The Wreck of the Mary Deare (31 page)

Patch rowed on, ignoring the cry. ‘Are you going to leave him to drown?' I said, leaning forward, trying with my voice to touch some spark of humanity in him.

‘It's Yules,' he answered. ‘Let Higgins pick him up.'

‘And Mike?' I said. ‘What about Mike?'

‘He'll be all right. That boat isn't going to sink.'

The oars dipped and rose, dipped and rose, his body swinging back and forth. And I sat there and watched him row away from the man. What else could I do? My shoulder had been driven out of its socket; he had only to touch it to send pain searing through me, and he knew it. I thought maybe he was right about the boat. It was only the stern that was damaged. All the fore part would be water-tight. And Higgins would pick Yules up. He had his dinghy launched now and was pulling away from
Griselda
. In the weird, fog-belt light he looked like a giant specimen of those insects that are called water-boatmen. Yules had seen him coming and had ceased to thrash about in the water. He was directly between us and Higgins and he lay still in the water, not crying out any more, just waiting to be picked up.

I don't know why I should have stayed, twisted round like that, in a position that gave me a lot of pain. But I felt I had to see him picked up. I had to know that there was no justification for the feeling of horror that had suddenly gripped me.

Higgins was rowing fast, a long, sweeping stroke that was full of power, and at each pull a little froth of white water showed at the dinghy's blunt bows. Every now and then he turned and looked over his shoulder, and I knew that it was at us he was looking and not at the man in the water.

We were pulling away from Yules all the time and I couldn't be sure how near Higgins was to him. But I heard Yules call out. ‘Alf!' And he raised one hand. ‘I'm here.' The words were distinct and very clear in the stillness of the fog. And then suddenly he was shouting and swimming with frantic desperation, his arms flailing the water, his feet kicking as the surface.

But Higgins never checked, never spoke a word to him. He left him to drown and the oars dipped and rose with terrible regularity, the water streaming from them at every stroke as he came after us.

There was one last despairing cry, and then silence. Sickened, I turned to look at Patch. ‘It's a bigger dinghy than ours,' he said. He meant it as an explanation. He meant that Higgins couldn't afford to stop—not if he was to catch up with us. His face was quite white. He was rowing harder now, the sweat glistening on his forehead. His words sent a cold shiver through me, and I sat there, rigid, all pain momentarily forgotten.

After that I was conscious all the time of the dinghy behind us. I can see it still, like a deadly water-beetle crawling after us across the sea, everlastingly following us through an unreal miasma of fog; and I can hear the creak of the rowlocks, the dip and splash of the oars. And I can see Patch, too, his set face leaning towards me and then pulling back, endlessly moving back and forth as he tugged at the oars, tugged till his teeth were clenched with the pain of his blistered hands, until the blisters broke and the blood dripped on the oars—hour after wretched hour.

At one time Higgins was less than fifty yards behind us and I could see every detail of his boat. It was a gay blue metal dinghy, a little battered, with the paint flaking and dulled with age, and round the gunn'ls was a heavy canvas fend-off. The thing was meant to hold five or six people and it had bluff bows so that every time he pulled it smiled an ugly, puffy smile as the thrust piled the water up in front of it.

But he had used his brute strength recklessly and he didn't gain on us any more.

The fog thinned out as night fell until it was no more than a tattered veil through which we caught glimpses of the stars. The young moon gave it a queer luminosity so that we could still see Higgins following us, little drops of phosphorescence marking the oar blades as they lifted clear of the water.

We stopped once and Patch managed to jerk my shoulder back into its socket, and a little later I moved over to the centre thwart and took the left oar, rowing one-handed. Though I was in considerable pain, we were fairly well balanced, for by then he was very tired.

We continued like that all night, holding our course by the hand-bearing compass that stood at our feet, its card glowing faintly. The moon set and the luminosity faded. We lost sight of Higgins. A wind sprang up and waves broke on the swell, slopping water over the gunn'ls. But it died away again about four and at last the stars paled in the first glimmer of returning daylight. It was one of those cold, cloud-streaked dawns that come reluctantly. It showed a lumpy sea, full of tidal swirls, and a blanket of fog lay ahead of us, clamped down between us and the coast of France.

