On a Making Tide Read Online Free Page B

visible in the gathering gloom as they ran under the gilded décor of the Victory ’sstern.
    Raisonable lacked the third deck that made Frears’s ship so impressive, yet up close she seemed even bigger. Horatio understood a fraction of what he was being told about her crossed yards and the standing rigging. That was partly through ignorance, but more because the knot of anxiety in his stomach made it difficult to concentrate. The rowers, pipes clamped firmly in their mouths, took their wherry deftly in a long arc, and swung it in expertly to touch against the platform at the bottom of the long, sloping gangway.
    ‘You will visit me, I hope, young man,’ said Frears, as a rope appeared andwas lashed to Horatio’s chest, which disappeared into the night air. ‘And pray be so good as to mention me to your uncle, Captain Suckling.’
    Horatio nodded to the older man and, with some assistance from the hard-faced Medway women, stepped over the counter from the bobbing boat on to the empty, floating platform. Climbing the gangway brought him to the entry port, which led on to a long, dark, deserted main deck spliced by two sets of open stairways that led aloft. From the bottom of the nearest he could see starlight, and ascending that he rejoined his chest where it had been dropped. The men who had hauled it aboard were nowhere to be seen.
    The upper deck was empty and Raisonable rocked gently, creaking and groaning. Occasionally someone would appear from a companionway and walk to another part of the ship, but they didn’t acknowledge him, and he was left to pace back and forth, once more shivering and a victim of the penetrating cold.
    Horatio wondered if he was forever to be a deserted soul in an unfamiliar landscape. Did the jolly tars he had been led to expect, the decorated fellows singing and dancing that were the stuff of naval legend, really exist? Was that image a myth? Could this be the reality? A cold, harsh, indifferent world that made him long for the comfort of home?
    A man emerged from a door aft. Looking at an hourglass he stepped towards the carved belfry that enclosed the ship’s bell, which he rang with little enthusiasm. Then he murmured, ‘All’s well.’
    ‘Excuse me, sir. I’m looking for Captain Suckling.’
    ‘He’s not ’ere,’ the man replied, as he turned to go back whence he had come. ‘Ain’t been aboard the last fortnight, an’ not like to be back this comin’ week.’
    He disappeared, and Horatio felt more bereft than ever. His father had told him the sea was a hard occupation, but nothing had prepared him for this. He sat on a pile of neatly coiled ropes and leant against the hard metal of a still-warm chimney, close to tears, until eventually his eyes fluttered and closed.
    The fitful dreaming that followed, continually interrupted by the bell, as well as the need to move around and keep warm, meant that when the drummer came on deck to herald the dawn, Horatio was fast asleep. The new midshipman lay crumpled in his cloak on the deck planking with his head on his hat. He slept through the long, soft drum roll that saw the sky turn from black to grey, jerked but remained still when the Port Admiral’s gun fired from distant Sheerness. The eight bells of the middle watch that summoned the crew failed to disturb him; the noise of the master at arms, rousing men from their hammocks, demanding that they ‘show a leg’, was muted by the wood of the deck. But the hard kick on the sole of his shoe woke him immediately.
    ‘Who the devil are you?’
    Horatio tried to stand up quickly, to respond to the officer, but his limbswere stiff. When he gained his feet, having stooped quickly to grab his falling hat, he was momentarily unsteady.
    ‘Are you drunk, sir?’
    The man who asked this was no older than Horatio’s brother, Maurice, but his tone and the way he held himself had an authority that belied a five-year difference.
    ‘No, sir,’ he protested weakly.
    One pair of bare feet