Rum Affair

by Dorothy Dunnett

  “Haven’t we got too much canvas? What if it gets worse?”

  “That’s all right. We’ll take down the mainsail.”

  Victoria, lifting her head, was looking at the weather, too, for the first time. “Cecil. We should be hove-to.”

  No reply. He wouldn’t stop now. He had nothing to lose. We were plunging south on the last of the ebb, with a cross-sea driving towards us, pushed before an Atlantic south-westerly gale. There might come a point at which there would be less risk in our ignorance, Victoria’s, Kenneth’s and mine, than in his obsessive need to press on. And then, with help or without it, somehow, Ogden must go.

  We were wet through. Victoria was shivering, and I could feel my fingers and feet growing numb with the beating cold of the water, the solid force of the wind, the great spilling spaces of icy air contained in the mainsail above us.

  Victoria said: “Cecil. We must get warm and have something to eat, or we’ll be no good. Let me try to heat some soup in the galley. We can go down one by one, and get our dry clothes and oilskins on maybe. You probably haven’t eaten all day.”

  It was a brave offer, as well as a sensible one. To anyone who had been as sick as Victoria, the prospect of entering the reeling shambles below, far less finding and heating some food, was a terrible one. I wondered, for one lightheaded moment, how she meant to locate soup among all these sopping, label-less cans and then realised that she couldn’t in any case. The last thing Ogden had done before taking the helm was to switch off the saloon and riding lights. There was no glimmer now aboard Seawolf except for the swimming green glow of the compass. And he would not let Victoria go below. As she stood, hesitating, gripping the side boards of the cockpit, Ogden said perfectly calmly: “If you move one step from there, I shall let go the tiller.”

  She stood her ground and one remembered how well, in some ways, she must know him. “That’s silly. She’ll be swamped, and you’ll simply drown with us. Look, I’m not going near Dr Holmes: what good will it do? He can’t sail either. He’s hurt. He’s probably knocked out by now.”

  “Nobody’s going down,” said Ogden, grinning again. He would drown with us, I thought, perfectly happily. Everything else had gone wrong but he still had this power of life and death in his own boat. This crazy tub of a boat, where the water swilled over our ankles and the engine would not work and the ropes were rotten and the lights were tied on with string. I thought: the lights are off. What if we meet a trawler, a drifter running for shelter? We have no lights and no engine. Dolly won’t see us. And neither would they.

  I said, pitching my voice over the distraction of noise: “She’s right. Soon we’ll be too cold to handle ropes: you’ll have no crew. If it’s Kenneth you’re worried about, give Victoria the tiller and go down and lock up the fo’c’sle yourself.” He had my gun and his own in his pocket but I didn’t want to remind him of that. He knew anyway that he couldn’t do without us. Not in this weather, at least.

  He hesitated. Years of muddling about in these waters must have taught him the maxim Lenny was fondest of repeating: in a storm it is seldom the boat that gives in – it’s the crew. But I had given him no easy way for his pride. It was Victoria who laid her glistening hand on the tiller and said: “I think I can do it, if you show me how. As you rise, you pay off a little. Then you bring her round as you fall down the trough.”

  “Not quite.” She listened as he instructed her. Then, her face grave, she took the tiller, and Ogden staggered below.

  SEVENTEEN

  We were novices. Even Victoria, who had been Ogden’s nurse and charwoman and cook and whipping boy half the season, knew little but how to obey orders blindly. Or we should have kept quiet about our cold and our hunger and have seen that Ogden was putting off doing the one thing that before all else should be done. Before wind and seas of tumultuous strength, Seawolf was being heeled and tossed and wrung by her sail. The reefed mainsail was no longer small enough to be safe. Seawolf needed to ride on bare poles.

  But Ogden had gone below.

  I did not know what detained him, striding through to lock up his prisoner, but I could perhaps guess. The saloon floor would be nearly impassable. Everything from those ill-fitting cupboards and ramshackle shelves would have fallen, choking what little floor space there was. The flex festooning the deckhead would be dragged down, the tilley lamps smashed, the cushions littered with broken bottles, and a soaking of meths and water and paraffin. I wondered how Kenneth was faring, injured and tied in that hell down below, and how he would feel when the door slammed and he knew that whatever the fate of Seawolf he could not escape. And all the time I was wondering, Victoria was struggling with the helm, until suddenly, on a little whimper, she cried out my name. And I stopped peering down into the blackness in Seawolf’s turgid belly, and looked round and saw.

