Peril on the Sea

by Michael Cadnum

  Sir Anthony gave a sharp, unhappy nod.

  “She may be further out of harm,” said the captain, in the tone of a man proposing a rabbit hunt, “with a shipload of brave Englishmen than she ever would be on this estate.”

  Sir Anthony bowed his head, silently conceding that Fletcher might be right.

  “I know you, Captain, if you please, sir,” said the squire, “by an engraving I saw in Winchester, in a broadside, A Most Easy Guide to the Bloodiest Pirates of England.” He spoke clearly so his accent might be understood. Sherwin knew the publication well, and thought it quite inferior work.

  “What other pirates were there?” asked Fletcher.

  “Only you, Captain Fletcher,” said Cecil Rawes.

  “There were surely others,” said Fletcher in a tone of mild inquiry.

  “There were going to be other printed sheets in the series, sir,” said the squire, “but the printer died, stabbed in a brawl.”

  “Killed by Drake’s agents, would be my guess,” said Fletcher, “keen to burnish his reputation.”

  “Go now,” said Sir Anthony with a sob he could not hide. “Be quick, all of you, before I change my mind.”

  SIR GREGORY was put, still unconscious, into a wheelbarrow, and his squire rolled him along through the dark. The fields that Sherwin had first seen only that morning were now a deeply foreign land, and the road that had seemed welcoming was now cut and sliced with challenging ruts.

  Baines followed with another wheelbarrow, one with a creaking wheel. The conveyance contained a small brass and leather trunk holding much of what Katharine would need during a short voyage, and all that necessity would allow her to bring on board the ship. Along with garments and an ivory comb, Katharine had placed into this chest a large banner, folded into a tidy, weighty triangle. She had told Sherwin that this was the griffin crest of her family, proof of the Vixen’s pacific intentions.

  “Did you know, sir,” Bartholomew asked Sherwin, “that there is a race of men without arms or legs that slithers along the Nile?”

  “The anthrogastropods,” said Sherwin. “I doubt such folk exist.”

  “Sergeant Evenage says he saw such a man,” said Bartholomew, “a pickled corpse at Canterbury fair. His face was in his ribs, and his mouth opened directly to his stomach.”

  Katharine walked beside him, tearful at having taken leave of her father, and Sherwin did not feel that talk of armless, legless beings was what she needed to hear.

  “Maybe someday, Bartholomew,” said Sherwin, “you will be pickled, and on display at Smithfield. A Credulous and Innocent Manikin, Captured from His Pirate Lord.”

  “I doubt,” said Bartholomew, “that you, sir, will allow that to happen.”

  WHEN HE WAS A BOY, farmland at night had always brought joy to Sherwin.

  The withy gatherers would tie their small, lopsided vessels along the bank of the river during the summer darkness, and Sherwin had heard their voices, the soft conversation of men and women, brought across the fields with eerie clarity by the water.

  Sherwin felt fortunate to possess a cheerful outlook regarding night, because the moon had been swallowed by cloud and an owl knifed the air overhead, a white-spanned hunter. Sherwin was undaunted. The trees, which had been entire nations of greenery and bird life by day, had retired into a dense darkness that, far from being reassuring, nevertheless seemed all the more wonderful with promise. The smells of the land, too, were rich and various: manure and fermenting hay, sap from recently split firewood, and the odor of field greens, timothy and sedge, drifting from the recently thatched roofs of Fairleigh’s cottages.

  The night had a quality of the unexplained for Sherwin, because he wondered if he would ever see such an hour on dry land again. He knew, as they took the road down to the sea cliff and made their way carefully along the sloping beach path, that the vessel waiting at the far edge of the high tide might be the conveyance that would bring him to the end of his life.

  26

  CAPTAIN, I THOUGHT I’d have to send a shore party after you,” said blond-bearded Lockwood. “The ship’s been ready this hour past.”

  The Vixen was gently bucked and harried by the simmering tide, already high and beginning to ebb, as the same efforts that had careened the ship righted her again, so that her masts pointed unsteadily skyward.

