Honour This Day

by Alexander Kent

  His eyes settled on Bolitho’s squared shoulders and he tried to control the apprehension which had been his companion since their return to Falmouth. It ought to have been a proud home-coming despite the pain and the ravages of battle. Even the damage to Bolitho’s left eye had seemed less terrible when set against what they had faced and overcome together. It had been about a year ago. Aboard the little cutter Supreme. Allday could recall each day, the painful recovery, the very power of the man he served and loved as he had fought to win his extra battle, to hide his despair and hold the confidence of the men he led. Bolitho never failed to surprise him although they had stayed together for over twenty years. It did not seem possible that there were any surprises left.

  They had walked from the harbour at Falmouth and paused at the church which had become so much a part of the Bolitho family. Generations of them were remembered there, births and marriages, victories at sea and violent death also.

  Allday had stayed near the big doors of the silent church on that summer’s day and had listened with sadness and astonishment as Bolitho spoke her name. Cheney. Just her name; and yet it had told him so much. Allday still believed that when they reached the old grey stone house below Pendennis Castle it would all return to normal. The lovely Lady Belinda who in looks at least was so like the dead Cheney, would somehow make it right, would comfort Bolitho when she realised the extent of his hurt. Maybe heal the agony in his mind which he never mentioned, but which Allday recognised. Suppose the other eye was somehow wounded in battle? The fear of so many sailors and soldiers. Helpless. Unwanted. Ferguson, the estate’s steward who had lost an arm at the Saintes what seemed like a million years back, his rosy-cheeked wife Grace the housekeeper, and all the other servants had been waiting to greet them. Laughter, cheers, and a lot of tears too. But Belinda and the child Elizabeth had not been there. Ferguson said that she had sent a letter to explain her absence. God knew it was common enough for a returning sailor to find his family ignorant of his whereabouts, but it could not have come at a worse moment or hit Bolitho so hard.

  Even his young nephew Adam, who now held his own command of the brig Firefly, was not able to console him. He had been ordered back to take on supplies and fresh water.

  Hyperion was real enough, though. Allday glared at the stroke oarsman as his blade feathered badly and threw spray over the gunwale. Bloody bargemen. They’d learn a thing or two if he had to teach every hand separately.

  The old Hyperion was no stranger, but the people were. Was that what Bolitho wanted? Or what he needed? Allday still did not know.

  If Keen had been flag captain—Allday’s mouth softened. Or poor Inch even, things would seem less strange.

  Captain Haven was a cold fish; even his own coxswain, a nuggety Welshman named Evans, had confided over a “wet” that his lord and master was without humour, and could not be reached.

  Allday glanced again at Bolitho’s shoulders. How unlike their own relationship. One ship after the other, different seas, but usually the same enemy. And always Bolitho had treated him as a friend, one of the family as he had once put it. It had been casually said, yet Allday had treasured the remark like a pot of gold.

  It was funny if you thought about it. Some of his old mess-mates might even have jibed him had they not been too respectful of his fists. For Allday, like the one-armed Ferguson, had been pressed into the King’s service and put aboard Bolitho’s ship, the frigate Phalarope— hardly an ingredient for friendship. Allday had stayed with Bolitho ever since the Saintes when his old coxswain had been cut down.

  Allday had been a sailor all his life, apart from a short period ashore when he had been a shepherd, of all things. He knew little of his birth and upbringing or even the exact whereabouts of his home. Now, as he grew older, it occasionally troubled him.

  He studied Bolitho’s hair, the queue tied at the nape of his neck which hung beneath his best gold-laced hat. It was jet-black, and in his appearance he remained youthful; he had sometimes been mistaken for young Adam’s brother. Allday, as far as he knew, was the same age, forty-seven, but whereas he had filled out, and his thick brown hair had become streaked with grey, Bolitho never appeared to alter.

  At peace he could be withdrawn and grave. But Allday knew most of his sides. A tiger in battle; a man moved almost to tears and despair when he had seen the havoc and agony after a seafight.

