Sea Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  In other words I could name my price for returning the painting, and the price would be paid far away from the prying eyes of the taxmen. The only fly in that ointment was that I hadn’t stolen the Van Gogh in the first place and didn’t know where it was. I was also angry at the continued accusations. Four years had not lessened anyone’s greed for the canvas, nor their conviction that I had stolen it. Doubtless my mother had thought a deathbed appeal would make me reveal its whereabouts, while now Sir Leon Buzzacott had sent this attractive messenger to try and bribe the information from me. But I did not share their obsession with the picture, and I was offended by their accusations. I was also offended by Jennifer Pallavicini’s patronising assumption of my guilt and, to show my irritation, I picked up her mug of tea and poured it down the sink drain. “Goodbye, Miss Pallavicini.”

  If she was startled by my action, she was too proud to show it. She gathered up her handbag. “You expect me to swim ashore, my lord?”

  I rowed her. There was no sign of the aluminium dory nor of the two men. Jennifer Pallavicini said nothing during the journey, but it was clear she was not enjoying the ride. She had gone out to Sunflower in one of Salcombe’s water taxis, but, without a VHF radio, I could not summon one for her return journey. Instead we rowed through the drizzle in sullen silence. She didn’t speak until I had safely delivered her to the town’s pontoon where, once she had clambered safely out of the inflatable, she turned back to me. “Where shall I return your sweater?”

  “Take it to an Oxfam shop. I’m going back to sea.”

  For a second she was tempted to take off the Aran sweater and throw it contemptuously into the dinghy, but modesty and the rain prevailed. She turned away; then, surprisingly, turned back. “One last question, Mr Rossendale?”

  “Try me.”

  Her dark eyes challenged me. “Why is your boat called Sunflower?”

  “I bought her from a Frenchman. He called her Tournesol. It’s bad luck to change a boat’s name, so I simply translated it. In other words, Miss Pallavicini, the name is pure coincidence.”

  She stared down at me, evidently unsure whether to believe my explanation; then, without another word, turned away towards the town while I rowed back to Sunflower.

  I sat in my wrecked cabin and tried to string a few explanations together. Sir Leon Buzzacott still wanted the painting; Sir Leon was convinced I had stolen it and could, therefore, betray its present whereabouts. My family had convinced him of that error by claiming to have proof of my guilt.

  Fine, except I wasn’t guilty. No accomplice of mine could have confessed, because there had been no accomplices. I suspected that my mother, convinced of my guilt, had invented the tale.

  Which didn’t explain the two men, or why the well-spoken thin man had wrecked Sunflower’s cabin. From what he had told Jennifer Pallavicini he clearly believed that I had the painting and was about to sell it. Had he believed I had the thing concealed in Sunflower? Did he think I’d hide twenty million quid’s worth of paint and canvas in a sea-locker? And who had told him I might have it? And what had he meant by saying that the painting wasn’t mine to sell? Jennifer Pallavicini had said the painting was mine, but Mother’s will evidently tried to deny me the ownership. The disagreement had all the makings of a fine lawyer’s stew, which meant that I should get the hell out of it. I’ve learned a few good lessons in life: always shorten sail when the first impulse occurs, never sail upwind unless desperate, and never, never, never give a lawyer a fingerhold on your affairs.

  And this wasn’t my affair. I didn’t have the painting, didn’t want the painting, and didn’t care about my mother’s will. The thin man, Jennifer Pallavicini, and anyone else who believed I had the Van Gogh, was mistaken. So the best thing I could do was forget I’d ever been offered twenty million pounds and sail away to the blue waters.

  But first there was work to do. I did a crude clean-up in the cabin, and began an inventory of what had been broken and what had not. Most of my tools and clothes, which had been stored with the spare sails in the forecabin, had been scattered about, though, blessedly, my visitor had not used his knives to search my sailbags. Undoubtedly he would have torn the sails to shreds, given time, but my unexpected return had frustrated him. The thin man had found no evidence of the Van Gogh, because there wasn’t any to find, nor, thank God, had he found my subsistence money. The cash, in a variety of different countries’ banknotes, was stored in a grease tin which, in turn, lay with other such battered and filthy tins in the tool tray next to the engine. No one would give the tin a second glance. But then, the thin man hadn’t been after money, just a twenty million pound painting, and he hadn’t found it.

