The Old Vengeful

He nodded cautiously, still doubtful about her reaction to the memory of that long, acrimonious and ultimately hilarious battle of the letter-writers in the columns of The Times.

'You found it amusing?' Elizabeth fabricated the ghost of a smile to take the sting out of her question. She could well believe that outsiders might have considered it so, that passionate and useless controversy about the naming of a warship which the letters editor had headlined variously, tongue-in-cheek, as 'The last fight of the Vengeful' and 'A hard-fought engagement'.

He took encouragement from the ghost-smile. 'To be honest... I thought it was the jolliest Times correspondence since those dons got to arguing about how fast and how far the ancient Greeks could row their triremes.'

Of course, he couldn't know how she had suffered through it all, with Father tearing into each morning's newspaper and his alternate bouts of rage and triumph as the argument swung this way and that.

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They had shamed her, those letters, for the contempt the recipients must have felt for him; and doubly shamed her, as he made it so very clear that in some twisted way he had come to regard his immortality as descending somehow through the renewed name of his beloved ship, rather than through his unloved daughter, who was plainly useless—very plainly—for such a purpose, and fit only to type his letters and his books, and cook his meals, and wash and fetch and carry and clean for him.

Well—so much for that! It was all flotsam now that time and events had revenged her on the last captain of the penultimate Vengeful— time and events and the Admiralty!

'My father didn't find it so funny.' This time she didn't pretend to smile.

'No, I rather gathered that.' He took his cue from her. 'But to a landlubber like me ships' names really don't have much significance. In fact, they often seem to me to be rather idiotic

—like the names people give to racehorses.'

'Oh, I wouldn't say that.' Elizabeth found the mention of racehorses slightly unsettling, however accidental it might be, as a reminder of Father's weakness. Except that, judging by the contents of the safe deposit boxes and the cash-box under her bed, it could hardly be called a weakness.

'But didn't they call one of the Flower class corvettes in the last war 'Pansy'?' countered Paul Mitchell. 'I can't imagine what the sailors made of that!' He lifted From Trafalgar to dummy3

Navarino. 'And what was it Nelson's sailors turned the Bellerophon into . . . because they couldn't pronounce it, let alone spell it—'Billy Ruffian', eh?' The grin came back. 'God knows what they made of the Euryalus!'

So the landlubber knew something about ships, Elizabeth noted. But if ships' names drew him out towards his proposition, then so be it.

'Ah, yet that merely illustrates the primacy of the classical education in those days, Mr Mitchell. It was just the same in the French navy—the French had an Hercule at the battle of the Saints in 1782, and a Hector, and a Cesar, and a Scipion . . . and then after the Revolution you have new names like Fraternite and Franklin, after Benjamin Franklin, creeping in—and the Droits de l'Homme, even.'

Paul Mitchell nodded. 'I see what you mean. Like the Reds renaming the Tsar's dreadnoughts October Revolution and Marat in 1919—Marat to them being like Franklin to the French revolutionaries, of course.'

He nodded again. 'Education, politics . . . and history too—

naming your ships after the battles you've won, and the men who won them . . . yes— Midway and Coral Sea, and Rodney and Nelson, and that weird dreadnought we had at Jutland, the Agincourt—'

Good heavens! thought Elizabeth. He even knew about Agincourt, which had started life as Rio de Janeiro, then had turned into Sultan Osman I, only to be taken over in the nick of time on Tyneside in 1914 by Churchill, to fire its ten dummy3

salvoes of 12-inch shells—at Jutland. The very mention of HMS Agincourt had always made Father quite dreamy, with a mixture of envy and pride oiling the waves of his bitterness.

But she had never heard anyone else speak of it—she had never met anyone who had ever heard of it—until now, with this strange young man—

'—and religion too . . . Santissima Trinidad, and all the other Spanish saints we blew apart at Trafalgar.' Paul Mitchell waved his bargain again. 'Yes, I can see that there's a lot more in ships' names than has met my ill-informed eye until now! So I'd better be careful, with an expert like you around, in case I say something stupid.'

'I'm not an expert.' Elizabeth was resolved not to be caught again.

'Not an expert?' He tried to make his disbelief sound polite.

'But a history degree at Lady Margaret Hall ...'

The contrast between the qualification and the unpaid secretarial work flicked her on the raw. 'I mean, I'm not an expert on naval history,' she said stiffly. 'Just what was it that you wanted to talk to me about, Mr Mitchell?'

'Ah . . . well, about your father's book, Miss Loftus—' he gave her back a direct look '—am I right in thinking that he hadn't finished it?'

He knew the answer. But, although there were plenty of ways he might know it, he knew more than that, and it was still the why which plagued her.

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'No, Mr Mitchell. As a matter of fact he hadn't.' To get more she still had to give more, she sensed that. 'My father was a sick man—he'd been unwell for a long time ... he behaved as though he wasn't, but he was. And he had his good days, and his good weeks, and his bad ones, therefore. May I ask why you want to know this?'