  The guardboat was turning again to pass beneath the tapering jib-boom of a handsome schooner. Allday eased over the tiller and held his breath as fire probed the wound in his chest. That too rarely left his mind. The Spanish blade which had come from nowhere. Bolitho standing to protect him, then throwing down his sword to surrender and so spare his life.

  The wound troubled him, and he often found it hard to straighten his shoulders without the pain lancing through him as a cruel reminder.

  Bolitho had sometimes suggested that he should remain ashore, if only for a time. He no longer offered him a chance of complete freedom from the navy he had served so well; he knew it would injure Allday like a worse wound.

  The barge pointed her stem towards the nearest jetty and Allday saw Bolitho’s fingers fasten around the scabbard of the old sword between his knees. So many battles. So often they had marvelled that they had been spared once again when so many others had fallen.

  “Bows!” He watched critically as the bowman withdrew his oar and rose with a boathook held ready to snatch for the jetty-chains. They looked smart enough, Allday conceded, in their tarred hats and fresh checkered shirts. But it needed more than paint to make a ship sail.

  Allday himself was an imposing figure, although he was rarely aware of it unless he caught the eye of some girl or other, which was more often than he might admit. In his fine blue coat with the special gilt buttons Bolitho had presented to him, and his nankeen breeches, he looked every inch the Heart of Oak so popular in theatre and pleasure-garden performances.

  The guardboat moved aside, the officer in charge rising to doff his hat while his oarsmen tossed their looms in salute.

  With a start Allday realised that Bolitho had turned to look up at him, his hand momentarily above one eye as if to shield it from the glare. He said nothing, but there was a message in the glance, as if he had shouted it aloud. Like a plea; a recognition which excluded all others for those few seconds.

  Allday was a simple man, but he remembered the look long after Bolitho had left the barge. It both worried and moved him. As if he had shared something precious.

  He saw some of the bargemen staring at him and roared, “I’ve seen smarter Jacks thrown out of a brothel, but by God you’ll do better next time, an’ that’s no error!”

  Jenour stepped ashore and smiled as the solitary midshipman blushed with embarrassment at the coxswain’s sudden outburst. The flag lieutenant had been with Bolitho just over a month, but already he was beginning to recognise the strange charisma of the man he served, his hero since he had been like that tongue-tied midshipman. Bolitho’s voice scattered his thoughts.

  “Come along, Mr Jenour. The barge can wait; the affairs of war will not.”

  Jenour hid a grin. “Aye, Sir Richard.” He thought of his parents in Hampshire, how they had shaken their heads when he had told them he intended to be Bolitho’s aide one day.

  Bolitho had seen the grin and felt the return of his sense of loss. He knew how the young lieutenant felt, how he had once been himself. In the navy’s private world you found and hung on to friends with all your might. When they fell you lost something with them. Survival did not spare you the pain of their passing; it never could.

  He stopped abruptly on the jetty stairs and thought of Hyperion’s first lieutenant. Those gipsy good looks— of course. It had been Keverne he had recalled to mind. They were so alike, Charles Keverne, once his first lieutenant in Euryalus, who had been killed at Copenhagen as captain of his own ship.

  “Are you all right, Sir Richard?”

  “Damn you, yes!” Bolitho swung round instant
ly and touched Jenour’s cuff. “Forgive me. Rank offers many privileges. Being foul-mannered is not one of them.”

  He walked up the stairs while Jenour stared after him.

  Yovell sighed as he sweated up the steep stone steps. The poor lieutenant had a lot to learn. It was to be hoped he had the time.

  The long room seemed remarkably cool after the heat beyond the shaded windows.

  Bolitho sat in a straight-backed chair and sipped a glass of hock, and marvelled that anything could stay so cold. Lieutenant Jenour and Yovell sat at a separate table, which was littered with files and folios of signals and reports. It was strange to consider that it had been in a more austere part of this same building that Bolitho had waited and fretted for the news of his first command.

