Novel - Airman by Eoin Colfer

Author:Eoin Colfer [Colfer, Eoin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction - Young Adult
Publisher: Disney Publishing Worldwide
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11: TO THE QUEEN, HER CROWN

The Saltee Islanders were preparing for celebration. The British royal yacht, HMY Victoria and Albert II, a three-hundred-and-sixty-foot paddle steamer, lolled regally in Fulmar Bay with the waves of St. George’s Channel tipping her gently like the fingers of a child on a rubber balloon. The queen herself was happily ensconced in one of the palace’s sumptuous apartments. Her diary records that I find the air of industry in this miniature kingdom wonderfully exhilarating. Looking down from my balcony window at the commerce far below, one almost feels as though one has arrived in Swift’s Lilliput.

Almost every patch of Great Saltee’s two hundred acres had been appropriated for the celebrations. The South Summit was festooned with clusters of pikes decorated with crimson and gold flags. The streets of Promontory Fort were painted in the same colored stripes. Every man with a hammer was banging in nails, and every man without one was hanging bunting from those nails. Even the weather gods were proving benevolent on the day, pouring down sunshine on the little principality, setting the waves dancing with sparkles.

The southern cliffs lost some of their gloom, fringed in beards of white spume.

It seemed to the gentlemen of the world’s press as though the kingdom of the Saltees was an oasis of calm amid the political consternation of Europe. They sat in seaside taverns on Fulmar Bay, boiling up their gullets with traditional spicy gull pancakes and cooling them off again with tankards of Irish stout. No journalists were permitted on Little Saltee, and none had been invited who might press the matter.

On the surface, happiness and contentment abounded, but as in many things, the surface gave a treacherous reading. Many were unhappy in the kingdom. Taxes had been reintroduced, and heavy tithes on imports. Public services were so skimped on that they were almost nonexistent, and residency had been granted to an assorted bunch of motley characters who were then spiffed up and handed commissions in the Saltee army, the best barracks, too. Common scarred veterans most of them, landing on the port with clanking sacks of weapons. Bonvilain was filling out his ranks with mercenaries and turning away raw recruits. Building his own private army, many said; though the marshall claimed that he was merely protecting the princess from revolutionaries.

Captain Declan Broekhart would, once upon a time, have objected vehemently to Bonvilain’s politics, but now he was too besieged by his own demons. Catherine Broekhart, too, was haunted by sadness, though she concealed it for the sake of their eighteen-month-old baby son, Sean.

Declan was consumed and ravaged by grief. He wore it like a coat. It was more a part of him now than his eyes and ears. It took his hunger and his strength. It ate away his girth and his stature. Declan Broekhart had grown old before his time.

Often Catherine would encourage him to fight his way clear of his dark mood. “We have another son now, Declan. Young Sean needs his father.

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