Rondo Allegro (40 page)

“He cannot have his dose until the watch bell, and that foot
bandage gets changed,” Mr. Gilchrist said, one thin hand pressed to his
bandaged ribs, several of which had been cracked by falling debris.

Anna’s memories of torturous thirst during the relentless
heat in Spain caused her to reflect that fever must feel very like, and what
could be the harm in drinking? “Then we shall declare the watch change now,”
she stated. “Since I hear no bells ringing.”

She made her way around the beds, not only dispensing
bandages and whisky-laced water, but trying to find a part of sheets or
blankets not damp, wiping a cool cloth over flushed faces, and listening to
fretful comments.

At the end, she groped her way to the stool set by the
hatch, directly under the swinging lantern. Mr. Bradshaw, lying nearby, reached
his fever-hot hand to take hers. She understood it was comfort he sought, the
unspoken comfort that could only be vouchsafed by touch.

“Would you tip us the foreign song?” he asked, seeing her
questioning gaze.

“Foreign song?” Anna repeated.

“The bird,” someone else said. “You sang it on us, in the
orlop.”

She protested, “I am very out of voice—out of practice.”

“Sing for us,” Mr. Bradshaw whispered. “We could have the
French ones again, if you haven’t a better.”

Anna had much better songs. She took a moment to hum her way
through a couple of scales, and began softly, to warm her voice further. Simple
tunes—“La marie et la mariée,” “Aucassin and Nicolette,” the lovely “Il
fantasma dell’opera,” and “Douce Dame Jolie.”

When she finished those, she looked around at her audience.
Some slept, lulled by melody into a semblance of peace, but the others had
turned her way, faces hungry for something that food, water, and medicine could
not give. She thought she understood those waiting eyes, casting her back in
memory to her early days, and how she longed for the heart-lift of song, so
beautiful, so powerful though it could not be touched and held.

This longing was what had motivated her to learn to sing.

Mr. Bradshaw tugged insistently at her hand. “The bird. He
said there was one about a bird. Please, mum.”

She had to brace her feet wide against the deck, but it felt
good to sing again, and better, it kept her from worrying about what she could
not help. And so she sang through the brighter, happier arias in
Magic Flute
until one by one they slept.

And then, though her entire body throbbed as she sat on that
uncomfortable stool, she leaned against the trunk lashed to the wall beside
her, folded her arms, and dozed fitfully until someone moaned and began
thrashing.

She jerked awake, and it was time to carry water around
again, and to tend bandages.

And so began a long, slow, unending nightmare. Time had
become meaningless, impossible to measure: it was experienced in a series of
images and expedients, emotions and snatches of nightmare-riddled dozes.

When the sick-berth was awake, they wanted song, and so Anna
sang. They were not the only ones. Unseen by Anna, those few who came, or were
sent, below-decks crept forward, drawn by the rise and fall of her beautiful
voice, a miracle amid the roaring maelstrom.

It lasted until the storm, in a final act of viciousness,
brought the foremast by the board. The crew chopped away like madmen lest the
spar with all its complication of yards and rigging should drag the ship over
and cause it to broach to. It wasn’t until the last of the tangle vanished in
an enormous green wave that the captain was discovered senseless, an axe still
gripped in his one good hand, caught by two crewmen before he could be swept
out to sea.

“He is in a coma,” Mr. Leuven said. “Put him in his cot.
He must be kept in darkness, and as quiet as can be, with as little movement as
can be.”

Numb with shock, Anna said, “I will tend him.”

Mr. Leuven glanced from her to Perkins, saying, “You must keep
him as still as ever you can. Violent movement, a sudden jar, can be mortal in
these cases.”

Anna stayed beside the captain’s cot for the remainder of
that dreadful voyage.

It was only a pair of days but time had long since lost its
sense of meaningful measure. They had lost sight of the rest of the fleet, but
steered for Gibraltar to discharge the load of prisoners. The tender, which
alone had sustained limited damage, was sent ahead to report, and to alert the
physicians there to the captain’s condition.

