patience—the purser’s request, he detached four stout-looking men from their work and sent them below deck.
It was clear now that no amount of coal would have pushed the
“Reef the mainsails!” cried Martin.
When this was accomplished the masts looked all but bare—there were a few small, tough-looking sails at the center of the ship, presumably to guide the ship without encouraging her to too great a speed.
“Had I better go below deck?” Lenox asked Carrow.
“If you prefer.”
Martin came charging past them toward aft, stopping long enough to say, “Now you will see my men at their best, Mr. Lenox. Tell the boys in Parliament. Tell Her Majesty, for that matter.”
“I shall.” When he was gone, Lenox went on, “I say, Lieutenant Carrow, why are we running into the wind now?”
“It’s the best way to keep the ship from capsizing,” Carrow answered with a dry smile, “and so I deduce that such is the captain’s desire.”
Lenox went rather pale. “Is there a chance of that—of us capsizing?”
Carrow laughed. “Oh, no. A chance in a thousand, perhaps, but no. This is only a bad storm, from the look of it, not what we call a survival storm. The wind will run us along at eight or nine knots—stiffly enough, mind you!— but not more than that. If it were more we couldn’t sail. In a nine-knot wind you have the great advantage of still being able to use your sails.”
“I see.”
“Even if we couldn’t, however, no, I shouldn’t imagine we’d capsize. And now I really might go below deck, Mr. Lenox,” said Carrow, “or else look sharply about yourself—one hand for you and one for the
Carrow tipped his hat good-bye and went to the aft of the ship, where several men were preparing a line with a drag—or a drogue, as Lenox would learn it was called—to hurl behind the ship, slowing them down, in case they caught the wind fully.
When Carrow had recommended that he go below deck, the weather had been relatively consistent, wetter now, slightly windier, but not bad. Suddenly, though, as if from nothing, the wind went from a heavy breeze to a force so powerful and unrelenting that it nearly lifted Lenox from his feet. As it was he lost his hat, and did well to grab on to a lifeline running down the boat, which he used to retreat below deck.
When he put up his head a few moments later there was a torrential rain; there were great crashes of whitecap onto the deck; brilliant flashes of lightning in a sunless, midnight sky; and that wind, always that wind. Martin’s voice was the only audible one. Everywhere else men worked in grim, silent concentration, always keeping one hand along a lifeline that they might not be swept overboard.
The ship looked in utter disarray. Strips of canvas were streaming out to leeward, sails were running from their boat ropes. He had seen enough, and ducked below the main hatchway and below deck.
“McEwan!” Lenox said when he reached his cabin and found the steward in his tiny hallway outside it, seated on a stool and polishing Lenox’s boots. “Have you ever seen such a storm?”
McEwan considered the question seriously and then responded, “Oh, only seventy or seventy-five times in all, sir.”
“Is it so common? I’ve never seen its like, I swear to you!”
“Here, take a towel, sir, and I’ll find you a fresh shirt. This is a fair storm, I’ll grant you that, but in the Mediterranean we had a twelve-knotter once. That, I can tell you, sir, was fearful. We hove to it and just barely managed to keep our masts upright. This was when I was a younger man, sir. We lost nine.”
“Nine men? How?”
“It was so dark and the rain was so thick that you couldn’t see a foot in front of your face. Men would take their hands off of the lifeline for a fraction of a second and be gone forever. Now then—a towel. And you’ll be wanting something warm to drink.”
McEwan trotted off to start a pot of tea.
If his speech had been designed to reassure Lenox, it failed. With a heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach he patted himself dry, keeping one ear bent toward the deck. Occasional claps of thunder seemed to shiver every board and plank of the ship. Suddenly it seemed the most insane chanciness, a madness, to be afloat on a man- made vessel out here in the middle of nothingness. Why should he have the slightest faith that the mast was well constructed? Or the sails? It was well-on impossible to find a decent carpenter in London, he had learned when he and Jane rebuilt their houses together, and yet here they were in a ship that hundreds of men had worked on, each capable of any of a multitude of small mistakes that might see them all dead.
This panic lasted in Lenox’s breast for some half an hour, and only subsided when he recalled the slapping of the swabs on the deck that morning, and the great cleanliness McEwan kept in his cabin. Perhaps that was the secret to it: in the navy one was always far too careful, to the point of absurdity, because when it mattered lives were staked to that precision and effort. Not in matters of cleanliness, perhaps. But the cleanliness was simply in keeping with the rest of the service’s fastidious care. Thank God.
Glumly he followed his cup of tea with half an orange. He would have traded the storm for scurvy in a heartbeat.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Each man at sea endures his first storm differently. Lenox knew he was lucky not to be seasick, and in fact when he lay still upon his bunk the pitching of the ship and the lashing rain had more of a somnolent than a terrifying effect on him. Just as he was actually dozing off, however, he remembered Teddy.
This woke him up, and, putting on a warm jacket, he lurched through the soaked middle deck toward the gun room. He prayed for Edmund’s sake that the boy wasn’t on deck. Better to start, surely, with a storm that wasn’t so immense. If it had been a squall, perhaps …
He needn’t have worried. When he reached the gun room and knocked on the door there was a pause, and then the door cracked slightly.
“How do you do?” said an older boy, perhaps seventeen, with terribly red, inflamed skin.
“Whosit, Pimples?” a voice called out.
“May I come in?” Lenox said.
It was a snug room, rounded with a blue leather bench that ringed the entire room, including the back of the door. At the center of this circle was a large, very rough table. Beneath the bright orange glow of two swinging lanterns five boys sat there, with hands of cards out, bottles of (no doubt contraband) ale on the table, and cigars crooked in their fingers. Their noisy chatter quieted when Lenox entered.
He spotted Teddy at one corner of the table, looking very young but also very definitely a part of the group.
“I’m Charles Lenox, gentlemen. I was just coming to see—”
As he was about to say Teddy’s name, however, he saw a desperate plea on the boy’s face not to do it. He didn’t want babysitting, apparently.
“Sir?” said Pimples.
“I was just coming to see Lieutenant Billings. But I appear to have been turned around. He’ll be nearer the wardroom, I expect.”
To Lenox’s slight disappointment they evidently found it entirely plausible that he would commit such an immense stupidity as mistaking the gun room, halfway across the
“He’ll be on deck,” said a senior-looking midshipman gently. “Perhaps you might wait until the morning?”
“Just so,” said Lenox. “Thank you.”
As he closed the door laughter exploded behind him. It didn’t aggrieve him to hear it, however—it delighted him.
He returned to his cabin then, to wait out the storm.
