“Lord Briton, I am mortified,” the captain says at last. “Don't know what to say. The poor lady. Will she be all right, sir?”
I do not tell him that I found this “poor lady” in rags in the wretched alleyways of Whitechapel selling herself for scraps of food and performing rites which would have seen her burned in a less enlightened time. The captain is of stock at once too old and too young to understand a woman like Ceridwen.
Instead, I say, “Gentlemen, please forgive my wife's temper. Lady Adlington is quick to anger, but her moods pass quickly. As to putting her ashore, that is out of the question. She is vital to this enterprise, and I will hear no more about it. Captain, I appreciate your concern for her well-being, and rest assured, I take full responsibility for her safety.”
The captain does not appear relieved by my words, which surprises me. So he is not simply trying to avoid responsibility but is genuinely concerned. I store that away for future consideration.
“Lord Briton, since I am of little use until we discover something of military importance, I put myself at the lady's disposal and yours,” offers Prescott with a slight bow. “It would be my honour to watch over her, if that is agreeable.”
“Most kind, sir. You have our gratitude.” Granted, having the boy follow her like a puppy is not ideal since much of what Ceridwen does may raise the young man's curiosity. We are not, after all, relying solely on what objects come up in the dredge to find our way to the Aethelfrith. However, given the circumstances, I would be a fool to decline. She will have to manage. “In the meantime, Captain, I look forward to catching my first glimpse of Ponthieu within the week.”
“Very well, sir. Best I get to it, then.” He bows and starts to leave. “Oh, one last thing, and it is such a small thing that I am loath to mention it. Crew has concerns about your dog, sir.”
I look at Prescott, but he clearly knows no more of it than I.
“Such an opinionated crew,” the lieutenant muses. His tone is light, but his disapproval is clear. “First Lady Sarah and now this....”
I shake my head. “Forgive me, Captain, but what dog is this?”
Hollins looks down. “Why, the one which leaves droppings on the port foredeck every night. Lads say they don't mind cleaning up after him, sir, but his howling has been keeping them up nights.”
I am surprised to feel a bit insulted that the captain thinks we would have surreptitiously brought a dog aboard without his consent. Surprised and amused, under the circumstances. We hired the boat, after all, so we had no reason to sneak about. Of all things, a dog. We are hiding many things from the captain and crew, even young Prescott, but a dog is not one of them.
I expect to find Ceridwen in our cabin, sitting on our bed fuming and bursting with rage against the captain, and I do not relish being his proxy. But better she should release her anger privately to me than publicly to the entire crew, especially under the circumstances.
To my surprise, she is nowhere to be seen. So I change to my work clothes, a simple shirt, dungarees and boots, and make my way to the back of the boat––aft, as I understand––to oversee the members of the crew assigned to running the dredging equipment. I confess, I do not recall a single one of their names, remembering them almost entirely by whatever coarse feature stands out the most. Every one seems to me to be a “mate” of one sort and another, engineer's mate, boatswain's mate, rigger's mate, but beyond that, I am at a loss. Ceridwen is much better at recalling their names. A pity it does not better ingratiate her with them.
I find her at the buckets, squatting at the edge of the boat in a charmingly unladylike way, wearing a pair of my dungarees and one of my shirts and with her dark curls tucked under a wide straw hat. The coat she took against the November chill is laid by whilst she runs her hands through the freezing mud.
Prescott stands near, and true to his word, he has armed himself to her protection. At her urging, he is looking into the depths through the extendable spyglass. The gadget is of my own devising, modelled on the large telescopes used to search the heavens. I have attached to it one of the newfangled electric lights encased in a sealed glass bubble which we send down alongside it to illuminate the darkness beneath the surface.
I am rather proud of the whole contraption. It has been a godsend in helping to direct our dredging efforts. I only wish I had stationed such scopes at intervals all around the boat. As it is, having but one is like looking into an attic through a keyhole.
