Relentless Pursuit by Alexander Kent Read Free Book Online Page A

After what she had endured, the grief and the enmity, it was a wonder she had written at all.
    He half-listened to the sudden thud of feet overhead, the shouts as a petty officer chased some confused newcomer to his right station. They would learn. They had to.
    He recalled the dry wording of his final orders.
You are to repair in the first instance to Freetown, Sierra Leone, and avail yourself of the latest intelligence concerning the forts and settlements on that coast. You will reasonably assist the senior officer of the patrolling squadron in whatever way you consider conforms with these said orders.
    But on passage Unrivalled would call into Funchal, Madeira, to replenish stores, and perhaps make more sense out of such vague instructions.
    The slave trade was a fact, although banned officially by Britain. A felony, to the delight of the anti-slavery movement in Parliament and elsewhere.
    A show of strength, then. He wondered how Galbraith and the others regarded it. They were safe, lucky to be employed; they had seen that for themselves in Plymouth and Penzance.
    For the practical ones, like Cristie, the master, it was all a matter of sea-miles logged, favourable winds and faith in the stars. To Tregillis the purser, it was food, drink, and a minimum of waste for every one of those miles, with enough left over for emergencies.
    He plucked at his shirt and felt the locket against his skin. The bare throat and shoulders, the high cheekbones . . . it was over because it had never begun. Nor would it. They might never meet again. Perhaps she only truly existed in this locket.
    Napier came in from the sleeping quarters, careful, he noticed, to walk lightly on the restless deck.
    He could see it now. The boy on Triton ’s deck, falling with a jagged splinter deep in his thigh like some obscene dart. Triton was like many Dutch vessels; her builders had used a lot of teak, something hated by English sailors. The splinters were known to poison and cause gangrene to spread at an alarming rate. Even O’Beirne had been troubled about it, and had wanted to put the boy ashore at Gibraltar where he might have received better attention.
    Napier had insisted that he wanted to stay with the ship. He had suffered for it, and would carry the scars of O’Beirne’s surgery until his dying day.
    O’Beirne had said severely, “You’ll always have a limp, my boy!”
    Napier had been equally stubborn. And he seemed to be overcoming his limp.
    Adam had written to the boy’s widowed mother. She should be proud of the child she had allowed to be signed on without, it seemed, much hesitation.
    He touched the locket again and carefully released it. Catherine had sent no address. It was as if she simply needed him to know that she was there. Like the day at the memorial service at Falmouth, when Galbraith had asked to join him.
    He looked at Napier. “It’s time.” He had heard the muffled chimes of eight bells, and beyond it the slow, regular clank of the capstan pawls.
    He thought of the men who had come with Yovell to sign on. How were they now?
    And Yovell himself. He had settled down as if he had never left the sea. He was sharing a tiny cabin space which also served as a store for the purser’s records with Ritzen, the purser’s assistant, a Dutchman who had played an unlikely but vital part in discovering the role and purpose of Triton in that last battle. Adam sensed that Yovell had needed to get away from his hard-won security, if only to hold on to something far more precious.
    Napier said, “Can I come up with you, sir?”
    Adam smiled. “Regrets?”
    The youth thought about it, his face serious. “My place, sir.”
    They walked through the screen door, where the marine sentry was already stiffly at attention, and probably wishing he was on deck with his mates.
    Adam touched his hat to the figures by the quarterdeck rail and looked at the slowly revolving capstan; its