Nelson’s last words, actually, were not the widely reported “Kiss me, Hardy,” addressed to Captain Thomas Hardy of the Victory, but rather, “Drink, drink .
With nearly nine hundred passengers on board, it was a sobering sound.Īs for me, I seem to be blessed with a natural immunity to the tossing seas: the result, I supposed, of seafaring ancestors such as Thaddeus de Luce, who, although only a lad at the Battle of Trafalgar, was said to have brought lemonade to the dying Admiral Nelson, and to have held his cold and clammy hand. We had encountered the remnants of a tropical hurricane, and now, for more than two days, had been tossed about like a cast-off cork.Įveryone except the captain and I-or so it seemed-had dragged themselves off to their bunks, so that the only sounds to be heard as one reeled along the pitching, rolling corridors to dinner were the groan of stressed steel and, behind closed doors on either side, the evacuation of scores of stomachs. It was like riding bareback on an enormous steel angel doing the breaststroke.Īlthough it was still early September, the sea was madness. and up out of the sea, climbing sickeningly toward the sky, then crashing down with a horrendous hollow booming, throwing out great white wings of water to port and starboard. Out here on the wild Atlantic, the Scythia’s bow was hauling itself up . Only the faithful family retainers, Dogger and Mrs. Mullet, would have shed a furtive tear at my departure, but even so, they, too, in time, would have only foggy memories of Flavia. Somewhere, a thousand miles behind us over the eastern horizon, lay the village of Bishop’s Lacey and Buckshaw, my former home, where my father, Colonel Haviland de Luce, and my sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, were most likely, at this very moment, getting on nicely with their lives as if I had never existed.
Scythia, my jaws wide open to the gale, hoping that the salt spray would wash the bad taste out of my mouth: the taste that was my life so far. I was standing at the heaving prow of the R.M.S. I shouted the word into the tearing wind, and the wind spat it back into my face. The very sound of it-like echoing iron gates crashing closed behind you like steel bolts being shot shut-makes your hair stand on end, doesn’t it? There is no sadder word in the English language.
“Banished!” the savage waves roared as they drenched me with freezing water. “Banished!” the wild wind shrieked as it tore at my face.
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