Victory Page 4

  It was dark. The water was very black and it smelled dank, like a ditch. We were pushed down into the boat, to sit there in a huddle between the sailors taking their places at twelve big oars. A wind was picking up, and small waves smacked at the sides of the boat. The tossing was strange to me, for I had never been in a boat before in my life. We were pushed off from the jetty, and the boat lurched to and fro as the sailors raised their oars and waited for the order to row. There was a lantern swaying over the back of the boat, but we were in the front, in shadow. Will was near me; I noticed he took care to press himself against the side of the boat, well ahead of the first oarsman.

  Suddenly my uncle gave a great shriek from the other side of the mass of chained men. “A rat!” he howled. “I am bitten! There are rats in this boat!”

  There was a hubbub at once. Everyone fears rats. The other men began to shout and shift about. “Rats!” they cried. “Beware the rats!”

  The boat tossed from side to side, even though it was a broad, heavy thing, and the officer in charge shouted angrily. The marines in the boat thumped out at the men with their gunstocks to keep them still—though I noticed that even they peered warily round the bottom of the boat as they did so. In a while, there was a command—“Oars—ready—row!” The seamen began to pull, and gradually we moved out into the middle of the river, heading for the estuary where the great ships were at anchor.

  Will was no longer beside me. It was too dark for me to see where he had gone, so I curled myself into an unhappy lump on the bottom of the boat, and thought about my mother, and tried not to cry. I found out later that Will was no longer in the boat at all. In the moments while everyone was distracted by my uncle’s shriek, he had slipped over the side into the water. My uncle told me afterward that they had planned it together, whispering hastily in the only few minutes they could snatch. Unlike the rest of us, he said, Will could swim like an eel. He was the son of a fisherman and had grown up on and in the water every summer. He knew that if he had just an instant’s chance to get into the sea, he could dive down and swim silently away below the surface. So my uncle gave him his chance.

  The water was choppier as we headed out into the estuary. I grew more and more miserable as the boat tossed, and I felt sick. Before long I threw up in the bottom of the boat, and made my poor neighbors miserable too. I lay there curled up in a ball with my eyes shut, feeling gobs of seawater splash over me, and I clutched my arms round my shoulders and cried like a baby. I didn’t care who heard me. I wanted my mother, I wanted her arms round me, I wanted to be at home.

  By the time we reached the towering side of a great ship I could neither see nor hear what was happening, what with the rising and falling of our boat, which now seemed so small, and an enormous eerie sound overhead that was the whistling of the wind in the ropes of the ship’s rigging. One by one we were sent up the huge side of the ship, clinging to a kind of rope ladder; it was hard to catch hold of it from the tossing boat, and I would have fallen into the sea if my uncle had not been close behind me, helping.

  And once up on the deck of the ship there was no relief, nor any care for us, for we were herded down a narrow stairway into a miserable space where we were shut behind a grating, with about a dozen others who were there already. There they left us all night, with only a leather bucket of water and a panikin to share it with, and a basket of what was called bread but was biscuit hard as wood. If they counted us they must have noticed one was missing, which meant trouble for someone in charge. I hope it was the fat young officer, though I never saw him again.

  My uncle said to the sailor who locked us in, “What ship is this?”

  The man stared, then laughed. “Damme, what loons have they sent us? This is Captain Sutton’s ship, cully—HMS Victory.”

  Molly

  2006

  Molly is crying. Very quietly, so that nobody shall hear her. The tears run down her cheeks and drip from the sides of her chin, and once in a while she blows her nose. But she goes on crying. They are tears of hopelessness, shed for something that she knows she cannot change.

  She is homesick. She sits hunched on the window-seat of her pretty bedroom, specially decorated for her by Carl (not with his own hands, but on his orders) before she arrived. Its walls are pale yellow and its many bookshelves are white; it has a white wicker armchair and a beautiful ash-wood desk, and a roomy bed with a flowered quilt. On the two bedside tables are two lamps, their shades perched over the cheerful papier-mâché shapes of a high-collared Victorian gentleman and his demure wife. It is a picture-book room, much larger and more comfortable than her room in the London flat, and she is crying because she wants to leave it and cannot. She wants to go home, but home is no longer there, even though it is not here either.