  It was fifteen feet high; the mountain that had risen behind us, and was rising still, blocking out the dark, curdled sky. Ogden, warned by some sixth sense maybe, moved down in the saloon and at the edge of my consciousness I saw his bonneted head, preparing to climb. Then my hands were on Victoria’s as she pulled and pulled at the helm.

  It was the wrong thing to do. For a moment we stared into the dense, palpitating blackness of the thing growing above us. The top had blown off its crest. The howling air, the peeling coachwork, the sails were all grey with spinning mares’ tails of foam as the crust was shorn clear off the sea. We watched it reach the height of its arc, far above us, with a gravely pondered precision. For a moment it lingered. Then, slowly, it overreached, curved, destroyed its glistening retainers of tension and balance, and fell, as a chimney might topple, on Seawolf’s starboard quarter.

  The crash, when it came, was brain-numbing: it had the quality, raucous, unexpected, of exploding TNT in a quarry. With it came a slabbed ceiling of water that, falling interminably, hit rigging, cockpit, inclined sail and too sloping deck, flinging Victoria and myself on our faces, tumbling Ogden back into the cabin, pouring boiling and choking over tiller, benches and instruments, and then leaping like a glistening animal to fill the shattered saloon.

  Battered, retching, thrown back and forth by the unending sluice, as I got to my feet three times to be hurled back and back, I felt Seawolf had stopped. I felt the long, dying shiver with which the old, insecure timbers received their belabouring. And as the water fell in blackness and the sea crashed and the wind squealed and whooped, I felt Seawolf roll, where the slope of her decks and her sea-filled, pathetic reefed mainsail had already half-carried her – rolling to port, to lay her mast in the sea.

  I remember lying half-drowned in the cockpit, my fingers cramped in some kind of grating, my feet encountering something supine and soft which must be Victoria, lying unconscious or drowned on the lee side of our waterlogged coffin. I remember seeing the glint of foam spots floating well above waist height in the saloon, and wondering where Ogden was, and if he had managed to lock the fo’c’sle door. I remember the deck heeling more and more until, do what I would, I slid on top of Victoria and the water poured up and over our heads and I seized her by the back of her collar and tried to stand upright, on the lee side of the cockpit.

  There were no lifebelts. There was no dinghy – I had seen that burst free and slide over. There were no lights to attract help and no help to attract: in all this waste how could our pursuers find us, even supposing they had continued to sail?

  A more worthy ship would have floundered. On Seawolf, in the midst of her dying roll, there came a single musical note, then another, plain through the crashing hiss of plunging timber and water. I looked up.

  The wind and spume-ridden spaces above us were filling slowly, noiselessly, with a forest dropped from the skies. A ghostly, tumbling mosaic of wood and wire and hemp and torn, cloudy fabric which came closer and closer to clothe all the deck and slither, ballooning into the sea. The mainmast had gone.

  For a moment, her deck nearly upright above us, Seawolf trembled, ready to follow her sails and her
spars. Then slowly, sluggishly, washing, creaking, gurgling like a soft, groaning sponge, she started to right herself, levelled, turned head to wind, and lay finally still to her drogue. There was absolute silence – and stillness – and peace.

  I looked at Victoria. In the cockpit, the water was ebbing although I could hear the sound of it slapping heavily in the cabin below. Around us, the deck and coachhouse lay darkly shining, swept clean on their weather side of every vestige of tackle. Forward, beyond the broken stump of the mast, the forehatch had been wrenched half-free of its moorings, and the short seas that caught and streamed over us as we gently curtseyed and dipped must be spilling partly at least into the fo’c’sle. I drew a deep breath. Kenneth. Ogden. Pumps, somehow, if we could find them: Victoria would know. We were going to live.

  Victoria knew. We needed to cut away the shrouds from the chain plates and free ourselves from the heavy spars which were already beginning to stir and jolt against our fraying, unvaleted sides. But for that we needed tools, and a brute strength that between us, cold and trembling with the weakness of reaction, we did not possess. The first step therefore for both instinct and reason, was to feel our way down the cockpit steps and into the watery darkness beyond.

