Sea Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Bastards!” I shouted. The thin man just stared at me. Blood glistened on his waxed coat. I had hurt him, and his eyes told me that he was not a man to forget or forgive a defeat. But let him hate, I thought, because in a week’s time I’d be sailing south and he could whistle his enmity at the waning moon. I watched as he pushed the dory’s motor into forward gear. He was a better helmsman than his companion, and I suspected that the thin man was capable at most things he turned his hands to. He had that kind of confidence about him, but he had failed with me. I raised two fingers at him as the small boat accelerated away between the moored yachts, then the two men vanished among the moorings, leaving behind only a haze of blue exhaust smoke and a smear of bright blood on a boathook’s head.

  And a woman. They had left the woman behind.

  So now I went to find her.

  “Bloody hell.” For a second I was too shocked to move, then I swung myself down the companionway.

  The girl lay on my starboard bunk where the thin man had evidently gone to work on her. There was blood on her face, chest, and hands. She was wearing a woollen skirt, a blouse, and a sweater. The sweater was in remnants and the blouse bloodstained and torn. On the companionway were the tattered fragments of her raincoat which looked as if it had been torn apart by dogs. She stared at me with whimpering, scared eyes.

  The bastard had also gone to work on Sunflower. He’d ripped her cabin to shreds, but that could wait.

  “Who are you?” I was pumping water from the freshwater tank into an unbroken cup.

  The girl did not answer. Her hands tried to pull the scraps of her torn sweater together.

  I knelt beside her and she flinched away.

  “For God’s sake,” I said, “I’m trying to help you. Now stay still.”

  I don’t think I reassured her, instead I think the abruptness of my tone merely scared her into compliance. Whatever, she did not move as I used a cleanish scrap of rag to wipe the blood from her face. She shuddered when the rag first touched her skin, then seemed to accept that I was helping her.

  “Nothing’s broken,” I said, which meant that her nose was still in one piece. The blood had come from a nosebleed, but that had stopped. One of her cheekbones was badly grazed, but the damage was really very slight, except to her nerves. I did not know about her ribs, nor was I about to investigate. The thin man had half stripped her to the waist, but I was not going to inflict a similar indignity on her. “What did he do to you?” I asked.

  “He threatened me with a knife,” she managed to say, “then hit me.” Her voice was wavering and scared, and no wonder for she was still rigid with shock.

  “Only hit you?” I asked. “Nothing else?”

  She nodded firmly. “Nothing else.” Meaning she hadn’t been sexually assaulted. “He said I’d come to make an arrangement with you, and when I wouldn’t tell him more, he tore my clothes.” She had barely been able to articulate the last words, which came out as sobs. “There was nothing to tell!” she protested to me, to the whole boat, then began to shiver violently. I pulled a sleeping bag from the mess on the cabin floor and draped it round her shoulders. She shrank away from my touch. I was almost as shocked as the girl. The violence of the thin man was so gratuitous and unexpected, but any explanations would have to wait till the girl had recovered some of her composure.

  “Go into the forward cabin,” I said firmly, “and clean yourself up. You’ll find some sweaters in the drawers. They’re not very clean, they’re a bit damp, but they’re better than nothing.”

  She nodded again, but did not move. She was clutching the sleeping bag round her body with her bloodstained left hand. She was still sobbing, each exhalation a tiny whimper of pain.

  “It’s all right,” I said, “I’m not going to hurt you.” I deliberately backed away and sat on what was left of my portside bunk.

  Still she did not move. She was struggling to subdue the sobs which slowly died away. She took some deep breaths and finally, when she felt she was once again in control of her voice, she asked if I was the Earl of Stowey.

  The question was so unexpected, and so out of place, that I just gaped at her. She frowned at me. “Are you the Earl?” she asked me again, but this time with a tone of desperation as if her recovery from the ordeal depended on my answer.