  But nor had he finished his search, and if he really did believe the Van Gogh was on board, then he might very well return to Sunflower. That thought gave me pause.

  I decided that hunger was a great feeder of fear, so I found a tin of stew, a tin of new potatoes, and a tin of corned beef. I mashed the whole lot together, then heated the mixture over the stove. I sat in the cockpit and wolfed the meal down. It tasted wonderful. My gum was still tender, but the pain of the tooth was blessedly absent.

  Yet the meal hardly diminished the scale of my problems. First, I had only a limited amount of money, and the repairs to Sunflower would take a great deal of that reserve. I’d be lucky to be left with fifty pounds, and that was not nearly sufficient to victual her for the long journey south. So, I needed a place where I could do most of the repairs myself and I needed a job to make some quick cash. I also wanted to hide from the two men; not because I feared them, but because I wanted no part of their hunt for the missing picture. Four years ago I had sailed away from all those complications, and I would be damned if I would let myself be sucked back into that maelstrom of greed and suspicion.

  No one tried to board Sunflower that night. Which did not mean that either I or she was safe. I needed a hiding place, a job, and somewhere to make my repairs and, with the expedient neatness that sometimes characterises our unexpected needs, I knew just where I might find all three. I slept uneasily, woke early, and sailed in the dawn.

  * * *

  The weather had cleared overnight. The estuary, even at dawn, was filled with sails. Three Salcombe yawls, pretty little wooden boats, hissed past me as I hanked on the jib and staysail. A big French sloop, loaded to the gunwales with what seemed to be a dozen fecund families, made a noisily joyful exit. The sun was making the sails open on the water like unfolding white petals. My grey battered sails joined them.

  The wind was back in the southwest. I motored Sunflower as far as the bar which, this morning, was a pussy cat. There was scarcely a ripple where, just a few days before, I’d plunged suicidally through the cascading white water. Once in the outer channel I turned off the motor and let Sunflower fall on to a starboard tack. The sea glittered under the rising sun. After the sordid events of the previous day it felt wonderful to be at sea again. A big white catamaran with a cabin the size of a townhouse passed me. A bearded man at her wheel shouted a genial “Good morning!” He had a startlingly pretty long-haired girl with him. She waved at me, and her friendly greeting suddenly curdled my high spirits like water poured into oil.

  I like my life. I like the moment when, after departure, I can turn back and see nothing but the empty sea. Perhaps a ridge of cloud marks where the retreating land lies, but soon, I know, there will be nothing. From that moment on I am beholden to no one, responsible only to myself, and dependent only on my own boat and my own strength. There are no lawyers at sea; no accountants, no estate office, no family, no expectations, no tenants, no creditors, no tax assessors, no bank managers, no stockbrokers, no land agents. Those were the dark-suited creatures I had fled. After my brother’s death I had been called home to become head of the family and Earl and Lord of Stowey, but instead I had found myself trapped between my mother’s grinding ambitions and the dull, dull strictures of the men in suits. His lordship must sign this document, and his lordship sho
uld consider the tax advantages of deferring this dividend, and his lordship must meet urgently with the revenue or the bank manager, and on it went until his lordship told them that he didn’t give a monkey’s. To this day, when some petty bureaucrat gives me grief, I tell him to go to hell. The first Earl of Stowey was a Norman who took the land with the edge of his sword, and I would be damned if I would be hagridden to death by a pin-striped army of bores. I went back to sea to escape them.

  And, till this return, I had avoided them. But there had been a price for that evasion, and the price was loneliness. I watched the pretty girl in the big catamaran and I felt a stab of self-pity. I hated that sensation. My God, but I’d chosen my path, and I had better stick to it, or else the world would mock my failure. That was pride, but I was a proud man. I might not like being called ‘my lord’, but the blood in my veins had been old when England was young. So damn the loneliness. It could always be assuaged. There would always be some empty-eyed girl, bag slung on her shoulder, waiting at a tropical quayside. It only took a nod, the girl would climb on board, and that was that till boredom or irritation dissolved the liaison. There were no ties in such relationships; no mortgages, no screaming children, no slow grinding tedium; just company.

