Sea Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  A single car accelerated into the yard. Garrard fled into the alley behind the warehouse. I was shouting. The driver of the car must have locked his handbrake for the back wheels skidded around to slash the headlights past me.

  The car stopped. Peel had already abandoned me and was running for dear life into the shadows behind the workshop. I rolled over and over, trying to free myself of the constricting canvas. I could hear Peel scrambling away, then I saw Garrard sprinting across the yard towards the open gate. “Stop him!” I shouted.

  I freed myself of the canvas and lurched to my feet. The car’s lights were dazzling me now. I saw a tall man’s silhouette. He was ignoring my attackers, and instead just walked slowly towards me. “You should have stopped them,” I protested feebly.

  “Bloody hell fire.” The man stopped a few paces from me. He was still standing in the headlights’ full glare, so all I could see of him was his shape. He laughed. “Just look at the state of you, boy! You’re as naked as the day I found you in Sally Salter’s caravan. Except you were having a deal more fun that day.”

  “Oh, my God.” It wasn’t the police. It was Charlie Barratt. My knees began to shake. I was staggering with weakness and relief and happiness and the sheer backwash of a terrible and unnerving fear. “Oh, my God.”

  “Hello, Johnny.” He ran forward because I was collapsing.

  “I’m all right,” I said, but I wasn’t.

  “It’s OK, Johnny.” His arms caught me, held me, then leaned me gently against the workshop wall.

  “Oh, my God.” My eyes were tight closed, but I could still see the dark water into which, in another moment, I’d have been plunged head first. I imagined the filthy cold water forcing itself down my gullet and so real was the feeling that I suddenly gagged. I dropped to my knees and vomited. I didn’t think I had ever been so near death. I was shaking, shivering, weeping, spewing.

  Charlie fetched a rug from his car and draped it round my shoulders. I was trying to apologise. I felt ashamed. I was crying helplessly. I was shivering and crying and vomiting, yet Charlie crouched beside me and pushed a flask to my lips. “Drink up, Johnny.”

  It was Scotch. I gagged on it, spat, then seized the flask to drink it properly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  “Shut up, you bloody fool. Drink.”

  And suddenly I knew everything would be all right, because I had found my friend. Or rather he had found me. And saved me.

  Part Two

  “The bastards.” Charlie had taken a lantern from the boot of his car and, in its bright light, was staring down at the stranded Sunflower. His voice was full of disgust and shock; almost, it seemed to my confused mind, full of a personal revulsion at what Garrard had done to my boat. “Oh, God, the bastards,” he said again, then, with all his old resilience, he plucked optimism out of disaster. “But don’t worry, Johnny. We’ll mend the boat! I’ll have some lads and a crane here at sparrow’s fart. We’ll lift her out, bung her on a low-loader, and take her to my place. We’ll make her good as new, eh?”

  I was too weak to respond. I was still shivering, too feeble to help as Charlie swung down into the dock and fixed a line to Sunflower’s transom post. “At least we know she’s not going anywhere,” he shouted up to me; then, as he climbed nimbly back to the quay’s top, “cheer up, boy, she’ll mend. I’ve seen worse.”

  Charlie hadn’t changed, except that he was more prosperous. He still had the quick smile, the same unruly hair and the same competent manner. He was a big man; hugely capable and scornfully dismissive of all difficulties. “It’s not the end of the world, Johnny,” he told me, “so get in the motor and we’ll go home.”

  His car was a Jaguar; brand new with deep leather seats and a dashboard like a fighter plane’s. I protested that I shouldn’t sit on the seats in my soaking wet jeans that Charlie had fished out of the dock, but he didn’t care. “Seats can be cleaned, you fool. Just get in.”

  He told me he had telephoned home the night before. “I’ve been out of touch, you see, but once Yvonne said you were here, I came like a shot.”

  “I’m bloody lucky you did.” I was shivering, still in shock, still ashamed of being so humiliated by Garrard and Peel.

