to him.

Commodore Aubrey Glassport, Commissioner of the Dockyard in Antigua, and until
Hyperion
's anchor had dropped, the senior naval officer here, was explaining the whereabouts and dispersal of the local patrols.

“With a vast sea area, Sir Richard, we are hard put to chase and detain blockade-runners or other suspect vessels. The French and their Spanish allies, on the other hand—”

Bolitho pulled a chart towards him. The same old story. Not enough frigates, too many ships of the line ordered elsewhere to reinforce the fleets in the Channel and Mediterranean.

For over an hour he had examined the various reports, the results which had to be set against the days and weeks of patrolling the countless islands and inlets. Occasionally a more daring captain would risk life and limb to break into an enemy anchorage and either cut out a prize or carry out a swift bombardment. It made good reading. It did little to cripple a superior enemy. His mouth hardened. Superior in numbers only.

Glassport took his silence for acceptance and rambled on. He was a round, comfortable man, with sparse hair, and a moon-face which told more of good living than fighting the elements or the French.