unmovable, another sad testament to the fleet action now called Trafalgar. That one word was enough to convey all the horror, the pounding and the fire, which combined to create the most bittersweet of victories, with the well-nigh inconceivable loss of Vice Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson.
Had anyone been interested, Joe could have explained his reluctance to deliver David’s effects in person. It wasn’t because his second luff had done anything amiss, or behaved in any way unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. True, he was young, but weren’t we all, at some point?
Joe had done this sad duty many times before, whenever possible. He should have been inured to the tears, the sadness and the resentment, even, when a mother, father or wife had stared daggers at him, as if he was the author of their misery, and not Napoleon. Left to his own devices, Joe Everard would happily have served King and country patrolling the seven seas and engaging in no fleet actions whatsoever. He had never required a major, lengthy war to prove his manhood.
They were all puppets in the hands of Napoleon. Now that war had resumed, after the brief Peace of Amiens, Joe saw no shortcut to victory for years.
Something worse explained his reluctance for this distasteful duty, something Lord St Vincent, or as he had been then, Captain John Jervis, had described one night.
They had come off victorious in some fleet action or other—they tended to blur together—and Captain Jervis and his men were moping about in the wardroom. The wounded were tended and quiet, and the pumps in the bowels of the ship had finished their noisy job.
‘Look at us,’ Captain Jervis had remarked to his first lieutenant, an unfortunate fellow who died the following year at Camperdown. ‘There is nothing quite as daunting as the lethargy that victory brings.’
No doubt. Trafalgar, a victory as huge as anyone in the Royal Navy could ask for, dumped a full load of melancholy on Joe Everard’s usually capable shoulders. Why one man should die and another should not was a mystery for the ages, and not a trifling question for a mere post captain who had done his duty, as had every man aboard the HMS Ulysses, a forty-eight-gun frigate. He and his crew of well-trained stalwarts had babied the Ulysses through the storm the next day, limped into Torbay and remained there waiting a final diagnosis from the overworked shipwrights.
He and his officers had travelled from Torbay to Plymouth to sit in the Drake and drink. They talked, played whist and cursed the French until they were silent, spent and remarkably hung over. Joe couldn’t release anyone to return home to wives, but the wives could come to Plymouth.
More power to you, he thought, as he had listened to bedsprings creaking rhythmically and wished he had found the leisure, or perhaps the courage, to marry.
After a week, the verdict was a month to refurbish and repair in the Torquay docks. He released his officers to their homes for three weeks and cautiously gave his crew the glad tidings, wary that some might not return and truth to tell, hardly blaming them if they did not. His sailing master, a widower with children in Canada, had no objection to staying in Torquay for the repairs. Such a kindness gave Captain Joseph Everard no excuse to avoid the condolence visit to Weltby, Kent, where Second Lieutenant Newsome’s parents and one spinster sister resided.
Since England apparently still expected every man to do his duty, Joe sent a note to Augustus Newsome, explaining the reason for his visit and hoping he would not upset the family by returning their son’s belongings in person. He added a postscript stating when he could be expected in Weltby.
He chose to take the mail coach from Plymouth to Weltby, mainly because he enjoyed the sight of ordinary folk going about their business, almost as if the war raging at sea was happening on Mars. He could listen to idle chat and observe people not poised on the edge of danger possessed with that peculiar thin-faced, sharp-featured look that all men at war seemed to wear as a badge of office.
He hadn’t reckoned on the power of Trafalgar. Joe never thought of himself as a forbidding fellow, but truth to tell, an ordinary ride on the mail coach would have been a silent one. Maybe he did look like a man who had no wish to talk. God knows he had frightened a decade’s worth of midshipmen.
But Trafalgar had loosened people’s tongues and heightened their curiosity. If the spirits of the deceased hung around for a while, as Shakespeare claimed they did in Romeo and Juliet, Joe had to imagine Admiral Nelson would have enjoyed the praise heaped on him by England’s ordinary citizens.
Joe thought he might be troubled to talk about the battle recently waged that was still giving him sweating nightmares in December, but he wasn’t. The other wayfarers were genuinely interested in the contest of the British fleet against the combined forces of France and Spain.
They even wanted him to explain his ship’s role, which also surprised him, because the newspapers had sung the praises—well deserved—of Mars, Victory, Agamemnon and Ajax, ships of the line with stunning firepower.
But, no, they had questions about the service of the battle’s four frigates and he was flattered enough to explain the frigates’ role as repeaters on such a roiling scene, with smoke obscuring battle signals. ‘We read the flags and passed on the messages, where we could,’ he said. ‘It meant moving about and coming in close so other ships of war could read Nelson’s flags.’
It sounded simple enough, but the reality was timing movements and darting about to avoid obliteration, which nearly came when the French Achilles’s powder magazine exploded and rained fire on the deck of the much smaller Ulysses. That was when David Newsome died, struck by a flaming mast. Joe paused in his narration and bowed his head, which gave the old lady next to him silent permission to hold his hand, the first such gesture he had felt in years. No one ever touched the captain.
‘It was a battle never to be forgotten,’ he said, when he could speak. ‘Our foe fought valiantly, especially the Spanish, but I do not think Boney will beat us now.’
The old lady still held his hand and Joe didn’t mind. ‘Then hurrah, Captain,’ she said quietly. The other travellers nodded.
When she did release his hand, she looked with sympathy at his face. ‘Does it hurt?’ she asked.
Joe touched the plaster on his cheek that covered black stitches from a splinter that missed his eye by a quarter-inch. ‘A little,’ he said. ‘My Trafalgar souvenir.’
She rummaged in the bag at her feet and drew out a ceramic jar. ‘Goose grease,’ she said. ‘Rub it in at night. Won’t scar so bad.’ She smiled at him. ‘A handsome fellow like you doesn’t need a reminder of battle, does he?’
He took it with thanks and turned predictably red, grateful none of his officers was there to chuckle at their captain. ‘It’s not as though I could forget, ma’am, but if you say it will prevent scarring, I believe you.’
He wondered if a traveller would comment upon his mail-coach journey, since they seemed to be settling into a certain camaraderie he found endearing. Sure enough, a little boy posed the question, curious why he was in a mail coach. Didn’t the Royal Navy pay better than that?
The child’s embarrassed mother tried to shush her son, but Joe laughed. Since they were all so plain spoken and kind, he felt no distance from them.
‘It’s this way...your name...’
‘Tommy Ledbetter,’ the boy announced. ‘I am five.’
‘Tommy, I like to travel by mail coach,’ he said. ‘I like to
