Free Second to None by Alexander Kent Page A

‘He knew, y’ see. When we went up on deck. He knew. I felt it.’
    She heard her brother by the door, and thought she saw Bryan Ferguson’s shadow motionless in a shaft of light. Sharing it. As they had every right.
    She found she was gripping his hand more tightly, and said, ‘I want you as my man again, John Allday. I’ll give you the love you need. I’ll help you!’
    But when he turned his face to hers there was no pain, no despair.
    He said, ‘I was with him to the end, love. Just like we always was, from the first broadside at the Saintes.’
    He seemed to realise that they were no longer alone. ‘I held him.’ He nodded slowly. Seeing it. Confronting it. ‘He said,
easy, old friend.
Just to me, like he always did.
No grief. We always knew.
’ He looked at her and smiled, perhaps trulyaware of her for the first time. ‘Then he died, an’ I was still holdin’ him.’
    She stood up and put her arms around him, sharing his loss, feeling such love for this one man.
    She murmured, ‘Let it go, John. Later we shall lie together. It’s all that matters now.’
    Allday held her for several minutes.
    Then he said, ‘Get the others, eh?’
    She shook him gently, embracing him, her heart too full for words.
    A life was gone. Hers was complete.
    Brush . . . brush . . . brush . . .
    Catherine, Lady Somervell, sat facing the tilted oval mirror, her hand rising and falling without conscious thought, her long hair spilling over one shoulder. In the candlelight it looked almost black, like silk, but she did not notice.
    The hour was late and beyond the windows the evening had darkened, the Thames revealed only by the light of an occasional lantern, a wherryman, or some sailor on his way to one of the riverside taverns.
    But here in the Walk, there were very few people, and the air was heavy, as if with storm. She saw the candles beside the mirror shiver and stared at the reflection of the bed behind her. There were far too many candles in the room; they were probably the cause of the stuffiness. But there were always too many, had been since that night of raw terror.
In this room. On that bed
. She had overcome it. But it had never left her.
    She continued to brush her hair, pausing only at the sound of a fast-moving carriage. But it did not slow or stop.
    She thought of the housekeeper, Mrs Tate, who was somewhere downstairs. Even she had changed her way of life since that night, when she had been visiting her sister in Shoreditch as had been her habit. Now she never left the house unattended, and watched over her with a tenderness Catherine had never suspected. And she had never once mentioned it. Her own thoughts had been too full, too chaotic in those first weeks after the attack. Even then it had been like witnessing the horrific violation of someone else, not herself. A stranger.
    Except on nights like these. Warm, even clammy, the thingown clinging to her body like another skin, despite the bath she had taken before coming upstairs.
    She hesitated, and then pulled open a drawer deliberately and took out the fan. Richard had given it to her after his ship had called at Madeira. So long ago.
    She looked at the diamond pendant which hung low on her breast. It, too, was shaped like a fan. So that she would not forget, he had said. The pendant the intruder had turned over in his fingers while she had been helpless, her wrists pinioned behind her. She looked involuntarily at the nearest window. He had used the cord. He had struck her, so that she had almost lost her senses, when she had called him a thief. Outraged, like a madman. And then he had begun to torment her, to strip her there, on that bed.
    She touched her breast and felt her heart beating against her hand. But not like then, or all those other times, when the memory had returned.
    And afterwards . . . The word seemed quite separate from her other