Victory

  They stare at Molly’s pale face.

  “Could she have fallen and hit her head?” the paramedic asks.

  “There wasn’t room,” Joe says. “Lord knows how she ever got in there without someone seeing.”

  “I should have looked,” Grandad says, anguished. “That second inside cabin—I didn’t look.”

  “You did look. We all looked. She was tucked away as if she was hiding.”

  “Does she have any medical condition?” The paramedic is taking Molly’s pulse again.

  “Some petit mal epilepsy when she was small, but not for years now. And this is different.”

  “Well, they can do an EEG—that would show it.” He looks down thoughtfully at Molly. “It’s like she’s in shock.”

  And that is what the doctor in the emergency ward at the hospital says too. She is puzzled. Everyone is puzzled. There is no sign of any physical damage whatsoever in Molly’s small body, but she seems to have retreated into impenetrable sleep. She is tucked into a hospital bed to be observed for the next twenty-four hours, with an intravenous drip in her arm, and electrodes on her head monitoring her brain.

  Grandad is in the waiting-room, trying to ignore a muttering television set. Joe Wilson sits beside him, to keep him company until Kate and Granny arrive.

  Joe says hesitantly, “Did you have a son called Charlie? Uncle Charlie, she kept saying, Uncle Charlie, as if something terrible had happened to him.”

  “She hasn’t got an uncle Charlie,” Grandad says. “My daughter is an only child, and Molly’s father had one sister who isn’t married. There isn’t even a family friend called Charlie.”

  “Oh.”

  They sit in silence, bent forward, elbows on knees.

  “Blood,” Grandad says at last, reluctantly. “Did you hear her say that?”

  “Three times, she said it. Slow, like.”

  The clock on the wall above them ticks, barely audible. The television squawks a commercial.

  “And that last thing, before she stopped talking. Did you hear that?”

  “I did indeed.”

  “Good boy, she said. Good boy. Maybe they have a dog at home.”

  “And then she said, The Admiral is dying.”

  “Yes. She did.”

  Carl is in his study, calling his travel agent to cancel the hastily booked ticket to London. Kate has just telephoned him again, incoherent with relief that Molly has been found unharmed. She has assured him that they will be home in a few days and that there is nothing he could usefully do by crossing the Atlantic.

  Russell is standing just inside the study door, fiddling unconsciously with the doorknob. It makes a regular squeaky rattling sound, like a rusty swing.

  Carl hangs up the phone and throws an eraser at him. “Stop twitching! Molly’s fine. They’ll be back next week—maybe sooner.”

  Russell still hovers, his face serious. Carl is suddenly reminded of the way he would hesitate on the brink of words when he was an earnest eight-year-old, trying to summon up the courage for some kind of confession.

  “Dad,” Russell says, and stops.

  “Well?”

  “Moll had some kind of breakdown, on HMS Victory? That’s Nelson’s ship, right?”

  Carl looks at him curiously. “Right.”

  “There’s this thing that happened,” Russell says. “I promised I wouldn’t tell, but maybe it’s . . . you remember she bought a book at Mystic Seaport?”

  And he tells Carl about Robert Southey’s The Life of Nelson, and about the finding of the piece of Nelson’s flag. They go to Molly’s bedroom and stare at the considerable collection of books on her shelves, and it turns out that Russell has paid more attention to Molly than she supposed.

  “All her really favorite books are on this shelf,” he says, peering close. “Yeah! Here it is!”

  And Carl finds himself faced with the astonishing little piece of cloth in its primitive envelope, and with 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.

  “Holy cow!” he says.

  Russell says unhappily, “I didn’t think too much about it—but Moll was knocked sideways, I remember. She made me swear to keep it a secret. I wish I’d told you and Kate.”

  “Loyalty is better than snitching,” Carl says. “Don’t worry about it. I’m glad you told me now, though.” He glances at Mr. Waterford’s card, which seems to be marking Molly’s place; then closes the book carefully and puts it back on the shelf.

