Any Approaching Enemy: A Novel of the Napoleonic Wars (27 page)

Nodding again to Talmage, he went forward to speak with Keswick about their progress with the rigging. The fore topmast section, he saw, was already being hoisted skyward to be set in its place.
Pylades
’s boatswain and his mates were preparing the mainmast to receive its spars. Charles thought it was all going quickly, too quickly where time with his wife was concerned, but about what he would have hoped for with respect to following after Nelson. He was satisfied that his ship would be ready for sea by the following morning.

As the receding specks of the squadron’s sails dropped one by one over the eastern horizon, Charles went down to his cabin for the noon meal with his wife. Penny had been occupied the entire morning, packing and repacking her and Claudette’s things in preparation for the journey back to England. He realized that it would be their last dinner together until he, too, was able to return home.

Charles entered his cabin to find a shambles, with opened sea chests dragged onto the floor and untidy piles of clothing and other belongings spilling over the chairs and table. Penny stood in the center, her hair tied up above her head and covered with a cloth cap. Even so, flimsy wisps had escaped in disordered strings around her face. Her expression was one of intense distress.

“How goes it?” he asked brightly. “Where is Attwater? Can’t he help with all this?”

Penny glanced up at him, her lips quivering, and promptly burst into tears. “No, he cannot help,” she exclaimed. “I have sent him away. No one can help.”

Charles had never seen her in such a state. For an instant he thought something had gone terribly wrong, or that some tragedy had occurred. “Where is Claudette?” he asked, not seeing the child.

Penny crossed the room and threw herself into his arms. Charles could feel her heart beating against his chest. “Claudette is asleep,” she managed. “I put her down for a rest.”

“Then what’s the matter?” he said, holding her tightly. “Why can’t anyone help?”

With an effort, she composed herself. She took a deep breath and pulled away, wiping at the tears on her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “I do not want to go,” she said. “I do not wish to leave thee.”

Charles used his thumb to wipe away a little moisture that she had missed. “You must,” he said softly. “You know that. You must return home for our child, for Claudette. Who will manage our estates?” He struggled awkwardly to find words to comfort her. “It will be all right, you’ll see. We will be parted for only a time. I’ll be back myself before your new mill is built.”

She smiled a crooked smile. “Thou dost not approve of my mill.”

“Yes, I do,” he answered. “It just took me a little time to get used to the idea, is all.”

“Oh, Charlie,” she said, “I don’t know what has come over me. I am not usually so …” Another thought came to her. “Why art thou here?”

“This is my cabin. I live here,” Charles answered. “I came for my dinner.”

“Oh. No wonder Timothy Attwater was so adamant. I will call him.”

“No,” Charles said. “I’ll find him and make amends. You clear off the table. Afterward, you must allow him to pack for you. It can’t matter that much where all this stuff goes.”

Over their dinner, she asked if he had as yet devised a plan to rescue Jacob Talmage.

“I have not,” Charles answered. “But I am still thinking on it. Don’t worry yourself; I will come up with something.” He wished he had even an inkling of what that something would be.

In the early afternoon, Bevan and Molly came to call. Charles saw the boat rowing across, sent word for Penny, and went to the side to greet them. Molly, he noted, had brought the flat wooden case that contained her sketches and supplies.

“Since it’s our last day together, we’ve come to make you sit for your portrait,” Bevan said cheerfully as he climbed aboard. “I’m to hold you in a headlock if necessary.”

Penny arrived, holding Claudette by the hand, as Molly lighted on the deck. “ ’Ow art thou, Capitaine Beban?” Claudette said dutifully. “ ’Allo Aunt Molli. ’Ow goes thy boat?” She smiled brightly. “ ’Ast thou wet thy swab yet today? Avast there, ye lubber.”

Penny sighed, as fully recovered from her outburst as if it had never occurred. “Timothy Attwater has been assisting with our practices,” she said.

After Claudette had been chucked under the chin, kissed, and tickled, Bevan straightened. “What are your plans, Charlie? We have some decisions to make.”

Charles thought for a moment. He knew what he should say but wasn’t sure he wanted to. There was no point in postponing the inevitable. “We’ll be as good as new by tomorrow morning. Would it be agreeable if I brought Penny and Claudette across at the top of the forenoon watch?”

