On we sailed, all this while; all through that day and the next, with the sea choppy and the wind sometimes fierce. We took our hammocks down to sleep in them, and then put them back again. At night, blue lights tossed on the horizon, and flares lit up the clouds; they were signals from the frigates, telling our Admiral that they still had the enemy ships in sight. And by the morning of October 21st, a warm hazy morning with the sun trying to shine, we saw them too. They had put out from Cadiz, on the west coast of Spain, not knowing that we were sailing up from the Strait of Gibraltar to catch them—twenty miles off the rocks of a cape called Trafalgar.
Now we were really sailing toward battle. Some of us were sailing toward death. I was not thinking about this when we were eating our breakfast, because for once we had neither the nasty burgoo nor our imitation coffee, but an issue of fresh bread, cheese, butter and beer. But Jonathan sat beside me, alternately sharpening his knife on a leather strop and using the knife to shred his hard lump of cheese.
“Young Sam,” he said, “if I go overboard, you are to take my kit for your own. Our messmates are my witness. The bag is strung up by that beam there.”
“Go overboard?” I said.
“There’s no nice ceremony in battle,” Jonathan said. “A dead man has to be flipped over the side, out of the way.” He looked at me with the nearest thing to a smile I had ever seen on his face. “But you will have to learn to play my pipe,” he said, “for I’ll not have it wasted.”
“And another thing,” said my uncle Charlie, on his other side. He pulled a ring off his finger, leaned past Jonathan and took hold of my hand. The only place the ring would fit was over my left thumb. “Take that to thine aunt, Sam, if need be,” he said. “With my love.”
I was getting really frightened, for the first time. Up on deck, drums were beating, and the bosun’s mates’ pipes rising in command. “I’m just as likely to get killed as you are,” I said.
“True,” Jonathan said. “But I have a feeling about that. I think you will come through. Here, sharpen your knife.” He tossed me the leather strop.
I heard myself say something that until now had been part of my private nightmares. “I’d rather be killed than have my arm or my leg cut off.”
“No you wouldn’t,” said Jonathan. “If Horatio Nelson can lead us all with one arm and one eye, anyone can do anything.” He tapped his mug of beer on the table and held it up to the other men, raising his voice, “To the Admiral, God bless him!”
“Bless him!” they rumbled—and then the pipes changed pitch to call us all up on deck. There was a rush to stow our things and hang up the table, and up we ran, to find the crew cheering. Out on the horizon was the long line of great ships of the French and Spanish fleet, and up in our rigging was a line of signal flags.
I could see Admiral Nelson on the quarterdeck, in his blue coat with all the bright stars and medals on it. He was looking up at the signal, and I think he was smiling.
I looked at the string of flags and said urgently to anyone who would listen, “What does it say?”
A big grizzled seaman beside me said, “He has signaled the fleet: England expects that every man will do his duty.”
And across the waves from the British ships sailing behind us came more cheers, clear and defiant, carried on the wind, carried into the teeth of the destruction that was waiting for us ahead.
Molly
ABOARD HMS VICTORY
Like a vast room the gundeck stretches before them, dimly lit by lanterns. There is more sense of space than Molly had expected. Great black cannons line the side of the ship, the nearest one higher than her head, and she can just make out the shapes of another row on the other side. There is wooden planking under her feet, and over her head. She sees wooden buckets, racks of cannonballs, coils of rope.
“Each of those balls weighs thirty-two pounds,” Grandad says. “These were the biggest guns, down here. When they were fired, the recoil sent them rushing backward to where we’re standing, hundreds of pounds of iron like a missile, and you had to keep clear or you’d be squashed. See those huge thick ropes threaded round each gun? They caught it when it recoiled, so that it wouldn’t go crashing backward right across the deck.”
Molly’s ears ring; for an instant she hears faraway thunder and feels a quivering under her feet. Then it is gone.
She says to Grandad, almost accusingly, “You’ve been here before.”
