“Why is it, Able, we knew he could not last, and yet we wish him with us still,” she said as he headed her toward the carriage. “Are we so selfish?”
“I believe we are,” he said. She heard all his chagrin. “Oh, and what is this? It appears to me that our equally singular Grace St. Anthony is not going to go meekly to church in a carriage.”
“Good,” Meridee said. “I’ll keep her company.”
He took her arm. “If you’re up to it, Meri.”
“I am. It’s not so far to St. Thomas.” I owe the great man, she thought, her heart full of sorrow and love. Sir B, you found the perfect place for Able Six and me.
Grace took her hand when she crossed the street. They touched foreheads and Grace murmured, “Meri, join me, but only if you feel you can.”
“It’s not so far,” she said, nodding to her man, who stood with his young crew beside the victualling wagon. “And you?”
“We’ll hold each other up,” the new widow said, “much as we have held each other up on different occasions.” She looked at the sky. “It’s a fair day for my dear man. The wind is right, too, isn’t it?” She squeezed Meridee’s hand. “Tell me it is.”
“It is, dear friend.”
The short walk to Portsmouth’s cathedral only taxed her toward the end, but Grace was there to put a supporting arm around her waist. Grace leaned closer.
“Meridee, how did you and I ever get entangled with navy men, of all specimens?” she asked. “They’re ribald and frank and have a certain reputation, and we’re ladies.”
“Just lucky, perhaps,” Meridee said, looking at her husband ahead of them, doing the slow funeral walk with his Rats. He looked back at her now and then, always appraising. “I would change nothing.”
“Nor I. More time would have been nice, but he was in such pain.” Grace spoke quietly, almost to herself.
Two rows of dignitaries lined the steps outside St. Thomas. Meridee was not surprised to see the Elder and Younger Brothers of Trinity House, but there stood Billy Pitt, England’s Prime Minister, looking too old for his years and shaky on his feet.
She sighed with relief when Able moved closer to Smitty and whispered to him, which sent the stalwart Rat to stand beside William Pitt, and hesitate not a moment to support him, even as some mourners gasped. There was no mistaking Mr. Pitt’s nod of gratitude, either.
She didn’t know the officers – Royal Navy men, Royal Marines and a smattering of British Army – but many of them also wore the distinctive star designating them Knights of the Bath. There they stood, bareheaded as a mist fell, honoring one among their number who had left them too soon.
She breathed deep of the incense inside the old church, wondering how many navy men had been laid to rest in this vicinity, and how many women mourned them. Please let me not be numbered among them, she thought, watching as the Gunwharf Rats stood their watch around the plain coffin.
When William Pitt was seated, Smitty joined his fellow Rats. He did a strange thing first, walking behind the coffin and placing both hands on it. He touched his forehead to the flag draping the highly polished wood in a tender gesture she had not though to see from that formidable Rat who kept his secrets and confided in no one. He stood beside Able finally, their shoulders touching. She wondered who consoled whom.
Meridee bowed her head, exhausted. She heard a murmur, a brief rustle of skirts, then the blessed relief of Able beside her, his arm around her.
He only left her side when the service ended and the Rats listened for their note. Singing “Heart of Oak” was the perfect touch, the song Sir B wanted, the anthem of St. Brendan the Navigator School. She heard chuckles from the navy men around her. Some sang along.
Not for Sir B a pampered spot among his ancestral dead on his little-used estate in the Hampshire countryside. He had insisted upon a plot outside St. Thomas, Portsmouth’s cathedral, a place with a view of the water. She and Grace followed the coffin carried now by the Gunwharf Rats into God’s Acre, with its collection of wells and ne’er do wells, lowlife and high livers of a navy town.
“I have often thought that there was a shadier side to Sir B that he never shared with anyone, his wife included,” Grace said as