Free Tested by Fate by David Donachie Page A

had caught up and, to Herbert’s annoyance, Nelson offered his hand in place of Andrews’s to swing young Josiah.He hadn’t finished lecturing his guest about the ways of the plantation fraternity.
    “I fear you have vexed my uncle, sir,” said Fanny. Andrews had moved on, as politeness demanded, to walk beside Herbert. “You leave him in the company of enthusiastic youth, in which he finds scant comfort.”
    “I would not upset him for the world, Mrs Nisbet, only for you.”
    That reply lost some of its gallantry through Josiah’s insistence on continued swinging. But the look in the grey eyes told Nelson he had struck home, that if he chose to pay attention to her it wouldn’t be unwelcome. They chatted happily, assessing each other’s antecedents in a way that caused no offence. He mentioned his Walpole relations and his father’s clerical lineage, while she alluded to her connection to the Scottish Earldom of Moray. Her late husband, from a good Ayrshire family, had qualified as a doctor, though he found practice in Nevis hard due to his propensity to suffer from sunstroke.
    Their sparring reassured her suitor. Nelson knew that she would not have volunteered such information without at least a passing interest in some future connection between them.

    Lieutenant Ralph Millar put as much emphasis as he could into his latest set of objections, though it signified little to the recipient, his captain, lost as he was in the throes of yet another romantic attachment.
    “Sir, how can you even consider such matters when you are confined to your ship and in danger of being clapped in gaol should you step ashore?”
    To Millar’s mind, Nelson replied like a spoilt child. “There is a lady on Nevis to whom I can only communicate by letter, while I have to stay here in St John’s harbour to ensure that these damned planters do not humbug me with the first enterprising American trader.”
    His premier wanted to mention Mary Moutray, not six months gone from the islands, who had so affected his captain that he hadclaimed to be unable to breathe. But then he recalled the way Nelson had talked about Kate Andrews, when they had first become close enough to share intimacies. And he had heard from others, mutual acquaintances, of his attachment to the Saunders girl in Québec. He just had to conclude that his commanding officer was an incurable romantic, a slave to his passions, inclined to fall in love at the drop of a hat, never having succeeded enough in any of his suits to be exposed to the unhappy consequences of his actions.
    The troubles he had now outweighed anything he had faced before, with the entire Leeward Islands establishment combining to sue him in their own courts for the cost incurred in his enforcement of the Navigation Acts. They claimed the loss of £ 100,000, and demanded that Nelson make redress. Millar had offered to take on some of the responsibility, even though he was as poor as his captain, only to be rebuffed with a reminder that Nelson’s rank demanded that it was he who had to face them down.
    How he was going to do that, with few means, wasn’t clear. He couldn’t afford the lawyers necessary to defend himself and was at present confined to Boreas for fear of arrest if he stepped ashore. Yet with all that hanging over his head it was hard enough to get him even to consider the subject, so taken was he with the idea of matrimony and the occupants of Montpelier.
    “Herbert is a man after my own heart, Millar, able to go against the herd. He offered to post bail for me to the value of ten thousand pounds. Ain’t that the finest thing?”
    “Of course, sir,” said Millar, who had met Herbert and found him a fussy old goat. “But does that mean he sees you as a future relative by marriage?”
    Nelson frowned. “I cannot read him. One minute he is all encouragement, the next as cool as a glacier. I have no real certainty that he is not toying with me.”
    Millar had another vision of the