The Storm-Grey Sea

Chapter Four - The Dauntless

Author's note: I make mention of a ship called the Bellona here. Though there was a real Bellona, this is a fictional one. Not to worry, though, as there were often a lot of ships by the same name over the years as various ones were broken up, captured, or rechristened. Also: lots of naval details. Sorry, but I like ships.

Rosalind had occasion to be gloomy, and took it gladly. She was quite unlike herself, and had been for the past few days. Her father, having received news from the Admiralty the day after the ball, had gone to London that very day, and had been gone six days.

Not to mention that Rosalind's closest friend, Jane, had recently written to invite her to London but she, in the absence of her father and quite unable to ask his permission, had had to decline.

Furthermore, she'd received a rather hasty letter from Isaac the day before saying that he intended to call, but since the Dauntless was due to set sail in four days for the West Indies, he would soon leave for Plymouth and then the sea.

And that meant that she would not see him for at least two months. In the absence of her father, the impending departure of Isaac, and her inability to go see Jane, she was most despondent.

"Will you take dinner in the dining room, Miss Marlowe?" asked Berkely. It was mid-afternoon, and she was sitting in her father's study, at the window, gazing out rather dejectedly over the back garden.

"I shan't. I've no one to dine with, Berkely. I'll have a small supper of soup and bread in the parlour," she replied, and gave a sigh.

"Is there anything I can do for you, Miss?" he asked, and Rosalind could hear pity in his voice that she knew he would never have expressed before her father.

"Thank you, but no," she said, and dismissed him. Getting up, she pulled a book off one of her father's shelves, a thick naval text, leftover from her father's days as a midshipman, and began to flick through it.

She had read it many times, had impressed her father from a young age with her knowledge of seamanship. For a landlubber, she had an extensive knowledge of all matters naval - she could name any part of a ship, knew the command structures inside and out, and when she walked in the wind, always oriented her position in the gale by the points of sail.

When she was seven, the had entertained her father with this peculiar habit. On a brief shore leave when he was still Captain Marlowe, she stood on a bucket, raised her arms into the wind, holding her handkerchief, and turned in various directions, naming the points of sail as she postioned the handkerchief.

"Look, Papa! I've close hauled her on a starboard tack!"

He'd laughed and pronounced her quite the cleverest little girl he'd ever met, quite pleased that she eagerly learned anything about seamanship that he taught her, and even more thrilled when she taught herself even more.

So Rosalind, the book in hand, went to sit in the parlour. She sat cross-legged in a chair before the fire, for it was a chilly afternoon, flicking to a favourite page that held a diagram of a full-rigged ship, letting her eyes rove over the familiar illustration.

She read for hours, switching from the handbook of seamanship to one that she knew her own father had never read.

She opened Thomas Percival's Medical Ethics, and read with little enthusiasm, half-expecting Isaac to call, or perhaps one of her other friends - Queenie, or Maria, or perhaps even Emma, but no such visit came. She was left in silence and solitude, her only company the maid who came in to light the candles and Berkely, when he delivered her supper.

Rosalind, becoming increasingly dejected as the sky darkened. She sat by the window, staring out, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone who would afford her some company. Gazing out, she saw, far to the east, the lights of Westleigh on the hill, surrounded by its sloping lawns and woods.