Turning the Stones (30 page)

I clamber over the rail to the accompaniment of a report from the lieutenant’s pistol. Then comes the boom of the
Vindicator
’s swivel guns. I turn to see Captain McDonagh’s rowboat rising out of a trough, badly exposed to his foes. The lieutenant pulls a second pistol from his belt and aims again, but the weather has dampened his powder and his pulling of the trigger yields only a flash in the pan. In a fit of petulance he flings the errant pistol on the deck. It fires belatedly with a cracking loud
bang
! There is a volley of shouts – the ball seems to have narrowly missed someone’s foot – and in those few seconds, Captain McDonagh, who is rowing hard, makes valuable ground. The guns swivel and let loose their shot, but the captain, bobbing up and down in the building sea, is not an easy target. Despite his perfidy, I find I do not wish to see him killed. I believe he will get away, for now it is beginning to rain, but can there be any hope for him in a rowboat on a stormy sea?

The detonation of a gun towards the port bow makes me jump. Smoke rises lazily from the mouth of the gun. And this time when the rowboat surges up on the crest of the big, grey swell, I cannot see Captain McDonagh. Or is that a glimpse of him lying wounded, perhaps, in the bottom of the boat? He does not ply the oars at all. Where are the oars? How will he propel himself without them?

The lieutenant orders another round to be fired. The shot splatters in the sea. I do not know the range of these swivels
– could it be a quarter of a mile? But what does it matter, for Captain McDonagh does not sit up. I am galled with him all over again – and then I must admit that it is not anger but distress.

Captain! Sit up! If you do not start to row, you will be swamped. With my heart in my mouth I watch the tender swing around broadside to the waves.

Pouring down now in a determined way, rods of rain pit the water. The lieutenant commands his helmsman to pursue the tender to confirm the captain’s death, but it is a course of action that grows more impossible by the second. The storm has come blustering in upon us with its mayhem, and waves are exploding around the
Vindicator
’s bows. The master of this vessel must stir himself to reef his sails.

I can see nothing of the rowboat.

Surely Captain McDonagh is feigning death in order to throw off the
Vindicator
. Surely that is what he is doing. Would not it be just like him to dissemble so? I creep forward, no one paying me any heed – the men on the foredeck are struggling with the jib. The lieutenant is leaning out amidships looking into the chaotic gloom, but even when another flash of lightning illuminates the convulsing sea, he cannot see any trace of the captain either. With an expression of irritation he turns away – there is a contretemps in the bow and he must attend to the messiness of the jib. The men brought the canvas down just as the cutter tunnelled into a wave and now the sail has slumped into the sea. Captain McDonagh, I cannot but think, would never have allowed such incompetence. Woe betide the man who let tackle drag in the water when the
Seal
heeled in a breeze.

I flail at a line that is tied to the mast below the boom and hold on tight against the wild movements of the boat. It occurs to me that I could not have chosen a worse place to ride out a lightning storm. Were the captain here, he would say, ‘Do you want to go to blazes, madam? Go below or must you baulk at my every command?’ I look for a binnacle but there is none. However, I will not go below. I do not trust the seamanship of this commander or his crew. The bow has come up again, but still the hands are unable to bring in the sodden jib before the next wave hits. They must hack at the rigging in order to cut the sail free.

I am concentrated on the detail of these actions – I cannot pretend to care about the wretched jib! – because I do not wish to turn my thoughts to the fate of Captain McDonagh. And yet my thoughts insist on going towards him, damn it. He is a cur, but it distresses me to think of him killed by the preventives’ shot. And the alternative is almost worse: that he is wounded and beyond rescue and bleeding to death, that is, if the flimsy tender remains afloat. The seas have risen from five to ten feet in less than twenty minutes – and the light is going now.

*

The elements have compelled the
Vindicator
on to a reckless course. I cannot see what is happening outside now. The lieutenant ordered me taken below-decks and one of his crew pushed me into this squalid hold. The hatch above wants a lid, and each time the boat hurtles off the top of one wave and buries its bow into the backside of the next, seawater washes through the grating. I am numb with cold, although I cannot bother myself about it, not when I consider Captain McDonagh’s fate. Senseless to reprehend him now.

