Chapter Text
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant.
(John Donne)
Ancient philosophers had much to say about thread. The stuff bound mankind to itself, they said. Ethereal cords trailed across the earth, restraining souls from chaos, roping one being to another so that none would be alone.
Whimsical nonsense. If dainty threads were the substance of human attachment, then Captain Harry Harville fancied the ancients had never been to sea. Delicate things did not last at sea. Teacups broke, instruments grew stiff with salt, and embroidery bled away in the damp. Skin weathered and the burgeoning sailcloth now tugging Candour about the far reaches of the Indies would tatter into shreds with time. A pity—it was a fine weave of sailcloth.
Harville leaned against the quarterdeck railing and rubbed at the fraying hem of his handkerchief. His rough thumb dislodged both a crust of salt and the leaf of a stitched poppy. He caught at the trailing threads and tucked them into a fold of the handkerchief.
No, a thread would not do. Harville preferred a towrope to bind him to his fellow creatures, preferably studded with a few links of iron, seven-stranded and well-tarred. No fool would mistake such an attachment and any wrinkled old Fate must needs a handsaw to damage it. And dare the sea to break such a thing!
Harville tucked the wounded handkerchief into his breast pocket. The cambric square had survived an entire two months aboard Candour before seeing today’s damage. Margaret would be proud that her handiwork had so defied the salt and damp. He would write her of it in his next letter.
“Captain! Colours to the south!”
At the cry, Harville felt the sudden, wolfish thrill flick over his arms and neck. Ah, Wentworth wouldn’t hear the end of this! Though their frigates sailed in tandem, barely a quarter-league apart, Laconia’s watch-hands had missed the sightings of the last two foreign vessels. Frederick Wentworth, Laconia’s vigorous captain, would be marvelously nettled. Harville limped across the quarterdeck and tugged his glass from his coat pocket.
“And what colours do you make out, Mr. Dobson?” Cripps, the first officer, bellowed into the air.
From his perch in the rigging, the seaman Dobson hollered back: “French, sir! They saw us, though, for now they’re flying for Portugal.”
Harville swept his glass along the southern horizon. There. Dots of color danced atop a dark smudge on the blinding expanse.
“Spread all canvas, Mr. Cripps,” he ordered. “Signal Laconia. We’ll be onto them by sunset.”
The cry was lifted. Candour burst into flurry. Harville kept the foreign ship in his glass and felt the wind flush across his temples as the towering beast of wood and canvas around him sprang to life.
Any thoughts of thread vanished in the coming hours as between them, the two British frigates worked to keep the French vessel from vanishing into the night. She was cornered soon, despite her shrouded lanterns. It was a delicate business, pinning the French ship between Laconia and Candour without riding too close or placing either in the line of stray cannonfire. Harville kept his glass trained on both the French ship and his counterpart on her other side.
“Prepare portside battery, Mr. Cripps,” he called. “Mr. Gordon, down with the topgallants.”
Cripps saluted and vanished into the maw of the gundeck, attended by Praiseworthy, his gunnery second. Harville shouted to Cookeham, who battled with the wheel, to swing port, to stay tight on the blighters’ aft. Gordon howled to the swarming web of seamen aloft in the rigging, and under his hoarse cries and the bosun’s whistle, the drawing in of sails and the release of others together shifted Candour within fifty yards of the vessel’s stern.
And then there were Laconia’s guns, booming along the French ship’s portside and hammering into her woody flesh. The French ship responded in kind and splinters, debris, and flaming shrapnel pocked sea and ship alike.
Through the murky glass, Harville watched the scrambling of swarthy faces, the cobbled-together bits of French uniforms, and banks of smoke. No flag of surrender yet. This French frigate was uncommonly steely. Harville wiped sweat and powder-grime from his arms and thrilled.