  She misses England. She misses the grey streets and green parks of London; she misses her friends, and the neighbors who were so familiar even though they exchanged no more than a faint smile each day. She misses Grandad and Granny, and the red double-decker buses, and even her school uniform. She is overwhelmed by America, where everything seems bigger and louder and more confident, and she is terrified by the prospect of being launched into the seventh grade at the enormous local school in a month’s time. Part of the terror is due to the fact that Molly is epileptic.

  It is a very mild kind of epilepsy, an occasional short-circuiting in the brain, and she has had no symptoms for so long that the doctor thinks she has grown out of it. Molly is a perfectly normal girl, physically and mentally, but she knows that there have been times, now and again, when she has seemed to lose track of what is going on around her. Sally, her best friend, used to describe it as “going sideways.” She said once, “You get that vague look in your eyes. I can always tell—you don’t hear what I’m saying, you’re like some whizzbang genius solving a problem in her head. Only you aren’t a genius, you’re just old Moll going sideways.”

  Molly smiles at the remembered voice. She blows her nose, and decides to write Sally an e-mail. What will she do without Sally, and her other friends Jen and Naomi, when she is alone at this huge new school? Who will look out for her, and understand, if her face becomes vacant for a few minutes? They will all think she’s crazy, or a complete geek.

  She scrambles down from the window-seat, tosses several wet tissues into the wastepaper basket, and goes out into her little bathroom to splash water on her face. Here in Carl’s Connecticut house she has her very own bathroom, all white and yellow to match the bedroom, with a print of van Gogh’s sunflowers on the wall. It is somehow part of the same pattern as the big two-acre garden, with its swimming pool and tennis court; it’s too much, she doesn’t belong there. Though when she had described it to Sally, disparagingly, Sally had e-mailed back that she thought Molly must have died and gone to heaven.

  “Hey, Moll? Kate says there’s tea if you want it.” Russell is passing the open door of the bathroom. He thunders down the stairs, yelling “Hey, lunkhead!” at someone below, and Molly realizes with a sinking feeling that his friend Jack must be there again. Jack’s universe has no space for a much younger girl, except as an object for heavy-handed teasing. And she just plain doesn’t like Jack. Seeking some symbol of self-protection, she goes back into the bedroom and snatches up a couple of books.

  The prospect of teatime counterbalances the thought of Jack, so she goes downstairs to the kitchen, where the two boys are sitting on stools at the island counter drinking milk and wolfing chocolate chip cookies. Carl is not here; he has gone to Italy. Kate smiles at Molly. Without asking, she pours her a cup of tea and cuts her a piece of cake. It’s a very English cake: a fluffy sponge cake with raspberry jam sandwiched in the middle, and the top sprinkled with fine granular sugar. This kind of sugar is not sold in the United States, so Kate makes it by whirling regular sugar in her blender. For Molly.

  “Thanks, Mum.” Molly pours milk into her tea.

  “Let’s have a naice cup of tea,” says Jack, in an exaggerated parody of an English voice
.

  “You’ll never make the school play, Jack,” Kate says equably, though Molly knows she despises fake English accents.

  “It’s teataime,” says Jack, undeterred. He takes another cookie and grins at Kate. “You make delicious bickies, Mrs. Hibbert! Just soopah!”

  Kate appalls Molly by laughing at him. But Russell has noticed the expression on Molly’s face. He digs his elbow into Jack’s side. “Shut up, lunkhead.”

  Jack digs him in return, more forcibly. “What’s up with you, old chap? Two years over there did a number on you—you should have heard your Limey accent when you came back!”

  “We don’t have an accent,” Molly says flatly. “You do. It’s our language. It’s called English.”