  “Yes, I am.” Since my brother died I’ve been the twenty-eighth Earl of Stowey, but I prefer the anonymity of plain John Rossendale because a title isn’t any damn use at sea. “But I don’t use the title,” I explained to her, “so just call me John, OK?” I rummaged through the mess on the cabin sole and found a bottle of antiseptic and a half-clean towel which I held out to her. “Why don’t you go forward and clean yourself up? I’ll make some tea.” She went on staring at me. “Go on,” I encouraged her.

  She took the bottle and towel, but still did not move, so I climbed up the companionway steps into the cockpit as though I was making sure that the two men had gone. Nothing stirred in the harbour except the rain slithering across the grey water. Smoke rose from chimneys in the town. I heard the girl moving in the cabin below, then the click as she locked herself into the forecabin. I took my binoculars from their clip in the cockpit cave-locker and stared towards the town, but I could see no sign of the small aluminium dory. My intruder had disappeared.

  I went below again and swore under my breath. The thin man had turned Sunflower inside out. He had forced locked doors open, then spilt the locker contents on to the sole. He’d torn up the sole and rummaged through the bilges. He’d broken the VHF. The radio’s case looked as if it had been prised apart with a jemmy. I switched the set on, but nothing happened. The damage to the boat was not immense, but the cost of making the repairs would be painful. I cursed the bastard again; then, because I could not contemplate starting to clean up, I went topsides once more, turned on the gas at the aft locker, then went below and lit the gas hob. The small galley was about the only place on the boat which had escaped the thin man’s attention, presumably because I had disturbed him before he could start its destruction. The chart table had been wrenched off its piano hinge and all my precious, rare charts were torn and crumpled. The sextant was safe, which was a blessing. It didn’t seem as if anything had been stolen, but I could not be certain till I had searched the boat properly.

  I made a strong pot of tea, mixed some powdered milk, and jammed up a leaf of the cabin table. I packed a pipe, lit it, then waited.

  It was ten minutes before the girl came nervously out of the forecabin. She was wearing one of my Aran sweaters, which suited her. She had short black hair, dark eyes, and honey-brown skin. She had also, so far as I could tell, recovered her composure, though there was still a wariness in her expression.

  “Tea,” I greeted her. “The milk’s reconstituted. Sugar?”

  “No sugar.” She picked her way across the wreckage of the cabin and nervously sat opposite me. “No milk either, please.”

  “Rum instead of milk?”

  She shook her head, then brushed her fingers through her hair. I saw that she was pretty. Even with a cut face, frightened eyes, and a mucky damp sweater she was pretty.

  “Did that bastard take the forecabin apart?” I asked.

  “Not as badly as this cabin.” She shuddered suddenly. “I was waiting for you in the cockpit when they arrived. There were two of them, but only one came aboard. I thought he was a friend of yours.” She shivered again and momentarily closed her eyes. “Thank you for frightening him away.”

  “My pleasure.” I put a mug of tea in front of her. “Sorry there’s no lemon. Does the pipe smoke bother you?”

  “No.” She cradled the tin mug in both hands, found it too hot, and quickly put it down. She glanced around the ransacked cabin, and grimaced. In the cold damp air Sunflower’s accommodation seemed dispiriting and drab. The girl took a deep breath, then looked across the table at me. “I’m Jennifer Pallavicini.”

  I did not respond. I had been half expecting her to tell me more abou
t the thin man, but instead she had offered me the formal introduction, so I just smiled an acknowledgement.

  “Doesn’t the name mean anything to you?” There was a trace of indignation in her voice.

  “Should it?”

  “We’ve been writing to you for three years!”

  I shrugged to show that none of her letters had reached me, then sipped my tea which I’d generously laced with rum. The heat of the liquid scalded the tender patch where the tooth had been drawn, and I winced. “Your letters are probably mouldering in General Deliveries all over the world. I’m sorry.”

  “We wrote care of your mother.”

  I half smiled. “I wasn’t the favourite child. She never even sent me a birthday card, let alone other people’s letters.”

