Heart of Oak Read Free Page B

above the two walls, was the sky. Grey, cold, hostile. He stepped back and looked around the room. A cell indeed.
    A carriage had been sent to Bethune’s house to collect him for the journey to and along Whitehall. He was met by a clerk who had murmured polite comments about the weather and the amount of traffic, which, he was told, often delayed important meetings if senior officers were trapped in it. The constant movement, the noise. Like a foreign country.
Because I am the stranger here.
    From there he had been handed over to the porter, a towering, heavy man in a smart tailed coat with gleaming buttons, whose buckled shoes had clicked down one passageway after another as he led the way. Like a ship of the line, with lesser craft parting to let them through.
    There was one picture on this otherwise bare wall. A two-decker, firing a salute or at an unseen enemy. Old, and probably Dutch. His mind was clinging to the inconsequential detail. Holding on.
    All those faces, names. Not even a full year since
Athena
had hoisted Bethune’s vice-admiral’s flag.
And I became his flag captain.
And now she was paid off, like all those other unwanted ships. Their work, and sometimes their sacrifice, would soon be forgotten.
    He recalled the longer waiting room he had seen briefly in passing. So like those redundant ships that seemed to line the harbours or any available creek: a final resting place.
    Officers, a few in uniform, waiting to see some one in authority. Need, desperation, a last chance to plead for a ship. Any ship. Their only dread to be discarded, cast from the life they knew, and ending on the beach. A warning to all of them.
    There were nine hundred captains on the Navy List, and not an admiral under sixty years of age.
    Adam turned abruptly and saw his own reflection in the window. He was thirty-eight years old, or would be in four months.
    What will you do?
    He realized that he had thrust one hand into his coat, the pocket where he carried her letters. The link, the need. And she was in Cornwall. Unless…He jerked his hand from his coat.
    “If you would follow me, Captain Bolitho?”
    He snatched up his hat from the table with its unread newspaper. He had not even heard the door open.
    The porter peered around the room as if it were a habit. Looking for what? He must have seen it all. The great victories and the defeats. The heroes and the failures.
    He touched the old sword at his hip. Part of the Bolitho legend. He could almost hear his aunt reminding him of it when they had been looking at his portrait; he had been painted with a yellow rose pinned to his uniform coat. Lowenna’s rose…He could see her now.
Andromeda.
He heard the door close. Cornwall. It seemed ten thousand miles away.
    There were fewer people in this corridor this time, or perhaps it was a different route. More doors. Two officers standing outside one of them. Just a glance, a flicker of eyes. Nothing more. Waiting for promotion, or a court martial…
    He cleared his mind of everything but this moment, and the man he was about to meet: John Grenville, still listed as captain, but here in Admiralty appointed secretary to the First Lord. He remembered hearing Bethune refer to him as “second only to God.”
    The porter stopped and subjected him to another scrutiny, and said abruptly, “My son was serving in
Frobisher
when Sir Richard was killed, sir. He often speaks of him whenever we meet.” He nodded slowly. “A fine gentleman.”
    “Thank you.” Somehow it steadied him, like some one reaching out. “Let’s be about it, shall we?”
    After the cell-like waiting room, this one seemed enormous, occupying an entire corner of the building, with great windows opening on two walls. There were several tables, one of which held a folding map stand; another was piled with ledgers.
    Captain John Grenville was sitting at a vast desk, his back to one of the windows, framed against the meagre light. He was small, slight, even fragile at first