Fortunately, the captain has put at our disposal those of the crew who are not needed moment to moment in the operation of the boat itself, being those who are normally responsible for rigging the boat for towing or whose jobs occur at intervals and leave them with spare hours. That gives us three men at a time on any particular day. Naturally, they have no idea what to seek in the detritus, so they confine their involvement to running the dredger and helping with the heavy lifting.
Ceridwen crouches where the buckets pour through the dredger's steel mesh and picks out any items of interest. As each bucket comes over the top of the belt, it pours its contents through the canted mesh, and she has as long to sort the muck from one as it takes the conveyor to bring up and spill the next. After some trial and error, we found the most advantageous spacing for the buckets to allow thorough sorting whilst continuing apace. Behind her, “Red Beard” mans the controls that manage the conveyor while “Stocking Cap” and “Long Nose” clear any last muck from the buckets, and they watch for anything unwieldy that might get caught on the belt, that they might call to have it stopped.
To be sure, most of what comes up goes back into the sea. On the one hand, we would be wise not to fill our limited storage with every trifle that comes up, and on the other, we would be even wiser not to steal treasures from Llyr's domain unnecessarily, especially not as we ask help in the hunt for the Aethylfrith.
“Sarah, this is remarkable!” Prescott shouts over the racket of the conveyor belt as I approach them, and I draw up short. Since breakfast, he has gone from calling her Lady Adlington or Lady Sarah to simply Sarah, likely at her insistence, and I hear unworthy whispers of jealousy in my thoughts. Did I see her smile at him over breakfast? Is this nonsense with the crew some elaborate ruse to allow them time together? Is the captain helping them? My erstwhile protégé I now eye as a rival even while in the rational part of my mind I dismiss any thought of my wife's infidelity as absurd.
Besides, I must consider the possibility that I simply did not hear him correctly over the clatter of machinery.
“Stop a moment, please, Mr. Higginbottom,” my wife shouts and waves her hand to the red-bearded one. Mercifully, the clatter slows and stops.
She stands to stretch the ache out of her knees.
“I had no idea there was so much down there.” The lieutenant still looks through the eyepiece. He turns the glass to and fro under the water, still quite taken with the novelty of seeing the sea floor, especially now that the scope is not vibrating with its proximity to the machinery. “There must be a fortune on the sea floor in coins alone, never mind all the antique dolls and pistols and parasol frames, jewelry, cannonballs.... I should think the historical value alone would make this a remarkable treasure, if one could gather it all. And to think, all those things fell in by accident.”
“Some did,” she smiles. “But unless everyone aboard every ship wanders about bleeding coins from their pockets, accidental losses cannot account for all of that,” she nods over her shoulder to a trunk-sized crate overflowing with coins, “much less all we are leaving behind.”
I laugh. “You would think it a small fortune.”
They both look up in surprise at the sound of my voice. In spite of myself, I watch them for guilt, but I see none. They must not have heard my approach with the echoes of the dredger still in their ears.
“Quite small.” She drops a musket ball into a particular box within another of the crates. “Oh, the pile looks impressive, and it jingles most satisfactorily in the crate, but it i
s mostly pennies and haypennies, a few French centimes. Many of the coins hold more value in age than denomination. This is why I am certain most are offerings.”
I look at her sharply.
“Or rather, coins tossed into the water for wishes,” she amends smoothly, signaling to the men to get the dredger started again, and they start turning the crank. “The oldest coin I have found so far dates from 1183, but the custom of making offerings to the water gods for favour is much older. I suppose the gods of water have always been more approachable than those of fire.”
“Hence our tradition of wishing wells.” I say this to bring the discussion away from talk of gods and offerings. She is too forthcoming with the lieutenant, almost to the point of scandal, and I shall have to have a word with her. But perhaps not. My fears come from a time when just suspicion would see a woman drowned or hanged or burned for witchcraft, and admittedly from my own budding jealousy. In any case, Prescott does not seem alarmed or, for that matter, charmed by her words. He is entirely enamoured by the scope at the moment, and for this, I am relieved.