The exhausted officers and crew relieved one another
watch-on-watch so they could all get at least snatches of sleep, and the galley
fires were lit again so that the ship’s people could be fed properly, though
the stores diminished rapidly due to the addition of all those prisoners
stuffed down into the hold. At least they had plenty of clean water, for the
cook’s mates had set out rain barrels as the last of the storm swept overhead.

Once the seas had diminished enough for the regular ship
routine to resume, the officers of the watch suspended the holystoning of the
storm-scoured quarterdeck. The sailors used swabs to mop what was already clean
as nature could make it. Those who were required to stand on the quarterdeck
walked softly. Even the evening gun was no longer fired off.

Anna remained beside the captain’s cot, steadying it against
the sway, and reflected on how the universal expectation of a wife placed her
there. Should Anna Bernardo the opera singer have boarded the ship, the
expectations due a single woman would have been so different. It would have
been deemed inappropriate for an unmarried woman to nurse a man, even a man in
a coma.

Yet she was both women, and in her own mind, she was still
more the singer than the wife. What, really,
was
a wife? She no longer possessed the outer marks of a wife, the
ring, and—

She glanced at the captain’s face. It hurt to think of him
no longer living, and so she suspended thoughts of the future. There was enough
to think about now, she decided as Perkins brought her a meal on the captain’s
good silver plate. He would never have done that for a mere Miss.

When her eyes burned she steadied the cot against her
shoulders and tried to read. In desperation she finally made her way through
the novel she had begun so many times. Perkins came to relieve her through the
night watches, for which she was grateful. She woke herself before dawn and
dressed hastily in the cold air, so that Perkins could retire. As the second day
wore on, the ship rolling and creaking under fretful skies, she sat on a stool
and steadied the cot against her hip while she finished plaiting her hat, and
breathed for him, unconsciously pulling with her belly as if she could will him
to waken.

Late in the day she watched the wavering light patterns
across the low ceiling and curving bulkheads, reflections of sunlight off the
restless waters below the stern window, and observed his face. Where was his
essence? Had his spirit departed, leaving only this faintly breathing shell, or
did he lie helpless, locked somewhere below the surface, where dreams lived?

She still could not define her emotions: sorrow seemed to
hover just outside of perception, as if she could feel the beat of wings.
Absurd, she tried thinking. She scarcely knew the man. If he woke, he might
wish her away.

And yet there were the memories, so many sides to him: the
wounded man who laughed ruefully into her hair when she tried to find a place
to fit her elbows, the hot breath of pleasure, the cool commander on his
quarterdeck, looking up at rigging and the sky beyond as king over his wooden
kingdom. His strong hands, his eyes closed, as he and his quartet wove a
musical tapestry with the complicated patterns of Bach as the ship sailed on
and on.

She could not but wonder how much of that life would he
share with her, given his waking again.

But sometimes she held his hand, in hopes he could feel her
warmth; she waited for the slightest twitch or tug as evidence he was there
somewhere inside the slowly breathing body.

At last, at last, the lookout shouted “Land ho!”

Gibraltar had appeared on the wild horizon.

She still did not permit herself to believe them secure
until they had actually come into the harbor and the thunder of the anchor
being let down rumbled through the ship. Her relief at safety—relative
safety—so overwhelmed her that once again she could find expression only in music.
Softly, softly: it was the aria Paisiello had written for Lord Nelson so long
ago, sung from on high in that freshly painted palazzo.

She hummed, her heart so full that tears blurred her
eyelids.

She began softly, but gradually, inexorably, the tide of
emotion was too strong and she lifted her face and sang with all her power. She
was no Catalani—they did not hear her on the quay—but all through the ship the
hands paused, listening, and the prisoners being brought up were amazed by
light and air and the beautiful sound.

Unaware, Anna sang on.

