"Sir, you may want to see this." Lieutenant Hornblower said from the rail. Captain Pellew came to his side and took the offered spyglass.
He saw a small rowing boat carrying one person, wearing a hooded cloak, struggling along in the choppy seas and battling through the sharp wind and icy rain. Whoever was rowing was clearly exhausted, and stopped and started, quite determined to soldier on.
"Call out to him." Pellew ordered quietly.
"Ahoy! Ahoy there!"
The figure stopped and looked round to see them.
"It's a woman," Pellew said. "Launch the quarterboat and bring her here."
"What if she's French, sir?"
"She's a woman in trouble, Mr Hornblower; chivalry dictates that we must help her. If she is French, well, we have plenty of room in the brig."
Pretty soon the little rowing boat was towed up to the Indefatigable and the woman brought aboard, along with her little trunk. She wasn't much to look at, with sandy brown hair that was hanging limply around her face and big scared blue eyes. Her dark lips trembled, partly from fear but mostly from cold. The poor young woman looked on the verge of tears. She hugged the rug Mathews brought for her tightly, as though it was a shield. She wasn't very tall, she was about the same height as Acting Lieutenant Kennedy, but she seemed smaller because her shoulders were hunched.
She seemed a bit puzzled as to her whereabouts but Hornblower and Kennedy noticed that when her eyes fell upon the British ensign flapping above the taffrail, she straitened up a little, her whole face opened up metaphorically as she smiled briefly. Hornblower was startled by the sudden transformation in her looks when she smiled. She smiled with her whole face, and it lit up her eyes making them sparkle. A little blush crept up over her smooth cheeks and she looked down at the deck as though ashamed of herself.
It turned out she was English, but she seemed uneasy when her name was asked for kindly by the captain. She said her name was Sarah.
"But I don't buy that for a minute, do you?" Kennedy asked Hornblower as they dried off in the wardroom. "She looked ashamed while she said it."
"Captain seems to think she's alright."
"He's been wrong before. Did you see the way she was so at home on the deck? Most non sailors are all over the place on a ship at sea, and it's not exactly a millpond out there. But she wasn't. She stood like we do. Like a seasoned sailor. I'll wager anything that she's spent a lot of time at sea, and for a woman that's not normal."
"I caught a glimpse of her locket. It looked expensive and was engraved with an N. And when the clasps on her trunk broke and the contents spilled out, her dresses weren't exactly those of a poor woman. She's more than just a woman. She's a lady."
"But why won't she tell us her name? If she's so rich as all that, she shouldn't be ashamed of her name."
"It's a puzzler." Hornblower sighed.
The rain cleared soon enough and Sarah came and sat up on deck. She usually wore a navy blue short sleeved gown with a white shirt underneath, her locket and a pair of simple sapphire earrings that dangled about an inch below her earlobe. She was usually seen perched on a cannon or sitting on the companionway with her folder of papers on her lap making charcoal drawings of the sailors and officers at work, a white apron shielding her dress from the black smudges that covered her hands.
A few days after her arrival, as she was drawing Hornblower the wind caught the papers in her folder and she and Hornblower scrambled around to pick them up. One proved difficult for her. Every time she got close to grabbing it, the wind blew it out of her reach. Eventually it blew up to the legs of Kennedy. She smiled sheepishly up at him as he picked it up.
It wasn't drawn by Sarah; the style was quite different. It was a watercolour of a ship's figurehead. Kennedy looked from the face of the woman in a toga like dress with a very determined smile on her lips to Sarah's face as she stood to face him.
"Could almost be you Miss Sarah. But why would your face be the face of a figurehead? If you'll forgive my frankness, you are not what some would consider a famous beauty." He asked accusingly.
"I painted this a long time ago. I saw the ship in the dry dock and fancied that I looked like the woman in the figurehead. It sparked my curiosity." She lied innocently, but very well, silently demanding the paper back.
"She lied to my face, Horatio. I knew she didn't paint that picture and she knew that I knew." Kennedy stormed to Hornblower in the wardroom as they prepared for dinner in the captain's cabin.
"Archie, why on earth are you getting so worked up about her?"
"I'm not."
"Kennedy, you've been moaning and griping about her since we brought her aboard four days ago." Hornblower snapped.
"Have I?" Kennedy looked confused.
"Yes, and it's thoroughly annoying."
"I'm sorry Horatio. I don't know why she's getting to me like this."
"She's a mystery wrapped up in a conundrum. Let's see, what do we know about her?"
"She's twenty-three, has an amazing talent for art, she knows how to load and fire a musket and has no compunctions whatsoever about killing people."
"Let us not forget that she saved your life and many others' yesterday because she was so good with a musket. She just knelt against the quarterdeck rail and took pot shots at the frogs. And whenever a frog tried to kill her she just thumped him with the butt of the musket no questions asked." Kennedy frowned at the eager admiration in Hornblower's voice.
"She knows how to tell ships time, quotes the articles of war back to us, knows the nautical name for every part of the ship, she even knows the nicknames for the mids and the crew and I thought only sailors knew them, what's more she knows the nautical in-jokes which never get out of the fleet, she knows how to navigate and how to plot a course, she could almost be an officer."
"It is odd, how much she knows about ships and the navy, I'll give you that. She's not scared anymore either. That first day she was a little mouse, scared of her own shadow. Then yesterday the frogs attacked us and she really woke up. She's really quite pretty, now that she's smiling all the time."
"Who's side are you on, Brutus?" Archie snapped.
"I didn't know we had to take sides." Hornblower laughed.
Kennedy just glared.