Free Winds of Folly by Seth Hunter Page B

nightly supper of toasted cheese.
    â€˜I think you like,’ the harlot crooned as her companions collapsed in hysterical laughter. ‘Spatch-a-Cock the Rat – with the bread sows. You take it away now, please, and if you like we make you another.’

Chapter Five
Night Attack

    N athan spent the night on deck, wrapped in his boat cloak. He was comforted by the thought that he would have been obliged to do so anyway, given the constant threat of attack. There were now up to a dozen privateers stalking the convoy, hoping for the opportunity to slip between the escorts in the darkness –
Inconstant
and
Meleager
to windward,
Unicorn
bringing up the rear, with the lumbering transports spread out across a mile or so of ocean. But it was never that dark at this time of the year, especially on such a clear, cloudless night. The sky was full of stars, the moon shining a rippling path to the west, and scarcely a breath of wind to fill the sails. They cast the log at regular intervals but their speed never attained more than two knots and one fathom. A sluggish but steady progress towards Cap Corse.
    Nathan sat in a canvas chair at the stern, hunched into the collar of his cloak, for even midsummer nights in the Mediterranean could be cool with the wind in the north. He was aware of a certain obstinacy in his manner, a dogged determination to suffer for his own perceived inadequacies. The first lieutenanthad graciously offered to give up his own cabin. The doctor, McLeish, less graciously offered him a cot in the sickbay. Nathan had declined them both. He did not see why others should be inconvenienced, he said, by his own exaggerated sense of honour – though honour was not what he privately called it. And because the Captain stayed on deck all night, so did most of his officers. Including the first lieutenant. Nathan appreciated the contrariness of this but decided there was nothing he could do about it. It was the way of the service.
    As the night wore on, his self-contempt ebbed a little and he began to feel a strange kind of content. Or perhaps there was nothing strange in it, for it was as beautiful a night as he could remember, and if you could forget the continuing vexations of courtesans, corsairs and the French, all seemed right with the world. The sails flapping lazily against the masts, the ropes creaking a little in the blocks. The ship riding easy on the gentle swell.
    And of course the stars. Nathan was tempted to climb into the tops and take his glass to them, but he felt too lethargic to make the effort – and despite the ingenuity of his cat’s cradle it was always a trial to hold the glass steady on a particular object in the night sky. Far more pleasant to just sit back and take in the whole panoply with the naked eye, especially as the master of
Inconstant
had the duty of navigating the convoy safely to San Fiorenzo. He had rarely seen such stars, so bright and so apparently close to hand, as if the topmasts were moving delicately through them, the
Unicorn
a starship gliding through the Milky Way.
    He wondered what Sara was doing now and whether she was gazing at the same celestial panoply. Perhaps she had reached England by now and had been reunited with her son Alex in Sussex.
    England. It was such a strange concept for him now, afterso long an absence. But when he thought about it, it was always the same little patch of it, the England of his childhood – and Alexander’s childhood now – an area of the south coast from the market town of Lewes to the village of Wilmington on his father’s estate, bounded on one side by the rolling hillocks of the South Downs and on the other by the sea. It was strange to think of Sara there, in the place he had grown up. Walking along the same woodland paths, climbing the Long Man, gazing out over the rolling Downland to the sea. He wished he was there with her, to be her guide. To show her the places he had roamed as a child, the