  It was a nightmare, but compared with the nightmare we had gone through, a matter only of cold perseverance. The motion was less than it had been, but it was still violent enough to make progress almost impossible in this lightless and waterlogged junkshop. I thought later that Ogden must have stumbled so far and then struck his head against the bulkhead or the mast, for we had hardly entered the saloon when we heard his voice, slow and soggy like the boat, just beside us. He said, as a statement, not a question: “The mast’s gone!” and I thought suddenly that for him, we might as well have gone down, for now, without sails or engine, he was a sitting duck. Victoria said quickly: “Are you all right?”

  His voice was sneering and rough. “No. But what the hell do you care?”

  “I do.” Her voice, in return, was thin but steady. “We’re all human beings, Cecil.”

  He said: “That’s what’s wrong with us. We ought to be spots in a computer. Or apes.”

  The conversation seemed to have come to a dead stop. I said tentatively, against the dead, whacking sound that had begun to echo on the port side: “Victoria thought you would want us to help clear the wreckage. It’s beginning to bump. If you can show me, I can maybe help with the pumping as well.”

  Now, dimly, I could see the white blur of his face. He was hanging simian-like on to the bulkhead, the water washing greasily about his long shanks. He seemed uninjured. After a moment he said: “The pumps, yes. Or she’ll settle. There’s an up-and-down stuck in the . . .” He paused, and then finished with a grunt: “. . . in the fo’c’sle.” Kenneth . . .

  There was not even a torch. All the shelves above the bunks were swept clean, and even the shelves themselves were hanging drunkenly by their insufficient nails. It was pitch black, except for the square of indigo behind us marking the door to the cockpit, and the low green sparkle that outlined our movements as we waded aft.

  Ogden had not reached the fo’c’sle to lock it, but it made little difference. The door had jammed, and took all our power to open it against a force of water that poured out, spectral with phosphorescence, darkly sparkling round our thighs. The flood level in the fo’c’sle with its broken hatch had been higher than here. A man tied and unconscious on the floor would have had no chance at all.

  Ogden, pressing through against the onrush of water, was intent on only one thing. Feeling above his head, we heard him exclaim with satisfaction, and when he stepped back, he had a lift pump in his hand. “Victoria, you’ve done this before . . .”

  I let them wade past me, and then I stepped through to the small, triangular nook in the old bows of the boat where Kenneth had been left. The water, knee-high now, was full of rippling dark shapes. I stepped on a soft resilience made up of tumbled cushions and bedding, and I recoiled and stood on the raised metal threshold, holding tight to the doorway. Outside, the impact of the broken masthead and boom against the flanks of the ship had settled down to a steady rhythm, shivering the water below as it rolled to the pitching and swaying. Inside the saloon I heard the voices of Ogden and Victoria, talking quite normally together as they fixed up the lift pump and its discharge pipe, somewhere near the steps to the cockpit, I judged. In a moment I heard the sawing sigh of the pump starting; and the minor sound of trickling water, fluctuating in volume and tone as the seas rose and fell beneath it, came tinnily through the orchestration of water sounds in my ears.

  If only I could see. For the third time I said: “Kenneth?” and when there was still no answer I bent and sank my hands below the cold slopping water. Then, abruptly, I stood up. For there ought to be light, a little light, at least, from the broken hatch cover above.

  I looked up. Blackness. More than that: a dragging noise that had nothing to do with the gear lying tangled the length of Seawolf’s port gunwales. These were hands working, dragging something – a tarpaulin, perhaps, over the hatch. And footsteps moving cautiously to and fro. Then inside the saloon, the voices and the sound of pumping suddenly faltered, and Victoria, her voice high, said loudly: “Listen!”

  But already I was listening. For low voices, footsteps, pumping cannot be heard in a storm which wraps you, as we had been wrapped all the night, in a blizzard of sound.

  I listened, and I heard nothing but water-filled silence. For the wind had totally stopped.

