Night Birds On Nantucket

by Joan Aiken

  Here Penitence said in a small voice, ‘Please, what about Papa?’

  The doctor started.

  ‘Quite right, my dear, quite right. In the emotion of the moment I had forgotten about him. We must go to his aid at once. Nate, just run and make sure those scoundrels are well away so that we can leave the lighthouse in safety.’

  Nate soon reported that both the Dark Diamond and the dory had shifted south; the Dark Diamond was almost out of sight round the corner of the island at Tom Never’s Head, and the dory was pursuing her.

  ‘Guess they don’t want to get mixed up with the old pink ’un,’ he said. ‘She’s middling close now; hear her whistle?’

  Indeed the whale was now letting off regular blasts, like the siren of a lightship, almost as if she was trying to attract somebody’s attention. With one accord the whole party moved outside to look at her.

  ‘Why, there’s Papa!’ cried Pen joyfully. ‘He must have felt himself sufficiently rested to follow me. Papa, Papa! Do you feel all right now? Are you sure that you have not overtired yourself?’

  ‘No, Daughter, no,’ Captain Casket said absently. He moved towards the group.

  The hillside where they stood sloped up quite steeply past the lighthouse to the cliff-edge, so that it was not possible to get a view of the sea until one stood on the very summit.

  ‘What is that sound?’ said Captain Casket.

  ‘Take care, Papa!’ cried Pen anxiously. She darted to him and held his arm, supporting him tenderly. They moved on together and stood at the top of the cliff.

  A great sigh burst from Captain Casket.

  ‘Oh!’ he said brokenly. ‘I am dreaming again. I must be! But it is a beautiful dream!’

  ‘No, Papa, it is no dream! We all see her too.’

  ‘And ain’t she half carrying on,’ said Dido. ‘Goshswoggle, ain’t she got no dignity? You’d think a grown whale would be ashamed to act so.’

  The pink whale was indeed giving an exuberant display of rapture at meeting her old friend Captain Casket. It was a beautiful and touching sight. She leapt clean out of the water a great many times, as if bent on demonstrating how high she could go; she repeatedly dived and came up, she rolled playfully from side to side waving her flukes and, as Dido said, ‘ogling the captain like an orange-girl’.

  ‘I must go down to her,’ Captain Casket said.

  ‘Pray be very careful, Papa!’

  ‘Why don’t we all go down?’ Doctor Mayhew suggested. ‘Didn’t I see you with a basket of food, Pen? How about breakfast on the beach? Those ruffians are not likely to come back while she’s out there. And it’s not a sight to miss.’

  So Pen fetched the food from the cart while Dido and Nate prospected for a path down the cliff, and then the whole party descended to the beach. Captain Casket made straight for the edge of the ocean, and Pen had much ado to prevent his wading in, so eager was he to approach as close as possible to the pink whale – who, luckily, saw his intention and swam in near to the land; and so these two friends gazed at one another with the utmost delight and mutual satisfaction.

  ‘Could you give her a hint not to come too close, sir?’ Nate said anxiously. ‘It’d be the devil to pay dragging her off if she got beached; I dare say she’ll weigh all of a hundred and fifty tons.’

  ‘She is a fine figure of a whale,’ murmured Captain Casket blissfully. But he roused himself to make some warning gestures, and the pink whale evidently understood these, for she swam to and fro parallel with the shore, letting out a series of loving bellows, without coming too near.

  ‘Well, it’s most uncommon I’m bound to say,’ Dido remarked. ‘But if I don’t get summat to eat soon you might jist as well bury me on this beach, for I shan’t be able to climb up the cliff again. What’ve you got in your basket, Penny?’

  Pen had large numbers of hard-boiled eggs and buttered biscuits, molasses tarts, and a stone jug of broth for the Captain which Dido and Nate heated up over a driftwood fire. The broth was all he would take; after that he stood at the edge of the surf throwing hard-boiled eggs to Rosie, who caught them with the grace of a dolphin. Doctor Mayhew opened his black bag and brought out a large leather bottle of ginger-jub which he passed round for the party’s refreshment.

  ‘Never go on my rounds without it,’ he said. ‘If medicine won’t help a man, this will. Many’s the fellow digging clams today who’d ha’ been buried long ago, but for a dram of ginger-jub.’ It was indeed powerful stuff.

