Spy limit

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

"Brace the main yards to the port tack, after yards to starboard! Port and starboard the helm!"

"Ah, yes!" Frank's eyes twinkled. "It was a different ocean, sir." "Port two degrees," said the pilot.

The quartermaster repeated the command and turned the wheel a spoke or two. By now they were nearing the northern tip of the great Burbo Bank; over the next four miles they would swing in a long arc to port, which would bring them to open water at last.

"A different ocean," Frank repeated.

To General Winfred there seemed a surprising lack of nostalgia in his tone.

"You appear to have taken well enough to steam,

Charles, I must say." Frank smiled. "In a way, General Winfred, it's a more manly trade. Under canvas you had to woo the sea.

You had to cajole it and flatter it and pretend to go along with its moods if you wanted to get your way with it - you had to be like a woman when she wants to impose her will on a man."

"And now?" General Winfred was enjoying the compari son, especially because he knew his wife was eavesdropping on their conversation.

The sea boot's on the other foot. And the sea's a woman at last. Respect her, of course - underestimate her strength, her fickleness, her We malevolence, if that's her mood. But while we've coals in our bowels, we're no longer at her mercy. have fifteen thousand horses down there that owe nothing to her."

Lady Shaw's nostrils flared in contempt. She considered him a thoroughly odious little man. Yet, even as she turned her back upon him, she could not but acknowledge that there was something fatally attractive about him, too. When his eyes rested on her, and seemed to look right into her ... there was a decided frisson of something in response to it. On a future voyage perhaps with General Winfred not there ...? The taming of such a brute would be ... piquant.

She gathered her court and they went below to attend that morning's concert in the saloon. "Are you coming, Shaw?" she asked coldly. "Those cat-gut scrapers?" he replied without turning

round.

They picked up the buoy off Formby Bank, and then the Formby Float, which caused them to make a little semicircular detour to pass it on the south.

"Has she drifted off her moorings?" Frank asked the pilot.

He replied that mud had shifted off the Little Burbos; it was always changing out here. If it didn't shift back naturally this week, they'd have to start dredging.

The Pride of Liverpool resumed her long, lazy are to port.

"When you retire, Charles," General Winfred said, clapping him on the back, "we'll get one of these ocean sailing yachts and just sail the seven seas for the sheer pleasure of it. Sail until the chippie puts his stitch in our nostrils, eh? Leave all these b****y women behind!"

Frank replied that by then he might well be glad of the opportunity. He caught sight of Wheeler, pinching his lips gravely to avoid smiling. "Number One!" he barked. "Prepare to drop the pilot!"

They dropped him at the Bell Beacon and then, keeping the North-West Lightship three or four miles to port, they set course west-by-south for The Skerries and Holyhead.

"Burn the funnels off her on your way home," General Winfred told Frank as they disembarked in Ireland. "Not that we're in the ocean-racing business, mind! I hope we never stoop to anything so vulgar. But that Blue Riband belongs to the Pride of Liverpool by right, d'you see! So be sure you get it for her, eh!"

HE DOCKED AT Pier 82, at the foot of West Forty Second Street, the following Monday at ten in the morning a week almost to the hour after leaving Liverpool; but it was the five days and two hours from Queenstown that gave them hope of the Blue Riband on their return voyage. 

As a mark of the company's pleasure and gratitude, Captain Charles granted an amnesty to all whose liberty had been curtailed for misdemeanours during the voyage. He did not know it at the time, of course, but it was an act of clemency whose consequence upon his own life was profound. 

Emma, who had expected to spend her first visit to New York with her nose pressed against one of the windows whose enticements were, in part, responsible for her confinement aboard, now found herself at liberty with the other stewardesses, much to Mrs Glover's annoyance. Joan Bolton had been a steward ess before, on the Servia and the Hamlet, and knew her way round the city - and, or so she believed, around life in general.

"Now the best place for a cheap slap-up meal," she said as they stepped upon solid land, "is the Park Avenue Oyster House in front of the Grand Central Depot. That's on Park and Forty-Second." Her insistence on the local idiom, like saying dee-poh and on such-and-such a street greatly impressed the other girls. One of them wanted to know if it was far from there to the Christian Girls' Guild. For a moment she pretended not to know what that was; then, with a tinkling laugh, she replied, "Oh, the Fallen Angels!

No, it's very near - on East Forty-Seventh, in fact. So, as soon as they had left their bags in at the CGG, which was, indeed, in East Forty-Seventh Street, six of them set off with Mrs Glover's grudging blessing for a "whizz-bang blow-out" at the Park Avenue Oyster House. At first they walked six abreast, arm in arm, but as they approached the intersection with Forty-Second Street, which seemed to be one of the main east-west thoroughfares, the press of the crowds forced them into threes, then, finally, pairs. Emma found herself arm-in-arm with Joan.

"We can slip away from these ninnies after the meal," Joan told her. "They won't dare split on us.