Stormchild (15 page)

Forward of the main cabin were two smaller sleeping cabins that shared a common bathroom. I had turned one of the cabins into a engineering workroom, while the other was crammed with stores. Last were two chain lockers, a sail locker, and a watertight compartment that held
Stormchild’s
small diesel generator, under which one of the two rifles was hidden.

On deck I had a life raft in a container, a dinghy that was lashed to the after-coach roof, and a stout rack filled with boat hooks, whisker poles, and oars. At the stern, on a short staff, I flew the bomb-scarred red ensign which had flown from
Slip-Slider
and which the navy had rescued from the channel. I would take that ragged flag to my own journey’s end as a symbol of Joanna.

Stormchild
had been rerigged, repainted, and replenished. The work had taken me eight weeks exactly, and now she was ready. The sale of my house was progressing smoothly, the boatyard had a new manager and all I needed now was the right weather to slip down channel and round Ushant. That weather arrived in early November, and I topped up
Stormchild’s
water and fuel tanks, checked her inventory one more time, then went ashore for my last night in England. I stayed with David and Betty, and used their telephone to make a final effort to reach Jackie Potten. There was no answer from Jackie’s telephone, and only the answering machine responded when I called Molly Tetterman’s house. So much for the ladies of Kalamazoo, I thought, and put the phone down without leaving any message.

The next morning, in a cold rain and gusting wind, I carried the last of my luggage down to the boatyard where the heavily laden
Stormchild
waited at the pontoon. Friends had come to bid me farewell and cheered when David’s wife, Betty, broke a bottle of champagne on
Stormchild
’s stemhead. David said a prayer of blessing over the boat, then we all trooped below to drink more champagne. David and Betty gave me two parting gifts: a book about Alaskan birds and the
Book of Common Prayer.
“Not the modern rubbish,” David assured me, “but the 1662 version.” It was a beautiful and ancient book with a morocco leather binding and gilt-edged pages.

“Too good for the boat,” I protested.

“Nonsense. It isn’t for decoration anyway, but for use. Take it.”

Billy, on behalf of the boatyard staff, then presented me with a ship’s bell that he ceremoniously hung above the main companionway. “It’s proper brass, boss,” he told me, “so it’ll tarnish like buggery, but that’ll make you think of us every time you have to clean the sod.”

We opened still more champagne, though I, who would be taking
Stormchild
down channel when the tide ebbed, only drank two glasses. It was a sad, bittersweet day; a parting, but also a beginning. I went to find my daughter, but I also went to fulfill a dream that had given such joy to Joanna—the dream of living aboard a cruising boat, of following the warm winds and long waves. I was going away, leaving no address and no promise of a return.

At midday, as the tide became fair, my guests climbed back onto the pontoon. Friends shouted farewells as the rain slicked
Stormchild’s
teak deck dark. I started the big engine. Billy disconnected the shoreside electricity, then slipped my springs, leaving the big yacht tethered only by her bow and stern lines. David was the last to leave the boat. He gripped my hand. “Good luck,” he said, “and God bless.”

“Are you sure you won’t come?”

“Good luck,” he said again, then climbed ashore. I looked ahead, past
Stormchild’s
bows, at the rain-beaten river, down which Joanna had sailed to her death, and from where Nicole had sailed into oblivion. Now it was my turn to leave, and I glanced up at the hill where my wife and son were buried, and I said my own small prayer of farewell.

People were shouting their goodbyes. Most were laughing, and a few were crying. Someone threw a paper streamer. Billy had already let go the bow line and David was standing by the aft. “Ready, Tim?” he shouted.

“Let go!” I called.

“You’re free, Tim!” David tossed the bitter end of the aft line onto
Stormchild’s
deck. “Good luck! God bless! Bon voyage!”

I put the engine into gear. Water seethed at
Stormchild’s
stern as she drew heavily and slowly away from her berth. Next stop, the Canaries!

“Goodbye!” a score of voices shouted. “Good luck, Tim!” More paper streamers arced across
Stormchild’s
guardrails and sagged into the widening strip of gray-white water. “Bon voyage!”

I waved, and there were tears in my eyes as the streamers stretched taut, snapped, and fell away. One of the boatyard staff was sounding a raucous farewell on an air-powered foghorn. “Goodbye!” I shouted one last time.

“Mr. Blackburn!” A small and determined voice screamed above the racket, and I glanced back across the strip of propeller-churned water, and there, crammed among my friends and dressed in a baggy sweater and shapeless trousers with her bulging handbag gripped in a thin pale hand, was the lady from Kalamazoo. Jackie Potten had surfaced at last. She had not let me down after all. “Mr. Blackburn!” she shouted again.

