The French Admiral by Dewey Lambdin

voice. “She was fourteen, I was eleven. I already knew I was down for the sea, but I thought I had another year before they sent me.”
    â€œYou precocious young bastard!” Alan laughed. “Well, did you get into her mutton?”
    â€œNo, actually. Not for want of trying, though. And she was an amazingly obliging wench. So you see, I understand being sent off for something.”
    And now I am supposed to tell you all because you have shared a confidence with me, Alan thought, feeling weary and old for his tender years. Well, you’ll not get an admission from me, no matter how much I like you and trust you.
    â€œMy father wanted me gone, David. I’ll not go into the reasons, but he never loved any of us, not once. To this day I am not sure what I did to finally displease him,” Alan lied glibly, “but displease him I did. And he packed me off to Portsmouth with Captain Bevan, Sir George’s flag captain, in the Impress Service then. I doubt I’m welcome back home.”
    â€œBut he supports you well enough. I know you have a yearly remittance, a pretty healthy one, near as good as mine,” David said. “That doesn’t sound too bad to me.”
    â€œDavid, do you love me?” Alan asked.
    â€œAye, I do, Alan. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had in the Navy, the best friend I’ve ever had, period.”
    â€œBelieve me that I hold the same fraternal regard for you as well, David,” Alan said, turning warm as he realized that he really did hold David Avery as his closest and merriest friend. “But what happened back in London is dead and gone, and there’s nothing to revive it. Nor do I care to. If you truly are my friend, please believe that it is nothing that I, or you, would be ashamed of, nothing to destroy a friendship.”
    â€œBut you don’t want to talk of it?” David sighed, partly in disappointment. “Well, there’s an end to it, then. I shan’t mention it again, or pry at you. And whatever passed between you and your father could never force me to lower my esteem for you.”
    â€œGod bless you, David. Perhaps in future, when it is truly of no consequence or I have sorted things out and made something of myself, I shall tell you one night.”
    â€œOver a half-dozen of good claret and two towheaded wenches.”
    â€œDone!”
    At 4:00 A . M ., the ship’s day officially began. Bosun’s pipes trilled the call for all hands, and the petty officers passed among the swaying hammocks, urging the men to wake and show a leg and form on deck. Pumps were rigged to draw up clean salt water to wash the decks, while the men rolled up their voluminous slop trousers above the knees and bent to the already pale timbers with holystones and “bibles” to scrub, sanding off any graying of the decks dried by tropical suns, raising up the dirt of the day before and sluicing it off into the scuppers, slowly abrading the deck a tiny bit thinner than the day before. However, wood was cheap and eventually, before they could ever wear enough away to harm the ship, Desperate would have been hulked long since or had her bottom fall away from rot and teredo worms.
    With the pumps stowed away once more, the men brought up their hammocks, each numbered and carried to its required place in the bulwark nettings, having been wrapped up tightly and passed through the ring measure so that all were as alike as milled dowels and would serve as a guard against splinters or musket shot during battle. The hands then stood to their guns, the eighteen 9-pounder cannon that were Desperate ’s main reason for existence, and the two short-ranged carronades on the fo’c’s’le and the swivel guns on the quarterdeck. As dawn broke they were ready for action against any foe that appeared.
    There was nothing in sight, not from the deck and not from aloft in the crosstrees of the masts. It might be halfway