Stormchild by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page A

and insensitive brother.
    David might have half wanted Nicole to be dead, yet oddly it was he who found her, or rather who brought me the evidence that Nicole might still be alive. It happened on the Sunday after our brief argument. I was at home, trying to ignore the whiskey bottle as I contemplated opening a can of soup for lunch, when David, still in his cassock, appeared at the back door. “It’s me,” he said unnecessarily, then dropped the color supplement of one of the Sunday newspapers on the table beside my can of tomato soup. “Mrs. Whittaker gave it to me after Matins”—he explained the newspaper—”because she recognized, well, you can see for yourself. Page forty. Mind if I have a whiskey?”
    I did not answer. Instead, with a heart thudding like a diesel engine, I turned to page forty. I knew it was Nicole. David did not need to say anything; there was something in his demeanor that told me my daughter had at long last reappeared.
    Nicole was in a photograph that showed a group of environmental activists harassing a French warship on the edge of France’s nuclear weapons testing facility in the South Pacific. The picture was part of a long article about the growing militancy of the ecology movement and there, in the very center of the photograph, was Nicole. My heart skipped as I stared at the photograph. Nicole. I wanted to laugh and to cry. The fifteen months of despair and sadness since Joanna’s death were suddenly shot through with brilliance, like a spear of lightning slashing through gray clouds. Nicole was alive, and I was not alone. My breath caught in my throat, and my eyes pricked with tears.
    The picture, taken in black and white through a telephoto lens, showed a catamaran that was festooned with banners carrying antinuclear slogans. In the foreground an inflatable boat manned by armed French sailors was motoring toward the catamaran, which was wallowing hove-to in a surging sea. Six young people lined the catamaran’s cockpit, all evidently shouting toward the photographer, who had presumably been on board a French warship astern of the inflatable boat. Nicole was one of the six protesters. Her face, distorted by anger, looked lean and tough.
    “Oh, God,” I said weakly, because seeing my daughter’s face after four years seemed something like a resurrection.
    “Genesis,” David said. He was striding up and down the unwashed kitchen tiles, and was plainly uncomfortable with my emotion.
    “Genesis?” I asked him, wondering if I had missed some subtle biblical point.
    “Look below the photograph, in the box!” David’s tone clearly suggested that he believed this reminder of Nicole’s continued existence could do my life no good whatsoever. He drank a slug of my whiskey, lit his pipe, then stared gloomily at the birds in my unkempt orchard.
    At the bottom of the page was a box in which the newspaper listed the various militant groups that were using sabotage, which they called “ecotage,” to jar the world’s governments into paying more attention to the environment. One of those groups was called the Genesis community, presumably, the writer averred, because its members wished to restore the world to its pristine condition. Not much was known about Genesis except that it was led by a man called Caspar von Rellsteb, who was one of the most outspoken supporters of ecotage, and that the group specialized in seaborne activities. They had attempted to sabotage the sixty-mile drift nets with which the Japanese and Taiwanese were obliterating life in the Pacific Ocean, and were believed to have attacked two Japanese whaling ships. The group’s activities were confined to the Pacific, where they had made strong, though futile, efforts to stop French nuclear testing. “It doesn’t say where they’re based!” I protested.
    “Obviously in the Pacific,” David said.
    “Oh, very helpful,” I said sarcastically, then looked again at the photograph as though there might be some