  “We were always lucky, you and I.” Charlie grinned at me, then used his earphone to wake up his foreman. He said he wanted a crane and a low-loader at Cullen’s Yard at dawn. The foreman evidently did not mind being woken at the dead of night, or else was used to it.

  Charlie lit each of us a cigarette. My pipe was somewhere in the bottom of George Cullen’s dock, along with my passport, money, everything. Damn George for betraying me, I thought.

  “I suppose,” Charlie said, “that you don’t want to call the police?” He offered me the earphone anyway, but I shook my head. It wasn’t that I had anything to hide, but after my experiences with the police four years before I didn’t want anything more to do with them. I just wanted to sail away, nothing more. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.” Charlie slammed his door and started the motor. “So what were those bastards doing to you?”

  “They were going to kill me.” I began shivering again, so I drank more of his whisky and sucked on the cigarette as we bounced out of George’s yard and accelerated away. There was no sign of either Garrard or Peel, nor of their dark van.

  “Tell me, then,” Charlie ordered.

  I told him all that had happened. He grunted an ominous curse when I said that it must have been George Cullen who had betrayed me, but he said nothing else till I told him that the murder attempt was somehow connected with the theft of the Van Gogh. “That bloody picture!” he said with disgust.

  “It’s a good painting,” I said defensively.

  “Piss off, Johnny. It’s a bloody daub, isn’t it?” Charlie still had a Devon accent as broad as Dartmoor. “I’ve seen better flower pictures on birthday cards.”

  “But those aren’t valued at a handful of millions. Twenty million, to be precise.”

  That checked him. “Jesus Christ. Are you serious?”

  “Twenty million. That’s what I’ve been offered.”

  “Who by?”

  “Buzzacott.”

  He gave a low whistle. I understood his incredulity. Charlie could understand a piece of land being worth twenty million, for land could be turned into a profit, but a painting? He drove in silence for a few minutes, then offered a scornful laugh. “It’s a load of codswallop, Johnny. What was your mother offered? Four? Five?”

  “Four.”

  “So it’s gone up five hundred per cent in four years? Bloody hell, I should be in that business. I’ll sell the trucks tomorrow and buy myself a paint box. I tell you, Johnny, there’s more money than bloody sense in this world. No painting can be worth twenty million.”

  “Maybe, but those bastards just tried to kill me for it.”

  “Do they think you’ve got it?” he asked incredulously.

  “No, but they seem frightened that I might get hold of it and sell it.” I paused, thinking that nothing made sense. “They said that my sin was inheriting the painting.”

  “Bastards.” He offered the dismissive judgment, then lit himself another cigarette. He had always smoked too much, but all Charlie’s appetites were excessive. One day, I supposed, that over-indulgence would catch up with him, but now, in the dashboard’s dim light, he looked incredibly fit and well.

  He drove like a man bent on suicide, but he had always been touched by outrageous good luck, so I doubted he’d ever kill himself at the wheel. He turned on the car heater to warm me up, then told me about his company. “I mainly sub-contract plant for road construction, but I’ll do anything with a profit. I’ve got a couple of caravan sites in Cornwall, and I tarted up those three scabby cottages at the bottom of the village and sold them for a wicked sum to folks from London. Of course I’m up to my eyeballs in debt, but who isn’t these days?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You always were an idiot,” he
said fondly. “There’s no point in risking your own money when the banks want to lend it. I borrowed a clean million eighteen months after you left, and I’m still borrowing. Mind you, my profits are bigger than the bank’s interest payments, so what the hell?” We had turned into the Devon lanes now, and the Jaguar was travelling between their narrow hedgerows like a bullet down a rifle barrel. Once or twice a rabbit froze in the harsh light, but Charlie just drove over them. He was country-bred and had no sentimentality about animals.

  “Do you still have the dogs?” I asked him.

  “Of course.” Charlie had loved hunting with his terriers. That was how I’d first met Charlie; he had been eight years old, I was seven, and I had found him poaching my father’s land. He had been teaching me tricks ever since.

  There was a thump as another rabbit died. I winced. Charlie frowned, but not because of the rabbit. “I saw that your mother died.”

  “Cursing me.”

