Stormchild by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online

clearly wanted me to know that he did his business in fashionable waters.
    I agreed he could keep Tort-au-Citron on one of the yard’s moorings for a month, but at that month’s end no delivery crew had arrived. Then another month passed, and still the abandoned boat swung to her mooring on the changing tides. Autumn winds shivered the river cold, and the first gray frosts of winter etched Tort-au-Citron’s rigging white, but still no one fetched her. Her hull became foul with weed and her coach roofs streaked with gull droppings. Telephone calls to Miller’s office elicited no instructions, so I sent him a whacking bill for the mooring’s rent, but the bill, like the boat itself, was ignored.
    Not that I cared very much, for Joanna’s death had left me in a state of numbed despair. The house decayed about me, the garden turned rank and wild, and the boatyard only functioned because the staff ignored me and ran it by themselves. I wallowed in self-pity. I had lost a son and a wife, my daughter had disappeared, and I seemed trapped in hopelessness. For weeks I wept in the night, the tears fueled by whiskey. My friends rallied, but it was the friendship of marriage that I missed most; I missed it so much that I often wished I was with Joanna and Richard in their graveyard high above the sea. Christmas was a nightmare, and Joanna’s birthday a purgatory. David tried to comfort me, but his efforts did not work; my brother was never a comforting kind of man. To be a comforting man one needs a much greater sensitivity to pain than David either possessed or wanted to possess. “Well at least you might cut your hair,” he finally told me, “you look like a damned hippie.”
    The mention of a damned hippie made me think of Caspar von Rellsteb, then of Nicole, and, for the umpteenth time, I wondered aloud where she was, and how I could send her news of her mother’s death. Since the bombing I had renewed my efforts to locate Nicole. I had contacted an old friend who now worked in Army Intelligence, and he had pulled official strings in Germany, but no one there knew of a man named Caspar von Rellsteb, or had heard of a boat called Erebus. Nicole had simply vanished. “If she knew her mother was dead,” I insisted to David, “she’d come home. I know she would.”
    David muttered something about letting bygones be bygones. He wanted me to forget Nicole, not because he disliked her, but because he doubted she would ever return home. My brother, with his vigorous view of life, wanted me to dismiss the past and start again, and a year after Joanna’s death he tried to kick-start that new beginning by introducing me to a widow who had moved to our town from Brighton, but I bored the lady by talking of nothing but Joanna and Nicole. I did not want a replacement family; I wanted what was left of my original family.
    David finally challenged me over Nicole. “Do you have the slightest evidence that she cares about you? Or wants to have anything to do with you?”
    “If she knew her mother was dead,” I insisted, “she’d feel differently.”
    “Dear, sweet God.” David sighed. “Has it ever occurred to you, Tim, that Nicole herself might be dead? Perish the thought, but that catamaran she sailed away on doesn’t sound like the safest vessel afloat.”
    “Maybe she is dead,” I said listlessly.
    “One prays not,” David said enthusiastically, “but whatever’s happened to Nicole, you simply cannot ruin your life wondering about it. You need a new interest, Tim. You’ve always liked dogs, haven’t you?”
    “Dogs?” I gaped at my brother.
    “Dogs!” he said again. “I mean I quite understand if Irene wasn’t the lady for you”—Irene had been the widow from Brighton—”but Betty’s found a charming woman who breeds dogs up on the downs.”
    “I don’t want a dog breeder,” I snapped. “I want to find Nicole.”
    “But I thought you agreed she might be dead?”
    “Fuck off,” I told my reverend