Cripps looked up through the hatch and nodded. Harville flung down his arm. Cripps’ muffled command of “fire!” was lost in the eruption, as Candour quivered with the blast of her portside battery. Praiseworthy slipped up to his captain.
“Sharpshooters to the top, Mr. Praiseworthy—take their portside crews, kegs, cannon tethers, all of it,” Harville snapped. The man disappeared. Not a minute later, cracks from the marines’ muskets peppered through the air. Minutes passed.
“Cease fire!” Harville shouted, and the call was taken up. The cannons and muskets quieted.
The bewildered French sailors cast about in confusion at the sudden stillness. After a moment of mute smoke came the hissing thunk of grappling hooks sinking into the French portside railing. There was a great clamour as Laconia’s crew with pikes, bayonets, and pistols leaped aboard her foe.
Harville sent Cripps and Gordon over the side with the first wave of Candour’s marines. He himself would not step aboard, for this was Wentworth’s rightful catch as both the first shot and the endurer of the greatest risk. It galled, in a quiet way. This prize would be vast, and only a small portion would fall upon himself and his men.
The battle was soon over, with a shuffle of wounded and a surrendering of French swords. Wentworth, bronzed and gleaming in the torchlight, leapt Candour’s railing and clasped Harville at the shoulder.
“Another, man!” he cried. “I would give my very coat for your lookouts, Harville. What say you, Mr. Wallace?” he called over his shoulder to a scruffy boy dragging a rope coil. “I offer you a bunk no less hard, biscuit with no fewer weevils, and no more pay than you have now. Though I daresay the name Laconia is a far grander one to sign to your letters home than is Candour.”
“Me mother wouldna care fer it, sir,” piped the boy. “Did always dislike the Papists, she did. Regrets, sir.”
Wentworth hooted and Harville clapped the boy on the shoulder as he passed.
“Yours be the glory for this, man.” Harville turned to his fellow captain. “Though for the sake of your doubtful French, Candour must bear the French captain and officers.”
“Indeed, my French would bring at least one Bonaparte to the West Indies in retribution. The youngest of my crew thank you, Harville.” Wentworth bowed and strode off to make the arrangements among his crew. A small cheer rose from Laconia’s newly-minted midshipmen at the news.
Harville’s own French was scarcely better than Wentworth’s, but once Doctor Rubens patched up the officers, and Harville plied them with decent wine and a passable beef pie, the Frenchmen loosened and seemed a genial lot. With the way of things, Harville supposed he’d meet many of them again upon the sea. For now, he’d relinquish them to the Admiralty’s politicking at Leeward Islands Station. They would be safe, for a seasoned officer and crew of whatever nationality were far too valuable to abuse.
It was late when Harville retreated to his quarters. He scrubbed until the washpan was black with soot, then eased himself down onto the bed. A groan escaped his throat as the weight lifted from his left knee. He peeled off his woolen stockings (bless Margaret for her study handiwork!) and examined the troublesome limb, strained by the previous hours’ exertion.
Reddened swelling begged for a few days’ coddling. Harville flexed his knee, thinking (not for the first time) that the surgeon might have been wiser to have taken it at the joint. At least a stump would be trustworthy, and Harville would not be eternally wary of stairs and loose cobbles. To his credit, Cookeham took care to keep the decks clear of unnecessary debris. A good instinct—Cookeham was a circumspect officer. And though he ached as he eased himself across the cot, Harville could do without laudanum tonight.
It was scarcely a glorious tale, the wounding of his leg. Rather, it was in an exchange with some Egyptian brig, only a year prior, that a flaming bombard soared through the air and ploughed into the decking beside Harville. He remembered little afterward, merely the surprise that burnt flesh could smell so pungent. Wentworth had been among the eight men needed to hold him down while a surgeon worked at the mess. The leg, shattered and torn and scorched, never truly healed.
