The White Ship

by Nicholas Salaman

  ‘Bloody great rock, sharp as a needle, about a mile out to sea from here, but not so far from the cape out yonder on the left. Taken down a good few ships in the last ten years. It’s a shortcut, see. Saves a half an hour on the run to Southampton. You just have to know what you’re doing.’

  It was as I had feared. This sea business was not for the timid. I had walked out onto the headland to the north of the town, and watched the waves crashing onto the rocks, and the ominous ripples in the water where currents stirred like crocodiloes. I had seen the tide come in with hunger written all over its fat face, greedy for the day when at last it would overwhelm the whole of the land but now drooling for the flotsam that lay on the margin of sea and sand. I had seen the tide go out, hurrying its prey of bladderwrack and dead dogs, with many an eddy and ripple of ooziness, out onto the broad ocean for Poseidon’s breakfast. I did not want to be on that bill of fare.

  I had seen, years ago, on one of my expeditions from the abbey, a corpse lying bloated on the river strand, and wondered what it felt like to drown with nothing but the gulls overhead and the burble of water in your ears. No, thank you very much, Juliana. And yet, somewhere, she had Alice in her power, to do what she wanted with her, until I brought home the bacon. If I only could find some way to do what she wanted without killing anyone … It was. I was sure, simply a matter of time before the answer struck me; but every day that passed, the toad was growing bigger.

  Lost in thought, I missed something the shipwright had said. He was looking at me expectantly.

  ‘My wife is dead,’ the fellow was saying, ‘but I could rattle something up.’

  He was asking me to sup with him. It sounded horrible, but I knew the man wanted to talk, and it was my job to see that he trusted me. Stick close to the man, Juliana had said.

  ‘Fish and cabbage … that suit you?’

  ‘Why don’t you come up to the inn and we could have supper there,’ I suggested. ‘They actually have a good cook. And judging by the smell, they may have got hold of some venison. An English lord brought some of it along for a farewell feast before his party embarked for England, and then they all fell ill with what they’d had the night before in Carentan, and didn’t eat it.’

  ‘Oh, well, that sounds like a good idea,’ he said.

  The thought of him cooking up a fish supper in his lonely cottage filled me with horror and an unfamiliar instinct of compassion. Poor old wifeless FitzStephen. He didn’t have lovely Alice waiting for him at the end of the day. But then, I thought, neither did I; nor might I ever have. I arranged to meet FitzStephen at the inn shortly after dusk, and walked back to The Seabass, unusually depressed. This thing was not going as I expected.

  The evening passed, pleasantly enough. Warmed by good wine and venison pie, the shipwright became quite cheery and regaled me with many a nautical yarn. There were races, there were shipwrecks, there were mermaids and there were manatees; there were great storms and high tides sweeping onto the land, there was a hulk full of bullion which was wrecked on Barfleur Point, but no one had ever been able to find the gold, though many had drowned in the attempt; there was a child, hiding in a boat, which was swept out to sea and ended up in Cornwall!

  ‘So what’s your game?’ he said suddenly, surprising me by turning his icy blue eyes hard on me.

  ‘I cannot tell you that,’ I told him, recovering as best I could, and hiding behind Juliana. ‘You know what she’s like. I am her man.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he exclaimed, clapping me on the back, ‘I confess I was just testing you. I like a man who can keep a secret, but the fact is, I know about it already. She has taken a share in the White Ship, and reserved it for its maiden voyage. She wishes me to make a show of offering it to the Duke, as a courtesy, for his voyage to England, but we know that in fact he has already made his arrangements. No, what she really wants to do is to offer it to her brother the Prince for his use and his Court’s – it will be her wedding gift, she says. The fastest ship afloat! It is just the kind of thing he likes. He will take wagers on the time it takes to reach Southampton. He will race after the Duke’s ship – built by some rascal in Honfleur – and overtake it. When he has won his wagers, he will be told of her gift, so it must be our secret until then. He loves to win a wager. She tells me she has sent you as her officer to see that everything goes according to plan. It will take quite a weight off my back, I can tell you. So there you are. Glad I got that off my chest! The Duke’s spies are everywhere so this has to be between ourselves and no one else. The Comtesse is explicit about that. She wishes the whole thing to be a complete surprise, especially her share in it. She sent you to find out if my ship is as good as I say it is. And that is what I am going to show you when we do the trial …’

