Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

Jackie and I sailed through sunlit days and phosphorescent nights. We saw no other boats. Hundreds of craft were out there, strung and scattered across the conveyer belt of the trade wind latitudes, but we sailed in apparent solitude, lost in an immensity of warm sea and endless sky under which we fell once more into our watch-keeping routine. I took the first watch from midnight until four, then Jackie would take the deck until ten in the morning. She then slept until nearly six o’clock in the evening, when she would join me in the cockpit for our main meal of the day. At eight I would go below and try to sleep until midnight, when Jackie would wake me for the first watch with a cup of coffee. I was always on call in case of an emergency, but she never needed to rouse me; she claimed that the hounds of hell could not have woken me, so deeply and well did I sleep at sea. My snores, Jackie claimed, began the moment I went below.

  I did sleep well. For the first time since Joanna’s death I was sleeping the night through, unharassed by regret. There was only one single morning on that whole voyage of two thousand seven hundred miles that I woke early. On that morning my eyes opened just after eight, a full hour before I usually rolled out of my sleeping bag, and for some reason I could not fall asleep again. It was not the solo sailor’s instinct for danger that had woken me, because there was nothing wrong with the boat’s motion and there were no odd sounds that betrayed a piece of broken rigging, and I could tell Jackie was safe, because I could hear the shuffle and slap of her bare feet on the foredeck. I wondered if she had gone forward to deal with some small emergency that had woken me, and which, before I was fully conscious, she had brought under control. I could think of no other explanation for being awake.

  I yawned, wriggled out from behind the lee cloths which held my sleeping body against the boat’s rolling motion, and climbed toward the cockpit. I paused at the midpoint of the companionway and turned to look forward, only to see Jackie doing strenuous aerobic exercises on the sun-drenched foredeck. I froze in sudden and acute embarrassment, because she was doing her bends and stretches in the nude. For a few seconds I stared at her, half in amazement and half in admiration, then, before she became aware of my early appearance, I ducked swiftly back into the galley, where I ostentatiously clattered some pots and pans together.

  “You’re awake early,” she called down a few seconds later.

  “Couldn’t sleep. What’s it like up there?” I shouted the question so she would not think I had already been on deck.

  “Same as ever. Sunny, warm, and a force-four wind. I’ve got six flying fish for your lunch.”

  “Chuck them back!” There comes a point when the taste of flying fish palls. “Do you want your tea now?” I asked her. Jackie had brought on board an herbal concoction of caffeine-free leaves, which I gallantly brewed for her whenever I took over the watch.

  “Please!”

  By the time I reached the deck she was in her bikini, looking positively overdressed. “You can turn in early, if you like,” I said.

  “I’m not tired.” She sat cross-legged on the far thwart and I was suddenly assailed by a vivid memory of her lithe, tanned body flexing and arching between the foresails’ sheets. I stared upward so that Jackie could not see my blush and, high above Stormchild’s swinging masthead, I saw a trans-Atlantic jet scratching its white contrail against the sky. “They say you can navigate by those jets,” I said, just to distract myself.

  “You can do what?” Jackie had been concentrating on harvesting her sprouts which grew in their plastic trays with an astonishing vigor, and which she ate with an equally astonishing enjoyment.

  “I’m told that some people have successfully navigated the Atlantic by following the vapor trails of big jets.”

  She looked up at the white line scratching itself between the puff-ball clouds. “Figures. Cheaper than buying a sextant.”

  The next morning six dolphins appeared to escort Stormchild. Their arrival gave an ecstatic pleasure to Jackie, and I had not seen such joy in another person since the day I had woken Nicole to the exact same sight twelve years before. Nicole’s delighted face had shown an unusual softness, and now, with Jackie’s enthusiasm to bring the memory into sharp and sudden focus, it did not seem so odd that Nicole had become the disciple of a man who claimed to be a fanatical environmentalist. “Tim, they’re so cute!” Jackie enthused.

  “They taste good, too.”