  The hock was good and very clear. He realised that his glass was already being refilled by a Negro servant and knew he had to be careful. Bolitho enjoyed a glass of wine but had found it easy to avoid the common pitfall in the navy of over-imbibing. That could so often lead to disgrace at the court martial table.

  It was too easy to see himself in those first black days at Falmouth, where he had returned there expecting—expecting what? How could he plead dismay and bitterness when truthfully his heart had remained in the church with Cheney?

  How still the house had been as he had moved restlessly through the deepening shadows, the candles he held aloft in one hand playing on those stern-faced portraits he had known since he was Elizabeth’s age.

  He had awakened with his forehead resting on a table amidst puddles of spilled wine, his mouth like a birdcage, his mind disgusted. He had stared at the empty bottles, but could not even remember dragging them from the cellar. The household must have known, and when Ferguson had come to him he had seen that he was fully dressed from the previous day and must have been prowling and searching for a way to help. Bolitho had had to force the truth out of Allday, for he could not recall ordering him out of the house, to leave him alone with his misery. He suspected he had said far worse; he had later heard that Allday had also drunk the night away in the tavern where the innkeeper’s daughter had always waited for him, and hoped.

  He glanced up and realised that the other officer was speaking to him.

  Commodore Aubrey Glassport, Commissioner of the Dockyard in Antigua, and until Hyperion’s anchor had dropped, the senior naval officer here, was explaining the whereabouts and dispersal of the local patrols.

  “With a vast sea area, Sir Richard, we are hard put to chase and detain blockade-runners or other suspect vessels. The French and their Spanish allies, on the other hand—”

  Bolitho pulled a chart towards him. The same old story. Not enough frigates, too many ships of the line ordered elsewhere to reinforce the fleets in the Channel and Mediterranean.

  For over an hour he had examined the various reports, the results which had to be set against the days and weeks of patrolling the countless islands and inlets. Occasionally a more daring captain would risk life and limb to break into an enemy anchorage and either cut out a prize or carry out a swift bombardment. It made good reading. It did little to cripple a superior enemy. His mouth hardened. Superior in numbers only.

  Glassport took his silence for acceptance and rambled on. He was a round, comfortable man, with sparse hair, and a moon-face which told more of good living than fighting the elements or the French.

  He was to have been retired long since, Bolitho had heard, but he had a good rapport with the dockyard so had been kept here. Judging by his cellar he obviously carried his good relations to the victualling masters as well.

  Glassport was saying, “I am fully aware of your past achievements, Sir Richard, and how honoured I am to have you visit my command. I believe that when you were first here, America too was active against us, with many privateers as well as the French fleet.”

  “The fact we are no longer at war with America does not necessarily remove the threat of involvement, nor the increasing danger of their supplies and ships to the enemy.” He put down the chart. “In the next few weeks I want each patrol to be contacted. Do you have a courier brig here at present?” He watched the man’s sudden uncertainty and astonishment. The upending of his quiet, comfortable existence. “I shall need to see each captain personally. Can you arrange it?”

  “Well, er, ahem—yes, Sir Richard.”

  “Good.” He picked up the glass and studied the sunlight reflected in its stem. If he moved it very slightly to the left—he waited, sensing Yovell’s eyes watching, Jenour’s curiosity.

  He added, “I was told that His Majesty’s Inspector General is still in the Indies?”

  Glassport muttered wretchedly, “My flag lieutenant will know exactly what—”

  Bolitho tensed as the glass’s shape blurred over. Like a filmy curtain. It had come more quickly, or was it preying on his mind so much that he was imagining the deterioration?

  He exclaimed, “A simple enough question, I’d have thought. Is he, or is he not?”

  Bolitho looked down at the hand in his lap and thought it should be shaking. Remorse, anger; it was neither. Like the moment on the jetty when he had turned on Jenour.

  He said more calmly, “He has been out here for several months, I believe?” He looked up, despairing that his eye might mist over once more.

  Glassport replied, “Viscount Somervell is staying here in Antigua.” He added defensively, “I trust he is satisfied with his findings.”