Harville fumbled in his uniform jacket for Margaret’s handkerchief. Margaret had urged him to heal, to apply for extended leave, to convalesce long enough to walk a hundred yards without a cane. Harville had gritted his teeth at the time such healing required and stubbornly re-enlisted. The navy was cutthroat in the jostling appointments of its valorous captains (and himself only newly-posted). To flag behind now, to heal an injury, would put him years behind in advancement. Shunting vessels from one port to another, or hauling valuable grain about the islands or colonies, now those he might do, but recompense for such would scarcely support a married life.
No, fortune was in the bold work of hunting privateers, in dancing the treacherous line between stalking the enemy and living long enough to profit from it.
And he would profit from this. Margaret and the children must eat. His body and training at sea were all the currency Harville could offer for their full bellies and clothed backs. Such were well worth his health.
Wentworth, by virtue of his wolfish fortitude and unattached nature, was not hampered by such prosaic economics. The man was whole-bodied, and no family relied upon its strength. He threw himself into the thick of any battle, refusing the modest preservation of his own life if it meant taking one more privateer, skirting one more reef to block an escape, tacking one more sidewind to inch a little closer to an unprotected hull-side. The man courted death for the thrill of neatly defying such, and his eyes gleamed in the uncanny sea-light, alive in a way only seen upon the water.
And here they were, with fresh orders (a year long!) to break the spine of American and French smuggler ships and blockade-runners in the West Indies, and each captain grateful for it in his own way: Wentworth for the glory and Harville for the fortune.
More lived than died today. Perhaps it was enough. Harville pressed Margaret’s handkerchief to his eyes and drifted asleep.
_____________
Leeward Islands Station buzzed with excitement at the arrival of the two frigates. Harville inhaled the rank humidity of fresh earth, animal dung, and rotting seaweed. He saw off the French crew to the naval office and set out to find fresh limes.
After some two days ashore, foreign colors were sighted beyond the far reefs (a flagrant provocation that had the station commander seething). Wentworth roused his crew and took Laconia northward to hide among keys and sandbars, not unlike a serpent in its den, eager to cut off easy escape to the American islands.
To Harville fell the task (the one he preferred, really) of hounding the foreign ship into Wentworth’s trap. It was a merry game, one hatched and honed in the heady, long-ago years when Harville was first officer and Wentworth the newly-posted captain of The Asp, and both eager to make their way in the world.
Harville hauled Cripps out of a grimy brothel, threatened the next time to leave him there with no pay, and shoved him toward the docks. At their arrival, Candour flung down her sails and tugged off toward open water, eager for the hunt. They sighted the foreign ship and gave chase.
The American ship, small and lithe, proved coy. She skittered over the water, skirting her pursuer until the wind died down. Candour, whose more-ponderous strength lay in her sturdy timbers and bull-dogged tacking into whichever faint breeze she could find, eventually out-swung her opponent and cut off her southeast route with a volley of cannon fire. The American ship tacked rapidly and hauled north in desperation toward open sea.
Harville grinned and drove the American ship straight north, firing regularly to both unnerve his prey and signal Wentworth as to their position. After some three leagues, Laconia burst around the sandbar straits amid a wreath of flame and powder smoke. A white flag soon trailed up the American mainmast.
Harville fired a flare in salute to his friend, swung Candour round, and headed southeast once more, where the American ship had been first bound. Rats were a social lot. Instinct told him a nest of the smuggling kind was not far off. With any luck, they’d rout it.
Five months into the tour, threadbare creases ran the length of Margaret’s handkerchief. Harville resisted taking it from his breast pocket. He kept it wrapped in a shred of oilcloth, a snug package over his heart. And over his heart it must be—to take into itself any fraying threatening his own soul.
_____________
It was not seven months into the tour when a successful mail ship managed to complete its journey from England to Leeward. A fat packet of correspondence awaited Harville when Candour docked, herself worn from a close brush with a duo of French brigs. New maps, reports from the distant Admiralty, a letter from Harville’s solicitor regarding the allotment of prize-money from last year—such were tokens from the world beyond the West Indies.
