Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  “They probably think Stephen is taking a good long time to rape you,” I told Jackie, “but in a few minutes it’ll dawn on them that something has gone wrong, and then they’ll start looking for him. But I think we’ll be safe here as long as we keep our heads down.”

  “Tim,” Jackie said. She was still shedding tears.

  “I’ve been meaning to apologize to you,” I said, because I had decided that, on the childish principle of eating the vegetables first, I might as well eat my humble pie quickly. “I should have told you about the guns on Stormchild. It was stupid of me. I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t blame you for jumping ship, because I really should have been honest with you.”

  “It wasn’t the guns,” Jackie said, then, after a sniff, she must have decided that her words had not made much sense. “That wasn’t why I ran away,” she explained.

  “Oh,” I said feebly, and I knew I would have to make a much more embarrassing and comprehensive apology, in anticipation of which I felt my face reddening. I was tempted to drop the whole subject, but somehow it seemed important to clear what was left of our relationship, and so I took a deep breath, then launched myself into remorse. “I’m also sorry about what I said to you on Antigua, about wishing you’d stay with me. I never meant to upset you, but sometimes we say things that are stupid, and I’m sorry.” The apology sounded lame, but it had been heartfelt and the best I could achieve under these weird circumstances.

  Jackie stared at me with her huge and solemn eyes. “I didn’t think it was stupid,” she said.

  “It was a stupid thing to say,” I insisted, “because all it achieved was to drive you away from me, so it was clearly out of place and I’m really very sorry.” My embarrassment had made me turn away from her as I spoke. I was watching Lisl and two men walk toward the escarpment. All three carried rifles. “By the way,” I glanced at Jackie, “where the hell did you hide that day on Antigua? I looked everywhere for you. I even took a taxi to the airport in an attempt to find you.”

  “I was on that Dutch boat. You remember? The couple we ate dinner with on your birthday?” She sniffed. “I waited with them until you sailed away, then I flew home. I’m sorry, Tim.” She sounded close to tears.

  “I’m the one who should be sorry,” I said very robustly, “because I should never have been so clumsy as to say what I did.” I frowned at Stephen who was listening avidly to this exchange of mutual self-blame. His eyes, wide above the loops of gagging rope, seemed to express incredulity for what he heard. “Still”—I went on talking to Jackie—”it really is good to see you again. I missed you.”

  “I missed you, too,” she said.

  My heart skipped a beat, but I was determined not to make another fool of myself, so I did not respond to her words, which I was fairly sure were nothing but an expression of politeness. “I’m rather in the habit of missing things at the moment,” I told her instead. “David’s taken Stormchild off to sea, and if I don’t get him on the radio soon he’s going to sail off and ask for help. He’s got your friend with him, Berenice.”

  “Berenice Tetterman?” Jackie asked in utter astonishment.

  “The very same. She ran away. The bastards shot at her, but missed, and we took her on board.”

  “But that’s her mother who was with me!” Jackie paused to take breath. “Molly came because I couldn’t persuade any newspaper to send me down here, so Molly sold her car and we used the money to fly to Santiago, and then we had to find our way down here and it was really hard because the car didn’t fetch a lot of money, and—”

  “Quiet!” I said.

  “I’m talking too much,” she said in bitter self-reproach.

  “No.” I pointed down the escarpment to where Lisl and her two companions were climbing toward us. There had been little chance of Jackie’s voice carrying that far down the slope, but I wanted Jackie to be aware of the danger. “If we’re quiet and still,” I said, “they won’t find us. Then tonight we’ll rescue Molly, if she’s still alive.”

  “Alive?” Jackie said. “You mean...” She could not continue.

  “I mean they’re a murderous bloody bunch, but I don’t think they’ll kill Molly because they know the San Rafael is coming back for you both. But they are killers. I’ve got proof of it. I also killed one of them. I didn’t really, I just shot him and they did the rest, but I suppose it’s the same thing.” I stopped talking because Jackie was looking so very miserable. “I’m sorry,” I said after a while, “but you really don’t understand how bad these people are. And Nicole’s one of them.”

  “Nicole?” Jackie stared at me with huge eyes. “You found her?”

  I shook my head. “She’s at sea.” I sounded bleak.

  “Maybe she isn’t like the others?” Jackie said tentatively.

  “She is,” I said, “in fact, she may be one of the worst.”

  “I’m sorry, Tim. God, I’m so sorry.” Jackie rested her face on her forearm and I thought she was praying, but then she spoke in a muffled voice. “I’m sorry for everything. I really am.”

  “Quiet now,” I warned her, and I touched Jackie’s elbow to reinforce the warning, and she raised her tear-stained face to see that Lisl had climbed onto the dam’s embankment not forty yards from our hiding place. “Stephen!” Lisl peered into the rain, seeking her lost gunman. “Stephen!” Lisl shouted again as her two companions joined her on the dam’s wall. “Stephen!” They all shouted together.

  “Make one little sound, Stephen,” I spoke very softly, “and I’ll dig your eyes out with a marlinespike.”

  Stephen, who was staring at us from the cave’s recess, made a gurgling sound, which I took to mean his eager agreement to stay silent. “Good boy,” I said encouragingly.