  She was hauled by the unified manpower of her crew down into the surf. Sherwin joined in, although Katharine and the captain and his first officer watched from nearby.

  “No, sir, if you please,” suggested the blond boatswain with a laugh, showing Sherwin how to put his weight on his back foot and lean with every ounce of his strength. Sherwin realized how relatively useless his help had been earlier that day.

  The task was very nearly impossible at first. The boatswain broke into a song, and the men joined in, the heave, oh, and heave oh, sung in a rhythmic chant. Sherwin was nearly convinced that the ship was going to remain fixed to the shore—she was never going anywhere.

  The waves were forceful, and the stones of the beach scraped the hull and gripped it as the ship shifted just slightly. No amount of effort would ever free this imposing but helpless vessel. The sweeps—the long oars that steadied the craft and could propel the ship—were put to desperate use, but no amount of straining and grinding of the oars was effective.

  Or was it?

  Sherwin and all the rest, including Katharine, climbed on board using a webbed rope ladder, with friendly assistance from their shipmates. Each time the surf surged under the keel, those oars levered the vessel outward, until at last, with a shiver, the rigging went taut and the masts straightened, and the ship was afloat.

  The Vixen was alive in the water, but she was instantly pushed back, her keel barking against the sand. And even when she made her way out beyond the breakers, the current did not free her. Rocks began to approach on the larboard side, black stones that erupted beneath every wave, streaming with white and seeming sharper after each deluge.

  Until the rocks looked smaller, through the darkness, the shore just a little more distant.

  And they were truly under way.

  KATHARINE LEANED OUT over the gunwale, gazing back at the shifting, night-shrouded cliffs of her home.

  She had been on board ships before, several times, sailing with her father to Honfleur, delivering her father’s investments in cooper’s hoops and other goods and picking up spirits of cider. But for all her experience she had never voyaged on a warship before, and certainly not with a captain of such a belligerent reputation.

  Katharine’s initial impressions were of a ship of uncommon efficiency, with a soft-spoken officer in Highbridge, and seamen who were lively and dutiful. She was not so innocent as to allow herself to believe that the ship’s company was as pacific as it appeared, but she felt no exceptional degree of apprehension.

  She wore the ring her father had given her under her doeskin glove, and she could feel the cherished circlet now, pressing into her flesh as she gripped the ship’s rail.

  Trust him, her sister would have whispered.

  Trust Sherwin.

  But as for the captain, with his well-pronounced speech and his theatrical voice, Mary would have cautioned, Trust him not so well.

  Her father had made his way to the top of the cliff, and now watched as the ship departed. She waved at him, and he waved in return, his hand a pale, indistinct trace through the salty air. Then she had to look away, too burdened by sorrow.

  Katharine watched the ship’s wake spreading landward through the dark. The unsettled water was itself a source of illumination. She saw more intensely than ever before that everything alive must indeed have an unknowable twin. This wake carrying the ship, that sailor clambering up the ratlines, and certainly that captain breathing on his hands to keep them warm. Each had an invisible shadow, a double that could not be perceived.

  Sherwin joined her.

  “How long, do you think,” she asked, “before I see Fairleigh again?”
/>   Her question was not idle. The thoughtfulness, and frankness, of his answer would be further proof that he merited her faith.

  “I have been asking myself the same question,” he said.

  “Someday you might love the place the way I do,” she said.

  “I admired your father, and the fine house, and the fertile fields,” he said. “And the brave goose, if you will permit me. Although, if you forgive me, my lady, your estate suffers only the very minor flaw of not possessing a river.”

  “It has one,” she protested with a laugh. “Not a wide river, but one with grassy banks and its share of moorhens. I played on it, and I learned to handle a boat, too.”

  “Pardon me, I did not know,” said Sherwin.

  She laughed again. Despite her sadness at parting from her father, she found Sherwin a more than pleasurable companion.

  “What is the name of your grand river, Lady Katharine?”

  “Well, it doesn’t have much of a name. We call it the Ooze.”

  Sherwin gave a polite cough. “Forgive me, but I think your river deserves a more beautiful appellation, Katharine.”

