Trade Wind (7 page)

Hero smiled faintly, but shook her head. “You are very kind, but I would not care to discard my mourning for any such trivial reason. Consideration for one’s personal comfort should not come first. Besides, I cannot believe that this weather can last much longer. Surely we shall find a wind soon?”

“Like I’ve told you—a sight sooner than we’d wish, if the glass is anything to go by,” said the Captain grimly.

He mopped his neck with a bandana handkerchief and escorted Miss Hollis out on to the deck, noting as they went the curious paleness of their shadows and the bubbling pitch between the deck seams, and wishing yet again that Amelia was not on board. Or Miss Hero Hollis either!

The heat in the tiny charthouse had been oppressive, but out on the open deck it was almost unbearable, and Hero paused in a patch of shade, and leaning on the rail looked enviously down at the cool depths below, where the weed of the long voyage stirred and waved like meadow grass.

Apart from the gentle rhythmic snoring of a fellow passenger who lay asleep in a long cane chair under the awning, and a subdued murmur of voices from forward of the weather deck, where the cook’s mate and a cabin boy were fishing hopefully for basking shark, the normal shipboard noises had dwindled to no more than a drowsy creaking of the blocks as the Norah Groyne moved lazily to the slow, glassy swell.

A trickle of sweat crawled down between Hero’s shoulder blades, and suddenly the clogging, sleepy silence of the afternoon seemed curiously sinister; as though the heat and the haze and the stillness had combined to bring Time to a standstill, and left the
Norah Crayne
suspended in some strange, aimless vacuum between reality and Cloud-cuckoo-land. Doomed to drift until her timbers rotted and her sails fell to dust, and she sank and was lost…

Hero shivered, and was aroused from this unpleasant reverie by footsteps and the cheerful, prosaic voice of the first mate, Mr Marrowby, who stopped beside her to remark affably that it was sticky hot, but that it would be a mighty lot cooler before nightfall.

“Do you really mean that?” asked Hero doubtfully. “I confess it always seems to me to be even hotter at night.”

“Ah, but there’s a wind on its way; and it’s my guess she’ll blow rough.”

“That’s what Captain Fullbright says. But I don’t see any signs of it yet.”

“You can smell it, though. And see over there—”

He pointed a blunt forefinger, and turning to peer out across the silky, shimmering waste. Hero saw what seemed to be a stain far out on the colourless ocean.

“Is that wind?”

“A breath of it. But there’ll be a sight more behind it.”

Captain Fullbright, returning from the forward deck, joined them at the rail, and Mr Marrowby wetted a finger and raising it said: “She freshens, sir.”

The stain on the water flitted towards them, ruffling the glassy surface into a myriad shivering ripples, and a faint breath of air shivered the sails and rattled the top hamper. For the first time in several days the
Norah Crayne
answered to her helm, and they could feel life flow through her as she woke from her long drowsing and thrust forward, the sea gurgling softly under her cut-water.

The boy at the masthead called: “
Deck ahoy! Sail, sir
—”

“Where away?” bellowed Mr Marrowby.

“
Over the starboard bow, sir. Headed north
.”

Mr Marrowby put his spy-glass to his eye and presently announced that it was a relief to raise another sail again, since speaking for himself he found this idling on an empty sea kind of lonesome.

“What kind of ship? I can’t see anything,” said Hero, shading her eyes with her hand.

“Three-masted schooner. But you won’t see far in this haze. There, I’ve lost her now. She was a fairish way out; and moving, which means she’s caught the wind. We’ll be getting it soon, and then it’ll blow this haze clear and we’ll be on our way again.”

Even as he spoke, another and stronger cat’s-paw of wind ruffled across the water; and all at once the drowsy lethargy of the last two weeks was over, and Hero found herself standing alone while orders rattled and canvas filled to the breeze, and a white lace of foam spun out from the cut-water. The breathless heat of the afternoon gave place to a salty, refreshing coolness that was a deep relief after the sweltering temperature of the past days and the airless torment of the long nights, and they were moving again. They were on their way, and Life and Adventure, the Island of Zanzibar, Destiny and Clayton Mayo, lay ahead.

But by six bells the wind had strengthened ominously, and two hours later it was blowing in savage gusts and the sea was white with foam.

