The Voyage of the Dolphin (8 page)

He checked the flash-gun tray, onto which he had shaken out the contents of a tin marked
JOHNSON'S N
o. 2
FLASHPOWDER
, and cocked the ignition hammer. Then he took the attached string in one hand and the shutter release tube in the other and, with a great deal of effort, fed them beneath the desk before settling himself in his chair. It struck him that he would have to drop the scholarly pen-on-lip touch, as synchronising the shutter and the flash would require the split-second cooperation of both hands, which would need to be out of shot. (He should really have sought assistance but hadn't been able to bear the thought of the ribbing.)

He set down the rubber bulb and clenched his pipe between his teeth. He believed this would add gravitas. Turning quarter-profile to the lens, he fixed his gaze on a knot in the wall and raised a quizzical eyebrow to destiny. Then, as he up-tilted his chin the better to emphasise his jawline, a vile puddle of tarry dottle ran back down the pipe-stem and into his throat and he choked, expelling a geyser of burning filaments from the end of the bowl. At the same moment he jerked on the flash string.

Up above, the explosion shook the wheelhouse, dislodging a compass from the wall and causing McGregor to upend a scalding beaker of Bovril into his lap.

‘F—k me pink, we've been hit,' he cried. ‘Mr Harris, sound the alarm!'

On deck Crozier and Phoebe jumped to their feet holding the sail between them and stared at each other in bewilderment as the ship's bell began to clang. Pounding down the steps from the bridge, one hand clamped to the front of his trousers, McGregor failed to see Bunion sleepily raising his head. With a scream worthy of Geronimo breaching a Mexican battlement he flew, with incredible velocity, through the air, skidded across the sailcloth and over the top of the gunwale, and disappeared from view.

The Icelandic coastline, with its jagged peaks and crags, had a raw, untidy look to it – the cataclysmic upheaval of its formation still oddly recent – that put Crozier in mind of the Giant's Causeway. Cliffs of crenellated basalt soared from beaches littered with shale and strewn with huge boulders, while out from the shore, grotesque in the dawn light, stacks of twisted rock rose from the water and seemed to stand guard.

Through the binoculars Crozier could see kittiwakes
(Rissa tridactyla)
and skuas
(Stercorarius skua)
cruising the heights, Atlantic puffins
(Fratercula arctica)
jostling for position along grassy ledges. He set the glasses down and breathed into his hands to warm them. It was thrilling to be so close to landfall again. He looked round at the others, all mute with anticipation. Ten minutes later, however, a thick fog descended and they were forced to lay to for a couple of hours.

By eleven o'clock they had rounded the southern horn of Faxafjord and by lunchtime Reykjavik began to materialise out of the mist, the masts of schooners and fishing boats swaying in the harbour, tiny figures moving on the dockside, the blurred geometry of the town itself just visible beyond. They dropped anchor some way from shore and the launch was lowered for the initial landing party, which consisted of the non-sailors and Bunion, rowed by the twins. Harris, Doyle, Victoor and the cabin boy would follow in the afternoon when the twins had returned with the first load of supplies. McGregor had retired to his bunk with a bottle of Wee Jimmy to help him over the severe chill that had resulted from his unplanned dip in the Atlantic.

‘What a ghastly smell,' Fitzmaurice remarked as they neared the jetty.

‘Rotting fish,' Crozier said.

‘My God, quick, I'd better light my pipe.'

On the pier, amid broken boats and piles of nets, groups of men stood around talking and smoking, while women hauled creels of cod and herring, and loaded carts pulled by shaggy little ponies of various hues. The local dog-pack, a whipped, hungry-looking crew, was camped further back around a mound of lobster pots. Perceiving them dimly from his place at the front of the boat, Bunion flexed his nostrils and one of his eyes began to flicker.

The town was fronted by a row of white-washed, black-timbered general merchants' stores and it was towards these that the landing party gravitated, once they had tied up the launch and fended off a cackle of knick-knack-peddling crones. The shops, marked with proprietary names such as ‘Hilmarsson' and ‘Sigurdsson', were flanked by warehouses advertising salt, coal and chandlery. Ponies, their reins pulled over their heads and hanging down to the ground, waited outside, shifting from hoof to hoof and exhaling puffs of vapour. The twins disappeared to begin negotiations. Spotting a trio of women laying out fish for curing, Phoebe went off to interrogate them. Bunion, meanwhile, paced back and forth with his snout cocked in the direction of the pack.

‘I'm surprised Uncle Crispin's not here to meet us,' Fitzmaurice said. ‘I would have thought it part of his job to welcome every British subject on arrival.'

Rafferty bristled.

‘Are
all
your relatives lions of the Empire?'

Sir Crispin Pimm, related to Fitzmaurice by marriage to one of his father's step-sisters, was the British honorary consul in Reykjavik, a post that had fallen to him after the previous title-holder – the only one among the half dozen longterm Englishmen in the country not unhinged by schnapps or homesickness – inadvertently discovered a new geyser while out for a ramble.