  “So then we heard you’d come home for your mother’s funeral,” she continued, “and because you never replied to our letters, I was sent down to find you.”

  To her it all made sense; to me, none. My mother had never forwarded a letter to me, I had never heard of Jennifer Pallavicini, and I wondered how she had discovered that Sunflower was moored in Salcombe. I had also noted that she had been sent to find me, implying that she was merely a messenger. “Who sent you?” I asked.

  She gave me an almost hostile look. It was clear that Miss Jennifer Pallavicini was recovering very swiftly from her encounter with the thin man. This was a tough girl, I suspected, and that realisation made me look more closely at her. There was a lot of character in my visitor’s face; a face blended of intelligence, beauty and determination. A formidable girl, I thought, and not one to take lightly. “So?” I prompted her.

  “I work for Sir Leon Buzzacott.”

  “Ah,” I said neutrally, though in truth her answer made complete sense. Buzzacott was the rich man who had almost bought Stowey’s Van Gogh, then been denied it. He had never hidden his bitter disappointment. Buzzacott, one of the City’s most glittering financiers, had established his own art collection, the Buzzacott Museum Gallery, at his country house. He believed that too many of Britain’s art treasures were crossing the Atlantic or going to the Japanese, and he had sworn to stop the haemorrhaging flow of paint. The Van Gogh had been his proudest acquisition, filling a great gap in his collection, and it evidently still rankled that the painting did not hang on his museum’s wall.

  “What exactly do you do for Sir Leon?” I asked.

  “I’m the curator of nineteenth-century Europe.” It seemed either a large task or an excessive boast; anyway, it made me smile, which annoyed her. “Damn you,” she said.

  “Damn me?” I was taken aback by the sudden hostility. I’d saved her from a worse beating, lent her clothes, made her tea, and now she was treating me like a piece of scum.

  She closed her eyes in exasperation. “Sir Leon has never relinquished his hopes of acquiring the painting. Naturally a new price will have to be negotiated, but Sir Leon will match any offer you may receive. Indeed, my lord…”

  “John,” I interrupted her.

  “Indeed, Mr Rossendale,” she continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “Sir Leon will accept any reasonable valuation which, in present market terms, must make the painting worth at least twenty million pounds.”

  It’s easy to pretend not to care about money, to say that a blue-water sailor only needs enough cash to keep the rust out of the hull and to patch up the sails and to buy a few bottles of hooch and tins of stew. That derision of money is the chorus of the sea-gypsies; how we’ve escaped the vulgar greed of the world, how we even feel sorry for the pin-striped business executives rushing towards their bypass surgery because of the stress of making money, and we’re so proud that we’ve escaped the love of the filthy stuff, and we profess not to care about it and even to despise it, but then along comes a dark-haired girl who casually says her employer is willing to lay out twenty of the big ones, and so I gaped at her and wondered if she was mad, or if I was going deaf. “Twenty?” I asked weakly.

  “Millions,” she said firmly.

  “Wow.” I grinned. I told myself that I didn’t care about money, but twenty million smackeroos? The art world must have gone mad in the last four years. My mother had thought she had done well to negotiate a price of four million, and she’d been assured that was at least one million above the highest auction price. But twenty? At least twenty, Jennifer Pallavicini had said. “You could buy a lot of boat for twenty big ones,” I said wistfully.

  “You could indeed,” she said icily.

  “There’s just one snag,” I went on, “which is that I don’t have the painting.”

  “But you know who does.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement. This girl, just like my sister and the rest of my family, was convinced of my guilt.

  “No,” I said gently, “I don’t.”

  Jennifer Pallavicini sighed, as though I wilfully exasperated her. “Before she died,” she said flatly, “your mother found evidence of your guilt. She told us as much. One of your accomplices confessed.”

  “Whoopee,” I said, “except it isn’t true.”

  “Your mother wished to confront you with that evidence” – she ignored my denial – “and to make one last appeal to you.”