Below decks the cabins were still uncomfortably hot, for with every porthole closed and secured, the wind could not reach them: only the noise and the shuddering lift and plunge as the
Norah Crayne
, making up for lost time, raced northward under every stitch of canvas she could carry, reeling to the lash of the gale and the surge of the furious sea.

Captain Fullbright’s frail little wife had taken to her bunk over two hours ago, and now she lay clutching a bottle of smelling salts and apologizing incoherently to her charge: “I feel downright ashamed of myself,” whispered Amelia. “It’s just plain degrading…a sailor’s wife! Mr Fullbright used to tell me that I would grow out of it and find what he calls my ‘sea-legs.’ But I never have. Such a bad example to you, honey. Are you sure you feel all right?”

“I feel fine, thank you,” said Hero buoyantly. “Now that we are moving again I can put up with anything. It was that dreadful, aimless drifting that I found so exasperating. Don’t you
detest
doing nothing and getting nowhere?”

“I can’t say that I do, dear. But then I guess I’m not an energetic person, and maybe it’s just as well that we are not all alike. It would be so dull. Oh…oh mercy!…”

Mrs Fullbright shut her eyes briefly as the ship gave a particularly malignant roll, and Hero said consolingly: “I read somewhere that some famous Admiral—Nelson I think—never cured himself of being seasick, so I don’t see that you need worry. Do you think you could manage a cold drink if I fetched you one? Some lemon water?”

Amelia Fullbright shuddered and closed her eyes again. “No thank you, honey. Just sit and talk to me. I like to hear you talk. It takes my mind off this horrible rolling and pitching.”

“What would you like me to talk about?”

“Yourself Your young man.”

“He’s not mine yet,” Hero assured her hastily.

“But I feel sure he will be. He sounds very charming; and so suitable in every way. Though I could wish he were not quite so closely related. A first cousin!”

“But he isn’t, you know. In fact, he is no blood relation at all. Clay is Aunt Abby’s son by her first marriage, and his father’s name wasn’t Mayo, but something long and unpronounceable that he changed to Mayo because two of the syllables sounded like that, and it saved time—his own father had emigrated from Hungary and his mother was Polish. I believe she was very beautiful, and they say Clay gets his looks from her; though Aunt Abby must have been pretty too when she was young. Clay was only six months old when his father died, and Papa once told me that it was a mercy that he did, because it seems that he was addicted to drink and gambling, and in the end some dreadful woman shot him in a Dance Hall—imagine! It must have been terrible for Aunt Abby, but fortunately she met Uncle Nathaniel about five years later, and married him. Though Cressy—that’s my cousin Cressida—wasn’t born until nearly six years after that. Yet in spite of everything, I think Aunt Abby always loved Clay best Which is odd, don’t you think? I mean, when his father had treated her so badly, and Cressy was Uncle Nat’s child?”

Amelia smiled faintly and said: “With some women, I guess it has to be a man.”

“But Cressy is so pretty; and she is the baby of the family.”

“I’m sure your uncle loves her best.”

“Yes, that’s true. Cressy can do anything with Uncle Nat. He did not at all want to take her to Zanzibar, because he was afraid that the climate would not suit her and that she would catch some dreadful disease, or die of heatstroke or sunstroke or something; and Aunt Abby too. He meant to leave them both behind, but Cressy teased him into taking them. She is very young. And very sentimental and romantic.”

“And Mr Mayo? Is he romantic too? I hope he does not take after his father!”

“Oh, no!” said Hero, shocked. “Not in the least, I assure you. In character he is wholly from Aunt Abby’s side of the family, and her father was a deacon. His appearance may be romantic, but he is really a most sensible person and not at all frivolous like Cressy. He is much older than her, of course. Cressy is only seventeen—no, she must be almost eighteen by now! But Clay is twenty-nine.”

“High time he was married,” commented Amelia drowsily. “I hope you do not mean to keep him waiting much longer, honey, or he will be so difficult…for a young wife.”

Her lashes fluttered and closed and she did not speak again, and presently Hero became aware that she had fallen asleep.

The cabin rocked and swung and tilted, lifted up and up, creaking and shuddering, and sank again with appalling swiftness to the accompaniment of a crescendo of noise in which it was impossible to separate the sound of falling furniture from the crash of cataracts of water sweeping across the reeling deck. But except for the heat Hero was aware of no discomfort, and she was gratified to find that the frenzied motion of the ship was, if not precisely pleasant, at least greatly to be preferred to the sluggish inactivity of the past ten days. She had already taken the precaution of removing anything movable to a safe place, and as Mrs Fullbright continued to sleep and there seemed to be little chance of obtaining a hot meal while the
Norah Crayne
flung herself to and fro in this abandoned manner. Hero made her way to the saloon where she collected a handful of ship’s biscuits and retired with them to her own berth to copy her chaperone’s excellent example.

