Sea Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  And all because of a bloody painting.

  It was a good painting, a very good painting. So good that it could have saved the family fortune.

  My father’s death had been a financial disaster to the family, but my mother, with a single-minded fury, had fought to save Stowey and its estates. Her legal battles had been waged for ten years, and at the end she had won her campaign and the key to it was the painting.

  The house had once been filled with fine pictures. The National Gallery in Washington DC has a slew of our Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses, while a gallery in California has the pick of our Dutch interiors and the two good Constables that London’s National Gallery had been desperate to acquire, but too poor to pay for. One by one the walls of Stowey had been stripped to pay gambling debts or death duties, but on my father’s death there had been nothing of any value left.

  Or hardly anything of value. There was a canvas which my mother swore was a Stubbs, but which Sothebys could not bring to auction as such. There was a Poussin, which probably wasn’t, but if it was then the old master had been having a bad day. There was a Constable drawing, which was undoubtedly genuine, but a Constable drawing doesn’t pay the revenue. The only recourse was to sell Stowey and its lands, but that was something my mother would not contemplate. Stowey had been in our family since the twelfth century.

  But there was one undoubted treasure. An odd treasure for a house like Stowey, and a treasure which, strictly speaking, did not belong to the family, but rather to my mother. It was a Van Gogh.

  The painting should have looked all wrong in the old house, as out of place as a drunken punk ensconced in a library, yet somehow it seemed perfect. It was a glorious, superb, demented canvas; one of the early sunflower paintings. It showed eight blossoms topping a half-glazed jar; an explosion of yellow paint touched by blue with poor Vincent’s childlike signature painted on the vase itself. On a summer’s day, when the sun blazoned Stowey’s mediaeval gardens with light, the painting seemed like a fragment of that brightness trapped and caught inside the house.

  The painting had been brought to the family by my mother. She had been left it by her father. She had hung the Van Gogh on the linenfold panelling of her bedroom at Stowey. My mother refused to lend the picture to any exhibition, though once in a while an art historian or a reputable painter would seek permission to visit Stowey, and I remember the awe with which they gazed at the lovely canvas.

  It was well protected. My mother’s bedroom had been in Stowey’s crenellated east tower, built for defence, and the mediaeval bastion had been supplemented with the most sophisticated alarms. No one had even tried to penetrate those defences, until the end.

  That end came ten years after my father’s death. My mother had fought every month of those years. She had cursed and kicked and clawed at the taxmen. She had challenged their assessments and fobbed them off with small payments torn from the sale of our outlying pastures. She had fought a good fight, but then my brother had gone into the gun room and ripped her fight to shreds.

  My brother’s suicide gave the taxmen a new carcass of juicy death duties to chew. My mother, recognising the inevitable, knew that either Stowey or the Van Gogh had to go. Stowey won. She agreed a price of four million pounds for the Van Gogh, but on the very day before it should have left the house, it was stolen. It transpired that my brother had let the insurance lapse one month before his death. The police were certain that only a person with intimate knowledge of the alarms could have penetrated to the gun room where the crated painting had been waiting for the security van. The police were also certain that I was that person.

  I had put the painting in the gun room to await collection. I had the key to the room and to the alarm systems. Only I was supposed to know where the painting was. My fingerprints were on the door’s lockplates. On the day after the painting was stolen I sailed across the Channel in a friend’s boat, presumably carrying my loot away. The evidence was all circumstantial, and utterly damning. I was never charged, because my guilt could not be proved, but the whole family was nevertheless certain that I was guilty. I had done it, they said, to spite my mother and because I didn’t want to give the taxmen their ton of flesh. My relatives said I was a rogue, that I’d always been a rogue, and that now I’d broken the Rossendale family with my selfish greed.

  The painting was never found. My mother’s fight, and four million pounds, was lost, yet the taxmen and the lawyers still had to be paid, and so Stowey was sold and now caters to well-heeled tourists who gape at a boot cupboard in the belief that a priest starved to death inside. My mother moved into an old rectory on the edge of the moor, and there she slowly died. The family had made me an outcast. And I had fled to sea.

