Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

The ‘dear thing’ was the Lady Georgina Rossendale, but I did not go straight down to her, preferring to stay a few more seconds with Sister Felicity. “Is everything all right here, Nanny?”

“With God’s blessing it will be. The diocese is always talking about selling the house, and I could see why they’d want to because it must be worth a wee fortune, but so far, thank God, they haven’t done it. But if they do, Johnny, we’ll just pick up our skirts and find somewhere else. Don’t you worry yourself.”

“And Georgina?”

“On her good days she misses Stowey.” Felicity made a small gesture of resignation. “Not that she has many good days, but when she does I sometimes think her understanding is just beneath the surface, like a bubble that only needs a little nudge if it’s going to burst, but then she falls away again. Poor thing. But she’s never any trouble, never at all. She’ll be glad to see you.”

I went down to the terrace, but it was not one of Georgina’s good days. At first I was not even sure that she recognised me. She was placid, smiling softly, and gentle. I told her about Sunflower , and perhaps she understood some of what I said, for she pointed out to sea where a slew of yachts were catching the tide before turning north towards Guernsey. Lunch was brought to the terrace on trays and I gently fed Georgina and mopped up her spills.

I left her in mid-afternoon. I climbed the steps, and only then did I learn that Georgina had remembered me, for, just before I would have disappeared behind the screen of bushes, she called my name. “Johnny? Johnny?”

I went back to her. “My love?”

She was crying. She was crying very softly, but the tears were flowing in copious and silent misery. She reached desperately for my hand. “I want to go home.”

“Are you unhappy?”

“I miss you.”

“Nanny’s here,” I said, then, in case Georgina had forgotten the nursery at Stowey, “Sister Felicity’s here.”

“She’ll die! She’s going to die, Johnny, and I’ll be alone.”

“No, no, no.” I held her tight, and I cried because there was sweet sod all I could do. I held her for a long time. Dear God, I thought, but what misery lay in this girl’s madness? I remembered that the last time I had been with Georgina in this garden had been after our brother’s death. Did she, somewhere in her tangled mind, connect me with death? John, Earl of Stowey, death’s messenger? I held her tight.

When I relaxed my embrace to look into her face, I saw that she had gone back into her mysterious world of gentle nothingness. I kissed her cheeks and she smiled at me, remembering nothing of her desperate fears. She seemed happy again, but I was still crying.

I climbed the garden steps and let myself into the main house to seek out Sister Felicity, but a young nun told me Felicity had been ordered back to her bed. I thanked the girl, then pulled out all my small change which I put into the box beside the door. I wouldn’t need British coins again for a long while, maybe never.

“Behold a miracle! The Earl of Stowey is giving money to charity!” I turned, astonished, to see my twin sister Elizabeth coming from the convent office. Her husband, Lord Tredgarth, was two paces behind her. He nodded at me with heavy disapproval, while Elizabeth just looked scornful. “I heard you had come to visit this morning,” she said, “but I hardly expected to find you still here.”

“I came to say goodbye.”

“You’re going somewhere?”

I shrugged. “Wherever.”

“Don’t let me stop you, brother.”

I didn’t move. The meeting, was unexpected and sudden, yet, despite Elizabeth’s rudeness, it seemed churlish just to walk away. I was also very curious about what had brought Elizabeth here. She looked very chic in a black summer dress and with her bright blonde hair cut expensively short. She wore a single row of pearls and had an expensive-looking handbag. Peter Tredgarth was certainly not paying for such baubles, and I wondered who was. She glared at me, expecting me to leave, but I stayed put as the silence stretched in the big cool hallway which smelt of wax polish and disinfectant. Lord Tredgarth was the first of the three of us to be embarrassed by the silence. “You found Georgina well, John?”

“No,” I said, “she’s frightened of the future.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, John,” Elizabeth snapped. “She’s half-witted, so how does she even know what the future is?”

“She’s frightened that Nanny will die and leave her alone.”

“There’s certainly no point in her looking to you for any security if that happens, is there? What have you ever done for her?”

