The Lord's Prayer

I'm going to pass over what happened after that, wife, for you know everything already.

What I want to talk of now is when we did catch the French ship. We fought with her well and in the end we won.

Peter and I had spent several nights together by then, and he was much dearer to me than anyone I had known before. He went with the boarding party while I had to stay behind and lead the gun crews. I was eventually able to board the French ship with several other men after we blasted a hole in her side at one of her cannons.

I did not see Peter throughout the whole thing. There were only bits of last fighting by the time I was aboard. The Acheron had struck her colors.

I was as excited as everyone else that we had won. But when I was told that Peter, my lovely Peter, had been brought down just as the fighting was ending, nothing mattered.

The few men that we lost were lined up and stitched into their hammocks. I sat beside Peter's body and remembered that night that was so far away now, when I had asked him about the stitching.

The man who was supposed to stitch up Peter's hammock reached to do so. I stopped him.

"Let me do it," I said.

I knew that with only one arm I would be unable to do it alone, so I asked the man, "Can you help me?"

He held together the sides of hammock and I stitched the hammock over Peter's face. As I reached his nose I paused and remembered all those times he had been alive, and how his face was always full of color. How heavenly he was in life. I blinked away my tears at the thought of how without his soul in it, his body was dim and grey. I continued to stitch, putting the last above his nose, but not through it.

While Captain Aubrey led the service for the fallen men, I stood and had to hold back tears with all my might. When the Captain got to the Lord's Prayer, I spoke in a dim voice to the God who had given to me, but taken away from me as well.

"Our Father,

who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy Kingdom come.

Thy will be done, on earth

as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And Lead Us

not into temptation, but

deliver us from evil.

For Thine

is the kingdom, and

the power, and the glory,

Forever and ever.

Amen."