Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Stormchild is for sale again?” I asked in mild astonishment.

  “Stormchild, yes, or Tort-au-Citron,” David confirmed. “It seems young Miller rather overplayed his hand in buying the boat, and his partners are now understandably keen to get the brute off their books. I warned them that in today’s market it won’t sell quickly, but if you can find a buyer, Tim, I think they’ll be willing to drop their price pretty savagely. In fact I think they’ll take a loss just to put the whole embarrassing exercise behind them.”

  “Maybe they’ll go as low as ninety-five?” I wondered.

  “Good Lord, no!” David seemed offended. “You’ll have to ask a higher price than that! At least a hundred and ten thousand! Remember, Tim, you’re on a broker’s percentage, and they’re lawyers! In the words of the good Lord himself, screw the wretches till they squeal.”

  “Ninety-five,” I said again, “because I’ve already got a buyer lined up.”

  David stared at me with a gratifying amazement. “You do?”

  “Yes,” I said, “me.”

  That stopped David cold. He gazed at me for a few seconds over the rim of his glass, took a long swallow of ale, then momentarily closed his eyes.

  “I could have sworn you said you intended to purchase Tort-au-Citron for yourself. Please inform me that I misheard.”

  Instead of answering I took our glasses to the bar and had them refilled. When I carried the pints back to the table I confirmed David’s worst suspicions. “I’ve decided to sell the house,” I said, “put a sales manager into the yard, and buy Stormchild.” I was damned if I would go to sea in a boat named after some legal jest. She would have her old name back. “With any luck I’ll be away before Christmas. Cheers.” I raised my glass to David.

  “Go and see Doc Stilgoe and have him prescribe you a nerve tonic,” my brother advised.

  I smiled. “Truly, David, I’ve had time to think about my life, and I don’t want it to trickle on like it is. Besides, I was never any damned good at running the business; Joanna was always the one who did the books, and I’m a much better sailor than I am a salesman, so I’ll buy Stormchild, then go looking for Nicole.”

  “You can’t just disappear!” David exploded at me.

  “Why ever not? Nicole did.”

  “She was young! She was a fool! She was irresponsible!”

  “And I’m alone,” I said, “and what responsibilities do I have?”

  “You have responsibilities to Nicole, for a start,” David said trenchantly. “If the silly girl ever does decide to come home, then it’s going to be mighty difficult for her if home is halfway round the globe and still moving!”

  “Nickel’s not coming home, David. None of the Genesis community has ever left von Rellsteb, at least not since he went into hiding. Maybe some of his followers have tried to escape, but he’s made damn sure that none get away to tell any tales.”

  “So what the hell are you going to do? Just wander away on a boat and grow a beard?”

  “I’m going to find Nicole, of course,” I said, then held up a hand to stop David from interrupting me. “I believe she’s being held against her will. I can’t prove that, of course, unless I find her, so that’s what I’ll do.”

  David snorted derision. “You are mad.” He was scornful, yet I also heard doubt in my brother’s voice, as though he knew I was right and was simply reluctant to admit it.

  “No,” I said very seriously, “I’m doing what you and I have often dreamed of doing. I’m going on an adventure, an old-fashioned quest across far seas, and, perhaps, at the end of it, I shall find Nicole.”

  “My dear Tim, what terrible things the Florida sun has done to your sanity,” David said, though I heard a distinct tone of jealousy in his voice. David often complained that the world had become dull and offered no chances for adventure.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” I asked him.

  He laughed. “My dear Tim, I’m busy.”

  “God will give you a sabbatical, won’t he?”

  “I’m overdue for one,” he said wistfully, and I could see he was tempted, but he was also frightened of the temptation. In some ways the relationship between David and myself was like the one that had existed between Nicole and her brother. Nicole, like me, was the daring one, the instigator of mischief, while David, like Dickie, was more cautious. My brother, tough as he was, did not like embarking on uncertain endeavors. That, I often thought, was why he preferred dinghy sailing to deep-water cruising. However fast and exciting a racing dinghy might seem, it is almost always sailed within sight of land, in sheltered waters, and in daylight. Blue-water cruisers, on the other hand, go out into the great waters where tempests, darkness, and dangers wait. “Damn it, Tim, I’d love to come,” David now said, “but duty forbids.”