  “Oh, shut up!” She laughed and hit me. There were times when she seemed impossibly young, and I hated those times. Mostly, to hide my feelings, I treated her with an exaggerated formality, and she seemed to reciprocate the courtesy, but, once in a while, as when she watched the dolphins leaping, her polite mask would slip and I would feel the scar being torn from my soul. I convinced myself that Joanna’s death had made me unusually vulnerable to a young woman’s charms, and I armored myself against any display of that vulnerability by my painfully correct behavior.

  Thus we sailed on. Stormchild threw us a few problems, but none that were unusually difficult; a steel cotter pin snapped on the self-steering gear so that the boat suddenly rounded up toward the wind and the sails slatted like demented bat wings. Jackie was on watch, and, by the time I was on deck, she had already recovered the helm and had opened the locker where we kept the spare fastenings. Another day I discovered the bilge was slowly flooding and traced the problem to a pinhole leak in a spare water tank. The odd sail seam opened, but nothing that a few minutes with a needle and sailmaker’s pad could not mend.

  Day by day the pencil line that represented Stormchild’s progress inched its way across our chart. I measured its advance by taking running fixes with the sextant, a process that, at first, Jackie had liked to double-check by turning on the satellite receiver and waiting for the small green numerals to betray the ship’s position, but gradually she learned to trust the sun more than the clever box of silicon chips, and soon she wanted to master the sextant herself. I taught her, and it was a good day when I was able to congratulate her for fixing our position within fifty miles. She laughed, rightly pleased with her achievement, then she spread her arms as though to encompass all of Stormchild and all of the unending sea and sky. “I could do this forever, Tim.”

  “You mean sail forever.”

  “Oh, sure.” Her eyes were alight.

  “There’s nothing to stop you,” I said, and felt my heart racing with a ridiculous and futile hope.

  “Yeah, there is.” She turned away. “Money and a job.”

  “Sure,” I said meaninglessly, and the ship rolled to starboard, back to port, and Jackie’s plait swung against her shoulder blades with Stormchild’s endless motion. Jackie’s hair, which had been mousy and bobbed when I first met her, had grown wildly long and had been bleached into a pale white gold by the salt and sun, so that now it lay in startling contrast against her dark-tanned skin. She looked exotic and fit now, and it was hard to see in this lean, bright-eyed and confident girl the nervous, timid, baggy-trousered waif who had first accosted me in Florida.

  We sailed on, mile after rolling mile, in what for me was the most perfect trade-wind crossing of the Atlantic I had ever made. I doubt that a single wave broke high enough on our cutwater to wet Stormchild’s deck, and only at the end, as we neared the Caribbean, did two squalls briefly soak our topsides with a sudden and drenching rain. Not long after the squalls, as our deck steamed dry under the tropic sun, we at last saw the airy castles of white cloud rising high above the horizon and I told Jackie that the clouds were forming above land. That afternoon an extravagantly tailed frigate bird swooped close to Stormchild and both Jackie and I felt the nervousness that is engendered by an approaching landfall. It is a nervousness that comes from a reluctance to abandon the safe security and comforting routine of a ship for the dangers of a strange harbor and its unpredictable people.

  I washed our shore-going clothes by sloshing them around in a plastic garbage bag half filled with seawater and detergent. Later, as the clothes dried in the rigging, we loosed the lashed down boom a
nd hoisted the huge mainsail and let Stormchild steady onto a port reach. The rolling stopped immediately and the noises of the ship, which had stayed so constant for four weeks, changed with the new motion. I turned on the VHF radio and heard the intrusive babble of voices.

  Two mornings later we were safe in Antigua’s English Harbour where, blessedly, there was space at the Dockyard Quay. The Dutch couple, with whom we had dined on my birthday and who had sailed from the Canaries a full month before us, took our mooring lines, and Jackie, to celebrate the completion of her first transatlantic sail, insisted on buying a bottle of cheap champagne that we all four drank at lunchtime. “I didn’t think you had any money,” I said lightly when the friendly Dutch couple was gone.

  “I used my last crumpled dollars,” she said, “though I do have some plastic, but I’m afraid to use it because the bills would never reach me, and then the bank will have me crucified.” She leaned back on the thwart, under the shade of the cockpit canopy that I had rigged once more. “This is fun, Tim,” she said with languorous warmth, then reached and lightly touched my hand. “Thank you for letting me come. God, but this is fun!”

