The Lion of Sole Bay (Strong Winds)

by Julia Jones

  Luke had started this holiday – however long ago – determined to stop dreaming and be practical. He’d never dreamed he would meet anyone as practical as Helen.

  “Sorry, Ants,” he said. “I need both my hands for this bit.”

  She let him go without a word. He knew she wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy either.

  “Rub it on thick,” said Helen. “And tell me when you’re done. Then I pull again.”

  It was pretty bad. He used the soap as thickly as she said and also managed to rearrange himself so the rigid corner missed his private parts and went scraping up the inside of his hip and over his flat stomach.

  She stopped pulling when he got stuck again with the corner of the tank half way up his chest.

  “Okay,” she said. “We don’t panic here. You lie still and you breathe. Then you stretch your arms behind you and you make your shoulders loose. Who has the soap now?”

  “Me.”

  “That’s you, Engel, is it?”

  “Is.”

  “Then you must use the soap all over his chest where it is stuck and also his shoulders and the tank. The head will be okay.”

  Angel did as Helen instructed, hating her more furiously every moment. Then Drie Vrouwen plunged, Helen pulled, Luke twisted and suddenly he shot out through the opening as fast if he’d ridden down a flume.

  Angel was right behind him. He’d knocked Helen backwards when he came out and the small girl was straightaway on top of her, pinning her arms to the floor, blazing with fury.

  There was some muffled shouting coming from behind them. That must be Mike, trapped in the cabin and calling after his daughter. No one took any notice.

  “Cool it off, Ants. Helen’s okay. She’s sorry and she’s on our side. I think …”

  “Don’t call her by that name.” Helen wasn’t fighting back though she easily could have done. “She hates it. It’s what the bullies call her at school.”

  “You should know. All about bullies!” Angel wanted to sob that she’d ever trusted this nice girl. Looking at her now, she remembered – she’d liked her so much.

  “Is that right, Ants? I mean Angela? Do you really hate your name? I thought you said it was okay.”

  Angel couldn’t never lie directly. (Not except to her parents, possibly.) “Well yeah. At school I hate it. Always have. And there’s a reason – which I told her. And which I’ll TOTALLY NEVER FORGIVE if you tell anyone else,” she said to Helen, sort of bashing her arms back against the floor and banging her chest with her head. “But you’re my friend, Luke. My only ever friend and you can call me what name you like.”

  “But” Luke wasn’t especially quick but he was getting there. “If I’m your friend…(which I so am) of course I can’t call you a name that you don’t like. What name do you like?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Angel felt awkward now, as if it was she who’d made the fuss.

  “She likes Engel.”

  “I so do NOT! Stupid Dutch girl.”

  “My dad said you were his angel. Is that the name you like? Angel, short for Angela?”

  Angel nodded but she didn’t say anything because she couldn’t. Not quite.

  “Sorry,” she muttered to Helen.

  “No. I’m sorry. In Dutch they are almost the same word. I think I mixed them. One means English and the other is angel. I have been trying to think of you only as English because that makes you my enemy. It made it easier for me to betray.”

  “Luke says you’re sorry. He says you’re on our side now.”

  “Yes. If there must be sides then I am on your side – if you’ll have me.”

  “Of course we will. Come on Angel. Let her get up. We have to make plans.”

  “Then we’ll get my dad out too.”

  Helen rolled up into a sitting position as soon as Angel got off and the two girls looked at each other. Luke checked out where they were and then he called back through the gap to Mike.

  “It’s okay, Mike. Angel’s fine and Helen’s on our side. I think we’re in her cabin. She’ll come and get you in a moment.”

  “Excuse me,” said Helen. She had straightened her clothes and she was twisting her pony-tail back into position. “It may be better for Mr Vandervelde if we leave him where he is.”

  “Huh?” Angel went tense and suspicious again.

  “Please listen to what I have to say. I am almost fifteen years old. Both of you are younger, I think?”

  “So?”

  “So we are children and – if things go wrong – we cannot be so badly blamed. Your father is an adult. They will say he is responsible.”

  “Who will?”

  “The police.”

  “Yeah, but if we’re going to use your phone to ring for help, maybe that’s good from Mike’s point of view. He’s the adult: he gets the credit. He could talk to them even.”

  “But my mother and the Kapitein, they are crazy tonight. They won’t give up so easily. Elsevier is drunk and she has given my mother some more powder that she should not have. Once I had put the ship on her course and found the root of ginger that stops my mother being sick they sent me down here to be out of their way.”

  “Is that why you decided to change sides? Fed up with being gooseberry.”

  He saw that she didn’t understand.

  “Are you jealous of Elsie with your mother?”

  “Yes, of course I am, but that wasn’t why I changed my side.”

  “What was it then? You’ve been helping them all along. You tricked us on board and it must have been you who helped to steal the red lion.”

  “And started the fire at the moorings,” Angel added.

  “No it was not. The fire was my mother. We needed a diversion and an excuse for the electricity to fail. I didn’t know she would try to make a fireship. And, before you ask, I didn’t know either that she would try to poison you. It was meant to be only a sleeping drug in the mushroom soup.”

