company flag very bright against the land.
Bolitho looked along Undine's deck and saw the hands pausing in their work to watch the big ship as she tilted to the pressure, her hull shining while she continued to tack clear of the anchorage. Thinking of home perhaps, where the Indiaman would eventually make her landfall. Or of old friends lying bandaged within her fat hull, and of the others who were not here to see anything at all.
Bolitho beckoned to Penn. 'Your glass, if you please.'
Only once had he been able to see Viola Raymond alone since Undine's return. Because of Raymond, or because she understood better than he that it was pointless to add to the pain of parting, Bolitho was still not certain.
'A fine ship, sir.' Herrick, too, had a glass. 'To think my old father wished me to go to sea in an Indiaman. Things would have been very different, I suppose.'
Bolitho tensed,-seeing the pale green gown -on the ornate poop, that same wide hat she had brought from Santa Cruz. He could hear her words to him, as -if she had just spoken across the broad expanse of lively white- horses in the bay.
'If you come to London, please visit me. My husband has gained his promotion. What he wanted. What I thought -I wanted, too.' She had squeezed his hand. 'I hope you got what you wanted from me?'
A gun boomed dully from the settlement, and another from the Indiaman's forecastle. Flags dipped in mutual respect.
Bolitho felt the ache returning. She was right. There must be no pain, only understanding. Peace, as after a great gale of wind. Something which they had seized, if only for a moment.
He thought of Raymond, going to a better appointment, while Conway returned to obscurity. It was impossible to fathom.
While he was much as before, except for that one moment. Or was he? By trying to mould him as she would have wished her husband, perhaps she had indeed changed him.
Penn called, 'Signal, sir! From Wessex to Undine.' He was straining his eye to a telescope to watch the flags breaking from the Indiaman's yards as she laboriously spelled out her message. 'Good luck go with you.'
'Acknowledge.'
Bolitho kept his eye on the pale green figure. She was waving her hat slowly back and forth, her autumn hair blowing unrestricted to the wind.
Half to himself he said, 'And with you, my love.'
Some of the seamen were cheering and waving as the other vessel spread more canvas and heeled ponderously on a new tack.
Bolitho handed the telescope to a ship's boy and said, 'Well, Mr. Herrick?'
Herrick watched him and then nodded. 'Aye, sir. A glass of wine. I think we deserve it.'
Bolitho held on to the mood, keeping his eyes away from the Indiaman as she stood purposefully towards the headland. 'At least we have earned it.'
Allday watched them pass, seeing Bolitho's hand touch his side-pocket where he carried his watch. Just a brief gesture, but it told Aliday a great deal. He walked to the nettings and stared after the departing Indiaman.
Sail away, my lady. You have left your mark, and for the better. But a closer embrace? He sighed. Neither of them would have weathered it.
Keen joined him by the bulwark.
'She makes a goodly sight, eh, Allday?
Allday looked at him. 'Aye, sir.' You don't know the half of it. 'But a bit too good for a poor sailorman, sir.'
Keen walked away and began to pace the quarterdeck as he had watched Bolitho do a hundred times or more. He knew Allday was laughing at him, but did not care. He had been tested, and he had won through. That was more than he had dared to hope, and it was more than enough.
He paused by the skylight, hearing Bolitho's laugh and Herrick's quiet rejoinder.
And he had shared all of it with them.
When he looked again for the Indiaman she had slipped past the headland and gone from view.
He started to pace the deck once more. Acting-Lieutenant Valentine Keen, of His- Majesty's frigate Undine, was content.
SPAN id=epigraph>
To the Contessa with love
Danger and Death dance to the wild music of the gale,
and when it is night they dance with a fiercer abandon,
as if to allay the fears that beset the sailor men who feel
their touch but see them not.
GEORGE H. GRANT
1. The Admiral's Choice
An Admiralty messenger opened the door of a small anteroom and said politely, 'If you would be so good as to wait, sir.' He stood aside to allow Captain Richard Bolitho to pass and added, 'Sir John knows you are here.'
Bolitho waited until the door had closed and then walked to a bright fire which was crackling below a tall mantel. He was thankful that the messenger had brought him to this small room and not to one of the larger ones. As he had hurried into the Admiralty from the bitter March wind which was sweeping down Whitehall he had been dreading a confrontation in one of those crowded waiting-rooms, crammed with unemployed officers who watched the comings and goings of more fortunate visitors with something like hatred.
Bolitho had known the feeling, too, even though he had told himself often enough that he was better off than most. For he had come back to England a year ago, to find the country at peace, and the gowns and villages already filling with unwanted soldiers and seamen. With his home in Falmouth, an established estate, and all the hard- earned prize money he had brought with him, he knew he should have been grateful.
He moved away from the fire and stared down at the broad roadway below the window. It had been raining for most of the morning, but now the sky had completely cleared, so that the many puddles and ruts glittered in the harsh light like patches of pale blue silk. Only the steaming nostrils of countless horses which passed this way and that, the hurrying figures bowed into the wind, made a lie of the momentary colour.
He sighed. It was March, 1784, only just over a year since his return home from the West Indies, yet it seemed like a century.
Whenever possible he had quit Falmouth to make the long journey to London, to this seat of Admiralty, to try and discover why his letters had gone unanswered, why his pleas for a ship, any ship, had been ignored. And always the waiting rooms had seemed to get more and more crowded. The familiar voices and tales of ships and campaigns had become forced, less confident, as day by day they were turned away. Ships were laid up by the score, and every seaport had its full quota of a war's flotsam. Cripples, and men made deaf and blind by cannon fire, others half mad from what they had seen and endured. With the signing of peace the previous year such sights had become too common to mention, too despairing even for hope.
He stiffened as two figures turned a corner below the window. Even without the facings on their tattered red coats he knew they had been soldiers. A carriage was standing by the roadside, the horses nodding their heads together as they explored the contents of their feeding bags. The coachman was chatting to a smartly dressed servant from a nearby house, and neither took a scrap of notice of the two tattered veterans.
One of them pushed his companion against a stone balustrade and then walked towards the coach. Bolitho realised that the man left clinging to the stonework was blind, his head turned towards the roadway as if trying to
