The Price of Glory by Seth Hunter

the cutters, with a quantity of marines and Bennett as their guide and translator, to make contact with the Chouans at Auray and report on the situation there. Since then, not a word. He anguished now that he had placed too much reliance on the American’s version of events in the town and that it might still be in Republican hands. But it was hard to know what else he could have done. He could hardly have gone charging up there with the whole squadron, not knowing what he might find at the end of it.
    He missed Tully, who made a perfect sounding board for his anxieties, though on this occasion there were certain of them he might wish to keep to himself for all Tully’s discretion. Certainly, in his own mind, Nathan knew he was shy of meeting with the Chouan leader, Charette, and thereby confirming without a shadow of doubt that the woman who fought by his side was Sara—
his
Sara. La Renarde.
    A sudden flash from out of the darkening sky, followed after a few moments by a clap of thunder. And now the rain came down in earnest, dancing upon the deck and churning the waters of the Gulf into a violent froth. Nathan turned from the rail.
    â€œI am going below to write up my journal,” he informed Lieutenant Balfour, for want of a better excuse, though neither excuse nor explanation were needed. “
I am going below to cut my throat,
” he might have said, and Balfour would have responded with the same indifferent nod, touching his hat.
    Yet even in the depths of his misery he could not help but wonder what was for breakfast and whether it would be long in coming. He raised his voice.
    â€œGabriel! Gilbert Gabriel there!”
    The presence loomed, never far from his side.
    â€œSir?”
    Gabriel had been his father’s servant when Nathan was a boy. He had taught him to load and fire his first fowling piece and tanned his hide on more than one occasion for some mischief considerably less ambitious than highway robbery.
    â€œWould you have another coffee on the go, Gabriel? And I believe I will have breakfast now rather than later.”
    Nathan turned guiltily away, not wishing to consider the negotiations that were sure to be involved in fulfilling such an outrageous request. Back in the privacy of Balfour’s cabin, he seated himself at the tiny desk, rolled back his cuff, and took up his pen:
    Friday, July 3rd. Rain.
    He stared at this startling revelation for some considerable time without adding to it. He felt like a schoolboy compelled to write some dreary composition. Verse was more appropriate to his present mood.
    Rain, tippling from the morning sky
    And drumming upon the taut canvas
    Of my vexéd mind
    As dimly I hear the vixen’s love-tortured cry …
    Love-tortured. No. Something else, something less maudlin yet expressive of sexual anguish and grief … He set it aside for future consideration and returned to the more mundane matter of his journal. Their lordships, who might one day read it, were not, as a general rule, enamoured of verse, not in a captain’s journal. Nor, so far as he was aware, of sexual anguish.
    Light wind NNW
.
    It was the duty of every officer in the service, above the rank of midshipman, to keep a record of their commission. Indeed, the lieutenants were obliged to satisfy their lordships, or at least their lordships’ underlings, that they had fulfilled their obligations in this regard, and have it attested by signature, before they were permitted to draw their pay. So the voyages of the
Unicorn
were documented severally beside the official version recorded in the ship’s log, which was kept by the ship’s master and tended to be less imaginative: though in truth imagination did not figure largely in any of them. Nor, as general rule, were they ever read. They were only read if something exceptional occurred, such as victory, or defeat, or mutiny. But then the journals were transformed from essays in banality to loaded weapons