  “Soup!” said Luke. “Not Lottie’s sausages?”

  “Stop,” said Angel. “We need to know that my dad is hearing this.”

  They all moved closer to the opening.

  “Dad,” said Angel. “Are you listening to what she said?”

  “I’m listening,” came Mike’s voice. “I’m not sure yet that I’m agreeing. You’re an extremely clever girl, Mejuffrow de Witt. I don’t think it would be easy to fool you.”

  “I am my mother’s daughter. That is all. I have no other relatives. I agree I helped to steal the Stavoren lion from the pub and I rowed it down the stream and there are other things that I have helped to steal. I tricked you all on board and I maybe didn’t stop long enough with the old man.”

  “I don’t know that bit,” said Angel.

  “I do,” said Luke. “It was Peter and he’d been lost somewhere along by the sluice and you were trying to get him over the gap and I met you and I wasn’t much use because I was so wobbly.”

  “But you phoned the farmer. And then I think you went back with him? It was convenient for me to leave you once he was in the Land Rover.”

  “I went up the track through the woods with Miss Grace and I opened the gates and I went and fed his cat while she put him to bed at the farm. I don’t know what you did.”

  “I returned to my ship and I helped the Kapitein and my mother to pull the figurehead on board. I wasn’t sure you’d gone to the farm and I was afraid you might have seen. That’s why I wanted you on board. So you couldn’t talk. I still thought that we were only thieves and seventeenth-century freaks. Wreken de Dame is politics.”

  “But you knew that your mother’s … a witch. You knew that she attacked my dad.”

  “No. She isn’t. That bit I’m sure about. She takes stupid drugs and she thinks that she has powers but they are not – I may need help for the words – powers b
eyond nature. She can make bad medicine but she can’t do more than that. I was there when she attacked the figure with the stone and I know exactly what time it was. Then I asked you and the accident to your father had already happened. I would have stopped them if that had not been so. I swear it. I wanted to love and obey my mother but not that much.”

  “That accident was completely all my fault.” Angel didn’t know whether she was glad or sorry. Better not to have been Possessed probably.

  “What’s made you change?”

  “It’s the gun. All along I have allowed myself to think that it was fake. But it’s real. The Kapitein is truly dangerous. I thought it would be all right if we could just get home. Now – I’m not sure.”

  “You must let me protect you all.” Mike’s invisible voice was anguished. Luke could imagine him twisting his hands around each other.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Vandervelde, but you are a weakness. You heard what the Kapitein said about hostages. She has only to threaten your daughter and you are defeated. If we ring the police she won’t stop at anything. And my mother … is not sane. They will use your love. It doesn’t matter about me because I am on the wrong side anyway.”

  “I don’t agree,” said Mike. “And if you won’t allow me to join you yet, can you promise me at least that your cabin door is locked? And can you also tell me what you did with my wet clothes? I think Angela’s pills are in the top pocket. I was thinking of my wife Nelly and I remembered that she’d put them there befire we left. They’re important and they’re in foil.”

  “My door is locked securely from the inside. I will pass the clothes and pills – you should all take more Stugeron – and then we will make our plans together. I am not dictating.”

  “You are in such bad trouble, Helen.” Angel spoke as one who knew. “Let me have your phone. Before you ring the police I want to send my mum another text. Just to tell her Dad and I’re okay and we haven’t forgotten the pills.”

  “Me too,” said Luke.

  But the texts wouldn’t send.

  Helen’s shoulders slumped. “Then we have drifted too far out to sea. I hoped my course would keep us closer to the land. The barge is slow and flat and she goes sideways. Elsevier won’t steer properly.”

  “It means you can’t call the police,” said Angel.

  “It means we’re out here in bad weather in the middle of the night with a couple of lunatics and a stolen lion and there’s no way we’re going to get help,” her father added.

  “We think Royal Katherine then,” said Luke. “Because we’re not going to give up and let them take us all the way to Holland.”

  “This Royal Katherine I don’t understand.”

  “Tell her, Dad. Tell her in Dutch. Anything to make it quick.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sole Bay III

  Friday 7 November, first of the waxing crescent

  Helen

  It was so dark. When she had last been up on deck there had been the loom of lighthouses to remind her of the comforting existence of the land. After Orfordness had come Southwold. The little town that she and her mother had visited when they first came over to England.

  It had been August. There had been a holiday feeling about the small streets full of visitors and the people actually queuing for entrance to the white-painted lighthouse and the unobtrusive museum. Helen had felt not uncheerful. She hadn’t understood, then, how long they would be staying in England nor precisely why they had come. All Hendrike had said that they were on a mission to bring back something that was so important that the Rijksmuseum would beg her to work for them again.

  Helen had never liked being in England. Of course not. But she wasn’t missing school on the day they went to Southwold and she was glad to be away from Amsterdam and have her mother to herself for a while, without Elsevier. This day out by train and bus to visit the site of the battle was something that almost any mother and daughter might have done if one of them had such an overwhelming interest. She knew her mother was a dedicated researcher. Admired her skill and single-mindedness. She only didn’t like most of the things her mother found.

