fire.” He smiled, thinking of past actions, with all their heart-pounding, gut-wrenching moments. “Protect your signalman with your life.”
“But what if we’re afraid?”
Bravo. He had trained his Rats well to speak up and never fear censure. “Good question, Tots,” he said, with a glance at Smitty. “Smitty, take the wheel and steer another point closer to the wind.”
“But sir.”
“Do it.”
Smitty did, and the Mercury heeled starboard abruptly. Able laughed to hear Ogilvie curse from the galley below. “I think he spilled his pease porridge,” Able said. “As you were, Smitty.” The yacht righted itself. “Men, we will be doing more heeling and backing, serving the fleet as repeaters. Get used to that fear. You can all swim. You know you have been through worse fright living in a workhouse.” He saw nods all around and it broke his heart as he knew it would. “But you’re here and you survived, didn’t you?” More nods, this time with confidence.
“Are you ever afraid, Master?” Whitticombe asked.
“I’m captain now.”
“Captain Six,” the boy corrected.
“Aye. I have many fears.” Able smiled when Van Leuvenhoek and William Harvey gasped in fake surprise inside his brain. “I want with all my heart to always return from sea to Mrs. Six and my son. I also want to prove to the Royal Navy that St. Brendan’s turns out splendid mariners. How we do that will require all our courage and knowledge. We rely on each other, and we trust to Providence. We calm each other’s fears as we do so. This is our work, as long as France and Spain threaten our shores.”
Here endeth the lesson, he thought.
“Ben, we must accustom ourselves to finding Papa away at sea now, and not just across the street,” Meridee told her boy as they folded clothes on her bed.
She smiled to watch him stare at the unmatched stockings, and then venture to roll two inside each other. The task eluded him, which made her wonder how it was that genius could occasionally run aground on simple chores that everyone else accomplished as a matter of course.
“Mama, this is hard!”
“I’ll show you slowly. See? Like this. You try it.”
Ben did, with better success. He matched and rolled two more, then plumped himself down on the bed, neatly tidied after a night of magnificent tumult with her man. “Is this why Papa always comes to you to fix his neck cloth?”
“Ah, yes, it is. He’s not very good at that.”
“He’s good at other things.”
“My love, we all have our strengths and weaknesses.”
It had taken her months to accept as normal that conversation with her child of one and a half years was unlike anything she had anticipated. In some ways, Ben was precisely normal, if a little ahead of most tykes his age. For the most part, he did not mess his nappies anymore or wet himself, but at times he did. He wasn’t a neat eater.
What he had was what his remarkable father possessed – a brain of enormous, unfathomable capacity. She wondered about one thing more. She sat beside him, which meant flopping back, grabbing him and growling into his neck until he laughed. What little Able told her about his early years in the Dumfries workhouse had included nothing like this. She knew their son, this flesh and bone of their bodies, knew love. How something as basic as love might influence him later in life, she had no idea. She hoped Ben would be of all things confident in people.
What about that one other matter, the one that worried her? Might as well ask. “Tell me something, Ben. Do you ever hear people talking in your head?”
Knowing how irritated she was with Euclid, she hoped Ben would give her a blank stare. He didn’t, and she sighed inwardly.
“I hear people and look around, but there is no one there,” he said.
“What do they tell you?”
He stared at the ceiling through wide-open hands and gave her a look Meridee could only call charitable. “That I will always be understood by my mama and papa, even if no one else understands.”
She tucked him close. “It’s true.”
After luncheon, they walked hand in hand a few doors down to Number Twenty, Saints Way. Betsy Cornwall had a decided green thumb. In all their riotous yellow and orange glory, nasturtiums spilled out of the window boxes. A flowering pot of asters by the front door spread their own beauty. Ben leaned over for a sniff and announced, “Aster tripolium, from the Greek word for