The Only Victor Read Free Page A

in her frames and timbers, deep down in her worn hull, undiscovered by any dockyard, had finally betrayed her.
    In spite of everything Bolitho had witnessed and endured during a lifetime at sea, it was still too hard to accept that she was gone.
    He had heard some say that but for his judgment in holding and defeating the Spanish squadron, the enemy would have joined with the Combined Fleet off Trafalgar. Then perhaps even brave Nelson could not have triumphed. Bolitho had not known how to react. More flattery? After Nelson’s death he had been sickened to watch the same people who had hated him and despised him for his liaison with that Hamilton woman sing his praises the highest and lament his passing.
    Like so many he had never met the little admiral who had raised the hearts of his sailors even in the squalor most of them endured on endless blockade duty or firing gun-to-gun with an enemy. Nelson had known his men, and given them the leadership they understood and needed.
    He realised that Allday had padded from the cabin, and hated himself for bringing him out here on a mission which was probably fruitless.
    Allday would not be moved. My English oak. Bolitho would only have hurt and insulted him if he had left him ashore at Falmouth. They had got this far together.
    He touched his left eyelid and sighed. How would it torment him in the bright African sunlight?
    He could recall the exact moment when he had faced the sun and his damaged eye had clouded over, as if a sea-mist had crept across the deck. He felt the chill of fear as he relived it: the Spaniard’s sharp breathing as he lunged forward with a cutlass. The unknown sailor must have realised the fight was over, that his own shipmates were already flinging down their weapons in surrender. Maybe he had simply seen Bolitho’s uniform as the enemy, all authority everywhere, which had brought him to this place of certain death.
    Jenour, Bolitho’s flag lieutenant, attempting to defend him, had had his sword struck from his hand, and there was nothing to stop the inevitable. Bolitho had waited for it, his old sword held out before him, and unable to see his would-be assassin.
    But Allday had been there, and had seen everything. The Spaniard’s cutlass had gone clattering across the blood-stained deck, his severed arm with it. Another blow had finished him. Allday’s own revenge for the wound which had left him almost constantly in pain, unable to act as swiftly as he once did.
    But abandon him, even out of kindness? Bolitho knew that only death would ever part them.
    He pushed himself away from the window and picked up the fan from his sea-chest. Catherine’s fan. She had made certain he had had it with him when he had boarded Truculent at Spithead.
    What was she doing now, all those six thousand miles astern? It would be cold and bleak in Cornwall. Crouching cottages beyond the big grey house below Pendennis Castle. Winds from the Channel to shake the sparse trees on the hillside, the ones Bolitho’s father had once called “my ragged warriors.” Farmers making good damage to walls and barns, fishermen at Falmouth repairing their boats, grateful for the written protection which kept them safe from the hated press gangs.
    The old grey house would be Catherine’s only sanctuary from the sneers and the gossip. Ferguson, the estate’s one-armed steward, who had originally been pressed into naval service with Allday, would take good care of her. But you never knew for certain, especially in the West Country.
    Tongues would wag. Bolitho’s woman. Wife of a viscount, who should be with him and not living like some sailor’s whore. They had been Catherine’s own words, to prove to him that she did not care for herself but for his name and his honour. Yes, the ignorant ones were always the most cruel.
    The only occasion when she had revealed bitterness and anger had been when he was called to London, to receive his