HEART OF OAK

The first ship Norrington was lieutenant on, the Royal William, came with a jaunty master of undiluted Chatham navy stock, with a dash of the old privateers' charm and blood-cunning adding further colour to his ancestry. Norrington liked him because he was easy to like, and because he never held his first lieutenant's landed background against him, as some others had done. The man distrusted surgeons, unsalted meat, and all modes of modern 'instruments'. His officers would laugh about 'the Captain's nose', by reputation as reliable a guide to the navigator as the Great Bear at night, and at times his instincts appeared to border on the supernatural. "The ship would know", the Captain was fond of saying to Norrington, the two of them standing on the poop deck looking out to the white wake behind the stern, stark against the night sky and the deeper blue water, paying no mind to the muffled sounds of seamen playing for tobacco, coins and scrimshaw below.

Every ship was a knowing thing. There were only so many ways man would move across the water and not be weighed down by his natural feebleness, the weakness of his legs, the inadequacy of his lungs; and here was a creature as fit for its purpose as any living animal under the Lord's heaven and sea. She knew what she was and what she was not; it was all clear and lucid from the start.

"Unlike a lot of us most times," the Captain said to the entranced Norrington. He put his hand against the painted wood. "This grew out of the earth, it was cut and bound together, and now we're riding on her. God knows how many times over it's older than me. All our lives depend on her, and she on us. And now because she smells like salt instead of sap, you think we can tell her anywhere to go that she doesn't already know? She knows, lad. They all know."

The sun shone on boy and tree, butter-rich and drowsy.

Long brown legs dangled lazy as cat's paws, extended calloused toes and stroked the bark in a gesture as little considered as the tapping of a foot. The scratching of an itch. From this bough, his favourite corner of the world, the boy could see as far as the stone bridge, where the edge of the old harvested forest used to be, and in the opposite direction, Oakham House near a mile away. He reached a hand overhead and pulled lightly. A fat acorn bounced off a shoe.

"Charles!"

"Go home, Jamie, and play with your wooden sword."

Insects danced and circled like tiny black letters in the air, making their own indecipherable cartography. When the seven-year-old squinted up, the leaves were so thick he could see only a little way past them. He called again. "Charles!" A smattering of projectiles rained down – as many striking the ground as his head and shoulders – and while it only hurt a little he flinched, then was angry with himself for doing so.

"What is it?" the irritated reply came down. Charles sounded further away, going higher up into the canopy in smooth, confident movements that brushed apart the growth without disturbing it. With the high sun above him, James could no longer see his brother, not even in fragments.

"Come down. I'm to be fetching you."

"You come up. I can't hear you."

Not believing this for a second, James hesitated. Go get your brother, Mother had said, issuing one of her rare orders. By what precise strategy this was to be accomplished, James was sure he didn't know, but he sat and started to pull off his shoes. He was not as tall as Charles or as strong. All the same, it was of little use to argue with him – that, James was certain. This way he could at least say he tried.

Twelve feet up - his shirt already clammy with sweat - this wasn't so difficult, he thought. This was still the familiar part. Then sixteen feet. The greenery enclosed James entirely, denying him of his sense of latitude. He had never gone this far before, following Charles, but he refused to think of it. He concentrated on searching for the path of least resistance, the scuffed patches his brother had left on the bark: putting one foot here, wedging the other over there, and then jumping up for that knot in the wood. Hold. And repeat.

And when his hand slipped and he started – legs scrabbling in vain for purchase on the trunk – to fall, his mouth round in a hiccuping gulp of surprise, James didn't have time to make any other sound, or even to think, before he saw his brother's arm dropping down, a lean rope. The hand clamped around one of his flailing arms. A frightful yank, as he slid in the direction which he was only half certain was down, and James realised that he was standing, or rather teetering, upright again. Both feet planted on a sturdy lower branch.

A tanned face broke through the foliage directly above, dark like a storm coming. It wouldn't last, Charles' ferocious rages never did; that was one agreeable thing about him. "Are you trying to get me into trouble?" he said. James scowled back automatically, only just biting back a surly, "Are you?"

"There's a letter arrived for Mother," he said instead, and touched the painful grazes on his legs with a palm that came away bloody.

"So? She gets a lot of letters."

"This one's from Greece." James thought he knew where Greece was. It was north of the Mare Mediterraney, where Father and the Namur were supposed to be. From the map in the scrupulously kept study, he also knew the purplish tract that was Italy, the peony red of North Africa, Arabia's sandy gold. England, quite rightly, he thought, had been outlined in a green that was like new oak leaves.

Charles stared, eyes limpid - Anatolian blue, thought James. His knees were bleeding again; he could feel the wetness trickling, warm and sticky, down his shins. His brother was suddenly pale underneath his freckled outdoors skin.

"Greece, Jamie? I swear I'll put a rat in your bed if you're telling an untruth."

Not waiting for an answer Charles stepped off his perch and jumped with uncharacteristic lack of grace, landing heavily but unhurt. "Wait," James began, but Charles was already scrambling up from the dirt.

James forgot his shoes and ran after him.

That night the moon was large and waxen. It shadowed James from his opened nursery window, then down the thick ivy and through the kitchen garden gate, as silent and light of foot as he was - trailed after his night-gowned shape over shambling stonewall and across the flat grassy field. It dusted his face with silver snow as he stood beneath his brother's beloved tree. It was even more intimidating now, surreal and half-visible in moonlight, taking up more space somehow; its rustling vibrations seemed louder. He stood there seeing and hearing only the tree.

For the second time that day, James started to climb. That he couldn't, that he really shouldn't when his eyes could hardly make out the outline of the hand he cast out, were no deterrent as he made his way up and up, going by touch, not stopping until he was as high as he dared to go and the branches swayed uncontrollably in the slightest of winds.

He stayed stock-still facing what he determined was southeast.

And waited.

It was uncomfortable, with one arm hugging the hard thinning trunk, and bitterly cold, which was probably to the good because it meant that he didn't fall asleep. When dawn appeared some hours later, he swept his gaze over the huge golden horizon of hills and paddocks and could not, to his terrible disappointment and grief, see anything that looked like Greece.

Bloody pirates, James thought furiously. He was too cold and too, too tired to cry.

"Bloody, bloody pirates." It was a kind of promise. Though he had never trodden the planks and timber of a single ship, he shared that fierce spark with the ghosts of trees. Foreseeing the day when he would master them, the lumbered wayfarers of the seas.

The End

28 September 2006