Down to the Sea Read Free

failure.
    Sean O’Donald, who had been standing quietly to one side, finally spoke up. “Air reconnaissance officer on the Gettysburg as well, sir,” he announced.
    Pat looked over anxiously at Andrew, and in that flicker was a subtle indication that Pat would have preferred something far safer.
    “They must think highly of your ability to put you with our navy’s newest armored cruiser.”
    “I asked for it, sir.”
    Andrew nodded, saying nothing.
    He looked at the four young officers, all of them filled with such hopes and enthusiasm this day, all looking so proper and elegant in their dress uniforms. In the crowd gathered below the platform, he saw more than one young lady waiting patiently, gazes fixed on their chosen beaus. He smiled inwardly, wondering how long the comrades would actually stay together at the Mouse before secretly heading off for a final, brief rendezvous. They were all shipping out today. That was another tradition of the service, to send out the new cadets on their graduation day, and he suspected that more than one would make a promise of marriage once their first six-month tour of duty was up. He silently prayed that they’d still be alive to keep those promises.
    “Go on, boys. Abraham, your mother and I will see you off later at the station.”
    Again the smiling salutes and the four comrades turned, leaping off the platform to disappear into the crowd. Andrew’s thoughts turned toward his own affairs. Other burdens now awaited him. a congressman from Constantine, corrupt as the summer day was long, was looking for yet another government job for a “nephew.” And Father Casmir, now a member of the Supreme Court, wanted to argue yet again about the Ming Proposal. Behind them, Andrew could picture all the other seekers, flesh pressers, hangers-on, critics, and false praisers.
    So now I look like Lincoln, he thought, absently reaching up to touch the gray chin whiskers, which Kathleen, in private, kept threatening to cut while he was asleep. As he looked over at her, a flash of pride and love swept through him, for already she had composed herself. She was turning to sidetrack a senator whom she knew was a gadfly to Andrew, charming the man with compliments about his far too young wife.
    Pat pressed in closer. “Times I wish we could erase all these years, be back at our tent at the front, sharing a bottle with Emil and Hans.”
    “The old days are gone, Pat. It’s a new age now.”
    “Ah, I know, Andrew darlin’, I know. It’s just hard to believe how quickly it changed.”
    “Your boy looks fit. He’ll do well.”
    Pat lowered his head, and an audible sigh escaped him. “He never cared for me, you could see that today. I’ve tried to make amends, I have.”
    Andrew was silent—for what could be said? The boy, like Abraham, has been bom the autumn after the end of the war, his mother of Roum aristocracy, a niece of old Proconsul Marius. And Pat had never married her. Andrew, Emil, all of Pat’s friends, had tried to push him on the issue, but he would laugh, then sigh and say he could never be tied down, and Livia, the darling, understood that.
    And yet she gave the boy his father’s name, raised him with love, and waited for the soldier she loved to one day acknowledge the truth of their union. She had died waiting. Only then had Pat realized his mistake, but by then it was far too late. Though the boy accepted his father’s recognition now, there was no love.
    Pat wistfully watched as his boy fell in with the others, disappearing into the crowd.
    “Pat, we do have to talk later.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t want word of this getting out, but I want your opinion on recent events.”
    Three events, unrelated on the surface, had occurred in the last month, and he alone was privy to all of them. Hawthorne had brought the first news, an anomaly noticed a week ago at an obscure outpost named Tamira’s Bridge, where a skirmish had erupted between the cavalry and a rogue gang of