by Jo Macauley
Beth grabbed the top sheet from the bed and held it up against the stern window. Easily big enough! She stuffed the corners into the slight gaps between the window and the frame and wherever else she could feel a little nook or cranny with her fingers. Within seconds she had completely covered the window. Next she shuffled to the table and felt for the candle and the tinderbox that was beside it. In no time at all, the cabin was illuminated – dimly but quite adequately – in the soft flickering yellow light, and finally Beth could begin to explore properly.
But she had barely commenced when she heard the door creak open; she swivelled sharply about to see two eyes appear round the gap.
“Oh, very cosy!” Ralph chimed. “Can’t see a thing in the other cabins, but I’m a bit of an expert at searching dark rooms for ... let’s say ‘lost property’ and the like, and from what I can tell they’re empty – just seems to be the odd chair, bed and so on. I reckon they’ve started stripping her bare already. Any luck in here?”
“I was just going to look inside this sea chest,” she said, starting again for a moment as John came into the quarters, looking pale.
“Anything?” Beth asked him, but he shook his head.
“I kept thinking I heard someone, though...” he said shakily.
Ralph rolled his eyes, and they turned back to the large wooden trunk under the stern window. To her irritation, Beth discovered it was locked.
“How about using this?” John said, his colour beginning to recover. Whoever had been the captain had left a sword hanging from a nail, and he grabbed it. “Looks stout enough. See if you can prise it open.”
When she first inserted the tip of the blade into the thin space under the lid and heaved, the end snapped off. But there was just enough of a gap to jam the thicker, jagged end back in. Within thirty seconds and a lot of yanking, she had levered the lid off and was rummaging inside. “Just bedding, clothes, navigation instruments ... Oh, hang on...”
Her fingers had come into contact with something hard hidden inside a folded-up blanket. Unwrapping it, she pulled out a small, slim wooden box with an ornately carved lid. She lifted it carefully and saw just one item inside: a folded letter bearing a red seal.
“Open it!” Ralph urged her.
Beth turned to him with a raised eyebrow. “My, it’s a good thing you’re here, Ralph. That would never have occurred to me!”
“Some people will tell you sarcasm’s the lowest form of wit...”
Ignoring him, Beth broke the seal, carefully unfolded the single page and read:
311064
YJJ GQ QCR
UC DMJJMU AYRCQZWQ JCYB
UFCL RFC QUGLC ZSPLQ
RFC PCNSZJGA QFYJJ PGQC YEYGL
HV
John peered over her shoulder. “It’s just nonsense...”
“Looks like the sort of thing I’d write – and I can’t write!” Ralph added, looking over her other shoulder.
But Beth had come across this sort of thing before during her instruction with Alan Strange. “It’s a cipher.”
“A what?” Ralph queried.
Beth sighed. “Don’t you remember your training? A cipher – a message written using some sort of code. To work out what it means we either need to find they key to the code, or work it out for ourselves.”
“Well, I can already tell you who sent it,” John announced. He had been examining the red wax seal under the light from the candle. “This is Sir Henry Vale’s seal. I have seen this many times on his old correspondence with the Navy Board. And look at the last two letters at the bottom of the letter, separate from the rest. I don’t think that’s in cipher – I think it’s the initials of the writer: HV!”
Then Beth noticed something else. “Look, in the top corner – it could be a date: thirty-one, ten, sixty-four.”
“31 October 1664!” John exclaimed.
“But that’s only four days ago,” said Beth, frowning. “Sir Henry Vale was one of the men behind King Charles I’s execution, after the Parliamentary army defeated the Royalists. He was beheaded for high treason two years ago...”
“Look,” Ralph interrupted. “You can puzzle over your fancy writing at your leisure now we’ve got the letter. We came here to find out what happened to your friend Will – remember?”
Beth quickly refolded the letter. “He’s right. We may not have much time. The only place we have yet to search is down in the hold. Come on!”
They quickly left the captain’s cabin and eventually found the hatchway that led down to the bowels of the ship. John held the candle, shielding it as best he could from any draughts while Beth gingerly lowered herself down the steep wooden ladder into the blackness. Even before reaching the bottom rung, the smells assailed her senses: the ever-present odour of tar, the rancid meat and cheeses of the crew’s provisions, the stale urine of rats. She was below the waterline now, a place where daylight never penetrated. John reached down and passed the candle to her, then began to descend himself.
“It doesn’t need three of us going,” Ralph said. “It’s probably best if I keep watch up here.”
Beth nodded up at him, then turned back into the darkness. The hold extended for most of the length and width of the ship, with just a few wooden bulkheads to divide up the space. The feeble candlelight could only illuminate a small area around them. As she crept along, shadows from the casks, crates and assorted nautical gear loomed up, danced about them, and then retreated like spectres fleeing from their approach. With every step, she heard the scurrying of rats fleeing into dark corners.
Suddenly, John froze. “What was that?”
“I didn’t hear anything...”
“Someone else is in here.” He was pointing towards the stern. “We must leave – quickly!”
