Sloop Of War by Alexander Kent

Author:Alexander Kent [Kent, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: C429, Kat, Extratorrents, Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9780099493860
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2006-01-22T13:30:00+00:00

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Part Two 1781

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10

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Sea Change

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Captain Richard Bolitho stared at the partly written letter he had been composing to his father, and then with a sigh carried his chair to the opposite end of the table. It was stifling hot, and as the Sparrow idled sluggishly on a flat calm she swung her stern very slightly allowing the hard sunlight to reach him and require him to move still further away from the windows.

Becalmed. How used he had grown to this situation. He rubbed his eyes and held his pen above the paper again. It was difficult to know what to write, especially as he never knew when this or any letter might find its way aboard a home-bound vessel. It was harder still to feel involved with that other world in England which he had left in Trojan nearly six years back. And yet . . . the pen hovered uncertainly, his own world, so close and so vital in colour and smell in the bright sunlight, and that word becalmed would still be too painful, too harsh a reminder for his father of the Navy which he had been forced to leave.

But Bolitho wanted to tell him so desperately, put his thoughts and memories into perspective, to share his own life and thereby fill the one remaining gap in it.

Overhead, blocks clattered and feet thudded on the quarterdeck. Someone laughed, and he heard a faint splash as one of the hands cast a fishing line outboard to try his luck.

His eyes moved from the letter to his open log which lay across the chart nearby. The log had changed as much as himself. Worn around the edges, matured perhaps. He stared at the date on the open page. April 10th, 1781. Three years, almost to the day, since he had first stepped aboard this ship in English Harbour to assume command. Without moving it was possible to glance back through the bulky log book, and even though he did not even touch a page he could recall so many of the things which had happened, faces and events, the demands made upon him and his varying successes in dealing with them.

Often, during moments of quiet in the cabin, he had tried to fathom out some set thread in his life beyond the narrower explanations of luck or circumstance. So far it had defied him. And now as he sat in the familiar cabin where so much had happened he could accept that fate had had much to do with his being here. If, when he had left the Trojan he had failed to take a prize en route for Antigua, or upon arrival there had been no opportunity for immediate promotion, he might still be a lieutenant in the old ship-of-the-line. And on that very first convoy, if Colquhoun had sent him back to English Harbour instead of going himself, would he have ever succeeded in proving to be more than average

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