Victory (19 page)

After Molly leaves him to take another look at the
orlop deck, this gradually becomes the worst day of Grandad's long and eventful life. When twenty minutes have gone by, he goes to look for her. He cannot find her amongst the groups of absorbed tourists, so he enlists the help of his friend Joe Wilson. Several other sailors join in too.

After an hour, Grandad becomes worried enough to call Granny and Kate to find out whether they have heard from Molly; they have not. The search goes on. After two hours he calls again, and this time tells them about Molly's startling request to stay in England as an adoptee of her grandparents.

After two and a half hours, he begins to panic, and he calls the police. By this time every sailor on the
Victory
is
quietly asking every visitor if they have seen a young girl of Molly's age and description, alone or with an adult. Joe Wilson is trying to pacify Grandad, who is distraught.

“She's got herself lost, that's what,” says Joe Wilson. “They'll find her.”

“She'd never leave the ship without me,” Grandad says.

“Well, maybe she got hungry. Youngsters do, you know. Maybe she went looking for a snack.”

Grandad says miserably, “Maybe she ran away.”

“Now why would she do that?”

“She's desperately homesick. She's only here on a visit—her mother married an American and moved her to the States. This morning she asked me if my wife and I would adopt her.”

“My word,” says Joe. “What's her stepfather like?”

“He's a very nice fellow,” says poor Grandad. “Molly just misses England. Where in the name of God has she got to?”

There are tears on Molly's face. Curled up in the darkness, she is caught in a grief that has come upon her from outside herself, swallowing her up, calling out echoes from the buried griefs of her own short life. Perhaps she is asleep; perhaps she is dreaming. She is so deep in misery, it is not clear even to her whether she is conscious.

A sailor guide approaches the half-door with a gaggle of tourists in tow. “This is the purser's daily issue room,” he says. “Those big tubs would be full of foods he'd give out to the men—flour, dried peas and so on. You can see flour
sacks lying on the floor beyond. That was the bread store.”

“Listen!” says one of the tourists. “What's that?”

The sailor falls silent, and hears the sounds of muffled sobbing from the cabin beyond. He swings his legs over the half-door, goes in, and stares down at Molly, astonished and distressed.

Carl says into the telephone, “Kate, darling, slow down. Take a deep breath. Start again, now. She's disappeared from
where
?”

He listens unhappily to his frantic wife at the other end of the line. He has never heard her so frightened, and he is overcome by a desperate need to put his arms around her.

“She asked him
what
?” he says.

The frightened voice pours out of the telephone. Carl listens, frowning, thinking.

“I'm coming over,” he says. “I'll get the first flight I can find. Hang in there, Katie. We'll find her. Call my cell the minute you hear anything. I'll be with you tomorrow. I love you.”

He puts down the telephone and goes to look for Russell.

When the sailors carry Molly out of the inner cabin, and Grandad and Joe Wilson come rushing to her, it is still hard to tell whether or not she is conscious. Slumped on the deck with Grandad's arms around her, she murmurs odd words, and her eyes open and then close again. Somebody has
called an ambulance, and before long there is a great commotion out on the dockfront and two large young paramedics come clattering down the ladder steps with a stretcher. Through the wind and the rain, Molly makes a dramatic exit from HMS
Victory
past an inquisitive crowd of visitors, and Joe Wilson insists on coming in the ambulance with Grandad because he is concerned by his old friend's deep distress.

They stare at Molly's pale face.

“Could she have fallen and hit her head?” the paramedic asks.

“There wasn't room,” Joe says. “Lord knows how she ever got in there without someone seeing.”

“I should have looked,” Grandad says, anguished. “That second inside cabin—I didn't look.”

“You did look. We all looked. She was tucked away as if she was hiding.”

“Does she have any medical condition?” The paramedic is taking Molly's pulse again.

“Some petit mal epilepsy when she was small, but not for years now. And this is different.”

“Well, they can do an EEG—that would show it.” He looks down thoughtfully at Molly. “It's like she's in shock.”