This was agreed to. Molly then put herself forward. “Good, ain’t you able to sit for me today,” she said.

Bevan excused himself to return and attend to responsibilities on his own ship. Charles offered to send Molly back when she was ready. Penny soon went below to resume her packing.

Molly wasted no time. “I want to set you by the rail on the quarterdeck,” she said. “That’s how I see you in my mind.” Charles positioned himself, stiff and self-conscious, by the weather rail, the port of Syracuse behind him as, he imagined, a suitable backdrop. Molly had asked Midshipman Sykes to fetch her a chair, and the boy had run down to the officers’ wardroom below Charles’s cabin and back up again. Molly now settled herself with her case squarely in her lap and appraised him.

“You ain’t a statue, Captain Edgemont, and you ain’t no admiral, neither,” she said critically. “Stand the way you normally stand.”

“You mean like this?” Charles said, assuming a casual but vigilant attitude, one knee slightly bent and his left hand resting easily on the hilt of his sword. Four fingers of his right hand he tucked inside his jacket. He imagined the effect rather pleasing.

“You never in all your life stood like that,” she said crossly.

“How, then?” Charles said.

“If you had been on deck all day and you were going to be there all night, how would you stand?”

Charles leaned back against the rail with his elbows resting on top in order to think.

“That’s almost it, sir,” Molly said. “Just turn to the left. This picture’s for Penny, so we want to hide your sword a little. Just a little more. There, now don’t you move.” She opened her case, removed a pencil, and sharpened it carefully on a rather vicious-looking knife with a long thin blade honed along both edges. Charles imagined that, given her past, she probably knew very well how to use it. Satisfied, Molly replaced the knife in the box and extracted a sheet of paper.

“Shouldn’t I smile?” he asked.

“You can if you want to,” she said, staring at him intently, “but you’ll find that your cheeks begin to ache after a time.” Her pencil began to move across the page. “Ain’t you handsome,” she said, more to herself, Charles thought, than to him. She worked with intense focus, the pencil sliding in quick slashes and stabs with lightning jolts, dashes, and squiggles in between. He could not see the surface of the paper, only the top of her rapidly moving hand and the blunt end of the pencil as it danced like a mast truck in a storm.

“How are you enjoying married life?” he asked, as much to distract himself from the pain he was beginning to feel in his elbows as to engage her in conversation.

“Won’t it take longer if we talk,” she said, barely glancing up at him. “I want to do one of your face next. I can talk then. It’s the attitude of the body and the hands that I have trouble with.”

Charles became acutely aware of his hands and fingers and how they were arranged.

After a short time, her pencil strokes became finer and more delicately placed. She glanced up frequently, her tongue poking between her lips in concentration. “There,” she said. “Won’t be a second. There.” Molly looked at him for a long minute, up and down, her eyes resting on his hands. She stared at her paper, made a small mark on it, opened her case, and slipped it inside.

“Can’t I see it?” Charles said.

“No,” Molly said firmly. “It ain’t finished yet. Nobody likes it before it’s finished. Now we need another chair. Penny asked special for one just of your face.”

“Mr. Sykes,” Charles called.

While they waited for the midshipman to return with a chair from Charles’s cabin, Molly spoke. “You asked about me and Daniel. I’m honest, sir, I ain’t never been more blessed. With my past, I had no right to ever hope for such a thing. Even if I hadn’t never been a whore, my pa was a shepherd, bless his heart. My Daniel is a gentleman. I am very pleased in my life, Captain Edgemont. I don’t know if it’s fair to Daniel, I’m no lady, and maybe it’s not. Sometimes it seems like a dream to me, and I’ll wake up back like it was. But don’t I hope not.”

Charles’s chair arrived, and he sat. Without any instructions to him, she sharpened two pencils with her blade, placed a fresh sheet on top of her case, and began to draw as she talked.

“I don’t know if it is an even bargain for Daniel, and I worry about that. But he wasn’t born so high, you know. His pa was a fisherman in Wales, like my pa kept sheep. He was a pressed man and served as a common sailorman, ‘before the mast,’ he said. He worked his way up to where he is now. He worked fearless hard, and there’s a price to be paid for it.”

