How Dark the Night (32 page)

“I remember she used to say to me in the evening, whenever I had been wrestling with a problem during the day, ‘It's off to bed with you, Richard. Things will be clearer in the morning after a good night's sleep. You'll see.'” He chuckled. “Fact is, she was usually right.”

“My mother used to say the same sort of thing,” Katherine mused. “Except, of course, to my father. Even though she knew it wouldn't do any good.”

“That's putting it mildly. When your father first realized my intentions toward you, it would have taken him more than a month of solid sleep to solve
this
problem.” He pointed at himself. “No colonial rebel for
his
daughter, thank you very much.”

Katherine smiled. “He had other plans for me, I admit. But in the end he came around. He actually came to like you.”

“He did, but only after I had walked through hell to prove myself to him.”

“No, that was not it. Father could be a cantankerous old cuss, but he
was
my father and he always had my best interests at heart. It took some doing and a few years of our being married, but when he realized how much I loved you and how very happy you had made me, he saw the wisdom of my choice. And then he began to view things a bit differently.”

Richard said nothing in response. During the early years of their relationship he had indeed had his trials with his father-in-law. But Katherine was right: in the end he had come to view things differently. Back in '99, when Katherine and Lizzy had sailed with their children to visit with both sets of parents for what would prove to be the last time, Capt. Henry Hardcastle, RN, had been the quintessential loving father and doting grandfather. Katherine had often talked with Richard about that voyage during their evening fireside ritual, as she had about many of the milestones of her life as a girl living in England and then as a married woman living in New England. Those hours of fond remembrance were the ones she enjoyed most each day.

At the moment, however, she was considering not the past but the future. “Richard, we need to talk,” she said, staring at the fire.

Although his heart almost stopped beating he managed a nonchalant response. “About what?”

“I believe you know,” she said.

He did know, or at least he suspected, what she had in mind simply by the gravity in her voice. She had broached this topic before, on two occasions, and each time he had cut her off before she could get very far into it. He downed a healthy swig of Bordeaux and sat there, waiting.

“I understand why you don't want to discuss this. Do you think
I
do? But there are things that need to be said and resolved, so please hear me out. We must face our worst thoughts and fears, Richard,” she said carefully. “The future is what it is for us all. We are
all
in God's hands. Each one of us is going to die at some point. It's the way of the world. We can only put our trust in God and in each other, and in the strength of what we mean to each other and the love we shall always have for each other. Denial does no good. I have tried it, and I assure you it does no good. We need to face this together, however much it may hurt to do so.”

“Katherine . . .”

“Hush, now. Let me finish. You have no doubt been thinking about how hard all this is on me. But
I
have been thinking about how hard it must be on you, and how hard it is going to be for our children. I have often thought about what I would do if our situations were reversed, if you were the one with this dreadful disease and I was the one left behind. Honestly, I don't know how I could go on. But somehow I would have to
find the strength to do it—for the many people who are near and dear to us, our children and grandchildren especially.”

She paused, then took up her glass and drained its contents. Richard poured her another round and one for himself, filling both glasses to the three-quarters level.

“Where is this leading us?” he asked quietly as he gently placed the empty bottle back on the table.

“I'm not sure,” she replied. “Perhaps to many places, eventually. The point for now is that we need to start talking more. We have been avoiding difficult discussions, and again, I understand why. But it's helpful to me to talk even if talking is painful and makes us sad or uncomfortable. More than anything I need to know that when I'm . . . gone . . . things will be in their proper place and that you will not be lonely.”

“How could I be lonely? I have family and friends all around me.
Our
family and friends, Katherine.”

“You know what I mean, Richard.”

So, Richard thought, it had come around full circle for a third time to the very subject he had refused to discuss before, and would refuse to discuss now. “I do know what you mean, Katherine,” he said evenly. “I know exactly what you mean, and I know exactly where you're going with this conversation. I will hear no more about it. As I have said before, I will discuss any topic you wish, at any time, except for that one. For that one the door is closed—and locked.”

