Second to None Read Online Free Page A

where there was only darkness now, except for Ferguson’s cottage. His lights would remain until the old house was asleep.
    He had been surprised by Lieutenant Galbraith’s request to join him at the church; he had never met Richard Bolithoas far as Adam knew. But even in
Unrivalled
he had felt it. Something lost. Something shared.
    He wondered if Catherine was able to sleep. He had pleaded with her to stay, but she had insisted on accompanying Nancy back to her house on the adjoining estate.
    He stood, and looked at the stairway where she had said farewell. Without the veil she had looked strained and tired. And beautiful.
    â€˜It would be a bad beginning – for you, Adam. If we stayed here together there would be food for rumour. I would spare you that!’ She had spoken so forcefully that he had felt her pain, the anguish which she had tried to contain in the church and afterwards.
    She had looked around this same room. Remembering. ‘You have your new ship, Adam, so this must be your new beginning. I shall watch over matters here in Falmouth. It is yours now.
Yours by right
.’ Again, she had spoken as if to emphasise what she herself had already foreseen.
    He walked abruptly to the big family Bible, on the table where it had always lain. He had gone through it several times; it contained the history of a seafaring family, a roll of honour.
    He opened it at the page with great care, imagining the faces watching him, the portraits at his back and lining the stairway. A separate entry in the familiar, sweeping handwriting he had come to know, to love, in letters from his uncle, and in various log books and despatches when he had served him as a junior officer.
    Perhaps this was what troubled Catherine, the subject of his rights and his inheritance. The date was that upon which his surname of Pascoe had been changed to Bolitho. His uncle had written,
To the memory of my brother Hugh, Adam’s father, once lieutenant in His Britannic Majesty’s Navy, who died on 7th May 1795
.
    The Call of Duty was the Path to Glory
.
    His father, who had brought disgrace to this family, and who had left his son illegitimate.
    He closed the Bible and picked up a candlestick. The stair creaked as he passed the portrait of Captain James Bolitho, who had lost an arm in India.
My grandfather.
Bryan Fergusonhad shown him how, if you stood in the right place and the daylight favoured you, you could see where the artist had overpainted the arm with a pinned-up, empty sleeve after his return home.
    The stair had protested that night when Zenoria had come down to find him weeping, unable to come to terms with the news that his uncle, Catherine, and Valentine Keen had been reported lost in the
Golden Plover.
And the madness which had followed; the love which he could not share. It was all contained, so much passion, so much grief, in this old house below Pendennis Castle.
    He pushed open the door and hesitated as if someone was watching. As if she might still be here.
    He strode across the room and opened the heavy curtains. There was a moon now, he could see the streaks of cloud passing swiftly across it like tattered banners.
    He turned and looked at the room, the bed, the candlelight playing over the two portraits, one of his uncle as a young captain, in the outdated coat with its white lapels which his wife Cheney had liked so much, and one of Cheney on the same wall, restored by Catherine after Belinda had thrown it aside.
    He held the candles closer to the third portrait, which Catherine had given to Richard after the
Golden Plover
disaster. Of herself, in the seamen’s clothing with which she had covered her body in the boat she had shared with the despairing survivors. ‘The other Catherine’, she had called it. The woman few had ever seen, he thought, apart from the man she had loved more than life itself. She must have paused here before leaving with Nancy; there was a smell of jasmine, like her skin