Charles had first met Bevan when they had both just made lieutenant on
Argonaut.
They had quickly become friends. Now that he thought of it, Bevan had never volunteered much information about his upbringing, and Charles couldn’t remember asking. “I didn’t know,” Charles said. “I guess I’d just assumed—”

“There’s a lot about Daniel that people don’t know,” she said, concentrating on her drawing. “Don’t he talk funny a lot, but he’s close with his feelings. In the early days, when I first met him in Portsmouth, when you was repairing your ship, mostly what we did was talk. We did the other thing, too, but we talked and talked, all night sometimes. It was then I knew I cared special for him, hard as I was against men. Of course, I didn’t think it was possible. It wouldn’t have been if it weren’t for your Mrs. Edgemont.”

“Penny,” Charles said. “You can call her Penny with me.”

Molly flashed a smile. “Your Penny,” she said, “now, she’s highborn. I know her pa’s a miller, but she was made to be a lady. She wouldn’t be half angry to hear me talking like this, but it’s the truth. Do you know why my Daniel is so taken with you?” Molly said.

“No, why?”

“Because he says you can speak what’s on your mind. Not that I agree, I think you’re shy, but compared to Daniel, you’re a circus performer. I saw a circus once when I was little. It was amazing how some people can do those things with everybody watching.”

She made some small strokes on her paper and studied it without enthusiasm, then darkened some of the lines. She began to nibble on her lower lip in contemplation.

“I’ll tell you this,” she said, looking up at him. “Daniel don’t like being no ship’s captain. For me, I don’t care what he does. I’d work my fingers till they’re stubs. I just want him to be as happy as I am in his life. Your life ain’t nothing if you ain’t happy in it.”

As she talked, Charles listened with a different understanding of her, and of his friend Daniel Bevan. She went on with an unself-conscious optimism about herself, her husband, and their future. She spoke of a time when Bevan could be home for good. He’d told her that he had enough money set aside to purchase a small piece of land, not as grand as Charles’s, but with several farms where they could put down roots, raise children and perhaps sheep. “Wouldn’t I love to have a few sheep of my own,” she said, opening her case a crack and slipping the pencils inside. “Here, you can see this one. Faces are easy.”

Charles looked at the sketch and saw pretty much the same face he saw in his mirror, only better. She’d done something around his eyes and the corners of his mouth that made him look … what … thoughtful, considerate, something like that.

“Penny will like that one,” Molly said happily. “Ain’t I pleased you could sit for me. If it’s all right, I’ll go speak with her now. She must be beside herself, what with leaving and all.”

THE MORNING ARRIVED overcast and squally, low roiling clouds bringing scattered spitting showers, the wind shifting to out of the west. The turn in the weather had slowed the work on
Louisa
’s masts, as a strong shower had passed through during the night. Still, at seven bells in the morning watch, all that remained was to run the halyards and bend on the canvas for the forward two topgallant yards. Those of
Pylades
’s crew who were helping had returned. Charles would be ready to make sail within a scant few hours.
Louisa
’s cutter lay idle in the water alongside, his wife’s luggage at that moment being passed down.

“It’s time,” he said to Penny, standing beside him, her head lowered, her face hidden by the edge of her bonnet.

“I am reluctant to leave,” she spoke hoarsely. “Oh, I cannot cry two times in two days.”

“It’s all right,” Charles said, something catching in his own throat.

Penny looked up at him, her expression fixed, with renewed dampness around her eyes. “Thou wilt return to our home when thou canst?”

“Of course,” he said, not trusting himself to say more.

A tear started down her cheek. Charles smoothed it away, and despite his crew gathered around, even watching from the rigging, he held her tightly against him. He felt her chest heave, and then she pulled herself away.

“I am recovered,” she said in a whisper. “I do love thee. I always shall.” Without waiting for a reply, she turned to slip into the chair, taking Claudette from Attwater and clasping the girl in her lap.

Charles watched as the cutter put out its oars and rowed across to
Pylades.
It felt as if his heart had been wrenched from his chest. He did not notice that those of his officers on the quarterdeck had moved unobtrusively to the opposite rail. He raised his pocket glass as Penny and Claudette were hoisted aboard the brig and watched as Molly and Bevan greeted them.

Almost immediately,
Pylades
upped her anchor. Her head soon fell off, and billows of canvas appeared on her twin masts as she made for the harbor entrance, gathering speed as they filled.