The dredger's motor chokes and splutters, and the buckets begin moving on the conveyor again. No sooner does it start, however, but the belt starts to jerk and chop, and the engine whines with effort, rising in pitch with its strain.
“Shut it down!” I shout. “Stop it at once, before it tears itself apart!”
Redbeard Higginbottom stares at the machine for a moment, then scrambles for the switch to shut the conveyor down, but not soon enough to stop a great gout of angry black smoke from puffing into the air.
I run to the side of the great machine and look into her motor, sick with dread at what I might find, but I cannot deduce much through the bubbling oil and smoke. Whether a pipe has burst or whether the whole motor is beyond saving, I cannot say. The poor little motor is far too hot to touch, so we will likely lose hours waiting for her to cool down and another day to repairing her, assuming we can affect repairs here. If we should have to return to port, we might lose as much as a week. Either way, it puts us off schedule. This may not be the worst possible calamity, but it is certainly inconvenient.
Higginbottom is overflowing with apologies. “Oh, I tried, sir, I did. So sorry, sir.” He looks over my shoulder into the engine. “Can't guess what went wrong.”
“These things happen,” I smile a bit grimly. “You did as well as you could.” I look into the engine again. “At least it did not catch fire.”
I hear another voice behind me. “Mr. Baron Briton, sir.”
The one I was calling Stocking-cap comes running toward me with another man in tow. “I ran to fetch the engineer to maybe have a look.”
The man beside him is dark-haired, in his fifties, but in spite of being older than anyone except perhaps the captain, he is still fit and hale. His beard is impressive, no doubt grown his whole life, and his eyes are a hard steel grey. On the whole, however, his demeanor does not appear harsh or unkind, just intensely focused on the problem at hand. He does not stop to speak but merely touches the brim of his flat cap as he passes in quick greeting and puts his mind straight to the still smoking motor. I step out of his way feeling a bit helpless.
“Don't worry, Mr. Briton, sir. Anybody can fix it, it's Mr. Aaron.”
“Bowen,” the engineer calls, and Stocking-cap goes to his side. They exchange a few quick words, and off Bowen goes to do his bidding, no doubt to fetch up some tools from the boiler room below.
Ceridwen takes my arm, and with the reassurance her touch grants me, I cannot help but feel foolish and even a bit guilty for my earlier suspicions about her and the boy, and more foolish still that, with the expedition in crisis, my first thoughts should be of such petty fancies.
“Well, Briton,” she sighs, “I suppose our requisite bit of bad luck is now out of the way. Such is my hope, at any rate.” She looks up at me, and I see that, while her words are light, her eyes shine with the same fear I saw in them the night of Lady Peggy's wedding, and I am reminded once more how fragile her state of mind is.
“This is no portent, my darling. The gods are with us,” I say quietly. “Were they not, I should think our bit of bad luck would have been much worse.”
She nods, and I know she would say more, but not now.
Bowen returns with the tools, and for the next two hours, Ceridwen and I busy ourselves with cataloguing and creating a detailed inventory while the engineer works on the motor. Prescott, meanwhile, continues to look through the eyepiece, taking advantage of the calm and quiet to explore the area beneath our boat.
“Say, have you found many coins dating from the '70s?” Prescott asks after a time. His eyes light up, as if he has solved a great mystery. He turns back to the glass. “Those may have come from the Eurydice.” He considers. “Not that her crew would have carried only freshly minted coins, of course.”
Ceridwen smiles as one might smile at a child reading his first words. “We have found quite a few, indeed, but no more than we would expect, given how much time we spent in the shipping lanes near Ventnor.”
“In point of fact, it is curious that we have not found more.” I do not mean just coins. I look at the methodically organised crates of what we have brought up, but they are remarkably empty. We spent a day dredging the very spot where the ship was known to have sunk, yet we found little. Indeed, we did not see so much as a finished piece of wood anywhere near the site, and this is a bit worrisome. Should we fail to find the Aethelfrith on this attempt, I will want to try again, but failure to have found any sign of Eurydice would make the lords less willing to support another attempt.