“Richard,” she said hurriedly, “it's critical that I tell you that you have my blessing whatever may happen, whatever you may choose to do. I need you to understand that I would not love you any the less, that it would not diminish in any way what we have had together, what we will always mean to each other.”

“End of discussion!” he stated emphatically. He looked at her and said, his voice breaking, “You are my wife, Katherine. You are my
only
wife. For today
and
for tomorrow.”

“Till death us do part,” she said quietly.

“No,” he countered. “Till God in his infinite love and mercy sees fit to reunite us.”

“Amen,” she whispered, and closed her eyes to the night as the tears welled up.

Thirteen

The Atlantic Ocean

June 1808

W
ITHIN
the Cutler family there was considerable debate on the course
Falcon
should follow from Boston to Cape Town. If she were to optimize prevailing winds and ocean currents, there were essentially two alternatives. The first was to sail south to where the north-flowing Gulf Stream split in two off the coast of North Carolina north of the treacherous Diamond Shoals, and follow its more powerful southern track eastward across the Atlantic to West Africa. There
Falcon
could pick up two secondary southbound currents—one leading past the Azores, the other past the Canaries—to near the mouth of the Senegal River, where the great clockwise motion of the North Atlantic Gyro veered westward back across the Atlantic toward the Indies. The voyage from the Senegal to Cape Town would potentially be the most difficult leg because the schooner would likely encounter southeasterly headwinds in collusion with the counter-clockwise motion of the great South Atlantic Gyro.

The alternate route was to avoid the Gulf Stream and other northbound currents along the North and South American coasts and sail southward in mid-ocean until they reached the latitude of the southern coast of Brazil. From there a strong eastbound current—the southern loop of the South Atlantic Gyro—reinforced by prevailing easterly winds would take them swiftly on a direct line across the Atlantic to the southern tip of the African continent.

They would need to cross the equator on either route, and
Falcon
would be subjected to the doldrums, an area of low pressure in the
low latitudes where prevailing winds are calm. Sea stories told of vessels trapped in the doldrums for weeks on end, of sailors delirious with thirst and hunger driven to commit savage acts of cannibalism. When that source of food was depleted, they succumbed to the elements, their skeletal remains bleached white on the weather deck of a ghost ship adrift on the open sea. Hugh could only pray that
Falcon
would breeze through this unfavorable stretch of ocean without undue difficulty or delay. He could not imagine living with Jack Endicott in such conditions.

Not a sailor himself and having little interest in the business of sailing, Endicott left the decision of which route to follow to his captain. Hugh Hardcastle, in turn, had conferred with his brother-in-law and also with Agreen Crabtree, the only one among them who had made this voyage. Back in 1801 Agreen had conveyed Caleb and Will Cutler in
Falcon
to Cape Town and from there to Batavia, on the East Indian island of Java, where the Cutlers had been grandly accommodated by Jan Van der Heyden and the vast resources of C&E Enterprises' Far Eastern headquarters. From Java
Falcon
had sailed east across the Pacific Ocean, south around the raging Horn, and northward off the coasts of the Americas in a circumnavigation that was completed, according to those in the know in Boston, in near record time.

Agreen recommended that
Falcon
take the first alternative, effectively shadowing the route that he and Richard had followed to Gibraltar and Algiers back in 1789. Hugh agreed. During his tenure as a post captain attached to the Mediterranean Squadron he had rarely had occasion to cruise south of the Azores. Nevertheless, he understood from his years of study of Royal Navy logs and charts that the course Agreen was recommending had first been developed by Portuguese and Spanish mariners exploring the New World and had since been refined by mariners of many nations, including, most recently, Capt. Thomas Truxtun of the U.S. Navy.