  I leaned back. The washboards were out of their slots and rain was flicking down into the cabin. I rubbed my face and winced as I put pressure on my sore gum. I looked up at the barometer, which happily wasn’t broken, and saw that the air pressure was rising. Too soon for me. I needed a few days to make my repairs, but as soon as the next depression had passed up-channel I’d use the backwash of northerly winds to take me away from England.

  “And that man” – Jennifer Pallavicini shivered at the memory of the thin man – “told me you’d come home to sell the painting.”

  That caught my attention. “He said what?”

  “That you’d come home to sell the painting. But he said it wasn’t yours to sell.”

  I stabbed at the faltering tobacco in my pipe with a shackle-spike. “So if his argument was with me,” I asked, “why go to work on you?”

  She seemed to consider whether or not to answer, then gave a small shrug. “When he first came aboard he asked me if I knew anything about the painting and I was foolish enough to say I did. When I told him I worked for Sir Leon he wanted to know how much we were paying you for the painting, and just when you were going to produce it. I said we had no agreement, and he didn’t believe me.”

  “So he beat you up?”

  She paused, then nodded stiffly. “And I think he rather enjoyed doing it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, but my sympathy only irritated her.

  “The important thing,” she said distantly, “is that at last we’ve succeeded in making contact with you. All that we now ask is that you deal with us rather than with anyone else.”

  I shook my head. “But I can’t deal with you because I didn’t steal the painting, and I don’t know where it is.”

  “So you say.”

  That churlish answer tempted me to anger. It would have been easy to give in to the impulse, for I was tired and irritated, but on the other hand I was beginning to see that Jennifer Pallavicini was a very beautiful girl indeed, and it’s astonishing how pretty girls can make men’s manners. So I hid the anger.

  Jennifer Pallavicini was collecting together the contents of her handbag, which the thin man had spilt across the bunk. “You should know,” she said as she restowed her bag, “that the painting is legally your possession. Your mother’s will can’t change that.”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t even read the will.”

  “She left the painting to your twin sister, but as your mother had already transferred its ownership to the Stowey Trust before your brother’s death, then the legacy is unenforceable.” She looked up at me. “In effect, my lord, you stole your own property.”

  I could feel a pulse throbbing in the pulpy place where my tooth had been prised out. Jennifer Pallavicini’s words were reminding me of the dull responsibilities I h
ad fled after the disappearance of the painting. The Stowey Trust was, in effect, the wealth of the Rossendale family, but formed into a trust to minimise taxes and death duties. These days the Trust was bankrupt, made so by the loss of the painting. However, the chief beneficiary of the Trust had always been the Earl of Stowey, which meant that if I had stolen the Van Gogh then I had indeed robbed myself. No one seemed to think that was an odd thing for me to do, probably because they were all convinced I was stupid as well as guilty.

  “Sir Leon is willing to overlook any complicity of yours in the painting’s disappearance if you’ll now assist in its recovery,” Jennifer Pallavicini told me.

  “How very kind of him,” I said.

  She heard the scorn in my voice, and shrugged. “We’re only trying to help you, my lord.”

  “Don’t call me that!” Despite her looks, anger had snapped into my voice. I heard the sudden emotion and did not like it. “Listen,” I said patiently, “my mother never had any proof that I stole the painting, because I didn’t. If she did have such proof, then she should have gone to the police. I assume she didn’t, because no policemen have paid me a call since I returned to England, so I suspect her proof was all imaginary. So go back to Buzzacott and tell him I didn’t nick the painting, that I don’t know where the thing is, and that I can’t help him. Tell him that four years ago the police questioned me for two days, and didn’t charge me because they knew they couldn’t make a charge stick. In short I know nothing about the painting, and that’s the end of the matter.”

  Jennifer Pallavicini didn’t blink an eye at my denial. “Sir Leon is offering twenty million pounds for the painting, Mr Rossendale, payable in any currency you desire and in any country you choose.” She paused for a response and, when I made none, went on. “You may take that as a negotiating position rather than as a final offer, Mr Rossendale.”