“But I thought you said the remains of the ship were likely all the way to France by now,” Prescott says, continuing to watch the sea bottom. “Why would anything still be here?”
“What moves a ship along currents on the surface also moves her beneath. The core of the ship and its compartments should still be streamlined and relatively light.”
He turns the scope slowly. “So you're saying that if a current or the wake of a large ship takes them up, it could carry them a long way.”
“Yes.” I am pleased that he understands. “But coins and so forth are heavier, relatively speaking, and tend to dig into the silt and––”
Prescott leaps backward from the glass with a shout. He stumbles and nearly falls, but catches himself on one of the crates.
Ceridwen cries out in surprise.
“Prescott,” I say, looking him over, “are you quite all right?”
His eyes are wide, but he nods, a bit shaken. “Yes, yes, I just...” His voice trails away as he realizes all the men around the broken dredger have stopped to look at him. “Forgive me, I saw something and gave myself a bit of a fright.”
I look up at Ceridwen, a question unasked on my lips. She shakes her head, as baffled as I am. I run to the glass and look through it, but I see nothing but the sea floor and empty water.
“What did you see?” Ceridwen asks. “Perhaps it was a ship.”
The lieutenant clears his throat. “I am embarrassed to say that it was probably nothing. I was watching so intently, looking at the sea floor for interesting items and watching the fish. Then, just like that, something obscured my vision, just closed it off.”
“What was it?”
He shakes his head. “I suppose it was just a very large fish, perhaps a shark coming near the glass. But it shocked me, to have my vision completely cut off so, that it seemed as if it was coming right for me. It just appeared so suddenly, and I....” He laughs at his own foolishness. “I suppose I thought it was going to hit me.”
“No need to be embarrassed,” Ceridwen smiles. “This was your first time looking through the glass.” She chuckles gently and goes back to organising the crates. “The other day, as we were leaving Ventnor, I saw the hull of a ship cross the top of the scope, and I ducked my head so as not to be hit by it. I felt every bit the fool, as well! But do you know, were I to see the same thing today, I would likely duck
my head again. It is a reflex. It cannot be helped.”
The men standing by the dredge mutter something between themselves, something I cannot hear, and chuckle, particularly the long-nosed one. I give him a glare, and he looks away.
“Perhaps. It was so surprising. One moment, I was looking around the ground, and the next, just... grey.” Prescott looks over at them. “I fear my little outburst has done nothing to improve the crew's confidence. My apologies, Briton.”
I am inspired to scold the men roundly for their insubordination, but I do not. After all, I did not hear what they said. Besides, I am somewhat at their mercy unless I would return to port to fix the dredger. But I am embarrassed for Prescott at their derision, all the same. I smile at the lieutenant. “Not to worry.”
Ceridwen stretches her back. “Speaking of such things, gentlemen,” she says to us, lowering her voice, “what would you say to sharing some of these coins out to the crew? Ones they might spend, of course. Perhaps it would ease the tensions and improve their confidence. Especially if they can manage these repairs, it would be a worthy reward. I might hope that they would be less perturbed by my presence, as well,” she adds bitterly.
“They might.” My tone is clipped and harsher than I intend. “You must know that the captain felt terrible for upsetting you. He only had your well-being in mind.”
“Oh, indeed. The poor captain.” She looks down. “I fear I comported myself rather like a harpy. I beg both your pardons. I have no idea what came over me.”
For my part, I have no idea what has come over her now. However, what I said to the captain is true. Her moods are unpredictable and fierce, but they pass. Prescott is quicker than I to tell her that she need not beg his pardon and that her reaction was perfectly understandable. I feel as if he has scored a point against me in a game he should not even be playing. And perhaps he is not. After all, what else should he have said? I should simply have said it sooner.
Heroes: A Raconteur House Anthology Page 16