  Outside the pub the gray wind beat bleak rain across the town’s roofs and brought the far sound of the wild seas breaking on the river’s bar. To me the noise was music, for it was the sound that would take me back to sea, and to the world’s far ends and, if God willed it, back to Nicole.

  In a boat called Stormchild.

  I craned Tort-au-Citron out of the water, scrubbed her hull clean of a season’s weed and barnacles, then gave her a triple coating of antifouling paint. First, though, I took the ridiculous name off her transom and painted her original name in its place. She was Stormchild again, and I was sentimental enough to think that the lovely boat was grateful for the change.

  I paid ninety-six thousand for her. She was worth nearly double that price, but I had persuaded Miller’s legal partners that she had deteriorated badly. The lawyers should have insisted on a survey, but they took my word on the boat’s condition, confirming David’s suspicions that Miller’s partners were simply glad to be rid of the yacht. Which suited me, for I now possessed a boat superbly suited to my purpose. Stormchild was tough, but she was also fast, safe, and comfortable. My plan was to provision her, then, leaving David to tie up the loose ends of my affairs, I would head south across Biscay. I could expect a lively time of that crossing, for it was already very late in the year, but I would be heading into the regions of perpetual summer, and, when the trade wind belt moved north, I would go west toward America.

  “You’ve heard nothing from that wretched child, I suppose?” David never called Jackie by her name. That was not from unkindness, but rather out of David’s fear of the unknown, and I, who knew my brother’s foibles only too well, knew I would never shake his preconception that Jackie, being young and foreign, was a threat to me.

  “I’ve heard nothing,” I confirmed.

  “A fool and his money are easily parted,” David said with sanctimonious relish. It was five weeks after my return from Florida and, on a bitterly cold day, he was helping me rig Stormchild. We had craned her into the water the day before and now she floated, lone and glorious, at the winter pontoons.

  “She might contact me yet,” I said defensively, though in truth I had rather abandoned hope of Jackie Potten. I did not for one moment credit David’s belief that she had cheated me, but I did fear that her investigatory skills had not proved equal to discovering why von Rellsteb had made his journey to Europe. I had not heard from Jackie, nor from Nicole. I had harbored a secret hope that the carefully written letter I had given to von Rellsteb on Sun Kiss Key would spur Nicole into a reply, but I had to assume that the letter had never been delivered.

  “If that wretched girl doesn’t come through with the goods,” David said acidly, “then you’re sailing into the unknown are you not?”

  “Not really. I think Alaska or British Columbia are the places to search.” I had bought the Admiralty charts for those far, inhospitable, and secretive coasts, and the more I studied the charts, the more I became convinced that von Rellsteb might indeed have taken refuge in one of the tortuous inlets of the North Pacific. In that expectation I now prepared Stormchild for desolate and icy waters. I had put a diesel-powered heater into her saloon and new layers of insulation in
side her cold, steel hull. I had built extra water and fuel tanks into her belly and crammed spare parts and tools into every locker. I had treated myself to the best foul-weather gear that money could buy, and I was stocking Stormchild’s galley with the kind of food that fought off winter’s gloom: cartons of thick soups, cans of steak and kidney pies, stewed beef, and plum duff. Thus, day by cold day, my boat settled lower in the water.

  Some of the equipment I needed was not available from my own chandlery, or from any yachtsman’s discount catalog. I had been alarmed by Jackie Potten’s description of the Genesis community as survivalists and impressed by her contention that Utopian communes often became degraded by the imposition of a controlling discipline, and I did not want to face such a belligerent group unarmed, so I quietly put the word about that I was in the market for a good rifle. Billy, my foreman, solved the problem by revealing that his father had hoarded two British Army rifles as souvenirs of his war service. “Silly old bugger shouldn’t have them at all,” Billy said, “not at his age. Bloody things ain’t licensed, and all the old fool will ever do is shoot hisself in the foot one day. You’d be doing me a right favor to take them out of the house.”