I banged
Stormchild’s
gearbox into reverse. White water foamed and boiled as the propeller struggled to check the deadweight of over twenty tons of boat and supplies. I slung a line ashore, David and Billy hauled, and ignominiously, just thirty seconds after leaving, I and my boat came home again.

J
ackie Potten was panting from the exertion of running through the boatyard carrying a suitcase and her enormous handbag. “A man at the marina office said you were leaving, and I just ran,” she explained her breathlessness, “and I can’t believe I caught you! Wow! This is some boat! Is it yours?”

“Yes, mine.” I ushered Jackie into
Stormchild’s
cockpit where I introduced her to David and Betty, who, alone of the rather bemused crowd who had come to bid me farewell, had returned on board the yacht. My brother now behaved with an excruciating gallantry toward her. He invited her down into the saloon, enjoining her to watch the stairs and not to crack her skull on the companionway lintel.

“I tried to telephone you from London Airport”—Jackie talked to me all the way down into the saloon—”but they said your home number was disconnected, and then I telephoned the boatyard and they said you were leaving today, and I would have been here hours ago, but British Rail is some kind of joke. They just pretend to run a railroad. Anyway I caught a bus in the end, which was kind of interesting. Is this some cabin! Are those books for real? You read Yeats?”

“The Yeats belonged to Nicole,” I said. I had put a lot of Nicole’s books onto the shelves, which were equipped with varnished drop bars to hold their contents against the sea’s motion.

“Is this really a stove? That’s neat. I didn’t know you could heat boats. And a carpet! Wow! This is more comfortable than my apartment!”

David, standing beside me at the chart table, watched Jackie explore the big saloon. “I see I did you an injustice,” he said softly.

“Meaning?”

“She’s hardly a Salome, is she? Or a Cleopatra. Not at all the sultry Jezebel I had imagined.”

“I hired her for her journalistic skills,” I said testily, “not for her looks.”

“Thank God for that,” David said with amusement, and Jackie, in her voluminous and colorless clothes, did look more than ever like some drab, wan, and orphaned child, an impression that was not helped by a brown felt hat of spectacular ugliness.

“Can I use this?” Jackie Potten referred to the saloon table, where she sat and spread some crumpled and dirty papers. “I have to account for your money, see? I guess I really did some pretty dumb things, and I’m not really sure that I separated out all Molly’s German expenses from mine.”

“You took Mrs. Tetterman to Germany?” I interrupted to ask.

“Sure! But not on your money. Really!” She sounded very anxious.

“Guide’s honor?” David, instantly divining the girl’s innocence, could not resist teasing her.

“Guide’s honor?” Jackie frowned at him. “Oh, you mean like Girl Scouts? Sure, Scout’s honor. Except maybe some of the receipts got muddled and that’s why I need to run through the paperwork with you, Mr. Blackburn, because you never said that Molly should go, but she kind of insisted and she’s really hard to turn down, know what I mean? And she speaks German, too, so it was a real help having her along, but we got those tickets you book thirty days in advance and we traveled midweek, only my ticket cost a lot more because I had to come here as well and Molly didn’t. She’s flying straight back to Detroit, while I’ve come to report to you. I don’t think we were really extravagant. I mean we stayed at this real fleabag. It was weird. They had a pool, which I thought was kind of neat, but the Germans swim naked! These fat guys, right? Really gross! Molly said it was just natural and healthy, and she went skinny-dipping with them, but I couldn’t do it, I really couldn’t. And the food was awful—they don’t know what vegetarian food is—”

“Quiet!” I sang out.

“I was only trying to tell you.” Jackie made another valiant effort to keep going, while David and Betty were trying hard not to laugh aloud.

“Quiet!” I had entirely forgotten this girl’s capacity to talk. I put a finger on my lips to keep her silent as I walked slowly to the cabin table. Once there I put my hands on the table’s edge and bent toward Jackie Potten’s indignant, pale face. “Did you find out why Caspar von Rellsteb sailed to Europe four-and-a-half years ago?” I asked her at last.

“That’s exactly what I was about to tell you!” Jackie said very indignantly. “Yes, I did!”

“Oh, blessed girl,” I sat opposite her. “So tell me now.”

“I was already telling you!”

“OK.” I held my hands up in mock surrender. “Please, continue.”