  Bolitho said nothing. The Inspector General might have been just one more burden to the top-hamper of war. It seemed absurd that someone with such a high-sounding appointment should be employed on a tour of inspection in the West Indies, when England, standing alone against France and the fleets of Spain, was daily expecting an invasion.

  Bolitho’s instructions from the Admiralty made it clear that he was to meet with the Viscount Somervell without delay, if it meant moving immediately to another island, even to Jamaica.

  But he was here. That was something.

  Bolitho was feeling weary. He had met most of the dockyard officers and officials, had inspected two topsail cutters which were being completed for naval service, and had toured the local batteries, with Jenour and Glassport finding it hard to keep up with his pace.

  He smiled wryly. He was paying for it now.

  Glassport watched him sip the hock before saying, “There is a small reception for you this evening, Sir Richard.” He seemed to falter as the grey eyes lifted to him again. “It hardly measures up to the occasion, but it was arranged only after your, er, flag-ship was reported.”

  Bolitho noted the hesitation. Just one more who doubted his choice of ship.

  Glassport must have feared a possible refusal and scampered on, “Viscount Somervell will be expecting you.”

  “I see.” He glanced at Jenour. “Inform the Captain.” As the lieutenant made to excuse himself from the room Bolitho said, “Send a message with my cox’n. I need you with me.”

  Jenour stared, then nodded. He was learning a lot today.

  Bolitho waited for Yovell to bring the next pile of papers to the table. A far cry from command, the day-to-day running of a ship and her affairs. Every ship was like a small town, a family even. He wondered how Adam was faring with his new command. All he could find as an answer to his thought was envy. Adam was exactly like he had been. More reckless perhaps, but with the same doubtful attitude to his seniors.

  Glassport watched him as he leafed through the papers while Yovell stooped politely above his right shoulder.

  So this was the man behind the legend. Another Nelson, some said. Though God alone knew Nelson was not very popular in high places. He was the right man to command a fleet. Necessary, but afterwards? He studied Bolitho’s lowered head, the loose lock above his eye. A grave, sensitive face, he thought, hard to picture in the battles he had read about. He knew Bolitho had been badly wounded several times, that he had almost died of a fever, although he did not know much about it.

  A
Knight of the Bath, from a fine old seafaring family, looked on as a hero by the people of England. All the things which Glassport would like to be and to have.

  So why had he come to Antigua? There was little or no prospect of a fleet action, and provided they could get reinforcements for the various flotillas, and a replacement for— He wilted as Bolitho touched on that very point, as if he had looked up quickly to see right into his mind with those steady, compelling grey eyes.

  “The Dons took the frigate Consort from us?” It sounded like an accusation.

  “Two months back, Sir Richard. She drove aground under fire. One of my schooners was able to take off most of her company before the enemy stood against her. The schooner did well, I thought that—”

  “The Consort’s captain?”

  “At St John’s, Sir Richard. He is awaiting the convenience of a court martial.”

  “Is he indeed.” Bolitho stood up and turned as Jenour reentered the room. “We are going to St John’s.”

  Jenour swallowed hard. “If there is a carriage, Sir Richard.” He looked at Glassport as if for guidance.

  Bolitho picked up his sword. “Two horses, my lad.” He tried to hide his sudden excitement. Or was it merely trailing a coat to draw him from his other anxiety? “You are from Hampshire, right? ”

  Jenour nodded. “Yes. That is—”

  “It’s settled then. Two horses immediately.”

  Glassport stared from one to the other. “But the reception, Sir Richard?” He sounded horrified.

  “This will give me an appetite.” Bolitho smiled. “I shall return.” He thought of Allday’s patience, Ozzard and the others. “Directly.”

  Bolitho peered closely at his reflection in an ornate wall mirror, then thrust the loose lock of hair from his forehead. In the mirror he could see Allday and Ozzard watching him anxiously, and his new flag lieutenant Stephen Jenour massaging his hip after their ride to St John’s and back to English Harbour.