  Jack crows with laughter. “Lah-di-dah!” he cries. “Lah-di-dah!” He slides off his stool and stands there, tall and chunky, mocking.

  Russell gets up hastily and heads for the door. “C’mon, Yank,” he says. “Time for a sail. Want to come, Molly?”

  “No!” Molly says.

  Kate looks at her.

  Molly says reluctantly, “No, thanks.”

  “Seven o’clock supper,” Kate says to Russell. “But not for the All-American as well, I’m afraid—I only have three lamb chops. Sorry, Jack.”

  Jack turns back to grin at her. He’s wearing jeans and a tank top, and his sun-reddened shoulders look enormous; he is on the high school football team, and proud of it. He leers at Kate flirtatiously, and this time he tries a terrible imitation of a Cockney accent. “Ooh, y’re an ’ard-’earted woman—” he starts.

  And Molly snaps.

  “Stop it!” she shrieks, and she flings one of her books at him. “Just stop it!”

  The book narrowly misses Jack’s head and hits the wall. He blinks, startled.

  Molly bursts into violent tears.

  “Moll—” Russell says unhappily, starting toward her, but Kate puts an arm round Molly and waves him away.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “Go off and sail. She’ll be all right.”

  Jack says in confusion, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay,” Kate says again. Now she has both arms round Molly, who is sobbing into her shoulder. “It’s not about you. Don’t worry.”

  Russell picks up the fallen book and puts it on the kitchen table, and the two boys go silently out of the kitchen like two big obedient baffled dogs.

  All Molly’s deep unhappiness has erupted out of her, like lava shooting out of a volcano. She is clutching her mother, shaken by great gut-wrenching sobs, making noises she has never in her life made before. She can’t stop. Kate lets her go on for a long time, holding her close, stroking her hair, but then she starts to soothe her, crooning to her as if she were a baby: “There, love, there . . .”

  Gradually Molly stops making the terrible deep noises and is merely crying. She raises her head; her face is all wet with tears and snot. “I want to go home,” she weeps. “Oh Mum, I want to go home.”

  Kate hands her a fistful of tissues. Molly blows her nose several times. They both know that what she wants is impossible.

  Kate says soberly, “Maybe I should never have married Carl.”

  “Oh no,” Molly says. “No. It’s not Carl. It’s just—”

  “I know,” Kate says. She pulls another tissue from the box, and dries Molly’s cheek. “We’ve turned your life upside-down. Nothing will ever be the same as it was.”

  A small husky sound comes from the baby monitor on the counter. It is Donald, upstairs, waking from his nap.

  Kate ignores it. She puts an arm across Molly’s shoulders, more lightly now. “I can remember crying like that,” she says. “Twice. Once, right after your father died. Then after that I had to concentrate on being a mum for you, comforting my little four-year-old who’d lost her Daddy, so for months I hung on and tried not to cry at all. But one night when I was going to bed I remembered it was our wedding anniversary, and I fell apart, I just howled, for half the night. I cried until there were no more tears in me. Because he was gone, gone, and he would never ever come back. Nothing would ever be the same again.”

  Molly clutches her hand, silently.

  The sounds from the baby monitor become a recognizable voice, complaining, insistent.

  “Come on,” says Kate. “He’s hungry.”

  “He’s always hungry,” Molly says, and they go upstairs. Donald crows with pleasure at the sight of Molly, wriggling about like a happy eel as she changes his diaper. Then he catches sight of Kate and bellows with hunger.

  Molly hovers, while Kate settles into the rocking chair to give him his bottle. The room is full of sunshine, with brightly colored alphabets running in a high border round the walls. Molly sits down on the floor. “Mum,” she says, “when Daddy died—I know it was a plane crash, but nobody ever talks about it. What happened?”

  Her mother looks down at her, across Donald’s small contented head. “It was one of those accidents that never get solved,” she says. “His newspaper had sent him to cover a story in North Africa, and he was on his way home. It was a normal commercial flight, but they hit bad weather and something went horribly wrong—nobody ever knew what, because they never found the plane’s black box that records all the details.”