Fitzmaurice thought for a moment.

‘No, not all, some of them work in the City. But now you mention it, my great-grandfather was Wellington's adjutant at Waterloo, my grandfather was Consul-General of the Mortlock Islands, and one of my great-uncles was Lieutenant-Governor of Uttar Bakavsa. But I'm not sure you could describe Uncle Crispin as – ah, here he is now.'

A tall man of indeterminate later years, still erect in carriage but fast running to seed, was striding towards them, looking about him with an imperious air. Sir Crispin Pimm was one of those men, abundant in the slipstreams of Empire, for whom the rules that constrain the lives of others are of scant concern. Behind the slow-motion wreckage of his face an unscrupulous energy burned.

‘Hugh, my boy, how the devil are you?' he cried, seizing Fitzmaurice by the ears. ‘I can't believe you're here. You haven't changed a bit.'

‘Ow. Ow. Marvellous, thanks. Ouch. Neither have you.'

‘How long can you stay?'

‘Oh, just a few days, Uncle, as long as it takes to re-stock the ship.'

‘Excellent. You'll have a chance to look around, and I've managed to swing a state dinner in your honour tomorrow night… Now, who are
these
chaps?'

Sir Crispin held his face very close — barely a couple of inches — like an incredulous sergeant-major, and Crozier found himself staring into intensely blue, strangely opaque irises, too shocked to recoil.

‘This is Walter Crozier, Uncle, one of my chums from College.'

‘Crozier, eh?' Sir Crispin said, maintaining proximity. ‘A good Borders name.'

‘Actually, it's of French orig—'

‘And who's this?'

‘Frank Rafferty, another College pal.'

Rafferty was blinking hard behind his glasses, holding his breath while Sir Crispin inspected his pores.

‘I had a footman name of Rafferty once. Had to sack the bugger for thieving,' the honorary consul said. ‘You're not from Cork are you?'

‘Dublin.'

‘Ah, good. Jolly old town. Haven't been there in years. I hear the natives are very restless these days.'

‘The
natives?
'

Phoebe joined them, her face flushed.

‘Much as I suspected, these poor women are doing all the work while the men loaf around drinking and smoking. I'm organising a meeting.'

Sir Crispin's head swivelled and his eyes bulged as he took in Phoebe's outsize oilskins and sou'wester, courtesy of Savage Newell.

‘And who, pray tell, is this young fellow?'

He moved in for a close-up but Phoebe skipped back smartly, her hands on her hips.

‘Uncle, I'd like you to meet Phoebe Sturgeon who will be staying in Reykjavik for a while.'

‘Phoebe? Isn't that a girl's name?'

‘Yes, Uncle.'

Sir Crispin looked confused, but before he could seek clarification, a cacophony of yelping broke out nearby and they turned to see a shifting whirlwind of dog limbs, people scattering in all directions. A small mongrel hurtled through the air.

‘Bunion!' the shipmates said in unison.

Alerted by shouting, the twins emerged from the doorway of J. Andersen Salt & Coal and rushed towards the gathering crowd. Three buckets of seawater failed to dampen Bunion's bloodlust and eventually Mikkel or Magnus seized him by the back legs and hauled him from the fray, tethering him to a buoy where he sat shivering and licking himself.

‘Well,' Sir Crispin said. ‘That was exciting. Welcome to Reykjavik. Follow me and I'll show you to your digs.'

The town was an unplanned jumble of buildings of square build and bright colours huddled together on the vast lava plain, with diamond-bright mountaintops in the distance to either side and a ridge of purplish hills to the rear. It was dominated by a large church of the pilgrim style with a short wooden clock-tower bolted onto the roof. Nearby, the red Danish flag, one of several visible on the skyline, twitched over the entrance to the parliament.

‘Look at that,' Rafferty muttered to Phoebe, ‘Danish flags everywhere. Will these people never be free?'

Sir Crispin marched ahead, alerting them to water-filled potholes and cairns of pony dung, spouting snippets of history, pointing out places of interest (‘That was the town's first shop, opened just fifteen years ago. God knows how people managed… There's the Latin School…') In the main square they stopped while their host talked, in a mixture of Icelandic and English, to a silver-bearded man dressed in a Viking-esque leather tunic and matching helmet. After a few minutes the conversation escalated into an angry flurry and the Viking turned abruptly and walked away. Sir Crispin rejoined the others.

‘Tricky blighters, the locals,' he said. ‘I'd have him arrested but there are only three policemen and he's related to two of them. In the old days I'd have had him flogged.'

As they proceeded he explained that he had purchased two hundred Icelandic ponies from the man, intending to export them, at a tidy profit, to Britain for use in the coalmines, work for which he had imagined them well-suited given their compact size and legendary stamina. However, after the first shipment a snag had emerged.

