Success to the Brave Read Free Page A

for his presence here.
    Allday had thickened out and looked as if nothing could ever break him. The oak. He smiled to himself in spite of his sense of loss at leaving Belinda when she most needed him.
    He had known Allday like a raging lion on the reddened deck of one ship or another. And he had seen him in tears as he had carried Bolitho below when he had been badly wounded in battle. It was impossible to imagine any place without Allday.
    Bolitho also thought about his new flagship for this special commission which would take him to America and the Caribbean.
    There was comfort in knowing that her new captain was also a good friend. Valentine Keen, who had once been one of Bolitho’s midshipmen, who had shared excitement and sorrow in very different circumstances. Achates ’ previous captain had died of a fever as his ship had sailed home from Antigua to the yard where she had been built to undergo a much needed overhaul and refit.
    It would be good to have Keen as his flag-captain, he thought. He watched Allday’s head fall to his chest and remembered it had been he who had once saved Keen’s life, had personally cut a jagged splinter from his groin because he had not trusted the ship’s drunken surgeon.
    Bolitho watched a group of farm workers by a field gate as they paused to drink rough cider from great earthenware jugs.
    A few glanced at the carriage, one even raised his arm in salute. The word would soon be around Falmouth. A Bolitho was leaving again. Would he return?
    He thought of Belinda in that big, quiet house. If only . . .
    Bolitho looked at the new gold lace on his coat and tried to settle his thoughts on the months ahead. He was not the first sea officer to leave home when a wife or family most needed him.
    Nor would he be the last.
    The peace could not endure, no matter what the politicians and experts proclaimed. Too many had already died, too many scores were still unsettled.
    With sixty of England’s one hundred ships of the line laid up and out of commission, and some forty thousand seamen and marines discharged, the French would be stupid to ignore such complacency.
    He tried to concentrate on Achates ’ eventual destination, the island of San Felipe which lay across the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti like a rugged sentinel. The island’s history was as wild and bloody as some others in the Caribbean. Originally Spanish, it had been occupied and held by France until the American Rebellion when it had been seized by Britain after a series of attacks at great cost to both sides.
    Now, as part of the agreement with France, the island was to be handed back as a sign of good faith. But when Admiral Rodney’s ships had taken the island in 1782, just a year after Achates ’ keel had first slipped into salt water, it had been a barren, hostile place. Now, according to all the information Bolitho had obtained from the Admiralty, it was both prosperous and thriving.
    The present governor was a retired vice-admiral, Sir Humphrey Rivers, Knight of the Bath. He had made his life on San Felipe, had even named the port Georgetown to mark the island’s permanent place under the British flag.
    There was an excellent harbour, and the island’s trade thrived on sugar, coffee and molasses, the growing prosperity owing much to a secondary population of slaves which had been brought originally from Africa.
    Admiral Sheaffe had explained that whereas in war San Felipe had provided an excellent outpost to command the routes to Jamaica and a strategic base for hunting down enemy privateers, in peace it was a liability, unnecessary to the British Crown.
    It had made no sense at the time, and as the carriage gathered speed down a steep incline and the sea reappeared on Bolitho’s right, it made even less now.
    Surely if the island was worth dying for it was worth keeping?
    It seemed like a betrayal, more callous than Bolitho would have believed possible. Why then had he