  Molly says, “Was it terrorists?”

  “No. Not back then. It was an accident. Bad luck. Terrible luck for all the hundred and twenty-eight people on board—and all their families, like us. The plane fell into the sea just off the coast of Spain.”

  Molly’s head whirls for a moment. “Into the sea?”

  “You knew that,” Kate says.

  “No I didn’t!” In her head Molly is back in the ocean after her fall from Carl’s boat, spluttering in the water.

  “Well . . . yes. Into the sea. But they didn’t have time to drown, they must all have been killed instantly by the fall.”

  There is strain on Kate’s face; she is not enjoying the remembering. Molly suddenly feels amazingly tired.

  “I have such a headache,” she says.

  Kate’s face changes and becomes familiar again; it is full of concern, and then understanding. “You’ve had quite a day, my love,” she says. “Here, give me a kiss. Then go and lie down for a bit.”

  So Molly does. She lies on her bed thinking about an airplane falling into the sea, and then knows nothing until much later, when Kate wakes her up with a bowl of soup and a slice of apple pie, all on a tray as if she were an invalid. She has slept right through supper. She eats her soup and pie and is still tired, so she puts on her pajamas and brushes her teeth.

  Russell comes up the stairs just as she is heading back into her bedroom. “Hi, Moll,” he says. “Here’s your book.”

  He hands her the faded navy-blue Life of Nelson, which now looks much more battered than before. “Thanks,” Molly says. She sits down on her bed holding the book, looking down at its cover.

  Russell is hovering in the doorway. He says awkwardly, “I’m sorry about Jack. He shoots his mouth off. But I’ve known him since we were little kids, y’know?”

  Molly says, “I can’t believe I threw a book.”

  Russell grins. “Good thing you’re a lousy shot.”

  Their two years of learning to be brother and sister are rescuing them. The awkwardness goes out of the air. Looking at her book, Molly can see that it has suffered greatly from becoming a missile; its binding is split, and when she opens the front cover it hangs loose, no longer joined to the rest of the book.

  But there is something else there that she has not seen before.

  “See you tomorrow,” Russell says. He turns to go.

  Molly hasn’t heard him. “Look at this,” she says, peering.

  A new note in her voice makes Russell come into the room and look down over her shoulder. Inside the dangling front cover of The Life of Nelson is a piece of heavy paper which must always have been stuck to it, but which is now coming loose, and they can see that something is hidden under
neath it. Molly sticks her finger underneath the edge of the paper, and it starts to tear.

  “Wait a minute,” Russell says. “Use this.” He takes a penknife out of his pocket, opens the blade and hands it to her. Molly slips the blade under the page, and pushes it gently sideways. The ancient glue crackles and parts as the blade slides along, and the paper comes loose. At the back edge, it is still attached; they see that although it had been glued to the inside cover, it is the original first page of the book. And facing it, still stuck to the cover, is some brown paper folded over into a kind of loose envelope.

  Molly touches the brown paper with one finger, but does not open it. She peers at the cover. “There’s writing,” she says.

  Russell looks down at it, mildly interested. Below the folded paper there are some lines written on the cover in bold sprawling handwriting. Molly reads them aloud, slowly.

  “This fragment of the great man’s life and death passed on to me by my grandmother at her death in eighteen eighty-nine,” she reads. She stops.

  “Go on,” Russell says.

  “That’s all. Then a name, the man who wrote it, I suppose. Edward Austen.”

  “‘Fragment of the great man’s life and death’?” Russell says. “Weird. What’s in that little wrapper?”

  “The great man must be Lord Nelson,” Molly says. She looks at the folded brown paper, and is nervous of touching it. She feels suddenly that she is on the edge of some huge powerful thing or happening, though she cannot imagine what. But she knows that she has to investigate, or Russell’s inquiring hand will come down and do it for her. So she puts out a finger and lifts up the top flap.