The thought of his piteous death – and the waste of his life – grieves me in spite of his treachery. He was a commander as resolute and weatherly as the
Seal
herself and his practicality could be trusted. I remember how he liked a ship’s rigging to have a little give in it as an aid to speed. He liked a loose-footed mainsail to fly freely with plenty of draught and power in it, although he would not abide carelessness. Yet he was not averse to granting a liberty either. And if a difficulty arose, he sprang to propose a remedy. I suppose I was just such an answer.

I am babbling to you out of fear – but you guessed that, no doubt. I am also under the influence of a peculiar calm, which accepts that I shall likely join Captain McDonagh at the bottom of the ocean before much longer. In my short life I have discovered that human beings have the capacity to entertain many different, often conflicting strands of their characters at the same time. I am reconciled to my fate. At the same time I am deathly afraid. My hands tremble, my heart races. Each assault by the sea, each roll of the battered vessel, terrifies me. Yet, when the wave has passed, optimism, incredibly, rushes into the void. I think, as death approaches, that we must keep believing, until the very last second, that we will get out of the jam.

I never knew I had such buoyancy.

It is pitch black down here. The lanterns went out almost as soon as I was cast down due to the wind and the wet and their antic movements. I sense that there is another prisoner in the hold, or a member of the crew. I keep my distance from him and cling to the companionway below the hatch. I can see nothing through the grating but a churn of greyness. How
long has the
Vindicator
been battling this storm? More than an hour, I conject, but it seems to me that the lieutenant is losing the fight. As far as I can tell, he has tried to wrest control of his vessel from the storm by changing direction, heading into the wind. He has been hindered, however, by a mighty cross swell that bats the hull and sends the
Vindicator
yawing like a guzzler too drunk to stand. I fear that the swell is pushing us at a dangerous angle to the wind.

Oh, Lord, listen to that roar. I know before it breaks that this wave is calamitous. It falls upon us like a hammer on an anvil. The
Vindicator
reverberates from the force and tips forward at a frightening angle, her bow stuck into the sea like a skewer. Then the sea scoops us up and, among the pandemonium, objects tumbling, wild shouts, it slews us around at a desperate tilt and I nearly drop from the companionway. We are in danger of capsizing.

I must get out now!

Clawing at the grating over the hatch, although I know it has been battened, screwed down as surely as any fastening of an early coffin, I fail to make headway. My cries evaporate in the shrieking air – and are overtaken then by the hollow sound of the keel scraping on rock and the splintering of timbers. Have we arrived at a shore or are we on a reef? Amid the crew’s frantic hubbub and the cacophony of the sea and the groaning vessel, someone calls the order to abandon ship. I hammer my fist against the grating.

All of a sudden a hand grabs my ankle. An elbow knocks me aside.

I crash from my perch and bang up hard on slimy boards. Who is it here? A cook or a carpenter – I don’t know, but he has a hatchet and is slashing at the wooden grating.

I force my way from the hold and grasp one of the mast hoops.

The
Vindicator
is heeling badly, the crew is fumbling with a tender to make good their escape, when all at once an eerie lull comes over the storm, as though it has lowered its head and is gathering itself for a final charge.

And, here it comes, now – the big, galloping wave that will overwhelm us.

A shudder passes through the cutter as it submits to its fate.

It is a shock to find myself thrown into the frigid sea, my mantle and skirts inflating around me like some sudden fungus.

I fear that the weight of them will drag me beneath the surface and it is with relief I hear in the darkness and confusion men’s voices and the rattle of rowlocks. I glimpse the outline of the tender and – is that a second, smaller rowboat? Yet my cries for help do not bring them near. Why do they not hear me?!

I have no idea how to keep afloat. My feet kick madly – and my shoes are lost. One hand makes a circular motion as if stirring laundry, the other fumbles at the strings of my mantle and my top petticoat and they fall away.

A wave slaps my face. I scream for help and swallow a mouthful of choking salt water. I scream again. The crew’s voices sound greatly more distant. They are rowing away and I am sinking like a stone. The percussion in my ears is the pounding of my frantic heart.

