Free An Ill Wind by David Donachie Page A

observance of Sidey’s birthday and just as aware of why he had declined. Every attempt he had made in the last few days to catch hold of his wife and ask her what she meant by saying she had no idea of where she belonged had been thwarted by her insistence that she carry out her nursing duties; she was avoiding him, of course, but there was little he could do about it in such a crowded ship without making obvious to all and sundry the depth of their rift.
    The decks below were lined with cots full of the seriously wounded, others were fit enough to use hammocks like the crew. Where he was accommodated was not spacious, and in cutting off part of his own cabin for a post captain – Sidey was an elderly lieutenant, he being a man without the interest or patronage necessary to see him elevated in rank – that too was much constrained. No one, it seemed, had seen anything untoward in Emily taking quarters elsewhere, in a screened-off cabin near that of Lutyens; they saw her as a nurse, not his wife, and, besides, he was an invalid.
    When it came to nursing, the one man he had remaining from his ship, the ruffian Devenow, was a better attendant: it was he who had helped Ralph Barclay take the air the day after they weighed from Toulon, he who had caught hold of his collar when, reaching out a hand to steady himself against the roll of the ship, he had stuck out a stump and nearly fallen to his knees. How had he managed to forget his missingarm when the pain was a constant, occasionally relieved with a dose of laudanum?
    How would being a one-winged bird affect his career? That he did not know, though there were plenty of precedents of officers having suffered amputations going on to serve their full term. He knew he must see Admiral Hotham, the only senior patron he could rely on, for the one constant in the King’s Navy, just as it was in normal life, was the need for the application of interest, the ability to call upon the intercession of a powerful patron to help secure advancement.
    ‘How you farin’, your honour?’
    Devenow, a big man with a brutish face, had entered without knocking, and Ralph Barclay was about to damn him for insolence only to check himself: he needed this fellow to care for him so there was no sense in making him sullen.
    ‘I am in pain. Perhaps Mr Lutyens will spare me a little more tincture.’
    ‘I’ll see to it right off, your honour.’
    ‘Did you take part in the singing, Devenow?’
    ‘Me, your honour, sing?’ the sailor replied, with a smile that showed the gaps in his teeth. ‘I only sing when I is full of grog, as you know. I’ll see to that laudanum.’
    How did I end up being cared for by the likes of him? Ralph Barclay thought, as the door closed, showing how little he understood Devenow, a man he had caused to be seized up for a flogging more than once.A fellow who hoarded his grog until he had enough to get insensibly drunk, and a bully to boot who stole the grog off his messmates, or caused them to hand it over without protest at the implied threat of a beating, he inevitably sought to use his fists on those sent to restrain him. Yet he held no grudge against his captain: in a mind not much given to notions of fairness, he saw it as Ralph Barclay’s right to regularly flog, in the same way as he saw it as his right to get habitually and stupidly inebriated.
    Needless to say, in the copious notes Heinrich Lutyens had made regarding the odd habits of the lower-deck ratings, Devenow and his ilk, for he was not alone, occupied several pages.

CHAPTER SIX
    Ralph Barclay’s desire not to attend Captain Sidey’s feast was thwarted by the need to use the whole of the great cabin to accommodate his guests: the temporary bulkheads erected to form the convalescent cabin had to be struck down so that all the leaves of the dining table could be put in place. Though not by any means a wealthy man, Sidey was determined on a good spread, raiding those stores he had acquired in Italy, for