  I tacked. We were well off Bolt Head now. The sea was spattered with yachts; many, like me, heading westwards. I was not going far; just down the Devon coast. Nor was I hurrying. I lashed the tiller, then went below where I buttered a piece of bread and made a flask of tea. I breakfasted in the cockpit as terns dive-bombed the sea. There was a gentle swell, a small chop, and a steady wind. Sunflower was fairly tight on the breeze, but she held her course well. She bridled sometimes, threatening to luff, and occasionally, as a steeper chop slapped the hull, some of the wreckage would rattle down below.

  Once clear of Bolt Tail I turned a few points to the north and Sunflower seemed to ease up. She was enjoying herself now, and I felt the urge to turn her bows towards the open ocean and let her sail far far away. But first I had to repair her, because only then could the two of us go back where we belonged.

  By midday, under a brassy brilliant sun, we were sailing into Plymouth Sound. We passed Drake’s Island, heading for the Hamoaze. This was naval and commercial water, slicked with oil, as romantic as a sludge pump, yet out of here had sailed all the ships of English history; the Victory and the Mayflower, the Revenge and the Golden Hind.

  Yet the place I sought had neither grandeur nor history, but only the hopelessness of decay. It was a boatyard consisting of a slip, a grubby dock, an empty grid, a filthy quay, a workshop, a warehouse, and a forlorn office. A few workboats were tied at the quay, but all looked ready for the scrapyard. No work seemed to be going on in the yard, though I saw an old green Jaguar parked by the offices which suggested that someone was minding the shop. After four years I’d half expected to find the old yard sold, but it was still here; a monument to sloth and carelessness.

  I moored Sunflower to a decrepit fishing boat, then climbed a rusting ladder to the dock. A woman’s bicycle leaned beside the office door which had a piece of hardboard nailed across the space where a pane of glass had evidently been broken. A similar repair disfigured the door at the top of the stairs. I pushed the door open, astonishing the secretary who sat behind the ancient desk. I blew her a kiss. “You’re still here, Rita?”

  “God love me!” Rita was a dim, good-natured girl who spent her days reading True Romance magazines. There was no other work for her to do in the yard except make the tea and answer the phone. “Johnny? Is it really you?”

  “It’s really me.” I took her hand, made an elaborate bow, and kissed a painted fingernail. “Is the old sod in?”

  “He’s probably asleep.” She stared at me. “You haven’t half got a suntan!” Then, remembering something, she dutifully frowned. “I saw it in the papers about your mother. I am sorry, John.”

  I shrugged, as though I was unable to articulate my own sorrow, then pushed open the door to the inner office.

  George Cullen started awake with a splutter. He tried to pretend that he had been working, and at the same time offered me a hurt look as though I’d offended him by not knocking, then, blinking fully awake, he recognised me. He smiled, decided a smile was not appropriate, and stood to offer me a hand. “My lord!”

  “It’s Johnny to you,” I said, “and how are you, you old fraud?”

  He shook my hand. “Johnny.” He said it tentatively, as though trying the name out, though he’d known me as nothing else since I’d been thirteen. Still, George was one of those men who liked to know a peer. “Johnny,” he said again, this time with pleasure as though he truly was glad to see me. “Quite a surprise! You’ll have a glass of something with an old friend, won’t you?”

  He produced a bottle of Scotch which had a label I’d never seen before and hope never to see again. In Mozambique, which is a destination I would not recommend to passing yachtsmen, I had drunk from a bottle which purported to be Scotch. It was called ‘Sbell’, and bore a very poor copy of a Bells label. Sbell whisky was a drink for a desperate man, though it made an excellent all-purpose solvent. George’s Scotch was of the same order. I took a sip, then grimaced. “Where on earth did you get this muck, George?”

  “It was a business gift, Johnny. From an associate.”

  “Bloody hell.” I drank it anyway, then held out my glass for more.

