This was the last Philip Nolan would ever see of home.
BEYOND THE BATTERIES OF THE FORTRESS AT SAN SEBASTIÁN, THE BAY OF Cádiz was flecked with white, the leavings of a stern tramontana that had blown for three days and two nights. The sky above the bay was brilliant, though the sun that rode through it was low, tending to the south and west on a bright and pleasant winter day. To the northeast, beyond the lower reaches of the harbor, light slanted over the delta of the Río de San Pedro. Past the marshland, in stages and switchbacks the road to Seville cut through the rolling countryside of Andalusia, the hills dotted here and there with orchards, vineyards, and round Spanish towers. As beautiful as this was, none of it interested the young man walking along the uncompleted ramparts toward town as fast as his long legs could hurry him.
Frank Curran had seen a white nick on the horizon, a pair of them, in fact, and they were the ships he had been waiting for. He now hurried back to the town, clasping a long glass under his arm and occasionally pressing his hat down on his head when a gust came at him from across the bay. These Curran could almost always anticipate, for they showed first on the reefs below the fort (how the swell broke there), and his sailor’s eye was keen enough to notice the changes in the sails shaped by the fishing boats and barca longas plying the wide bay. He was, after all, a naval officer, a fact gratefully confirmed by the newly signed commission that crinkled in his coat pocket.
Of all his papers and possessions laid carefully in a cruise box and a pair of seabags back at the inn, the commission in his pocket was the most precious thing he owned. It would embarrass him had anyone seen how he’d studied it by candlelight or reread it a dozen times even this afternoon when he was alone on the point under the battery. He had folded and unfolded it, pretending that he had just discovered his name, Francis Gifford Curran, and the high-flown words placing on him especial trust for his patriotic valor, conduct, and fidelity, fairly charging all midshipmen, sailors, and Marines junior to him to render obedience, etc., etc., written in a boldly wielded pen proclaiming him a lieutenant in the Navy of the United States from the date of February 3, 1827—a day that had come and gone not forty-eight hours ago. Even now Curran could feel the unaccustomed weight of the epaulet on his left shoulder, and from the corner of his eye he caught its glimmer now and again, a physical manifestation of his joy.
Curran stretched out his legs and filled his lungs with the fine, crisp air. The day was glorious; as a newly commissioned lieutenant he would have thought it fine if it were blowing a whole gale. On the winding coast road a mounted Spanish officer passed by on his way to inspect the San Sebastián guns, and Curran touched his hat. The Spaniard peered for a moment at the uniform and the tall, sandy-haired young man who wore it, vaguely connecting him to the American ships heading into the bay.
The Spaniard said, “Buenos, señor,” as he bowed slightly in the saddle, and then damned his horse in a gush of deep-voiced, lisping Castilian when it threw up its head and tried to caper. Curran could make out a few of the words, excellently chosen, something about horsemeat and the making of glue. Curran suppressed a smile out of military courtesy; the officer was a major, and like most sea officers Curran rode indifferently. In fact, he did not care for horses at all, even though his mother had taken pains about his equitation as she was of an old Shenandoah family that took horsemanship as the mark of a gentleman.
Curran walked on, and when he glanced back he saw the Spanish officer also looking over his shoulder, partly out of embarrassment and partly to reassure himself that the man with a telescope was not after all a French spy. Halfway to town, where the ramparts were highest, Curran stopped again and swept the sea with his glass. At the top of the bay, gliding under topsails, was a frigate, plainly Constellation, the Stars and Stripes at her mizzen and her commission pennant streaming from the maintop. She was still several miles in the offing, and he could just make out the officers on her quarterdeck and occasionally the green jacket of a Marine.
Curran turned his glass south, and the wind pushed at his back. From this height his eye commanded maybe fifteen miles of sea, and he could see another vessel coming under reefed courses, tack on tack, off Cape Zahora. A man o’war, by the way she handled. Her hull was too high and wide for a Royal Navy frigate, and Curran could see that she was every bit Constellation’s match, and perhaps her better. The ship came about crisply as he watched, but she was beating nearly straight into the wind; her tack presently took her away from the land and toward the bright, rolling horizon.
There were a dozen other vessels in the Bay of Cádiz, but only one was carrying on so determinedly north. Curran held the glass, counting her gun ports, and as he watched, the ship put out trysails very briskly. Without doubt she was Enterprise, one of the United States Navy’s newest frigates—a crack ship nearly as renowned as her cousin Constitution. So similar were they, built off almost identical drafts, that it took an appreciative eye to tell them apart. If anything, Enterprise was sharper built, with a longer quarterdeck lending grace to her lines; an elegantly spooned bow rendered her motion in the seaway very much like that of a galloping thoroughbred. Regardless of her beauty, the wind was presently in her teeth, and it would be the better part of the afternoon before she could wear round Punta de San Sebastián and run into Cádiz.
Curran snapped closed his telescope and continued toward the edge of town. He must meet the ships, he thought. Present himself and compliments. Perhaps even ship into his number one rig. Constellation would be in the harbor first; he could signal for a boat. But then Curran thought better of clambering aboard in his best uniform just to show away. What a gull he would look. No, he would save his dress blues for going aboard Enterprise to present his orders and his commission.
Again, an immense, peaceful joy came up in Curran’s heart. He had spent a third of his life at sea, almost all of it in foreign oceans, and every minute of sea time—some of them very anxious moments indeed—had been spent learning his profession and earning the modest amount of gold upon his coat. Though he had yet to experience command, in eight years at sea he had drawn a full measure of responsibility, and there were moments that it still astounded him that the lives of every man on board had depended on his ability to read the stars, sum their courses in the sky, and make landfall on unknown shores.
All of this long process had changed him from boy and landsman to as perfect a nautical creature as ever walked on two legs, but none of this slow transformation compared to the metamorphosis that had altered him wonderfully, almost magically, into an officer. What had really changed in the last forty-eight hours? What made him so different? He had not grown taller, and his gait on land was still that of the rolling sailor. His mind ticked with the same thoughts and his blood coursed with the same desires, but a great longing had been satisfied. He had been made an officer by an act of Congress; he had gotten his step, passed for lieutenant, shipped his swab, and almost nothing in his life had ever pleased him so. As Curran walked into Cádiz he knew this to be one of the happiest afternoons of his life.
Where the cobbles started at the edge of town there were three large bodegas, their doors open and the shade within cool and beckoning. Inside the storehouses Curran could see the round fronts of a hundred oaken solera, and as he went by he caught the smell of oloroso, clove, and almond. Siesta was just over, and shutters were being lifted up from windows and doors of the taverns fronting the harbor. Curran pressed a few centavos into the hand of a little boy and sent him on his way to Tres Osos to fetch his seabags and dunnage. Constellation