  While they were eating, Dido said:

  ‘Now, Penny, I wants to hear all about how you came to be trapesing over the moors at sun-up with your pa, a-rarin’ to rescue us, instead of snoring in your bed like a good girl. How the mischief did you know where we was?’

  Pen explained how she had overheard the scene in the barn.

  ‘And you mean to say you bamboozled old Misery so she never guessed you knew? Why, Pen, I never thought you had it in you,’ exclaimed Dido handsomely. ‘You’re a walking wonder, girl! And slipped a Mickey Finn in her skilly? She’ll surely think she’s got sleeping sickness! Oh, dear, I haven’t laughed so much since Mr Slighcarp fell over the cutting-spade!’

  ‘Order!’ said Doctor Mayhew severely. ‘Now, has everybody finished eating? Nate! stop throwing eggs at the whale. This is a serious occasion. We have got to think how to prevent those deadbeats from heaving our island into the middle of New Jersey!’

  10

  Ways and means – Penitence eavesdrops – Aunt Tribulation is suspicious – the rocket – the gun’s last ride

  ‘NOW,’ SAID DOCTOR Mayhew, absently tipping the last of the ginger-jub down his gullet, ‘how are we going to stop them firing this gun?’

  ‘Is not firing kungscannon?’ exclaimed Professor Breadno woefully. ‘Is not having bigbang?’

  ‘Your big bang, my dear professor, would leave this island in a devilish undesirable location.’

  ‘Could firing otherwards round world mayhaps?’ the Professor said hopefully. ‘I fixing nordwestbang.’

  ‘No, no, professor, that would push us out into the middle of the Atlantic, right over to Spain probably. Can’t you see, we don’t want the gun fired at all.’

  The professor’s face fell.

  ‘Besides,’ Dido pointed out kindly, ‘you really can’t shoot poor old King James, you know!’

  ‘Na, na, na, snat Kung Jimsbangen, ‘sKung Georgebangen. Kung George IV!’

  ‘King George the Fourth?’ said Dido, bewildered. ‘But we haven’t got a King George! It’s King James the Third, bless his wig!’

  The professor shook his head and burst into a flood of refutal, mostly in his own incomprehensible language, which it took some time to disentangle.

  ‘I see what it is,’ Dido said at length. ‘Those peevy culls have been leading him up the garden path, making him believe there was a Hanoverian king on the throne because he’s really against the Hanoverians and they wanted him to make the gun for them. Talking about pitching the double! What a lot of swindlers! Can you explain to him, Doc?’

  It took some time to get across to the professor that there was already the sort of king he preferred on the English throne and therefore no need to shoot anyone off it; in the end he was convinced but greatly disappointed.

  ‘Firing at sönn, at mönn, at stare?’ he suggested as a last forlorn hope.

  ‘No, Breadno, that just wouldn’t do. It would sink us. We’d go right under water. Have a bit of sense, can’t you?’

  Poor Professor Breadno sighed heavily and stumped away from the council down to the edge of the waves, where he stood skipping stones and gazing mournfully at Rosie, who, exhausted by her great aquabatic display, was resting comfortably in the swell, her tiny eyes fixed on Captain Casket with a look of great devotion.

  ‘You say the gun is now all ready to fire, and the professor’s presence is not needed?’ Doctor Mayhew said to Dido.

  ‘That’s right. Aunt Trib – Miss Slighcarp said she would fire it. They only need the
cannonball and that’s being delivered today. Then they plan to go back on board the ship, tipping us over the cliff on the way, I dessay, and skedaddle till the rumpus has died down, before coming back to pick up the gunner. They wasn’t aiming to pick poor old Breadno up at all; I wonder if they’ll leave Auntie Trib behind too?’

  ‘So,’ said Doctor Mayhew thoughtfully, ‘as we haven’t enough able-bodied men on the island to deal with a whole shipload of desperate ruffians, our best plan would be somehow to get rid of the gun itself before they can fire it.’

  ‘But, Doc, it’s huge! It’s about a mile long, and as thick as a tree! I don’t see how you’ll ever get it moved if you’ve got no help but grannies and young ’uns and whaling widders.’

  ‘No more do I at present,’ Doctor Mayhew said frankly. ‘But somehow it must be done, so we had all better set our wits to work.’

  For a long time nobody spoke. They sat frowning in the silence of intense thought.

