"Man the braces." Beer looked at the swinging compass. "We'll alter course again in about ten minutes. Pass the word."
The lieutenant hesitated. "And you knew his father in the war, sir?"
"Yes." He thought of the young captain's grave features, driven by something he could barely suppress. How could he tell him the truth? It no longer mattered. The war, as his second-in-command had called it, was over long ago. "Yes, I knew him. He was a bastard but that is between us alone."
The lieutenant strode away, surprised and yet pleased that his formidable captain had taken him into his confidence.
By midnight under all plain sail, Unity was steering due south, with the ocean to herself.
8. Friends and Enemies
A week after leaving Gibraltar the frigate Valkyrie and her consort anchored at Freetown in Sierra Leone. After a swift passage, the final day was the longest Bolitho could remember. Searing heat that drove the bare-backed seamen from one patch of shadow to the next, and a glare so fierce it was almost impossible to discern the dividing line between sea and sky.
At one point the light airs deserted them completely, and Captain Trevenen immediately lowered boats to take the great frigate in tow in the search for a wind to carry them towards the unending span of green coastline.
Bolitho knew from hard experience that the tides and currents and the perversity of the winds off these shores could make even the most experienced sailor lose his patience. It did not help Trevenen's temper when Laertes, although only some two miles off the starboard quarter, filled her sails and began to overhaul the senior ship without difficulty.
Monteith, the fifth lieutenant, clambered into the beak head beneath the flat, listless jibs and with a speaking trumpet shouted to the three towing longboats.
"Use your starters! Mr. Gulliver, get them to put their backs into it! " As if he could sense the anger around him he added hastily, "Captain's orders! "
Bolitho heard it from the cabin and saw Allday look up as he was giving a ritual polish to the old sword.
It was like a furnace on deck. Out there in the unprotected boats it would be far worse. No boat could offer more than steerage way, especially with a ship as big as Valkyrie.
He stared astern at the undulating swell, and at the sky which was without colour, as if it had been burned out of it.
"Send for my flag lieutenant." He heard Ozzard leave the cabin. It had been a difficult passage. Valkyrie was not a proper flagship, and yet he was more than a passenger.
He had lurched from his sleep one airless night, trapped in his cot as the nightmare came at him again. The hundred-mile reef, Golden Plover rearing on to its jagged spines with her masts torn from her, then the sea boiling around the wreck, the foam suddenly blood-red as the sharks drove in amongst the drowning seamen, most of whom had been too dazed and drunk to know what was happening.
In the nightmare he had been trying to reach Catherine, but another held her, had been laughing as the sea had closed over him.
It was the first time he had really got to know something of George Avery, his new flag lieutenant. He had woken to see him sitting near him in the cabin's darkness, while the rudder-head had thudded dully like a funeral drum.
"I heard you cry out, Sir Richard. I brought you something."
It had been brandy and he had drained it in two swallows, ashamed that Avery should see him like this. He had been shivering so badly that for one terrible instant he had believed the old fever was returning, the one which had all but killed him in the Great South Sea.
Avery had said, "I thought it were better me than another." He had obviously been observing Trevenen very closely, something that made his apparent remoteness a lie.
After some time Avery told him that he himself had been dogged by nightmares after losing his schooner to the French. As a prisoner of war, and badly wounded at that, he was more of a nuisance to his captors than a triumph. He had been held in a small village, and been visited by a local doctor who had done little to help him. It was not that the French had been cruel or full of hatred towards one of the enemy, but simply that they had believed his death was inevitable. And after the Terror, death no longer had much power to frighten them.
Eventually, when he had begun to recover, some of the villagers had taken pity on him, and when he was released following the Peace of Amiens they had supplied him with warm clothing and fresh bread and cheese for the journey home.
As Bolitho had regained his own composure and shared some of the brandy with this quiet-spoken lieutenant, Avery had told him of his distress when he had been court-martialled Even aboard the old Canopus some of his fellow officers had shunned him, as if by a closer contact with him they might somehow become tainted, their own hopes of advancement dashed.
Bolitho had heard of many lieutenants who had served in several campaigns, some with distinction, who had never been selected for promotion. Perhaps Avery would be one of those, and the little armed schooner Jolie had been the nearest he would ever come to a command of his own.
Of Sillitoe he had said, "My mother was his sister. I think he felt obliged to do something for her memory. He did little enough when she needed him. Too proud, too stubborn… those were characteristics they shared."
"And your father?"
He might have shrugged: it had been too dark to see.
"He was at Copenhagen, Sir Richard, the first battle. He was serving in the Ganges, seventy-four."
Bolitho had nodded. "I knew her well. Captain Fremantle."
Avery had said quietly, "I know there were many killed. My father was one."
The following day after he had been conferring with Yovell over some signals, Avery had spoken to him again. He had said suddenly, "When my uncle told me of this possible appointment I wanted to laugh. Or cry. With respect, Sir Richard, I could hardly imagine you accepting me no matter what you thought of my record, when so many dozens of lieutenants would kill for the chance! "
Now, with the last order still hanging in the airless heat of the cabin, Bolitho reached for his coat but changed his mind. Nobody seemed to know much of Trevenen's background, but it was more obvious than ever that he owed this command to
Sir James Hamett-Parker. Why? A favour for some service in the past?
He said curtly to Avery, "Please ask the Captain to come aft."
While he waited he continued his assessment of Trevenen. He was older than expected for a frigate captain, especially for a ship like this, which was the first of her kind.
And there was a certain meanness about the man. He seemed to spend a lot of time going over the lists and books of ship's stores and victuals with Tatlock, the anxious-looking purser. Like the matter of the dockyard paint for the figurehead. Trevenen was known to have made a lot of prize money from attacks on the enemy's supply ships, so it was not lack of funds. A man who gave nothing away about his feelings, his hopes, even his background…
The marine sentry bawled, "Captain, sir! "
Trevenen entered, hat in hand, frowning slightly as he tried to see Bolitho after the blinding sunlight on deck.
"I want you to belay that last order, Captain Trevenen. It can do nothing but harm. Apart from the sixth lieutenant, Mr. Gulliver, who was a midshipman himself just a few months ago, the other midshipmen in the boats are too inexperienced to understand anything but the need to obey orders."
Trevenen regarded him calmly. "I have always regarded that as…"
Bolitho held up his hand. "Hear me. I have not asked you here to discuss varying ideas of loyalty and discipline. I am telling you to belay that order. Further, I would wish you to impress upon your officers, through the first lieutenant, that petty bullying must not be tolerated. The man Jacobs, who died because of a second flogging a few days after the first, was being taunted by a midshipman who is no more than a child, and who acted like one! "