The maps revealed a tightened blockade along the American colonies, the Admiralty reports told of a frazzled Napoleon, and the solicitor declared that the prize-money was safely invested and expected soon to bloom. Wartime economics at home suited speculation, and Harville felt the knot of worry in his belly soften some.
At the bottom of the packet lay brighter treasure: four letters from Margaret! Harville saved her letters like the last bite of a fresh strawberry, until the end of the day, when he sank onto his cot. Her fair and cheery hand filled page after page. Harville soaked in the indulgence of how much time she devoted to him, writing in dim candlelight, the children finally asleep.
And then his fingers ruckled at the paper— It is a comfort that fatherhood so charms you, Harry—for after a lying-in come October, you shall be a father once again. I suspected when you left but scarcely knew for certain. This little lump of warmth is hale and hearty and squirms and roils like a small shrimp in the surf (yes, certainly, a sailor’s wife I must be). Fanny, your mother, and my cousin Eleanor are to come for the lying-in. What a party we shall be.
October. October. It was October now. Foreboding tightened his ribs and chilled his belly, despite Margaret’s hopeful tone (deliberate, he knew, for her previous lyings-in ever cost a year of her health and twice had cost the life of the babe).
Harville walked the deck for hours that night. Guilt kept him from any reasonable sleep—guilt that he wasn’t there to safeguard the two precious lives that his intimacy so jeopardized. Margaret’s handkerchief frayed with his near-constant fiddling.
“Stow the damn thing, man!” Wentworth roared one evening, weeks later. “You’ll be sorrier if you destroy it. And Margaret’s a strong, able woman—she’d clout you herself if she heard you carrying on so. She’s no fool to think herself piteous for being with your child.”
Harville muttered about handsaws and towropes and stuffed away the handkerchief. Laconia and Candour rested at anchor, someplace in the deep waters off St. Lucia. The air was stale, the sea unmoving, and the heat stifling. Harville felt he might scream.
“I’m neither husband nor father, but I’ve seen that children are a happy thing in your family,” Wentworth continued, twisting the compass arm on his sextant. “They’ve made you glad, certainly, your Edmund and Gracie...?” he trailed off.
“Another child is wanted, yes,” Harville snipped into the pause.
“Then I am at a loss to understand you.”
“It’s not just a child—it’s the years of this!” Harville flung a hand at the black sea and the other at the maps strewn across his table. “I leave and she’s alone and yet the hearth is still lit and our children are fed and…” A black thought clawed out of his mouth. “God forbid, Wentworth—she might die. And I wouldn’t know it, not for months.”
If the child died, he would grieve, certainly. Yet if Margaret died in childbed, he would be cut from his moorings at high tide and drawn out to the endless waste. The severed towrope would drag him under. And he wouldn’t know.
“Then pray she doesn’t, man. Stay alive yourself and hie back to her.” The old blackness settled over Wentworth’s face, and he returned to his figures.
Margaret’s handkerchief fell to pieces that night in Harville’s fingers. Outside, the deep monsoon clouds began to gather.
___________
It was in the wake of a December monsoon that Candour rounded a Jamaican peninsula and, through the evening drizzle, she beheld a sight that had every seaman’s stomach running cold. Fires on a cove beach lit up the fog. Dozens of masts silhouetted black against the distant flames.
Harville lifted his glass to his eye. There were seven ships, two of which sported a hundred cannon and were clearly rigged for the open Atlantic. Danish colors flew above the largest ship—a massive frigate. Harville ground his teeth. He had thought these islands well-prowled and scouted enough that any movement of this size would be known and accounted for. What was the naval office in Kingstown doing, letting such a privateer fleet assemble? The settlement looked temporary, likely built within the last days.
His chief officers shifted close in the murk.
“Beat to quarters,” murmured Harville. “Ready every gun on this ship, Mr. Cripps. Mr. Gordon, prepare all canvas to swing north.”