“Molly insisted on going to Hamburg, because that was where von Rellsteb’s mother came from. Molly said two heads were better than one, and it really was a good idea, because she speaks German, and she found this lawyer and he was terrific! He had a cousin who lives in Detroit, and I guess that helped, because we could tell him all about Detroit and he was really interested, because he’s never been to the States and he was thinking of going, in fact, he was thinking he might go this Christmas, and Molly—”

“Jackie!” I snapped. “I do not care where your Goddamned Hamburg lawyer will spend his Christmas. I want to know about Caspar von Rellsteb!”

David was half choking with laughter, while Betty, who was used to organizing the waifs and strays of society, looked as though she wanted to tuck Jackie under her arm and carry her away for a proper feed. Jackie, astonished at my reproof, gazed wide-eyed at me for a few seconds, then looked contrite. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but the thing is that Friedrich, that’s the lawyer I was telling you about, was really terrific and he didn’t charge us a penny, and that was what I was trying to explain to you, because you’ve got to review these accounts”—she pushed the untidy pile of scruffy papers toward me—”to see that we didn’t spend your money unwisely, and Friedrich, and this is what I’ve been trying to tell you all along, only you keep interrupting me, knew all about the von Rellsteb legacy, because it was quite a celebrated case, and he dug all the papers out of the archives and he gave Molly and me copies, and, of course, we paid for the photocopying, you’ll see it down there at the bottom of page three, there, see? Twenty-nine marks? And that’s cheap for photocopying, because in America you probably pay ten cents a sheet, in fact, a place near my house charges fifteen cents a sheet! Fifteen! And we paid much less for two copies each of a hundred and ten pages. I’ve got a proper receipt for the photocopying as well.” She dug through her vast bag. “I know I’ve got it. I remember putting it aside.”

David, hugely amused by Jackie, had gone to the table where he leafed through her carefully handwritten accounts. “What’s this?” He demanded with mock sternness. “Six marks and thirty-seven pfenning on ice cream?”

“Oh, gee.” Jackie blushed with embarrassment. “I told Molly we shouldn’t have bought the ice cream, but she said it was all right, because we deserved some reward for all our work, and the food was really terrible. All those sausages, which neither of us would eat, and we’d run out of our own money and we just wanted some ice cream. I’ll pay you back, Mr. Blackburn, truly I will.”

“You can have the ice cream,” I said magnanimously, “if you tell me about Caspar von Rellsteb.”

She did, though it took her the best part of a half hour. Betty made us all tea and we sat in the big stateroom, listening to the wind sigh in the rigging and to the rain patter on the coach roof and to the small waves slap on
Stormchild’s
hull, as Jackie Potten slowly unveiled the mystery.

Caspar von Rellsteb’s father, Jackie said, was not alive, but had died in the air battles at the very end of the Second World War. Caspar von Rellsteb had discovered his father’s identity when he went through his mother’s papers after her death, and the same papers suggested that he might have a claim on his dead father’s considerable property. He had sailed to Germany to make that claim, taking with him a letter, in which, shortly before his death,
Oberstleutnant
Auguste von Rellsteb had bequeathed his whole estate to Caspar’s mother, Fraulein Eva Fellnagel. The letter, written from a Luftwaffe station late in the war, was hardly a legal will, but Auguste von Rellsteb left no other instructions for the disposition of his property before he was killed when his Focke-Wulf 190 was shot down by an American Mustang. The legal status of the letter was challenged by the estate’s trustees, but the German judges had dismissed the challenge and upheld the validity of
Oberstleutnant
Auguste von Rellsteb’s last wishes. Caspar von Rellsteb had won his case.

“So how much did he inherit?” Betty, quite caught up in Jackie’s breathless retelling of the story, asked.

“It’s kind of hard to say,” Jackie answered, then explained that the legacy went back to the early nineteenth century when a certain Otto von Rellsteb, the youngest son of a landed Junker family from East Prussia, had crossed the Atlantic to the newly independent Republic of Chile. Otto von Rellsteb, like thousands of other hopeful Germans, had gone to buy land at the southern tip of South America, an area so popular with German immigrants that it had been nicknamed the New Bavaria. Otto, unable to afford the richer farmland on the Argentine
pampas,
had purchased a huge spread of cheap coastal land in Chile, where he had established his
finca,
his estate, and where he had raised thousands upon thousands of sheep. He had also discovered an easily quarried deposit of limestone on his
finca
and, thus provided by nature, he had prospered, as had his descendants until his great-great-grandson, Auguste, hating the bleak, wild, stormy coast, and detesting the sound of sheep, and loathing the dumb, insolent faces of his workers, had returned to Europe where, glorying in the Reich, he had joined the
Luftwaffe,
impregnated a whore with his son, then died in a blazing aircraft for his führer.