A Ravelled Flag (Strong Winds Trilogy)

by Julia Jones

  “Into the skiff, all of you,” she hissed. “Take your weight off.”

  Joshua and Donny clambered obediently into Vexilla. They waited in the cold blackness while Polly Lee kept working the winch with her good hand and the hook. How much longer before she would admit defeat?

  “You too,” she ordered June. “Nimblefingers won’t wake now.”

  June joined them in the skiff.

  No-one spoke. The cold and the quiet were absolute. Except for the working of the winch.

  Then they felt a first slight sliding movement.

  “Yes!” Polly Lee’s beloved boat was free again.

  “Back on deck everyone. Donny, up with her foresail. Quick as you like. Mr Ribiero, hand over hand with that anchor – if you’d be so good. We won’t need much sail to take us out of the anchorage. Tide’s already on the turn.”

  They dropped anchor in the next reach and had slept a few hours before they moved Strong Winds and her two tenders round to the River Stour.

  Donny saw nothing of their journey. Skye had woken and was being repeatedly sick as the anti-depressants as well as the alcohol drained out of her system. He needed to stay with her.

  Joshua was able to give her something to soothe the pain of continual vomiting but he warned Donny that she might even have a fit if they did not manage the withdrawal process carefully. He arranged with Gold Dragon that she would use her VHF to call for help in an emergency.

  None of this was orthodox but Joshua was convinced Skye needed to be in a familiar place. She needed her family and she needed to stay far away from whoever had been supplying the alcohol. He blamed himself, he said, for not having understood the situation earlier.

  Donny didn’t know when he’d see any of his friends again. He bundled up the wooden toys and asked June if she would drop them at the vicarage. He’d drawn a card for Wendy and Gerald but nothing for anyone else.

  They’d never exactly had riotous festivities when he and Skye had lived with Granny Edith but this Christmas was going to break all records for a non-event.

  Great Aunt Ellen wrote a note to the SS. It announced that they had changed their address but that Donny would continue to attend school as before when the new term started. Official visitors could call by previous appointment. She didn’t precisely spell out how such appointments could be made.

  The stretch of river that was now their home was almost completely deserted. After Shotley there were no marinas or extensive anchorages and only a few small ships used the dredged channel that led to the quiet Essex port of Mistley.

  Gold Dragon had anchored on the Suffolk side of the Stour, off a long curved bay which was bounded by a sandy cliff and a fringe of beach. A small creek twisted inland through the mudflats offering access to a former barge dock and a track to Gallister village and Donny’s school.

  “I haven’t asked anyone for a mooring and I’m not going to. There’s precious little shelter out here if it comes on to blow but I’ve laid two anchors and the holding ground’s good. We’ll have to tough it out. When your mother’s better she’ll want to walk along that beach. It’s prehistoric.” She gave Vexilla’s stern painter an unnecessarily fierce twist. “The Tiger may think he’s bested the Dragon this time but we’ll batten down our hatches and trust that it won’t long before he discovers his mistake.”

  It was an admission.

  “So you do think there’s someone out to get us. You believe all that ... knife stuff at Pin Mill was a set-up? You don’t think that it could possibly have been Mum?”

  Gold Dragon stared at him. “Nimblefingers? Setting about those mooring ropes with my old rigging knife? No! That knife’s blunt as a spoonbill’s beak. I’d already ordered a replacement before the Pufferfish swiped it. If they take her to court we’ll call the shopkeeper in Lowestoft as our expert witness. That knife couldn’t have possibly done so much damage. Neither could Nimblefingers.”

  “It’s someone from your past?”

  “That’s ... possible.”

  This made Donny feel so much better that he settled down immediately with a heap of old cod line. Great Aunt Ellen had said she’d like some samples of ornamental splicing as her Christmas present – and a pledge for future boy labour. Then there’d be time for him to finish Skye’s weaving frame.