The night that followed had been anything but peaceful, for the
Norah Crayne
, her masts bare and her stay raised for a storm spanker to keep her head up and the wind and the sea on her bow, plunged and reared like an unbroken colt on a lead rein, and when she fell off, her bows swooped down into a cross sea, and with nothing to lift her the ocean leapt aboard and raged boiling along her decks.

Dawn broke grey and reluctant through heavy black clouds and furious rain, and thunder rolled across the tossing desolation while lightning flashed and the gale screamed in the rigging. The rain and spray between them had reduced visibility to a matter of yards, and the sea had combed the clipper’s decks of anything movable. Her boats were gone and their davits had been smashed to matchwood, but still the storm showed no signs of abating, and Captain Fullbright kept the pumps going and wondered how far his ship had drifted off course.

The
Norah Crayne
’s passengers, with one exception, had remained prudently in their berths. The exception being Miss Hollis, who had not only managed to dress herself (no mean feat in that rolling, pitching pandemonium), but had actually made her way to the saloon where she had drunk a pannikin of cold coffee and eaten a hearty meal consisting of salt beef, pickles and biscuits. After which, on finding that there was still no assistance that she could render to Amelia, she had returned for a time to her own cabin. But it had been far too dark to read or sew (even if the violent motion of the ship had not precluded either occupation) and there had been nothing to do but he and look up at the ceiling, or endure with closed eyes the unpleasant sensation of being lifted up for dizzying, interminable moments of time, only to be dropped again with a long jarring rush that seemed as though it must end with the entire vessel being engulfed and dragged under by the enormous seas.

Hero had always thought of herself as being sensible and level-headed; but the gloom and the incessant creaking, grinding, deafening tumult, and above all those terrible downward swoops into unseen gulfs, began to tell on her nerves, and presently the uncomfortable thought crept into her mind that the narrow, high-sided berth in which she lay bore a depressing resemblance to a coffin.

She had heard stories of ships that had vanished in storms and never been heard of again, and once, when she was a little girl, one of her Crayne cousins had told her how, when on a voyage to Rio de Janeiro, he had seen a great ship under full topsails slide into a long watery hollow and disappear—run under in a wild waste of ocean. If a similar fate should overtake the
Norah Crayne
, she would know nothing about it until the cabin door burst in and the black water swirled up to the ceiling. She would not even be able to get out of her berth, but would be trapped there and drowned, and the whole, desperate, straining ship would become one vast wooden tomb, sinking slowly down through leagues of cold darkness until it came to rest at last on the quiet ooze of the sea floor.

Perhaps the frenzied motion of the ship was making her a little lightheaded, for her imagination suddenly presented her with a vivid and startlingly unpleasant picture of great eels and octopuses slithering down the wrecked companionways and through the cabin doors to batten on the bodies of the drowned, while sharks swam hungrily past the blind portholes and between the tangled rigging outside…

Hero dismissed the horrid fancy with an effort; angry with herself for entertaining such absurd notions and beginning to wonder if it had been really wise to eat salt beef and pickles for breakfast. For there was no disguising the fact that she was not feeling at all well, and it could not possibly be seasickness, because Mr Marrowby had told her that once she had got her “sea-legs’ she would never need to suffer from such a thing again. And she was sure she had acquired those weeks ago. But either Mr Marrowby was wrong or else the heat had had a deleterious effect upon the beef, for she was certainly feeling distinctly queasy.

The cabin tilted at an acute angle as the ship struggled up the long slope of a watery mountain, and as it reached the top grey daylight peered through the porthole and the rain and spray hissed against the glass as the
Norah Crayne
balanced briefly on an even keel. Then the bows crashed down and they were falling again, rushing downward into darkness with the seas roaring up and over the glass; down and down until it seemed impossible that they could ever rise again; to bring up with a shock and a jar and a savage roll, as the dead weight of hundreds of tons of water swept across the deck, and the
Norah Crayne
struggled upwards once more; sluggish, dizzy and punch-drunk, but still gallantly fighting back.