When Nights Were Cold Read Online Free

that Catherine would not fight. She didn’t have the strength. Father loved her too much. And if Catherine had to stay here then I would also have to stay.
    Catherine was supposed to become a concert pianist and I had planned to follow my father’s example and become an explorer, though not, of course, in the Navy. I’m not sure why I had imagined that this would be palatable to my family since, in 1893, my father had been one of those who voted against women becoming fellows of the Royal Geographical Society. He had mentioned it many times and with pride but, because he was my father and seemed to love me, I took nothing personal from it. I was his favourite companion for trips to London Zoo and Kew Gardens. He liked to share his knowledge of plants, animals, insects and climate with me, but he never talked to Catherine or Mother about these things. When he referred to girls and ladies, I thought that he meant ones like Catherine and Mother and the ladies we knew in Dulwich, who liked to stay out of the sun and travel no further than each other’s at-homes. I didn’t think then that he included me.
    Father had been a real traveller when he was a captain in the Navy but now he was an invalid. He went to China when we were small and his ship was caught in a storm on the Yellow Sea. He told this story many times, never quite the same way twice, but I kept some version of it that I understood as truth. A sudden roll of the ship tipped four men overboard and my father was one of them. Afterwards, all he recalled was that he had been thinking of my sister and me, how strange it was that we were there in the morning cutting the tops off our boiled eggs, while he was already at night, fighting sky and sea. The three who went down with him drowned, but Father emerged near some piece of debris from the ship, hauled himself atop it and wrapped his arms around wooden struts that felt like table legs.
    At daybreak he was floating on a flat, emerald sea. His head was resting on his arms, which were blue from the cold, but he felt hot and tried to pull off his shirt. A small boat sailed towards him, and human voices screeched like herring gulls. A rope went round Father’s middle, tightened and pulled. In his hallucination he thought his rescuers were the three drowned sailors, come to collect him for the journey to the next world, but they were four cheerful fishermen from near Weihaiwei who wrapped him in nets for warmth and took him to the edge of the naval base. He fell unconscious and woke up later to find that he had gangrene from hypothermia and the surgeon had cut off part of his left foot and three fingers. He began to cough and, though he did not know it then, the damage to his lungs meant that the cough would stay with him for the rest of his life. Father was invalided out of the Navy and he came home, a smaller, weaker man who never liked to see his seafaring friends any more.
    He told me that he regretted clinging to the wreckage in the sea and that he only did so in the hope of rescuing his men.
    â€˜I let them perish, little Grace,’ he said. ‘And God made me survive in this hopeless state for my sins. He is just, you see, but He is cruel.’ He held up the remains of his hands. ‘Anyone can look at me and know that I failed.’
    I didn’t like Father to say such things. He believed that God would not forgive him and he hated going to church on Sundays. He still attended, once a month or so, for the family reputation, but he said that God could not welcome him and it was hard. Sometimes I imagined myself diving into the water to rescue the sailors, swooping deep, somehow holding the collars of three of them in one hand, then using my other arm to swim quickly away and deliver them to my father so that the world could call him a hero.
    Father walked a little, but his left foot was no more than a stump and he had pains that shot up his legs and made him gasp. He sat in his study,