"Alexander Kent - Bolitho 20 Darkening Sea Txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kent Alexander)

He stared at the sea and felt his left eye smart slightly. "Yes.

But we won, and now they say that but for our victory our main forces would have had to fall back from Martinique."

"But for you, Richard! You must never forget what you have done for your navy, your country."

He lowered his head and gently kissed her neck. "My tiger."

"Be certain of it!"

Ferguson's wife Grace, the housekeeper, came out to them and stood beaming with a tray of coffee. "I believed you would like it out here, m'lady."

She said, "Yes, that was thoughtful. The house seems extra busy today."

She reached out suddenly and gripped his hand. "Too many people, Richard. Demanding to see you, to ask for things, to wish you well. It is difficult to be alone even in our own house." Then she looked at him, a pulse beating quickly in her neck. "I have ached for you, wanted you in every way you dare to use me." She shook her head so that some of her loosely pinned hair fell across her face. "Is that so wicked?"

He took her hand tightly. "There is a small cove."

She raised her eyes to his.

"Our special place?" She studied him until her breathing became steadier. "Now?"

Ferguson found his wife by the stone table in the garden. She was looking at the coffee, which was untouched.

He said, "I heard horses..." He saw her expression and sat down at the table. "Pity to waste it." He reached out with his one arm and squeezed his wife's waist. It was hard to remember her as the thin, sickly girl she had been when Bolitho's press gang had caught him and Allday with some others.

"They've gone to find one another again." She touched his hair, her thoughts, like his, drifting, remembering.

Even down in the town they looked at her ladyship differently now. Once she had been the whore Sir Richard Bolitho had abandoned his wife for, who would turn any man's head with her beauty and her proud defiance. There would always be dislike and contempt from some, but the awe at what she had done and endured aboard the ill-fated Golden Plover and the squalor and the fight for survival she had shared with the others in that open boat had changed almost everything.

It was said that she had cut down one of the mutineers with her own Spanish comb when Bolitho's plan to retake the vessel had misfired.

Some women had tried to imagine what it would be like to share a small boat with the good and the bad, the desperate and the lustful when everything else seemed lost. The men watched her pass and imagined themselves alone with the vice-admiral's woman.

Grace Ferguson came out of her dreaming with a start. "It'll be lamb for tonight, Bryan." She was in charge once more. "And some of that Frenchie wine they both seem to like."

He looked at her with amusement. "Champagne, they call it, my dear."

As she made to hurry away to begin her preparations she paused and hugged him.

"I'll tell you one thing. They can be no happier than we've been in spite of all th' devils that plagued us!"

Ferguson stared after her. Even now, she could still surprise him.

TWO

A Very Honourable Man

Bryan Ferguson reined his little trap to a halt and watched his friend as he stared down the lane towards the inn. The Stag's Head was pleasantly situated in the tiny hamlet of Fallowfield on the Helford River. It was almost dusk, but on this balmy June evening he could still see the glint of a stretch of the river through a rank of tall trees, and the air was alive with late birdsong and the buzz of insects.