Because she sang with her eyes closed, she never saw the
subtle movement beneath Duncannon’s eyelids, as at last his mind, drawn by the heart-lifting
aria, drew him up and up through the layers until he floated just below the
surface. He remembered that sound, the angels on high under the painted dome of
heaven, but this was the real angel, not a palace smelling of paint, with
officers shifting and sighing right behind. This was the promised heaven, a
realm of infinite peace, and he was alone with the angel, song, heart, spirit
perfectly in tune . . .

“The lieutenant wants you,” Parrette whispered voicelessly
from the cabin door

Anna stopped singing.

“They want us ashore before they bring out the wretches
locked below.” And, when Anna cast an uncertain glance at the captain, Parrette
murmured, “I shall sit with him. He is not going anywhere.”

Anna wiped her eyes, and got to her feet.

Suspended somewhere between memory and exaltation, he was
bereft. The angel was gone.

He sank down again into dreams.

o0o

Lieutenant Sayers had made the wardroom his temporary
headquarters.

He sat on a bench, his bad leg stretched out to rest on a
cheese of cannon wads. He steeled himself to ignore the ever-present throb of
pain from his ruined knee, an attitude only partly effective.

Tired as he was, he could not sleep well, partly from the
pain and partly from his anxious wait for Collingwood’s orders respecting the
Aglaea
. Promotion was fairly sure, at
least for all lieutenants who had been active in the battle (and had survived
it), but what was very unsure was a ship. There would be many more new captains
hungry for a commission.

As acting captain, he now had power over the ship, but with
it commensurate responsibility. That included attending on the flag the
afternoon of his arrival at Gibraltar, when the signal was raised for All
Captains.

At this meeting, he discovered the personalities behind the
shining epaulettes and the laced cocked hats; most he respected, though he grew
to dislike Harvey’s constant carping about the victory, and what he would have
done in this or that situation. Captain Fremantle muttered as Sayers climbed
down the ladder behind him to their waiting gigs below, “That fellow has
obviously never served in an action before Cadiz.”

Sayers did not know if Captain Fremantle meant to be
overheard, or if he forgot and thought that his old friend Captain Duncannon
was following him, so the new acting captain kept a prudent silence.

He also did so later that night, when he had himself rowed
ashore to execute business concerning the prisoners, where he overheard
captains muttering about Collingwood’s sometimes contradictory orders.

While he disliked very much the idea of climbing over Henry
Duncannon’s back, there was no arguing with the fact that the captain lay in
the cabin hovering between life and death, and therefore unable to command the
ship. Someone would have to take command, and Theophilus Sayers meant to be
that man if he could. That meant driving the crew to a peak of efficiency that
would impress the new C. in C. with his zeal.

All this was in his mind when the post was brought to him.
He had not expected much, as after all they had been brought post only a week
or two past. And it proved to be scarcely a dozen pieces of mail. But it was
his job to sort it and get it passed to its recipients . . . and
so he stared down at the last of the letters, his mind stumbling to a halt for
a time, until roused by the boatswain’s tweeting the hands to dinner.

Tucking the last letter under the ship’s log, he roused
himself to a new set of urgent tasks. He summoned his remaining midshipmen and
sent them flying off on errands, some clutching notes. He would mention the
letter to no one until he had his arrangements well in hand.

o0o

Anna and Perkins traded watches sitting by the captain’s
cot, keeping it as still as possible. He never stirred except for his slow,
shallow breathing.

Late that night, once Parrette had made certain that Anna
had hot water to wash, and a good meal inside her before she fell exhausted
into her cot, she joined her son in the after-cabin, where the great table had
sat empty ever since the captain’s injury. “Perkins says the captain is to be
moved to the shore. I am certain that Anna will go with him, and so shall I. Do
you come with us?” she asked in French.

“My duty is here.” Michel took hold of one of her hands. “I
am so glad to have found you again, Maman. But this is now my life.”

“You were forced into it,” Parrette said.

He shrugged. “I was forced to be a drummer boy, forced to
many things when the army crossed Europe.” His expression altered to hatred. “I
will never go back to France. Even if I did not have bad memories, however they
change the laws, I will still not likely have a right to my name.”