me.” She smiled. “But do slow down, please. I had to run to catch you.”
He did as she commanded, relieved she had not left him alone. “Mrs. Perry is consoling Ben because he wanted to come along. I told him you would take him aboard the Mercury this afternoon to make up for it.” She nudged him. “Don’t make me a liar, Able.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” he said, and nudged her back. “I’ll take you aboard, too, if you’d like.”
“Not this time,” she told him. “Maybe next year. If the Mercury were to bob about, I’ll puke, sure as the world. Where away?” She peered around his arm to see him better. “Is that correct?”
“You’re the perfect sailing master’s wife,” he assured her. “Where away? To Haslar to tell Davey’s surgeon that we’re sailing tomorrow.”
“May I come along?”
“I’d be miserable if you didn’t.”
God bless his wife. Gradually he slowed down until they strolled along the Gunwharf, then past warehouses and up the incline to Haslar. Her quiet presence calmed his brain. The hard things were never so hard when Meri was close.
Davey took the news with his quiet smile. Able saw no fear in his face.
“Ask your surgeon if he can spare some capital knives for your kit,” Able added. “No worries, Davey. Should you need to use them, I’ll be right by your side.”
He told him about dinner that evening. “You can bed down in the sitting room later and we’ll all walk to the Gunwharf together in the morning. I want my crew around me.”
Chapter Thirty-three
They sailed the next morning on a fair wind to Spain. Meri and Ben saw them off, along with Ezekiel Bartleby, and all the students and teachers from St. Brendan’s. The count was already stashed below, amused at the whole business. Able knew his father was more at home on a splendid Spanish three-decker, but he bore with good grace this humble setting of a yacht captained by a bastard and manned by workhouse lads.
Last night’s dinner had been a fitting send-off for the Mercury’s crew. Able compared this dinner with the one before that first voyage. He looked at the faces of his crew and saw a maturing in them, even in Avon March, youngest by several years. They had seen firsthand what war could do to ships and men in the battle off Cape Finisterre. It had sobered them, but he saw no fear.
Smitty surprised him by his attention to Mrs. Munro. The widow had been voluble in her praise of Smitty’s lively conversation as he escorted her to the dinner in Grace’s carriage. “He’s a fine boy,” she said, when the fine boy was out of earshot.
Perhaps Smitty wasn’t out of earshot. At her praise, “Fine boy,” Able watched his back straighten as he rejoined the crew. “That he is,” Able answered, making sure Smitty could hear him.
Unlike this cheerful send-off, every trip to sea before now was a solitary entity for Able. He packed his duffel, then usually ate a meal in the best taproom he could afford. Able never considered himself lonely, not with all the interlopers in his brain, but there were times when he watched other officers playing cards or laughing over shared memories with their friends, that he knew he was missing something not even Sir Isaac Newton could supply.
He felt it acutely if he decided to walk through a neighborhood some blocks from the wharf of whatever naval port his ship lay at anchor. He knew it was rag manners to stare into people’s houses, but if curtains were drawn back, and if he heard laughter, he justified a quick glance at fathers and mothers with children around. After a few such solitary walks – at the risk of argument let us call them lonely walks – he didn’t go again.
Here he sat at their last dinner before sailing, Meri close by with Ben in his chair, his father seated at the other end of the table, Mrs. Munro next to the count, and all his other sons – beg pardon, the Rats – crowded together, and look, Grace and Captain Ogilvie close enough that their shoulders were probably touching. (Well, they were all crammed close together like whelks in a basket.)
He smiled to see improved table manners, and what passed as polite conversation, even though the subject always seemed to be the sea. He didn’t mind; he loved the ocean, too. Be his ship large or small, there was no feeling like the joy