  He laughed. “She was a rancid bitch, eh?”

  “She never liked you.”

  “That was mutual. How’s Georgina?”

  “Same as ever.”

  “Poor maid,” he tutted. Charlie had always been kind to Georgina, though that kindness had never extended to my other sister. He used to call Elizabeth ‘Lady Muck’, and I noticed he did not bother to ask after her now. Instead, after a moment’s silence, he laughed ruefully. “Funny when you think about it.”

  “What is?”

  “I don’t know.” He was silent for a moment. The headlights were brilliant on the tall hedgerows. Sometimes, as we breasted a rise, the light would sweep across pastures. There were no lights showing in this deep countryside, though off to our west the reflection of Plymouth’s street-lamps glowed against the clouds. It was only out at sea, I thought, that one found real darkness; absolute, impenetrable, black darkness. Everything was polluted ashore, even the night.

  Charlie picked up his train of thought. “When I was growing up we used to look at your house and be real impressed by it. When I was just a tot I used to think God lived in Stowey, and it was damn nearly true. That was Lordy’s house, we were just his farm labourers, and I don’t suppose Lordy even knew we existed. But now look at us. I’ve got more money than all your lot put together.”

  “Well done, Charlie.”

  He smiled. “And you’re Lordy now.” The villagers had always called my father ‘Lordy’. They had not really liked the family, there were too many memories of past injustices, some of the memories stretching back five centuries; but, in their own way, they had been proud that the Earl and Countess of Stowey lived in their community. Now ‘Lordy’ was a penniless yachtsman and the labourer’s son drove a Jaguar.

  And owned a house that was half the size of Stowey. I caught a glimpse of the big house as the Jaguar’s headlights slashed across its façade. My impression was of raw brick and broad glass. Charlie touched a button in the car and the triple garage doors clanked open. A dog began yelping in the kennels and Charlie shouted at it to be silent. “It isn’t a bad place,” he said of the house as he parked the car. “Cost me a penny or two.”

  It was four o’clock in the morning, but Charlie made no effort to be silent. He crashed into the house, switching on lights and slamming doors. He went to the laundry room and fetched me a pair of dry jeans and a sweater. I changed in the kitchen where children’s drawings were held by magnets on the fridge door. “How many kids have you got now?” I asked him.

  “Still just the two. Johnny and Sheila.” Johnny had been named after me, despite Charlie’s wife who didn’t like me. Sheila was named for Charlie’s mother. Yvonne, I reflected, did not have much say in how this family was run.

  Charlie scooped ice out of the freezer and filled two glasses. Even when we’d been teenagers he had liked to take his drinks American fashion; that, for Charlie, was the height of sophistication, and he hadn’t changed. He grinned as I jettisoned the ice from my glass, then he filled it to the brim with single malt Scotch. “Cheers, Johnny.”

  “Cheers, Charlie.”

  It was good to be home. We touched glasses, then drank. Somewhere upstairs a child cried, and I heard footsteps as Yvonne went to soothe it. She must have heard Charlie’s arrival, but she did not come down.

  “Come on, Johnny, let’s have a proper chat.” Charlie led me into a wide drawing room. Before he switched on the lights I saw that the windows looked across sloping pastures to one of Salcombe’s lakes, then the view was obliterated by the glare of electric lights. He put the whisky bottle on the table, sat me down in a leather armchair, then insisted on hearing the whole story of my night once more. “I’ve told you once,” I protested.

  “But I want to hear it again, Johnny.”

  So I told him again. And still nothing made sense.

  I woke at midday. The sun was streaming past yellow curtains. A Thermos of coffee, a jug of orange juice and a packet of cigarettes lay on the bedside table. My jeans, newly washed and ironed, were folded on a chair with a clean shirt. A radio was playing somewhere in the house.

  I washed, shaved with a razor that had been laid out for me in the bathroom, then went down to the kitchen. Yvonne was topping and tailing a bowl of string beans. She was a tall thin woman with long dark hair and very pale skin. She had grown up in Stowey’s village and had been the prettiest girl there when Charlie married her. She was still attractive, but now her frail beauty was sullied by an air of brittle nervousness. She wasn’t glad to see me. “In trouble again, Johnny?” She sounded awkward calling me ‘Jonnny’, but Charlie and I had long cured her natural urge to address me as ‘my lord’.