  Jackie had gone very white. Lisl was close enough for us to hear the click as she cocked her rifle. She raised it in the air and fired off a whole magazine of bullets, then waited for any response from the missing Stephen.

  The rain billowed across the reservoir, but no reply came to Lisl’s shots. She swore, then scrambled up to the flat-topped rock that Stephen had used as his bastion. She found no sign of him there, nor, from her new vantage point, could she see any evidence of him. “Fuck him,” she snapped to her waiting companions, then she jumped down to the path and turned back toward the house. I sympathized with her reluctance to search the torn landscape, for such a search could have taken all day and still have missed hundreds of hiding places such as the one where Jackie and I now sheltered.

  “You’re just going to abandon him?” One of the men with Lisl called after her.

  “For Christ’s sake, Paul! He’s got a gun! How the hell could anything have happened to him? He’ll turn up with the girl in his own time. Now come on.”

  The three of them scrambled back down the hill and Jackie let out a long, deep sigh of relief.

  “I’m afraid they’ve got an awful lot of guns,” I told Jackie, “but you really should understand that I wouldn’t be alive today if I hadn’t brought a gun myself. I mean I know just how much you disapprove, but the thing is that—”

  “Shut up, Tim,” Jackie said with a brusque and intense passion.

  So I shut up. Jackie added nothing to her bitter command, but instead just stared into the wind and rain.

  So, filling her silence, and needing to make my peace with this girl, I tried to explain myself one more time. “I don’t like guns any more than you do,” I said, “not really, but if some murderous thug is having a go at me I really do—”

  “Shut up, Tim, please.” Jackie sounded very weary, as though I bored her, and I suddenly realized that I was merely compounding the mistake I had made on Antigua, because my very apologies were a stratagem of love, and, by making the apologies, I was offending her just as I had offended her by the more honest and outright declaration.

  So I finally shut up properly and I stared at the house and I thought how lonely life was going to be after all.

  “I told you that it wasn’t
the guns that made me run off,” Jackie said suddenly.

  “I know that,” I said miserably, “it was the other thing,” and I felt curdled with shame at the memory, but I made myself define the thing exactly, as though, by eating the last bitter crumbs of the humble pie, I could destroy its memory. “It was my wanting you to stay with me.”

  “Yes,” she said flatly. “That was exactly it.”

  I stared above the settlement to where the empty waters of the Desolate Straits lay gray and cold. Rain swept in spiteful veils across the distant hills and over the slate-colored tideway. “I’m sorry,” I said bleakly. I had already apologized more than enough, but I had not realized till now just how deeply I must have offended Jackie in the crowded Antigua street.

  “It frightened me, you see,” Jackie said in a voice so soft that I almost did not hear, and when I turned to look at her I saw that she had begun to cry, “because I wanted to say yes.”

  “You wanted to.” I began to echo her words, but she cut me off by shaking her head to indicate that any interruption now might make her lose the thread of her explanation.

  “I wanted to say yes”—she went on more strongly—”but it terrified me, Tim. I didn’t know if I could make a decision like that so quickly. Do you know what I mean? So I thought, I’ve got to get away from you to give myself space. At least I thought that once your brother arrived, because he’s a bit overpowering. But I couldn’t really explain it to you.”

  I wanted to say something, but could find nothing to say, so kept quiet.

  “So I ran away,” Jackie went on, “because everything was confusing, especially with your brother there, and I felt in the way, and I thought that if I could just give myself a bit of space I’d find out what I wanted.” She stared bright-eyed and serious at me, and I wondered if ever, anywhere on God’s earth, a stranger situation had been found for two people to fall in love, and suddenly I began to dare that we were indeed falling in love. Jackie took my silence for an encouragement to speak on. “I mean it’s a big decision, isn’t it? You wanted me to give up my career, right? And live on a boat? That’s kind of a drastic life change! And if I’m going to make that kind of emotional commitment then I want to be sure that I’ve considered that commitment properly, and you’d want me to do that, too, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” I said, realizing I had forgotten just how much this girl could talk when she was nervous, “or no, perhaps,” I went on, and I saw the astonished Stephen was still listening to our every word.

  Jackie shook her head in self-recrimination. “I should have explained it all to you on Antigua, but you always seemed so self-sufficient and I thought you’d probably be glad to get rid of me in the end. You see I thought you were just trying to be nice to me, and that you’d change your mind when you really thought about it.”

  “You thought what?” I asked in astonishment.

  “That you didn’t mean what you said, and that if you had a few weeks without me you’d think better of it. I mean I couldn’t blame you if you did, because—”

  “Jackie!” I put a finger on her lips to stop her talking.

  She must have thought we were in danger for she stared at me with very wide and very frightened eyes.

  I kissed her tears. “I love you,” I said, and I think I was close to crying myself.

  Only now it was happiness that filled me, and so I kissed her again and I felt relief surging through me as strongly as a flooding spring tide swelling over shoals to render them harmless, and I felt the same relief flood into Jackie as I put my arm about her shoulders and held her close.

  Stephen gargled at us. I think he was attempting to be the first to congratulate us on our new found happiness, but I kicked him with my heavy right boot anyway, just to shut him up.