  A week later, our ship dressed overall with what flags I could muster and with underwear filling in the gaps, we celebrated Christmas. I gave Jackie a coral necklace, and she gave me a woolen scarf that she had been secretly knitting. “I’ve nothing else to give you,” she apologized, “and you said it will be cold in Patagonia.”

  “It’s wonderful,” I said, “thank you.”

  “It isn’t much. I bought the wool in the Canaries. It’s real nice wool, isn’t it?”

  I felt an urge to kiss her, just as a thank you, but I did not have the courage to move, or else I had too much sense to move, and Jackie must have intuited that something was out of joint for she looked at me oddly, then smiled and twisted away up the companionway. “It’s weird, isn’t it,” she said, “to be having a hot-weather Christmas?” I suspected she was covering a moment of mutual embarrassment with a meaningless babble of conversation. “I have an aunt who goes to Florida every winter, and she cooks a turkey and all the trimmings, but she has to turn the air-conditioning way up before she can bear to eat it. Oh, wow, look at that!”

  “That” was a majestic French yawl, agleam with bright work and brass, that had shaken out its mainsail ready for sea. I envied the French crew, for I, too, would have liked to have been at sea where, somehow, coexistence with Jackie was easier than in port, but I was waiting for David’s promised letter which would enclose the sailing directions for the Chilean coast. I telephoned him on Christmas Day, but got no answer. I decided to wait until New Year’s Day, after which, letter or no letter, Jackie and I would sail again.

  Jackie telephoned her mother on New Year’s Eve, and afterward called Molly Tetterman. “She wanted to come down and join us,” Jackie said when she joined me outside the telephone office, “but I couldn’t bear it! She never stops talking! Never!” Then she burst into laughter as she remembered how I had used to accuse her of the same sin. “Have I changed, Tim?”

  “Yes,” I said, “you have.” We were walking back toward the dockyard in the hard, bright sunlight.

  “Is it a good change?” Jackie asked coyly.

  “Yes.” I smiled. “I think it probably is.”

  Suddenly, and with what seemed like an impulsive artlessness, she put her arm through mine. “I was so scared of you at the beginning. I suppose I should never have asked to come with you. It was kind of rude of me, right? But once I was on board you were so awful to me!”

  “I was not.”

  “You were! I just happened to mention that I was a tiny bit cold and you jumped down my throat! I thought you were going to throw me off the boat!”

  I laughed. “I don’t want you to get off the boat”—I hesitated, knowing I should not say the next word, but I said it anyway—”ever,” and immediately after I had spoken it I felt like such a damn fool that I wanted to take the word back. I felt Jackie stop, then pull her arm out of my elbow. She stared up at me looking shocked, and I knew I was blushing.

  “Tim?” Her voice was suddenly very serious.

  “Look—” I began to try and explain myself, and Jackie began to say something at the same moment, and then we both stopped to let the other carry on, and I was cursing myself for being such a clumsy and insensitive idiot. Then we were both interrupted by a voice that boomed at us from across the street.

  “There you are, Tim! Good man! Well done! Don’t move! Splendid! And Miss Potten, too! First class! I was on my way to the harbor, piece of luck finding you here!” It was my brother David, who, lugging two enormous seabags, dodged between the bicycles and bright-painted taxis to join us. “I’m signing on,” he said as he dropped the bags on the pavement by my feet.

  “You’ve come to join us?” I asked in horror.

  “Indeed I have, dear boy. I decided you were right! I need the change. I need the rest. I need the inspiration, my God, do I need that! I have been granted a sabbatical! Twenty years, Miss Potten, I have labored in the Lord’s vineyard, and now I am free to sip the wine for a season of idleness.” He beamed his pleasure at me. “Betty sends her love.”

  “She let you off the leash?”

  “She cut the leash! She almost insisted that I come! So I have left her the keys to the Riley, and I have installed a Low Church curate in my place who will probably destroy my congregation’s faith, but I care not!” David turned his happy face to Jackie, who, I thought, did not seem overjoyed at his arrival. “My dear Miss Potten, permit me the liberty of observing that you look positively different!”