“Loved her?”

“Don’t be impertinent. We’ve all loved Georgie. But some of us have to be practical as well.” She looked at her watch, then grimaced at my dirty jeans and unironed shirt. “Are you flying back to the mainland now?”

“No.”

“Then I needn’t offer you a lift to the airport.” She sounded relieved. “Come along, Peter.”

I frowned. “You mean you didn’t come here to visit Georgina?”

“I came here, brother, to make sure that her funds are still adequate. As I said, some of us try to be practical. There really isn’t any point in wasting our time by seeing her; she doesn’t know me from Catherine the Great, but that doesn’t prevent me from worrying about her welfare. Now come along, Peter, we have a taxi waiting.”

Her high heels cracked and snapped over the parquet floor. I moved into her path, making her stop and provoking a look of utter disdain.

An alarm bell had rung faintly in my head. I did not trust Elizabeth when she spoke of Georgina’s funds. Elizabeth is constantly short of money, made so by her husband’s ineptitude as a farmer and his failures as an investor. “Are Georgina’s funds adequate?” I asked her now.

“Entirely. You don’t have to worry. Not that you ever did. Now stand aside, please.”

“Tell me something,” I said on a pure impulse. “Did you send two men to kill me?”

Anger blazed in Elizabeth’s eyes. “Peter. If John doesn’t move out of my way, then kindly remove him for me.”

Her husband loomed closer. He’s a big and burly man, but everything he touches turns to disaster. “Piss off, Tredgarth,” I said nastily, and he fell back, as I’d known he would. “Did you send them?” I asked Elizabeth again.

She paused, summoning her artillery. “You are a fool, John,” she said eventually. “You behaved disgracefully at Mother’s funeral, and now you’re accusing me of planning your murder. Try not to be so utterly pathetic and ridiculous. I’m quite seriously worried about you. Clearly there’s a strain of lunacy in our family. Georgina has it, and now it seems quite likely you do too. No, I did not send any men to murder you. I sometimes wish I had. Is there any other crime of which you wish to accuse me? No? Good. So kindly get the hell out of my way.”

I got the hell out of her way. And I still didn’t understand what had happened in England, or why, or who had set it all in motion. I only knew that I had a boat waiting at St Helier and an ocean to cross. So, with the questions still unanswered, I found my rented bike and pedalled off to find the world.

At noon the next day a good west wind whipped me through the Passage du Fromveur between Ushant and the French mainland. I should have stood much further out to sea, passing Ushant well beyond the horizon and thus avoiding the heavy merchant traffic that thrashes round Finisterre, but I had a fancy to run the headland’s tides and, as my life was now once more governed by fancy, I stood inshore and let Sunflower have her head.

I had an ebbing spring tide in the passage so that we shot through at close to fifteen knots. The wind was brisk enough to shatter the waves on the rocks about the Kereon light. Seabirds screamed above the islands that were bright with gorse in the sunlight. Another British boat was shooting the passage with me, but, once he had cleared the Pierres Vertes cardinal buoy, he turned due south towards the Raz de Sein while I held west towards the open ocean. At dusk, looking back, I could see the brilliant sweep of Le Cre’ach Lighthouse marking my last sight of land. Lisbon next, I thought, and then I wondered why, and supposed it was because the first time I’d sailed away from Devon I’d made the Tagus my first port of call. I had no need to go there now. Instead, I decided, I would go straight for the Azores. I would sail into Horta and there, at those hospitable quays, meet the first sea-gypsies again. Such gypsies rarely ventured further north than the Azores, and few even went that far towards the cold latitudes, but I knew there would be a handful of weather-beaten boats and I’d hear the first tenuous strands of gossip from the world I’d temporarily deserted. Perhaps I’d find a crew who wanted to cross the Atlantic. Or perhaps I’d change my mind and go south, round Africa, to head up into the paradises of the Indian Ocean. Nothing mattered any more so, at a whim, I decided to skip Lisbon.