Peril on the Sea

by Michael Cadnum

  Katharine was deeply moved by Baines’s loyalty. His daughter, Eleanor, had been a playmate of hers, and a good friend. She had been married recently to a miller, and Katharine felt a certain good-hearted envy of Eleanor and her less ambitious, more peaceful existence.

  “I WILL NOT have us ruined,” said Anthony when father and daughter were alone, “and I will not have you married to Lord Pevensey.”

  That had been the offer, according to Sir Gregory—if she agreed to marry his lordship, the debt would be forgiven.

  “Lord Pevensey is not such a brute of a man,” offered Katharine, not meaning the words so much as experimenting with how they sounded.

  They sounded terribly false.

  “He is a greedy beast, as you know,” said Anthony. “I should have seen these ill tidings before they arrived. I’ll ride to London and bribe the Admiralty.”

  “With what in your purse, Father?”

  Anthony limped up and down the room, his injury troubling him even more than before. The veteran stallion had failed to leap a hedge last Candlemas eve, and horse and rider had fallen heavily. Anthony had heard a bone or sinew snap, and now a painful ulcer on his ankle was slow to heal. The horse had survived and had been sold to meet Fairleigh’s many expenses.

  Anthony flung open the shutters and gazed out at the stormy darkness. Not all the windows in the fine house were glazed, but this window was leaded and glazed like any church window, and the rain beat down on the glass. “Katharine, do you want to marry that—that scheming weasel of a lord?”

  “No,” she said emphatically. “I believe I should have a favorable regard for the man I take as my husband.”

  “And so you should,” agreed her father.

  “I know that Lord Pevensey cheats at dice,” she added, “and bribes cockfight stewards—and if the Devil came to Devonshire, he’d feel at home at Pevensey Hall.”

  “How does he cheat at dice?” asked her father.

  “He pares them so they are off-weight—I saw him pocketing a little knife before you sat with him last Stephen’s Day. I told you he cheated.”

  “Yes,” he agreed thoughtfully, “you did.”

  “I don’t like his lordship, and could love him only out of Christian charity, but I’ll marry him tomorrow, Father, if it brings you peace.”

  “No, I’ll outduel him before I allow you to share his bed.”

  “Fight him with a sword?”

  “I studied the rapier and the dagger when I was young,” said Anthony, “and I do believe that with Baines’s help I could brush up my skills.”

  “We must consider a better plan.”

  She loved her father, and she had a deep respect for his resourcefulness. He had the energy to make a master swordsman of himself, if he put his mind to it, but she did not think any fair fight could defeat a devious, grasping soul like Lord Pevensey. Besides, her father’s nagging wound would sometimes not allow him to walk with any comfort, much less engage in combat.

  “I’ll hire murderers,” said her father.

  “You are too gentle for crime, Father, except for the usual sort of half stealing from your creditors.”

  “He won’t be seizing any ships,” said Anthony, “with a new mouth cut out of his throat.”

  “You are not a great sinner, Father,” said Katharine. “And to conspire to murder, you have to have a sinner’s humor.”

  “Maybe I’ll develop such a character,” said Anthony.

  “I pray not.”

  “The truth is, Katharine, that unless I think of a plan, either you will marry this grasping peer of the realm or we will be more destitute than two houseflies.”

  Despite her outward calm, Katharine felt bleak at their prospects. She was not one of those overly imaginative young women who thought wood pigeons spoke to them, but sometimes she did hear her name in the bells of the nearby Saint Simon’s church, Ka-thrine, Ka-thrine, the first note higher than the second. Just now the sexton must be pulling on the bell, perhaps dislodging the swallows who liked to take up lodging in the belfry.

  Hope soon, said the ungainly music as it spilled through the evening,hope soon.

  “You will devise a way around this misfortune,” she said encouragingly.

  “Do you believe so?”

  He was appealing, the way he needed to hear her express faith in him.

  “Yes, you’ll devise some cunning way out,” she said.

  “I think I will, too,” he agreed with a laugh.

  She joined him in quiet laughter. The truthful, objective alternative was too disheartening.