  They’d walked across a small bridge and along to the sand dunes at the mouth of the river until they could see the length of Sole Bay and gloat over the complacency of the English and French who had allowed themselves to be caught so unprepared. The horizon had been hazy in the summer heat, the sea almost viscous in its lapping calm. The few yachts that were attempting to sail drifted slackly with the tide.

  Helen had looked carefully at the maps in the museum which showed how this coast had filled and flattened over time. She had thought about shoals and sea drift as she stood on the beach in the sun and she had tried not to listen to her mother as she conjured up the smoke and the guns and the killing.

  It had been such a beautiful day. The sea like milk. It was impossible not to imagine the early morning of the battle. The alarm bells ringing in the little town, the sailors being hurried back to their ships. Away to kill and be killed.

  “And even the foam was tinged with blood,” Hendrike kept repeating, as they stood together on the summer beach. Helen thought her mother should have been sad about this but it was more as if she was excited.

  That was the moment she had begun to feel frightened. Her friends would be packing tents and picnics, spending whole days in Amstelveen beside their favourite lake. She had gazed towards the horizon and wondered how long it would take her to row across to Holland.

  Southwold had struggled in the months after the Battle of Sole Bay. There’d been eight hundred wounded sailors in a town where there were only one hundred and fifty-three households. In the museum she’d read a copy of a notice from the Southwold town clerk, after the battle in 1672. He’d offered one shilling to anyone who found and buried the body of a dead sailor. Helen wondered how much he’d had to pay out? She shrank back from the water lapping gently against the sand. It felt tainted.

  This November night was completely overcast. No moon nor stars, no cloud shapes nor streaks of grey against the black. No twinkling navigation marks.

  It was cold too. Nothing had hindered or diverted this north wind as it had come blowing down from – the Arctic? It drove the rain against Drie Vrouwen’s spray hood as relentlessly if it were generated by a machine. The swell was unremitting and the barge was struggling as she laboured up one side of each rolling wave-mound and slid ungracefully down the next.

  It was two in the morning. They had left the creek more than half a day ago. Fourteen hours motoring in tough conditions. She wondered whether the Kapitein had remembered to switch the diesel tanks. She doubted it.

  There was no automatic steering on Drie Vrouwen. The tiller had been lashed in position and Elsevier slouched in the corner with her hat pulled down over her face and a velvet cushion behind her. Two stone geneva bottles rolled empty at her feet and only the glow of the constant cigar warned Helen that she was still awake.

  Helen looked at their track on the chart-plotter. Their progress was painfully slow but they would soon be approaching the first of the deep water shipping lanes. She needed to act – for all their sakes.

  “Where is my mother please?” she asked.

  “The cow is on the cabin roof. The covers have blown from the lion and she rides it like a Valkyrie.”

  The long line which she’d stolen to lash the trophy to the roof had disappeared on the night of the fire. Helen had attached the bundle to the rails as securely she could by tying knots directly from the eyelets round the edge of the tarpaulin. If the tarpaulin had come off, how was the prize secured?

  “I have a problem, Kapitein. There is water over the cabin floor. A leak perhaps from the moment that we struck the shoal? I have pumped, of course, but I can’t keep up any more. The man would help if we threaten his daughter. They are sleeping now. They will be shocked to submission if we wake them.�
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  It had seemed like such a simple plan when the four of them had been talking. Make holes in the fresh water tank to flood the floor and get either of the lunatics down to enforce obedience. Then jump them. Hit them on the head. Slam them in the side cabin and lock the door.

  Luke was waiting with the runestone. He had promised that if it was her mother he had to cosh, he’d try not to remember what she’d wanted to do to his dad. There were no restrictions if Elsevier was the likely victim.

  Up here in the wet and wind-blown night the plan was juvenile. Adventure story stuff.

  Elsevier took a long drag on her cigar. “Why should I care? So the carpets get spoiled. So the mutineers get wet feet. So they catch cold and die? What’s it to me.”

  “The extra water slows the ship. At best it will delay our arrival. At worst she may sink.”

  Elsevier pulled out the gun and shot a hole in the spray hood.

  “Get the cow to deal with it,” she said. Her voice was slurred. She was very drunk and therefore dangerous.

  Helen wished she’d never got involved in anything so idiotic. She could hear scraps of wild singing coming from the cabin top. Her mother was up there with the Stavoren lion that she’d identified and traced and stolen. She was bringing it home to the country where it had been made. It meant so much to her, this old relic. She wouldn’t feel the weather. She’d be way back in the seventeenth century, returning with her prize, restoring the glory days.

  And now her dutiful daughter was going to try and lure her below so that Luke, who hated her, could hit her on the head.

  Hendrike would be safer if she was shut away. They’d used the side cabin before when she’d been out of her mind.

  They’d all be safer.

  Luke wouldn’t hit hard. If she and the others could get control of the barge and take the carving back to England, she could explain to the authorities that the heist was a gesture that went too far. She could help them understand her mother’s obsession – and her illness. She’d point to Elsevier as the criminal master mind.