“Well, that shows self-knowledge,” says Kate.
“Say thank you for me, Russ,” Molly says, because she knows that without obnoxious Jack, a great many things would not have happened.
“Okay,” Russell says. “Dad, can I have the car tonight?”
“No,” Carl says. “Today is cake. Don’t push your luck.”
Russell says, undeterred, “Well, how about tomorrow? I could drive us all to Mystic Seaport for that trip that got rained out.”
Tomorrow will be Saturday. “Sounds good to me,” Carl says.
“Count me out,” Kate says. “Donald’s going to a birthday party.”
“A party?” says Carl. “He’s eleven months old!”
“Everyone has a right to a social life,” Kate says.
“Moll? Want to come to Mystic?”
“Yes, please,” Molly says promptly. She longs to share her piece of flag with Mr. Waterford, and it surely shouldn’t be too difficult to slip away from Carl and Russell for half an hour.
But it is.
They drive to Mystic Seaport the next morning, with Russell at the wheel of Carl’s car, and Carl, beside him, trying hard not to offer advice, comment or criticism. Molly thinks she sees Carl close his eyes as Russell accelerates past a truck on the highway, but she can’t be sure.
They visit the ropewalk, which Molly finds oddly familiar even though she has never seen it before; they visit the cooper’s shop, the shipsmith’s forge, the sailing ship L.A.Dunton, the whaleship Charles W. Morgan and the tall ship Joseph Conrad. All the ships are considerably younger than HMS Victory, though Molly has the grace not to point this out. They eat lobster rolls for lunch at the Seaport café. Molly cannot escape. At length, even though they have already visited the Seaport’s own excellent bookshop, she says, “I really want to go back to that bookshop we found on the rainy day. D’you mind if I go?”
“Let’s do that!” Carl says enthusiastically.
“Sure!” says Russell. “That guy had some great magazines.”
They get to their feet, and Molly is still trapped. She can find no reason at all for telling them she wants to go alone.
So they all three troop off to SHIPS AND THE SEA, and there at his desk is Mr. Waterford, small and grey-haired, smiling as if he were expecting them. Perhaps he is.
Molly says, “Mr. Waterford? I’m Molly Jennings.”
“Hello, Molly,” Mr. Waterford says. He raises his gaze to include Carl and Russell, who loom very tall in the low doorway, and Carl puts out his hand.
“Carl Hibbert,” he says. “And Russell.”
“I remember,” Mr. Waterford says. “You’ve brought better weather with you this time.”
Russell makes a beeline for the sailing magazines, and Carl drifts off into the back room. When they are out of sight, Molly pulls her Life of Nelson out of the bag she has been clutching to her all this time.
Mr. Waterford looks at the book for a long time, peering first at the Edward Austen inscription and only then, with thin reverent fingers, unfolding the envelope to reveal the piece of the Victory’s flag and Emma Tenney’s beautiful earlier handwriting. This he studies very carefully indeed, through a magnifying glass, and then he sits back with a kind of sigh. He takes off his glasses, and Molly sees those arresting grey eyes again.
“Astonishing,” says Mr. Waterford. “Quite astonishing. The flag, yes, but also the story behind it.”
Molly says, “Samuel Robbins. Is there any way to find out more about him?”
The grey eyes contemplate her. “That’s the real reason you’re here, isn’t it, Molly? Not just to show the old bookseller your buried treasure.”
“Well,” Molly says. “Yes.”
Mr. Waterford smiles at her. He puts his glasses back on, opens a drawer in his desk and pulls out a slim file of papers. “I did a little research after you e-mailed me,” he says. “Look. Here is a list of the crew of HMS Victory at the time of Trafalgar—and here is Samuel Robbins. Classified as a ship’s boy, aged thirteen, from London. But that’s all anybody seems to know about him.”
“I know things,” Molly says. “I think I dream about him. It sounds crazy, but I sort of . . . hear things. Feelings, and words. Almost as if he’s calling to me.”
“Is that frightening?” Mr. Waterford asks.