  He wanted me to buy both rifles. They were .303 Lee-Enfields, the No. 4 Mark I version, which was a robust, bolt-action weapon, tough and forgiving, with a ten-shot magazine and a maximum range of twelve hundred yards, though only an optimist would bother to take aim if the target was much above three hundred paces. The Lee-Enfield had once been the standard rifle of the British forces, and was still used by armies that appreciated the merits of its rugged construction. Both guns still had their army-issue, brass-tipped, webbing slings, while their stocks and barrel sleevings had been lovingly polished with linseed oil.

  David helped me hide the two guns deep inside Stormchild; one we placed in a specially disguised compartment under the generator in the bow, while the other we hid behind the timber paneling of the after companionway. “It’s sensible to take two,” David said with a most unchristian relish, “because if one goes wrong, then you can always shoot von Rellsteb with the second one.”

  “Don’t be daft,” I said, “I’m not going to shoot him. I’m only taking the guns as a precaution.”

  “Don’t let him shoot first,” David warned me. To my brother Stormchild’s voyage had transformed itself from an exercise in futility to an enviable demonstration of moral absolutes that would end with good triumphing over evil. David’s initial opposition to my expedition had changed when I told him how idealistic communes like the Genesis community often became fouled by the politics of domination. To David, therefore, Nicole had become a pristine maiden victimized by a Prussian villain, and that dislike intensified when I told David of my conversation with von Rellsteb, and how he had expressed a desire to live at one with the planet. That was just the kind of heretical mysticism that brought out the Christian soldier in my straightforward brother, and so, enthused by righteous indignation, he encouraged me to slay the enemy and release Nicole. But that enemy was well armed, and I was sailing alone, which was one of the reasons I wanted David, who was my closest friend as well as my brother, to accompany me. I made my strongest effort to change his mind on the day when, at long last, we took Stormchild for a long shakedown sail off the southern English coast. “Nothing would please me more than to accompany you,” David said, “but it’s impossible.”

  “Betty wouldn’t mind, would she?”

  “She’s all for it! She says it would do me good.” David was standing at Stormchild’s wheel, which, in the manner of many brilliant dinghy helmsmen who find themselves sailing a larger yacht, he twitched far too frequently. We had left the river long before dawn and flown up-channel in the grip of a bitter east wind that had now gentled and backed into an evening whisper. Stormchild had taken the day’s white-topped waves beautifully, while now, serene and beautiful, she ghosted the evening’s flood tide homeward. “She sails very sweetly,” David said as he glanced up at her towering, sunset-touched main.

  “She does,” I agreed, “but I still wouldn’t mind a second pair of hands aboard.”

  “Doubtless, doubtless.” David crouched out of the small wind to light his pipe, then chucked the dead match overboard. “Even the bishop said a sabbatical might do me good,” he added wistfully.

  “Then come!” I said, exasperated by his refusal.

  “It would be sheer irresponsibility,” he said with a touch of irascibility. “Besides, I’m older than you. I don’t think I could cope with the discomforts of longdistance cruising.”

  “Balls.”

  He shrugged. “If I could find someone to look after the parishes, I would, maybe.” He sounded very uncertain.

  “I wish you would come. Think of all the bird life in Alaska!”

  “There is that,” he said wistfully. David and Betty were both ardent ornithologists, and their house was filled with bird books and pictures.

  “So come!” I urged him.

  He shook his head. “You’ve been itching to make a long voyage for years, Tim. It’s been too long since you sailed round the world. But I’m not itching for the same thing. I’ve become a creature of habit. People think I’m a curmudgeonly old clergyman, and that’s exactly what I want to be. You go, and I’ll stay at home and pray for you. And I’ll keep a pastoral eye on the boatyard, too.”

  “If you change your mind,” I said, “you can always fly out and join me.”

  “That’s true, that’s true.”

