Sea Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  SEA LORD

  Bernard Cornwell was born in London, raised in Essex, and now lives in the USA. He is the author of the Arthurian series, The Warlord Trilogy; The Starbuck Chronicles on the American Civil War; Stonehenge; The Grail Quest series, set during the Hundred Years War; over twenty Sharpe novels; and most recently, The Saxon Stories, set during King Alfred’s defence of England against the Vikings. For more information about Bernard Cornwell and his books, visit his website – www.bernardcornwell.net.

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  SEA LORD

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  First published by Michael Joseph 1989

  Published in Penguin Books 1993

  21

  Copyright © Rifleman Productions Ltd, 1989

  All rights reserved

  It is inevitable that some boat names in Sea Lord will coincide with the names of real boats. Nevertheless every vessel in this book, like every character, is entirely fictional.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192892-0

  SEA LORD is dedicated to

  Diedree and Oscar Morong,

  Masters under God of the good vessel

  Diedree-Anne.

  Part One

  I didn’t want to go home. I’d once sworn I’d never go home, yet here I was, plugging across the Western Approaches on a flooding tide in a filthy night.

  In seven years I had been home just once. That first return had been a family duty and had turned into a family disaster. I had endured as long as I could; then, overwhelmed by responsibilities and harried by lawyers, I had sailed away. It was then that I had sworn never to return to England.

  Now, four years later, I was going home.

  And again it was duty which drew me back; family duty.

  It certainly wasn’t homesickness, for in seven years of ocean wandering I had never missed England. I tried to persuade myself it was curiosity that took me north into the cold Channel waters, but curiosity needs the provocation of affection or hate, and I felt neither for my family. Yet now, if the message was true, my family wanted my return and so, dutifully, perhaps guiltily, I was going home.

  The message had reached me in English Harbour, Antigua. It came from my family’s lawyers who had left the message with my London bank. I’d telexed the bank, hoping some dividends had taken me out of the red, but instead of money the bank had sent me news that my mother was sick and wanted to see me. It was the first time in four years that my mother had noticed my existence or, to be fair, that I had remembered hers. I didn’t want to go, but there was a pathetic appeal in the message and so I slipped my mooring and turned Sunflower’s bows to the eastern sea.

  I didn’t hurry home. Indeed, and it might have been my fancy, it seemed to me that Sunflower sailed sluggishly right across the Atlantic. We spent a week becalmed in the horse latitudes and afterwards, when we made the westerlies, she developed a weather-helm I’d never known in her before. For the first time in her life, my boat became a pig to sail and I wondered if this new stubborn waywardness was some reflection of my own reluctance to reach England. Somehow we made it to the Azores, but then, a week out of Horta, a foul toothache erupted in the back of my upper right jaw, and I was tempted to believe that this new pain, like Sunflower’s weather-helm, was a mute protest against the voyage. The toothache got worse as I endured a long beat north before the west winds drove me hard towards the English Channel. I sailed alone.

  Just Sunflower and me. Sunflower was a French-built steel-hulled cutter, thirty-eight foot long, with an angular hull that banged in a moderate sea and sounded like a demented field gun in a big one. She was twenty years old that springtime, and showed it. The mainsail on a modern yacht has about as much cloth as a bikini bottom, but Sunflower had a proper mainsail with some guts in it; a big bellying brute of a driver-sail. She had a proper boom too: a real skull-cracking spar instead of a stubby high-tech afterthought. She hadn’t been built with the modern refinements of in-mast reefing or headsail roller reefing; instead she had old-fashioned reef points that needed to be tied down by hand. On a cold wet night that can be a murderous job, but better to have fingers scraped raw and bloody than a mainsail jammed in its slot and threatening a capsize in a rising gale. Her foresails had to be dragged on to the foredeck in their stiff bags, piston-hanked on to their stays, then hauled into the wind’s face. She was never a fast boat, not compared to the gossamer-light multihulled speed-sleds that take all the ocean-sailing records these days, but Sunflower would have sailed you to hell and back, and that’s all a proper seaman should ever want in a yacht.

  It was all I ever wanted, for Sunflower was my home. She and I had done a lot of miles. We’d sailed the southern ocean, rounded the Horn, run the Agulhas Current, smelt the African jungle, anchored off Indian coral; and now, because of a message from my family’s lawyers, we were pounding a Western Approaches sea; a short, grey, unfriendly sea that hammered the hull’s angular chines and shredded white into a stinging cold shrapnel that slashed over Sunflower’s gunwales to spatter me in the cockpit.