  His throat must have been dry after his confession. We drank a further toast or two or more to the White Ship and the Comtesse Juliana, so that when I took to my bed I was less worried than I should have been. She had primed the man perfectly for me to do my job. Everything was falling into place. All that was needed now was my get-out clause.

  I woke to a grey morning and the cry of gulls which sounded like the souls of the damned, and understood that I was being shoe-horned into something that fitted far too tightly.

  LXIV

  Warm in my sheepskin coat again next day – the best for cold weather you could ever wear, Haimo had said, although it smelt a bit – I took out Perrine, a business-like little rowing boat, tubbier than the one on Breteuil lake, with two oars from under the seat and FitzStephen sitting in the stern to see how I handled her. The sun had come out and Haimo’s coat became uncomfortably hot, so I took it off and laid it on a thwart. We went up and down the harbour a couple of times. It was high water, mill-pond calm, and I fared none too badly, feathering the oars like a ferryman, so there was hardly a splash. At last, FitzStephen declared himself satisfied, and I put him out on the jetty.

  ‘If you go beyond the harbour wall,’ he said as a parting shot, ‘remember that it’s coming up to high water now. You only want to be out there for half an hour. If you’re out there much longer, you won’t be able to come back.’

  ‘Ever?’ I asked, thinking he was trying to scare me.

  ‘Well, you could come back with the returning tide this afternoon. Or you could find yourself halfway to Guernsey. And then you’d have to pray for good weather, and I’d have to come and get you.’

  ‘How far is Guernsey?’

  ‘About twenty miles’

  ‘That’s a lot of sea.’

  ‘Oh, it is that.’

  He was a funny, fussy old fart, I thought.

  I paddled around for a while as he stood watching me, then he turned on his heel and walked back into his office. I rowed out beyond the jetty where the water moved with hardly a ripple. I rowed towards the point that lies off to the right of the harbour where I had stood a few days before looking at the tide nibbling the rocks. I didn’t want to seem to be a landlubber, so I rowed around a bit more, thinking of my beloved Alice and missing her more than I ever thought I could miss anyone. Then I came back, tied Perrine up where I had found her, and did some walking around the town while I encouraged the idea that was forming in my head to take shape. What I needed was a plan of action. At the least it would be a fall-back position if she were ever to chide me for lack of dedication. It would show her that I meant business. She had given me my role. I had to sink the White Ship. Now all I had to do was work out how it might be achieved. It didn’t mean that I would actually have to do it. After an hour’s pacing about, I thought I had it. I would practise my oarsmanship for an hour or two maybe for three or four days in a similar manner, and then embark on an adventure. I recalled my friend the Marshal telling me that battles are only won after thorough reconnaissance. I thought I might go and take a closer look at the rock with the funny name, and try to take some kind of reckoning as to where exactly it was and how I might find it, first by day and then perhaps by night. I didn’t like the sea,
but the idea of Alice languishing in captivity urged me forwards. Wasn’t that her favour that I had hung in my room?

  I thought too of Juliana and the bond there had been between us, that was still between us, though I considered she had behaved badly, taking Alice hostage; it was insupportable, it smacked of jealousy. And her plan for revenge on her father smacked of worse than that – but then she had been pushed. Those poor girls of hers. Surely they would never have wanted me to be plotting the death of others? How many had FitzStephen said would be on board? Three hundred? No, the very idea was anathema. The girls had been such gentle creatures…

  These unhappy images filled my mind as I walked about the old town with its smell of fish and the sea and the tar and the tackle. I found myself walking down a lane going out of town, such as Alice had described to me when I had asked her about her home.