  In a yacht called Sunflower.

  There wasn’t much I had to do in Salcombe because I didn’t plan on a full provisioning in England. I would fill up with fresh water, put diesel in the tanks and spare cans, and stock enough food to reach Vigo or Lisbon. I wanted an estimate for a new trysail, but even if I could afford it, I would not wait for delivery, but rather have Charlie send the sail to Tenerife. There were a slew of small problems. One of the winches had worn gearing, a bow fairlead needed replacing, and Sunflower’s bottom was filthy with weed and barnacles. I planned to strand her at low tide on the mud of one of Salcombe’s lakes, then spend a filthy time scraping her clean before giving her a new coat of anti-fouling. She needed a good cleaning inside and out, and my clothes needed a rinse in fresh water. I would have liked to have found a fibreglass dinghy to replace the inflatable, which in turn had replaced a rigid dinghy that had been stolen in Antigua, but that could wait. I wanted a small outboard so I didn’t have to row the tender. The folding bicycle needed brake pads. I needed grease for the stern-gland. There were a couple of rust spots inside the hull which needed quick attention, and there was the bloody tooth which was now flaring up again with all its old intensity.

  At first I ignored the tooth on the principle that a pain ignored will go away. It didn’t. Instead it got worse, so, three days after the funeral, I rowed ashore and telephoned dentists until I found one who could see me straightaway. That meant another bus ride, only to be lectured by a pompous little twerp who told me I didn’t brush my gums properly. He said I’d need to make a series of visits while he first drained the abscess, then scraped out the root canal to save the tooth.

  “I don’t want it saved,” I said irritably, “just take the damned thing out.”

  “But it can be saved, Mr Rossendale.”

  “Take it out,” I insisted. Teeth are a human design fault, like appendixes, and all design faults are life-threatening at sea. This tooth wasn’t one of my front ones, so the lack of it wouldn’t make me ugly. Besides, it would be far cheaper for me to have the tooth drawn in England than giving me trouble across the Atlantic where you need to take out a mortgage before you dare see a dentist. The pompous little twerp was unhappy, but finally did what I demanded, grunting and heaving with his pliers. The Novocaine must have been from a weak batch because the extraction hurt like hell, but that was better than drawing the tooth myself a thousand miles to sea. A friend of mine did that once. It took him half a day and the best part of a bottle of Scotch, and when it was done he found he’d pulled the wrong one.

  I consoled my pain with a large whiskey in the pub, then went down to the town pontoon where I’d left Sunflower’s inflatable. No one had stolen her, perhaps because I’d pasted a score of false repair patches on her faded black skin so that she looked as though she was ready to give her last gasp and sink. Her oars were underwater, weighted with a length of chain and tethered by a tatty piece of fraying rope. I retrieved them, then rowed myself slowly out through the murk. It was still raining. Grey clouds were scurrying low over Goodshelter, then depositing a misty and obscuring rain on the moorings. A crabber engine choked into life, but otherwise the estuary seemed as empty as winter. I planned to motor Sunflower up to the drying mud of Callapit Creek. I would spend a few day
s scrubbing her hull, then go back to sea. I made a mental list of things I needed to buy: galvanised shackles, valve springs, welding rods, an angle grinder, fuses. My face felt swollen, numb and tender.

  I stopped rowing and turned to see if I was aiming the unwieldy dinghy in the right direction. I was a quarter-mile from Sunflower and way off course, blown there by the wind which was carrying the dinghy too far to the north. That’s one reason I hate inflatable dinghies; they’re prey to every gust of wind and current.

  But if the dinghy was an unwieldy brute, Sunflower looked magnificent. I rested on the oars, admiring her. She looked drab and scuffed among the smart yachts on the other moorings, but her drabness was the result of long sea miles and it gave her the battered beauty of functionalism. She was weather-beaten, tough and practical. Then, as I gazed at her, a man’s head appeared in her companionway. He stared around the moorings, glanced at me for a second, then ducked back into the cabin.

  For a moment I was shocked into immobility. I even doubted what I’d seen. Somehow all the years of ocean travel had not diluted the prejudice that blatant thievery is more common abroad than in an English harbour; certainly not in genteel, yellow-wellied Salcombe.