My higher self looks down in sorrow on the poor, panicked creature thrashing in the sea and can do nothing but regret that she is so very ill-equipped for her ordeal.

And then: the herring girls of Parkgate swim into my mind.
I see them waist deep in the Dee, washing the fish oil from their arms. Some of them liked to frolic in the water, driving themselves quite a long way out. How did they do it?

With head up, I reach forward and drag a hand through the sea, and repeat the action with my other arm. Yes, they turned their arms like a windmill.

Again, I reach up, reach over and pull. And again, and again, and again … My shoulders burn with the effort, but I plough onward. Onward, onward, onward. Sweating and freezing at the same time. I cannot go on, but I must. I do not want to die in this lonesome way, I do not.

I alter the movement of my desperate arms, pushing the water away from my breast. The propulsion is less effective, but I lack the strength to do otherwise. How very tired I am, and the thought of the dark, silent fathoms beneath, the malign profundity of them, is dangerously paralysing. I force myself to crane my neck as far as I can out of the water and it is then that the moonlight shows me a shape in the swells, rising and falling. I do not know what it is. My eyes are stinging from the salt.

Something grazes against my leg, something finny, and its slithery touch so appals me I find the energy to kick out and continue.

The only thing anchoring me to life is the screaming pain in my muscles. Overarm again. Rotate right arm, slap into water, slap and scoop, now the left arm. An object is bobbing nearby. With a cry I seize hold of it and find myself clinging to a wooden grid about the size of a small door. It is one of the
Vindicator
’s hatch covers!

I begin to cry then, out of gratitude for the hatch cover,
and there is even some fleeting comfort in the heat of my welling tears. Oh, this beautiful raft. Surely it will save my life. Very cautiously, I wriggle on to it, lying on my stomach. The thing dips a little, but it holds my weight. My entire body is shaking with cold and I dare say I might freeze to death, but it is bliss to rest my cramping arms. For a long while I simply drift, with frozen fingers clamped to the grid. It occurs to me eventually that I am being carried on a current.

And then I wonder if I am drifting further out to sea into the great abyss of the Atlantic.

I beat away the thought, silently shouting at it to leave me alone.

But what can I do except drift?

The noise of the sea is one unceasing roar.

Who can say how many minutes or even hours I have been dawdling on this sea? I rise up and down the swells in a trance. Up and down. My feet and my hands grow numb. What a pity that the elegant mantle the captain gave me has gone to its doom. And I lament my poor French slippers, drifting down on their long journey to the bottom of the sea.

There is something amiss. My raft is waterlogged. It is sinking! In a panic I slide off the hatch cover and begin to kick. I kick desperately, hanging on to the cover. I am pure will, for to give up is to go under. I pretend there is nothing in my mind, no fear of death, no horror of annihilation. I am nothing but kicking feet. I hang on to the hatch cover and I kick my feet.

I am exhausted and the raft is exhausted too. It wants to go under.

I manoeuvre around the thing so that I am lying on my
back, clutching the raft to my chest as though in an encouraging embrace. The raft and I stay afloat, but now I have a view of the black sky and the pitiless beauty of its stars. They glitter at a distance that is so terribly remote it seems the definition of loneliness.

I turn away from the stars and take up the grind of pushing the raft and kicking.

And then, up ahead, something shining! Oh, thank God, there are lights, yellow and a strange blue-green. With a last burst, I drive towards the brightness.

I discover a sight as hopeless as it is enchanting. The lights are only the glowing emanation of a school of fish. At my approach, the luminous creatures swim away, fanning out in a glittering formation of green brilliants, like a gorgeous necklace ornamenting the vast body of the sea. As though cast down by this disappointment, the raft decides it is unable to go on and it submerges itself – not entirely, but enough so that I cannot make use of it except to hang on to a corner of it as I watch the phosphorescence fade.

I am in a state of isolation that it is beyond me to bear. I tread water slowly, wearily, spent now. My limbs feel as though they are broken. All that is keeping my head above the surface is the thought, delirious though it is, that you wait for me on a shore somewhere, near or far. The thought of you is the same thing as life itself.