To Glory We Steer by Alexander Kent Read Free Book Online Page B

tattoo of crossed flags and cannon.
    Brock stepped back and swayed on his heels. He looked along the rank. “No man has a tattoo like that unless he is a seaman.” His voice was slow and patient, like a schoolmaster with a new class. “No man would recognise me as a gunner unless he had served in a King’s ship!”
    Without warning his cane flashed in the weak sunlight. When it returned to his side the other man had blood on his face where it had cut almost to the bone.
    The gunner looked at him levelly. “Most of all, I dislike being taken for a fool!” He turned his back, dismissing the man from his mind.
    A seaman yelled, “Another signal, sir! One more group comin’ down the road!”
    Vibart sheathed his sword. “Very well.” He looked coldly at the shivering line of men. “You are entering an honourable service. You have just learned the first lesson. Don’t make me teach you another!”
    Maynard fell into step beside him his face troubled. “It seems a pity that there is no other way, sir?”
    Vibart did not reply. Like the man who had begged for his wife, such statements lacked both purpose and meaning. Only aboard the ship did anything count for any of them.
    Bolitho sipped at his port and waited until the servant girl had cleared away the table. His stomach had long grown used to meagre and poorly cooked shipboard food, so that the excellent meal of good Cornish lamb left him feeling glutted and uncomfortable.
    Across the table his father, James Bolitho, drummed impatiently on the polished wood with his one remaining hand and then took a long swallow of port. He seemed ill at ease, even nervous, as he had been from the moment of his son’s arrival.
    Bolitho watched him quietly and waited. There was such a change in his father. From his own boyhood days to the present time Bolitho had seen his father only on rarely spaced occasions when he had returned here to the family home. From foreign wars and far-off countries, from exploits which children could only guess at. He could remember him as tall and grave in his naval uniform, shedding his service self-discipline like a cloak as he had come through that familiar doorway beside the portraits of the Bolitho family. Men like himself, like his son, sailors first and foremost.
    When Bolitho had been a midshipman under Sir Henry Langford he had learned of his father’s wounds whilst he had been engaged in fighting for the fast-advancing colonies in India, and when he had seen him again he had found him suddenly old and embittered. He had been a man of boundless energy and ideas, and to be removed from the Navy List, no matter how honourably, was more than the loss of an arm, it was like having his life cut from within him.
    Locally in Falmouth he was respected as a firm and just magistrate, but Bolitho knew in his heart that his father’s very being still lay with the sea, and the ships which came and went on the tide. Even his old friends and comrades had stopped coming to visit him, perhaps unable to bear what their very presence represented. Interest changed so easily into envy. Contact could harm rather than soothe.
    Bolitho had a brother and two sisters. The latter had now both married, one to a farmer, the other to an officer of the garrison. Of Hugh, his older brother, nothing had yet been said, and Bolitho made himself wait for what he guessed was uppermost in his father’s mind.
    â€œI watched your ship come in, Richard.” The hand drummed busily on the table. “She’s a fine vessel, and when you get to the West Indies again I have no doubt you will bring more honour to the family.” He shook his head sadly. “England needs all her sons now. It seems as if the world must be our enemy before we can find the right solution.”
    It was very quiet in the house. After the pitch of a deck, the creak of spars, it was like another world. Even the smells were different.