  “By God,” he said, listening to the weather outside. “This is a fierce tempest—I would not be on a ship tonight for all the gold in Christendom.”

  III

  LAST BREATH

  8

  SHERWIN SANK into the cold sea.

  He looked upward at the shifting, unsteady silken surface of the water—the life that he was leaving behind. The ship’s keel was a heavy apparition, bearded with sea grass and barnacles, and the sea quaked, all that windy tumult quiet from beneath the waves. His last breath broke upward, carrying with it a fragment of prayer.

  THE RESCUE began like an intrusion, an unwanted trespass into his beckoning quiet. Some presence broke the surface, and circles expanded outward across the muted starlight.

  And he saw the hook, a descending, angry-looking grappling iron, searching downward on a long, uncoiling line like a serpent, a hunting creature whose touch would do him harm.

  This time he seized the iron hook and hung on.

  Soon Sherwin was out of the brine and into the windy night. He was heaved up the side of the ship, banging against the vessel like a dangling wooden doll.

  After being dragged over the gunwale, none too gently, he was stretched out upon the deck. Seamen nearby were manhandling the salvaged casks into the cargo hold using can hooks, short ropes with hooks at each end. Sherwin felt like a piece of salvage himself—of dubious value.

  A broad, alert face gazed down into Sherwin’s, with an expression like that of a man peering into a well. He had a wispy red beard and a nose that had evidently been broken at some time in the past. He wore a soldier’s cap with a cock pheasant feather and a jaunty scarf of silk plush.

  This individual lifted up a pale object, a fishlike shape Sherwin dimly recognized as his own hand. The warm fingers of this stranger tried to wrestle his father’s signet ring off Sherwin’s ring finger, and the endeavor succeeded after a long moment, the gold and garnet ring slipping down over his knuckle.

  Sherwin gave a kick, coughed a fountain of salt water, and sat up.

  “What nature of beast is he, Evenage?” called a voice from the quarterdeck.

  “A gentleman, I reckon, Mr. Highbridge.”

  Strong arms carried Sherwin into a cabin belowdecks, where the same matter-of-fact folk stripped him of his linen shirt, and he was entirely naked.

  The man called Evenage covered Sherwin with a thick wool blanket and handed him a metal cup of hot wine mixed with pepper and mustard. The beverage was so highly spiced Sherwin sneezed, nearly spilling it all.

  He tried to ask a question, but the words would not come.

  “Never mind the name of this ship, for now,” said Evenage with a tone of friendly evasion. He had a pleasant voice. “Or the name of her captain. I am the sergeant of the vessel, here to pour as much of this hot wine down your throat as I am able.”

  A ship’s sergeant was sometimes charged with serving as law officer aboard the ship, with the duties of locking up violent seamen, and—at times like this—investigating a new arrival.

  “Sergeant Evenage, I thank you,” said Sherwin through chattering teeth.

  “The captain has a book of prayers,” said the red-bearded man, “if you wish to read from it.”

  Sherwin was aware of the thanks he owed to divine mercy for so far sparing his life. He was not unusually pious, but neither was he a noted sinner. He did not like the sergeant’s implication
that he was in special need of divine intervention. “Why would I need the comfort of the captain’s personal prayer book?”

  “My good friend,” said his companion, in a tone of regret, “I have to say that most men fished from such cold seas never survive the night.”

  9

  AS HE LAY hugging the blanket around his trembling frame, Sherwin was visited by two other men.

  One was a round, plump house cat of a man in a leather apron, who pressed his fingers into the pulse points on Sherwin’s neck with an amiable but unconvinced manner, as though marveling that their new visitor was still among the living. Sherwin gathered that this man was either the ship’s cook, estimating the time remaining before Sherwin could be served up to cannibals, or else the vessel’s surgeon.

  That this last impression was most likely was emphasized when a voice called, “The captain sends for you, Dr. Reynard,” and this rotund, nearly silent man immediately reported to the upper deck.

  The only other visitor to attend Sherwin’s bed that night was an individual that Sherwin found a source of anxiety—a man who stayed well out of the swaying, unsteady lamplight and gazed upon Sherwin from the dark.