  “Does it indeed?” she asked, in an air of good-humored challenge.

  He ducked his head self-consciously as he added, “A name as charming, if you will allow me, as the people who live there, and the lady who graces the place.”

  Katharine felt her father’s absence all the more keenly now, and wondered: Would Sherwin be someone who could ease her distress at departing? He had a warm smile, it was true, and a winning way of seeming both shy and forthright at once.

  “Do you have any particular friend in your life, Sherwin?” she asked.

  “Any particular friend?” asked Sherwin, as though slow to understand what she might mean. “You mean, perhaps, any exceptional companion among the ladies.”

  “You guess my meaning well, Sherwin.”

  “In truth,” he said, with an undeniable warmth to his gaze, “I have no special claim upon my heart.” He added, as though reluctant to offend, but keen to understand, “If that is what you mean.”

  “That,” she said, “is exactly what I mean.”

  “And as for you,” he asked, “what gentleman of this pretty countryside has earned your affections?”

  “No one,” she said.

  She could not deny it—he gave a happy smile at this reassurance. And he added, “This, for me, comes as very welcome tidings.”

  She could not suppress her happiness—she liked Sherwin very much.

  27

  THE DARK WATERS of the English Channel were battered by a strong wind out of the west.

  Foam shot through the air, and streaking brine spent itself against the reefed and inclined canvas of the sails.

  Katharine’s presence on board was explained by telling the truth. The crew was told that she was the owner of a ship that the Vixen was setting sail westward to intercept. Highbridge murmured something about keeping the cargo “out of the hands of creditors,” and the crew responded with knowing and sympathetic smiles.

  Her presence also helped solidify Sherwin’s role aboard the vessel. If there had been any doubt whether he would bring good luck or bad, Katharine was evidence of a turn toward respectability—even gentlefolk had to resort to cunning. His solicitousness toward Katharine, and the way she smiled at him, made the crew members feel that the ship had taken on a courtly quality, with a role to play in the financial and perhaps even the romantic future of a gentleman and a lady.

  Sir Gregory and Cecil were lodged with the master gunner, and Sir Gregory accepted his new condition as a potential sea warrior with a grudging grace. Possible sea strife against the Spanish was, after all, a chance at honor and gold. Although the knight was troubled by sea-sickness, he and Cecil were kept busy helping the gunner clean and repair a variety of weapons, and ready the mortars, muskets, and other firearms for battle.

  For his part, Sherwin sharpened rapiers and pikes with a whetstone, and when he was not busy sharpening steel he was busy kneading hoof-oil into leather. Every boot and belt, strap and scabbard became instantly stiff because of the salt air, unless worked on regularly.

  What might be a simple task on land became a constant effort against the bucking, tossing progress of the ship and the extreme slant of the ship as she tacked against the gusty and variable weather. The youngest sailors were sent aloft to take in or pay out canvas, as required, and even the most experienced seaman sometimes had to cling to a rope to keep from falling all the way across the deck.

  The quartermaster, a mariner named Grewel, was a short, balding man with responsibilities over goods and ballast stored within the ship. He called the strongest seamen to help rearrange the cargo in the hold as the vessel’s interior shifted. Cecil Rawes helped, and so did Sherwin and the sergeant, along with other able men, moving sea chests and barrels into new positions.

  “Not a sign of that old leak, Mr. Highbridge,” called out Grewel.

  “Thank God for that,” breathed Evenage.

  THE NIGHT was still murky during a quiet respite from the strong winds, dawn yet hours away, when a howl rose from belowdecks, sharpening to a scream.

  Sherwin looked around for Katharine, and she was there beside him, gloved and mantled, her features hidden by her hood.

  “Our shipmate Tryce,” explained Sherwin. “Dr. Reynard is working to save his life.”

  “May God steady the surgeon’s hand,” said Katharine.

  “Will you be comfortable in your berth?” asked Sherwin, trying to make easy conversation over the wailing from the surgeon’s quarters.