  “You don’t think it’s the reason this thing has happened to Moll?”

  “No!” Carl says firmly. “Let’s go get lunch.”

  But late that night, he goes back alone to Molly’s room and takes down The Life of Nelson again. He has brought a magnifying glass with him, and he opens the book under the brightest light he can find. First he makes a note of the telephone number on Mr. Waterford’s card, and then he looks intently at the book’s remarkable inside page. He seems to be staring not at either of the two inscriptions, or even at the morsel of the flag, but at Emma Tenney’s signature.

  Donald has always been an amiable, cooperative baby. He is fast asleep in his stroller when Kate and Granny arrive with him at the hospital, and Granny keeps him in the waitingroom next to Joe Wilson, who has five grandchildren and is accustomed to babies. Grandad leads Kate down a buff-colored corridor to Molly’s room, and as they tiptoe through the door Molly opens her eyes and gives them a sleepy smile.

  “Hello, Mum,” she says, and Kate is across the room in a flash, taking her in as close an embrace as the IV line will allow, pressing a damp cheek against her daughter’s hair.

  “Thank God,” she says. “Oh Molly darling, thank God.”

  “I’m sorry,” Molly says. Over her mother’s shoulder her eyes meet Grandad’s, and he knows she is saying it to him as well. He comes closer, and when Kate finally lets her go, Molly reaches out her hand to him. He gives it a squeeze.

  “Do you remember what happened, Moll?” he says.

  “Not really,” Molly says. “Just waking up, and you being there. That was the good part.” Her eyes grow distant, as if she were looking at something a very long way away. “But it was so dark—and so much noise—”

  Kate says quickly, “Get some sleep, now. Don’t try to think about it. We’ll take you home to Highgate in the morning.”

  Grandad knows that they are faced with mystery, and that Kate and perhaps everyone will try not to press Molly to examine these few hours of her life during which she retreated from reality. He hears this in the voice of the doctor who admitted Molly to the hospital, who learns that Kate has arrived and comes to talk to them in the waiting-room before going off duty.

  “Has she been under a lot of stress recently?” inquires the doctor gently. She is very young, with short blond hair, and stern black-rimmed glasses designed—Grandad guesses—to add gravitas to a very pretty face.

  “We’ve moved to the United States,” Kate says. “It’s a big adjustment.”

  “When do you go back?”

  “In a few days.”

  “Well, this wasn’t any kind of seizure,” the doctor says. “Physically she is just fine. Emotionally, who knows? Just keep an eye on her, as I’m sure you would anyway. If there are any other puzzling incidents you might want to try psychotherapy.” She smiles at them, a conspiratorial English smile. “Plenty of therapists in America, I believe.”

  So all the conversation in Molly’s family is of stress and emotional pressure, as they put themselves into two hotel rooms which have been booked by a helpful officer from HMS Victory. Joe Wilson had urged them to come home with him instead, but Granny said firmly but gratefully that it would be unthinkable to present his wife unexpectedly with three strange adults and a small baby.
Joe Wilson, who has unlimited confidence in his wife, had looked disappointed.

  Now in the hotel Granny’s cell phone rings, and it is Carl, calling for a report on Molly. Granny tells him all is well and hands the phone to Kate.

  And Grandad, who will not allow space in his life either for cell phones or for computers, goes outside into the Portsmouth night for a solitary walk. The rain has stopped and the wind has died down, leaving a dark, damp summer night.

  Grandad walks slowly along the street, thinking of Molly’s desperate plea to stay in Britain; thinking of the rapt expression on her face as she first gazed at HMS Victory; thinking of certain other moments on board Nelson’s ship when perhaps she might have been hearing things that he did not hear. He thinks of Molly’s father, his lost son-in-law, and of the way he died. He thinks of his own days in the Royal Navy, long ago, and of nights at sea, alone under a dark sky filled with blazing stars, when he felt a curious kinship with other sailors on that same sea from years or centuries ago.

