When she mentioned that fact to Patrick, it perplexed him. Since his simplistic view of Bohemianism meant a degree of sexual promiscuity, he found himself wondering about her, and also wondering why he was concerned. Before he could wonder more, Trina answered his unasked question.
“I am hardly a Bohemian. I am probably more conservative than an old dowager.” She frowned. “Why do people fear me when I try to be a little different? All I want is the freedom to be me, to learn, to search. Does that make me a Bohemian?”
Her answer relieved him. “Of course not.” Now why was he so relieved?
“Do I frighten you, Patrick?”
He lay on the ground, his face looking into the latticework of tree limbs while she sat farther in the shade, her back against the tree trunk. “Naw. After fighting Apaches, Spanish, Germans, and the odd drunk in a garrison town, I’m not frightened of you at all.”
Patrick told her about growing up an only child in Michigan, around Detroit, and what it was like being a soldier, moving from place to place and never really being settled. He had a lot of friends and was part of a fraternity, but he had little opportunity for close relationships. As for women, there were very few in a military compound, and those who were there were either already taken or not worth taking. It was, he told her, a strangely monastic existence. Not that he was a saint, but there was no reason to bring up everything.
He told her that for some time he had been considering leaving the military. “I think I may be through with war and killing. I know I don’t want to sell farm machinery, but I would like to do something like what I did at West Point -teach. I’ve friends at the University of Michigan and maybe I can get something there. With what I get from the family business, and a few other investments I’ve managed to make, I could live there quite comfortably.”
Trina nodded. “I wonder now if I could ever go back to living in New York. It’s like a phase of my life that’s closed. It’s occurred to me that I was never really comfortable in the city. For all its cosmopolitanism, it can be strangely restrictive. I don’t think I will ever go back there to live. Those apartments I lived in were rented. It’s as if we knew we would not put down permanent roots.”
Against their wishes, the afternoon passed. As the sun descended, Patrick gathered their belongings and they drove the carriage slowly back to town and her house. When they arrived, Heinz informed him he’d found suitable accommodations with a local farmer a couple of miles down the road. He’d done so by appealing to the man’s patriotism and by outbidding another man.
The four of them ate a quick and light dinner prepared by Molly. Both Patrick and Trina were openly pleased that Molly and Heinz had managed to negotiate a sort of unarmed truce. With dinner finished, it was time to depart. Patrick told Heinz to get the horses, which gave him a moment to say a quiet good-bye to Katrina.
As they stood by the open door, Patrick had a feeling of longing. He wanted to touch Trina, but he feared that simply reaching for her hand would hurt her even more than the possibility of rebuff would hurt him. They stood in silence for a minute until Trina solved the problem. She reached up and kissed him softly on the lips. “I’m not afraid of you either, General Patrick. Please come back to me. I would appreciate it very, very much.”
11
C APTAIN ROBLEY EVANS, Fighting Bob to his peers and the press, paced the deck of the battleship Alabama and peered into the mist. He had a feeling of utter impotence. The Alabama was one of the finest and newest American warships afloat; yet with the distant sounds of ships’ guns echoing about, she was forced to crawl at less than one-third her rated speed of sixteen knots. He wondered if she was moving at all. It was maddening.
The powerful Alabama was designated BB-8, or the eighth modern battleship in an expanding American navy. It displaced more than twelve thousand tons, was more than 370 feet in length, and had a crew of just under seven hundred. The only newer American battleship was the Wisconsin, BB-9, currently cruising the West Coast.
“Anything, Mr. Lansing?”
“No, sir. The lookouts think they can see the sky, so the mist may be breaking up, but until then we are well and truly blind.”
Evans breathed deeply of the warm, moist air. What on earth had caused a mist at this time and place? It only showed how little control man has over the planet. According to the navigator’s best estimate, made less than an hour ago when they could see, the Alabama should have been about five miles off Saint Augustine, the ancient city on the east coast of Florida.
Evans dared not speed up lest they blunder into something that might prove fatal or run aground. Evans and the crew of the Alabama knew full well that the United States was at war with Germany. Less than two weeks ago, they had been in port in Rio de Janeiro when the word was cabled throughout the world. In immediate contact with the American embassy, they’d been told to wait in Brazilian waters until they were either asked to leave by the Brazilians or given further orders.
A few days later, orders had arrived directing the ship to depart Brazil and steam directly to the naval station at Guantanamo Bay on the eastern tip of Cuba. There they hoped they would be further enlightened. They had steamed carefully and prepared for war by painting the ship gray, discarding unneeded wooden furniture, and practicing their gunnery, which had proven to be a major problem for the navy.
With gun ranges and ship speeds increasing, it was damnably hard to hit anything at all. Worse, the Alabama ’s secondary batteries, set as they were in the hull of the ship, could easily be rendered useless in a heavy sea, as the waves would crash right over them. There had to be a better way, Evans had thought. That was why he had experimented with the new Royal Navy way of aiming and firing that was being developed by their brilliant young innovator Percy Scott. So far, Evans had been impressed with the results.
Scott’s technique was called “continuous aim” and required a telescopic sight for each gun, an elevating wheel to raise the gun so that the target did not become lost in the pitch and roll of the seas, and practice, practice, practice. The result was that a gunner did not have to find his target each time the guns fired; thus the rate of fire as well as the accuracy were increased. Evans had recalled the humiliating misses at Santiago where hundreds of shells splashed all over the ocean but rarely near the Spanish ships. The newspapers had crowed over the terrible shooting by the Spanish but had apparently not noted the almost equally bad American gunnery.
The Alabama had made Guantanamo without incident. What had been a bright and gleaming example of American naval pride in Rio had been transformed into a dark and lethal weapon, at least as lethal as Evans could possibly make it. He knew that only a handful of his crew had ever seen battle, and that had been in the one-sided victories against the totally overmatched Spaniards. How would they react? All the drilling and practice in the world could not compensate for the real thing. For all intents and purposes, his ship was a virgin.
There were other problems as well. The numbers of men in the navy’s officer corps had not kept pace with the ongoing expansion. The Alabama, like virtually every other ship, was short more than 20 percent of its allotted complement of officers. This resulted in junior officers having serious responsibilities. Evans did not relish the thought of going to war without a full complement of officers or enlisted men.