By Fickle Winds Blown

by Maryk Lewis

normal shipping routes, which hugged the capes, seeking to cut down on the distance to be travelled. Captain Hedley preferred to go the extra distance to gain more favourable winds and easier sailing. It paid. Day by day the sun rose ever higher in the sky. The sea became bluer, the air warmer.

  But very much they were all alone in a world of their own.

  Nineteen

  In his watch off duty of an evening, the boatswain began to teach David Selkirk to play chess. The young sailor showed an aptitude for the game, but he could only play by telling his opponent to move his pieces for him on the board the carpenter had made up for him especially. The pieces plugged into little holes drilled in the squares, so the board could be tipped on edge, and David could see it without having to lift his head from the pillow.

  When the boatswain was not available, the carpenter would sometimes play, or perhaps White Eye. They were quite proficient players. Andy could play, and so could Jess, but not so well, and it was not long before David had to allow them a couple of pawns in order to make a game of it. It might have been that Andy was distracted by Jess being nearby. It was certainly a great excuse for him to get into the hospital flat, where he could have some time with Jess, without earning black looks from the officers, or some of the passengers.

  Sarah did not play. To make a game of it, she would have had to give David so many pieces it would have been an embarrassment for him, and would quite have spoiled the easy, nurse-and-patient rapport they had established. That David would have liked a still closer relationship was only too plain, but Sarah wisely did not allow it to develop.

  That didn’t mean that she didn’t like the young sailor. She did. She just didn’t tell him so. That she confided only to her diary, where also she recorded her secret thoughts about Ken MacGovern. Oddly enough, no thoughts about Gil Inkster ever went into her diary, though she worked with him closely and comfortably for long hours every day.

  Because there were so many people throughout the ship still suffering the after-effects of the influenza epidemic, there was not room for them all in the hospital flat, and therefore the doctor decided that if they could not all fit in, then none could go there. They stayed in their own bunks, cared for by their friends and relatives, and visited regularly by either the doctor or Matron Greeley. That left the hospital flat with only David and Matilda Earnshaw as occupants.

  Matilda was better with people about her, the sounds of quiet conversations in the background, so there was no need to limit the visitors that David could have. His visitors either chatted with him, read to him, or played chess. Before long a second chess board was set up by his bunk, and while somebody played David, his other visitors played a separate game. In that way Charles Rutherford was able to play Andy, a thing not allowed anywhere else in the ship. They proved to be very evenly matched.

  Games between Jess and either of the youths were also keenly contested, with any result likely, but Jess and Charles could play in the great cabin if they chose. Her games with Andy could only be in the hospital flat.

  Meeting Andy on deck, except when working, was more restricted. Andy sometimes trailed a line from the stern, hoping to catch a fast-swimming tuna, although with little success. Jess could join him in the evenings, if she wore a borrowed pair of Andy’s pants, and an oiled slicker with the hood pulled up over her plaits. The captain, or the officer of the watch, knew perfectly well who she was, but pretended not to. Those few passengers who knew, kept it to themselves. There were only a few passengers who would object, and there was a conspiracy to keep them in ignorance.

  One particularly warm evening, after the sun had dived quickly over the horizon with hardly a pause for twilight, Jess found Andy hanging a pair of bright lanterns in the ratlines outside the galley. A further lantern replaced the dim light that usually hung on a bracket over the door.

  “Three lights forming a triangle,” Jess commented. “Are you signalling to another ship?”

  “No, they’re to lure fish,” Andy explained.

  “Oh yes,” said Jess with interest, knowing that fish will come to a bright light. “Do we hang lines over the side between the lanterns?”

  “Oh no,” replied Andy. “We don’t use lines for these fish.”

  “No lines?” echoed Jess suspiciously, beginning to wonder if she was the poor fish to be caught. “You’ll have to show me how this works.”

  “We go into the galley,” he said, suiting his actions to the words, “and we sharpen a couple of filleting knives ready for the first fish to arrive.”

  “Mmm, hmmm,” she nodded without belief, “well I’ll just make myself a nice cup of tea while we wait for the fish to line themselves up. Where do you expect them to arrive exactly?”