  And though he is appalled by the horror and grief Molly may have faced today, he thinks he can understand the mysterious four-hour vacancy that occurred in her consciousness. But he can hardly tell anybody, even his wife, that he believes his granddaughter may have witnessed the events of the Battle of Trafalgar, fought two hundred years ago.

  Molly is back in her little room at her grandparents’ house in Highgate, thinking about Sam Robbins. All day she has been very quiet, because she is in a stunned state of mind. When anyone has asked her questions about those hours on HMS Victory she has not properly told the truth—not even to Grandad. Although the whole thing is a painful blur, she is sure that she was feeling and hearing what Sam Robbins felt at Trafalgar. She does not think this was Sam’s doing, even though she is also becoming convinced that he has somehow been trying to reach her ever since she found his piece of the Victory’s flag—or perhaps even before that.

  She slips out of bed, pads over to the window and pulls the curtain open—carefully, so as not to make a noise. Through the zigzag pattern of the roofs around her she can see the night sky, brightened by the lights of London, with a few stars shining here and there. From the Victory, Sam would have seen a dark, dark sky with millions of stars.

  She thinks: he didn’t want me to have to see the battle, he tried to keep me away from it, but it was part of him so he couldn’t. Like Grandad said, Victory was a killing machine. But it was Sam’s new home and he loved it, because of Nelson. He loved Victory, and he loved the sea.

  “Good boy,” she says aloud, finding the words in her head, and she wonders what they mean.

  But one thing is clear as crystal in her mind now: she knows what she must do with Sam’s piece of the flag.

  She climbs back into bed and falls asleep.

  It is their last day in London, a warm sunny day. Kate is in her bedroom, packing, and Molly brings her an armful of clothes from her own room, where she has been emptying the drawers of the bureau.

  “Can I leave my sneakers here for next time?” she says.

  “Of course,” says Kate. She pauses, and looks at Molly, holding a sweater half-folded in her hands. She says, “Did this week make things worse instead of better?”

  “No!” Molly says. She wrinkles her nose. “Well, just for a bit it did. I even asked Grandad if they would adopt me so I could stay here.”

  “I know,” Kate says. She pauses, then gives Molly a wry grin. “I hope you’ve changed your mind.”

  “Mum!” says Molly. They look at each other across the open suitcase, these two survivors who know each other so well, and then Molly grins too. “I couldn’t let Donald have you all to himself,” she says.

  “I love you too,” Kate says. “Get out of here and make the most of your last day.”

  Molly goes downstairs. Granny is mowing the square of lawn behind the house, pushing the little whirring hand mower with contented precision. The sweet smell of mown grass drifts in through the open window.

  Grandad is in the big kitchen-dining-room making scones for tea. Molly wanders in and watches him placing neat dollops of raisin-studded white dough onto the baking sheet. “There!” he says, sliding them into the oven, and he sets the timer.

  Molly says, “Can we take some back with us tomorrow, if there’s any left?”

  “I made a double batch specially,” says Grandad. “Make sure they get eaten fast, though—they don’t keep for more than two days.” He pulls off his apron, tangling it as usual with the glasses that he wears on a string round his neck. “I have something else for you to take back, Moll. It’s over here.”

  He leads her to his big mahogany desk in a far corner of the room, and hands her a brown manila envelope. It isn’t sealed. Molly opens the flap and pulls out a framed photograph.

  “Oh!” she says. “It’s Daddy!”

  The picture shows a man squatting beside a tall model yacht, his hands raised to adjust its rigging. The water on which the yacht floats fills the whole background of the picture, as if it were the sea, and the man is looking back over his shoulder at the camera, laughing, saying words silenced forever by the click of the shutter.

  “Taken at the Round Pond.” Grandad says. “Seeing that boy there the other day reminded me. So I went though about six hundred pictures to find it, and had it enlarged for you.”

  Molly says, “It’s wonderful. Thank you, Grandad.” She puts her arms round his neck, and his beard bristles against her cheek.