  ‘We couldn’t stuff the barrel full o’ summat?’ Dido suggested doubtfully.

  ‘That might lead to a most disastrous explosion,’ Doctor Mayhew said.

  ‘Cut the gun into sections – no, that would take too long,’ Nate muttered.

  Several hours slipped by in fruitless discussion. Nate paced about the beach in circles, staring at the ground.

  At last Pen said, ‘Sheep.’

  ‘Sheep, Penny?’

  ‘There are such a lot on the island. Could they not be put to some use? Harnessed to the gun and made to drag it away?’

  ‘Dunnamany ropes you’d need,’ Dido said kindly. ‘Have another try.’

  Nate, who had wandered near, strolled down to the edge of the waves and skipped stones with the professor.

  ‘Or we could bury – no, that would not do,’ Pen sighed in discouragement.

  ‘Hallo, what’s bitten Nate and the professor?’ Dido suddenly said.

  Nate, apparently galvanized by an idea, had grabbed the professor’s arm and was talking to him earnestly, using a lot of gestures, sometimes pointing out to sea. They buttonholed Captain Casket, and brought him into the discussion. He nodded, at first doubtfully, then with confidence and animation.

  ‘What’s the lay?’ called Dido. Nate came pounding back over the shingle with the others close behind him.

  ‘We’ve got it! The very thing! We’ll use the pink ’un.’

  ‘Old Rosie?’ said Dido. ‘Why, o’ course! She’s just the article. Why in Pharaoh’s name didn’t I think of that meself?’

  ‘But how? How do you mean?’ said Pen.

  ‘Why, it was your notion of the sheep that put it into my head,’ Nate told her. ‘Tie a rope to her flukes, don’t you see, and get her to haul the gun into the sea. It’d be as easy as a greased slide.’

  ‘But would it be kind?’ said Penitence dubiously.

  ‘We can fix a knot that’ll come undone as soon as the gun’s in the sea. Cap’n Casket’s agreeable to the idea. Says he don’t think it’d upset her too much.’

  ‘We’d need an uncommonly strong rope, and a long one,’ Doctor Mayhew observed.

  ‘There’s the lifeguard rope,’ Nate said. ‘That’s best new five-inch Manila, and there’s nigh on two mile of it.’

  ‘We’ll need all of that. Now let’s think of how we’d go about this. One party would have to make an end of the rope fast to the gun, while Captain Casket and somebody else must row out to the whale with the other end. We can use the lifeguard’s dory – I’ll explain to him afterwards. I had best be with the captain, who must obviously remain here on the shore so that the whale does not swim away before we are ready. Nate, you had better go with Professor Breadno and tie the rope to the gun; the professor will know the most suitable place to make fast.’

  Nate saw a difficulty.

  ‘How’re we going to shift the rope? That coil’s powerful heavy.’

  ‘In Mungo’s cart,’ Dido suggested. ‘We can all lift it in, and then it will unroll as you go.’

  ‘We can’t take the cart all the way to the forest; if there’s anybody left on guard they’d spot us.’

  ‘No, but you’ll have unrolled a lot of rope by the time you get there, it won’t be so heavy. You can leave the cart about half a mile away and roll the coil along the last bit. There are sheepskins in the cart; put those on your shoulders and meander through the scrub a bit aimless-like and stooping; anybody watching from the forest’ll think you’re a sheep. I’ll come with you to keep a lookout,’ Dido volunteered.

  ‘We really ought to try to find out when they aim to fire,’ Doctor Mayhew said. ‘If Miss Slighcarp’s going to do it, we only have to keep an eye on her movements, and as soon as she starts for the forest we’ll know. Who could do that?’

  All eyes turned on poor Penitence, who became rather pale, swallowed once or twice, and then said valiantly, ‘I’ll do it. I don’t mind. That is if, Doctor Mayhew, you’ll promise to look after Papa.’

  ‘Penny you’re a real bang-up hero,’ Dido said warmly. ‘I wish I could come with you, but if Aunt Trib was to see I’d got out of the lighthouse she’d twig the whole lay in a minute. But you can pretend you know nothing about anything and just act like a saphead – try to delay her from going to the forest if she seems liable to start before Nate and the cap’n are ready and we’ve got the gun away.’

  ‘How should I delay her?’ asked Pen nervously.

  ‘Why, talk to her, distract her, ask her advice about summat – ask her how to make wedding-cake or some blame thing.’