He began to back up carefully the way they’d come, and Beth turned to follow – but then she heard the sound too. It was a muffled voice, seeming to be calling for help.
“Wait. It’s not a trap – it’s someone in need of aid!”
They made their way through the darkness quickly now – and there they saw him, with a gag in his mouth and a great length of chain binding him to the mizzen mast which descended through the ship from the upper deck.
John rushed past Beth and threw himself to his knees beside the figure. “Will! I thought they had killed you!”
Beth gently removed the gag from the young man’s mouth. “Two men ambushed me when I came on board...” he gasped, like someone coming up for air after nearly drowning. “Th-they threatened to kill me ... Thank God you came!”
“Who were they? Did they sound like Dutchmen?” Beth asked.
Will shook his head. “English. Their leader was an evil man. Talked like he had a sore throat – and as he was tying me I noticed he had a finger missing from one hand.” Beth and John exchanged glances. “You know who it is?”
“His name is Edmund Groby,” said John.
“What we don’t know,” said Beth, “is what exactly he’s up to.”
“All I know is that there was something down here he didn’t want me to see.”
John tugged at the chains and examined the lock that kept them taut round his friend’s middle.
Will gave a humourless laugh. “No use, John. They’re strong and tight – I can barely breathe.”
“We must find out what Groby’s secret is,” Beth said urgently, casting her eyes around the hold.
“What about Will?” John said. “We can’t just leave him like this.”
“While we’re searching, we can look out for any kind of tool lying about that we can use to break the lock.”
Beth began to search to one side of Will, and John the other. There were casks of rum, spare sails and spars, but nothing that looked remotely like the sort of thing that Edmund Groby would go to such lengths to keep secret.
“Beth – shine your light this way,” John called.
She turned and held the candle at arm’s length in his direction. He was standing by a big crate,
and the label VIRGINIA TOBACCO flickered into view. Virginia was the British colony in America where convicts were sent. Why would a ship from Holland, found adrift in England, be carrying American cargo?
“It’s odd. I can’t smell any tobacco, and it’s normally really strong...” John mused, trying to prise the lid open. “Pass me the candle.”
Beth handed it to him. “Let me try,” she said, working her smaller fingers into the small crack in the lid.
“Nothing makes sense today,” John muttered as she gave it a tug. The wood of the crate creaked and splintered and began to give way. “But at least we might be able to get to the bottom of this...”
They peered inside. “Dust!” she said. “Nothing but a crate of dust!”
“I’m sure I recognize that smell...” John said, almost to himself.
Beth began sifting some of the fine black powder through her fingers, holding it up to the candlelight. “Maybe there’s something buried within it. They wouldn’t just fill a crate with useless dust, surely?”
She scooped up another handful, and pulled John’s hand that held the candle lower towards the hole she’d made, peering closer so that her head was virtually inside the crate. At the same moment, she heard John let out a shrill cry of alarm, snatching the candle back and sending them both tumbling to the deck as he did so.
“Hey!” she complained, rolling onto her back.
“That’s not dust,” John cried. “It’s gunpowder!”
Chapter Fourteen - Flight from the Doodgaan
John sprang to his feet like a scalded cat, brushing his hands and clothes frantically to rid himself of the deadly substance. Beth set the still-burning candle down on top of a barrel well away from the crate.
“What were they planning to do with that?” Will said, still chained to the mast.
“I don’t know,” Beth replied. “But now we know what Edmund Groby is capable of—”
She was interrupted by an urgent whisper from above. “Someone’s coming!” It was Ralph, who had been keeping guard at the hatchway to the deck above.
“Up the ladder, quickly!” Beth cried to John.
But Ralph was already sliding down it to join them in the hold. “Too late – they’re on deck. Time to play hide-and-seek!” He vanished into the shadows towards the prow of the ship.
“Except the losers don’t get another turn...” Beth heard John mutter as he dived – Captain Jack-style, she thought – behind a large water cask. Beth hastily replaced the lid of the gunpowder crate, apologized to Will as she shoved the gag back into his mouth, then extinguished the candle and squatted down behind a pile of musty tarpaulin.
Within seconds, she heard the footsteps overhead getting ever closer, and then, just visible in the pitch darkness, she could make the vague outlines of two men clambering down the ladder. One of them was grunting with the effort, and a chill of recognition crept up Beth’s spine on hearing the harsh, rasping sound.
Edmund Groby.
“Are you sure about this, master?” came a voice she didn’t know.
“Of course,” Groby snapped. “People are already asking too many questions. Once the ship is no more, people will wonder about her for a few days and then quickly forget. Do it, man.”
Beth frowned. Once the ship is no more? That didn’t sound good...
A flame flared into life, accompanied by a crackling, fizzing sound. Groby and his accomplice clattered back up the ladder quickly.
“They’re going to blow up the ship!” Beth hissed to her friends as loudly as she dared. “We need to get out of here!”