  “Captain Fletcher has knocked together a cabin for me beside his in the sterncastle,” she said. Ships had rooms and quarters of variable sizes, all small and capable of being taken down and rearranged quickly. Accommodating a lady, or any unexpected visitor, was no particular challenge to the carpenter and his mates. “I’ve been helping our shipmates by making an inventory.”

  “An inventory of what?” asked Sherwin.

  “I’ll be mending and cleaning linen to be used as slings and bandages, to ease the suffering of the wounded—should there be any. Mr. Highbridge suggested the task, and I am happy to help.”

  Sherwin realized how startled Katharine felt, to be so suddenly at sea, and as troubled by the sudden silence as she must have been by the screams. Tryce had seemingly succumbed to oblivion as the surgeon’s apprentice carried a bundle from belowdecks and padded solemnly to the ship’s rail.

  A splash followed, the sound muffled by the wind—Tryce’s limb was offered to the deep.

  She said, “No doubt you are well accustomed to shipboard suffering.”

  Sherwin had to laugh. “No, I’m new to this life.”

  He told her then of the sinking of the Patience, and of his own plunge into the cold sea. By the time his tale was completed, the Vixen had left the rocky shoreline well behind.

  “For me,” he concluded, with perhaps a dollop of heavy drama, “the sea is the source of torment.”

  “How fine, Sherwin,” said Katharine, “to have survived such adventures.”

  Sherwin had not viewed his near misfortunes in quite that dashing perspective. But he liked the way it sounded. He allowed himself a brief vision, an actor portraying him, giving voice to a speech. Nature that alloyed us from four elements. Not a bad beginning, thought Sherwin.

  Something, something. He would have to write all this down. The sweet climb from brine to comradely smiles. The scansion needed planing, like knots in a timber, but the captain had been right. Surely this beautiful new friend would inspire him to write the sort of verses that were bound to be declaimed to the admiration of the plumed and perfumed as well as the penny-payers.

  He imagined the actor depicting Sherwin Morris, late of Her Majesty’s Privateer Fleet, drawing a sword and taking a stand.

  Against a rampant pig.

  “They were not adventures, actually,” he said, in a tone of self-admonishment, “so much as awkw
ard misfortunes.”

  AS DAWN BROKE, herring gulls followed in the ship’s wake, hungry and assertively curious, wheeling and bickering with a freedom it gave Sherwin pleasure to watch.

  The seas were too rough for regular gunnery practice, but the four falconets—light cannon—on deck were each loaded and fired once, the brass guns erupting in puffs of smoke that streamed instantly away in the wind.

  The master gunner was a man named Ralph Aiken, a small individual who stood with his arms folded as the sergeant spoke loudly into his ear. “We have enough shot for one rehearsal with the matchlocks, do we not?”

  The matchlocks, a variety of musket, had been oiled and polished by Sir Gregory and Cecil, under the instructing gaze of the master gunner. Sir Gregory and Cecil looked on from a distance now, eager to see the success of their efforts.

  “No, not so much gunpowder as to permit a single proper mock skirmish,” said Aiken emphatically. “But to please you, sergeant, and our young gentleman, I’ll spare a spoonful of black powder, just one, to give him the feel of the weapon.”

  “The gunner’s been as deaf as a bucket,” Evenage confided to Sherwin, “ever since a murder piece blew up in his face against the Turks off Joppa.” A murder piece was a cannon used in close-quarter combat.

  The sergeant used a leather powder flask to prime the weapon as the master gunner looked on, pursing his brow when a trace of the powder spilled.

  “Easy, there, easy,” the gunner chided.

  “We’re low on lead shot, and powder, too,” murmured Evenage. “From what I hear, the Spaniards have bought up every ounce of spare shot metal in Europe.”

  Evenage showed Sherwin how to fit a matchlock musket onto a tripod and aim the weapon out over the tossing waves. The coiled fuse smoked and smoldered. Sherwin triggered the firearm, and breathed the brief, eye-smarting whiff of the discharge. The amount of powder they had put into the weapon had been small, and so the report was lost in the rumble of the sails as the luff—the weather edge of the canvas—lost the wind and found it again.