  This silent spectator was dressed in a long black cloak with jet buttons, and a black cap that fit tightly over his head. He carried what looked like a golden circlet on a long ribbon around his neck.

  From time to time he murmured some advice or question to Evenage or Dr. Reynard, and both men listened respectfully and answered briefly in low voices. The red-bearded sergeant always relaxed and sat down when the man in black left the quarters, and he stood in tense attention when the tall man’s shadow fell across the cabin once again.

  DESPITE HIS FATIGUE, his convulsive cold kept Sherwin awake all that night.

  The lamp overhead swung with the movement of the ship. The seas continued to be heavy, judging by the circles and swivels of the light, and the shadows around Sherwin rocked and shifted. The Patience had been what was called a sweet ship, because years of carrying leaking casks of wine and spirits had mixed with the water in her ballast and caused her to have a pleasant smell.

  This vessel, however, had a warship’s ambience—the odor of gunpowder and iron. He also scented turpentine, made from the essence of evergreens, useful as a thinner for the thicker, blacker stone-pitch, and as a sealant for wood.

  Another smell, too, permeated the soldiers’ quarters, and Sherwin could identify the source only when Evenage crumbled a bit of black and yellow herb into a brass bowl at the end of a reed tube, and lit the leaves with a stick of smoldering cork.

  “You’ll want to empty out those ill humors, sir, as I’m sure you know,” said Evenage, exhaling blue smoke. “This tobacco will bring you to life.”

  Sherwin had known tobacco smokers around Lincoln’s Inn, men with a row of silver or brass pipe bowls, and a habit of gazing into the hearth while puffing, coughing, puffing, as though the herb gave men a bovine power of inner concentration even as it disgorged phlegm.

  He had once read a printed broadside for sale in Paternoster Row, The King of Trinidad’s Daughter, Princess Tobacco. While the aromatic plant had detractors, many authors praised its medicinal possibilities. Sherwin accepted the pipe from the sergeant’s hands and fitted his lips over the mouthpiece. He inhaled, and he could feel the tobacco leaves burn hot in his fingers, and hear them expire in whispers.

  He exploded in coughing.

  And yet, within moments, a perplexing calm altered his concern just a little, as though he was a new, much wiser version of himself. He glimpsed empty bunks, and sea chests secured against the bulkhead. There was space in these efficiently arranged quarters for several men.

  “Where are the other soldiers?” asked Sherwin, taking another curative pull on the reed. Again he coughed violently.

  “They met with misfortune,” said Evenage with a regretful sigh. “As fighting men now and again will.” The sergeant wore a ruby ring on his left hand, and his buckles were silver. Sergeant Evenage grew even more serious when he added, “Watch your answers when First Officer Highbridge questions you. He holds your life in his hands.”

  “What nature of man is this Highbridge?” asked Sherwin.

  The pipe had gone out, the fire extinguished, the herbs reduced to a black rind of crumbs. His strangely immobile tongue felt like bacon, smoked black and thick. Sherwin gave the instrument back to Evenage with his thanks.

  “Peter Highbridge is an excellent first mate to the captain,” said Evenage. “A good man. He knows the bobstay from the keel, I can tell you. But he’s cunning, too, and quick to defend the ship.”

  A footstep on the deck above silenced the sergeant, and he lifted a finger to his lips.

  10

  THIN RAIN lanced downward through the opening as the tall man returned, brushing sea-foam from his long, dark mantle.

  Doors and ports on the Patience had swung with noisy creaks, wooden complaints from every quarter of the vessel. The sound had been comforting to a traveler like Sherwin, who was essentially a landsman. The grunts and chuckles of the merchant ship had reminded him of the oak-pegged buildings of Chiswick and London, tall-timbered houses that gave gently under heavy feet and, by every estimation, could last for centuries.

  This vessel was quiet, with oiled hinges, Sherwin surmised, and her planks sealed with oakum.

  Highbridge stood over the bunk and gave Sherwin a smile.

