Carette of Sark

by John Oxenham

My greatest hope was to return to French and English waters in the Joséphine. I could perhaps have slipped away into the island, but that would in no way have furthered my getting home, rather would it have fettered me with new and tighter bonds. For in the end I must have boarded some English ship and been promptly pressed into the service, and that was by no means what I wanted. It was my own Island of Sercq I longed for, and all that it held and meant for me.

I saw clearly that if at any time we came to a fight with a British warship, and were captured, I must become either prisoner of war as a Frenchman, or pressed man as an Englishman. Neither position held out hope of a speedy return home, but, of the two, I favoured the first as offering perhaps the greater chances.

As the weeks passed into months, all of the same dull pattern, I lost heart at times, thinking of all that might be happening at home.

Sometimes it seemed to me hardly possible that Torode would dare to go on living at Herm and playing that desperate game of the double flags, while somewhere one man lived who might turn up at any time and blow him to the winds. And in pondering the matter, the fact that he had spared that man's life became a greater puzzle to me than ever. Depressing, too, the thought that if he did so stop on, it was because he considered the measures he had taken for his own safety as effective as death itself, and he was undoubtedly a shrewd and far-thinking man. That meant that my chances of ever turning up again in Sercq were small indeed. And, on the other hand, if a wholesome discretion drove him to the point of flitting, I had reason enough to fear for Carette. He had vowed his son should have her, and both father and son were men who would stick at nothing to gain their ends.

So my thoughts were black enough. I grew homesick, and heart-sick, and there were many more in the same condition, and maybe, to themselves, with equal cause.

Just four months we had been there, when one morning an old-fashioned 20-gun corvette came wallowing in, and an hour later we knew that she had come to relieve us and we were to sail for home as soon as we were provisioned. Work went with a will, for every man on board was sick of the place in spite of the easy living and good faring, and we were at sea within forty-eight hours. The word between-decks, too, was that Bonaparte was about to conquer England, and we were hurrying back to take part in the great invasion. The spirits and the talk ran to excess at times. I neither took part in it nor resented it. My alien standing was almost forgotten through the constant companionship of common tasks, and I saw no profit in flaunting it, though my determination not to lift a hand against my country was as strong as ever.

We had a prosperous voyage of thirty-five days, and were within two days' sail of Cherbourg, when we sighted a ship of war which had apparently had longer or quicker eyes than our own. She was coming straight for us when we became aware of her, and she never swerved from her course till her great guns began to play on us under British colours.

True to those colours, as soon as her standing was fixed, I made my way to Captain Duchâtel to claim performance of his promise.

I had no need to put it into words. The moment I saluted, he said, "Ah, yes. So you stick to it?"

I saluted again, without speaking.