We breakfasted on three squares of chocolate. It was half of all we had left. The woodwork of the dinghy was beaded with dew, our clothes sodden with it. Water slopped about over the floorboards as we pitched in the sea, and in our exhaustion it was becoming more and more difficult to row a course. ‘How much farther?' I gasped.

Patch looked at me, his face grey, the eyes deep-sunk. ‘I don't know,' he breathed. His lips were all cracked and rimed with salt. He frowned, trying to concentrate his mind. ‘Tide's west-going. Be with us in two hours.' He dipped his hand in the sea and wiped salt water over his face. ‘Shouldn't be long.'

Not long! I gritted my teeth. The salt was behind my eyeballs, in my mouth; it pricked my skin. The dawn's chill gripped me. I wished to God I'd never met this gaunt stranger who rowed like death at my shoulder. My mind blurred to a vision of Mike and our plans. And now the future was dead,
Sea Witch
gone and nothing in the world to think about but the Minkies, with each stroke an agony.

The sea at dawn had been empty. I could have sworn it had been empty. I had searched it carefully—every trough, every swirl, every sudden humped-up heap of water. There had been nothing—absolutely nothing. And now, suddenly, I was looking at a speck away over Patch's shoulder. The sun was coming up in a great ball of fire and the clouds that streaked the east were glowing orange and blazing to red at their edges—and all this vivid surge of colour, imprinted in the sea seemed designed solely to show me that speck etched black in silhouette. It was a boat with two oars and a man rowing.

Ten minutes later the fog folded its clammy blanket round us again. The speck blurred and vanished. And at that moment I thought I heard a bell, very faint to the east of us. But when we stopped rowing it was gone. There wasn't a sound, except the sea. It was all round us in our grey, boxed-in world—the wet slop of water. But a little later there was a murmuring and a sucking in the veil through which our eyes couldn't see, and almost immediately the fog darkened, became black, and a shape slid past us like the towering superstructure of a battleship. It was there for an instant, blurred and indistinct, a great mass of black rock with the swell frothing gently at its base, and then it was gone as the tide hurried us on. ‘My God! We're there,' I gasped.

We had stopped rowing and all around us was the murmur of the sea. Another rock appeared out of the grey curtain of the fog, a sinister pillar of rock like a crooked finger that slid stealthily by with a froth of white water at its foot as though it were sailing past us. For a moment that damnable fog almost convinced me that I was in a geological nightmare in which the rocks steamed through the water under their own power. And then a swell came up, grew big and broke suddenly. Water surged over the gunn'l and we were thrown backwards as the dinghy hit a submerged rock. The tide swung us round and dragged us clear before the next swell broke. We were soaked, the dinghy half full of water. It was hopeless to go on with the tide swirling us through a maze of dangerous rocks. We had reached the Minkies, but in an area of reefs almost twenty miles by ten we had no hope of getting our bearings. ‘We'll have to wait till the fog clears,' Patch said. ‘It's too dangerous—almost dead low water.'

In the lee of an ugly island of rock we found a little inlet where the water was still, like glass, tied the dinghy to an up-ended slab and clambered stiffly out. We stamped and moved about, but the sweat still clung to us in an icy film and we shivered under our sodden duffle coats. We ate the last of our chocolate and talked a little, grateful for the sound of our voices in that cold, dismal place.

I suppose it was inevitable that Patch should have talked about the
Mary Deare
. We were so close to her, frustrated by the fog. He talked about Rice for a bit and then he was telling me about Taggart's death. He seemed to want to talk about it. ‘Poor devil!' he whispered. ‘For the sake of that girl of his he'd sold his soul in every port in the Far East. He'd ruined his health and drunk himself stupid, engaging in every shady deal that would pay him more than a captain's wage. That's why they got him up from Singapore.'

‘Did Gundersen engage him then?' I said.

‘Probably. I don't know.' He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Whoever it was, they picked the wrong moment. The old vulture was going back home to his daughter, and he wasn't going to sink a ship on his last voyage.'