“We’re not taking them, sir?”
Harville glassed over the cove once more. Fortune awaited. Yet a single error would render Candour outgunned and battling a numerous adversary in the dense fog. Margaret (if she lived) would… no.
He shook himself. “We’ll scuttle them in the cove. We’ll have time for at most three volleys before hellfire opens. We make run for it then. To your posts sharpish. And quietly, gentlemen.”
The crew wafted to their posts. A faint rumble of dragging cannons belowdecks had Harville cursing softly, the glass still pressed to his eye. Time slowed to the gentle wash of the swells against the hull. Praiseworthy materialized beside his captain.
“All ready, sir."
But a far-off whistle pierced his words, and the game was up.
“Fire—fire, man!” Harville bellowed.
Candour erupted at his command. Through his glass, he watched masts splinter and railings shatter. One of the foreign sloops shuddered and began to list. Black shapes—sailors, soldiers, workers—swarmed along the beach. Again Candour shook with the blast of her batteries. Punctured sails and torn rigging sagged over one distant ship. A burst of flame (black from coal oil—what fool kept it on deck?) washed over another.
Perhaps it would be so easy as this. Perhaps… but Harville watched an orange cloud bloom from the French and Danish gundecks as their batteries opened fire, and so the matter was decided. Cannonballs pounded into the water just short of Candour’s broadside. Next time, the wall of flying shrapnel would find wood.
“All canvas and starboard, Mr. Gordon,” snapped Harville. “Mr. Cripps, fire every damn gun on this ship.”
Sailcloth rippled and tightened, tugging against the wind. Candour, trembling with each volley, eased from the cove mouth. Her guns screamed and fired, pouring into the French ship, which slowed and began to list like a drunkard.
Harville glimpsed the sails of the Danish frigate puffing out. The ship was meatier than was Candour and would take longer to gain on them, should she not run aground on the bones of her flaming sisters scuttled in the cove.
The cove and its mayhem faded back into the muffling fog. Now for Kingstown and right quick. Harville crouched over his maps with sextant and compass at hand, intent on navigating in blind mist through island reefs under full canvas. Gordon stood hunched at the wheel, tight-fisted and shaking.
“Fathoms steady, sir!” came the cry from the bosun, dripping knot-rope in hand.
“Steady, Mr. Gordon,” called Harville.
“Aye, sir."
“Fathoms dropping, sir!”
“To port, Mr. Gordon.”
“Aye, sir.”
More minutes passed.
“Fathoms steady, sir!”
“Steady on, Mr. Gordon.” Harville strained to see the blotched shapes of islands on his map in the dim, hooded lantern-light. “One further reef at starboard in four knots, and then we’re in the clear.”
Cripps rubbed at his face. “Kingstown will be but some six hours from here. A warm bed, gentlemen, or three, if we’re lucky.”
“It's a wonder you've last so long,” grumbled Gordon, tight-throated. A good officer Gordon was, but unease clung to him long after a battle. Shaking himself free of it was a learned, necessary thing. Harville peered at the evening fog, craning to see some change, some land-like shape or ruffled surface that would indicate the reef.
Instead, through the sodden murk, a leviathan of shadow and gunfire bore down upon them. A wall of fire wrenched across Candour’s deck. It was the Danish frigate, intent on blood and far too close. Even the stoutest towrope might wrench asunder beneath her weight and bloodthirsty cannon.
“Hard to starboard!” Harville howled. “Hard to starboard! Cripps—give it all guns! Praiseworthy—every sharpshooter!”
Cries erupted, followed by the din of retorting gunfire. A second volley of cannon rolled into Candour, but the booming was soon eclipsed by a fearsome scream of fracturing wood. Harville jerked his eyes to the heavens. Like some great landslide wreathed in mist, the close mizzenmast twisted, hooked into a wicked shape, and fell away. The very bones of the ship shuddered.
