Pohlstars Read Free

She knew none better than me. I was her godfather and her friend. There were a hundred other children on board, and four who were her special friends, but there was no person who was more special than I.
    And then the Commodore one morning came to breakfast in May's room, as he always did when he was aboard, and looked tired, admitted he'd had a bad night's sleep, got up from the table, fell face down on his plate, and died.
    I could forgive the Commodore for dying. He didn't plan to do it, and it happens to us all. But I will never forgive him for dying with his will so written that his bastardly bastard son, Ben, became May's guardian until she was thirty years old.
    He was aboard before the body was cold and had moved into the Commodore's rooms before the smoke of the Commodore's cigars was aired out. The will gave him the voting rights on May's stock. I could forbid him to sell a share. I could take the dividends and invest them anywhere I chose-but where was there a better investment than the oaty fleet?
I could, in fact, do nothing.
    For a month, then, I looked over my shoulder every minute, expecting to see the Commodore's hired assassin, but the assassin never came. All that came was a note, one day, mailed from Papua New Guinea via the boat's air service, and all it said was, "It's not your fault, this time.
    The Commodore never broke a promise to me but two. The first was that he'd have me killed if I failed to protect May's interest. I did fail her then, and knew I had, but I didn't die. The other promise was that I would never have to worry again, because after he died, for twenty years and more. I did nothing else.
    Later on, in Twenty-three, The queen she married, but not to me. Later still, in Twenty-four, A scowling imp of a son she bore. She bore him and raised him for years and miles, The son of the queen of the grazing isles.
    When May was fifteen, Van Dorn went at last back to the engines, and May went off to school. She took her four friends with her, the four other Mays with whom she'd grown up, but Ben would not allow me to join them. "You can keep your job and your pay, Jason, he said to me, "but leave my sister May alone, for when she's ready to fall in love it will be with a rich boy and a sensible boy and a handsome boy, and not with a dirty old man who sleeps with her socks under his pillow. That was a lie. I told him it was a lie. But what was behind it was no lie, for the love was still there. If May had been five years older, if she had been a year older even, I might easily have told her what I felt before I let her go. And might have got a good answer, perhaps. There was thirty years between us, and I am not handsome. But she was easy with me, and trusted me, and had good reason for trust.
    So Ben the Bastard fouled Owner's Quarters with his fat dark wife and their sallow brat, Betsy, who never liked me. Nor I her, to be sure. That whole family was repellent. I never knew Ben's mother, but I knew who she was. A file clerk in a lawyer's office. The Commodore seduced her to get a look into the lawyer's contract files, where there was something worth money for him to see. He got his look. She got his child. He would never marry her, of course, for she hadn't a dime, and when she pupped his bastard, he was long gone away. I will say for the Commodore that he acknowledged the son. He paid the bills to bring him up, even when it was hard for him. He sent the boy through school and gave him a place with the Fleet, though not at sea, but would never give him his name.
    So it was Benjamin (which means "gift of God") Zoll (for that was the woman's name) who came aboard with the will in his pocket and the resolve in his heart to reign.
    Well, he had more than arrogance. He was a mean- hearted man, but a hardworking one. The first day he was over the side in a diving mask, discovering cracks in the antifouling plates and surfacing in a fury. Twenty maintenance workers lost their jobs that day, but the next