“No—no, not at all. Only when he showed me frightening things—and that wasn’t his fault, I think he tried not to.” She stops, nervous that he will merely smile tolerantly, an adult listening to the imaginings of a child.
But Mr. Waterford is nodding, slowly. He picks up the book, cradling its spine in one hand as if he were judging its weight. He says, “One of the nicest things about being an antiquarian bookseller is the detective work you can do. This edition of Southey was published in London in eighteen hundred and ninety-seven. Sometime after that, Edward Austen must have bought this copy, and inside the front cover he stuck this homemade envelope. And wrote underneath it—” He looks down, putting his glasses back on—“This fragment of the great man’s life and death passed on to me by my grandmother at her death in eighteen eighty-nine. That means he’d had the piece of the flag for at least eight years before he stuck it in the book. I wonder what made him hide it then—and hide it so thoroughly, sticking it down behind the endpaper of the book. Almost as if someone had told him to. So that it would be waiting.”
Molly is only half listening now; she is not interested in Edward Austen, she only cares about Samuel Robbins. “And his grandmother Emma Tenney,” she says, “she was Sam Robbins’s daughter. When he grew up, he was her dad.”
Mr. Waterford looks at her over his glasses for a moment, and there is a frowning crease between his eyebrows, as in a teacher contemplating a student who is failing to learn.
He puts The Life of Nelson on his desk and bends his angled desk lamp down to shine on the unfolded envelope that holds the piece of Nelson’s flag. He nudges the fragment of cloth aside to reveal the signature written there. Then he gets down from his chair and beckons Molly.
“Come and look at this name. Through the glass. It might help explain why Edward Austen and you both chose this book.”
It is a high, narrow chair, like a stool; Molly hauls herself up. Mr. Waterford puts his magnifying glass into her hand. He says, “Emma Tenney, you said? But look at the long tail of that first letter—and at the rest of the word—”
“Emma Jennings,” Molly says, reading. She hears what she has said, and peers closer through the glass. “Not Emma Tenney. Emma Jennings.”
“Like Molly Jennings,” Russell says. He has come up behind Molly and is standing there quietly, looking over her shoulder. Molly half-turns, taken aback, but she is too involved in the matter of Emma to pay him attention.
Mr. Waterford says, “Suppose Emma Jennings had a son and a daughter. The daughter married a Mr. Austen, and had Edward Austen. The son would have had children named Jennings, and those who were boys would also have had children named Jennings. Suppose one of their descendants was your father.”
Molly’s face is a mixture of astonishment and delight and doubt. “Is that true? Could it be?”
Carl says, “Probably.” He has come close while Molly was intent at the desk; he stands beside Mr. Waterford, towering over him.
“How do you know?”
“I made a phone call,” Carl says. “I called your dad’s father—your other grandfather.”
“The one in Australia?” Molly’s voice comes out in an incredulous squeak. She has never met her father’s father; all she knows about him is that he left his wife and two small children one day long ago, sailed to Australia and never came back.
“Steve Jennings,” Carl says. “Lives in Perth. Old and weird and doesn’t like talking. But once he figured out I was harmless, he did admit there was a family story that his great-great-great-grandfather had fought at the Battle of Trafalgar.”
He is looking at her, this tall confident stepfather, with a kind of nervous hopefulness, like a dog
who has brought some well-meant offering but is prepared for rejection. Molly looks round at Russell and sees the same uncertain expression on his face too.
“You knew all this before I came back,” she says to them both, and to Mr. Waterford. “You all talked to each other, but you didn’t tell me.”
Carl says, “You had such a hell of a week over there. I thought you had enough to cope with.”
Molly thinks about this for a moment. Then she slips down from Mr. Waterford’s stool-chair, puts her arms round Carl’s waist as far as they will reach, and presses her head against his chest for a long moment. Only Russell can see the loving relief on Carl’s face.
“We’re all guilty of secret-breaking,” Carl says. “Russ told me about your book, your mom gave me the phone number . . . we were worried, Moll.”
“I know,” Molly says. She takes her head out of his chest and looks at Russell.
“Fink,” she says.