  “Oh, Tim.” Jackie took a deep breath.

  “Does that mean we’re sharing a boat now?” I asked her.

  “I guess it does.” She smiled coyly.

  “Whoopee,” I said, and just hoped I could get the boat back.

  By midday the settlement was sufficiently worried about the missing Stephen to send two men to search the island’s interior on the cross-country motorbikes, while another four men, all armed with assault rifles, combed the ravines and rock piles of the high plateau, but no one thought to explore the escarpment’s crest immediately above the settlement where the three of us lay concealed. Instead the searchers all went further west, presumably on the assumption that Stephen must have pursued Jackie into the wild landscape that led toward the distant ocean. The search parties had a miserable time of it because the rain was an unending, drumming, thrashing tempest that slashed across the high country and beat the reservoir into frenzy and drowned the vegetable fields at the escarpment’s foot.

  We kept dry in our crevice, and I told Jackie all I had learned about the Genesis community from Berenice and from my own exploration of the limestone workings. I told her about the Australian boat, and about the corpse I had found in the high rocks under the cold wind. I showed Jackie the passport, then un-gagged Stephen to discover if he knew anything about the Australian girl’s death. When Stephen had finished gasping and making a fuss about his strained jaw muscles, I unfolded the blade of my rigging knife and pressed its sharp tip into the soft tissue under his left eyeball. “My father was a surgeon,” I told Stephen, “and he taught me that the medical term for what I’m tempted to do is enucleation.”

  He whimpered, which I decided was a request for further information.

  “Enucleation,” I told him, “is the operation of removing the eyeball.”

  He whimpered again, which I translated as an indication that he understood me.

  “So unless you want me to begin my new career as an ophthalmic surgeon right here and now, Stephen, talk to me.”

  What he told us about the Australian boat confirmed Berenice’s story. The catamaran Naiad had come unexpectedly to the settlement and von Rellsteb, desperate to acquire a fourth yacht, had invited the three Australians to a meal at the mine. Once at the mine the two men had been shot and the girl tossed into a storeroom. “Did you rape her?” I asked Stephen.

  He hesitated a split second too long, so I drew blood with the knife’s blade. He gave a small scream that was echoed by Jackie. “You bastard,” I said to Stephen. “And Nicole? Was she there?”

  He nodded.

  “Tell me,” I said, and I put the point of the stainless steel blade into the newly drawn blood. “Tell me about Nicole,” I ordered him.

  At the time of Naiad’s arrival, Stephen said, Nicole had been the navigator for the second Genesis boat, and Stephen had been a member of that same crew, but Nicole, he claimed, had been a difficult shipmate. She was not only a more competent sailor than their skipper, but she was also full of more energy and anger and resolve. Nicole, Stephen said, always wanted to sail the extra mile or take the extra risk. She was desperate to take over command of Genesis Two, and the arrival of the big Australian catamaran had seemed a heaven-sent chance for von Rellsteb to prevent a mutiny. Thus the Naiad had been pirated and given to Nicole.

  “So who killed the Australians?” I asked Stephen.

  He stared dumbly at me.

  “Who?” I insisted, even though I knew the answer.

  “She did,” he almost whispered the accusation. “The others hesitated, so she snatched the gun.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” Jackie murmured in a stricken voice.

  I stared hatefully at Stephen, wanting to murder him for being the messenger of such news, but then I decided I had better drain the cup to its bitter dregs, so asked him which boat had sailed to Europe two years before.

  Again his hesitation was just a fraction too long, indicating not only assent, but guilt.

  “Genesis Two?” I asked. “Your boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Nicole was with you?”

  He nodded in terror.

  “And you placed a bomb on my boat?”

 
It would have taken a nerveless creature not to feel terror at the tone of my question, or perhaps it was the cold, sharp steel that pricked at his eye socket that made Stephen shudder and begin to breathe in short, urgent gasps as though he suddenly had to cram a lot of oxygen into what was left of his miserable life. Jackie, fearing what I was about to do, turned away.

  “It wasn’t me!” Stephen managed to say.

  “Was it Nicole?”

  “She and her lover.” He was gabbling now, eager to prove that he was cooperating with me, eager for my approval, eager to save his sight and his life.

  “Her lover?” I remembered the photographs in the radio room at the mine which had showed Nicole with the tall, blond young man who had looked so uncannily like her brother, and I wondered what strange beasts prowled in our lusts when we let them through the gates of inhibition and fed them with our angers. “Is he fair-haired?”

  Stephen nodded. “He’s called Dominic, and he’s her navigator now. They thought that if you died then they would inherit your boatyard and they could start their own group in Europe. Nicole wanted to prove she was better than Caspar, you see, but she needed a base to work from, so she picked your boatyard. Caspar didn’t mind, because he always found Nicole difficult, so he said we could take Genesis Two to Europe, but only on condition that Nicole called her new group Genesis and acknowledged him as its founder. It almost never happened because we arrived a day late and we thought you’d be gone, and the weather was bad, but Nicole pressed on. She never gave up, never.”

  I stared into Stephen’s terrified face, hating him.