  Our hearts beat, and we were silent too a moment with our different thoughts. Then Ogden said, with deliberation: “Get on with the pumping. It won’t last. It’s the centre of the depression. It’ll give us time to get rid of the water and that clutter on deck: that’s all.” He paused a moment and then said: “That must be Holmes, up there. It’s just as well. We’ll need him.”

  I don’t know what I thought: that Kenneth, with total surprise on his side, should have come flying down the steps from the cockpit, brandishing some invincible weapon, and forced Ogden at gunpoint to sail straight for Dolly. I realised I was tired, and daydreaming. The only guns on board were in Ogden’s big pockets. We could not sail anywhere: our mast and mainsail had gone. And if we were to stay alive, merely, we needed all the working help we could muster. Ogden, poor thing that he was, represented our only source of knack and experience. Kenneth, with whatever strength he had left, our only other male help. Friends, lovers, allies, enemies on dry land, we were all now only ciphers, in a derelict boat. I followed Ogden on deck.

  It was Kenneth. He was kneeling on deck, swiping one-handed at the tangle of wreckage with a small half-blunted axe. I wondered fleetingly what department of government contributed it. I dropped beside him – “All right?”

  “I’ll live. My left shoulder.” He looked up at Ogden. “You shouldn’t leave open clasp knives in your lockers. I’ve cut the lee shrouds. The weather ones and the backstay have gone. There’s no point in trying to save any of it unless you want a sea anchor. How long before the wind starts again?”

  Ogden, on his knees too, was examining the mess. Water slopped over the gunwales and ran out through the scuppers as we leaned over to the weight of the wreckage. The seas were silent and huge, lifting the billowing mass and swaying it down all the time in front of our eyes. Ogden said: “Oh, we have maybe twenty minutes, half an hour. The sail can go, but I want to save a good spar. We could mount a staysail maybe on that.”

  I said: “Call me when you want me. I’ll go below and give Victoria a rest.” As I went, I heard Ogden answer, in reply to some query of Kenneth’s: “It’ll veer, probably: my guess would be from the north-west maybe. And harder. We’ll have sea room down nearly to Ardnamurchan. But then, the tide’ll be against us. We’ll not run so hard, but we’ll have some fine, dirty seas.” He was, in a queer way, enjoying it.

  I have never worked harder than I did in these twenty minutes; and in a way, like Ogden, I found it almost enjoyable.
Victoria was satisfactory to work with, willing, quick and sparing herself nothing. We made short work between us of the pumping, although her face in a little while went very pale: it is hard on the midriff. Some of the water we should never get out. Both the deckhead and the bulkhead were leaking: probably they always did; maybe the extra stress had now sprung them further. But I had discovered and rigged up an Aldis, and in its light Victoria got the cooker going and we found and opened a tin or two of something sloppy, which did in fact turn out to be soup. There was a tin mug in one of the bunks which we should all have to share: the rest seemed to be shattered. Nothing came out of the sink pump, and there was no hope, now, of dry clothing. But we should do.

  Up on deck, the worst of the wreckage had gone, and the staysail was up, on a temporary boom. It looked like a teacloth after Seawolf’s great spread of sail. But this, with a scrap of jib, was going to steady us. Victoria, the last to have her soup, came up to see. “We’re going to make it.”

  Ogden looked round. Crouched in the cockpit, he was working on his knee with ballpoint and charts, trying to calculate our whereabouts and possible drift. “We ought to. I should be there before daylight,” he said; and the little smugness in the tone lingered and died in the ensuing silence. “Where?” said Kenneth: then, sharply: “You’re not proposing seriously, surely, to try and sail on?”

  Ogden didn’t trouble to look up. “We’re bound to drift south anyway. There’s quite a chance I can reach the right spot on the shore. Victory out of defeat, eh?” He looked up then, and grinned into our staring faces. “Oh, there’s a risk. But there’s a risk in staying hove-to. I’m going, anyway. And you haven’t much choice, have you?”

  “Single-handed?” said Kenneth. I shut my mouth, and so did Victoria. “Won’t you need help with the sails? And relief from the tiller? You don’t suppose any of us are going to help you?” And after a moment he added: “We don’t need you now, you know, Ogden. There are enough of us to keep her afloat until help arrives. Head to wind, we can handle her as well as you can. If you sail, you’ll have to sail her alone.”