‘Turns out they can't stand being in confined spaces. You see, they're so used to the pure, fresh breezes of the fjords that after an hour underground the little bastards just faint dead away. Useless. You can't be bringing ponies round with smelling salts all day. Now the scoundrel won't take them back.' He paused to run a fingernail around the flared rim of a nostril. ‘I'll probably have to pass them off as beef.'

Their accommodation was a ramshackle three-storey hotel of planks and corrugated iron where civilisation petered out and the desolation of the lava plain resumed. Visible from the perimeter of its muddy, fenced-off garden, a straggling collection of turf huts seemed to grow out of the earth, grass carpeting the walls and roofs. People in dark clothes moved between them, and goats and sheep grazed, some of them on the dwellings themselves. Further off, a large lagoon reflected the clear afternoon sky and the bleak gyres of the seabirds.

They were greeted at the desk by a squat figure of uncertain gender and no discernible teeth, who smirked horribly at Sir Crispin, then shouldered their bags and gruntingly led them to rooms under the eaves. Fitzmaurice and Phoebe were allotted a chamber each, while Crozier and Rafferty, due to ongoing repair work, found themselves thrown together yet again. Conditions were less cramped than on the
Dolphin
but nevertheless snugger than either would have preferred. Sir Crispin was staying on the second floor, in the hotel's only ‘suite'. (‘I had a nice house in the centre but there was a tiresome misunderstanding about rent,' he explained. ‘Anyway, after Lady Pimm went home — she found the climate very disagreeable, poor thing – there wasn't really much point.')

 

It was too late for lunch, so they settled for an early dinner, which they took in the hotel's damp and echoing dining room. Over pickled herring and dried catfish Sir Crispin held forth on his adopted country and his fading hopes to exploit its resources.

‘This business with the ponies is most unfortunate. It's set me back quite a bit,' he said, pouring himself an impressive measure from the bottle brought by the hostess (whose name, it was revealed, was Bjork). ‘I might be able to turn them into pies, flog ‘em off cheap to the Irish, but I'll be making a substantial loss. This stuff…' he held up a medallion of fish, ‘has a big market, especially the salt-cod, but we haven't developed a taste for it in Britain and the Spaniards have their greasy paws on the rest of the trade. They can be very touchy about interlopers. Bloodthirsty lot. There must be metals and minerals here but the ground's frozen solid most of the time. Too expensive to get at. Plenty of hot water, of course, but how do you export that?' He dabbed at his lips with the edge of the tablecloth. ‘I've actually got my eye on the puffins. Millions of ‘em, you see, and really quite tasty. Puffin pie? What do you think? Go down well at Simpson's-in-the-Strand?'

After dinner, they took a stroll on the lava plain. It was a clear evening and skeins of milky green light were writhing across the northern horizon, smoke-like ribbons that billowed and twisted into fantastical shapes – animals, wraiths, ogres – unwinding as quickly as they formed, dispersing among the stars.

‘Impressive, isn't it?' Sir Crispin said.

‘It's wonderful,' Phoebe whispered.

The others expressed their feelings in a variety of grunts.

As they watched, the emerald vapours, which seemed blown on a wind from another world, were intersected by vertical striations of yellow and blue, then mauve, crimson and silver, until it looked as though a downpour of multi-coloured rain was headed their way. This evaporated and was replaced by a huge lenticular cloud, within which flashed and twinkled all the hues of an opal.

‘I don't understand, though,' Phoebe said. ‘Why does it happen? What's causing it?'

‘Haven't the foggiest,' Sir Crispin said. ‘The Scandewegians say it's the Valkyries' armour gleaming as they ride back and forth from Valhalla. The Eskimos, on the other hand, reckon it's the souls of their ancestors playing football with a walrus's head or something. By the way, you're not with child are you?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘It's just if you are, you should look away. The locals believe it will make your baby cross-eyed.'

‘How interesting. But no, I'm not. At least, I don't think so.'

The other three turned to stare at her. Phoebe gazed up at the night sky.

‘Just look at all the stars – is that Orion? — and it's not even completely dark yet.'

‘Soon, it won't get dark at all,' Sir Crispin said, ‘and in winter there's no light whatsoever. Poor Lady Pimm found that very difficult.'

They stood, tiny figures on the edge of the vast plain, contemplating the cold sparkle of the heavens.

‘
The eternal
silence of those infinite spaces affrights me
,' Crozier murmured after a while, but no one appeared to hear him or, if they did, could think of an appropriate reply.

*

The next day, after a breakfast of bread and herrings, the company dispersed to attend to various errands and interests: Sir Crispin to probe the logistics of large-scale puffin procurement; Fitzmaurice and Crozier to liaise with the
Dolphin
; and Phoebe, accompanied by Bjork, to round up and militarise the womenfolk of Reykjavik. Inspired by Phoebe, Rafferty announced his intention to seek out the local insurgents. They were walking in the direction of the harbour and had just passed a statue of the independence hero Jón Sigurðsson.