Sinclair muttered his assent, while continuing the search. He was just about to give it up—the lurching and swaying of the vessel made it difficult to hold any image still—when he saw an open wagon rumble down a side alley, and two figures, one in yellow, one in a white apron, jump off its end and run toward the docks. With one hand, he held on to the railing and with the other trained the telescope on the running girls. The one in front was Eleanor, clutching her nurse’s hat, and Moira, holding her skirts up and away from her ankles, lumbered behind.
The Henry Wilson was now a hundred yards or more from the dock, and the flag flying from its stern obscured his view. But he could tell that the girls’ eyes were trained, and their steps directed, toward one of the other transports leaving the dock. Eleanor, he could see, had stopped a man in uniform, and after a few hasty words with him, she had taken Moira by the arm and turned her instead toward the dock from which the 17th Lancers’ ship had just departed.
The flag rippled and snapped in the gathering sea breeze, and Sinclair shouted to Rutherford, “They’re there! Coming toward the dock!”
Rutherford craned his neck over the bulwark railing, and Sinclair tucked the telescope under one arm and waved in wide, sweeping motions.
More sails cascaded down from the topmasts and the ship instantly pitched forward, gaining speed. The land was being left behind, and the people on it were being quickly reduced to specks.
Sinclair lifted the telescope one more time, and found the bright spot of yellow one last time. He willed her to look in his direction—she seemed to be staring toward the bulging sails for some reason—and just as the ship plunged into the first of the waves to skirt the breakwater, casting a mist of chilling spray over everyone on the decks, he thought she had indeed turned her green-eyed gaze toward him. Or at least he chose to think so.
The weeks that followed were the most miserable in Sinclair’s young life. He had enlisted in the army to ride for glory and, truth be told, for the chance to parade around town in the dashing uniform of a cavalryman, but not for this—not to be imprisoned in the stinking bowels of an overcrowded ship. Not to eat cold salt pork and mealy biscuits—once you were done plucking out all the weevils, there was nothing left but a handful of crumbs—day after day, and to spend night after night in a wretched, dark hold, fighting to keep his terrified horse from dying. He thought longingly of his London life, his card games and dog fights and evenings at the Salon d’Aphrodite. (Throwing Fitzroy through the window had become the stuff of regimental legend.) When the ship’s steward served him out his pitiful daily ration of rum, he thought of the fine port at the Longchamps Club, and cold champagne. When the first mate—a commoner, no less—upbraided him for smoking a cigar belowdecks, he thought of the rich humidor kept in the company barracks—not to mention the riding crop he would have liked to use on the man who had just dared to speak to him like that. The army, despite the occasional chafing he’d felt at its myriad rules and regulations, had served him well till then…but with every hour aboard the filthy, pitching vessel, something was changing in him. In his breast, he felt a growing resentment, a sense of having been cheated, misled.
He could see the spirits of his friends being dampened, too. Frenchie, once so quick to whistle a tune or make a joke, lay in his swaying hammock, green as a cricket pitch, clutching his stomach. Rutherford, ordinarily full of bluster and noise, spoke less confidently, when he spoke at all. Many of the others—Winslow, Martins, Cartwright, Mills—moved about the ship like ghosts, their faces ashen, their clothing soaked, and while the air on deck was undoubtedly fresher, there was the constant spectacle of dead horses—and increasingly men, too, who had fallen to dysentery, colic, or some other affliction—being dragged to the gunwales and tossed, like refuse from a dustbin, into the churning sea. A career in Her Majesty’s navy, now that he had been able to see it so closely, was something Sinclair could not fathom.