‘And so Dellimare got rid of him—is that what you're suggesting?' I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No, I don't think he intended to kill him. I think he just got hold of his liquor and was waiting until the old man was sufficiently softened up to do what he wanted. He couldn't have known he'd die that night.' He smiled at me out of the corner of his mouth. ‘But it amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?' He had sat with Taggart for several hours that night, listening to a life story told in scraps of delirium—the risks and the crookery and the shady deals . . . and then two men had been drowned. That was what had started Taggart drinking. ‘Like most of us, he just wanted to forget.' And he went on, conjuring up the ghost of that dreadful old man, completely absorbed in the tragedy of it, standing there on that rock like a Trappist monk, his body shivering under the limp brown folds of his duffle coat.

He switched suddenly to the daughter . . . that photograph, what it had meant to him. Her image had been his confidant, his inspiration, a symbol of all his desperate hopes. And then the meeting in St Malo—the shock of realising that there were things he couldn't tell her, that she knew he was hiding something from her.

‘You're in love with her, aren't you?' I said. We were strangely close, alone together in the eerie stillness of the fog with the sea all round us.

‘Yes.' His voice had a sudden lift to it, as though even here the thought of her could raise his spirits.

‘Despite what she did to you in court?'

‘Oh, that!' He dismissed it. That last night in Southampton—she had come to apologise. And after that he had told her everything—all the things he had confided to her picture. ‘I had to tell somebody,' he murmured.

He lifted his head suddenly and sniffed at a breath of wind that came to us out of the dripping void. ‘Still westerly,' he said, and we talked about how soon the fog would clear. He hadn't liked the look of the dawn. ‘That depression,' he muttered. ‘We've got to reach the salvage ship before it starts to blow up dirty.' The words were ominous.

And shortly after that we had to go back to the dinghy. The tide had risen, covering the rocks of our inlet, and it kept us constantly on the move then. We were in a strange submarine world where everything dripped water and the floor of the sea rose steadily until the towering bastion of rock had dwindled to a miserable little island barely two feet above the level of the sea. It was two o'clock then and the swell had increased and was showering us with spray as we sat huddled together in the dinghy.

I was barely conscious of time. The fog hung round us, very thick, so that it seemed as though nothing could exist in the whole world except that miserable strip of rock and the ugly, surging water.

We didn't talk much. We were too desperately cold. We took it in turns to sit and drift into a sort of coma. The tide went down again and the rock re-emerged like some monster lifting its dripping body out of the sea.

It was just after five that the fog began to clear. A wind sprang up and gradually the greyness lightened until it was an iridescent dazzle that hurt the eyes. Shapes began to emerge, forming themselves into rocks, and the sea stretched farther and farther away from us. Above our heads a patch of sky appeared, startlingly blue, and suddenly the fog was gone and the sun shone. We were in a sparkling world of blue-green water littered with rock outcrops.

We made the dinghy fast and scrambled up the barnacle-covered, weed-grown fortress of the rock. It was suddenly very warm, and from the top, which only a few hours before had been a bare, wave-worn little island, a fantastic sight met our eyes. All round us the sea was islanded with rock—mile upon mile of sinister reefs and outcrops—the Minkies at one hour before low water. Beyond the rock islands, we had glimpses of open sea—except to the south-west; to the south-west the islands became so numerous that they merged to form a solid barrier.

The beacon on Maîtresse Ile, which stands 31 feet at high water, was easily identified, and from it Patch was able to get our bearings. The rock on which we stood was on the northern side of the Minkies, about a mile inside the outer bastion of the Pipette Rocks, and he reckoned that the
Mary Deare
must lie almost due south of us. I have checked since with the large-scale chart and find that he was just about right. But the three miles that separated us from our objective constituted the main body of the reefs. We didn't appreciate this at the time, nor did we fully understand the extraordinary change in configuration of the above-water reefs that could occur in the last stages of the falling tide.

The wind was blowing quite fresh and an ugly little chop was forming on the long swell that marched steadily eastward through the reefs. Already there was a good deal of white water about, particularly in the vicinity of submerged rocks, and I think we should have been more cautious if we hadn't suddenly caught sight of Higgins. He was standing on a big rock mass not half a mile to the east of us. It was probably the Grand Vascelin, for there was a black and white beacon on it, and even as Patch pointed him out to me, I saw Higgins move and begin to scramble down to his dinghy, which we could see bobbing about at the base of the rock, its blue paint looking bright and cheerful in the sunshine.