  ‘An old grange,’ she had said. ‘Low roofs and sagging windows and a fire going straight up through the ceiling. They call it a manor, and it has some fields and a wood. But my stepfather never did much to it. It was damp and the rain came in if the wind blew from the east. I had a room with a window from which I could see the sea. I dreamt of riding away on a ship to England and starting a new life. And what did I do? I rode away on an old palfrey halfway across Normandy to a cold castle ruled by another unhappy man. There were cowslips in the garden in spring and roses everywhere in summer, and smoked fish for supper. That’s what I remember about Barfleur.’

  And there it was before me, or something very like it!

  I looked at the sagging roof and the roses in the garden, and there was one white rose left, in perfect bloom, and I thought it was Alice, and the house was Alice’s, and I wept for her. Whatever it was I had to do, it would be done without fail. There was smoke coming out of the centre of the roof, but I did not go in. What could I say?

  ‘I am lying with your daughter who is at the moment in the hands of a she-devil who would not hesitate to kill her if it served her purpose.’

  It would not be well received, and the drunkard would huff and puff into his beer.

  LXV

  I cannot impress upon you enough the oddity of those initial days at Barfleur before the final act could unfold. It seemed as though I were half at play, and half in the midst of a trap whose mechanism had been set and from which there was no escape; a disaster that could overtake me as well as everyone around me. I tried my best to persuade myself of the first. There was no point in becoming nervous so early in the matter. A hundred and one things might happen to prevent the necessity of fulfilling my promise. But at the back of my mind there was always a moment when a sudden word or memory would send a cold toad of terror down to sit somewhere under my belly-button. Perhaps indeed it never completely went away. But I was young, and even the condemned man eats a hearty breakfast.

  Next day, and the day after, and the day after the day after that, I went down to the harbour in my sheepskin coat, untied Perrine, and we rowed about, out beyond the harbour wall when the tide was right – and on the last day when it was almost right…

  Perhaps I was impatient, but it is also easy to misjudge the time, especially in a new place. The church bells rang, it seemed to me, at odd times. The fishermen would have told me the time just by looking at the water, but they were out fishing. I was simply not sufficiently experienced in the sea, that was the long and short of it. I intended to wait until the tide was almost out when the water would slacken, and then row out to the rock, but meanwhile I thought I would take a turn outside the harbour while the water was at its height, before the tidal race had started.

  Out I rowed, out and about in the wide bay. The flood tide had been higher than usual, someone had said something about a spring tide, but this had not really registered with me. The October sun shone and the water licked the boat, it was very calm, and my thoughts were far away. I mused over the events of the past two years and the people I had met: Juliana and Alice, the little girls Marie and Pippi, my little palfrey Blackberry, the witch Mother Merle, my mother, my father, that dreadful half-brother of mine, Fulk with his hopeless love, Eustace the Bad, the Duke and his intransigent barons, FitzStephen and his passion for his white ship … So many people. What did they think they were doing? They thought they had freedom to choose their way, but weren’t they really like the flotsam in the river at Rouen, carried away like bugs on a branch; scurrying to the left, hurrying to the right while all the time the hungry waves of the wide ocean were waiting to gobble them up…

  I did not like these thoughts, and I shook myself and lifted my head to look around me. The water had been so still, but now there were little waves.

  Something was happening that had not happened before on my outings in Perrine: the water had started to go out it struck me, rather forcibly, that I had better row back. The quay was not where it had been when I left it. Rowing back, however, was now a problem: the water seemed stiffer. Stupidly, I caught one oar in the air as I rowed harder, and I fell backwards into the bottom of the boat, bumping the back of my head.

  I must have been out for a few moments and lay there like a gaffed pollock. When I regained my seat, I could see FitzbloodyStephen had come out of his office and was laughing. At least I thought that was what he was doing, because he was jumping up and down and gesticulating. He, too, seemed to be diminishing. I bent to the oars, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. There was no doubt about it. The shoreline was getting smaller. I was going out to sea.