  Jackie forced a smile. “Hi.”

  “Hi, indeed.” David plucked his seabags from the pavement. “The last time I was here the Admiralty Inn served a halfway decent beer and a damn good meal.”

  “It still does,” I said.

  “Then show me to it, dear boy. Show me to it.”

  We found a table in the pub, but there was an immediate awkwardness between the three of us, to which David, full of news of home, seemed oblivious. The boatyard, he said, was surviving my absence. There had been a fire in a hardware store in the town’s high street, but no one had been hurt. The bishop had broken his leg on a dry-ski slope in the local shopping precinct. “It was entirely his own fault,” David said with unholy relish, “I see the church has to be relevant to modern life, but that doesn’t need to be proved by hurtling down plastic ramps.”

  “The bishop doesn’t mind you taking a sabbatical?” I asked David.

  “He’s all for it. He thinks I’ve been working too hard. He also believes that rubbing up against some foreign cultures will broaden my horizons, but I told him that was nonsense, I just wanted to do a bit of bird-watching.” David rubbed his hands gleefully. “Just think of it, Tim! The green-backed firecrown hummingbird.”

  “I thought you were feeling too old to cope with a yacht’s discomforts,” I said accusingly.

  “Old?” David laughed. “I’m only fifty! Just three years older than you, Tim.” Jackie glanced at me, then looked away quickly. “So!” David spread his arms to encompass the table. “What do the next three months hold for us?”

  “You’re here for three months?” I gaped at him. I had somehow thought he might have come for just two weeks.

  “That should be long enough to settle von Rellsteb’s hash,” David said happily, “and still give us time to spot a hummingbird or two. But first we have to beard the monster in his Patagonian lair. How do you plan to do that?”

  I unfolded a paper napkin, found a pen, and, still dazed by David’s blunt happiness, made a crude sketch of South America. “We sail to Panama as soon as possible,” I said, “then make a loop out into the Pacific to avoid the Humboldt Current. I’m afraid there won’t be any time to make a visit to Easter Island, or to put in at any of the ports in northern Chile, instead we’ll go straight to the southern coast, probably to Puerto Montt.” I stabbed my crude map low down on the Chilean
coast.

  “You seem to be in a devil of a hurry.” David lit his pipe.

  “From everything I hear it’s sensible to make a landfall in Patagonia before the end of February,” I said, “and between now and then we’ve got the best part of five thousand miles to go, so yes, I’m in a hurry.” I paused. “It’s going to be a very uncomfortable voyage, David.”

  David laughed. “He thinks I’ve gone soft,” he confided in Jackie, then looked back to me. “I assure you I’m as fit as you are, Tim.”

  “Who’s keeping an eye on the boatyard while you’re away?” I asked with alarm.

  “Your new manager. Very good chap, by the way. Knows his onions.”

  “Oh, Christ!” I sighed because my elder brother’s arrival threatened to tear my life into shreds. Just three months ago I had been begging for his company, but now, isolated in the strange relationship I had with Jackie, I did not want David’s loud intrusion. Except he was here now, and could not be sent back, which meant that the small fragile bubble in which Jackie and I had been so delicately existing was about to be obliterated by the great gales of David’s bluff goodwill.

  Jackie clearly felt the same sense of violated privacy for she had spoken hardly a word since we sat down in the pub, but now she leaned toward me with a frown on her sun-tanned face. “I think maybe you don’t really need me anymore, Tim. Now that your brother’s here.”

  “Of course I need you!” I said hastily.

  “Every ship must have a cook!” David put in his three cents’ worth of appalling insensitivity.

  “Shut your bloody trap!” I snapped at him, then looked back to Jackie. “You can’t jump ship now!”

  “What I was thinking,” she said, and without even acknowledging David’s presence at the table, “was that I ought to fly home and make sure everything’s OK there. With my mom, you know? And with my apartment. I mean, hell, I just walked away from it! Things may need looking after.”

  “You’re abandoning the Genesis community?” I asked in disbelief.