Command a King's Ship Read Free Page B

Majesty’s frigate Undine tugged resentfully at her cable as a stiffening south-easterly wind ripped the Solent into a mass of vicious whitecaps.
    Lieutenant Thomas Herrick turned up the collar of his heavy watchcoat and took another stroll across the quarterdeck, his eyes slitted against a mixture of rain and spray which made the rigging shine in the poor light like black glass.
    Despite the weather there was still plenty of activity on deck and alongside in the pitching store boats and water lighters. Here and there on the gangways and right forward in the eyes of the ship the red coats of watchful marines made a pleasant change from the mixtures of dull grey elsewhere. The marines were sup- posed to ensure that the traffic in provisions and last moment equipment was one way, and none was escaping through an open port as barter for cheap drink or other favours with friends ashore.
    Herrick grinned and stamped his feet on the wet planking. They had done a lot of work in the month since he had joined the ship. Others might curse the weather, the uncertainties offered by a long voyage, the prospect of hardship from sea and wind, but not he. The past year had been far more of a burden for him, and he was glad, no thankful, to be back aboard a King’s ship. He had entered the Navy when he was still a few weeks short of twelve years old, and these last long months following the signing of peace with France and the recognition of American independence had been his first experience of being away from the one life he understood and trusted.
    Unlike many of his contemporaries, Herrick had nothing but his own resources to sustain him. He came of a poor family, his father being a clerk in their home town of Rochester in Kent. When he had gone there after paying off the Phalarope and saying his farewell to Bolitho, he had discovered things to be even worse than he had expected. His father’s health had deteriorated, and he seemed to be coughing his life away, day in, day out. Herrick’s only sister was a cripple and incapable of doing much but help her mother about the house, so his homecoming was seen in rather different ways from his own sense of rejection. A friend of his father’s employer had gained him an appointment as mate in a small brig which earned a living carrying general cargo up and down the east coast and occasionally across the channel to Hol- land. The owner was a miserly man who kept the brig so shorthanded that there were barely enough men to work ship, let along handle cargo, load lighters and keep the vessel in good repair.
    When he had received Bolitho’s letter, accompanied by his commission from the Admiralty charging him to report on board Undine, he had been almost too stunned to realise his good for- tune. He had not seen Bolitho since that one last visit to his home in Falmouth, and perhaps deep inside he had believed that their friendship, which had strengthened in storm and under bloody broadsides, would be no match for peace.
    Their worlds were, after all, too far apart. Bolitho’s great stone house had seemed like a palace to Herrick. His background, his ancestry of seafaring officers, put him in a different sphere entirely. Herrick was the first in his family to go to sea, and that was the least of their differences.
    But Bolitho had not changed. When they had met on this same quarterdeck a month ago he had known it with that first glance. It was still there, the quiet sadness, which could give way to something like boyish excitement in the twinkling of an eye.
    Above all, Bolitho too was pleased to be back, keen to test himself and his new ship whenever a chance offered itself.
    A midshipman scuttled over the deck and touched his hat.
    â€œCutter’s returning, sir.”
    He was small, pinched with cold. He had been aboard just three weeks.
    â€œThank you, Mr. Penn. That’ll be some new hands, I hope.” He eyed the boy unsympathetically. “Now smarten