The Broken Sword by R. Mingo Sweeney

Author:R. Mingo Sweeney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Published: 2019-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

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Patrick MacQueen found himself a room near the east coast Naval College HMCS Kings. It was on the campus of Dalhousie University and impressive enough, with stone ionic pillars and a parade square out front; but it wasn’t a patch on the castle at Royal Roads. His new quarters were in a relatively modern little house, which was owned by a recently married couple who had converted the basement into a bedroom. He was lucky to get it, but he made them nervous by his very presence, and they were obsessively tidy. He had no guests, and he never once stepped into their little drawing room, where they seemed to spend every evening in front of a small fireplace. He would quietly go down the narrow stairway to the small bedroom and then they would stir and go to bed above him. They tolerated him merely for the rent.

In the early mornings, Patrick would board a crowded tramcar that clanged its way down Spring Garden Road and along Barrington Street. He got off just above the headquarters building, and walked downhill through a guarded side gate, had breakfast in a busy officer’s tearoom, and then went up to the office. The window looked down on the gate and up the hill. Like clockwork, the admiral would then descend the hill on foot for his daily constitutional, inevitably astounding sailors with his gold-braided cap and gold-topped cane. They would jump into the snowbanks and freeze at the salute as his one-man parade passed by. He had a ruddy, cheerful face and was weighted by many pressing problems, not the least of which was the German admiral at Brest, who had been poring over charts for hours.

Patrick often walked to Admiralty House for luncheon when things were slack. There were white table clothes and silver trophies, a billiard room, and a bar. Sub-lieutenants were usually relegated to a gun room, but here they were free to mingle with their betters, as long as they didn’t become a nuisance. One of the more colourful denizens of both these buildings was Commander Prentice, RCN, an Englishman who always wore a rimless monocle. One day, Patrick almost blundered into him in the hall between his office and the NCSO. The commander was stalking along the corridor and carrying a sword to preside at a court martial. Patrick was carrying an inkwell, to have it refilled. For a few brief seconds he thought that he was going to be eaten alive.

The actual captain of the dockyard had his offices in a square brick building situated near the main gate. It had angling stone steps; below was the parade square and the reviewing stand under the White Ensign, common to the navies of the old empire. The gunnery school was near this, and that is where the spit-and-polish existed, and where parades were held. Destroyers and corvettes and Bangor minesweepers were sometimes banked three deep at the jetties along the waterfront. They were the escorts of the Triangle Run from New York to St.

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