And that is what the doctor in the emergency ward at the hospital says too. She is puzzled. Everyone is puzzled. There is no sign of any physical damage whatsoever in Molly's small body, but she seems to have retreated into impenetrable sleep. She is tucked into a hospital bed to be
observed for the next twenty-four hours, with an intravenous drip in her arm, and electrodes on her head monitoring her brain.

Grandad is in the waiting-room, trying to ignore a muttering television set. Joe Wilson sits beside him, to keep him company until Kate and Granny arrive.

Joe says hesitantly, “Did you have a son called Charlie?
Uncle Charlie
, she kept saying,
Uncle Charlie
, as if something terrible had happened to him.”

“She hasn't got an uncle Charlie,” Grandad says. “My daughter is an only child, and Molly's father had one sister who isn't married. There isn't even a family friend called Charlie.”

“Oh.”

They sit in silence, bent forward, elbows on knees.

“
Blood
,” Grandad says at last, reluctantly. “Did you hear her say that?”

“Three times, she said it. Slow, like.”

The clock on the wall above them ticks, barely audible. The television squawks a commercial.

“And that last thing, before she stopped talking. Did you hear that?”

“I did indeed.”

“
Good boy
, she said.
Good boy
. Maybe they have a dog at home.”

“And then she said,
The Admiral is dying
.”

“Yes. She did.”

Carl is in his study, calling his travel agent to cancel the hastily booked ticket to London. Kate has just telephoned him again, incoherent with relief that Molly has been found unharmed. She has assured him that they will be home in a few days and that there is nothing he could usefully do by crossing the Atlantic.

Russell is standing just inside the study door, fiddling unconsciously with the doorknob. It makes a regular squeaky rattling sound, like a rusty swing.

Carl hangs up the phone and throws an eraser at him. “Stop twitching! Molly's fine. They'll be back next week—maybe sooner.”

Russell still hovers, his face serious. Carl is suddenly reminded of the way he would hesitate on the brink of words when he was an earnest eight-year-old, trying to summon up the courage for some kind of confession.

“Dad,” Russell says, and stops.

“Well?”

“Moll had some kind of breakdown, on HMS Victory? That's Nelson's ship, right?”

Carl looks at him curiously. “Right.”

“There's this thing that happened,” Russell says. “I promised I wouldn't tell, but maybe it's . . . you remember she bought a book at Mystic Seaport?”

And he tells Carl about Robert Southey's
The Life of Nelson,
and about the finding of the piece of Nelson's flag. They go to Molly's bedroom and stare at the considerable collection of books on her shelves, and it turns out that
Russell has paid more attention to Molly than she supposed.

“All her really favorite books are on this shelf,” he says, peering close. “Yeah! Here it is!”

And Carl finds himself faced with the astonishing little piece of cloth in its primitive envelope, and with Emma Tenney's inscription.

This the most precious possession of my father Samuel Robbins, his piece of the flag of HMS Victory on which he served as a boy at Trafalgar. Given into my safekeeping as a girl, before his last voyage from which he did not return. May God bless my dear father and his Admiral.

“Holy cow!” he says.

Russell says unhappily, “I didn't think too much about it—but Moll was knocked sideways, I remember. She made me swear to keep it a secret. I wish I'd told you and Kate.”

“Loyalty is better than snitching,” Carl says. “Don't worry about it. I'm glad you told me now, though.” He glances at Mr. Waterford's card, which seems to be marking Molly's place; then closes the book carefully and puts it back on the shelf.

“You don't think it's the reason this thing has happened to Moll?”

“No!” Carl says firmly. “Let's go get lunch.”

But late that night, he goes back alone to Molly's room and takes down
The Life of Nelson
again. He has brought a
magnifying glass with him, and he opens the book under the brightest light he can find. First he makes a note of the telephone number on Mr. Waterford's card, and then he looks intently at the book's remarkable inside page. He seems to be staring not at either of the two inscriptions, or even at the morsel of the flag, but at Emma Tenney's signature.

