Sergeant Verity and the Blood Royal Read Online Free Page B

sponson, followed by the Mayor, the Recorder of Plymouth in wig and gown, and the city fathers with their address of welcome.
    In the crowd itself, every pocket spy-glass was trained on the Victoria and Albert. The Prince of Wales was not only on board but must show himself sooner or later. The young man's father, the Prince Consort, was also on board and might, perhaps, be glimpsed. It was said that Her Majesty, too, had come to see the eighteen-year-old heir to her throne on his way to the New World.
    The last of the evening sky faded, somewhere over the Cornish moors. Riding-lights and the oil-lit squares of open gun-ports illuminated the Channel fleet at anchor. On the royal yacht itself the grand saloon showed a curtained brilliance. Then the ornamental barge returned to shore with its cargo of dignitaries. The admiral's barge from HMS Hero crossed the harbour to the Victoria and Albert to take on its precious cargo and ferry him back to the towering hull of the flagship. The crowd began to drift from the Hoe and the ramparts of the Citadel. Late that night, the paddles of the royal yacht went astern, bearing the Prince Consort back to Osborne. In the dawn light, to the thunder of salutes from the Citadel and Mount Edgecumbe Park, the Hero put to sea under full sail and with smoke trailing from her black stumpy funnel. The ports were closed for safety over her ninety-one guns as she passed with her escort, the Ariadne, between the two lines of the Channel Squadron. Then, taking the lead, she remained at the head of the mighty fleet until the watchers on the ramparts saw that the last sails had dipped below the western horizon.
    The novelty was more than a passing wonder. Eighty-four years earlier the American colonies had won their freedom from the mother country in bitter battle. Now the young man who would one day be king of England was undertaking the first royal pilgrimage to the land which his great-grandfather had lost.
    Sergeant William Clarence Verity, of the Metropolitan Police Private-Clothes Detail, sat on his wooden travelling-box among the sooty brickwork and granite-rimmed breakwaters of Liverpool's Waterloo Docks. To one side of him, barefoot girls with dirty legs and women nursing babies at the breast, huddled with their shabbily dressed menfolk. The surplus population of England awaited shipment by steerage to the new cities of North America. At the opposite end of the quay, protected from proletarian intrusion by a pair of stalwart dockyard policemen, groups of gaily-dressed women in pink or turquoise silks, and spruce family men with trim whiskers, chattered and guffawed self-confidently. Many of them clutched little tins of 'The Sea-Sickness Remedy', thoughtfully purveyed by Thomas Thompson, chemist of Liverpool.
    Sergeant Verity, in rusty and threadbare frock-coat, shiny black trousers and tall stovepipe hat, glowered at them all. His pink moon of a face, black hair flattened and moustaches waxed for neatness, grew a shade redder with portly indignation.
    'It ain't right!' he said furiously. 'It ain't never right. And you know it, Mr Samson!'
    Sergeant Albert Samson, red-whiskered and pugilistic, turned his eyes reluctantly from those of a dark and dimpled pauper-girl with whom he seemed on the point of reaching a distant understanding.
    'There's a lot in this world ain't right, but what happens just the same, Mr Verity.'
    He spoke with the nonchalance of one unaccustomed to letting other men's troubles bow his spirit. Verity swung round on his lacquered box.
    ‘I saw it, Mr Samson! In Superintendent Gowry's office. It was signed "Albert", in the Prince Consort's own hand, plain as I sit 'ere! He chose me for guard to the young Prince of Wales for the American visit. Mr Samson, ‘e been gone a week, so have the rest! And 'ere I am!'
    'You was needed for the Volunteer Review in Hyde Park,' said Samson cheerily. 'The detail was short-handed as it was.'
    'Mr Inspector-bloody-Croaker!' said Verity