  It was night-time and the wind was rising. It was England’s homecoming wind, a southwesterly, but there was nothing welcoming in this malevolent cold force. At dusk the wind had been force three or four, by midnight it was five and rising, by three in the morning I’d taken in the first reef, and now, an hour before dawn, Sunflower was riding a hard force seven. I’d dropped the main and was running on a working jib alone. That sounds cautious, but I did not shorten sail out of fear, only because I was dog tired. I dared not sleep, for we were near the shipping lanes, and you don’t take risks with the one-hundred-thousand-ton tankers that slam oblivious through the darkness. I’d seen one such supertanker just after midnight, or rather I’d seen the great block of her bridge beneath her steaming lights, but I hadn’t seen the tanker’s hull because the wind was shredding the wavetops into a grey devil-drizzle that danced above the sea. Sunflower and I had been racing the whitecaps then, just spits of light in the darkness, and I’d known the tanker would be ignorant of our presence. She’d passed a half-mile to our south, heading towards Biscay.

  The sight of the tanker had jarred me into a new alertness, but the wakefulness didn’t last. Desp
ite the foul pain in my tooth, I dozed. I sat on the port side of the cockpit, one knee crooked over Sunflower’s tiller, and leaned my head against the guardrails. The banging of the sea against the hull was hypnotic. I’d sleep for a few minutes then start awake to stare in sudden, uncomprehending alarm at the compass. Once or twice I rubbed my eyes to help my vision, but mostly succeeded only in grinding dried, accreted and stinging salt into my eyeballs. The pain in my tooth was a throbbing agony, but even that was not sufficient to keep me awake. But I knew I had to stay awake. Sometimes I would stand to let the spray hit me, hoping that its forceful discomfort would keep me alert, but as soon as I sat again the sleep would insidiously steal over me. I was in a half-gale, in short steep seas, in a small boat pitching like a demented rocking-horse, sailing into the world’s most dangerous seaway, with an aching tooth and stinging eyes, and all I could do was sleep. And hallucinate.

  I was used to the tired hallucinations of a night sail, yet familiarity did nothing to convince me of their falsehood. The hallucinations are half-dreams of an uncanny reality. That night I distinctly saw the loom of a lighthouse guiding me home and, later, a coastline. If the hallucinations had been of fantastic things, say of women or hot food, then my mind would have dismissed them as apparitions; yet that night’s visions were of the things I most wanted to see – signs of a safe landfall – and so I saw a gentle twilit coast backed with church towers, trees and cliffs, and the coast even had half-obscured leading lights showing the way home. One part of my brain knew that I was seeing an elaborate illusion, but still I would indulge it. It was only when something shattered Sunflower’s rhythm that the mind would sluggishly tear itself away from the comforting fantasy to accept that we were indeed slamming through a shortening sea in a half-gale with no leading lights to guide us home. Those were the moments of wakefulness.

  Eventually I stopped fighting the sleep. Somehow my wet clothes so arranged themselves that I had the illusion of comfort, and to move was to bring cold wet cloth against a sore chafed skin. So I stayed still, I dreamed, and Sunflower flew up-channel to where the big ships thumped and the black rocks waited.

  And still I did not know why I came home, or what waited for me in England.

  I’d fled England four years before. I’d gone home because my brother had died and I had become the new head of the family. They looked to me to solve their problems, but instead I had bought Sunflower, victualled her, then run away to sea. I’d scraped round Ushant against this very same southwesterly wind and had felt an immense liberty unfold before my bows. I had gone, I was safe and I was free. The unwanted responsibilities and my family’s spitting accusations had dropped astern like sea-anchors cut adrift.

  I’d never regretted that leaving. I’d stepped on far beaches, sailed into distant nights and made friends with people who knew nothing of my past. To them I was merely John Rossendale, master under God of the good ship Sunflower, and a welcome mechanic, carpenter, welder and rigger. I was anonymous. I was free.

  And now I was coming home. Alone.

  I hadn’t always sailed alone. When I’d first left England, seven years before, Charlie Barratt had sailed with me. We had three good years together, sailing the southern oceans; then, when my family demanded my return, Charlie had gone with me. We had been in Australia when the news of my brother’s death arrived and we had been forced to sell our boat to raise the money for the air fares. We promised ourselves we’d buy another yacht in England and go back to the Pacific, but Charlie had married instead and that put paid to his dreams of far blue seas. I had struggled with my brother’s legacy for as long as I could; then, in desperation, I bought Sunflower and went back to sea alone. I didn’t sail alone for long. A German girl came aboard at Belize and stayed as far as the Marquesas where she abandoned Sunflower to join a ramshackle commune that shared a vast catamaran skippered by a moody Pole. I’d heard that the catamaran had broken up off the Trobriands, drowning everyone aboard, but the sea lanes are full of such rumours, so perhaps the German girl was still alive. In the Solomons I’d met an Australian who sailed with me one whole year, but she discovered who I was and wanted to marry me and, when I adamantly refused, she jumped ship in California. There had been others. The oceans are littered with hitch-hikers, struggling from one coast to another, bartering rides on battered yachts, and all believing that their freedom from bureaucracy will last for ever. Some of the hitch-hikers drown, some get murdered, some disappear, a lot become whores, and a few, a very few, go home.

  Now I was going home, and I didn’t want to. I hallucinated, I slept, and I dreamed of far southern seas.