“Sure,” says Russell cheerfully. “But how about it—you’re Samuel Robbins’s great-great-granddaughter! Or maybe a couple more greats in there.”
Molly nods her head slowly. Out of all the strange sensations she has had, over the past two weeks, what she is feeling now is perhaps the strangest. It is such a mixture of things; she cannot separate them out. Warmth. Release. Acceptance. Home. A hand reaching out, giving, asking. Perhaps two hands.
She says to Carl, “Do you think Daddy knew?”
“Well, he didn’t know about Sam Robbins,” Carl says. “Nobody did. But he did know the story about an ancestor fighting at Trafalgar—I remember the old man saying so on the phone. Gave little Paul a big kick, that, he said.”
“And that’s why Daddy called his yacht Victory,” Molly says.
“What yacht?” says Russell.
Molly says, “There’s a photograph—I haven’t shown you yet.” She sees in her mind her father standing beside his model boat, laughing at the camera. She wonders whether he looked at all like Sam Robbins.
In a kind of reflex, her hands move to the desk and push the little piece of the Victory’s flag back, very gently, into its folded covering.
Mr. Waterford says, “There’s one thing I should remind you about—that little object is very valuable. I checked the price that the other piece of the flag went for, at that sale in London, and it was forty-six thousand pounds. That’s about eighty thousand dollars. With the inscriptions in your book as provenance, you’d probably get the same for this one, minus commission.”
“Wow!” Russell says.
“We couldn’t sell it!” Molly says in horror. “It belongs to Sam. It’s his bit of Nelson.”
She looks up at Carl and sees him nodding his head.
“You’re in charge,” he says. “Seems to me Sam Robbins gave it to you.”
Sam
1832
After our Admiral’s funeral and the last of our ship’s service in that war, we were released. So I could go ashore with what money I had owed to me, and I went first to my aunt Joan in Chatham. I gave her Uncle Charlie’s ring, that I had worn on the thumb of my left hand for her since Trafalgar. Poor lady, she missed my uncle sorely for the rest of her days.
Then from Chatham, I went home.
I should say in truth, I went back to what had once been my home. I had been gone for three years, and I was very different from the boy who had left. My mother said that when first I walked in the door, tall and sunburned, wearing a sailor’s short jacket and my hair tied back in a pigtail, she had no idea who I was.
“Until you smiled,” she said. “Then you were my Sam.”
And her face had lit up like a candlewick catching flame—and the little boy at her knee had taken one look at me and hidden his face in her lap. He was the baby she had had after I left. His name was Charlie.
Nothing in this life stays the same forever. My elder brother Dick had married, and was living with his wife in a cottage nearby. It was not much of a place, but good enough: put up for them by order of the bailiff, who was a good man and had put a new roof on our old house as well. The oldest of my little sisters, Mary, was working up at the great house, in the kitchens. Alice and Beth were still at home, and had grown into pretty girls I hardly recognized.
As for my father, he had had a terrible accident, from a plow horse rearing and kicking him in the head. He had a great scar on his forehead, and though he was still strong and able to work, he was silent and withdrawn—and much easier to live with. Strange, that a cruel accident should turn a fierce man gentle. I was glad of the effect, at any rate, because that made it easier for me to leave my mother again. We all knew that my home was not there with them anymore. My home was a ship at sea.
And so it has been from that day to this, as I put out once more now from Portsmouth, bound for Antigua in the Vagabond. As always I leave my heart behind, with my dear wife and daughter, and with my piece of my Admiral’s flag, that has been a part of me for so long and ever will be.
Remember that.
Remember that, if you will.
Molly
IN CONNECTICUT
“Grandad,” says Molly into the telephone, “what would have happened to Sam Robbins if he died at sea?”
There is a faint crackling pause from Highgate, where Grandad has by now learned the story of Sam’s piece of the flag. Then he says, “Well, if you aren’t a corpse tossed overboard in the thick of battle, burial at sea is very moving. Back in Sam’s time, the body of a dead seaman would have been sewn up in his hammock, probably by his friends, with a heavy chunk of shot at his feet. Then the ship’s company would be drawn up on deck and the captain would read the burial service from his prayerbook. And when he got to the line ‘We therefore commit his body to the deep,’ the plank that the dead man’s body was lying on would be tipped up so that he slid down into the sea.”
