Victory (20 page)

She slips out of bed, pads over to the window and pulls the curtain open—carefully, so as not to make a noise. Through the zigzag pattern of the roofs around her she can see the night sky, brightened by the lights of London, with a few stars shining here and there. From the
Victory,
Sam would have seen a dark, dark sky with millions of stars.

She thinks:
he didn't want me to have to see the battle, he tried to keep me away from it, but it was part of him so he couldn't. Like Grandad said, Victory was a killing machine. But it was Sam's new home and he loved it, because of Nelson. He loved Victory, and he loved the sea.

“Good boy,”
she says aloud, finding the words in her head, and she wonders what they mean.

But one thing is clear as crystal in her mind now: she knows what she must do with Sam's piece of the flag.

She climbs back into bed and falls asleep.

It is their last day in London, a warm sunny day. Kate is in her bedroom, packing, and Molly brings her an armful of clothes from her own room, where she has been emptying the drawers of the bureau.

“Can I leave my sneakers here for next time?” she says.

“Of course,” says Kate. She pauses, and looks at Molly, holding a sweater half-folded in her hands. She says, “Did this week make things worse instead of better?”

“No!” Molly says. She wrinkles her nose. “Well, just for a bit it did. I even asked Grandad if they would adopt me so I could stay here.”

“I know,” Kate says. She pauses, then gives Molly a wry grin. “I hope you've changed your mind.”

“Mum!” says Molly. They look at each other across the open suitcase, these two survivors who know each other so well, and then Molly grins too. “I couldn't let Donald have you all to himself,” she says.

“I love you too,” Kate says. “Get out of here and make the most of your last day.”

Molly goes downstairs. Granny is mowing the square of lawn behind the house, pushing the little whirring hand mower with contented precision. The sweet smell of mown grass drifts in through the open window.

Grandad is in the big kitchen-dining-room making
scones for tea. Molly wanders in and watches him placing neat dollops of raisin-studded white dough onto the baking sheet. “There!” he says, sliding them into the oven, and he sets the timer.

Molly says, “Can we take some back with us tomorrow, if there's any left?”

“I made a double batch specially,” says Grandad. “Make sure they get eaten fast, though—they don't keep for more than two days.” He pulls off his apron, tangling it as usual with the glasses that he wears on a string round his neck. “I have something else for you to take back, Moll. It's over here.”

He leads her to his big mahogany desk in a far corner of the room, and hands her a brown manila envelope. It isn't sealed. Molly opens the flap and pulls out a framed photograph.

“Oh!” she says. “It's Daddy!”

The picture shows a man squatting beside a tall model yacht, his hands raised to adjust its rigging. The water on which the yacht floats fills the whole background of the picture, as if it were the sea, and the man is looking back over his shoulder at the camera, laughing, saying words silenced forever by the click of the shutter.

“Taken at the Round Pond.” Grandad says. “Seeing that boy there the other day reminded me. So I went though about six hundred pictures to find it, and had it enlarged for you.”

Molly says, “It's wonderful. Thank you, Grandad.” She
puts her arms round his neck, and his beard bristles against her cheek.

“You're welcome,” he says, and kisses her. Then he moves her gently aside so that he can put his glasses on his nose. He picks up the photograph. “Take a look at this. I don't remember noticing it before, but the enlargement has brought it up.”

He points to the stern of the tall graceful boat, as the timer buzzes from the stove, and Molly sees that a name is written there.

The yacht is called
Victory
.

The sound of the drums was like the beating of a
great slow heart. Muffled drums, they were, with black cloth over them. Everything was muffled that day, even the grey clouded sky. All of England was mourning the death of one man, and all the people of London were out on the streets leading to St. Paul's, and all the air filled with the slow beat of those drums and the unending slow march of thousands of feet.

Ten thousand soldiers were marching in procession, before and behind us, in that long step that they keep for funerals, with the hesitation in it that breaks your heart. Marines were marching too, and the cavalry regiments trotting their horses slow, with a soft jingle of harness, and artillery with horses pulling the creaking gun carriages.
Every man of us wore black stockings, with black crepe on our hats, and black ribbons hung from the horses' heads. Over the beat of the drums, sometimes you would hear the wailing lament of a pipe band, like London weeping.

And there were we, forty-eight of us from the crew of his flagship HMS
Victory,
walking in pairs: forty-eight seamen and marines, with the senior men up front carrying our poor flag, the tattered white ensign that had flown from the masthead at the Battle of Trafalgar and been shot through and through. The men held it up sometimes to show it to the people lining the streets, and some said you could hear a rustle like the sound of the sea as hundreds and hundreds of men took off their hats in respect. Me, all I could hear was the drums, and the feet, and the boom of the minute guns.

Dozens of carriages creaked along behind us, drawn by more jingling horses, filled with noblemen and officers. Thirty-two admirals in full dress uniform there were at the Admiral's funeral, and a hundred captains. There never was a funeral like it, not even for a king. The Prince of Wales rode in his crested carriage just in front of the funeral car, a long gun carriage made to look like our
Victory,
with high prow and stern, and a canopy swaying above our Admiral's coffin.

