The Perils of Command by David Donachie Read Free Book Online

shown John Pearce his fellow men and women in all their guises, and few of those, be they high born or low, could be described using a word like glorious.
    The observation Rufus had made about losing your head was seen as unthinking by Michael O’Hagan, troubling to Pearce and that got the freckle-faced younger man a glare to tell him he had overstepped the mark, engendering an immediate mumbled apology, one brushed aside.
    ‘My father was all for freedom of speech Rufus. He would not have had you hold your tongue, even if it was likely to cause upset.’
    ‘Sure, John-boy, there’s a way of saying things that’s right and another that is not.’
    ‘True.’
    That brought to the Irishman’s face a look that presaged a sally, a sure sign he was going to get great amusement from his own comment. ‘Like a rebuke to me for the effects of drink when you come aboard two nights on the trot, three sheets to the wind an’ scarce able to walk.’
    ‘If I felt any shame for it, Michael, all I would have to do is recollect the night we met. You were blind drunk I recall and you sought to remove my head from my shoulders with those great fists of yours. Yet you have not behaved so since, so I must be content.’
    The incident in that smoky tavern, prior to the invasion of a whole hoard of naval brutes, was a standing joke amongst the Pelicans, one of the few that could be drawn out as such from an occasion that lived in their minds as a calamity. Ralph Barclay had led his press gang into the Liberties, against both the law and custom, to take up for sea duty men not bred to it, which was another crime on its own.
    Such a jocular response from John Pearce should have brought on shared laughter and repeated reminiscence, added to comments that it was a pity Michael’s swinging hams had missed. That it did not confused him; indeed his companions, if anything, looked sheepish rather than pleased to be reminded.
    ‘Have I said something untoward?’
    ‘No,’ replied Charlie, who for all his skill had a cast in his eye of false innocence.
    ‘It has always pleased me that we are friends—’
    ‘Not always, John.’
    ‘True, Rufus, there are times when I have cursed you all. But deep down we share a regard and a history that binds us firm and makes us honest with each other, or so I believed till this very moment.’
    ‘Don’t get what you is driving at,’ Charlie chipped in.
    ‘I sense a secret shared by you and kept from me.’
    ‘Imaginings,’ opined Michael.
    This only deepened the suspicions of Pearce, there being a deliberate attempt to avoid eye contact. He then reasoned that it had been a long time since they had been in a position such as they were now, free from the need to act as officer and common seamen, not since Leghorn and that had been brief. Had something occurred in the interval – his own behaviour being the most obvious – that was acting to stretch their bond? He could ask, but he doubted he would be afforded an honest answer and that was hurtful.
    The cry from the coachman was a now familiar one – the need to disembark – yet it was no steep incline to overcome this time but a customs post, soon revealed as the crossing they must make from the Kingdom into the Papal States, fortunately as opposed to the French revolution as were Naples and Britain.
    ‘This should make you happy, Michael. If the Catholic God has a corporeal presence anywhere it will be here as well as Rome. Happen you’ll get a sight of where your Peter’s pence is actually spent.’
    If said in a jocose way there was an underlying mischievousness in the statement. Adam Pearce had lambasted the aristocracy for their blind cruelty to the poor, but he had even more vehemently cursed a church that calleditself Christian yet acted as if Satan was more their master, and in this his son had entirely agreed.
    How many times had John heard Adam ask in his stump speeches why an Archbishop of Canterbury required two palaces and an income