  I was woken sharply in the dawn. It was not the feral grey light that woke me, nor my toothache, but rather because the wind had shifted abruptly to the south and Sunflower went over. It could only have taken a few seconds, a blink of a dream, no more, but the tiller slipped under my knee’s grip, and she broached. For a moment she was speeding along the hissing crest of a wave, then the sea smacked her over, the wavetop broke, and she was falling, tipping, slamming down on to her starboard side. Water poured like Niagara over the port gunwale. For two seconds I was standing in sudden amazement on the far thwart, then I was pitched forward into the maelstrom of white water. Just before my head went under I saw the mast-tip drop into the water, then I was thrashing in sudden panic until the safety line jerked me hard and fast. The wave was still seething round me and breaking high over Sunflower’s hull that was lying flat on the sea. I despaired for a moment, until the inexorable laws of physics began their work and the deep heavy keel began to drag Sunflower upright. No law of physics would save me. I would have to drag my waterlogged weight to the high gunwale and somehow climb back aboard, but then a merciful and freakish backwash of water flung me against a starboard guardrail stanchion. I felt a sharp blow against my ribs, but all I could think of was to cling like grim death to the guardrail as the boat righted. She came up sluggishly at first, then tore herself free of the sea’s grip, and I rolled up with her to haul myself unceremoniously over the rails into the swamped cockpit.

  That was the sea’s alarm call. Good morning and welcome to the Channel. I crouched in the swirling cockpit and gasped for breath. The pain in my ribs stabbed at me, but there was no time to worry if anything was broken. The jib was flogging and another steep sea was charging at our beam. I rammed the tiller hard to port and dragged the jib sheet in to catch the wind. Sunflower sluggishly turned her quarter to the waves. Water was still streaming off the foredeck and coachroof, cascading green and grey into the white-flecked, heaving sea.

  The drains were emptying the cockpit. I doubted any water had got into the boat. Sunflower’s washboards are of one inch teak and, like the companionway hatch, I keep them bolted shut in dirty weather. I had been lucky. The knockdown had been my own fault, but, thanks to the safety line, I was alive. I gingerly felt my ribs and, though the pain was sharp, nothing seemed to be broken.

  I was soaked through after my ducking, but Sunflower was moving again in the broken seas. I lashed the tiller, then stripped myself stark shivering naked. It was springtime, but the Channel air still had a cutting edge and the sea was as cold as an opened grave. I unlocked the companionway, waited until Sunflower had been overtaken by a hissing sea, then clambered over the washboards to drop into the cabin.

  I had very few dry clothes left, but I found two pairs of jeans, one pair of socks, and three sweaters. I pulled them all on. They felt warm, but I knew they were full of dry salt crystals which, exposed to even the smallest dampness, would attract the moisture and swell to make me chill and damp again. I scrubbed my hair half dry with a mildewed towel, then wedged myself into the galley and slid the Thermos out of its padded clips. I poured a big mug of tea and, though Sunflower was pitching and corkscrewing, I didn’t spill a drop of the precious hot liquid. Practice in such small things makes for perfection. A tanker could have turned me into scrap steel in the time it took to drink the tea, but I needed something warm inside and I wa
s craving for a pipeful of dry tobacco.

  Those creature comforts gained, I went back to the cockpit and disentangled my oilskins from the wet mess on the bottom grating. I grimaced, knowing that the water inside the oilies would soak my new dry clothes, but there was no choice. I kitted up, pulled on drenched boots, then hauled up the mainsail that had three reefs already tied to the boom. Sunflower liked the extra canvas and became steadier. We were on a beam reach, and my boat was sailing the gale’s wrath like a dream. I was wide awake now, my hallucinations had vanished with the dawn, and I was going home.

  But why, and to what, I did not know.

  I should have sought shelter in Falmouth, or at any of the Cornish ports, but I had a sudden reluctance to exchange my damp clothes for a landfall. The wind, still in the south, was gusting towards gale force and flensing the wavetops into a stinging white mist that obscured the grey sea. The waves were thundering from the southwest, but being crossed by the new wind that filled their troughs with confusion. Sunflower did not mind. She was a tough beast and had taken far worse. She had a steel hull and, over the years, I’d doubled the strength of all her rigging. She’d ridden the edge of a typhoon once, and all that had been broken was some crockery in her galley. Now, in a filthy new day, she sailed up-channel. The daylight was grey, churned with spray, and cold. I was curbing Sunflower, not wanting a following sea to poop her, but, though she was pitching hard, she was in no danger. All that could have killed her now was a bigger ship or my own carelessness.

  My first sight of home was a glimpse of the Eddystone lighthouse. It was then I turned for Salcombe. I suppose I’d always known I was going to Salcombe because Charlie lived there. Charlie and I had grown up together, chased our first girls together, got drunk together, were arrested together, then sailed the far seas together. Whatever else waited for me in England, Charlie was there, and his friendship alone made this voyage home worth its while; so, in the hard dawn wind, I turned for Charlie’s home port: Salcombe.