  ‘And supposing she wants to know where I’ve been and where Papa is, what shall I tell her?’

  ‘Why, you can tell the truth. Say Doc Mayhew reckoned as how it would do your pa good to have a look at the pink whale and that he’s a-sitting on Sankaty beach. That sounds innocent and harmless and will put her off the scent.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Pen, wan but resolute.

  Everything was now in train. The whole party helped to lift the lifeguard rope, which was kept coiled in a chest at the foot of the lighthouse, on to Mungo’s cart. Then Doctor Mayhew and Captain Casket returned to the beach, dragging with them one end of the rope, while Nate, Dido, and Professor Breadno drove slowly away down the Polpis road, unrolling the coil as they went. They took Pen with them for some way, and then she left them and struck off across the moors towards Soul’s Hill.

  ‘Poor Penny,’ said Dido who waved vigorously as Pen looked back for reassurance. ‘I reckoned as how I’d teach her to stand up to Aunt Tribulation, but I never figured things would be quite as rugged as this. But she’s coming up smiling, I will say; I’d never a thought Pen had so much gumption in her. Reckon her pa ought to be mighty well satisfied with her now, considering what a little puny moping thing she was on board ship. If he could take his mind off that blame whale o’ hisn for five minutes, that is!’

  The whale was still just visible, rocking like a pink blancmange in the breakers, and Nate began singing softly:

  ‘Sweet whale of Nantucket, so rosy and nice.

  As round and as pink as a strawberry ice –’

  ‘That ain’t stately enough,’ Dido said. ‘That don’t give a proper notion of her at all.’

  ‘All right.’ Nate considered a moment or two, while a few more fathoms of rope unrolled.

  ‘How about this, then?’

  ‘Sweet Whale of Nantucket, so pink and so round.

  The pride of our island, the pearl of the Sound,

  By Providence blest to our shores you were led,

  Long, long may you gambol off Sankaty Head!’

  ‘That’s better,’ said Dido. ‘Though it was really Cap’n Casket she was led by, not Providence. I guess really, all the time he thought he was following her, she was following him.’

  As Pen disappeared over a hill Dido said with a sudden pang of anxiety, ‘Croopus, I do hope nothing don’t go wrong when Penny gets to the farm. I wonder did we do right to send her?’

  ‘Oh, I guess she’ll be al
l right,’ Nate said.

  Dusk had begun to fall when Penitence reached the farm. Nobody was in sight. Penitence slipped quietly into the kitchen and then paused, as she heard voices coming from the parlour. The door was not quite closed.

  ‘. . . should be loaded by now,’ Mr Slighcarp’s voice said. ‘Thanks to that cursed whale and all the brats and old grannies swarming on the beach at Quidnet we were obliged to slip right round to the south side of the island, which meant the men had to carry the shot a great deal farther from the landing-place. We didn’t want to risk anyone getting a sight of it.’

  ‘No, you were very right,’ his sister agreed. ‘Where is Dark Diamond now?’

  ‘Making northing again, back to Quidnet. Just coasting along she’s innocent enough – might be going back for another sight of the pink whale. We’ve another boat beached at Quidnet ready to take us all off to her when the gun’s loaded.’

  ‘What delayed the ship so long?’

  ‘They were chased all the way from Spithead by a perditioned naval sloop, the Thrush, which several times nearly caught them; in order to give it the slip they were forced to beat right down to Trinidad.’

  ‘What happened to the sloop, then?’ asked Miss Slighcarp uneasily.

  ‘They lost her in the end; probably gave up and went back to report failure.’

  ‘It’s as well we are now ready to fire.’

  ‘They could never have touched us on Nantucket; it’s American soil. But we had best get away prudently and as fast as possible in case the sloop is still hanging about.’

  ‘What time shall I fire the gun?’

  Penitence drew nearer to the door and listened intently.

  Mr Slighcarp did some calculating. ‘Hmm, there’s a fair south-westerly, say fifteen knots, plus the trip to Quidnet . . . Give us time to get away. Say six hours. Better make it eight hours. Don’t fire before midnight.’

  ‘Very well. I will fire at midnight exactly. Darkness suits us better,’ she said. ‘There is no risk of being seen on my way there. I don’t want to be suspected before you come back to pick me up. As Tribulation Casket I am safe enough.’