Crack!
Fire blossomed across Harville’s shoulder in the wake of a musket ball. He cried out at the burning, and in the instinctual half-step backward, fingers clenched to the wound, he slipped on the wet decking. A sickening tremor shuddered in his bad knee, then white-blinding pain. He fell hard, scrabbling at the air. Silver and black exploded across his eyes.
A seamen tugged him upward again, and amid the dangerous lurching of both ship and knee, Harville attached himself to the wheel and shook his sopping head, dog-like, until his vision cleared. He felt his shirt collar grow hot with blood beneath his jacket.
“Mr. Gordon, what’s our damage?” he roared, in equal pain and necessity of conquering the hell around them.
“Lost the mizzen, sir! Damage to our port stern hull at the waterline.”
Harville cursed. He could feel Candour listing, dragged low by the splintered mast. “Up with the boys to the rigging, Mr. Gordon. Down with the mast before we swim tonight.”
Gordon disappeared and soon the drooping rigging swarmed with young Wallace and his compatriots. A ricocheted shot from a British marine knocked over an oil lantern aboard the Danish vessel. The monsoon swells bore the ships apart.
“Heads below! Down she comes!”
A mighty groan and clashing of timber and water shook Candour. She broke free of the entrapping mizzenmast which plunged into the sea, dragging tattered, jumbled rigging behind it. The ship sprang up, catching a wind that tugged her fore of the Danish frigate with increasing speed. With a final growl at the widening gap, the Danish frigate limped off into the fog, half-aflame.
Only silence remained. Silence and drizzle and groans of the wounded. Harville knew the rigging had dragged lives with it into the sea.
Cookeham took a party down to rearrange the stores to better balance the ship. Cripps set his gunnery crews to the same task with the cannon. Gordon mobilized the rest of the crew to repair, brace, and bail out the aft chambers. If they could manage the gushing water, surely they could live!
Harville prayed for a soft tide and eased Candour towards Kingstown. He helmed the wheel himself long into the night, flexing his hands under the weight of wood and souls alike. When smoke and lights of the friendly port gleamed through the dripping fog, Praiseworthy sent up distress flares. A crowd of eager hands awaited as Harville nosed Candour’s bow gently into her mooring.
Under the rush of offloading wounded and shoring loose timbers, Cookeham pushed a mug of hot rum to his lips. Harville drank, tasting the bitter slip of laudanum. Doctor Rubens joined Harville at the wheel and prised off his white-knuckled grip.
“Easy, man,” he quietened. “If she sinks now, we’re on friendly shores, though we must trust Westcott will not let it come to such, if he so calls himself a carpenter.”
Cookeham and Doctor Rubens half-carried, half-dragged Harville into his quarters. Rubens cut away at the trouser leg and examined the trembling, swollen joint that bent freely no more. He did not look at Harville as he turned to douse a towel in fresh water.
“There comes the question, Captain Harville, of whether a limb is fit for service,” he said briskly.
“Not yet.” Harville grit his teeth. Margaret (if she lived) and the children must still eat, and there were yet two months in his tour where a fortune might be made. “Not yet."
Rubens clicked his tongue and draped the cool, dripping towel over Harville’s knee. “The question may be decided for you, and the debt then may be more than a mere leg."
Harville did not respond.
“Well, bind it tightly enough and you shall walk again, I think,” Rubens said, “though I confess it shall be with more difficulty than before. I will take the leg, Harville, at the earliest chance you give me.” He cleansed and bound the wound across Harville’s shoulder (more discomfort than destruction, that one), swathed the knee in fresh, cool cloths, and departed.
The pain burrowed deep. Harville fumbled for the oilcloth bundle in his coat pocket. He pressed it to his mouth and breathed. No scent of home remained—only sweat, smoke, and salt-rot. Laudanum settled his body to sleep, but his soul guttered through black and perilous dreams.
