Free On a Making Tide by David Donachie

to Burnham Thorpe had tended to cause all the nephews and nieces to take on a single personality. According to his father, Horatio was the terrier of the bunch, as well as the runt, never content to let an older sibling hold sway. He had questioned in his letters the Rector’s notion of sending him to sea, which by its very nature was a hard, dangerous life. His brother-in-law had informed him that if anyone was inured to a world of rough andtumble, it was his third boy. The long-suffering cleric had tried and failed to calm the beast of transgression that lay within the child’s breast.
    The Captain smiled as he recalled the last lines of his final letter. It had been a warning, in some sense, to the Rector of the worst he might expect: ‘Let him come, and the first time we go into action, a cannonball may knock off his head and do for him at once.’ The smile evaporated as the recent memory of his nephew’s swollen face swam back into his mind. Given the state of him, it looked as though he might not survive long enough to face a day’s sailing, never mind a proper sea fight.
    ‘Mr Fonthill!’ he yelled. ‘If you please.’
    The first lieutenant, seated in the wardroom below the captain’s feet, heard the faint sound of his name through the deck beams. But he was the senior officer on the ship – barring the Captain – and with a proper sense of his place in the scale of things, he didn’t move until the officer of the watch sent a messenger to fetch him. He entered Captain Suckling’s day cabin with a degree of confidence, since the man behind the desk was not only his own patron but had a deep appreciation of his subordinate’s efficiency in running the ship. ‘Sir,’ he said, removing his hat in the required fashion.
    Fonthill was not received with the civility he had come to expect. He was subjected to a baleful look, and there was a rasping note in his superior’s voice. ‘What in the name of God has been going on in the mid’s berth, Fonthill? My nephew looks like he’s come off second best in a cockfight.’

    The Captain’s nephew looked aloft to the tiny platform called the top foremast cap, over a hundred feet in the air. The drawings he had studied had done nothing to show the dimensions of these great lengths of fir. Had Raisonable been at sea, he would have seen, several times a day, men make their way up to that place with an ease born of long habit. No sail could be set without it. So it was effortless, in a rational way, to look at the task as one that presaged no danger, a mode of thought an idle mind might contemplate when not required to do likewise. But rationality be damned: he was scared stiff.
    He knew he was being watched by the very people he had failed to name in the great cabin. Not all of them were ill disposed. But even those who sympathised with his plight would do nothing to aid him, fearing, as much as he did himself, the ridicule that must ensue from being thought soft. He was on his own, faced with a direct order he dare not disobey, required to go aloft by a route that was something of a mystery to him.
    Grabbing one of the taut lanyard ropes that held the shrouds, he jumped up on to the bulwark, his first thought to look down at the grey tidal waters of the Medway estuary. It was an unpleasant sight. Flotsam, the filth of the thousands of ships that used the Thames, had been brought up by the tide, and was drifting beside the warship. In a flash he saw his body floating among that nautical debris, a corpse that would, for years to come, be washed in and out by the continuous ebb and flow.
    ‘Take your time, Nelson. Never look down. Don’t try going up by the futtock shrouds, use the lubber’s hole. And always keep one hand clapped on.’ He turned at the soft voice, partly in response but more in mystification , only to elicit, for his pains, a harsh whisper: ‘Don’t look at me, in the name of Holy Christ.’
    Foley, sharp nose set dead ahead, went walking by,