With music and high words the funeral service lasted for hours, inside St. Paul's Cathedral. A great blaze of candles hung from the huge domed roof. At the very end, when the coffin was to be lowered into the ground, we seamen had been told to fold our ensign in ceremony, and lay it on
the top. But when Will Wilmet the bosun and three of the older men took up that shredded white cloth, Will gave a kind of sob—and suddenly all the men were reaching for our sad flag and it came apart, and they stuffed pieces of it into their jackets. And the coffin went down into the crypt, under the stone floor, forever.

He was a good man, Wilmet. He gave me a scrap of the flag for my own, afterward, outside the Cathedral, when we were gathering to march back through the streets of London without our Admiral.

“Here, young Sam,” he said. “Here's a bit for you. Keep it till you die, and have it buried with you. Your own little bit of Nelson.”

Kate, Molly and Donald have been back in Connecticut
for three days. It is dinnertime: a celebration dinner, because Russell has passed his driving test. Kate has bought a chocolate raspberry ice-cream cake and decorated it with a Matchbox Corvette and one candle. Everyone has second helpings of the cake except Donald, who rejects his first helping but manages to smear a large amount of it over his face, hands and hair.

Russell says through a mouthful, “Jack would be pissed at missing this.”

“Why isn't he here?” says Molly, privately very glad that he is not.

“He's gone. His doomy parents have sent him to some
military academy in Virginia, and their term starts early. Oh by the way, he left you this.”

Russell gets up and unpins an envelope from the kitchen bulletin board. Molly opens it cautiously. Inside is a card with a picture of an immensely ugly dog which has just fallen on its back after tugging at its leash, and the legend SORRY I WAS SUCH A JERK. The signature reads:
Until the next time—Jack Parker.

“Well, that shows self-knowledge,” says Kate.

“Say thank you for me, Russ,” Molly says, because she knows that without obnoxious Jack, a great many things would not have happened.

“Okay,” Russell says. “Dad, can I have the car tonight?”

“No,” Carl says. “Today is cake. Don't push your luck.”

Russell says, undeterred, “Well, how about tomorrow? I could drive us all to Mystic Seaport for that trip that got rained out.”

Tomorrow will be Saturday. “Sounds good to me,” Carl says.

“Count me out,” Kate says. “Donald's going to a birthday party.”

“A party?” says Carl. “He's eleven months old!”

“Everyone has a right to a social life,” Kate says.

“Moll? Want to come to Mystic?”

“Yes, please,” Molly says promptly. She longs to share her piece of flag with Mr. Waterford, and it surely shouldn't be too difficult to slip away from Carl and Russell for half an hour.

But it is.

They drive to Mystic Seaport the next morning, with Russell at the wheel of Carl's car, and Carl, beside him, trying hard not to offer advice, comment or criticism. Molly thinks she sees Carl close his eyes as Russell accelerates past a truck on the highway, but she can't be sure.

They visit the ropewalk, which Molly finds oddly familiar even though she has never seen it before; they visit the cooper's shop, the shipsmith's forge, the sailing ship
L.A.Dunton,
the whaleship
Charles W. Morgan
and the tall ship
Joseph Conrad.
All the ships are considerably younger than HMS
Victory,
though Molly has the grace not to point this out. They eat lobster rolls for lunch at the Seaport café. Molly cannot escape. At length, even though they have already visited the Seaport's own excellent bookshop, she says, “I really want to go back to that bookshop we found on the rainy day. D'you mind if I go?”

“Let's do that!” Carl says enthusiastically.

“Sure!” says Russell. “That guy had some great magazines.”

They get to their feet, and Molly is still trapped. She can find no reason at all for telling them she wants to go alone.

So they all three troop off to SHIPS AND THE SEA, and there at his desk is Mr. Waterford, small and grey-haired, smiling as if he were expecting them. Perhaps he is.

Molly says, “Mr. Waterford? I'm Molly Jennings.”

“Hello, Molly,” Mr. Waterford says. He raises his gaze to include Carl and Russell, who loom very tall in the low doorway, and Carl puts out his hand.

“Carl Hibbert,” he says. “And Russell.”

“I remember,” Mr. Waterford says. “You've brought better weather with you this time.”

Russell makes a beeline for the sailing magazines, and Carl drifts off into the back room. When they are out of sight, Molly pulls her
Life of Nelson
out of the bag she has been clutching to her all this time.

Mr. Waterford looks at the book for a long time, peering first at the Edward Austen inscription and only then, with thin reverent fingers, unfolding the envelope to reveal the piece of the
Victory
's flag and Emma Tenney's beautiful earlier handwriting. This he studies very carefully indeed, through a magnifying glass, and then he sits back with a kind of sigh. He takes off his glasses, and Molly sees those arresting grey eyes again.

“Astonishing,” says Mr. Waterford. “Quite astonishing. The flag, yes, but also the story behind it.”

Molly says, “Samuel Robbins. Is there any way to find out more about him?”

The grey eyes contemplate her. “That's the real reason you're here, isn't it, Molly? Not just to show the old bookseller your buried treasure.”

“Well,” Molly says. “Yes.”

Mr. Waterford smiles at her. He puts his glasses back on, opens a drawer in his desk and pulls out a slim file of papers. “I did a little research after you e-mailed me,” he says. “Look. Here is a list of the crew of HMS Victory at the time of Trafalgar—and here is Samuel Robbins. Classified as a
ship's boy, aged thirteen, from London. But that's all anybody seems to know about him.”