“I certainly have,” Grandad says. “I’m a devoted member of The Nelson Society—we know a lot about this old ship. So I’m your personal guide, Miss Molly, at least until we find my friend Joe. This is what they call a ‘freeflow’ day on Victory, when you can wander about alone instead of being part of a guided tour.”
Molly says, “That’s good. Tours are for tourists.”
“We’re not tourists?”
“Of course not. We belong.” And as she says it, she feels somehow that the ship agrees.
Grandad leads her up some ladderlike steps to the next deck. Again it is lined with cannons, poking their deadly noses out of the side of the ship through holes in square Plexiglas windows. Rain beats against the Plexiglas.
“Gunports,” says Grandad. “These guns are run out—that means they’re sticking out, ready to fire. But there was none of that glass in Nelson’s day. When the gunports were open, the rain came in, and the spray, and everyone was wet most of the time. This is the middle gundeck, twenty-four-pounders, twelve men to each gun. And that huge round wooden thing behind you is the capstan. It goes down to the deck below, and when the ship was about to set sail, two hundred and sixty men on the two decks pushed it around to wind up the anchor line. A marine beat a drum to keep them in time—heave . . . heave. . . . ”
Faintly in Molly’s head a drum beats, tapping out a tune she does not know, and yet thinks she has heard before. She is feeling very strange, as if another world were leaking into her own.
“So many guns,” she says.
“And more yet,” Grandad says. “This beautiful ship was a killing machine, I’m afraid. But look up there—it’s Nelson’s own cabin.”
And there it is ahead of them, through a polished doorway: the Great Cabin of the Admiral. But it is filled with a group of tourists, among them the two Americans from the train, and Molly hangs back. Grandad looks at her questioningly.
“No, thank you,” she says.
“Are you sure? It’s Nelson’s cabin—isn’t he your reason for being here?”
“Well, sort of,” Molly says. “But not just him.” She is looking at a notice on the wall. It says:
HMS VICTORY AFTER 157 YEARS OF SERVICE
WAS PLACED IN 1922 IN HER PRESENT
BERTH IN THE OLDEST DOCK IN THE
WORLD, AND RESTORED TO HER CONDITION
AS AT TRAFALGAR
She thinks: everything around me is just the way it was. . . .
Up they go again. Everywhere the steps are so steep that she cannot imagine what it was like to climb them when this ship was at sea. Now they are on the upper gundeck, the topmost of the three, lined on both sides with twelve-pounder cannon. All these guns give Molly a sense of foreboding; she tries not to look at them. She pays more attention to the hutches labeled FOR HENS AND ANIMALS, and the sick berth, where canvas cots with straw mattresses inside them hang from the beams overhead. On a table there are wooden bowls and mugs, and spoons made out of bone, all looking as if they were waiting for someone to come and use them.
At the front of the berth, three steps up, inside a door, she finds a special little toilet for the sick men. Watching, Grandad says, “All the healthy men had to go up into a very bouncy place called the heads, with holes in a plank hanging over the sea, and do their business there. Not much fun, eh? It was up this way—”
And he takes her up more steps to the forecastle, the outdoor deck high in the bow. Wind and rain lash at them, and they zip up their coats. The wind is humming in the rigging; the sound fills Molly’s head. She thinks: it’s
a sound there is no word for; it’s the sound Sam and Nelson heard.
The wind sings in from the other world, joining then and now.
Clutching their collars, they stumble the length of Victory’s deck toward the stern, past the towering mainmast, past the ship’s boats that look to Molly bigger and sturdier than Carl’s sailboat. Pointing upward, Grandad shouts in her ear, “That’s the poopdeck, where Nelson was standing when he was shot.”
Molly nods, but stays below the poopdeck, and finds the door to Captain Hardy’s cabin. When she read her book she liked the sound of Hardy, Nelson’s loyal friend who kissed him good-bye before he died. Inside the cabin, there is a plain cot right next to a twelve-pound cannon, and then an astonishing room looking as if it were in a town, not on board ship. There is a handsome leather-covered sofa and a shiny table, with two chairs with carved backs, and two with red velvet seats. Two English ladies in raincoats and plastic headscarves are gazing at them.