  And the intruder, if I had not imagined the whole thing, had to be a thief. I’d left Sunflower’s companionway locked tight, so he must have broken the big padlock to get inside the cabin. The intruder had not been Charlie, for the man I’d seen had black hair, and Charlie’s thatch was as fair as mine. I wouldn’t have cared if Charlie had broken the cabin lock, then drunk all the whiskey on board, but I was damned if some stranger would steal from me. I began rowing again. As I did so the dark head appeared again in the companionway. I rowed steadily, aiming well away from her, and the man must have decided that I posed no threat for he ducked back down into the cabin. I rowed on, keeping well to Sunflower’s beam. I knew the intruder might still be watching me through one of the thick cabin ports so I pretended to be going to a mooring north and east of the boat. I didn’t hurry. I did nothing to make him suspicious.

  I wanted to trap him. He was thieving from my boat, and I wanted to make him regret it. I knew I would have to be cunning, for he was surely alert to the possibility of the owner returning. So I kept rowing away from Sunflower, though now, because I was past her, I was able to watch her constantly. The man did not reappear in the companionway, so he must have felt safe.

  I went a good two hundred yards past Sunflower’s mooring, then turned south amongst a gaggle of moored Salcombe yawls. I rowed until Sunflower’s bows were pointing directly towards me, then I let the ebbing tide carry me down towards her. I steered with a single oar over the dinghy’s transom. I noticed there was no tender tied to Sunflower, which was odd, but, when I was just twenty yards away, I forgot the oddity because I heard voices. There were evidently two intruders aboard, a man and a woman. The woman’s voice, sharp and penetrating, seemed to make a protest, but the man’s voice overrode her.

  I put out a hand and caught the rail of Sunflower’s pulpit. The tide was trying to take the dinghy down Sunflower’s starboard flank to where I would have been visible through the cabin ports, but I held the dinghy back, took a breath, then slowly hauled myself over the bows. The big hull rocked gently under my weight, but not enough to warn the intruders of my presence. I’d kept the inflatable’s painter in my left hand and I quickly hitched it to the pulpit rail. The inflatable would bump softly against the steel hull, and I prayed the tiny thumping would not alert them. The man was speaking again, low and urgently, but I could not hear his exact words.

  I crouched over the forehatch. I guessed that the man and woman would be in the main cabin. I could just see the twisted remains where they had forced the hasp of the main companionway. I briefly thought of making my entrance there, but my footsteps could have alerted them as I negotiated the cabin roof and I wanted to surprise them. I took the bunch of keys from my pocket and, taking exquisite care not to make them jangle, found the small key for the forehatch padlock. The dinghy, driven by the wind, thumped softly and persistently against the hull. Rain slicked Sunflower’s teak-planked deck.

  The key went unwillingly into the lock, resisted, then turned. I eased the padlock out of the steel hasp, laid it with the keys on the deck, then took hold of both latches.

  Then a bellowing roar made me twist round. I should have realised that the man and woman must have used another boat to reach Sunflower, which boat, to prevent suspicion, had left them aboard before going a safe distance away. Their accomplice on board that other boat had belatedly seen me, and now he was accelerating towards the rescue of his companions. The rescuer was a huge man, built like a prizefighter, who conned his small boat with a noticeable clumsiness. That boat was a small aluminium dory, flat bottomed and driven by a big outboard which was flinging water white to either side. The noise must have alerted the intruders, for the man’s head reappeared in the companionway. I saw sleek black hair lying close to a narrow skull, then the man turned and stared in astonishment at me.

  I had snatched a boathook from its rack on the cabin roof. I kept two boathooks there. One was for hooking boats or moorings, but the other, the one I seized, had a more specialised purpose. I had sharpened its spike to sail-needle sharpness, then ground a blade edge down the outer curve of the hook. That done I had hollowed out the head of the shaft and weighted the weapon with lead. In effect I had made myself a miniature boarding pike that had proved its worth more than once. Any yacht in far waters is fair game for a thief, and a lone sailor had better take precautions or else he or she will end up as crabmeat. Now, in Salcombe’s supposedly peaceful harbour, I swung the weighted blade, blunt side forward, at the black-haired man. He turned away from the blow, which nevertheless caught him on the back of his neck. It half felled him, or else he was already falling, for he disappeared down the companionway.