They burst from their hiding place, and Beth gasped as she saw that Groby had lit a long trail of gunpowder heading towards the barrels, like a fuse. She and John desperately tried to scuff out the trail to prevent its progress, but the wooden floorboards had caught alight, and fire was beginning to run rampant in the hold.
“We can’t leave Will,” John said urgently. “We must try again to free him.”
Beth and John hurried over to him. “Try to pull the chain up and over his body,” she suggested quickly. They tugged with all their might, but he was shackled so tightly round his chest and beneath his armpits that it was impossible, and he cried out in agony at their futile efforts.
“Stop, stop!” he begged.
John grimly wiped the sweat from his brow. “My friend, even if we have to break your arms or dislocate your shoulders, it will be better than death!”
“That is not what I mean,” Will replied, coughing against the smoke beginning to fill the hold from the flames. The orange light from the hissing fuse played across his ghastly pale face, and his terror-filled eyes seemed to be transfixed by it. “Even if you could do it – which I doubt – it would take too long. You must go now. Save yourselves!”
Just then, Beth saw a grubby face appear through smoke. Ralph used one finger to hook the lock holding Will’s chains in place, then drop it.
“It’s a Robinson number twenty-seven.” He sniffed dismissively. “You’d think they’d fork out for something better than that if it’s such an important job.” He calmly fished a little piece of wire from his pocket.
Beth looked anxiously towards the other side of the hold, where the flames were beginning to lick larger. “Hurry!” she said urgently.
But after a few deft flicks and twists, there was a metallic click, and Will wriggled free of his shackles. But instead of heading for the ladder, he tottered on stiff legs towards the crate of gunpowder and the ever-shortening fuse.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
“Go!” he ordered them. “I might not be able to do this.”
Beth couldn’t believe her ears. “Do what?”
“Extinguish the flames. I’m not going to let them destroy the evidence after what they’ve done to me!”
“I’m off,” Ralph muttered, already poised at the bottom of the ladder. “He’ll never do it. The fire’s already too fierce, the ship will blow any moment—”
“It’s impossible Will, you must come now!” John begged his friend. “We can find other evidence...”
Will edged closer. “I shall do this,” he called. “Go now! There’s no point risking more than one life.”
Beth’s own mind was in turmoil, but the gunpowder fuse was rapidly burning through and the flames growing more and more intense. She grabbed John by the elbow, ushering him after Ralph. “There’s no time to argue. Come on!”
They scrabbled out onto the deck, still gasping from the smoking atmosphere that had begun to envelop the hold. The air outside was cold and fresh, and as she and John scurried across the planking, Beth saw Ralph crouching down in the shadows on the deck, waiting for them on the opposite side of the ship from the wharf.
“Stay down! We can’t go that way,” he whispered quickly when they reached him. “I think Groby spotted me. I only just managed to hide. He and his bully boy headed off over there thinking they were giving chase...”
Beth and John spun round and saw the two men in the light from the lantern of the night watchman, who had now appeared on the scene. They were covering the only exit to the dockside, looking around in the shadows and frowning.
“You ... you mean we should go in the water? I can’t swim!” John protested.
“You won’t need to.” Ralph was tugging on a length of rope that hung over the side of the ship. “There’s a boat on the other end of this!”
“Let’s go,” Beth whispered. “We have to hurry before they spot us.”
Beth waited while John cautiously climbed in, then scrambled after him and down into the little rowing boat, from where she reached up and helped Ralph to haul himself in. John grabbed the oars, and soon they were pulling away with the aid of a strongly flowing current.
“I think we’ve done it.” he whispered.
But as they cleared the Doodgaan and looked across the Thames towards Tower Wharf, they saw Groby shout and point towards them.
“They’ve spotted us!” Ralp
h said.
Beth’s heart began to pound as she saw the night watchman saying something and pointing along the riverside, then Groby and his henchman began running in that direction. And as John rowed further, they saw what the watchman had been directing Groby towards another boat.
Moments later, Groby and his accomplice had jumped into it and were quickly leaving the dockside. The big man at the oars was straining his broad back, pulling powerfully towards them...
Chapter Fifteen - Shooting the Bridge
“PULL!” shouted Ralph. He struggled to make himself heard over the roar of the water. Now that they were out in the middle of the river, Beth was surprised at how fast and furious the Thames was rushing. She knew that at certain times of the year there were particularly high and strong tides that boosted the river’s flow – and this was surely one of those times.
“I am pulling!” John gasped, heaving at the oars with all his might.
“Well, they’re gaining on us. Let me take an oar and help...” Ralph cried, beginning to rise, but Beth yelled at him to sit down.
“The interruption will slow us down, or you might upset the boat!”
The only consolation was that their boat was picking up speed because they were going with the surging tidal flow – but so was Groby’s boat, and his man was strong enough to row faster than poor John. They were gaining by the second. Beth could now hear Groby’s guttural cries as he urged his henchman on, directing threats and curses at them, but his actual words were blurred into one nasty, incomprehensible screech by the noise of the river.
“Pull for the opposite bank, John,” Beth urged.