  “I see you are feeling better,” said Highbridge. His tone was mild, but Sherwin had heard such mild men before, asking directions on their way to deliver death warrants.

  “I am feeling more alive, sir,” said Sherwin, “thanks to this sergeant’s good efforts.”

  Highbridge considered Sherwin’s simple, heartfelt answer as though Sherwin had quoted an axiom in Greek.

  “He speaks like a young man of spirit, sir,” said the sergeant. He added, “He could be a spy, it’s true, but by my stars he is a worthy shipmate.”

  Sherwin felt pleased at this remark, and grateful.

  But Highbridge seemed unimpressed. “Who are you?” he asked, looking hard at Sherwin.

  Sherwin identified himself and his late father, and gave his hometown as Chiswick, by way of London.

  “You sailed with Captain Pierson, as I guess,” said Highbridge, “on the Patience.”

  “Sir, that is true,” said Sherwin. He knew that his best strategy was to be honest but brief.

  “What,” asked his inquisitor, “were you doing on that ship?”

  Sherwin gave a short account of his aspirations aboard the merchant vessel, and of his history of Captain Pierson’s life, the notes for which were now lost, along with the untold secrets of the man’s adventures. He concluded by changing the subject, and adding, “I want my signet ring returned to me if you will.”

  “We shall return your ring when it pleases our captain.”

  This was spoken without any courtesy or indeed any effort to soften the words. Sherwin was growing increasingly uneasy. Good manners were far more than a way of showing respect for social rank and importance. They also demonstrated compassion, and, in a world where legal torture was still sometimes applied, the absence of politeness could be the harbinger of serious trouble.

  As though to make his sinister intentions clear, Highbridge added the further question “Why did the Patience sink?”

  Sherwin’s spirits stirred. “If you believe that I served Captain Pierson by setting his cargo alight, the Devil, sir, may take you.”

  “If you are a liar or a Spanish agent,” said Highbridge, “we will bleed the truth out of you.”

  “Do you imagine that I am a sympathizer to Spain, bent on devastating the pleasures of Englishmen by destroying their brandy?”

  Highbridge’s smile was brief, but it was warmhearted. “We might wonder if the Patience carried some other, more ignitable cargo, in addition to wine spirits.”

  “Who captains this ship?” asked Sherwin, beginning to envision a letter of complaint ab
out this ship and officer Highbridge to the Admiralty.

  “Brandon Fletcher,” said Highbridge, “is captain of the Vixen, by Her Majesty’s leave.”

  Sherwin gathered the woolen blanket more tightly around his shoulders. This was not good tidings at all.

  He had heard the stories about Brandon Fletcher, as had everyone else in England. Along with Francis Drake and Martin Frobisher, Fletcher was a seaman adventurer, although his reputation was more bloody than that of his competitors. He was known by name and by sight throughout Europe, his woodcut features appearing on pamphlets glorifying his exploits. Sherwin had studied these publications with keen interest.

  While Drake had been the first Englishman to sail around the globe, and Frobisher had explored for a Northwest Passage to the Indies, Fletcher had spent a career robbing ships on the high seas, both merchant and military, and had been rumored to take an Englishman hostage at times, if his family could afford ransom. Fletcher had been active as a naval official when Sherwin’s father began a career in law, and Sherwin prayed that Fletcher might recognize the greyhound symbol on the stolen signet ring as that of an old and valued acquaintance.

  “Does Captain Fletcher,” asked Sherwin, “believe that the Patience carried a hidden consignment of brimstone?”

  “Captain Fletcher,” said Highbridge with another fleeting smile, “believes what he chooses.”

  Brimstone was a major component of gunpowder, and in a country frantic to arm itself against foreign attack, the supply of the explosive powder was strained. The best sulfur was thought to come from the volcanic regions of the Mediterranean, and merchants were importing the flammable mineral while trying to keep the shipments out of the grasp of Spanish sympathizers.

  Sherwin was increasingly angry that his honor could be so starkly challenged, but he was aware, too, that on a vessel captained by a notorious brigand he might have few privileges and no pleasant prospects. He was deeply worried.