“Cor blimey, that’s posh, i’n’t it?” says one to the other.
“Must have been nailed down,” the second lady says.
Out they go to the windy deck again, Molly and Grandad, with the singing of the rigging all around them. The deck is almost empty. Grandad huddles himself into his coat; Molly gazes up at the towering masts. Before she left America she had copied out and learned by heart the older of the two inscriptions in the front of her book, Emma Tenney’s inscription:
This the most precious possession of my father Samuel Robbins, his piece of the flag of HMS Victory on which he served as a boy at Trafalgar. Given into my safekeeping as a girl, before his last voyage from which he did not return. May God bless my dear father and his Admiral. . . .
Remembering it, she knows now that she is trying to reach out to the boy Sam Robbins, to touch his hand in the past. And that he, for reasons of his own, is reaching out to her.
“Go in out of the wind, Grandad,” she says. “I won’t be a minute, I’ll catch up with you.”
Grandad looks at her doubtfully.
“Truly,” Molly says. The wind blows her hood across her face and she pulls it aside to peek at him. And since he is deeply concerned about her state of mind, and knows the necessity, sometimes, of solitude, he nods his head and goes to the hatchway leading below.
Molly stands there in the whipping rain, listening to the wind, seeking any feeling or hint of long-dead Sam, and wondering what he felt when he was here. She thinks too of her father, who fell out of the sky into the ocean, to die where Sam must have died on that last voyage from which he did not return. Misery flows into her mind, but she does not know whether it is brought by the cold rain or by her own condition of life.
The misery grows, it clutches at her. She finds a strange metallic taste in her mouth, and she is gripped by a wave of wretchedness so strong that she hears herself give a sharp groan. At the same time she thinks she hears an echo of a voice.
. . . Insolence! A bar in his mouth for three days! . . .
She looks round nervously, but there is nobody about to hear her, or the voice, if it was there; the rain is keeping them all belowdecks.
Then for an astonishing moment, as she looks up at the grey sky and sees the humming, singing ropes of the rigging, suddenly the sense of misery vanishes away and she feels a lightness, a joy simply at being on the ship. It is as if the strange sound were embracing her. There is an ominous quality to it, but it brings more pleasure than fear. She finds herself wishing that the ship were sailing; longing for it to break free from its last long home in Portsmouth Harbour and sail out into the waves.
She says experimentally to the air, “Sam?”
But of course there is no answer, and she goes to the hatchway and climbs down out of the rain, and finds Grandad waiting. When he sees her, he reaches out his arm to give her a hug.
Down they go again into the depths of the Victory, following the route marked out for visitors. Here and there, groups of tourists cluster around a guide posted to answer any questions they may have. On the upper gundeck, a sailor guide with a bald sun-browned head is pointing at a very long curved piece of wood: “This is the elmtree pump,” he is saying. “It would bring up twenty-five gallons of water a minute, for washing down the decks or fighting fire.”
For an instant Molly thinks she hears a big creaking sound, and the rhythmic whoosh of water—then it is gone, and she and Grandad are moving on past an older sailor who is telling another group, with gloomy relish, all about flogging and the making of a cat-o’-nine-tails. “Or if you were a boy,” he says, “they’d thrash you with a cane instead. You’d be bent over a cannon—that was called kissing the gunner’s daughter.”
Molly feels a flick of horror, and hurries Grandad back down to the middle gundeck, with the great capstan, and hammocks hanging between the guns. “A hundred and forty-two marines slept here,” another guide is telling a cluster of visitors.
Grandad says, “Here’s the cook’s galley, for their one hot meal of the day, about one o’clock. Two bells, in the middle watch. I forgot to tell you about bells.”