  I was shouting, part in rage that the intruders had dared to break into Sunflower, and in part to scare the man. I scrambled over the liferaft and coachroof, then jumped down into the cockpit where I turned and held the boathook like a poised harpoon. The dory was slewing round, spraying water in a great curved sheet. The big man at its controls shouted incoherently at his companions on Sunflower. I could see the woman’s legs in my cabin. She was sitting on the starboard bunk, but I could not see her male companion. “Stay there, you bastards!” I shouted. I planned to trap my intruders inside Sunflower, cow them into docility, then use the VHF to call the police. The man in the dory was having trouble controlling his boat, which was a blessing because I didn’t fancy fighting a man of his height and weight.

  I was about to go down into the cabin when the unlocked forehatch swung open and the black-haired man pulled himself lithely up on to the foredeck. He was thin. He had a suntanned countryman’s face and was wearing a check shirt beneath a waxed cotton coat. He had a yellow waistcoat, brogues, and cavalry twill trousers. He was dressed for the racecourse rather than the water. The dory thumped alongside, ringing like a cracked bell on Sunflower’s steel hull. “Come on!” the helmsman shouted at his companion, “jump!”

  I ran forward. The thin black-haired man did not jump into the dory, but turned to face me instead. He brushed at his tweed jacket, and somehow the commonplace gesture slowed my attack. Then he looked up at me. He had very confident eyes. He was a handsome man, perhaps in his late thirties, with a sardonic, knowing look about his narrow features. It was a face which suggested a long acquaintanceship with human fallibilities, but it was also a face with an intrinsic air of command. “There’s really no need to get excited,” he said to me in a very condescending voice.

  “What the hell are you doing on my boat?” I still advanced on him, but slowly now and with the boathook held out like a pike.

  “I want to talk to you, of course.” He had a very crisp voice; an unashamedly upper-class voice honed by public school and effortless confidence. “Shall we go below?”

  “Only after you’ve paid for the damage you
’ve done.”

  He smiled wearily. “We’re going to be tedious, are we? And for God’s sake stop pointing that hook at me.”

  The dory’s helmsman, a much coarser creature than the thin man, still held on to Sunflower’s guardrails. He was bald, big, and was staring with concern at the threatening boathook, but the other had already dismissed the weapon’s menace. He reached out with his right hand to fend off the hook. I resisted his gesture and, in sudden anger, he gripped the boathook’s head to wrest it out of my hand.

  He was surprisingly strong for such a thin man, but, a second after he had seized the hook, and while he was still pulling, his brain registered a stinging pain where he had expected none. I added to the pain by twisting the haft. Blood was spilling out of his hand now, dripping on to Sunflower’s deck. I saw the sudden agony on his face. He snatched his right hand away, dripping blood, then groped his left hand beneath his jacket to find a slim, long-bladed knife that had been sheathed at his belt. His larger companion was evidently uncertain whether to come to the thin man’s aid or keep the dory alongside, so did nothing. I lunged, skewering the boathook’s sharpened point into the thin man’s upper arm. He swore, tried to fend the hook away with his knife, but I had swung it away and now hefted it hard back.

  He had taken enough and scrambled desperately over the guardrails. He was too slow to escape my swing and the weighted boathook caught him on the back of his head as he jumped. Blood was bright in his black sleek hair. He fell against the big man who let go of Sunflower. The dory rocked alarmingly. I ran forward, raised the hook, and slammed it down, hoping to ram it clean through the aluminium hull. Instead I punctured a spare petrol can which began adding its fuel to the blood in the dory’s scuppers.

  The thin man, whom I’d wounded, was much more alert than his big companion. He threw himself at the dory’s controls and rammed the throttle into reverse. The engine roared, the boat scuttled backwards like a frightened crab, and the big man nearly fell overboard.