  The water was moving with more urgency out here. A slight breeze was coming in from the north-west and the tide was flowing out against it. My little boat bobbled about in it, and I bobbled with it. Of course I tried and tried to row back to the harbour; I am not an idiot. Well, yes, you probably think I am, because I had been warned about the tide. I just thought I could do it. Nobody likes to be thought a loon; I didn’t want FitzStephen to go back to Juliana with an adverse report.

  The fact was, I could make no impression on the flow of the water, indeed all I was doing was exhausting myself. I gave up and leaned panting on my oars. The rocky point where I had walked yesterday drifted past. One or two outlying rocks drifted past as well. I turned the boat round and look back at the jetty. FitzStephen had disappeared. A small group of rocks eased by on the right hand side – sorry, starboard – and then a big jagged bun of stone on the port.

  Oh well, I thought, he’ll come and get me. He’s gone to round up some men and they’ll have a bigger boat with more oars which will cut cleanly through the water. He won’t let me just float away … Will he?

  And then I thought: Barfleur is a busy harbour, there will be ships coming in, fishing boats, they will give me a tow.

  I turned back to look at the sea. There was nothing; it seemed endless. One or two seagulls swopped low over me, hoping that I might split a fish and toss it overboard, but they soon turned away, crying disgustedly. A bigger wave rocked the boat and I was gripped by panic. The shore was half a mile away. There was just half an inch or so of planking between me and drowning. This was how it was going to end. Next stop Guernsey. If I was lucky.

  I closed my eyes and said a few prayers, regretting my past wickedness and thinking of my mother, then of Alice who I would never see again.

  Perrine and I drifted on, she oblivious to the danger we were in, mounting the little seas with a certain dash while I was almost insensate with alarm. There is a fear some people feel about being in wide open spaces. I had never had it before, but the broad bosom of the sea was having that effect on me now.

  I perceived a shape in the water ahead of me. I thought for a moment it might be a distant vessel, but on closer observation it turned out to be another, bigger rock around which the water eddied and sparkled. This must be the Quilleboeuf about which I had heard from FitzStephen. A plan formed in my mind to land on the rock – it was the only thing that would keep me from being swept out – and then, at low water, the tide could bring me in again.

  As I approache
d the rock, which proved indeed to be a bloody great thing, mostly under water when I neared it, dark as a sea monster, I started to row against the current with all my strength so that when my boat hit it would be a gentle contact. On what I judged to be the south side, I noticed what seemed like a little inlet, and I aimed for the safety of this enclosed space. Just before we touched, I shipped the oars, tied Perrine’s painter around my wrist, and when the contact came – a hard rumbling scrape – I scrambled out over the stern and plunged onto the slippery barnacled stone. I was almost submerged by salt water, and bumped my leg, cracked my funny bone, nearly lost Perrine, swallowed a quartful of water, and at length found myself sitting on my rocky island above the waves, lord of one followed by six zero acres of ocean.

  The tide hurried past. Perrine jostled uncomfortably on the low rock beside her. I pulled her round to face the flow, so that the tide held her straight, keeping her in position between the two shoulders of the inlet.

  I sat and surveyed the scene. All around was sea. Behind me lay a clear route to England. To my right, only half a mile away, was the rocky shore of the Raz de Barfleur, to my left was the open water of the Baie de Seine, in front of me was the way back to Barfleur, a matter of a mile. The tide would cease in five hours or so. I was quite safe on my island. I caught a glimpse of the bottom now, sand and rocks, about ten feet or more below. FitzStephen had told me that the tide hereabouts was famous for its rise and fall. Twenty-five and a half feet, he had said. That was half a foot higher than Honfleur and a foot higher than Cherbourg. The man seemed to take pride in his bastard tides. All I knew was that this blob of rock was going to end up twenty-five feet high, from low tide mark to summit. It was going to be substantial – high as a house – before the tide started coming in again. At the flood, however, for all the rock’s size, its top poked, as I had found, only a few feet above the water.