But Molly isn’t listening. Something is making her stare closely at the fire hearth and the tiled floor around it, and the big iron stove. Something here makes her feel close to Sam.
She lingers by the galley. It’s as if she can feel a blast of heat, smell strange smells, hear sounds of bubbling water . . . and voices. . . .
. . . Everything out of this galley comes straight back, or you get a thrashing. . . .
Grandad says, “Are you all right, Moll?”
“I’m fine,” she says with effort. “I’m fine.” But she is not fine at all; she is caught in a haunting.
She follows him down, down again to the lower gundeck, where she sees tables lowered between the cannons. They are set with wooden dishes and wooden spoons, and samples of ship’s bread, which are flat brown wheels looking as if they too were made of wood. There is a press of tourists down here; Molly can hear languages she thinks are French, German and Swedish, and others she cannot recognize. She feels oddly glad that they are there, as if they were a protection.
Grandad leads her down another set of ladderlike steps; the spaces are growing smaller, the ship darker. Something is making her drag her feet. Not yet, something is saying.
“This is the orlop,” Grandad says. “Funny word, isn’t it? Dutch—means ‘covering.’ It’s the last deck above the hold, and the grand magazine where they kept the gunpowder and shot. We’re below the waterline here, so the enemy couldn’t fire into the magazine and blow everybody up.”
Molly’s ears are singing, her eyes blurring; she sees a jumble of cables, of netting hung from walls, of swinging hammocks. She moves slowly through the murk, feeling as though someone were pushing her away, trying to keep her from coming down here; as though someone were trying to protect her from a peril or distress or pain. In the almost-dark, she finds herself looking down into a kind of pit, filled with barrels and black metal lumps lying on what looks remarkably like a stony beach.
She hears Grandad saying cheerfully, “We’re right at the bottom of the ship here—that’s ballast, in the hold. Pig iron and shingle. And stores of course, barrels of water and meat—and over here, come—”
She follows, slowly, blindly.
“—the grand magazine—see the copper on the walls, to keep the rats out. If they nibbled through and left a little trail of gunpowder—BOOM! Anyone who came down here was searched, to make sure he had nothing that could cause a spark. And the barrels of gunpowder are padded from each other by sheets of leather, look—”
A voice from the murk says hesitantly, “Commander Blake?”
Molly looks up in surprise; she has never heard Grandad called a commander before.
Grandad is grinning broadly. “Joe!” he says.
A sailor comes forward out of a dimly lit corner: an old grey-haired man, Molly sees, though perhaps not so old as Grandad. He is wearing the navy-blue uniform of the guides, and he is hold
ing out his right hand, and smiling.
“It was the voice,” he says, “I could never forget that voice,” and he seizes Grandad’s hand and starts to shake it. “I’ll be darned,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“I believe in surprises,” Grandad says cheerfully, and the two of them stand there shaking hands and beaming at each other until Molly thinks they will never stop.
Finally Grandad remembers her. “This is my granddaughter Molly,” he says. “Moll, this is my old friend Joe Wilson. Radio operator, retired.”
Joe Wilson reaches out to shake Molly’s hand too. Her hand disappears for a moment inside his, which is very large.
“I was in the Navy with your grandfather, a long time ago, Molly,” he says. “In the nineteen fifties, aboard a cruiser called HMS Bermuda.”
Grandad says, “Have you had any word of . . .” and they are off on a tennis game of reminiscence, these two old shipmates, digging out of their memories the names that have been buried there since their youth. Molly lets them go through Nobby Clark and Peely Robertson, but then she can no longer bear the anxiety that is growing inside her head. She has to get away. She touches Grandad’s arm.
“I’m just going up to the orlop deck again,” she says. “I shan’t be long.”
Joe Wilson says, “I’d come with you, but I’m on duty down here. To stop people falling into the hold.”
“Come straight back, sweetheart,” Grandad says.
“I will.”
“Look across from the top of the hatchway,” Joe Wilson says, “and you’ll see where Nelson died.”