____________
It was a stormy day in January when a squawking flurry of porters, beggars, and brothel-workers heralded the arrival of a naval ship at Leeward Station. Cripps and Gordon melted off into the crowd to gather news. Harville wrapped his leg, found a cane, and took a bit of wine in preparation for the walk to the post-house.
A plump packet of mail awaited him. Slipped among the standard array of reports and embossed seals, Harville found two nondescript letters, postmarked within a day of each other. He recounted, then reshuffled, and then harangued the post boy and the clerk and the clerk’s superior officer until it was unequivocally verified that there was no letter, package, note, nor parcel from Margaret Harville misplaced in the desk, fallen between the floorboards, or otherwise missing from the naval post station among the Leeward Islands. The next ship was not expected for some weeks, and no, Captain Harville—young Ned had not been set upon by thieves when he lugged the bags of post from the ship.
Margaret had simply not written.
Ears quirring with panic, Harville limped across the docks to Laconia, newly-ported from a recent run from Saint-Domingue. He shouldered by a flock of carpenters at work on some gaping damage above the waterline (and how Wentworth managed to continually commandeer the services of half the carpenters in the Indies was positively indecent). The watch waved him aboard.
Harville stumped up to the quarterdeck, collared Wentworth from the map table, and slapped the offending letters into his hands. Startled, Wentworth shuffled through them, noting the postmarks and the feminine penmanship—the tight script of Harville’s mother and the flowing, expressive hand of his sister Fanny.
Wentworth’s face turned pained. “They are not addressed to me—“
Harville slammed his fist against the table. “For God’s own sake, man—read! Am I husband to a gravestone or no? Tell me quickly!”
Wentworth raked his hands through his fair hair and cracked open the seals. His face steeled as he scanned through the two letters. Harville dropped his eyes to the paper. He could make out the swooping lines of an M, again and again and...
“Your hand, man,” Wentworth said.
Harville stretched out his hand, trembling, and Wentworth tipped open a fold of the letter. A tiny wisp of red-blonde hair, tied with thread, tumbled into the waiting palm.
Harville stilled. Please.
“These letters bear news of a rosy baby girl and a healing mother.” Wentworth’s voice was tender. “I wish you joy.”
Harville caved over the precious wisp in his fingers.
“You are certain?” he rasped.
“Your daughter Susanna Constance was born the eleventh day of October of this last year,” Wentworth continued, rifling through the letters. “Edmund and Gracie wish to build a rowboat for her. Fanny is hard-pressed to keep them from the chisels in your wood chest. Your Margaret is well. All are well, Harville—more than well. Her own words, those.”
He tugged a fold of paper from Fanny’s letter and pushed it at Harville, pointing to the final lines. “There. More than well.”
Harville clutched at the letter and stumbled off toward the captain’s quarters. Wentworth followed and once inside the sparse room, availed them of the locked cabinet where the best liquor was kept. Harville folded into a vacant chair, devouring the brief, golden words written in Margaret’s exhausted hand:
We are more than well, Harry. I cannot fathom how even your boundless heart shall not burst with all the gladness now in-dwelt with this small family. We await your return.
Not a word about the birth in Margaret’s note, but his mother’s letter indicated the ordeal had been mercifully straightforward. Margaret suffered a fever for two days afterward, but had recovered. Fanny wrote of neverending dishes of hotpot from the neighbors, and she had received a letter in sonnet from her Benwick by way of the Cape, and cousin Eleanor was embroidering their wedding linens, and...
And all was well.
Harville removed the oilcloth bundle from his breast pocket and unpacked it. He tucked the dainty wisp of baby hair into the tatters of handkerchief. The letter he folded around the cambric—paper armor that swore as to a yet un-severed towrope.
He lipped at a glass of port and stared at the ceiling, unblinking and misted-over. Susanna Constance—precious, precious daughter. Wentworth nursed along his port in agreeable silence.