  “The trouble’s not of my making, Yvonne.”

  “It never is, is it? You want coffee?”

  “I’ve got some.” I lifted the mug which I’d filled from the Thermos upstairs. “Nice house, Yvonne.”

  “He likes it. He built it.” She said it dismissively.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I liked living in the village. I miss my friends.” She tipped the vegetable scraps down the sink, then turned on the waste disposer. While the machine ground away she stared through the wide window at the far yachts on the distant water. “He likes it, though,” she said when the machine had stopped its din; then, with a wry look at me, “he likes to show off his money, you see.”

  “Why shouldn’t he?”

  “It’s the bank’s money, not ours.” She sniffed. “I suppose you’ll be staying here for a few days now?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “You will if he wants you to. What he wants, he gets. You’re supposed to join him now.”

  “Where?”

  “In the yard. It’s on the Exeter road. You can’t miss it, it’s got his name plastered all over it. He says to take the jeep.”

  The jeep was a powerful Japanese four-by-four; what Charlie would call a proper piece of kit. I drove it to the Exeter road where, in Charlie’s vast yard, Sunflower was standing on the bed of a low-loader. She’d been expertly cradled in timber. It was obvious that someone had worked very fast and very skilfully that morning.

  “I couldn’t get to sleep,” Charlie greeted me from her cockpit. “So I went over to George’s and knocked up the cradle myself. A proper job, eh?” He congratulated himself on his own carpentry, then tossed me down a lit cigarette. “You’re looking better.”

  “I’m feeling better.” I climbed the ladder propped against Sunflower’s starboard flank. “Jesus,” I swore bitterly. Sunflower’s portside guardrail stanchions were stove in, the mast was nothing but a stump, and, as the mast had buckled and broken, it had lifted the coachroof out of true. The starboard cleats had ripped from the teak-planked steel deck, leaving two-foot holes edged with jagged splinters. The deck was thick with filth. The liferaft must have been triggered into action after Charlie and I had left, for it had inflated itself and now, torn and cut by the crane wires, lay bedraggled and wet over the foredeck. I stepped down into the cabin whic
h stank of filthy river water. Everything was waterlogged. In the forepeak the tool drawers had splintered open. I found my pipe, passport and money and carried them back topsides. The boathooks were missing, the danbuoys had gone; almost anything which had not been shackled to the deck had dropped or floated away. The boat was a mess; a tragic mess.

  “What damage?” Charlie asked cheerfully. “It’s nothing! I’ll have the cabin dried out by tomorrow, then we’ll put some chippies in to repair the joinery. I’ll shot-blast your hull properly, instead of the dog’s mess you were making of it, paint her up, and we’ll rig a new mast in a couple of weeks. Your sails are already drying in my paint shop.”

  “I can’t afford a new mast,” I said bitterly.

  “You probably can’t afford to buy my dinner either, but we won’t go hungry. Come on, you bastard, cheer up!”

  “Charlie, I’m serious. I can’t afford it.”

  He paused at the head of the ladder. “What’s friendship for if it can’t help out a mate, eh? Don’t be daft, Johnny. You won’t have to pay. I’ve already ordered your bloody mast. Now come on, I’m hungry as hell.”

  We drove to a pub where the barmaids greeted Charlie with a kiss. He knew everyone, and had a word for all of them. He glad-handed the bar like a politician on the make, but then took me to a secluded corner where we could talk in peace. “I told them to make us a proper steak and kidney pie,” he said as he sat down. “You could do with some decent food.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “And no salad.” He drank half his pint. “Yvonne eats nothing but bloody salad. She read this article about diet in one of her women’s magazines. Jesus wept, I’m married to a rabbit. She told me I should give up the beer and the beef. Like hell, I said. I told her I expected a proper meal on my table, and by God she’d better provide it.”