  “You’re welcome,” he says, and kisses her. Then he moves her gently aside so that he can put his glasses on his nose. He picks up the photograph. “Take a look at this. I don’t remember noticing it before, but the enlargement has brought it up.”

  He points to the stern of the tall graceful boat, as the timer buzzes from the stove, and Molly sees that a name is written there.

  The yacht is called Victory.

  Sam

  JANUARY 1806

  The sound of the drums was like the beating of a great slow heart. Muffled drums, they were, with black cloth over them. Everything was muffled that day, even the grey clouded sky. All of England was mourning the death of one man, and all the people of London were out on the streets leading to St. Paul’s, and all the air filled with the slow beat of those drums and the unending slow march of thousands of feet.

  Ten thousand soldiers were marching in procession, before and behind us, in that long step that they keep for funerals, with the hesitation in it that breaks your heart. Marines were marching too, and the cavalry regiments trotting their horses slow, with a soft jingle of harness, and artillery with horses pulling the creaking gun carriages. Every man of us wore black stockings, with black crepe on our hats, and black ribbons hung from the horses’ heads. Over the beat of the drums, sometimes you would hear the wailing lament of a pipe band, like London weeping.

  And there were we, forty-eight of us from the crew of his flagship HMS Victory, walking in pairs: forty-eight seamen and marines, with the senior men up front carrying our poor flag, the tattered white ensign that had flown from the masthead at the Battle of Trafalgar and been shot through and through. The men held it up sometimes to show it to the people lining the streets, and some said you could hear a rustle like the sound of the sea as hundreds and hundreds of men took off their hats in respect. Me, all I could hear was the drums, and the feet, and the boom of the minute guns.

  Dozens of carriages creaked along behind us, drawn by more jingling horses, filled with noblemen and officers. Thirty-two admirals in full dress uniform there were at the Admiral’s funeral, and a hundred captains. There never was a funeral like it, not even for a king. The Prince of Wales rode in his crested carriage just in front of the funeral car, a long gun carriage made to look like our Victory, with high prow and stern, and a canopy swaying above our Admiral’s coffin.

  With music and high words the funeral service lasted for hours, inside St. Paul’s Cathedral. A great blaze of candles hung from the huge domed roof. At the very end, w
hen the coffin was to be lowered into the ground, we seamen had been told to fold our ensign in ceremony, and lay it on the top. But when Will Wilmet the bosun and three of the older men took up that shredded white cloth, Will gave a kind of sob—and suddenly all the men were reaching for our sad flag and it came apart, and they stuffed pieces of it into their jackets. And the coffin went down into the crypt, under the stone floor, forever.

  He was a good man, Wilmet. He gave me a scrap of the flag for my own, afterward, outside the Cathedral, when we were gathering to march back through the streets of London without our Admiral.

  “Here, young Sam,” he said. “Here’s a bit for you. Keep it till you die, and have it buried with you. Your own little bit of Nelson.”

  Molly

  IN CONNECTICUT

  Kate, Molly and Donald have been back in Connecticut for three days. It is dinnertime: a celebration dinner, because Russell has passed his driving test. Kate has bought a chocolate raspberry ice-cream cake and decorated it with a Matchbox Corvette and one candle. Everyone has second helpings of the cake except Donald, who rejects his first helping but manages to smear a large amount of it over his face, hands and hair.

  Russell says through a mouthful, “Jack would be pissed at missing this.”

  “Why isn’t he here?” says Molly, privately very glad that he is not.

  “He’s gone. His doomy parents have sent him to some military academy in Virginia, and their term starts early. Oh by the way, he left you this.”

  Russell gets up and unpins an envelope from the kitchen bulletin board. Molly opens it cautiously. Inside is a card with a picture of an immensely ugly dog which has just fallen on its back after tugging at its leash, and the legend SORRY I WAS SUCH A JERK. The signature reads: Until the next time—Jack Parker.