Molly can see this in her imagination as her grandfather describes it. She shivers at the splash and the sinking down, down, down into the sea, but she tries to remind herself that this is not a person Grandad is describing, but a dead body.
“Um,” she says.
As if he were reading her mind, Grandad’s faraway voice says, “Just remember that’s not Sam we’re talking about, just his leftover body. Funerals are really ceremonies to say good-bye to someone who isn’t there anymore. And to say thank you.”
There is another crackling pause, and he says, “Are you all right, sweetheart?”
“Yes, I am,” Molly says. “I really am.”
She says to her mother, “Did Daddy have a burial at sea?”
“No, love,” Kate says, startled. “We had a memorial service for him at St. Peter’s Church in Chelsea, where we were all living then. That was how we said good-bye to him. You were there, but I don’t think you understood what it was all about.”
Molly says, “I think I’d understand now.”
It has been a long sail, in a brisk wind. The sailboat is out beyond the tip of Montauk, tossing in the swells from the ocean. Puffy white clouds scurry across the sky.
Carl yells from the tiller, “Right around here, Moll. We’re out past the island—this is the Atlantic Ocean now.”
“Okay!” Molly calls back. She is crouched amidships, looking out over the gunwale. “Thank you!”
Carl turns the boat up into the wind, so that the mainsail flaps loudly, and Russell loosens the jib. There is an earsplitting rattling of canvas, and then suddenly, astonishingly, the wind drops for a few moments. The sails hang loose, and all you can hear is a faint breath in the rigging, and the smack of the waves against the side of the boat.
Molly takes a small plastic bag out of the inside pocket of her jacket, and her fingers slip inside it. They come out with the tiny piece of grey-white cloth that spent so long inside the cover of Robert Southey’s The Life of Nelson, Heinemann edition, London, 1897.
She says softly, “I commit Sam’s bit of Nelson to the deep.”
Holding the scrap of fabric between her fingerti
ps and thumb, she leans over the edge of the boat and lowers her hand into the water. And as the sea takes it, the scrap of cloth dissolves into a little dark cloud, like a ragged trail of dust, slipping away through the grey water, fading, until it is gone.
Molly says to the sea, “That’s for Sam Robbins, and for Daddy.”
Far off behind the slap of the waves against the boat she hears a faint echo of distant sound, like the roar of an airplane, like the boom of a gun.
Then the wind picks up again and the mainsail flaps loudly, demandingly. Carl calls from the tiller, “Okay?”
“Okay!” Molly calls back. She smiles at him.
“Let’s go home,” she says.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction, and the life of Samuel Robbins—like that of Molly Jennings—is entirely my own invention.
But there really was a Samuel Robbins on board HMS Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar: a ship’s boy, age thirteen. Every other member of the crew who appears in this story was a real person too; you can find them all listed at the Victory’s fascinating Web site, www.hms-victory.com, and amazingly detailed in The Men of HMS Victory at Trafalgar by John D. Clarke.
There are two wonderfully vivid books about the life Sam and his shipmates must have led, both written by former seamen: Sea Life in Nelson’s Time by John Masefield and Life in Nelson’s Navy by Dudley Pope. Among the many good biographies of Horatio Nelson himself, my favorites are those by Carola Oman, Christopher Hibbert, Tom Pocock and Ernle Bradford—and, of course, Robert Southey.
Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson did not live to be promoted to full admiral, but I have the assurance of a living rear-admiral of Her Majesty’s Navy that one may address any kind of admiral as “Admiral” after using his precise rank the first time. Sam Robbins’s encounters with Admiral Nelson are not historical; they came out of my imagination, and I loved writing them. Perhaps I wrote this whole book only for the chance of meeting one of my greatest heroes, just as I was lucky enough to meet Shakespeare in a book called King of Shadows and Merlin, long ago, in a sequence called The Dark Is Rising. Writers are fortunate people.