  There was suddenly a loud slap and a slither on the side bench, right in front of where Andy was just picking up a knife.

  “Why, right here!” said Andy. “Where else?”

  A wet, wriggling fish lay gasping on the bench. Jess’s eyes bugged. Angus MacGillivray and the two stewards burst into raucous laughter, as Andy grabbed for it, and whacked it between the eyes with the butt of his knife.

  “I didn’t believe you!” Jess gasped.

  “He didn’t believe him either,” the cook cackled. “That was the neatest thing I’ve seen yet.”

  “That wasn’t expected then?” Jess asked.

  “Not right into the galley like that,” Angus wheezed. “On the deck outside certainly. Not in here.”

  “How did it get here?” she persisted.

  “It flew,” Andy grinned.

  “Andrew Davison,” Jess stormed, “don’t you dare! You promised you wouldn’t tease me any more.”

  “It did,” Andy protested. “It’s a flying fish, it really is.”

  “That’s true,” the cook supported him. “They live in these latitudes. They fly right up out of the water when the tuna chase them. Bright lights at night attract them onto our decks.”

  “They sort of glide on these big fins,” Andy said, pulling one out so that Jess could see the tough flight membrane stretched between long spines.

  A thud and a flapping sound came from the deck outside.

  “There’s another one,” said a steward, diving out the door to pick it up, before it could wriggle back into the sea through the scuppers.

  “That’s more the way we expect them to arrive,” Andy admitted. “They make good eating fried in bacon fat.”

  In the next hour more than a dozen came aboard, and then there were no more. Andy and the cook filleted them and fried them. Jess and the two stewards took around small helpings for all who wanted a taste. With bread made fresh that afternoon, they were delicious.

  It was as well the reforging of the mast shackles had been done when it had. The very next day, the tenth out from Plymouth, a blast of wind came out of nowhere, showed as a shadow coming at them across the water, and laid them away over on the port side. People screamed, and clutched at anything to hand. There were no strange clouds to give them a distant warning; only the wind, and the break in the pattern of the waves. Had the forge been out on the fore deck still, it and all the pig iron would have gone over the sides, punching out the scuppers on the way. There would simply have been no time to shift them.

  Black clouds popped up suddenly from behind the horizon out to starboard. Lightning flickered around the cloud tops. The air hung hot and strangely still.

  “School’s out!” Mr Milburn shouted from the poop. “There’s more to come where that came from. All passengers below. Tie everything down. It’s going to get rough.”

  The watch off duty were pouring from the forecastle unbidden. They had no need to be told what to do. Even as the mate shouted at the passengers, men were scrambling up the rigging, and taking in sail.

  Jess shot into the galley and began tying down the fasteners over the crockery racks. Sarah headed for the hospital flat, concerned for her patients. Matilda in her swinging cot would come to no harm, but David would need to be wedged down ag
ainst movement.

  “Is there a blow comin’?” David asked.

  “Big black clouds, anvil-shaped heads with lightning.”

  “Aye, they twist out off the trade winds. Nasty, they are. The old timers said it was Old Nick’s head, the Devil lookin’ at them from over the edge of the world.”

  “What, the old story that if you get too close to the edge, you fall off?”

  “Aye. The black lumps of cloud are the Devil lookin’ to see who’s goin’ to drop into his hands next.”

  “What was supposed to stop all the sea from falling over the edge, and leaving us sitting on the dry bottom?”

  “They didna tell us that.”

  Slowly the ship glided almost to a stop. With no way on her, she would become unsteerable. The helmsman used the last of her motion to head her into the wind. She was not quite there when it struck.

  For a moment she was all but taken aback, shoved clean backwards by the pressure of wind on her hull and rigging. Then the newly set storm sails filled, heavy canvas triangles set low down. She heeled, and started forward again, driving into waves, and taking them on the quarter. Spray flew high over the bows.

  All was confusion below decks. People who had not been fast enough to grab for a handhold were tumbled into heaps to leeward. Everything loose fell from its place, and the there was a crashing of glass and crockery. Those still abed clung to their bunks, some clawing at the blankets slipping over the sides, others