Stormchild by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page B

clue in its grainy composition as to where I might find my daughter. Yet all the picture told me was that Nicole had been alive when the picture was taken the previous autumn. I recognized the catamaran as the Erebus which, nearly four years before, had taken Nicole out of my life. I could not see Caspar von Rellsteb in the photograph; if any one of the six protesters seemed to dominate the scene, it was Nicole herself. The obsessive look on her face was so familiar to me; a look of such determination that it veered toward bitterness. “Buggering up the French bomb, eh?” I said enthusiastically. “Good for her!”
    “If the Frogs want a nuclear bomb,” David said irritably, “then they have to test it somewhere. It’s not doing us any harm, is it?”
    “Don’t be such a fool,” I said. “Good for Nicole!”
    David puffed a smoke screen from his pipe. “If you read the rest of the article,” he said in a very guarded voice, “you’ll notice that the attacks on the Japanese whaling ships were made with dynamite.”
    There was a second of silence, then I exploded with indignation at the inference he was making. “Don’t be so bloody ridiculous, David!”
    “I’m not being ridiculous,” he said, “but merely pointing out to you what that damned policeman will undoubtedly notice.”
    “Fletcher’s lost interest,” I said. “Besides, if anything, this article proves that Fletcher was wrong! It proves Nicole can’t have killed her mother.”
    “It does?” David asked. “How?”
    “She’s in the Pacific!” I pointed out. “Even Fletcher will have to admit that it’s difficult for someone in the Pacific to plant bombs in England! How’s she supposed to have done it? She just popped out one night, sailed halfway round the world, planted a bomb, then sailed back again. Is that it?”
    “Of course you’re right.” David had not intended to trigger my anger, and now mollified it by changing the subject. He picked up the can of soup. “Is this lunch?”
    “Yes.”
    “You’d better come to the rectory instead. Betty’s made a loin of pork with applesauce.”
    “No dog breeders you want me to meet?”
    “None at all,” he promised.
    So I went to Sunday lunch at the rectory, where the three of us discussed the article, examined the photograph, and agreed that Nicole looked wonderfully well. I was feverish with excitement, which worried David and Betty, who both feared that my hopes of a reunion with Nicole might be horribly premature. Yet I could not resist my own pleasure; my daughter was alive and was working to make a better world. Her activities were far away, which suggested she could not have known of her mother’s death. “I’m going to find her,” I told David. “Find her and tell her.”
    “It’ll be a bit difficult,” David warned me. “That article doesn’t give you much of a clue where Genesis might be.”
    But the name was clue enough and, the next morning, still excited, I went to London to find out more.
     
    Matthew Allenby was the secretary, founder, chairperson, inspiration, spokesperson, and dogsbody for one of Britain’s largest and most active environmental pressure groups. He was also a remarkably modest and kind man. I did not know him well, but we had sometimes met at conferences where I was a spokesman for the boat trade against the protestors who complained that our marinas polluted coastal waters. Allenby had always treated my arguments fairly, and I liked him for it. Now, though we had not met for at least two years, he greeted me warmly. “I should have written with condolences about your wife,” he said ruefully, “and I’m sorry I didn’t.”
    “I couldn’t bring myself to read the letters anyway.”
    He offered me a smile of grateful understanding. “I suppose it must be like that.” He poured me coffee, then, after the obligatory small talk, asked me just why I had been so insistent on an immediate meeting.
    To answer I pushed the color