The oilcloth bundle simmered warm in Harville’s hand that night as he sprawled across his cot. Relief ached through him. Love begets life, and Margaret was safe. Their daughter was safe. More than well, more than well, more than well...
_____________
Harville was no stranger to the particular vintage of underhanded finagling required when a finite amount of salt beef existed in the same port as an infinite number of sailors. Kingstown’s naval supply master, quite new to his posting, unfortunately had little familiarity with such exchanges.
In a conflict as old as any spice route, Harville felt some pangs of conscience as he watched his first officer Cripps, with a smooth and earnest demeanour, extract from the supply master not only a full complement of infirmary stores, but also an entire refitting of hammocks and cooking pots. Several assurances of coffee, sugar, and limes materialised. The conversation moved to pitch and gunpowder. Harville rather worried for the balance of power in Europe should Cripps ever apply to politics.
When the substance of the conversation turned to the medicinal necessity of what he knew to be entirely too much brandy, Harville forced himself to act with decency and intervene. It would not do to rob the man blind. Cripps acquiesced the negotiations with only a substantive victory, and the supply master departed Candour none the wiser.
Harville considered the re-supplying an especially satisfying exchange since along with two crates of oranges for the officers’ use, he obtained a stack of woven wool blankets, newly traded in from the shepherds across the island. One of the blankets, at least, would find its way to Margaret.
More satisfying than any box of coffee or crate of oranges was the knowledge that these supplies meant Candour’s return to England was imminent. Harville was bound for home.
It was in a final loop through the small islands—merely three nights at sea!—that Candour engaged a 12-gun American schooner. One of the schooner’s riflemen found his mark in a half-empty keg of powder, rolling loose near Candour’s own guns. The eruption produced an inferno that swept up into the forecastle, downing booms and rigging. Gordon’s uniform and flesh were scorched from his side. Harville dragged the writhing officer away from the blaze, and Margaret’s handkerchief grew red-stained.
Harville howled orders for a bucket-line, to tack away from the foe, for knives to cut loose the blazing rigging. Flaming debris plunged into the gundeck, cracking hard against the inner hull, and the screams began to rise. Praiseworthy swung Candour’s deck cannon round and, in a half-breath of righteous chance, gutted the schooner below its waterline.
In the hours that followed, scraps of smoking wreckage floated in Candour's wake. Nine men and four boys were killed in the powder eruption and its fire. Death might have better suited some of the survivors, charred and broken as they were. In the infirmary, Doctor Rubens covered a small heap of amputated limbs and waited until nightfall to dispose of them overboard. Harville sat with young Wallace, whose lifeless body was found crushed beneath a fallen yardarm.
Candour required more repairs than Westcott, her valiant carpenter, could accomplish without an army of trained attendants. This unfortunate necessity of time (again—time, and he had so little of it left in his half-able body) saw Harville marooned at Leeward for a full month longer than he liked.
Post arrived, and a waxed packet with the Admiralty’s seal revealed Harville’s most recent orders. He was to leave behind the Indies and proceed on a leisurely run past Copenhagen for a friendly bout of action with any Danish privateers that might harass the British merchant convoys bound for the Baltics. He would, of course, be expected at Plymouth for resupply en route.
Plymouth. Margaret and the children were in Portsmouth. Could he get to them? He would be in Plymouth for a scant three days in mid-May for resupply—certainly not long enough for any measure of leave with travel. Margaret could not quickly travel with a babe-in-arms, nor with the other children. Yet to be wrenched apart once more without even a few hours’ respite… Harville was a man of ample capacity, but this he could not do.
He penned a hasty letter to Wentworth, himself bound for the Mediterranean but intending to first re-crew in England: Bring my family to Plymouth if you can—for God’s own decree is that it is not good for man to be alone. I must have them, and I cannot retrieve them of my own strength.
Wentworth, with a puff of his cheeks and a pinch in his heart, agreed.