“I wonder where he’ll be sent? Maybe Martinique? His brother lives there.”
Davis noticed the far-off look on Wake. “Yeah, I heard that’s where you first met Madame Faber. Oh, don’t look shocked, Peter. It’s common knowledge that you’ve paid a lot of attention to her. Strom isn’t thrilled, by the way. Faber has a short fuse, as you saw, and the Strom’s afraid you’ll light it with a little amorous friction. He actually likes you, but he’s worried about Faber’s possible reaction. Or overreaction.”
“Madame Faber and I are merely friends, Dan. Friends, that is it. Damn it all, I don’t need those kinds of rumors. I’m married.”
“Thou doth protest too much, Lieutenant. And the rumors are already out there, whether you need them or not. But, hey, don’t worry too much, amico. By the end of the week your beautiful friend and her husband will be out of Genoa and on a ship bound for the French consulate at God knows where. Then the rumor mill will start grinding on about someone else—with a much juicier story, no doubt—and in a month at the most nobody will remember your pitiful gossip.”
***
Wake saw sixty-two-year-old, ramrod-straight, squinty-eyed Rear Admiral Augustus Ludlow Case as every inch the image of a veteran naval officer. He also knew the man’s reputation in the navy as an intellectual and a warrior. Case, a naval officer for forty-six years, had been on several scientific expeditions before the war and after the war had headed the Bureau of Ordnance. It was Case who was pushing for torpedo development and oversaw the establishment of the navy’s fledgling torpedo station at Newport in 1871. Shortly afterward, he was made a rear admiral and sent to command American ships in Europe.
During the war Case had fought on the treacherous coast of North Carolina, where the weather was a much worse enemy than the Confederates, and was instrumental in the capture of two forts. Wake had heard that the man could be brutally hard in his insistence on keeping his blockade station no matter what the weather.
Just the year before, of all the navy’s senior officers, it was Case whom Admiral Porter had selected to lead the combined squadrons in the naval demonstrations off Key West that were designed to intimidate the Spanish in Cuba. Porter came down in person later, to the snickers of the fleet’s officers, once Case had gotten everything together. Though Case was not large in stature, Wake knew he was not a man to be underestimated or trifled with.
Unfortunately, his flagship did not befit the man. The 5,000-ton United States Ship Franklin was an obsolete steam screw frigate, having been laid down in 1854, twenty years earlier. Built partially of old materials from her namesake forerunner that had been built forty years before that, she was considered by most in the navy to be the product of bad contractors, bad material, and bad luck. Ten long years after she was started, she was launched but only used as a barracks ship. Later, after the war, she served in the Med, but her boilers and engines were in constant need of repair, her guns were outmoded, and her upper spars cracked. She returned home, was assessed as not worth repairing and decommissioned from seventy-one to seventy-three. Franklin had been dragged back out and put in commission for this cruise. No one trusted the ship and everyone, including her captain, referred to her as “the bitch.”
Wake was depressed the moment he stepped aboard.
The officer of the deck, a slack-jawed self-important lieutenant, disbelieved Wake’s assignment as the new flag lieutenant until Wake dug out his papers and showed them to him. The decks were under repair everywhere. It appeared that most of the crew was foreign as he heard several languages being spoken, but it was the look on the crew’s faces that bothered him most. The sullen glances he saw were indicative of other problems.
When he was shown to the squadron’s chief of staff, Fleet Captain Cadwell Luther Staunton, that man dismissed Wake with barely a word of introduction and told him to return to the staff office the next day when they could find something useful for him to do.
The corpulent squadron chief surgeon, Wally Cutter, advised Wake later at dinner in the wardroom that Staunton was trying to make it to his retirement in four months without any making decisions that could cause his career to end prematurely. Hansen, the staff chief engineer, commented that Staunton was safe in that regard—he hadn’t made a decision for years. That led to a round of laughs at the table, which made Wake very uneasy. He knew of Case’s reputation but not that of the other staff officers. Their behavior was insubordinate and contrary to good discipline, in his opinion, but he also learned upon arrival that they had all been together for almost a year, so he kept his mouth shut.
To his consternation Wake found out his cabin mate was the surgeon. Within hours Wake was trying to figure out how to switch with someone else, since the man reeked of medical alcohol—other hard spirits being illegal—and of intense body odor. Wake thought of the days during the war when he had commanded the Rosalie, a tiny sailing gunboat, and had slept out on an open deck in the weather, both foul and fair. His first night aboard the Franklin was an exercise in self-discipline, as Cutter snored and passed wind and generally filled the miniscule cabin with a stench that reminded Wake of rotting death.
***
The next morning he was summoned to the admiral’s quarters in the great cabin aft, presenting himself to Case while wondering if the surgeon’s stink had permeated his uniform.
Case’s desk was covered with paperwork. He didn’t appear to have noticed any foul odor, but instead looked and sounded busy. “Yes, Lieutenant Wake, come in and stand easy. You are my