Donald has always been an amiable, cooperative baby. He is fast asleep in his stroller when Kate and Granny arrive with him at the hospital, and Granny keeps him in the waitingroom next to Joe Wilson, who has five grandchildren and is accustomed to babies. Grandad leads Kate down a buff-colored corridor to Molly's room, and as they tiptoe through the door Molly opens her eyes and gives them a sleepy smile.

“Hello, Mum,” she says, and Kate is across the room in a flash, taking her in as close an embrace as the IV line will allow, pressing a damp cheek against her daughter's hair.

“Thank God,” she says. “Oh Molly darling, thank God.”

“I'm sorry,” Molly says. Over her mother's shoulder her eyes meet Grandad's, and he knows she is saying it to him as well. He comes closer, and when Kate finally lets her go, Molly reaches out her hand to him. He gives it a squeeze.

“Do you remember what happened, Moll?” he says.

“Not really,” Molly says. “Just waking up, and you being there. That was the good part.” Her eyes grow distant, as if she were looking at something a very long way away. “But it was so dark—and so much noise—”

Kate says quickly, “Get some sleep, now. Don't try to think about it. We'll take you home to Highgate in the morning.”

Grandad knows that they are faced with mystery, and that Kate and perhaps everyone will try not to press Molly to examine these few hours of her life during which she retreated from reality. He hears this in the voice of the doctor who admitted Molly to the hospital, who learns that Kate has arrived and comes to talk to them in the waiting-room before going off duty.

“Has she been under a lot of stress recently?” inquires the doctor gently. She is very young, with short blond hair, and stern black-rimmed glasses designed—Grandad guesses—to add
gravitas
to a very pretty face.

“We've moved to the United States,” Kate says. “It's a big adjustment.”

“When do you go back?”

“In a few days.”

“Well, this wasn't any kind of seizure,” the doctor says. “Physically she is just fine. Emotionally, who knows? Just keep an eye on her, as I'm sure you would anyway. If there are any other puzzling incidents you might want to try psychotherapy.” She smiles at them, a conspiratorial English smile. “Plenty of therapists in America, I believe.”

So all the conversation in Molly's family is of stress and emotional pressure, as they put themselves into two hotel rooms which have been booked by a helpful officer from HMS
Victory
. Joe Wilson had urged them to come
home with him instead, but Granny said firmly but gratefully that it would be unthinkable to present his wife unexpectedly with three strange adults and a small baby. Joe Wilson, who has unlimited confidence in his wife, had looked disappointed.

Now in the hotel Granny's cell phone rings, and it is Carl, calling for a report on Molly. Granny tells him all is well and hands the phone to Kate.

And Grandad, who will not allow space in his life either for cell phones or for computers, goes outside into the Portsmouth night for a solitary walk. The rain has stopped and the wind has died down, leaving a dark, damp summer night.

Grandad walks slowly along the street, thinking of Molly's desperate plea to stay in Britain; thinking of the rapt expression on her face as she first gazed at HMS
Victory
; thinking of certain other moments on board Nelson's ship when perhaps she might have been hearing things that he did not hear. He thinks of Molly's father, his lost son-in-law, and of the way he died. He thinks of his own days in the Royal Navy, long ago, and of nights at sea, alone under a dark sky filled with blazing stars, when he felt a curious kinship with other sailors on that same sea from years or centuries ago.

And though he is appalled by the horror and grief Molly may have faced today, he thinks he can understand the mysterious four-hour vacancy that occurred in her consciousness. But he can hardly tell anybody, even his wife, that he
believes his granddaughter may have witnessed the events of the Battle of Trafalgar, fought two hundred years ago.

Molly is back in her little room at her grandparents' house in Highgate, thinking about Sam Robbins. All day she has been very quiet, because she is in a stunned state of mind. When anyone has asked her questions about those hours on HMS
Victory
she has not properly told the truth—not even to Grandad. Although the whole thing is a painful blur, she is sure that she was feeling and hearing what Sam Robbins felt at Trafalgar. She does not think this was Sam's doing, even though she is also becoming convinced that he has somehow been trying to reach her ever since she found his piece of the
Victory
's flag—or perhaps even before that.