  Their new home was the most beautiful place Donny had ever lived. The river was so wide: the sky so big. Every time he came up on deck the view seemed different: either the boat had shifted her position or some change in the light seemed to alter all the distances as well as drenching everything with an unbelievable range of colours.

  Strong Winds chuckled and tossed as the waves ran by and she swung to the turning tides. She felt like an island, separate and safe. Their enemies would surely forget about them here. The boatyard had almost done them a favour, telling them to move. He couldn’t think how they’d put up with being stuck at Pin Mill for so long. He’d still be able to get to school. Still manage that 100 percent attendance.

  On Christmas Day all of them found something to give each other and when the tide was right, they rowed across the shallow bay for a first short walk along the deserted beach. It was cold and lonely and Skye was very shaky so they didn’t stay long.

  The kids at the vicarage, Donny remembered, would only have Wendy and Gerald. No relations at all, except each other – unless they were allowed an extra prison visit.

  Tuesday 26 December

  “Okay, Mum,” Donny signed to Skye on the day after Christmas. “What did you do with all those letters that the SS sent us? And where exactly were you getting your ... brave sleep drink?”

  She looked evasive and ashamed and as if she was about to go shut herself into her cabin.

  “Sorry but we’ve got to know. Great Aunt Ellen says that if you keep people in the dark they can’t look out for rocks. And if the ship gets holed we all go down.”

  There were no rocks on the beautiful muddy Stour but Skye understood what he meant.

  “There is a place from which everything is taken but some returns again,” she explained.

  Eh?

  “Many things, glass and paper and cans. The young braves showed me. They drink from the cans that do not rust. Sometimes they are wild and hurl the cans where they may cause harm but when the small man is there they crush them beneath their feet and use the given takeaways. We used them, Doh, you and I, and the other boat-dwellers. It is a system. For all that is not wanted but can be made new.”

  Got it – she meant waste disposal and recycling. The bins were sited at the back of the car park, beyond the communal post box and the public toilets. They were so obvious you didn’t even notice them.

  That was the official system. The well-hards and the small man had introduced Skye to an unofficial system – two extra open boxes behind the public bins: one was for paper that wasn’t newspaper, and the other was for plastic bottles. You could take items out of this part of the system as well as put them in.

  If you were given paper that you didn’t want – such as an SS brown envelope – you could put it straight into the paper crate, once you had made your mark on the small man’s list, and it would be gone before you returned. If you noticed that someone had left a couple of inches of water in the bottom of a plastic bottle, you could take that bottle out of the recycling box, drink the contents and put it back again. The young braves often helped to sort the bottles.

  “That water is cold fire. They like it too, though not as much as the drink from the cans. The young braves are often frightened deep inside. Cold fire water helps to make them bold.”

  “But why would you be frightened Mum? We’re here with Great Aunt Ellen. We’re a family. We look out for each other. We can ... do things.”

  Skye looked desperately sad. “Gold Dragon is old as Nokomis was. Soon she will take the longest road. Pauguk is greedy, he comes for all. H
e took her friend without farewell. And in my dreams I see my father, standing lonely at his doorway, beckoning to me from his wigwam in the land of the Dacotahs. And the beautiful Wenonah, dead of famine and of fever.”

  She’d slipped into Hiawatha-land again but he understood. Once you started to think of all the people in the world who’d died, it did get you down. Especially if two of them were your parents who’d left you as a baby and sailed away never to return.

  “But Mum, you’ve always known this. Most of it. So you use your dream-catchers and your worry beads and you watch the birds and make things and cook for us. Why can’t you do that now?”

  “Since Nokomis took the long road and we left our home in the North I have lost myself. And the Woman who makes Bad Worse told me I would lose you too if we did not leave. The other women who come with the small man. They are also frightened.”

  “The woman who makes bad worse ... ?”

  “She treads in blood,” his mother added helpfully.

  Donny’s head was swimming and he could see that Skye was getting tired too. He mustn’t stress her – but he really needed to understand who’d been supplying her with the brave sleep drink – otherwise known as the cold fire water.