Hugh set a departure date of May 1. He had pegged the distance from Boston to Cape Town at approximately 8,000 sea miles. At an average speed of 6 knots
Falcon
would make close to 150 miles per day—twice that amount on the best days, half that amount on the worst. Allowing one full day for reprovisioning in the Canary Islands and one full week as a hedge against the doldrums and other unforeseen difficulties, Hugh put
Falcon
in Cape Town Harbor a week before the target date of July 15. If Jack Endicott were delayed for any reason, Jan Van der Heyden would simply wait for him. Van der Heyden would be sailing an equally daunting distance from Java in
China
, the largest and most heavily armed ship in the C&E merchant fleet. According to Agreen, who had toured
China
in Batavia Harbor, she looked more like a Royal Navy ship of the line than a merchant vessel.

Six weeks prior to departure,
Falcon
's crew was hard at it. The yellow-hulled, double-topmast schooner had gone up on dry dock at the Benjamin Hallowell Shipyard in Boston, where she had originally been built, and in the process had had her bottom cleaned, her topmasts replaced, and her after cabin, normally the purview of her captain, reconfigured to accommodate a desk, a sofa, two wingback chairs, and a traditional bed for Jack Endicott, whose cabin this would be throughout the voyage. Hugh Hardcastle assigned himself the smaller albeit still comfortable first mate's cabin. Sturgis Haskins, first mate doubling as sailing master, and Paul Shipley, second mate doubling as de facto boatswain, were each assigned an even smaller cabin. A crew of twelve experienced seamen, divided equally into a two-watch bill, rounded out the muster roll. Four of these seamen, including Shipley, were well acquainted with the 9-pounder brass guns mounted on the schooner's weather deck, four to a side. Piracy loomed as a constant threat in most foreign waters, and Hugh Hardcastle was glad to have the guns. He would, he informed Haskins and Shipley, see them exercised each day during the Atlantic crossing.

A day before departure, the customs collector of Boston Harbor gave final clearance to Captain Hardcastle to sail wherever he wished because
Falcon
carried no cargo.

A
S YOUNG
Seaman Carlson strode studiously aft, doing his best imitation of a midshipman on the weather deck of a warship, he was unable to mask a grin. “Captain Hardcastle,” he announced, “Dougherty has spotted the peak of Mount Teide. She lies dead ahead, sir.
Dead ahead
,” he repeated meaningfully.

Hugh Hardcastle had heard the cry from aloft and understood its significance. If
Falcon
were anywhere close to the dead reckoning that he and Haskins had plotted on the charts since leaving Boston, their first sighting of land would be of the twelve-thousand-foot-high volcano on Tenerife, the largest of the seven islands in the Canary Archipelago two hundred miles off the West African coast. Despite his inbred Royal Navy stiff upper lip and his decades at sea, Hugh could not resist cracking a slight grin at hitting Mount Teide on the nose.

“Thank you, Carlson,” he said evenly. “Pray light below and inform Mr. Endicott. I should think he would enjoy seeing this.”

“Aye, Captain,” Carlson responded, turning smartly toward the hatch.

Presently Jack Endicott appeared on deck. Even after more than three weeks at sea he still dressed in business attire, although in these warmer climes he had left his dress coat and waistcoat below. Nonetheless, his meticulous coiffure and the quality and fit of his shoes, trousers, shirt, and silk stockings and neck stock bespoke a man who was far more comfortable in a countinghouse on land than in a vessel at sea. And yet, to Hugh's surprise and delight, Endicott had complained very little about the inconveniences and limitations of shipboard life, and he had just clambered up the companionway ladder without pause or grumble despite his considerable girth and nearly sixty years of age. What is more, Endicott freely made conversation with the two mates and with those members of the crew who were not too intimidated by him to speak, a boon that Hugh had not anticipated. He had even told Able Seaman Jeremiah Butler, the oldest and most seasoned member of the crew, that he considered Butler his equal because both men had reached the top of their chosen profession. Butler had responded to that magnanimous compliment with a blank stare.