  Our wake was now just a shimmer of evening light, proof how sea-kindly was Stormchild’s sleek hull. We were hurrying home in an autumn dusk, sliding past a dark shore where the first lights hazed the misted hills yellow. There was a chill in the air, a foretaste of winter, an invitation to follow the migrating birds and turn our boat’s bows south. In front of us the sea was dark, studded by the winking lights of the buoys, while astern of Stormchild the empty sea was touched with the dying sun’s gold so that it looked like a shining path which would lead to the earth’s farthest ends and to where all our secret hopes and wildest dreams might one day come true.

  I had Stormchild’s compasses swung professionally, then had a technician give her radar a final service. I had learned that the Alaskan coast was prey to ship-killing fogs, so the radar was more than a frill, it was a necessity. The aerial was mounted at the mast’s upper spreaders and fed its signal to two screens; a main one above the navigation station at the foot of the companionway, and a repeater screen that was mounted in the yacht’s center cockpit.

  A new spray hood arrived. It was made from stout blue canvas with clear plastic windows that would shelter the forward section of Stormchild’s cockpit against the bitter northern seas and shrieking winds. Stormchild had a small auxiliary wheel mounted in that forward section of the cockpit, while the main wheel was further aft. Astern of the large main wheel was the teak-planked coach roof over the after cabin. That cabin was the most comfortable aboard, but not in a rough sea when the motion amidships was always easier, so I was using the after cabin as a storeroom. I planned to live, sleep, navigate, and cook in the main living quarters amidships. On the starboard side of those midships quarters was the navigation station, which was equipped with a generous table, good chart stowage, and plenty of space for the radios and instrumentation. Aft of the navigation table was a shower and lavatory, while opposite, on the port side of the companionway, was a large galley. Forward of the galley was the saloon with its two wide sofas, table, and wall of shelves that held books and cassette tapes. The diesel-powered heater looked something like a small and complex woodstove, and gave the saloon a decidedly cozy air, a feeling heightened by the framed pictures and glass-shaded oil lamps.

  Forward of the main cabin were two smaller sleeping cabins that shared a common bathroom. I had turned one of the cabins into a engineering workroom, while the other was crammed with stores. Last were two chain lockers, a sail locker, and a watertight compartment that held Stormchild’s small diesel
generator, under which one of the two rifles was hidden.

  On deck I had a life raft in a container, a dinghy that was lashed to the after-coach roof, and a stout rack filled with boat hooks, whisker poles, and oars. At the stern, on a short staff, I flew the bomb-scarred red ensign which had flown from Slip-Slider and which the navy had rescued from the channel. I would take that ragged flag to my own journey’s end as a symbol of Joanna.

  Stormchild had been rerigged, repainted, and replenished. The work had taken me eight weeks exactly, and now she was ready. The sale of my house was progressing smoothly, the boatyard had a new manager and all I needed now was the right weather to slip down channel and round Ushant. That weather arrived in early November, and I topped up Stormchild’s water and fuel tanks, checked her inventory one more time, then went ashore for my last night in England. I stayed with David and Betty, and used their telephone to make a final effort to reach Jackie Potten. There was no answer from Jackie’s telephone, and only the answering machine responded when I called Molly Tetterman’s house. So much for the ladies of Kalamazoo, I thought, and put the phone down without leaving any message.

  The next morning, in a cold rain and gusting wind, I carried the last of my luggage down to the boatyard where the heavily laden Stormchild waited at the pontoon. Friends had come to bid me farewell and cheered when David’s wife, Betty, broke a bottle of champagne on Stormchild’s stemhead. David said a prayer of blessing over the boat, then we all trooped below to drink more champagne. David and Betty gave me two parting gifts: a book about Alaskan birds and the Book of Common Prayer. “Not the modern rubbish,” David assured me, “but the 1662 version.” It was a beautiful and ancient book with a morocco leather binding and gilt-edged pages.

  “Too good for the boat,” I protested.

  “Nonsense. It isn’t for decoration anyway, but for use. Take it.”

  Billy, on behalf of the boatyard staff, then presented me with a ship’s bell that he ceremoniously hung above the main companionway. “It’s proper brass, boss,” he told me, “so it’ll tarnish like buggery, but that’ll make you think of us every time you have to clean the sod.”