  “I make her call it vodka now. Make her use the proper word,” said Donny bitterly to Anna, Luke, Maggi and Xanthe when they came to visit the next day. “Even one whiff of it makes me want to puke. This small man, from what Mum calls the flower company, showed her a bottle with a picture she could recognise. They – whoever they were – I’m certain it was Toxic’s goons, but of course I can’t prove it – made sure that there was always some vodka in one of those bottles. Pretty much every day. That kept her hooked. When any official letter arrived and she was hiding – sorry, recycling it – they’d maybe supply an extra couple of inches. She didn’t like the letters, she didn’t like the man who delivered them but she did like the drink. Until this last time. She might not hate it quite as much as I do but she’s definitely getting there.”

  The others were shocked.

  “Poor Skye,” said Maggi. “Shall I go knock on her cabin? See if she’ll come out? ”

  “We had to watch her all the time at the beginning because Great Aunt Ellen thought she might, well, try to harm herself or something. She knows she’s been completely stupid. She made it so easy for them. They could pop a full bottle in whenever they wanted: stress her out a bit more and she’d drink it. They’d just reel her in. Reeling.”

  “What a Christmas!” said Anna. “Ours was bad because of our mum not being there; yours was bad because you’ve had to be sitting with yours almost every single minute.”

  “And my dad, Anna, he wasn’t there neither.”

  “Even our dad wasn’t there,” said Xanthe. “He got called into the hospital first thing. Father Christmas’s sleigh bells were still tinkling away into the sunrise. Mum got majorly stressed. She’s certain that there’s something going wrong in his department. So we all went and Mags and I goofed about with some of the patients who didn’t have any visitors of their own. Poor old buzzards,” she added reflectively.

  The older ones looked at each other. Then laughed.

  “Maybe loads of people have rubbish Christmases,” said Maggi.

  “Maybe,” said Anna.

  Luke didn’t say anything. He looked depressed.

  “What we need, fellow Allies and esteemed visiting Confederate,” said Xanthe, “is a bit of fun. We need excitement!”

  “No thanks!” said Donny. “I had quite enough excitement at Pin Mill.”

  “Come on, Donny-man,” Xanthe urged. “I don’t mean we’re going to play dodge-the-van or family lynchings, I mean we need a challenge, an expedition. Something to get the old heart pumping.”

  “Xanth hasn’t sailed Spray for almost a week,” said Maggi. “She’s getting withdrawal symptoms ... oops, wrong words – sorry!”

  “It’s okay. You’re right. We need to stop sitting about. I’ve read those other two books that Great Aunt Ellen bought in Colchester.”

  They looked at him in surprise.

  “Yeah, straight up! Nearly two books in five days – and signing bits of them to Mum as well. Those kids were always doing something. You know, like climbing mountains or discovering the North Pole. And there’s a real boff in Winter Holiday, Anna. Exactly Oboe’s type. Or yours.”

  “Could we?” said Luke eagerly. “Could we climb a mountain?”

  “Mountains not exactly thick on the ground around here and they had to have a frozen lake for that North Pole stuff,” said Xanthe, who’d read the whole series. “Tell you what we could do, though, we could make a set or two of snowshoes, so you could mud-skate. There’s acres of mud here when the tide goes out. It’d be extreme!”

  She hurried them all into Vexilla to go prospecting for materials. The tide was ebbing so they didn’t have long.

  They collected what looked like properly bendy twigs and reeds but turning them into mud-shoes wasn’t as easy as they’d expected. In the end they had to resort to gaffer tape all around the edges to stop the twigs from splitting, and twisted plastic bags for the bits that fastened to your feet.

  Great Aunt Ellen opened tins of soup and Skye emerged from her cabin to help. Work went better once she joined in and by low water, they had one completed pair for Luke to try.

  “’S like walking in gi-normous dream-catchers,” he puffed.