  George refilled my glass. He’s an affable crook. He looks as bent as any front-bench politician, what with his beer belly, jowly face, and small suspicious eyes, but he has a great taste for gossip and a healthy fear of the prison yard. He had inherited this Hamoaze boatyard from his father, but the yard didn’t do real business any more. George’s income came from fencing items thieved from boats. The police must have known about him, so the only explanation for his continued liberty must have been that he was grassing on someone. I’d known George for twenty-one years. I used to spend my holidays working in the yard. Back then there had still been a semblance of industry at Cullen’s Boats, but that pretence seemed to have been long dropped.

  He waddled to the window and stared down at Sunflower. “Been far in her, Johnny?”

  “Round the world, George.”

  “Have you now?” He gazed at her as he stuffed his pipe with tobacco. “I’ve always fancied sailing round the world. Never had the chance, of course. Too busy.”

  George couldn’t make it past Plymouth Breakwater in a gin palace, let alone sail round the world, but I smiled politely. He shrugged, then hospitably offered me his tobacco pouch. “Just visiting, are you, Johnny?”

  I shook my head. “I want your grid for a couple of days, and what’s left of your workshop.”

  “Of course, Johnny, of course. I’ll have to check that no one’s booked in, of course, but…”

  “Shut up, George. Of course no one’s booked in. And don’t worry, I’ll earn my keep.”

  “Ah.” George frowned. I suppose he had been expecting me to offer him cash, while now I was suggesting that he paid me for odd jobs, but his cupidity was beaten by his snobbishness. A lord was a lord, even if he was penniless. George lit his pipe, then went back to his littered desk. “We’ll work something out, Johnny.”

  “And I want something else, George.”

  He heard the wariness in my voice and matched it with his own. “Something else?”

  “I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.”

  George might be a sluggish old toad, but he has a nose for mischief. He slumped down in his padded chair. “The police again, Johnny?”

  “Not the police. A couple of bastards think I’ve got something. They came looking for it yesterday, and they might come looking again. So I don’t want them to know where I am.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  I described the two men as I filled my pipe with George’s black shag. I couldn’t give much of a description of the big balding man who had helmed the dory, but I offered an excellent description of the thin man who ha
d such a crisp public school accent.

  “Garrard,” George interrupted me when I mentioned the thin man’s voice.

  “Garrard?”

  “Trevor Garrard. Used to be in the army. A right posh villain, he is. Was he carrying a knife?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s Garrard, then. You don’t have to worry about his mate, he’s just a thick lump of muscle, nothing more, but you should watch Garrard. He’s nasty.” I was not in the least surprised that George knew the two men because there was very little villainy in the Southwest that George did not know about. “Garrard was cashiered out the army,” George went on, “then he got snared by the Fraud Squad, so now he’s a winkler. He did a bit of bookie’s business at one time, but I don’t suppose he dares show his face on a racecourse these days. He was too violent, you see, and the coppers got a line on him, so nowadays he’s mostly a winkler.”

  “A Winkler?” I asked, wondering if the Winklers were a notorious family of criminals.

  George poured himself more whisky. “A winkler,” he said with plump dignity, “is a rent-control operative.”

  “Come again, George?”

  He sighed. “Suppose you’ve got a property, Johnny, and there’s a sitting tenant in it, paying you a lousy rent, and the law won’t let you turf the useless bugger out. But you’re losing money on the property and you want to put another tenant inside who’ll pay you a proper rent. So what do you do? You can’t hire another bleeding lawyer, because you’ll get the same answer, so you hire yourself a winkler. Things begin to happen to your tenant. Nasty things. The water gets shut off, rats take up residence, and perhaps half the roof falls in. Their pussy cats get strangled and their car tyres get slashed. The tenant eventually gets fed up, moves out, and you pay the winkler for his services. He’s winkled them out, you see.” He added this last explanation helpfully.

  “You know this fellow, Garrard?” I asked.

  “Not personally” – George was being evasive now – “but I know he’s done some jobs for local businessmen. He comes from Bristol, I think. Ronny’s from London, but he’s not such a bad lot.”