  “Just be careful,” fretted Anna. “It’s really cold and I don’t want you falling over.”

  “Windy Wen-dy!” Luke shouted. At which point he trod one wide mud-shoe on top of the other and toppled sideways, ripping a plastic bag fastening.

  Back on board Strong Winds, cleaning him up and effecting repairs, they began to plan other expeditions.

  “When the weather’s better we could definitely go camping,” said Xanthe. “Though personally I wish the weather would get worse. Then we could build an igloo. Like we did when we lived in Canada. It never snows properly here.”

  Donny looked at her. “Sorry, Xanthe, but are you saying you actually made an igloo? One that didn’t fall down – because, on the evidence of this morning ...”

  “... I couldn’t roll a snowball in the Arctic! Thanks a lot. And how pathetic were you – letting Luke go first across the sucking mud?”

  Luke looked surprised. “Didn’t reckon I had no choice.”

  “Er ...”

  “What about the code, Anna?” asked Maggi quickly. “How are you getting on with it?”

  “Not too good. I’ve turned it back into decimal but the numbers don’t make any sense. Not yet anyway. It’s here in your notebook. Pages of it!”

  “You’d need canoes if you wanted to reach the source of the Stour,” Great Aunt Ellen was still considering expeditions. “You’d have to carry them round the locks and the weirs. You’d be against the flow in the upper reaches. It’d take days. Character-building, I suppose.”

  “Dash-dot is N and the single dot is E,” offered Xanthe, looking at the first line of Anna’s pages of workings. “It’s Morse.”

  “So now when I turn binary to decimal and put back the noughts it reads 522852N 014546E < 050107”

  “And if you add degrees and minutes to the first two numbers, he’s given you a lat and long,” Donny added. “You know, they’re sort of like a grid reference.”

  “I know what latitude and longitude mean,” she snapped. “I’m not a complete moron! And I’m sure now that the last number’s a date. The lawyer said the puzzle was time-limited. Fifth of January 2007 – that’s the first day of term. That’s what he meant by insert symbols! And to think I’ve been wasting my time thinking of algebraic formulae and trying to use BODMASS.”

  “Oboe didn’t leave you a puzzle – he left you a place.”

  “The co-ordinates of a place.” They were all talking at once now
.

  “Digitalised co-ordinates.”

  “Yeah, but you can digitalise pretty much anything.”

  “You know what,” said Donny, opening Strong Winds’ chart drawer and spreading a sheet out on the cabin table. “That’s almost where we went.”

  “Not quite an East Pole, more an Easternmost Point,” agreed his great-aunt, laying a parallel ruler across. “We had a Native Guide, if I recall.”

  “Oboe must have been to this Easternmost Point. He must mean me to go there. How soon can I set off? Let’s not wait another minute!”

  Anna’d jumped up in her excitement and started struggling back into her jacket. The rest of them were sitting there open- mouthed. This was so uncharacteristic.

  She paused and sat down again. “Okay,” she said. “So where, exactly, is it? In words this time – I’m backing off numbers for a while. ”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Journey to the Easternmost Point

  Thursday 28 December

  “Anna,” said Luke. “It’s only Low’stoft. Near where we was in that caravan park. You remember. Before we came down Ipswich.”

  “Well, more fool me for not noticing.” Her eyes were bright, red spots burned in her pale cheeks. “I didn’t want to be there so I must have blanked it out. Don’t fret, Luke, you can still be our Native Guide but how soon can we go?”

  Suddenly they all felt that this was serious. It was more than an outing to fill the days between Christmas and New Year, or to give them something to talk about when they went back to school. This was going to matter somehow.

  “If time presses,” said Great Aunt Ellen. “I’d suggest you sail up the river to Manningtree on the tide, leave the dinghies as far as you can go, then cross the fields and take a train. I don’t know how many trains there are and you might have to change at Ipswich. But ... whoever wants to go has to get permission first – if you want to have your expedition without oldies.”